Long Way Down (23 page)

H
alfway across the George Washington Bridge, the sun slid down behind the Palisades and the temperature, already cold, began to plummet.

“Come on, keep up,” he called back. I was a good ten paces behind him, but there was no danger of my turning and running off. Where was I going to go? “I am freezing my ass off, and not liking it one bit.”

I walked faster. It kept me warm. There hadn’t been even a breeze walking through the city, but up on the south side of the bridge the unprotected walkway was open to a cold damp wind coming up the Hudson.

“Where are you taking me?” I asked again.

He didn’t answer. He had not answered any of the other times I had asked.

“Move along, my man,” he said. “And keep your head down. There’s another camera coming up right along here.”

I put my head down. “Can I take the damn glasses off?” The sunglasses were as good as a blindfold—I could barely see one step ahead of me.

“Soon.” He led me to the end of the bridge and up the sidewalk toward Fort Lee. “This way.” We jumped the chain-link fence, he was a lot more graceful than I, and took the next street along the top of the cliff. We kept walking. A neighborhood of shops and two-story homes gave way to a steeper section of the cliff. Luxury high-rises soared up above us, while down the cliff there were multilevel parking garages to service them. Below that there was nothing but rocks and trees and scrub brush cascading down toward the river.

“Keep smiling,” he said. “We’re almost there.”

I tried to keep up, but my legs were starting to fail me. I’d covered too many miles on aching feet already that day. I was about to protest and plead for a break, when my guide—or captor, I still wasn’t sure which—crossed the road and walked down the ramp into the darkness of one of the concrete garages.

The apartment building soared up an uncountable number of stories. Far above I could make out terraced balconies and floor-to-ceiling windows. The views from there of the Hudson and Manhattan must have been breathtaking. There was a curved driveway leading to a polished brass-and-glass entryway where two doormen stood guard. They were contentedly ignoring me, but I was sure that if I took more than a few steps toward the entrance, they would be all over me.

“You coming?” The man had returned to the bottom of the ramp and stood glaring at me. It wasn’t really a question.

“I’m coming,” I said, and crossed the street.

He led me to the far side of the lot and down two flights of stairs, our footsteps echoing coldly in the narrow stairwell. The only light came from a dim yellow bulb all the way at the top, yet I was still unprepared for the inky blackness of the lowest level of the garage when we arrived at the bottom.

“They got motion sensors that turn the lights on when you come down the ramp or use the elevator, but the stairs are on a
different circuit. We don’t like to advertise our comings and goings. This way.”

Around the end of the last row of cars, there was a cutaway in the wall and we made a turn. The garage was open, with a chest-high concrete retaining wall running the length of the cutaway. Above the wall was a space six feet tall and thirty feet wide.

“How you holding up?” He sounded clinical, not concerned. He simply wanted information.

“My feet are killing me, and I could use a break. But if we’re close, push on.”

“We’re here,” he said, stopping at the half wall. “But this bit gets tricky. If you feel shaky, speak up.”

Beyond the wall stretched treetops, partially screening the river and the city. Manhattan stretched out for ten miles downriver. Now lit from within, the buildings along the Hudson looked like glowing jewel cases. At that distance, the city was clean, and beautiful, and alluring. A place of incredible magic.

“Nice view, huh? The folks across the street have to pay big bucks for that view.” He laughed, hitched his butt up onto the top of the wall, and swung around facing the city. “Last little bit. Come on.”

I had decided that the murky, and all-powerful, forces that seemed to be able to track my every move across the country were not going to go through such an exercise to gull me into meeting them in the woods below Englewood, New Jersey. Though I wasn’t sure what to expect, I had left all resistance behind.

On the far side of the concrete wall, someone had set up a long extension ladder that led down to darkness.

“I’ll go first in case you need me to guide your feet. Just keep moving and don’t look down,” he said.

“What’s to see? It’s pitch-black down there.”

“Let’s go.” There was nothing to do but follow.

I edged over the wall and started down the ladder. It creaked and groaned with our combined weight, but it held steady against the wall. Once down into the darkness under the garage, I realized that it was not quite so pitch-black. I could see the ground fifteen feet below. The ladder bowed a bit as I reached the halfway point but rebounded as I made my way down the last few steps.

