He actually texted back. mw going up in smoke was his cryptic reply.
Oh damn. I glanced out the window—the major thoroughfare the limo was traversing had turned into a parking lot. I couldn’t take it anymore. I pounded on the driver’s window until he opened the glass.
“I’m outta here,” I told him. “Keep heading for MacroWare.”
He lifted a hand in understanding. I shoved open the door and jumped into the unmoving traffic, dodging between hulking SUVs blaring their horns—as if miles of cars would magically disappear to satisfy the impatience of Type-A morons.
Once I was on the sidewalk, I could feel the pulse of alarm again. Pedestrians pushed and shoved in their hurry to be elsewhere, all of them shouting into their mobiles. Car horns blared. In the distance, I heard dozens of sirens, but there was nowhere for traffic to retreat. This was not a normal rush hour. This was more like three concerts, a Christmas tree lighting, and the Olympics emptying into the streets at once.
I made a mental note never to isolate myself in limousines again. No wonder the wealthy had no idea how the rest of the world lived. I’d never fully realized how my prized isolation had cut me off from reality. A rich man’s pedestal wouldn’t be any better than my basement.
Especially if some Unholy Pratman had the power to stop emergency services while he committed who knew what crimes. I smelled big-time cover-up, at the very least. My gut really didn’t like the idea of that much power consolidated in one place.
I didn’t have time to reach my clothing stash for more suitable attire. Still in my dowdy skirt and ugly black coat, I slipped through crowds gathering on corners, past the business suits consulting their fancy phones. How long before the phones stopped working?
The MacroWare sales office was only a few blocks away. I wondered how Tudor had managed to get through their security but didn’t waste time worrying over that detail—not while the entire MacroWare staff appeared to be spilling from the building and milling outside on the sidewalk.
Was there a fire?—which was what I’d expected after Tudor’s smoke message. I heard no alarms or loudspeakers indicating a fire drill. I smelled no smoke and saw no leaping flame. That didn’t keep me from panicking at the prospect of a hidden fire with my brother in the middle of it.
If there was a fire, the place would burn down. No fire truck could get through this traffic.
Why was Tudor inside a building where my next best suspect worked? He didn’t need to be physically inside the building to mess with their servers—which should be sensibly located offsite. My adrenalin was rapidly escalating into berserker mode.
Where the hell was Tudor? Didn’t he have the sense to get out with everyone else? I wanted his long red hair back so I could see him in the mob. But in his knit cap and slouchy sweater, he’d look like every other geek in the lot, except the execs. I strained to find him, but I was too short to see through the crowd.
Under the assumption that Tudor would be watching for me if he was outside, I sauntered past the mob rather than attract attention by gawking. Around the corner from the employee door was the glass front public entrance. It was dark. I glanced at my phone. Not five yet. They shouldn’t be closed.
I tried texting Tudor again but this time didn’t get a response. Not liking this. If he was outside with the rest of the crowd, he’d be able to hear his phone.
I called Graham and got voice mail. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” I said into the recording. “MacroWare is dark. Everyone is outside, but I’m not finding Tudor. I’m going in.”
That was about the nicest threat I’d ever left him. I pushed open the front door and entered the dark lobby. Apparently no one had told security to lock the doors during an emergency. Eggheads lacked common sense.
I smelled smoke. I didn’t feel heat or see flame. I heard no crackling. I’ve had a lot of experience with fires. This one just seemed to stink, and it wasn’t even a fried-electrical smell. Why weren’t the smoke alarms going off? They must have done so earlier to send everyone out.
I found a bank of light switches, but they didn’t work. I produced my LED from my bag and proceeded onward. “Ratface?” I called into the darkness. Even in my panic I wasn’t using his very identifiable name. I was hoping Tudor would recognize my voice or the old insult.
I heard a noise further down the carpeted corridor. Trusting the building code would require a fire exit at the other end, I hurried down the empty hall, shoving open office doors and flashing my light, looking for trapped employees or Tudor.
