“Okay!” Ashley held up her hands. “You don’t need to jump down my throat. Hey, it’s your life. You do whatever. It’s just that, you know, it doesn’t make sense.”
“What’s logic got to do with it? You’ve been in therapy. Fear’s not rational. And sometimes, being rational isn’t the most rational thing to be.”
Ashley’s mouth dropped open. She blinked and reared back. “Ouch.” She reached out her hand to Diana. “I only . . .” Her eyes teared up. “I just . . .” And just like that, Ashley turned the tables and she was the aggrieved party.
Diana took Ashley’s hand and squeezed it. “I know, I know. You only want what’s best for me. But let me be the judge of what’s best, would you?”
Diana tried to drop Ashley’s hand but Ashley held fast. “You’re right,” Ashley said. “After all, you never judge me . . .” Ashley held on long enough for Diana to catch the irony.
“You’re impossible,” Diana said, but she was laughing.
“Sorry. I couldn’t resist. You stepped right into that.” Ashley bit her lip and stared past Diana at the locked door. “So, can I at least come in and watch your meeting? I’ll be quiet as a mouse.”
“Ha! You have never, in your whole entire life, been remotely mouselike.”
“Come on.” Ashley held Diana’s gaze. “Sweetie, seriously, don’t you think it’s time you let someone in?”
This time, Diana blinked first.
Ashley gave her a look of mock surprise. “Besides, leave me out here and I might open your package. Or even worse, neaten up the place.”
As Ashley glanced about the living room, still furnished with pieces they’d grown up with, Diana registered the discarded clothing, cereal bowl with congealed oatmeal, a week-old mound of clean laundry that she’d never put away. On the mantel over the fireplace was a simple brass urn that contained Daniel’s ashes.
“If you’re not careful,” Ashley added, “I might even fold your towels and sort your underwear.”
Diana turned back to her office door. She started entering the security code again. The door clicked and swung open a few inches. She could feel Ashley peering in from behind her. It really was past time to let another human being into her inner sanctum.
She held the door wide open and Ashley stepped past her and stood in the doorway.
“Wow,” Ashley said. “I didn’t realize you broke through the wall. This is a great space.”
Soon after she’d moved in, Diana had spent days swinging a sledgehammer, venting her rage on the wall between what had been her parents’ bedroom and her own. It was better than lying comatose for days on end, under a mound of Daniel’s clothing. By the end, she’d been coated with plaster dust, her face streaked pink from tears. She’d patched and painted the walls and ceiling, and pieced together oak flooring to fill the spots where wall had been ripped out.
Ashley continued into the room. “Gorgeous,” she said, running her fingers over the wall hanging that Diana had picked up in Peru when she and Daniel had gone there to climb Machu Picchu. “But this”—she took in the computer equipment—“looks like some kind of command central. And what are these?” She indicated the bank of monitors. “Surveillance?”
“With infrared for night vision. Plus an alarm system. Redundant Internet access. Firewalls. Motion sensors. Welcome to Gamelan Security headquarters. Aka, my office.”
“How did you manage to set all this up?”
“Jake helped me.”
“So all that experience hacking into other people’s systems finally pays off.” Ashley paused, but when Diana didn’t rise to her bait, she gave a brittle smile and asked, “So, how is charming Jake?” Ashley and Jake had gone out on one spectacularly awful date during which he’d spent the whole evening texting.
“He’s good. I think. We’re working together, but I haven’t seen him seen him in months.”
Ashley picked her way past a dead ficus, over an empty can of Red Bull and some open boxes filled with foam packing material. She settled herself in Diana’s desk chair—white fiberglass molded into a tulip shape with a red seat cushion and polished aluminum base. Daniel had given Diana that chair, a period piece from the sixties, as a Valentine’s Day gift a few years earlier.
