by Reece Hirsch
An office relationship like this one was supposed to be just a brief interlude of decadent fun. He was supposed to show Sarah a good time for a few months, take her to some nice dinners, plays, a concert or two, and then they would both return to the inevitable trajectories of their lives.
Having cancer, though, had given everything a gravity that it was never supposed to have. When he had first told Sarah about the diagnosis, she had said the right things but then kept her distance for two whole days. She had returned, though, without a word of explanation or apology, and from that point forward she had been there for him through every harrowing, enervating step of the treatment process. He couldn’t speak for Sarah, but from that day when she returned, Chris had started looking at their relationship differently.
That night, Chris took Sarah to a Steely Dan concert at Masonic Auditorium. She had heard of the band but didn’t really know their music. Chris had figured that one of the advantages of being older was that he could introduce her to some of the great things her generation wasn’t familiar with, but he wasn’t sure the plan was working out.
The seventies rock band was gliding through “Kid Charlemagne,” one of his favorite Dan songs. After the morning’s miraculous good news, Chris’s senses still felt hyperacute. It was as if every nerve ending was hardwired into his heart now. Everything prompted a swell of emotion, even the song’s snaking, rising guitar solo. He felt like he was one emotional moment away from making a fool of himself in public.
At the root of this new feeling was the realization that he was going to die—but not today. I’m going to die. When you first grasp that concept as a child, it seems like a revelation that is both monumental and entirely irrelevant, like the fact that there are millions of stars like our sun scattered throughout the universe. As you move through your life, you say the words to yourself with varying degrees of conviction. When a car runs a red light and misses you by inches in an intersection, you say it and you mean it for a moment. But Chris now said the words to himself with a bone-deep and lasting certainty that they were true. I’m going to die.
And yet he had lived and apparently wouldn’t die anytime soon. Forty years wasn’t old, but getting that close to death had given him thoughts that most people don’t have until they’re fifty, or maybe even sixty, if they’re lucky. In a typical life, death was like an important new product that was rolled out in the most slow and careful of launches, with viral awareness of the brand building until it was inescapable and the signs were everywhere. He’d had those thoughts sooner than he should have, and they had changed him in ways that he was still discovering.
Once Chris’s initial euphoria had worn off, a certain amount of survivor’s guilt set in. Why hadn’t Tana had his luck? He remembered the hideously bright red liquid cancer drug Adriamycin that she had taken intravenously. Like her fellow breast cancer patients, Tana had called it “the red devil” because of its terrible side effects. Her treatment had been much more excruciating than his, so it should have worked better. That would have been fair.
Chris’s turbulent new feelings were tempered when his thoughts returned to the task that lay ahead of him—tracking down Enigma and Ripley and stopping the threatened cyberattack. His new lease on life might be short-lived if the hackers had their way. He recalled the image of his faked death certificate and wondered again if it was a prank or a prophecy. I’m going to die. That’s what someone was telling him.
“So how are you liking the show?” he asked.
“It’s good. Good band, really good musicians.”
Chris knew faint praise when he heard it. “You’re not really into it, are you?”
“Maybe it’s just because I didn’t grow up on this music. When was the last time these guys were on the charts, like nineteen eighty?”
“Actually, that sounds about right. You don’t have to spare me, you know, I can take it. I’m very resilient. After all, I just beat cancer.”
“You shouldn’t joke about that.” She tried to frown, but her pursed lips couldn’t hold back a smile.
“No, I want you to be brutally honest with me. Try to forget for a moment that I’m in a weakened state after my bout with cancer.”
“Stop it,” she said, laughing.
“I just used to think these guys were so cool.”
“You thought they were cool?” The note of irony was unmistakable. She looked away, surveying the middle-aged crowd lining up to buy plastic cups of wine and microbrew. “It is nice to see that your musical tastes extend beyond classical and your precious Bach, though. Maybe it’s just that I have my mind on other things.”
“Like what?”
“Like what we could do to celebrate the good news.”
“I’ve got an idea.”
She grinned. “You always have that idea.”
“It’s a really good idea.”
“Are we going back to my place or yours?”
“Mine. It’s closer.”
They both sipped wine from plastic cups, pretending to watch the concert crowd but really watching each other.
Finally, Sarah said, “You know, I do know what you’re thinking.”
“Oh, do you?”
“Yeah. I have heard that song ‘Hey Nineteen.’ How’s it go?”
Chris didn’t care to admit that she had read his mind. “Oh, right. Something about a guy dating a younger girl. She doesn’t appreciate his music and it makes him feel old.”
CHAPTER 8
January 9
When Chris saw the message in his inbox the next morning, he found it more shocking than the email containing the faked death certificate. It was from Sarah, and it read simply: “Chris—we’re over and I’m moving on. Don’t try to follow me. Sarah.”
How could the woman who had accompanied him to his oncologist the day before send him that email? And what did she mean by “moving on”? Was she leaving the law firm? Was that what she meant by telling him not to follow?