Nothing but dark monitors everywhere. A computer company with no active computers is a sad affair. No electronic alarms blared at my intrusion. No security guards monitored my progress or stopped me. In a place like this, back-up generators ought to be kicking in to at least keep the servers and security running.
The lack of electronics was pretty damned scary. It presented a sharp image of a world without internet or security cameras, without fire or burglar alarms—a world where people could just walk in off the street. Wow. Hard to wrap the mind around. It was almost like being back in an old cowboy Western. We might as well have swinging doors.
Apparently hysteria provokes my imagination to strange heights.
I shoved at the next door. It didn’t open, and I reached freak-out level. “Ratface?” I called again, more urgently.
Tudor dropped through the ceiling in front of me. I nearly had a heart attack until I saw him holding one of those useless little netbooks that cost three fortunes and a harem or two. Then I wanted to smack him. I was still shaky from imagining his crumpled body behind that locked door.
“Some arse is burning something,” he whispered, nodding his head toward the back part of the building. “The ventilator quit working when the electricity went out.”
“I don’t see any reason to stay in here and find out who,” I muttered, but I followed him down the hall. So, yeah, our entire family is nuts, including me. “Doesn’t look like you’ve patched the software hole yet. The entire city is crashing to a halt.”
“You haven’t given me enough time. And my monster isn’t crashing anything. It only eats data files. This is a real attack if servers are shutting down.”
That shut us both up. We could be hunting a truly dangerous human monster, not just a cookie-eating one. I’d been hunting a killer, without giving much thought to the killer’s agenda. MacroWare’s operating system ran over half the computers in the world. Shut down MacroWare’s servers, corrupt their operating system and browser... and the result would be far worse than the traffic jam outside. If we had a megalomaniac controlling MacroWare...
One big corporation ruling all computers was such a very bad idea.
I pulled Tudor into one of the dark offices and shut the door.
“How much can you do with that tiny piece of overpriced junk?” I asked.
He flipped it open to show me the available networks. “There’s a strong signal in the building that isn’t MacroWare’s. I had just hacked their password when I smelled smoke. I was looking for the source when you yelled at me. I don’t know even know if MacroWare is still online, but the wireless ought to be strong enough for me to try to tap into their off-site servers if I go outside and find a hiding place.”
I wanted him safe and a hundred miles away, but if Tudor was our only hope of getting the world as we knew it back up and running . . . “There’s no one up front. Head that way, sit by the front door so you can escape if necessary. No one on the street should be able to see you. I’ll look for the smoke.”
He yanked a fire extinguisher off the wall and handed the canister to me. Then he hit the fire alarm for good measure. Nothing happened. “Is that what Graham means when he says emergency services are down?”
“I’m guessing MacroWare’s security is shut down,” I said. “And for good measure, Pratman may have disconnected police and fire department computers so they won’t get here until he’s done with whatever he’s doing.”
Tudor snorted at the epithet I’d created from his slang, but he didn’t interrupt while I thought out loud.
“Emergency services ought to have some kind of radio communication,” I continued, “but it won’t do them much good with the traffic out there, so stay by the door where I can find you. I’ll locate other fire exits, then hunt our smoking gun.”
He took the gun part literally and looked alarmed. I pointed back the way I’d come. “Save the world, minion.”
Apparently accepting that we had different goals, he grimaced and loped toward the front. I lofted the heavy fire extinguisher, decided I could handle it, and proceeded down the hall of executive offices. I was hoping to find my objective on this floor. I didn’t want to be trapped on the second floor if there really was a fire and not just a smoking rag.
The stench of smoke grew heavier as I progressed down the hall. The titles on the various doors grew increasingly more officious. I’d reached Chief Financial Officer before I heard the muttering.
“I’m not a damned programmer,” I heard a man’s voice whine. “I’ll make it all go away, if you’ll just leave me alone. You knew we couldn’t do this forever.”
