Desperate

by Daniel Palmer

  “No, I wasn’t all right. I wasn’t all right in the least,” I wanted to say, but couldn’t get those words out.

  My gaze was fixed on our largest kitchen knife, the black handle and shiny silver blade shown in stark contrast against the white of our bedsheets. The blade was at least eight inches long, forged from a single piece of high-carbon steel, resistant to stain and corrosion. The thick blade looked strong enough to cut through muscle and then saw right into bone.

  Somebody had snuck into my home, had gone into my kitchen, retrieved the knife from the drawer, and slid it under Anna’s pillow while we slept.

  Roy had given Nicky Stacks my message.

  And Stacks had returned a message of his own.

  CHAPTER 49

  I was back at work for the first time since becoming a murderer. My access badge functioned fine, but still I felt that my colleagues were looking at me differently, as if I gave off an unfamiliar scent. Probably just my imagination, but it was noticeable to me.

  I sat in my cube and powered up my workstation. Same as always, murderer or not, the e-mails were there, gathered in my in-box, awaiting my reply. They’d have to wait. I had other business to attend to. Important business, like making sure I stayed alive.

  I had given Anna a vague explanation about the knife before I left for work. It was probably connected to the stress of Lily being gone, I said, and made up some BS about my subconscious putting the knife under her pillow as a way of protecting Anna from being hurt even more.

  She didn’t seem to buy it. She insisted I stop taking Adderall and consider going to see a different shrink. She also, half jokingly, said she’d be sleeping with one eye open from now on.

  “That might be a good idea,” I wanted to say, but held my tongue. Instead of obeying Anna’s wishes, I popped some Adderall—because that’s what addicts do—and called ADT from work to schedule an alarm installation. If Anna asked, I’d say I made the appointment beforehand and the knife and alarm were two unrelated coincidences.

  I spent the whole day in my cube, avoiding meetings, trying to figure out my next move. Should we run? Could I hide my parents? Hide Bessie? Who else would Stacks go after if he couldn’t get to me? Did he know my friends? My coworkers? Would he go after Brad? His twins? What about Roy’s suggestion? Could he even find a buyer? Do I go to the cops? How would I get out of the murder charge if that came up? At that point, I was certain of only one thing: Nicky Stacks was a man who did not and would not forget a debt.

  Or a promise.

  The day slid away in an Adderall-fueled burn. I’d come up with no good answers, no workable plan. The only thing on my side, as Mick Jagger had once sung, was time. It was a short duration for sure, but at least I had enough days before the big deadline for me to come up with something. With luck, that something would generate one million dollars. Perhaps Roy and I needed each other more than I wanted to believe.

  On my drive home I was more focused on my options than I was the road. Maybe that was why I didn’t notice the black Cadillac CTS with tinted windows until it was riding my bumper.

  I glanced in the rearview mirror, furious—I hate tailgating—and checked the side mirror before switching lanes.

  The Cadillac switched right behind me and inched even closer. My body tensed as I anticipated the front of the Cadillac scraping my back bumper—it was a hair’s distance away, looming large and threatening in my rearview mirror.

  Alarmed and unnerved, I gripped the wheel tight and punched the gas. My Dodge Charger lurched forward, but the Cadillac kept pace, mirroring my every move as I erratically changed lanes. My face turned hot as if I’d just been slapped, and again I checked the rearview. Because of the tinted windows, I couldn’t see inside the car, but I knew it was Stacks, or one of his minions behind the wheel. The rest of the world went out of focus with my attention fixated entirely on the black machine behind me.

  As I accelerated some more, the dotted dividing lines blurred into a single streak of white, and the trees on the side of the highway became a line of green. I nearly clipped the rear of a burgundy SUV while working my way from the far right lane to the far left. The Cadillac stayed on my tail as though it were attached to my bumper by an invisible cable.

