Catalyst

by Steve Winshel

  “You wanna piss him off enough so he’ll tip his hand? That’s your plan? Brilliant. What’s your back-up plan – we hire Inspector Clouseau to track him down?”

  “If I can get him to get in touch, I can track him down. I just need to get him into a dialog, so we have to go back and forth. Email and cell phone. If I can get him to contact me enough times, I might be able to find out where he is.”

  Rigas looked a little irritated now. “I thought you said you couldn’t track him that way.”

  “Not exactly the same way. One call or email isn’t enough – not if he’s taking precautions. But if I know he’s going to use the phone or email, then I can set up a series of hunts to narrow him down. The first will tell me which region of the country, the second which city, and a couple more will let me identify the wireless connection or cell region he’s using. He’d only be untraceable if he switches Internet providers or cell phones every time he’s in contact. He’d have to have a new phone every other call, and I don’t think that’s likely.” Josh said this with more confidence than he was feeling, but knew it could be done technically. What he didn’t say was that if Helen’s boss were moving around in one city or traveling to multiple cities, Josh couldn’t do it. He needed to have contact with him four or five times over a short period of time, a few hours, to be able to find him.

  She thought about it for a minute. “Okay, if he responds then it ties him to the Ventrica. We’ll include some stuff about the Mills murders too. If he thinks he can’t be tracked, he might not deny his involvement. That’ll be incriminating enough to pin him to it. Then we can put the rest of the pieces together. And there’s something else.” She told Josh about the Lockheed missile test and the involvement of the software company where Bernard Mills had worked. Then she looked at him expectantly, like Josh was going to put it together. No way this was all a coincidence, and he realized what it meant; it made sense and it scared him.

  “Mills must have been working on the software for the missile intercept system, I’ll bet. Helen got to him. But why?” Josh was asking himself, not Rigas. To her, this was information to help tie Helen’s boss to criminal activities. To Josh, this was a step in understanding why Helen’s boss was doing this, which could lead to finding him before he found Allison and Josh. There was also a certain amount of curiosity about the person who was doing all this, though that curiosity was lagging far behind the part of Josh that feared the reach of someone who could affect a missile test by the U.S. government.

  “Why was your friend so upset about the news report?”

  “Not my friend…but he was pissed because he’d been playing the market and Lockheed’s stock dropped or something.”

  It made Josh’s head hurt to think about it, but he knew the answer. Helen had gotten this poor guy Mills to do something to the software, maybe sabotage it, so the test would be a failure. Lockheed stock would drop – a lot. Her boss must be playing the market, shorting Lockheed. It would be worth millions if you knew ahead of time the stock was going to take a hit. It was brilliant, but sick. He explained it to Rigas.

  “Damn! I like that. We should be able to track him, find out who bought a lot of Lockheed stock just before the missile screw-up.” She thought about it some more. “And we can use it in this social hack bullshit you’re gonna do. Spook him a little. Let’s go.”

  Josh started to get excited. Rigas may be tough, but he trusted her opinion. If she thought this would work, then his confidence grew. They headed back into the office, Rigas carrying the rest of her sandwich.

  Josh had already thought about the first email message he would send. It had to be a smart, careful inducement to get this guy into a conversation. The series of messages Josh had planned were going to make a very dangerous person very angry and he needed to keep Helen’s boss interacting with him.

  Josh began to compose the email, Rigas leaning in over his shoulder and giving pointed advice. Focused on the message, he was distracted by the scent of strawberries. He realized with a start it was Rigas’ hair. He took a quick glance at her but shook it off before she could notice. Only she had noticed and it made her smile to herself.

  Josh only had one example of Helen’s messages to her boss, from the keylogger he had put on her computer. Her email account didn’t keep copies of old emails sent. But between that one example and the two she had sent him, Josh got the sense criminals weren’t chatty in their emails. It took ten minutes but when he hit the Send button, he was fairly confident they would get his attention posing as Helen.

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Murello was concerned. The Ventrica design was worth an estimated $750M to him. But now Helen was delaying. He had found her reliable over the past three years. That was meaningless now. She had twenty-four hours to get the design to him or he would send in a backup.