Before Diana could stop her, Ashley reached for the mouse and jiggled it. The monitor flickered to life. The replica of the room they were in came up. Nadia was frozen in the middle of it. The queue of waiting messages in the lower corner of the screen had grown.
“How cool is this?” Ashley said.
Diana closed the office door. She crossed the room and tapped Ashley on the shoulder. “You mind?”
“Sorry.” Ashley relinquished the mouse and stood. She leaned forward, staring at the screen, her long blond hair falling almost to the keyboard. “OtherWorld?” she read aloud. “So what is this, some kind of game?”
“Game?” Diana choked on a laugh. “No. It’s—” She paused, searching for the word. “Just like the name says, it’s another world. There are stores and other offices here. You can go to parks and hear concerts. I meet with clients.”
“Wow. Video conferencing with cartoon characters.” Ashley snickered.
Diana massaged her forehead. “Sort of. But I don’t get paid in Monopoly money.” She edged Ashley aside and slipped into the chair. “And the cartoon characters are real people.”
“You’re sure about that?”
“Reasonably so.”
Ashley gave her an astonished look. “This, from a woman who trusts no one?”
“No one but you, my dear.”
Diana noticed the timer: minus two minutes, thirty seconds. She was officially late. She eyed the message-waiting flag on Skype. Probably Jake, trying to raise a response out of her.
With a few clicks, she transformed Nadia’s hair from short, spiky blond to conservative brown done up in a French braid.
“Meet Nadia,” Diana said as she exchanged her avatar’s leather jacket, jeans, and boots for a dark tailored suit jacket, a short skirt, and ballerina flats. “She’s my alter ego in-world. And this is Gamelan Security’s in-world headquarters. Her office. You can think of it as my very own 3-D MySpace.”
“Or Rapunzel’s virtual tower?” Ashley said.
Diana remembered the green cover of the book of Grimm’s fairy tales, its spine peeled away. Rapunzel had been their favorite. Over and over they’d play out the story, taking turns at being the princess who lets down her long hair so that a wicked enchantress, and later a handsome prince, can climb up to her tower prison.
“Except Nadia doesn’t need rescuing,” Diana said. “Business is booming. And she’s late for her meeting.”
Clients had been lining up ever since Gamelan exposed a young medical student as the mastermind behind the breach of a prominent health insurer. They uncovered a massive theft of patient and physician medical records, though unfortunately not before the hacker’s customers abroad had used the information to manufacture thousands of counterfeit health insurance ID cards and generate thousands of phony prescriptions. After the story hit national and international papers, Diana and Jake had more work than they could handle.
Diana dragged the red cap and wraparound sunglasses back to her inventory. The gold charms that her avatar wore around her neck—just like the real pair of gold Ds that Diana often wore around her own—were barely visible.
“Okay. Here we go.” She swiveled toward Ashley and put her finger to her lips. “Remember”—she lowered her voice to a whisper—“you’re a mouse.”
“Where do you want me?” Ashley squeaked.
Diana pointed to a chair. Ashley held her hands like paws in front of her, minced over to the chair, and sat.
Chapter Three
Diana toggled a switch. The computer monitor went blank, and the image of the virtual room that had been on the screen reappeared, p
rojected across the upper half of the blank wall opposite them.
Ashley’s mouth fell open. “Wow.”
“Shh,” Diana said, suppressing a smile. She felt a little like the first time she had ridden a two-wheeler, zooming past Ashley, who watched from astride her Hot Wheels. Her glee had been short-lived. A week later, Ashley was riding a two-wheeler, too, self-taught.
Diana hooked on her earpiece and typed in some coordinates. Moments later the image of her office dissolved, replaced by MedLogic’s chrome-and-glass corporate building. A box appeared in the corner of the screen and she typed in the pass code, then swiped her index finger across the fingerprint reader on the side of her keyboard. A bell sounded.
“Nadia Varata,” Diana said into the microphone.