  I switched lanes again, no signal, but this time the Caddy pulled up to my left so for a time we were driving next to each other at the same rate of speed. I rolled down my window and screamed, “What do you want? What do you want from me?”

  The Cadillac abruptly accelerated, pulled ahead of me, switched lanes, and slowed, forcing me to jam on my brakes to avoid a collision. Fortunately, there wasn’t another car behind mine; otherwise it would have been a shower of broken glass and a big crunch of steel. I slammed on my horn, which had all the effect of a BB striking a turtle’s shell. My palms were soaked with a stress-induced sweat. We were both going seventy-five, weaving in and out of traffic. Whoever was behind the wheel seemed to anticipate my every move.

  I saw an exit ahead, but before I could take it, the Cadillac changed lanes, slowed down, and pulled in right behind me. There was no way I was going to lose this tail, so I did the next best thing. I got off at the exit and came to a slow stop on a wide dirt shoulder. The Cadillac pulled in right behind me and came to a stop as well.

  I killed the engine and got out of my car. The Cadillac’s engine was still running, with the low hum of a finely tuned machine. My hands were balled into fists, face red with rage. There wasn’t much traffic rolling by this weedy stretch of road, but the cars that did pass weren’t offering to stop and help. They didn’t know what we were all about. Could have been mechanical troubles, road rage, or just two friends trying to follow each other to some destination. Whatever it was, nobody stopped to ask.

  I went right up to the driver’s side and began banging my fist against the door. The tinted window reflected my rabid expression back at me like a distorted fun-house mirror. I pulled violently on the door handle, but of course it was locked.

  “Open the door, Stacks!” I shouted. “Come out and face me! You ever come into my home again and I’ll kill you! Open this door right now and show yourself, or are you a coward?”

  The Cadillac’s V-8 engine revved and roared in response, and the message was clear—back away. I didn’t care. I pounded my fist even harder against the glass.

  The window rolled down just a few inches, enough room for a gun barrel to stick out and point at my chest. Gazing at the muzzle, I staggered back a step, my open mouth frozen in horror. I pivoted as I went to the ground and heard a faint click behind me—the sound of a gun hammer striking, but there was no follow on explosion, no bright and blinding flash like when I shot Jorge, no stench of gunpowder souring the air.

  I crouched on the ground, my hands covering my head, whole body shaking. The Cadillac’s engine revved several times as if it was getting ready for a drag race. When it went into reverse, tires screeching, sand and stones went scattering in all directions and a column of dirt lifted skyward as the car skidded off the shoulder, fishtailed twice, and slipped back onto the road.

  I stood, imagining how it would have felt to take a bullet in the chest. I thought of Anna, the knife, the gun, the giant mess I’d made of our lives. I waited until I was safely back in my car before I texted Roy. My message was simple and to the point.

  Check with Nicky and see if you can find a buyer.

  CHAPTER 50

  Here’s the thing about cybercrime: it looks just like work. I sat alone in my cube, clicking, and mousing, and typing. I didn’t need a black balaclava to conceal my identity. No, I would need to modify log files to cover my tracks.

  In terms of data security, what we implemented to safeguard Olympian’s intellectual property could earn us a CIA triad “best practices” award. CIA in my world has nothing to do with the Central Intelligence Agency. It stands for something else: Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability. Protecting sensitive information from unauthorized access is what confidentiality is al
l about. When it comes to safeguarding sensitive data, privacy equals security.

  The “I” in CIA, or integrity, means protecting the data from modification. Only those with root access, meaning the three members of the Security Breach Team, Matt Simons included, could access or alter any and all data pertaining to the Olympian project. Which was why the Breach Team was carefully selected and highly trusted, and why we changed all the passwords after Adam Wang was let go.

  Ensuring that critical data is available when needed, the “A” in CIA, safeguards against power outages, failover redundancy, or denial of service attacks.