I didn’t hear anyone reply. Assuming he was on the phone, I eased past the CFO’s office and on to a double door suite with no label on it. Conference room was my assumption. I peered in the sidelight window. At a console of monitors against the near wall, I could see a tall man in a high-backed chair. Shades of Graham.
But this wasn’t competent, self-assured Graham. Whoever this was, his body language revealed a terrified, weak dude apparently in over his knucklehead. He kept rubbing his brow and practically wringing his phone while slumped over a keyboard.
At this hour in the winter, the floor-to-ceiling windows were mostly dark, except for illumination from a distant street light. So it was only the building electricity that was out. The smoke was stronger here. I didn’t find the source until I saw the man feed papers under a desk and watched smoke billow out. Really, who burns papers anymore—unless he was trying to set off the sprinklers. Water would certainly wipe out any evidence in the mainframe servers, if they were in this building. It wouldn’t wipe out any off-campus back-up, but this guy didn’t look as if he was thinking too clearly.
He set his phone down on the desk and returned to pecking uncertainly at his keyboard.
What should I do now? Given what I could see of his height and shoulders and what I’d put together so far, I was pretty certain this was Wyatt Bates, brother of the aphrodisiac-wielding dead exec, and that he could be a desperate serial killer.
But he’d just talked to someone who apparently knew at least some of what he was up to. He had accomplices.
That scared the crap out of me.
My usual verbal attack wouldn’t work with a real killer. I only intimidated the powerless. The possibility of murderers with weapons roaming the hall was frightening. I should have sent Tudor away.
But the moron in the conference room could be destroying the internet for all I knew. He was most certainly destroying evidence. If I was right, he had killed one of the most important men in the world. He could easily have shot Hilda. For what? To spy on banking committees?
To save an all-powerful mortgage company. One partially owned by the family of another MacroWare exec—Bob Stark. For all I knew, Goldrich owned half of MacroWare and half the politicians in D.C. in one manner or another. Money has a way of creating its own influential fiefdom.
But Stark wouldn’t poison himself.
Remembering Senator Paul Rose and his tribe of wealthy investors in Goldrich’s halls—there was more than a simple mortgage company involved. I had huge files on the senator and his Top Hat cabal and knew they ran entire mega-banks and brokerages. Legislation controlling their realms could endanger all of them. Could Stiles’ death just be about money? That sucked so bad I wished the killers could all die more than once, in painful ways.
Leaning against the wall, fire extinguisher in hand, I worked through a scenario to keep from going off half-cocked. If I was afraid of losing our meager rainy day fund as the stock market slid downward, I could just imagine what guys worth gazillions must fear now that the spyhole had gone public. MacroWare stock was plummeting. Soon, the rest of the market would follow.
Whoever had created the spyhole was about to lose everything because they’d wanted to control banking regulations. They were so arrogant, they had thought the peons would never catch them.
It would take time and a lot of quick thinking to cover their tracks—hence the emergency shutdown.
Hence the mass murder of MacroWare execs? They’d been the first to learn of the spyhole.
If Stiles or his execs had informed the government that someone in his company had been using software to spy on government agencies, all hell would have broken loose. Homeland Security had the manpower to locate the spyholes, the spies, the information leaked, and how it was used. The powerbrokers would have all gone to jail.
Desperate men led to desperate measures, and they could justify it to each other in the end.
I was scared, but I was also majorly ticked as I worked all this out. I snapped a blurry photo through the window and sent it to Graham. I’d sent him one earlier of Rose and company but he hadn’t acknowledged it. I assumed he’d identified the cabal by now, but whether he could tell anything from this profile was doubtful. The guy in here was just another peon.
The Top Hat guys never got their hands dirty—but one of these days, I was going to nail a witness who would squeal. This was as good a place as any to start.
With no police to back me up, I didn’t have a lot of alternatives. I needed to halt whatever he was doing.
