“How did you find me?” I said when he looked up for a moment.
He went back to the book. McKenna answered. “I deduced that you would be looking for me in places with Wi-Fi—libraries being the most obvious choice. I told him to watch one for five days. If you hadn’t shown up, we would have tried something else.”
“He was inside. I thought you said he didn’t do indoors.”
“Even Abraham gets cold.”
Abraham made a sound that could have been a grunt or it could have been a laugh.
“What’s next?”
“I’ve been working on gaining access to Arinna’s labs and security system. I’ve been assuming that was what you still wanted. Was I wrong?”
I had no trouble answering that one. “Not at all. It’s the only way for me to clear this up. And don’t worry, you’re still on the payroll. I brought cash.”
“I knew you were good for it. But if you want to get into their systems, we are still going to have to go out there—on-site. The way they’ve isolated their network, I’d have to be Homeland Security to see all the files.”
“You’re willing?” I said.
“All part of the service. I’ve been piggybacking on wireless connections from the high-rise across the street. Working at night, so I won’t be noticed. I’m close. I could be ready as early as tomorrow night. Should we ask Abraham to join us?”
I thought of the way he had handled the two Latino muggers. “If we get to the point that we need his skills, we’re in far too deep. What do you need me to do?”
“There are things that are known and things that are unknown, and in between there are doors. And I think that would be a very good thing for you to work on. Maps of the property, the offices. What security I will need to override. Then there’s transportation. We need a vehicle.”
“I’ve got that covered.” The VW minibus, parked less than a mile away. “I’ll go to work on the rest.”
44
You’ll get better reception if you walk down along the top of the cliff for a bit. All this concrete blocks signals.” McKenna was hunched over his laptop. Abraham had already taken down the ladder for the night and crawled into his tent. I was ready to crawl in the other and get some sleep, but I wanted to try Skeli first.
Ten feet away from the entrance to the cave the night closed around me like a hangman’s hood. My other senses opened up, and I inhaled hydrocarbons from the space heater and the garage above. I stumbled over the tiny rocks and roots that had suddenly grown much larger. And I heard the rustlings of wind in the bare branches above. My imagination soared, too.
The call was routed through the house in Santa Fe, back to the VW nearby, then to the phone at Roger’s apartment before connecting across a thousand miles of ocean. Pop picked up.
“Everybody’s fine, but if you don’t speak with Wanda immediately she’s going to tear my arm off.”
“Give her the phone, Pop.” He was already gone.
“How are you?” Skeli cooed. I could hear her fear and concern, and I could hear her trying to hide it. Trying to make it easier for me.
“Well-fed. Well-exercised. No one has tried to kill me in hours. Couldn’t be better. Soon I’ll be climbing into a nice warm bed and thinking of you.”
“Please don’t kid. I’m not handling this very well as it is.”
“You? You’re the rock.”
“I’m not. I’m frightened for you. I’m coping. Maintaining. But I’m not a rock.”
I told her I loved her. I told her that I would take very good care of Jason Stafford because I loved her and the Kid and I knew they needed me as much as I needed them. I told her that I was close to being finished with this case, and that as soon as I was done I was catching the first plane to join them. That what I was doing was making them safe, too. And I told her that I would take no unnecessary or dangerous chances. And when I said it, I believed it.
“How’s my boy?”
“Terrific. He’s swimming. He calls it swimming, anyway. He’s a water baby. Oh, and he opened up to me last night. You want to know why he was pissing in the cup?”
“He talked about it? You’re incredible. How did you get him to even sit still for the conversation?”
“He saw Carolina cleaning the toilet, pouring some blue stuff in there. It got him upset.”
I found myself laughing with a shaky relief. “She should try another color.”
Skeli laughed back—also a bit shaky. “Does the stuff come in other colors? How do I know?”
“She can use the cheap vodka.”
We both laughed again and let a moment’s silence surround us.
I opened my mouth to say “I miss you” but Skeli spoke first.
“Will you be here for Christmas?”
It stopped me dead. I had no idea when Christmas was. I struggled to come up with the date. My mind worked backwards and forwards trying to find a moment that would define the present.
“What’s today?” I finally said.
“That’s a little scary, Jason. The twenty-third.”
We were going to break into Arinna Labs on Christmas Eve. It might work in our favor. Who would be there? If all worked well, I could go public with whatever we found first thing Christmas morning. Once the story was out there, there’d be no reason for anyone to be trying to stop me. I’d be safe. So would my family.
“Maybe,” I said. “I’ll try for a late-afternoon flight.”
“Be safe,” she said.
Good advice.
45
One more time I made the drive out to Westwood. McKenna plugged his laptop into the charger, turned the heat up to max, and fell asleep.
I woke him an hour later. We were stopped on the side of the road by a stretch of woods, a few hundred yards before the turnoff.
“Magic time,” I said.
“Where are we?”
“The Westwood property starts just up there, past the end of the stone wall.”