  The real CIA could take a lesson from us about safeguarding data. What we had was the Fort Knox of data security. There was no single repository for everything Olympian. The design plans were kept on a physically separate server from the materials plans, which were housed in a different building. The measurement plans, essentially the recipe for making the nanotubes, were in the same building as the materials plans but kept on yet another separate server on its own private network. The process diagrams and assembly instructions were also in that building, but they were on a different floor on a physically distinct machine as well. And each room, where each different server was located, was protected by sophisticated access control and tracking mechanisms.

  It wasn’t a small amount of data. If I printed out everything, the process to cook up an Olympian battery would fill several boxes of three-ring binders. In addition to the physical separation, we also had a suite of high-end data loss prevention products (or because we computer folks love acronyms, DLP products). Try to e-mail some protected files to your Gmail account, or IM them, or stuff them in a Dropbox folder, and we’d block access using in-motion data protection technology. Stick a USB key into the slot on one of our servers, or a camera cable, or an iPod, and we’d deny the file transfer using endpoint technology. Go after our archives, the artifacts of our failed attempts to build the battery, the plans we’d long ago abandoned, and our data at rest security protocols would make sure the Security Breach Team knew immediately. I had to get through four layers of security on four different physical machines to give Roy what we’d agreed upon.

  As it turned out, Nicky gave Roy a couple of names; he went dialing for dollars, and came up lucky. Somebody was willing to pay a million for the Olympian product plans—maybe even more. I didn’t care if Roy was skimming on this job like he did the other. I just wanted Nicky Stacks gone from my life forever.

  It was time to get to work. Security layer one: Did I have the right biometric authentication and badge permissions to unlock the doors to the server rooms where the machines are located? Answer: yes. My fingerprint had been recorded using a biometric reader and as a member of the Security Breach Team, I could use my badge plus a finger-scan to unlock the server room doors.

  Layer two: When I logged into the machine, could I access the files I needed? Answer: yes, again, as long as I used my root log-on.

  Layer three: Could I decrypt the data? Answer: Each member of the Security Breach Team had the decryption protocols so we could evaluate the content for any unauthorized changes.

  Layer four: Could I disable the monitoring? Answer: You bet. I had the same level of access as Matt Simons when he breached the system to sabotage Adam Wang’s career.

  The whole theft occurred over many hours, involving four different locations, four different biometric scans, and four different file transfers to my 8GB USB drive. The amazing thing about data theft was how so much of it, reams and reams of it, could be stored on something smaller than my thumb, with lots of room to spare.

  Four times I needed to modify the server log files to delete my presence. In addition, I also had to delete the logs for the biometric access control to the server rooms. If they were ever checked, logs showing that I accessed the four separate locations in quick succession might look pretty suspicious. It was akin to erasing video surveillance footage of a traditional B&E job. I had been there, but I wasn’t there. I was a phantom, a ghost. The whole time it felt like an out-of-body experience, my stomach doing twists to rival Greg Louganis in his prime. My tapping fingers left behind drops of sweat encoded with my DNA on the keypads. Good thing we didn’t detect for that marker.

  I was on the fourth log file, standing in the middle of a frigid server room on the second floor of my office building. Air conditioners used to keep the servers cool were blasting on high, while my feet felt bouncy on the raised floor. I was just about to complete the last step in my theft. I had committed the robbery in the light of day, during regular working hours, because after-hours access would have raised questions and left records I could not have erased as easily.

  I wasn’t kidding myself into thinking my actions were justified. I was scared, sick with worry, but felt cornered and out of options. Go to the cops and Stacks would make sure I went down for Jorge’s murder, leaving Anna, my parents, everyone I love unprotected, and me a target for one of Stacks’s men to shank while I was in jail. Did I let all those people I love die, or did I take matters into my own hands?

  I tried not to think of how this would impact my company. I was standing at a fork in a road where each path would lead me to a different but horrible outcome.

  My body quaked. I thought of confiding in Brad, but worried about dragging him and Janice into my disaster. I had made a decision to reset my moral compass because I saw no other choice.