“Welcome, Jason,” a familiar voice said. “You’re just in time for dinner.”

O
ther than a swipe of black soot across his forehead, Dr. McKenna looked like life on the run agreed with him. He had shaved the beard and cut his hair, leaving a single conservative part. He was wearing a heavy winter-season blue suit, and a full-length apron over it proclaiming
STUART SAYS, ‘LICK MY
RIBS,’ CAN DO Q, CLARKS
DALE, MISS,
with a cartoon drawing of a smiling, round-faced man wearing a pig snout.

“Make yourself comfortable,” he said, indicating the three canvas folding chairs near the mouth of the man-made cave. A single mammoth round concrete pillar supported the floor of the garage a good six feet over our heads. We were directly under the three-story structure. On both sides the rock curved upward, meeting the concrete and sealing off the area into a single high-ceilinged vault. A thin layer of soil on the floor softened the rough, jutting surface. McKenna, or his friend, had set up two small dome tents, a camp table, a kerosene heater, a small gas grill, and even shaded overhead lights. A heavy-duty orange extension cord ran up the side of the pillar to the garage. “Cozy, isn’t it? Abraham has been living here since last spring, and when I heard about it, I thought it would be
just perfect for my needs. We came to an agreement quite quickly. I provide the cash to maintain our lifestyle, and pay him to act as my assistant. We’ve spruced the place up quite a bit in the last few days. How do you like your steak?”

“Medium rare?” I looked around again. “Are you planning on spending the winter down here?”

“Well, for my part, I certainly hope not. I have a family I’d like to see again. But Abraham suffers from PTSD after two tours in ‘Insanistan,’ as he calls it. He doesn’t do well inside four walls.” McKenna gestured out at the woods in front of us. “This place is perfect for him.”

“Nobody bothers you? No cops, or kids, or dogs, or . . .”

“Just the raccoons, so far. We have to keep both food and garbage under lock and key.”

He opened the grill, flipped the steaks and sliced zucchini, and closed it again. “Another few minutes. Coffee or water? There’s nothing stronger, I’m afraid. Abraham no longer touches alcohol—it interferes with his treatment—and I respect his quest.”

Hot coffee sounded good. “I’ll take a cup.”

“Milk and sugar are in the big blue cooler.”

Abraham, who seemed much less imposing once I knew that he had a name, had taken one of the chairs and was reading underneath a clip-on light attached to a broom handle stuck in the dirt. His feet were warming by the space heater.

“What are you reading?” I asked.

“A novel.”

My reading list had shrunk to books about cars, which I read to the Kid, or books about kids with autism.

“Which one?”

He looked up. “Why do you care?”

“Sorry,” I said. “I was just making conversation.”

“Not necessary.” He went back to the book.

The three of us ate around the camp table, Abraham continuing to read while McKenna and I spoke, only responding with a quick look when one or the other of us mentioned him. I caught sight of the book cover. Tom Young’s
The Warriors
. The cover showed an armed soldier in silhouette against a blood-red background. A strange choice for a man with PTSD, but then again, maybe not.

“How did you find me?” I said when he looked up for a moment.

He went back to the book. McKenna answered. “I deduced that you would be looking for me in places with Wi-Fi—libraries being the most obvious choice. I told him to watch one for five days. If you hadn’t shown up, we would have tried something else.”

“He was inside. I thought you said he didn’t do indoors.”

“Even Abraham gets cold.”

Abraham made a sound that could have been a grunt or it could have been a laugh.

“What’s next?”

“I’ve been working on gaining access to Arinna’s labs and security system. I’ve been assuming that was what you still wanted. Was I wrong?”

I had no trouble answering that one. “Not at all. It’s the only way for me to clear this up. And don’t worry, you’re still on the payroll. I brought cash.”

“I knew you were good for it. But if you want to get into their systems, we are still going to have to go out there—on-site. The way they’ve isolated their network, I’d have to be Homeland Security to see all the files.”

“You’re willing?” I said.

“All part of the service. I’ve been piggybacking on wireless connections from the high-rise across the street. Working at night, so I won’t be noticed. I’m close. I could be ready as early as tomorrow night. Should we ask Abraham to join us?”

