Catrina saw the tears forming in Alison’s eyes. She really meant it. She was worried about this consultant.
“I’m going to need a little more information,” Catrina said. “Why don’t you come to my office tomorrow? We can talk in a more comfortable, confidential setting.”
****
Alison Clarke took the Sixth Avenue South exit off of I-5. She turned her silver-gray Acura MDX south on Sixth Avenue and followed her GPS to Massachusetts Street.
“You have arrived at your destination.” She liked to call her GPS Sally. Sally now told her, “The address is on the right.”
Not at all what Alison expected. Apparently, Cat Flaherty’s office was in an old warehouse.
A row of loading docks was to the left; up a few concrete steps a heavy glass door appeared to be the entrance.
Alison parked in front of the run-down looking warehouse and walked up to the door. Next to the door, a small sign said “Flaherty and Associates.” Below the sign was a brass colored speaker and a telephone receiver.
Alison picked up the phone and pushed the red button.
“Flaherty and Associates, may I help you?” An electronic voice sounded in Alison’s ear. It had a slight accent.
“Alison Clarke here to see Catrina Flaherty.”
“Yes, Mrs. Clarke. Come right up.”
A buzzer sounded in the door. Alison pulled the handle. The door weighed a ton. She stepped into the tiny foyer. A single ficus plant, really only a stick with three leaves and dry soil in its pot, sat sadly in the entryway. Brown leaves littered the floor below the ficus. Next to the sad plant a long stair case led up to her right.
Alison climbed the seemingly endless tread-worn carpet-covered stairs to come out on a landing at the top. In front of her, a solid looking door with a “Flaherty and Associates” sign blocked the way. She turned the door knob, it was unlocked.
The carpet in the office was no better than the carpet on the stairs. The reception desk in front of her looked like World War II surplus. An ancient CRT computer monitor took up most of the desk space.
A heavy black woman in a shapeless linen dress with an open collar, loose short sleeves, an intricate red, green and gold geometric pattern down the front and two sets of green, yellow and red horizontal stripes just below the knees rose from behind the desk.
“Good to see you, Mrs. Clarke. Mrs. Flaherty is expecting you.”
There was that accent. Alison couldn’t quite pin it down.
“Please follow me.” The receptionist’s dress flowed behind her as she walked. “Would you like a cup of coffee, tea or water?”
“Coffee would be nice.” Alison, noting that the receptionist was exceedingly light-footed for such a large woman, followed the woman through a warren of secondhand desks. Some had out-of-date computers and monitors, others were just piled with paper. The women working behind the desks looked like refugees from some kind of third world conflict. A woman who might have been pretty once, but with hollow-looking blackened eyes sat at one desk. Another extremely skinny woman with shaky hands and darting eyes sat at another. They all wore dated business clothes, probably courtesy of Good Will.
“Do you take cream and sugar?” the receptionist asked.
They finally arrived at a glass door in the far wall. Through a large glass window, Alison saw Catrina, sitting behind another cheap desk, talking on the phone. “Yes, cream and sweetener would be fine.”
Doubt began to seep into Alison’s mind. Was Catrina Flaherty really the right person for this job? Maybe she should have gone to the police.
“Ms. Clarke, thank you for coming.” Catrina hung up the phone without saying ‘goodbye’ and rose to meet Alison as she entered the office. “How can we help you?” She thrust out her hand. “Abeba, take Ms. Clarke’s coat please.”
Alison hesitated for a moment. She wondered if she’d ever get her expensive camel hair coat back. What the hell, in for a penny in for a pound. She handed the black woman her coat.
Alison shook the proffered hand, noted Catrina's firm grip. She held on longer than last night, looked in her eyes and assessed Catrina. Her hand was hard and calloused. More like a working man’s hand, not what she expected from a woman.