  Sitting on a cloudless Sunday afternoon looking out the window onto the city he planned to own within a half dozen years, Murello heard the low tone indicating an incoming email. It was from Helen.

  Murello opened the email. There was no attachment and that was all he really needed to know; she wasn’t delivering the design. This was getting wearisome. But the content of her message got his attention away from the missing deliverable.

  Problems getting the design – Cardient contact more difficult than expected. Crawford dead. Not sure I can get the Ventrica. What do you want me to do?

  H.

  Murello looked at his screen. In three years, Helen had never needed clarification about what to do. Even when things had gone awry, she stuck to her mission. Only one time she had tried to up her fee. She’d figured out how foolish that was before Murello had to take any action. Now she needed advice on how to handle a minor bump? He thought for a moment. Despite the secure line and untraceable email account, she should never directly use the name of the product being stolen. Helen had no idea who Murello was and no understanding of why he wanted the Ventrica – or any of the other information he paid her to get – but this was a stupid mistake anyway. An unforgivable mistake. Murello scanned his memory for the name of the Northern California operative he had used to clean up a local situation a few years ago. He would send the man in to eliminate Helen. Her track record was only as good as her current performance. The man would pick up the trail of the Cardient contact and determine if the operation could be salvaged. If not, Murello would cut his losses on the Ventrica and move on.

  He knew Helen feared him, so he had to keep her sitting tight for a few hours until she could be eliminated. Murello knew where she lived, as well as how she spent her spare time and where she hid her accounts. No doubt he could track her if she decided to run, but it would save time if she stayed put. He replied to the email.

  Where is the design? What is the status of the contact?

  He would play along until Helen was dead.

  * * *

  The one thing Josh hadn’t calculated was wait time. What were they supposed to do between emails? Rigas seemed content to sit on the couch in his office and flip channels on the T.V. Head resting on the arm of the couch, gun sticking out from under her arm, and a bowl of pretzels she’d brought in from the pantry. It looked like a familiar pose for her and he guessed it was how she spent a lot of her time at home. It was that strange mix he kept noticing: an almost male casualness she portrayed, only she kept one shoe dangling off the toes of her foot and the other leg curled under. Josh almost laughed when he thought of what it looked like – Angelina Jolie in one of those Lara Croft Tomb Raider movies. Tough, smart, cool female adventurer, and sexy. The T.V. played an E! Biography of Cindy Crawford.

  “She’s hot, huh?” Rigas gestured with a pretzel. Josh didn’t answer, but entertained the thought of saying Crawford was nothing compared to the cop on his couch. It would have been funny, a joke she would have liked, but he couldn’t be making those kind of jokes with the seriousness of what was going on around them. He admitted to himself that wasn’t the reason he didn’t say anything.
It was because it was true – Rigas was smart and cool and very sexy and there was no way he was going to open that can of worms. He looked at Rigas. It was a good bet no one ever broke up with her because of boredom.

  Josh needed to kill some time so he started a broad search using public databases to look for large movements of Lockheed stock. It didn’t take any special skills to do this since the trades were public; you just had to know where to look. Large block buying and selling was always recorded. It only took a few minutes to find a bunch of trades over a hundred thousand shares that had taken place in the past couple weeks. What was more interesting was getting hold of the puts and calls – the contracts that let you either buy or sell the right to buy or sell the stock at a later date at a different price. This was what someone would do if they thought the price of a stock was going to change significantly either up or down. If you guessed right, you made a lot of money. There were a lot of trades on Lockheed, including some very large ones, but nothing stood out. Most of the company names were unknown to Josh; these were financial institutions or front companies for big investors that you wouldn’t know about unless you were in that business.

  Rigas interrupted his work. “You gonna check the email soon?”

  It had only been a few minutes. He’d explained he couldn’t have Helen’s email forwarded to his own account because it would create an electronic trail. On the chance her boss figured this out, Josh didn’t want him seeing the connection. Instead, Josh had to log into a web site and check Helen’s email each time. He did now, and saw the reply. He started to read it out loud to Rigas.