I thought of the way he had handled the two Latino muggers. “If
we get to the point that we need his skills, we’re in far too deep. What do you need me to do?”

“There are things that are known and things that are unknown, and in between there are doors. And I think that would be a very good thing for you to work on. Maps of the property, the offices. What security I will need to override. Then there’s transportation. We need a vehicle.”

“I’ve got that covered.” The VW minibus, parked less than a mile away. “I’ll go to work on the rest.”

Y
ou’ll get better reception if you walk down along the top of the cliff for a bit. All this concrete blocks signals.” McKenna was hunched over his laptop. Abraham had already taken down the ladder for the night and crawled into his tent. I was ready to crawl in the other and get some sleep, but I wanted to try Skeli first.

Ten feet away from the entrance to the cave the night closed around me like a hangman’s hood. My other senses opened up, and I inhaled hydrocarbons from the space heater and the garage above. I stumbled over the tiny rocks and roots that had suddenly grown much larger. And I heard the rustlings of wind in the bare branches above. My imagination soared, too.

The call was routed through the house in Santa Fe, back to the VW nearby, then to the phone at Roger’s apartment before connecting across a thousand miles of ocean. Pop picked up.

“Everybody’s fine, but if you don’t speak with Wanda immediately she’s going to tear my arm off.”

“Give her the phone, Pop.” He was already gone.

“How are you?” Skeli cooed. I could hear her fear and concern, and I could hear her trying to hide it. Trying to make it easier for me.

“Well-fed. Well-exercised. No one has tried to kill me in hours. Couldn’t be better. Soon I’ll be climbing into a nice warm bed and thinking of you.”

“Please don’t kid. I’m not handling this very well as it is.”

“You? You’re the rock.”

“I’m not. I’m frightened for you. I’m coping. Maintaining. But I’m not a rock.”

I told her I loved her. I told her that I would take very good care of Jason Stafford because I loved her and the Kid and I knew they needed me as much as I needed them. I told her that I was close to being finished with this case, and that as soon as I was done I was catching the first plane to join them. That what I was doing was making them safe, too. And I told her that I would take no unnecessary or dangerous chances. And when I said it, I believed it.

“How’s my boy?”

“Terrific. He’s swimming. He calls it swimming, anyway. He’s a water baby. Oh, and he opened up to me last night. You want to know why he was pissing in the cup?”

“He talked about it? You’re incredible. How did you get him to even sit still for the conversation?”

“He saw Carolina cleaning the toilet, pouring some blue stuff in there. It got him upset.”

I found myself laughing with a shaky relief. “She should try another color.”

Skeli laughed back—also a bit shaky. “Does the stuff come in other colors? How do I know?”

“She can use the cheap vodka.”

We both laughed again and let a moment’s silence surround us.

I opened my mouth to say “I miss you” but Skeli spoke first.

“Will you be here for Christmas?”

It stopped me dead. I had no idea when Christmas was. I struggled to come up with the date. My mind worked backwards and forwards trying to find a moment that would define the present.

“What’s today?” I finally said.

“That’s a little scary, Jason. The twenty-third.”

We were going to break into Arinna Labs on Christmas Eve. It might work in our favor. Who would be there? If all worked well, I could go public with whatever we found first thing Christmas morning. Once the story was out there, there’d be no reason for anyone to be trying to stop me. I’d be safe. So would my family.

“Maybe,” I said. “I’ll try for a late-afternoon flight.”

“Be safe,” she said.

Good advice.

O
ne more time I made the drive out to Westwood. McKenna plugged his laptop into the charger, turned the heat up to max, and fell asleep.

I woke him an hour later. We were stopped on the side of the road by a stretch of woods, a few hundred yards before the turnoff.

“Magic time,” I said.

“Where are we?”

“The Westwood property starts just up there, past the end of the stone wall.”

“There’s no fence?”

“You don’t see it from the road. It’s about twenty feet into the woods and it goes forever.”

He fired up the laptop, and for the next few minutes there was nothing for me to do except fret. I was tired but pumped. The combination of fear, constant vigilance, and living on the run was starting to tell. I ached in almost every muscle. But I was ready.

“Pull up closer,” he said. “I need a stronger signal before I do anything.”