The building exterior dissolved and MedLogic’s conference room materialized around Nadia. Projected across a full wall, the replica of a corporate conference room, complete with a long table and a white board, felt like an extension of Diana’s office.
The suited male avatar, standing beside a window with Diana’s slide show already running in it, belonged to Jake. He even looked like Jake, or at least the way Jake had looked when Diana had last seen him in the flesh, more than six months earlier when he’d been slim with thick, reddish hair that grew like straw thatch, and had a fondness for John Lennon wire rims.
Five other avatars, all belonging to employees of MedLogic, sat at the conference table. Diana recognized the CFO Michael Courtemanche and head of security Anish Chander. She’d met them at previous meetings. Both wore suits and ties. Jake had already started to run Diana’s presentation.
“This is surreal,” Ashley whispered. “Can they see the real us?”
Diana shook her head and shushed her. She clicked on her virtual briefcase and dropped it onto the conference table. Then she sat Nadia in a chair.
Jake continued delivering the presentation. “And here’s the inventory showing every storage device that’s been connected to your back-end systems for the last three months,” said Jake. The presentation showed a long list of devices and serial numbers.
For all Diana knew, Jake could have been anywhere in the world where he could get a wireless connection with enough bandwidth to run OtherWorld. As he continued, summarizing the security analysis they’d done, a text message popped to the top of her queue.
JAKE: YOK?
Yes, she was fine, she texted back. Just late.
Jake’s avatar explained how they’d methodically traced every connection until they’d discovered a laptop with a data file that had no business being on its hard drive. The laptop also had a little program that automatically copied its files to another location out on the Internet.
Diana typed:
NADIA: T4 TO
Thanks for taking over.
Back came:
J: NO BD
Actually, it was a big deal. She shouldn’t have been so late that he had to fill in for her. It was unprofessional.
The slide presentation was replaced by a window with video that showed the real Jake sitting opposite the unfortunate employee who owned the laptop with the suspect files. The poor woman—the name SONYA LOCHTE floated briefly on the screen and then disappeared—looked to be barely out of her mid-twenties. She had wispy pale blond hair, down to her shoulders, perspiration glistening on her forehead, and a deer-in-the-headlights look in her eyes.
“I . . . On my computer?” Ms. Lochte touched her neck. Pink streaks ran up her pale throat, from crisp white shirt collar to her chin. “I’m in marketing. You tell me there’s files on my computer that shouldn’t be there? I believe you. But honestly, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Marketing.” Diana recognized the voice and the derisive snort that followed. An empty voice balloon appeared over the head of CFO Michael Courtemanche’s avatar. Diana wondered if in real life the guy had hair like Matthew McConaughey too.
“It’s entirely likely that she has no idea what happened,” Diana said, a voice balloon appearing over Nadia’s head. Outside attackers often probed until they found a vulnerable entry point, poked a hole, and then exploited it low and slow without anyone being the wiser.
“We can’t afford employees in any department who don’t understand security protocol.” Courtemanche again. Diana didn’t bother to point out that it was doubtful that any of their security protocols would have prevented this particular incursion. “We’ve confiscated her computer and locked her out of the system. At least it was an easy fix.”
A text message from Jake streamed across.
J: F**IDIOT
Diana agreed. The guy was a complete idiot if he thought that confiscating poor Sonya Lochte’s computer was all it was going to take to solve the problem. She pressed her palm into her forehead. When was that aspirin going to take hold?
“Was the data encrypted?” Diana asked, even though she knew the answer. She’d already examined the stolen spreadsheet. Its cells contained unencrypted data—letters and numbers that meant nothing to her.
A moment of silence stretched out. “Felix?” The voice balloon was over Chander’s head.
“Of course it was encrypted.” This bold-faced lie was from an avatar wearing a dark suit. That had to be Felix Manning, their director of IT.