This was a totally different Catrina than Alison had met the night before. Gone was the pretty cocktail dress, the heels, jewelry and makeup. Today, Catrina worked with a plain face, tight jeans and a blue button-down Oxford shirt, a sharp contrast to Alison’s red tailored business suit and spiked heels. Catrina was taller than Alison, maybe by four inches or so. Her short blond hair lacked the bouncy curls of last night, but her beautiful gray eyes lit up her face.
“I told you last night that I had a problem.” Alison checked out the unmatched chairs opposite Catrina’s desk. “You have an interesting operation here.” She finally resigned herself to sitting in the moth-eaten chair. “I didn’t expect you to be so busy, to have a full staff here on a Saturday.”
“We’re a twenty-four hour operation. When a client needs our help, we have to be here for them.”
The same secondhand store motif as the rest of the building decorated Catrina’s office. An old oak, glass-fronted legal book case stood across from her desk. An unmatched credenza with pictures of Catrina and a boy of varying ages from toddler to high school sat behind her. There was no evidence of a father.
One picture showed Catrina walking behind the boy as he rode on a pony. The much younger Catrina looked like Barbie. Long blonde hair, long legs, big boobs, slim waist. The last twenty years had put a few pounds on her body, a few lines on her face. The boy was a toe-headed blond.
A picture of a freckle-faced twelve-year old riding the tea cups with her at Disneyland sat next to the boy on the pony. A handsome young man, in a cap and gown, displayed his high school diploma to the right.
“You have a good-looking son.”
“Thank you.” Catrina looked over her shoulders at the pictures. “Matthew’s in college now. He’s going to Seattle Central for a couple of years, then he hopes to transfer to the U.”
Alison could tell by the look in Catrina’s eye that something was not well in paradise. Another mother could always tell.
“So,” Catrina turned back to Alison. “Tell me about your problem.”
Alison hesitated. Now that she had seen Catrina’s secondhand store office, her war-refugee staff, she questioned whether she was the right person for the job. Finally, Alison cast the die. “We’re getting ready to launch a new product.” Alison turned behind her and closed the door. “This is going to shake up the tech industry like nothing else since the iPod. I won’t go into the details now, let me just say that secrecy is of the utmost importance. We can’t let our competitors know about this product before our launch. We want to blitz the market. We want to sweep the consumers off of their feet.”
The door opened and the receptionist entered with a silver tray in her hands. She set a cup of coffee in front of Alison and handed another to Catrina.
“Cream and sweetener, Mrs. Clarke.” The woman set a glass creamer and a sugar holder in front on Alison.
Alison appraised the coffee cup. Clear glass with a stem and base. Gold rim. Gold letters spelled out “F&A.” Certainly more classy than the office and the furniture.
“I don’t understand what a new product has to do with a missing consultant.”
Alison noticed that Catrina drank her coffee black.
“We had a leak.” Alison gulped a breath of air. “News of the product got out to the press. It was a PR nightmare. The leaked information could only have come from one of the members of the executive team or the board of directors. I had to know who was trying to sabotage my campaign. I hired DigiGuard Security to, shall we say, investigate. To find the leak.”
Catrina didn’t respond. Her stare made Alison uncomfortable.
“Donna Harrison, the president of DigiGuard, reported to me weekly,” Alison continued. “They were making good progress. She thought she would ha
ve proof for me by the end of the week. Then she disappeared. Just dropped off the face of the earth.”
“Have you gone to the police? Did her family fill out a missing persons report?”
How could Alison make her understand? “Her husband has filed a report. He didn’t tell them what she was working on, he respected our confidentiality agreement. I haven’t gone to the police.”
“I’m sorry, Ms. Clarke, but this doesn’t seem like our usual type of job. Maybe I could give you a couple of names . . .”
“No.” Alison made up her mind. “I need you. From what I’ve learned about you, you’re the only person for this job.”
"We usually don't take on missing persons cases . . ."
"This is bigger than that." Alison cut in. "Donna's missing, but why is she missing? What did she learn that made her a target? Something very wrong is going on in my company. I need to find out what it is, and I don't want word of this to get out to the press. Stock prices would plummet."