“There’s no fence?”
“You don’t see it from the road. It’s about twenty feet into the woods and it goes forever.”
He fired up the laptop, and for the next few minutes there was nothing for me to do except fret. I was tired but pumped. The combination of fear, constant vigilance, and living on the run was starting to tell. I ached in almost every muscle. But I was ready.
“Pull up closer,” he said. “I need a stronger signal before I do anything.”
“You’re in already?” I said.
“They’ve got a multimillion-dollar security system and a two-hundred-dollar firewall. I could teach a second grader how to do this.”
I drove another hundred feet down the road and stopped again.
“Is here all right? I’m afraid of getting picked up by any cameras they might have along the road.”
He didn’t answer at first. He tapped at the keyboard. “I’m past the firewall. Okay. Remember what I said about beating a randomly generated code?”
I did, but I was feeling a bit impatient. “Just do it, okay?”
“There’s a quicker way. Cheat.”
“In this case, I’m in favor of cheating.”
“Software engineers are as lazy as the rest of humanity,” he said, still typing. “They don’t want to have to struggle with passwords if they need to get into the system. So, they leave a back door at the admin level. Sometimes they hide it, but it’s still there.”
“And you’ve found it?”
“And cracked it. Let’s go.”
“Are you sure? Where am I going?”
“The front gate. I’ve disabled all of the cameras, so for the next ten minutes the guards will be watching frozen screens, which is fine . . .”
I put the car in gear and rolled forward. “As long as it’s dark outside and nothing’s moving.”
/>
“Go. Go.”
I made the turn and rolled down the drive to the gate. The overhead spotlight came on and I froze, feeling like the world could see me attempting to break into the grounds of one of Long Island’s wealthiest families.
“Quickly. Go.”
“The goddamn gate is closed!” I hissed.
“Exactly. Sorry. Sorry.” He tapped the keys again. “No one closed Selena’s email account yet. And, there it is.”
“You’ve got today’s code?”
“Getting it. Keep going.”
I stopped at the gate. No voice sounded out of the darkness. The front of the car was lit up like the top of the Empire State Building on the Fourth of July and no one seemed to notice us.
“Got it?” I was discovering that the ice-cold nerves of a foreign exchange trader did not serve quite as well for a break-in artist.
“Now listen, Jason. There’s nothing I can do if the guards are listening, understand? I mean, if they’re sucking down caffeine and watching reruns of squirrels skittering across the lawn, we’re fine. But if they open the door and hear this jalopy drive by, well, there’s not much I can do about it.”
“I know. And we can’t help it if those squirrels suddenly freeze and don’t move. Put in the code, will you?”
McKenna’s face was a pasty white in the glare from the overhead spotlight. He looked very young. It occurred to me for the first time that he was almost twenty years younger than I was. He probably looked up to me. He probably thought I knew what I was doing.
He typed in the code. There was a click, and a hum, and the gate rolled back.
I rolled through and continued down the driveway. No one screamed for us to stop. No shots rang out. To our right, the guardhouse was lit, shining through the trees like a strippers’ bar in the Adirondacks.
“Turn off the lights if you’re nervous.”
“I’m not nervous,” I said.
“Okay. And I’m not Irish-American from Buffalo, New York, with a wife and two daughters and a mother in a nursing home who calls me ‘Everett’ whenever I visit.”
“Who is Everett?”
“How do I know? Early onset of dementia. The woman hasn’t recognized me in years.”
I turned off the van lights. It was dark—impossibly dark—but we could still see the pavement in front of us. We passed the turnoff for the guardhouse.
“The system resets automatically every ten minutes, so we need to be inside the building in another”—he looked at the screen again—“eight minutes.”
“It’s nice that one of us knows what he’s doing.”
We got to the lab parking lot with time to spare. I parked as far from the front door as possible, hoping that the van wouldn’t be picked up by the cameras. McKenna jumped out and ran for the front door. I followed.
There was a plastic-and-metal plate in a small box next to the locked glass doors. McKenna took out a gadget that looked a lot like a garage door opener, held it against the plate, and pushed a button.
“What is that?” I said, trying to make myself appear inconspicuous.
“Electronic lock picker. I got the design for it off a YouTube video.”
The door clicked. McKenna pulled open the door and we were in.
“Does that thing work on any door?”
“No. It’s only programmed for the top three electronic lock companies.”
“What would you have done if the lock was made by the fourth?”
“Picked up a rock and smashed the glass.”
“Elegant,” I said.
I led the way to the elevator, put my face in the retinal scanner, and waited. The elevator clicked and hummed, and a moment later the door opened. We both stepped in and I punched the button for the second floor. Nothing happened.
“I’ve got this,” McKenna said. He held up the little black gadget and swiped it over the face of the panel. The lights flickered on and the elevator started up immediately. “Same code as the front door. It would have to be, or all your employees would have to carry two coded keys. You can only make security systems as careful as the people who will use them.”