I shoved open one of the double doors, aimed the fire extinguisher, and opened a stream of foam on his trash can. It was very definitely Wyatt Bates who looked up. I needed to run, but working out the cover-up hadn’t cooled me off. I was geared for a fight.
The Big Guy bellowed and came after me. I kept spraying, knocking out his computer and the trash can fire, while liberally coating him with foam. I didn’t know what was in this stuff, but it couldn’t be good for the eyes.
He reached for his coat pocket. Uh oh.
I flung the extinguisher at his head and took to my heels.
I aimed for the nearest fire door but it burst open under the power of several camouflage-jacketed goons carrying very large weapons. I could probably recognize an Uzi if pressed, but guns were guns. They all killed.
I was so outta there. Not taking time to determine if they were good guys or bad, I turned and zig-zagged in the other direction.
As expected, automatic gunfire rang out behind me—but no bullets whizzed by my head. I figured it was just a matter of time.
Tudor’s worried face peered around the corner from the lobby. At my gesture, he disappeared.
I hated this skirt. I skidded around the corner just as more gunfire broke loose. This time, bullets hit the wall behind me. That made them bad guys in my book.
Tudor was outside, shouting into his phone as I burst through the glass doors. I didn’t hear heavy footsteps following. I figured the gunmen were finding a less obvious line of attack than running into the street spraying cars and pedestrians with lead.
“Outta here!” I shouted, grabbing Tudor’s arm and dragging him through the line of traffic inching down the street. We ran into a Starbucks packed with frantic people trying to call home. Our abrupt entrance hardly rated a second glance. They hadn’t heard the gunfire and were dealing with their own individual calamities.
I prayed the gunmen wouldn’t mow down an entire coffee shop full of innocent people. “Safety in numbers,” I told Tudor, pulling out my phone and hitting up Graham’s name. “Go look anonymous in some corner and keep on doing whatever you’re doing.”
“I can’t. We’re too far out of range,” he protested. “I need back in the building. The Wi-Fi in these places suck.”
“We need you alive more t
han we need the internet fixed.” I shoved him into a chair and stood in front of him, while watching out the plate glass window. No armed men emerged from MacroWare’s front door.
I got Graham’s voice mail again. “Goons just shot Wyatt Bates. He was burning papers and sabotaging something from a computer. Tudor can’t get in to the network to find out what. Your call now. I’m just sitting here waiting for my limo to roll by.”
Okay, so I’d already changed my mind about isolating myself—a limo worked just fine when gunmen were on your tail.
Twenty-five
Tudor’s Take:
The din in the coffee shop sounded like Tudor’s bunk on a Saturday night. He shut out the noise and tried to access the network he’d found inside MacroWare, but it had gone off line. Ana had probably fragged it.
Muttering all the profanities he knew and inventing a few more, he tried the Starbucks Wi-Fi to reach Graham, but it was overwhelmed by the frantic crowd.
Graham hadn’t trusted him with an internet connection not directly under his supervision, but Tudor knew his sister had one. “I need your cell hotspot,” he told Ana, who was looking decidedly grim as she talked into her mobile and held up a finger to tell him to hold on.
Knackered, gutted, ready to return to a boring school room, he glanced out the plate glass front windows. People were running away from MacroWare’s office. His gut clenched with fear, as if this were a real war zone. He wanted to burrow down under a table and hide but figured that would look pretty dodgy.
The geek squad from MacroWare poured through traffic in this direction, and Ana stiffened. Did she see the gunmen? He strained to look, but she handed him her phone. “Give me yours. Take this and find a place with lots of exits and a good sight line.”
“Won’t work,” he protested. “I need Graham’s satellite connections or something way stronger than cellular to finish this job. I just wanted to see what was happening over there.” He connected her phone with the netbook, but he was really getting scared. No cops, no emergency services, and gunmen with automatics were the worst kind of cock-up.
Cyber Genius Page 22