"You're assuming something bad happened to Donna. Maybe she just had enough, needed a break. She's probably sunning herself on a beach in Mexico right now."
"Then find out for me." Alison leaned forward in her chair, made fierce eye contact with Catrina. "Make sure she's okay. I have to know what she found."
“Why not just take this to the police?”
“It’s delicate." Alison paused for a long minute, collecting her thoughts. "Let’s just say that what Donna was doing may not have been entirely legal.”
****
Tommy Prince loved the Seattle Aquarium on Pier 59. His mom brought him down here today for a special ninth birthday. He liked playing with the octopus and starfish in the tide pool, but best of all, he loved watching the seals and sea otters. He could stand above the pools and watch them sun themselves on the rocks, or go below and see them swimming through the water like torpedoes.
“Mom, I’m getting hungry.”
“Okay, Tommy. It’s getting late anyway. Let’s grab some fish and chips and we’ll head home.”
For Tommy, this was the highlight of an aquarium outing. He loved walking up to the open-air counter on the next pier and ordering fish and chips for Mom and himself. Then Mom gave him the money to pay with. He felt like he was treating her.
Tommy and his mom gathered their tray of fish and chips, stopped at the pop machine to draw a Diet Coke and a Coke, then made their way to the tables overlooking the water.
It didn’t take long to fill Tommy up. Soon he was antsy. He got up, walked around, looked down into the bay. He occasionally saw tiny fish swimming around the pilings. He saw some sea anemones growing; on the bottom he saw a crab. Then he noticed something very different. A large white blob nudged gently against the piling with the waves. Was it some kind of white seal? Then it dawned on him what he was looking at.
“Mom. Come here. Hurry.”
“Just a minute, honey. Let Mom finish her lunch.”
“No, Mom. You need to come now.”
His mom took another bite of fish, then grabbing a couple of fries in her hand; she walked over to the railing.
“Look, Mom. Right there.” Tommy pointed at a thing floating around the piling.
“OH MY GOD!” His mom screamed. The fries fell to the ground. “Somebody, call 911!”
****
Ted glared at his computer screen. Then he stood and stretched. All around him the detritus of hard labor at the office marked the end of the day. The group at the next table left a stack of pizza boxes. He smelled the sharp garlic aroma from Thai takeout containers at another table.
Someone had placed a pair of lacy panties on top of the wooden bear’s head at his table. Bear seemed to take it in stride. If you can’t take a joke at YTS, he said, you won’t last long.
Bear was the only other person still in the office. Their co-workers melted away into the evening while Ted’s attention was focused on his target.
He'd spent the whole day trying to hack into an insurance company’s Web site. He’d tried SQL injection attacks, carefully crafting SQL code in the page’s text boxes hoping to gain control of the database server. He tired cross site scripting, using a little known Internet Explorer security hole, he added his own Java script to the page in an effort to take control of the site. He tried hacking their global.asx file, their web.config. In the end, after a full eight hours of brain sweat, he had to pronounce them hack-proof. Ted was not happy.
Bear wasn’t satisfied. He thought he could hack any system. When Ted left work, Bear was still tied to his workstation, trying to hack in. Ted knew damned good and well, that what little sleep Bear got that night, would be at YTS. Bear was legendary. Once he sank his teeth into a Web site, he wouldn’t let go until he was in.
In a way, Ted hoped that Bear would fail. It wouldn’t look good for Ted if Bear succeeded where he couldn’t. On the other hand, he kinda liked Bear, in an odd-ball sort of way, if you could like someone who was that moody and grumpy. Anyway, Ted wished him well and headed home.
Ted walked the two blocks to his bus stop in Pioneer Square with his head still immersed in the problem. Had he missed something? Would Bear find some vulnerability he didn’t know about yet? Could he learn anything from Bear’s success?
Stepping in a puddle, in the cobble stone paving of the Square, brought him back to the present. Walking on those rough stones, when they were wet and slippery, needed his full attention and now he had a wet shoe to deal with. The evening mist dripped from the iron pergola covering the corner. At his bus stop, he looked across to Magic Mouse.