  I had no way out. I’d give Roy the plans and pray he could sell them.

  All that changed when I felt a tap on my shoulder.

  My heart stopped, and a fresh band of terror raced up my spine.

  “Goodness, Gage,” Patrice said. “What are you doing here? I’ve been looking all over for you.”

  Could Patrice see the fear in my eyes? Caught in the act, caught red-handed, I tried to speak but couldn’t find my voice. What was she doing here? What did she want?

  “We’re supposed to have a meeting in my office before we meet with Peter.”

  I groaned inwardly. In my haste to get the data for Roy’s middleman, I hadn’t checked my calendar. I knew we had a meeting scheduled for later in the afternoon, but I’d forgotten Patrice wanted to have a premeeting before we sat down with the CEO.

  “I’m just finishing up,” I managed to say. “I’m sorry I forgot all about it.”

  “I tried to text you,” Patrice replied, sounding a bit frazzled. I hadn’t checked my phone. I must have been concentrating hard because I didn’t even feel the vibrations from each new text received. “Mamatha said she saw you come up here.”

  “I’ll be right there,” I said, exhaling slowly.

  “You look busy, so we’ll reschedule. Finish up and come down to my office in an hour,” Patrice said. “Does that work?”

  I didn’t bother to check my calendar. “Will do,” I said. “I’m so sorry,” I wanted to say.

  “What were you doing here, anyway?” Patrice asked.

  The lie came out before I realized what I was saying. “Just making sure the configuration files didn’t get corrupted during last night’s backup,” I said. “I don’t want anything to go wrong for the next demo.”

  Patrice returned a pleased smile. “Thanks, Gage. Really. You’re one of the reasons the project has turned into a success. I honestly don’t want to think of what would happen if we fail.”

  But I was thinking about it. I was thinking about the company going out of business. Thousands left unemployed. Countless lives altered or even halted. Careers would be ended. Marriages would crumple under the strain. Families would be torn apart. Savings accounts depleted, all because I gave Roy the secrets to our success.

  I thought about Wendy from my group, whose kid needed major orthodontic work. And Zack in documentation, who needed five more years of steady employment before he could embark on his bucket list dream to travel to Europe as a kickoff to retirement. I thought about Rebecca, who was pregnant and the only one working while her husband finished grad school, and Est
her, whose husband just died of a heart attack. The ripple effect from my betrayal would reverberate through so many lives.

  Save the people I love or save the company that saved me when I was at my worst, my darkest time?

  Patrice turned to go, but something made her turn back around.

  “Oh, and while you’re accessing the servers,” she said. “Can you make sure the archive is still online? Gerry finished his forensic analysis and wanted to make sure the configuration of the battery that caught fire went into the proper archives, but he couldn’t do the transfer. Maybe you can do a quick check and figure out why. If you can’t, we might have to restore the data from our backups.”

  “I wonder why that happened,” I said, honestly curious.

  Patrice just shrugged. “Who knows,” she said. “Mamatha thinks it has something to do with the disaster recovery system IT is testing out.”

  “I didn’t know we were testing a new system,” I said.

  “Neither did we,” Patrice said, her tone implying corporate inefficiencies were just a fact of life. “Mamatha just found out about it herself, but whenever something that works stops working, the best place to look for the culprit is usually what changed. This new system is probably what caused the archive to become inaccessible.”

  “So the backups were taking snapshots of everything?” I asked. “All of our data?”

  Patrice nodded. “That’s what I was told.”

  My eyes widened. Yes, of course.

  “I’ll be happy to check on the archive problem,” I said. And I meant it, too.

  Because what Patrice just said changed everything. I logged out of the server and set off to talk to our IT guys.

  I never did make the second meeting with Patrice. I was too busy working with IT. When I had what I needed, I went looking for Matt Simons. I found him in his cubical, working away.

  “Why weren’t you at Patrice’s meeting?” Simons asked.