Ali thought about what she had learned about Jillian Sosa. While Lance was in the slammer, Jillian was busy being homecoming queen and co-captain of the computer science club. She hadn’t exactly been pining away since their split.
“One of the kids from school dropped by to see Lance at the hospital tonight,” Ali said. “Andrew Garfield. He brought Lance a card and a new computer, both of which were compliments of the computer science club.”
“Really?” LeAnne asked. “Andrew stopped by again?”
“He’d been to the hospital before?”
“A day or so ago,” LeAnne said. “I was glad to see him. It felt to me like all my son’s old friends from school just abandoned him. As for the computer? Lance will be overjoyed. The cops confiscated his old one, and they’re holding it as evidence. I knew Lance would be asking for a new one, and I had no idea how I’d pay for it.” That little bit of good news seemed to help revive LeAnne. She stood up and straightened her shoulders. “I’d better get back inside and see if Mom needs any help. This has been a very tough day in a series of tough days. She should
probably go to bed, and I should, too. But what about tomorrow? Do I let Thad and Connor go to school?”
Ali thought about that. “With your mother back home safely, it would seem, on the surface at least, that the danger is past. Still, I don’t think it would hurt to err on the side of caution. I’d keep the two younger boys with me if I were you. Your mother, too, for that matter. For the next several days, while the police are investigating this latest incident, I’d keep the whole family close to me and as far from their regular schedules as possible.”
LeAnne nodded. “All right,” she said. “I’ll see what I can do.”
Just then the garage door opened. Wrapped in a blanket and clutching a pack of cigarettes, Phyllis Rogers appeared in the doorway.
“Mother,” LeAnne exclaimed. “Where are you going?”
“Out to the car to have a smoke,” Phyllis replied.
“After all you’ve been through today, you can smoke inside if you want.”
“No,” Phyllis said. “Don’t break down your own conditions.” She pressed the button to open the garage door and stepped out into the winter night.
LeAnne shook her head. “She’s a stubborn old bat,” she said, “and tough as nails.”
Leaving Phyllis to smoke in privacy, LeAnne and Ali returned to a living room full of police officers, in uniform and out. When Phyllis finished her cigarette and came back inside, a detective with a notebook in hand sat on a footstool in front of her, asking questions that sounded similar to the ones Ali had been asking a few minutes earlier. A crime scene technician on her knees was carefully sweeping up whatever was to be found by the front door, searching for minute traces of the substance that had been used to incapacitate Phyllis. Detective Hernandez had done enough to explain Ali and B.’s presence that they were free to go as soon as Ali and LeAnne returned to the living room.
Outside in the car, B. put the key in the ignition and turned to Ali. “Where would you like to go?” he asked. “I can take you back to the
hotel and drop you, or you can come with me to Austin. What’s your choice?”
“Austin,” Ali said. “We’ve both had way too little sleep. You’re not driving there on your own.”
“Thanks,” B. said. “I was hoping you’d say that.”
It was almost one in the morning when they headed south on I-35. When B.’s phone rang a few minutes later, Ali answered with a laugh, putting the phone on speaker. “What a surprise to hear from you at this hour,” she told Stuart Ramey. “Do you ever sleep?”
She already knew that the answer was “very little.” Stuart kept his very capable hand on the company’s tiller from a pizza-box-strewn office in High Noon’s Cottonwood headquarters. There was a rumpled cot in the back corner where he slept, and a shower in a bathroom down the hall. When B. was on the road, Stuart generally kept the same hours, matching B.’s many time-zone shifts in spirit if not in body.
“Not when I’ve got stuff to do,” Stuart said. “I’ve got a handle on the camera technician who went off the grid. His name is Arturo Miejas. He’s a naturalized citizen, but he’s originally from Monterrey, and he has family members mixed up in the Cabrillo cartel.”
“Wait,” B. said. “You’re telling us that the Cabrillo drug cartel may be involved?”
“I’m not saying they are or aren’t, but I am saying that someone close to some Cabrillo associates was involved in the attack on Lance. I think we’ll be able to trace back to Arturo’s computer the keystrokes that took those cameras out of service. By the way, he and his wife and two kids crossed back into Mexico at Juárez late last week. None of them has been heard from since.”