He loved the quirky toy store. He could let go of his thin veneer of adulthood when he roamed their aisles. He’d even bought a kite to fly at Gas Works Park this summer, if summer ever got here.
“Hey, hero, how ya doin’?.” The burly bus driver greeted him as he climbed aboard the MT66.
When was it going to end?
He stepped off of the bus at Eastlake and Stewart. He was far enough north of down town that the sky scrapers faded to six and seven story buildings. Everywhere he could see, construction cranes heralded new buildings going up in his neighborhood. According to Chris, the construction crane was the new state bird.
Ted limped the four blocks to his apartment. His cracked ribs made everything harder. Still, he was glad he hadn’t bought that new car. He hadn’t driven his old Mitsubishi since the fight. He wasn’t sure he even wanted to fix his car. Every time he walked by it, the smashed door reminded him of his humiliation. The boot prints in the rear panel only added insult to injury. The ugly yellow and green Metro buses were more convenient for getting around downtown anyway.
Turning his key in the door, he said, “Hola, señorito,” as he picked Oscar up and rolled him onto his back. Oscar went limp and emitted a loud purr. His small studio was just as he left it. No barf or hairballs on the carpet today. He’d check his loft bedroom later. His bed was Oscar’s favorite place to leave him presents. Oscar hadn’t tipped over any plants or torn down the curtains on the big sliding glass doors. “Musta been a quiet day, gato. No signs of raping and pillaging.”
Ted leafed through his mail. Two new Net Flicks movies waited for him, Patriot Games and the original Bourne Identity with Richard Chamberlin. He hadn’t more than taken his wet shoes off, when his Blackberry buzzed in his pocket. He didn’t recognize the number.
He took a chance on answering. “Hello?”
He hated telemarketers. He usually just hung up. That was when he wasn’t feeling cantankerous. On those occasions, he’d argue with the poor telemarketer for half an hour or so before they gave up on him.
“Mr. Higuera? This is Catrina Flaherty.”
Catrina Flaherty? Oh yeah, my angel. “Hello, Ms. Flaherty.”
“Call me Catrina, please. Am I calling at an inconvenient time?” Her voice had that same husky, commanding tone he remembered from the hospital.
“No, this is fine. What can I do for you?” He wandered into his kitchenette, pulled a bottle
of Henry’s from the mini-fridge and twisted off the cap. Oscar brushed against his damp socks.
“I’d like to see you, Ted. Do you have time to meet with me?”
Ted’s heart rate sky rocketed. “See me? What do you want to see me for?”
“I thought we should get to know each other a little better.”
Caramba. So what if she was Mama’s age. Ted had visions of her well-filled-out blouse and long legs. The blonde hair and gray eyes didn’t hurt either. Maybe she thought Ted was older.
“Can you meet with me after work tomorrow?” she asked. “Say at Doc Maynard’s?”
You betcha. “I’ll be there.”
****
Ted made it a point to wear slacks, a turtleneck sweater and a sports jacket to work that day instead of his standard T-shirt and jeans. He spent the day fending off the teasing by Bear and the rest of the crowd. “Got a job interview today?” they’d ask, or, “Hot date tonight?”
He didn’t want to tell them that he did, in fact, have a hot date. He wasn’t sure what he thought. Catrina was much older than him, but she was in prime shape. Was she one of those cougars he heard about who liked younger men?
If so, why was she interested in him? He’d love to jump her bones, but what did she want?
He didn’t need a mama. He already had one. But, on the other hand, if it’s offered, take it.
Five o’clock couldn’t come soon enough. Ted’s pulse raced and his breathing was shallow as he raced out the door. He hadn’t felt this nervous since his first date with Jenny Rodriguez in the eighth grade. Oh yeah, those were good times.
That was the day Ted discovered that he was attractive to women, well girls at least. Since then, he never had a hard time getting a date or at least a piece of ass.
Hacker For Hire (Ted Higuera Series Book 2) Page 10