We stepped off the elevator into blackness, lit in spots by the glow from electronic indicator lights. Spots of red, green, and white were scattered about the offices, but the heavy drapes kept out any light that might have seeped in from outside.
“Find some lights,” McKenna said. “We can’t work like this.”
“Great,” I muttered, feeling along the wall for a switch.
“Here we go,” McKenna said, and the room was flooded with light from above.
“Damn. Do we need that much light?”
“Are you worried? Who can see in?”
I turned on the gooseneck lamp over Haley’s desk. “We don’t need more than this. Turn those off.”
He flicked the overhead lights back off and joined me at the desk. “Let’s see what I can find.”
I stepped aside and let him work. There was enough for me to do pacing, checking every sound in the empty building, and peering out into the darkness around the edge of the drapes, while being careful to let no stray ray of light escape. The tap, tap, tap of the keyboard and the occasional whirr of the hard drives on McKenna’s and Haley’s computers were a constant background to my anxiety. It felt like a very long time before McKenna called me over.
“It’s just what you thought,” he said. “The trade authorization for Phil Haley to short-sell shares of his own company and buy them back again after the stock tanked came from this computer. Clear as can be. But, this computer was being hacked at the time and the orders came from somewhere else.”
“Selena.”
He nodded. “I hacked her computer myself a week ago. I recognized the IP immediately. It’s static because she was on the Arinna network.”
“She didn’t strike me as the hacker type.”
“Yeah, well, we come in all sizes and colors, but I think you’re right. Whoever did this was good. She had help,” he said.
Penn would have been able to find her the help. Or maybe she just went to the DEFCON hackers convention and hired someone.
“Is this what you were hoping to find?” McKenna asked.
It cleared Haley of orchestrating the insider trading, but there was another question I wanted answered. I told McKenna about the license plate and what I had seen on the news.
“So you think someone doctored the file,” he said.
“I’m positive. I saw the pictures the day after the murder. That plate was unreadable.”
“Images. Digital images,” he corrected.
“Fine. Images,” I said, smiling around my clenched teeth.
“Here’s why it’s important. I can change the code so that your eye will be fooled, but I can’t fool someone who looks at the code.”
“What I want you to find out is if that change was made here—on this machine.”
“And inserted into the security file?”
“Precisely,” I said.
It didn’t take him long. I stepped away and let him work.
“Aaaaahh . . . yup. Dead on. Here’s what I’ve got.” He opened a file. The Rolls-Royce appeared on the screen with the blurred license plate. “Now watch.” He clicked again. Another license plate appeared, superimposed over the first. “That’s one of his attempts. A little sloppy, right?” He clicked again and again. “He gets better with practice.” The pictures fit together more exactly.
“Could he send them to the security files from here?” I said.
“He’s got full admin access. But why would he risk it? I’m telling you, any competent technician could find the changes.”
“He was betting it would never get that far. All he needed was to spread some doubt and get the cops looking for someone else as the murderer.”
“So whose license plate is that?”
“I don’t know, but I’ll bet good money on Chuck Penn. I just don’t know why Haley didn’t wipe all this off his computer after he was done,” I said.
“He thought he did. He deleted all this. But as we like to say, ‘Nothing is ever lost, it’s just misfiled.’”
“So what do we do? Can we copy all this to your laptop?”
“We can, but if you want hard evidence, you’re going to have to take the computer. Who can say I didn’t create all this myself?”
Once Penn was identified as the man behind the insider trading scam, and possibly as the murderer of his accomplice, I would be in the clear. He’d have no need to try and shut me up, and he’d be hip-deep in alligators fighting off the cops and the SEC. Much too busy saving his own skin to bother trying to take mine. Special Agent Brady would not appreciate a call from me on Christmas morning, but if I dumped the whole thing in his lap, I could still make an early-afternoon flight to Tortola.
“I’ll take the computer. We’re done here.”
46
Here, hold this while I get my keys,” I said, handing the computer to McKenna.
He put it under one arm and huddled up against the side of the van out of the breeze coming off the water. It was cold.
I fumbled through the pockets of the big overcoat before I found the missing keys in a pants pocket. “Got ’em. Let’s go.”
“Who’s there?”
It was Haley’s voice coming out of the darkness down the path between the rhododendron.
“Hurry up,” I hissed at McKenna, opening the passenger door for him.
A bright beam of light skewered us at the moment of getting into the van.
“Hold it. Don’t move. I’ve got a gun.” He stepped closer. “Stafford? Is that Jason Stafford? What are you doing here? Who’s that with you? And what the hell has he got?”
All I could see was the big bright light that engulfed us. If I’d been by myself I would have tried to run. Guns are dangerous, messy, but often inaccurate. I didn’t imagine that Haley was a sharpshooter, especially in the dark while holding a heavy searchlight in the other hand. But I couldn’t leave McKenna. I decided to brazen it out.
Long Way Down Page 25