“You’re in already?” I said.

“They’ve got a multimillion-dollar security system and a two-hundred-dollar firewall. I could teach a second grader how to do this.”

I drove another hundred feet down the road and stopped again.

“Is here all right? I’m afraid of getting picked up by any cameras they might have along the road.”

He didn’t answer at first. He tapped at the keyboard. “I’m past the firewall. Okay. Remember what I said about beating a randomly generated code?”

I did, but I was feeling a bit impatient. “Just do it, okay?”

“There’s a quicker way. Cheat.”

“In this case, I’m in favor of cheating.”

“Software engineers are as lazy as the rest of humanity,” he said, still typing. “They don’t want to have to struggle with passwords if they need to get into the system. So, they leave a back door at the admin level. Sometimes they hide it, but it’s still there.”

“And you’ve found it?”

“And cracked it. Let’s go.”

“Are you sure? Where am I going?”

“The front gate. I’ve disabled all of the cameras, so for the next ten minutes the guards will be watching frozen screens, which is fine . . .”

I put the car in gear and rolled forward. “As long as it’s dark outside and nothing’s moving.”

“Go. Go.”

I made the turn and rolled down the drive to the gate. The overhead spotlight came on and I froze, feeling like the world could see me attempting to break into the grounds of one of Long Island’s wealthiest families.

“Quickly. Go.”

“The goddamn gate is closed!” I hissed.

“Exactly. Sorry. Sorry.” He tapped the keys again. “No one closed Selena’s email account yet. And, there it is.”

“You’ve got today’s code?”

“Getting it. Keep going.”

I stopped at the gate. No voice sounded out of the darkness. The front of the car was lit up like the top of the Empire State Building on the Fourth of July and no one seemed to notice us.

“Got it?” I was discovering that the ice-cold nerves of a foreign exchange trader did not serve quite as well for a break-in artist.

“Now listen, Jason. There’s nothing I can do if the guards are listening, understand? I mean, if they’re sucking down caffeine and watching reruns of squirrels skittering across the lawn, we’re fine. But if they open the door and hear this jalopy drive by, well, there’s not much I can do about it.”

“I know. And we can’t help it if those squirrels suddenly freeze and don’t move. Put in the code, will you?”

McKenna’s face was a pasty white in the glare from the overhead spotlight. He looked very young. It occurred to me for the first time that he was almost twenty years younger than I was. He probably looked up to me. He probably thought I knew what I was doing.

He typed in the code. There was a click, and a hum, and the gate rolled back.

I rolled through and continued down the driveway. No one screamed for us to stop. No shots rang out. To our right, the guardhouse was lit, shining through the trees like a strippers’ bar in the Adirondacks.

“Turn off the lights if you’re nervous.”

“I’m not nervous,” I said.

“Okay. And I’m not Irish-American from Buffalo, New York, with a wife and two daughters and a mother in a nursing home who calls me ‘Everett’ whenever I visit.”

“Who is Everett?”

“How do I know? Early onset of dementia. The woman hasn’t recognized me in years.”

I turned off the van lights. It was dark—impossibly dark—but we could still see the pavement in front of us. We passed the turnoff for the guardhouse.

“The system resets automatically every ten minutes, so we need to be inside the building in another”—he looked at the screen again—“eight minutes.”

“It’s nice that one of us knows what he’s doing.”

We got to the lab parking lot with time to spare. I parked as far from the front door as possible, hoping that the van wouldn’t be picked up by the cameras. McKenna jumped out and ran for the front door. I followed.

There was a plastic-and-metal plate in a small box next to the locked glass doors. McKenna took out a gadget that looked a lot like a garage door opener, held it against the plate, and pushed a button.

“What is that?” I said, trying to make myself appear inconspicuous.

“Electronic lock picker. I got the design for it off a YouTube video.”

The door clicked. McKenna pulled open the door and we were in.

“Does that thing work on any door?”

“No. It’s only programmed for the top three electronic lock companies.”

“What would you have done if the lock was made by the fourth?”

“Picked up a rock and smashed the glass.”

“Elegant,” I said.

I led the way to the elevator, put my face in the retinal scanner, and waited. The elevator clicked and hummed, and a moment later the door opened. We both stepped in and I punched the button for the second floor. Nothing happened.