“Sounds like somebody helped him stage a quick exit before the authorities started looking for him,” Ali observed. “How come nobody helped Marvin Cotton?”
“Cotton’s stupid,” B. replied. “He screwed up on the Lowell Dunn fire. But if the Cabrillo cartel is involved in this, he’d know better than to rat them out. If he tries to turn state’s evidence to dodge the death
penalty, he’s a dead man. The cartel will take him out no matter where he is.”
“What else do you have for us?” Ali asked.
“Slave driver,” Stu said, “but I do have an additional item or two. For one thing, you were right about the computer, and so was Lance.”
“The gift computer?” B. asked.
“That’s right. I had Sister Anselm dig it out of the box and hook it up to the hospital Wi-Fi. Sure as hell, I ran a diagnostic on it and found a keystroke logger. Whoever installed it taped the box back up so it looked like it came fresh from the factory.”
“Did you disable the logger?”
“No, I didn’t,” Stu said. “I had Sister Anselm give me the serial number. I’m tracking the sales information. Then I had her put the computer back in the box, tape it up, and put it away. If Lance tries to use it, he needs to know that someone—most likely from the computer science club—is watching his every move. I’ve taken a cursory look at everyone on the club roster. As far as I can tell, the kids are a nerdy bunch: good grades; no criminal records; no extracurricular activities other than computer science. They remind me of someone else I used to know back in the day—sort of like looking in the mirror fifteen years later.”
“I think you need to take a really close look at the club’s two co-captains,” Ali suggested.
“Andrew Garfield and Jillian Sosa?” Stu asked. “Makes sense, since Andrew’s the one who delivered that computer to Lance’s room. What’s the deal with Jillian?”
“LeAnne Tucker just told me that Jillian and Lance were an item before he got shipped off to jail. Now it looks as though Andrew has taken up where Lance left off.”
“I’ll look into it,” Stu said. “I promise. But not tonight. I don’t know about the two of you, but if I don’t get some shut-eye pretty soon, I’m going to fall over onto my keyboard.”
“Morning is fine,” B. said. “We’re on our way to Austin to talk to Lance.”
“That would be the great middle-of-the-night recruiting gamble?” Stu asked.
“None other.”
“Good. Tell me how it went later on in the morning,” Stu said. “Right now I’m going to go lie down.”
“I wish I could go lie down,” Ali said. “I’m dead on my feet, too.”
“We’ve got rooms at the Omni,” B. said. “I made the reservations when we were supposed to fly into Austin, and I forgot to cancel them when we changed the itinerary. We’ll go there once we square away things with Lance.”
“We’re going to rent a room without luggage?” Ali asked. “Won’t people talk?”
“Let ’em,” B. said.
They pulled into the hospital parking garage just after two; they had to walk around the building to the main entrance. A security guard let them into the elevator and directed them to the fifth floor. The burn unit waiting room held one person, a fit-looking man in his sixties, wearing a clerical collar. Wide awake and with his arms crossed on his chest, he sat next to a closed door, daring anyone to try to gain entrance.
“You must be Father McLaughlin,” B. said. “I’m B. Simpson. This is my fianceé, Ali Reynolds.”
“I’m sure you are who you say,” Father McLaughlin said, “but if it’s all the same with you, I’d still like to check those IDs. Sister Anselm went back to her hotel to get a couple of hours of sleep, but she gave me my marching orders. She said the nurses could come and go, but as far as visitors are concerned, the two of you are it.”
When Ali opened her purse to get out her ID, she was surprised to see a Taser lying on top of her wallet. She knew that B. usually carried one in his checked luggage and was surprised that he had slipped it into her purse without her noticing. Still, she was glad to have it.
Once Father McLaughlin had checked their IDs, he nodded them toward the door. It was the middle of the night, so Ali expected to find
Lance Tucker asleep. He was lying with his hospital bed propped up, facing a television set, but the sound was muted and he didn’t seem to be watching the weight-loss infomercial.
He looked toward them as the door opened, and an unexpectedly impish grin crossed his face. Lance Tucker had suffered major, life-changing burns and had lost a leg, but his expression said he had everything he wanted in life and more. “Mr. Simpson?” he asked, holding out his hand.