It wasn’t that Chris couldn’t handle rejection. In fact, he had always expected Sarah to leave him for a younger man. Just not today, and not after the way she had acted the day before. Although he found it hard to admit, yesterday was probably the first time he had begun to entertain the notion that they might have a future together. Was this some sort of perverse reaction to yesterday’s positive prognosis?
Chris immediately went to Sarah’s office to see if she was in. Jamie Dahl, a fellow corporate paralegal who had the office next door, started shaking her head when she saw him approaching down the hall.
“She’s not in. Resigned today. No notice.”
“Did she say why?”
“Not to me. Apparently, she just did it in an email to Don. We’ve worked together for three years, so I thought I’d at least get a good-bye. I guess you must be feeling the same way …” Jamie flinched slightly as soon as she said it, but Chris was already aware that nearly everyone in the office knew about his relationship with Sarah.
“It’s okay,” he said, already heading for the office of Don Rubinowski, the firm’s managing partner.
“Where’s the dear leader?” Chris asked Don’s secretary.
Don’s secretary waved him into the office without any introduction. “He’s expecting you. And he doesn’t like it when you call him that.”
Don was no stranger to the midlife crisis. In a development that even he felt was painfully clichéd, Don had married a woman twenty years his junior who sold Porsches. At the Porsche dealership on Van Ness Boulevard, Don had apparently found one-stop shopping for all of his midlife crisis needs.
Don stood up from behind his desk as Chris entered. He had close-cropped gray hair and a face so taut that some suspected he’d had a lift. Don broke off the call that was on speakerphone, saying, “Sorry, but we’ll have to finish this later.”
“So is it true?” Chris asked. “Did Sarah actually resign?”
“Yes. I got a terse little email, no explanation. No ‘Thank you, I’ve learned a
lot here,’ nothing. No sign that she was looking for a recommendation letter, either. It sort of makes me think that the next thing we hear from her is going to be in the form of a pleading.”
“I don’t think you need to worry about that.”
“Oh, I don’t? Pardon me if I question how well you know the girl.”
“I’ve been having an affair with her.”
“Yes, I’ve gathered that. Apparently half the office knew before I did. You know, we have a policy about that sort of thing. You were supposed to make an official disclosure to HR.”
“I know.”
“And it’s not that I’m entirely unsympathetic. I understand that you’ve been going through some tough times. And look who I married. Just not in the office.”
“It wasn’t something that I planned, believe me.”
“Stacy has friends that age, lots of them. She could have set you up if you’d just said something.”
“I wasn’t just looking for someone younger—”
Don waved a hand to indicate that the relationship counseling session was at an end. It took a lot to get a rise out of Don—his experiences as a veteran litigator and long-time managing partner had rendered him flame-retardant and shock-resistant. “If you do hear from Sarah and figure out what she’s thinking, I’d appreciate it if you would share with me, if you’re so inclined.”
“In all honesty, I have no idea what she’s thinking. Just yesterday she really didn’t seem like someone who was about to leave.”
“You’re lucky if you can understand a woman your own age. With someone who’s fifteen, twenty years younger than you, you’re just never going to get there. You may think you’re connecting, but eventually you realize just how much was getting lost in the translation.”
“You think we’re a couple of fools?”
“Probably. The difference is that I married mine. I really can’t tell you if that makes me the smart one between us.”
“So what are you going to do?” Chris asked.
“What is there to do? I’m going to accept her resignation. Oh, and I’m also going to hope to God that we don’t get sued.”
“I think there’s something wrong here. It just doesn’t seem like her.”
“What’s wrong is that you’ve driven off a member of our staff because you couldn’t keep it in your pants. Don’t compound the problem by trying to find her. You’ll just make things worse for all of us.”
“Did I say I was going to try to find her?”
“No, but I do have some experience with these sorts of situations.” Don stood up from his desk, signaling that the failed interrogation was over. “You need to keep your head in the game. Has BlueCloud engaged you to track down those hackers?”
“Yeah, I even got a personal audience with Dave Silver himself.”
“I’m not surprised,” Don said. “If BlueCloud takes the hit for a cyberattack, he loses hundreds of millions of dollars the next morning when the market opens.”
As Chris rose and turned to leave, Don put his hand on Chris’s shoulder. “Take care of yourself.”
Most people would have simply accepted Sarah’s email at face value, but most people didn’t have the forensic resources available to them that Chris had. He wasn’t necessarily expecting to find anything, but he decided that he was going to glean every bit of information that he could from the email. It was, after all, what he did.
Ed shot Chris a questioning look when he saw him take a seat at a computer in the forensics lab. “Can I help you out with anything there?”
“Thanks, Ed, I’m fine. Personal project.”
Ed nodded and returned to his work. He was probably wondering what could be more important than the Lurker virus, but he knew better than to ask directly.