“Hmm. I wonder if you were using AES.” Diana feigned innocence, knowing full well that they had not used Advanced Encryption, the latest industry standard. “We’ve found, in some cases, that our clients think they’re protected when they’re not. We can run a few tests, help you troubleshoot—”
Manning cut her off. “I’m satisfied that the problem is solved. It’s clearly an inside job.” He sounded so smug, but she knew he was blowing smoke. There was no way to tell if the attack had come from outside or in.
Manning added, “And we triple-wiped the laptop.”
Damn. Diana had baited that laptop’s hard drive with a phony data file that had in it a homing device that would have enabled her to trace the hackers.
“In that case, we should be all set,” Jake said. “Don’t you agree, Nadia?” I so do not, Diana wanted to shoot back. Customers were right, except when they weren’t and then they didn’t want to know. “Nadia?”
“Right,” she finally said. “All set except for some recommendations. Shore up your firewalls and intrusion prevention systems, stuff like that. I’ll send over a report with the details. Meanwhile, we’ll get started tracking down these criminals and—”
“At this point, the ball is in your court, Felix,” Jake said, talking over her. “It sounds as if you’re confident that you have the situation under control . . .”
“Anish?” IT director Manning asked.
“Completely,” Chander said.
“But if everyone just rolls over and—” Diana started.
A text message popped up on her screen:
J: BACK OFF
Chander continued. “I’m well aware that I’m responsible for security, and I’m satisfied that our people have this issue covered. We can take it from here. We’ve been assured.”
“Been assured?” Diana winced as she heard the shrillness in her own voice. But really, what was that supposed to mean? And who exactly had assured them? She hated it when victims simply plugged the breach and folded. That’s what hackers depended upon. When victims didn’t come after them, they’d go on probing for the next unguarded entry point. In fact, Daniel would have called that the hackers’ greatest and most unappreciated service to industry—finding chinks in corporate armor.
There were a few uncomfortable moments of silence.
“Nadia. Jake.” Courtemanche spoke up. “I appreciate the work you’ve done for us. Thank you so much.”
Blah, blah, blah. Diana swallowed her frustration.
“It’s been our pleasure working with you,” Jake said. “We’ll send you our
final reports. And, of course, the invoice.” He chuckled.
“Of course. Send it to my attention,” Chander said. “And we trust you’ll continue to observe the nondisclosure?”
A new text message streamed across.
J: O&O
Over and out? It was more like Over and don’t let the door smack your sorry asses on the way out. Diana transported Nadia home.
“Know what that reminded me of?” Startled, Diana turned around. She’d nearly forgotten that Ashley was in the room with her. “Client I once had. Bugged out after I’d met with them for hours, worked up an entire ten-page proposal, then she goes, ‘Sorry, the event’s been canceled.’ Only it’s not. Turns out they’re using my proposal to spec an RFP for other hotels to bid on.”
“That sucks.”
“Yeah, it sucks. But there’s one thing I’ve learned. Whatever you do, don’t take it personal. ”
But Diana was taking it personal. This wasn’t the first time she’d seen this happen. Neponset Hospital five months ago. Unity Health Insurance six weeks later. When she’d pointed out the similarities to Jake—two clients rushing for the exit when they’d barely gotten past hello—he’d told her to grow a thicker skin. Now this was number three.
“I’m not being paranoid,” Diana told Ashley.
“Did I say you were? Actually, I thought you were very . . . tactful.”
“I made an effort. But I don’t get it. I mean why—?”
“Weren’t you listening to them?”
“They didn’t say anything. It makes no sense.”
“That’s the point. Trust me. This has nothing to do with you. You can bet they’ve got some hidden agenda, some internal thing going on.”
Diana stared at Ashley. Of course she was right.
“They pulled the rug out from under you?” Ashley went on. “So? Big frickin’ deal. Move on.” She stood, held her hands together in prayer, and drew them up and down, slicing the air in front of Diana. “I grant you absolution. As of this moment, it is officially not your problem.”
Come and Find Me Page 2