“With High Noon Enterprises,” B. answered. “And this is my fianceé.”
Ali offered her hand. “I’m Ali Reynolds.”
“Sister Anselm told me you were willing to help, but I never expected that you’d drop everything and come here. She says you were in Austin when they dropped Grandma off at the house in San Leandro? Is she all right? They didn’t hurt her?”
“A little banged up is all,” Ali said. “She’s lucky, and so are you. In kidnapping cases, even when the ransom demands are met, the outcome isn’t always good.”
“The kidnappers only think the demands have been met,” Lance said. “They’re wrong.”
“What do you mean?” B. asked.
“They wanted GHOST. As far as they know, they got it. They have access to a GHOST file on a cloud along with the fifteen-digit code needed to activate it. What they don’t know is that they’ll have only twenty-four hours of access before the whole thing blows sky-high.”
B. said, “I came here because I’m interested in GHOST. I was hoping to purchase it outright or license its use, but it sounds as though you’ve installed some sort of fail-safe protocol so the program will self-destruct.”
“It’s better than that,” Lance said with a grin. “As soon as they log on, that computer and every IP address the first computer is networked to or has been sent worm-contaminated files that will begin uploading the contents of their hard drives to my cloud storage. The data-dump
process will take four to six hours, depending on the Internet connection and the amount of material. That’s the reason for the six-hour delay before the second set of confirming passwords is applied. If they don’t appear, then the worm goes back to that whole flock of computers and reformats the hard drives. It’s dead simple. I’ll have collected all the information on their computers. Unless they’ve got current backups, they’ll have nothing.”
“You installed a Trojan in your own program?” B. asked.
“Designed it in along with everything else,” Lance said. “Are you still interested?”
“I suppose,” B. said. “But now that GHOST has fallen into someone else’s hands . . .”
“It hasn’t,” Lance said. “Not really. I gave them a file that they thought was GHOST. It’s called GHOST; it’s just not the real thing. Mr. Jackson and I were afraid that something like this might happen—that someone would try to gain unauthorized access, so we created a dummy file with a few critical pieces missing. They’ve had it for what . . .” He looked up at the clock on the wall. “. . . almost three hours now. They’ll be able to use it for another three. At that point, they’ll get an error message and the computer will shut down. When they try to reinitiate, they’ll need another fifteen-character password. After three tries with an incorrect password, reformatting initiates. Even if they power down the computer, the worm will resume the moment power comes back on.” Lance paused, looked at B. and Ali before adding, “Sweet, huh?”
“If you gave the kidnapper a worm-infected version of GHOST, where’s the real one?” B. asked.
Lance reached under his pillow and pulled out a tiny object. It was made of red, white, and blue plastic. As it began to unfold, Ali recognized it for what it was: a Transformer. When her son, Chris, was a preteen, he had been a big fan of Transformers.
When the tiny robot was fully deployed, Lance handed it over to B.
“A thumb drive disguised as a Transformer?” B. asked.
Lance nodded. “When the cops went through the house, they searched everywhere for anything computer-related. I kept this in a box with the rest of my Transformers. They never bothered to unfold any of them. They looked in the box, decided it was just a bunch of old toys, and walked away, which is just what Mr. Jackson said they’d do. He kept one like it in a box of toys at his house.”
“What’s on the thumb drive?”
“A beta version of GHOST. That’s the one I used to disable the school server. If I’d been able to use the finished version, you might not have caught me. The cops tried like crazy to link the attack to Mr. Jackson, but they couldn’t because he didn’t do it. They could only trace it back to my computer.”
“Where’s the final copy of GHOST?”
“On the cloud. Mr. Jackson finished the design work after I was arrested.”
“This is where you did the programming for GHOST?” B. asked, holding up the thumb drive.
Lance nodded. “All of it. We kept the finished files in a shared cloud account with another fifteen-digit password and a second password required six hours later. That’s how Mr. Jackson and I worked together. We could go to the shared account and compare notes without having any of our GHOST work resident on either of our computers and without any e-mail trails back and forth.”
“It sounds like you and Mr. Jackson were serious about security.”
Lance nodded. “We were. He told me GHOST was far enough ahead of the curve that it would be worth a lot of money.” He looked at B. “Is that still true?”