Sarah’s email had been sent from her iPhone. Chris examined the routing on the email and noticed something odd. The email had been sent using a local WiFi connection in Barcelona, Spain.
Chris lifted his hands from the keyboard.
The threatening email with the fake death certificate had also originated from Barcelona. This was too unlikely to be a coincidence. Although he had nothing that could be called solid evidence, in that instant Chris knew that Sarah had been abducted by Enigma and Ripley, the hackers who had killed Pietr Middendorf. Perhaps the email that he had received from Sarah had been forced.
Chris knew that the hackers were dangerous, but he had never imagined that they might target Sarah. How could they even know that he was seeing Sarah? Chris felt an anger so intense that it incinerated every thought in his head.
Chris couldn’t say exactly how long it took, but he eventually got his emotions under control. He needed to think clearly if he was going to hunt down Sarah’s abductors.
Chris logged into his firm email account from a networked computer, opened Sarah’s email, and clicked “Reply.”
He typed: “Sarah—where are you?”
Chris slumped in his chair. Although Sarah had been gone less than twenty-four hours, he was certain that this was a kidnapping, and that the police needed to be involved.
EPISODE 2
CHAPTER 9
When Chris called the Central Station of the San Francisco Police Department on Vallejo Street, a desk clerk told him that he would need to come down to the station and submit a written report. By one in the afternoon, Chris was sitting in a molded plastic chair in the station’s waiting room completing the paperwork.
The Central Station was a gray, concrete complex near the on-ramp to the 101 Freeway. It was a clear, cold, sunny day, and the officers and complainants were all briskly going about their business. From the TV cop shows, Chris thought that you had to wait twenty-four to forty-eight hours before filing a missing persons report, but that was not the case. The missing persons report could be filed immediately as long as you didn’t know the whereabouts of the person. Chris suspected, however, that the police would take very little interest in the matter until at least twenty-four hours or so had passed. Because Sarah didn’t have any living family, Chris knew that if he didn’t file the missing persons report, it was unlikely that anyone else would.
Michael Hazlitt of the FBI had recognized the recurrence of the Barcelona IP address as an interesting coincidence, but he wasn’t persuaded that a kidnapping had occurred. Nevertheless, Hazlitt said that they were going to hunt down Enigma and, if he also happened to be a kidnapper, then all the better. Hazlitt politely arranged a meeting for Chris with the unit of the FBI that handled kidnapping cases, but they were similarly unpersuaded, concluding that the matter of real interest was the cyberterrorism case, which was already being pursued.
As Chris completed the report, he described Sarah’s appearance, the clothes she was wearing the last time that he saw her (green silk blouse and jeans) and identifying physical characteristics. He described his relationship as “friend.” He was struck by how little the contents of the form conveyed about who Sarah really was. For that, he flashed back to the first time she caught his attention.
Bill Ober, an arrogant first-year associate from Harvard, had asked him a peculiar question that sent him in search of a paralegal named Sarah Hotchner. He had seen this sort of sniping before. Paralegals and first-year associates were in some ways natural enemies. The first year’s sense of entitlement and salary often rankled the paralegal, who was often considerably older, with more practical knowledge of how the day-to-day aspects of lawyering got done.
Chris peered into her tiny office, where Sarah was collating exhibits for a court filing in an accordion rack. “It’s Sarah, right?”
She turned to face him, a small smile already in place. “Right, Sarah Hotchner.”
“Chris Bruen. Nice to meet you.”
“I know who you are.”
“Apparently you do. Did you say something to Bill Ober about me?”
Sarah cocked her head. “What did he say?”
“He said that you told him that I would be driving him over to the cour
thouse today on a motorcycle—with a sidecar. That he should act like it’s no big deal when I ask him to ride in the sidecar.”
“Hmm. He said that?”
“He said that.”
“And you don’t have a motorcycle with a sidecar?”
“No, I don’t. And I don’t think that Bill made that up. He doesn’t have that much imagination.”
Sarah nodded, giving it some consideration. “Probably right.”
“That was nicely done. Just wacky enough to be true. And Bill does need to be taken down a notch or two.”
Sarah chose not to comment.
“But while I appreciate the assistance, I’ve got this one,” Chris continued. “Taking down overconfident first years, particularly Harvard Law grads, is something we’re pretty good at around here.”
“Just trying to help,” she said, the half smile still there.
After that exchange, Chris had decided that it might be fun to work with the new paralegal, so he had asked for her when he was assembling his next due diligence team.
He smiled at the memory, then felt the hurt.
When he had completed the missing persons report, Chris was asked to come back to a desk in the squad room that was occupied by an officer in her late thirties with dyed blond hair and a rumpled uniform. She peered over the lipstick-smudged lid of her Styrofoam Carl’s Jr. coffee cup at some notes on a yellow legal pad. Her name tag read “Officer Holly Miller.”
“Chris Bruen?” As soon as she spoke, he recognized the mildly uninterested tone of the officer that he had spoken with on the phone.