“I’ve got this,” McKenna said. He held up the little black gadget and swiped it over the face of the panel. The lights flickered on and the elevator started up immediately. “Same code as the front door. It would have to be, or all your employees would have to carry two coded keys. You can only make security systems as careful as the people who will use them.”

We stepped off the elevator into blackness, lit in spots by the glow from electronic indicator lights. Spots of red, green, and white were scattered about the offices, but the heavy drapes kept out any light that might have seeped in from outside.

“Find some lights,” McKenna said. “We can’t work like this.”

“Great,” I muttered, feeling along the wall for a switch.

“Here we go,” McKenna said, and the room was flooded with light from above.

“Damn. Do we need that much light?”

“Are you worried? Who can see in?”

I turned on the gooseneck lamp over Haley’s desk. “We don’t need more than this. Turn those off.”

He flicked the overhead lights back off and joined me at the desk. “Let’s see what I can find.”

I stepped aside and let him work. There was enough for me to do pacing, checking every sound in the empty building, and peering out into the darkness around the edge of the drapes, while being careful to let no stray ray of light escape. The
tap, tap, tap
of the keyboard and the occasional whirr of the hard drives on McKenna’s and Haley’s computers were a constant background to my anxiety. It felt like a very long time before McKenna called me over.

“It’s just what you thought,” he said. “The trade authorization for Phil Haley to short-sell shares of his own company and buy them back again after the stock tanked came from this computer. Clear as can be.
But
, this computer was being hacked at the time and the orders came from somewhere else.”

“Selena.”

He nodded. “I hacked her computer myself a week ago. I recognized the IP immediately. It’s static because she was on the Arinna network.”

“She didn’t strike me as the hacker type.”

“Yeah, well, we come in all sizes and colors, but I think you’re right. Whoever did this was good. She had help,” he said.

Penn would have been able to find her the help. Or maybe she just went to the DEFCON hackers convention and hired someone.

“Is this what you were hoping to find?” McKenna asked.

It cleared Haley of orchestrating the insider trading, but there was another question I wanted answered. I told McKenna about the license plate and what I had seen on the news.

“So you think someone doctored the file,” he said.

“I’m positive. I saw the pictures the day after the murder. That plate was unreadable.”

“Images. Digital images,” he corrected.

“Fine. Images,” I said, smiling around my clenched teeth.

“Here’s why it’s important. I can change the code so that your eye will be fooled, but I can’t fool someone who looks at the code.”

“What I want you to find out is if that change was made here—on this machine.”

“And inserted into the security file?”

“Precisely,” I said.

It didn’t take him long. I stepped away and let him work.

“Aaaaahh . . . yup. Dead on. Here’s what I’ve got.” He opened a file. The Rolls-Royce appeared on the screen with the blurred license plate. “Now watch.” He clicked again. Another license plate appeared, superimposed over the first. “That’s one of his attempts. A little sloppy, right?” He clicked again and again. “He gets better with practice.” The pictures fit together more exactly.

“Could he send them to the security files from here?” I said.

“He’s got full admin access. But why would he risk it? I’m telling you, any competent technician could find the changes.”

“He was betting it would never get that far. All he needed was to spread some doubt and get the cops looking for someone else as the murderer.”

“So whose license plate is that?”

“I don’t know, but I’ll bet good money on Chuck Penn. I just don’t know why Haley didn’t wipe all this off his computer after he was done,” I said.

“He thought he did. He deleted all this. But as we like to say, ‘Nothing is ever lost, it’s just misfiled.’”

“So what do we do? Can we copy all this to your laptop?”

“We can, but if you want hard evidence, you’re going to have to take the computer. Who can say I didn’t create all this myself?”

Once Penn was identified as the man behind the insider trading scam, and possibly as the murderer of his accomplice, I would be in the clear. He’d have no need to try and shut me up, and he’d be hip-deep in alligators fighting off the cops and the SEC. Much too busy saving his own skin to bother trying to take mine. Special Agent Brady would not appreciate a call from me on Christmas morning, but if I dumped the whole thing in his lap, I could still make an early-afternoon flight to Tortola.

“I’ll take the computer. We’re done here.”