  She bounded out of the couch and hunched over Josh’s shoulder to read the email herself. It was about what he had expected as a reply from Helen’s boss and Josh was ready with a response. He started typing as Rigas debated with him which way to go. Josh wanted to tell Helen’s boss that Crawford had killed Allison and that she, Helen, was worried Barnes was going to crack. Rigas liked the idea, but thought word of Allison’s death would have gotten back to the guy if he were so connected. Better to stick with what really happened: Barnes had barely averted his sister’s death and Crawford was killed in the struggle. But Barnes was getting close to the edge, just like Mills. This let them slip in the connection with the other murders by suggesting Barnes might lose it the same way. If he responded, it was circumstantial evidence he knew of the connection. They agreed and Josh put the finishing touches on the email, then had a brainstorm.

  The first email from Helen’s boss contained header information listing a series of servers it had been routed through. Before sending this new reply, Josh did a trace and found the email originated on the East Coast, somewhere between Boston and Washington, D.C. That was about as accurate as he could get for now – the next email would narrow it down further, and if Josh could get him to make a phone call then they could cross-reference and figure out a city and even range of blocks in that city. He needed to get him to call. But Josh realized he didn’t have Helen’s cell number. When she’d called him, the number was blocked so caller ID didn’t record it. He explained it to Rigas and she just looked at him like he was a loser. She was right. They had Helen’s full name, her street address, and Rigas could call and get anything else she needed from the station, like social security number. Josh told her to get it while he went online and did the same thing he had done earlier with Rigas’ cell phone. She got off her call to the station and gave him Helen’s social security number. Two minutes later Josh had Helen’s cell number. A few minutes after that, he’d set it up to ring in the office if anyone called it.

  “What’re you gonna do if he calls?”

  “I don’t need to answer it to get the trace going. We’ll let it ring, then have the machine pick it up with a blank message. He may even try back again, and a second call will narrow it down to a building wherever he is.”

  Josh added a final line to the email and sent it.

  * * *

  Murello was just finishing writing a message to the operative in Northern California with instructions on killing Helen when he saw she had replied. That was unusually fast; this was already more communication than he’d had with her in the last six months.

  Cardient contact has design in encrypted form. I’m concerned he will do what Mills did after we pushed too hard. Need to consider alternatives. Call ASAP – clean cell #828.702.3329.

  H.

  Murello paused and concentrated. This wasn’t right. He thought for a few minutes, looking out the window at the Sunday evening gridlock on 5th Avenue. Something was wrong. He looked at his cell phone and picked it up, but put it down without dialing. He pulled up a blank browser window on his laptop, made sure he was connected to a wireless router several blocks away belonging to a bank whose security code he had broken earlier that week and could access using an illegal signal booster he’d left under a grate in the sidewalk near the bank. Logging into the bank’s servers, he connected to Cardient’s public web server that let anyone read about products and skim press releases. He entered an IP address for an internal Cardient server available only to employees with the right software or sitting in a Cardient office. It was protected with a password and 128-bit encrypted VPN security. In less than twenty minutes Murello was surfing the internal Cardient network. He had already done this some months back to ensure the Ventrica design wasn’t readily available on the network and had confirmed it was on an unreachable, unconnected server – hence the need for Helen’s work. He searched the private servers for any unusual activity to see if there had been a spike in people working on the Ventrica or any special security measures being taken that would suggest Helen had been compromised. There was nothing. No unusual movement, nothing to indicate anything was going on. If Helen had been caught there would be extra security. If her Cardient contact had called in the cops, same thing. Murello pulled up a log file containing a list of all searches done on the internal Cardient network. He skimmed the file for searches on “Ventrica” and found a few dozen employees had scanned for information on the new product. Nothing unusual here. As he was about to close the file and decide on his next move, something caught his eye. A name. Josh Barnes. Murello looked at the name for a long moment. Then he searched the company employee logs and found Josh Barnes, Ph.D., VP Engineering. He broke into the PeopleSoft database Cardient used to manage employees and looked up Barnes. Hired in 1992, Ph.D. from Princeton, 1987…bachelors from Stanford in 1983. Son of a bitch.

  Murello turned off his laptop and ripped out the hard drive. He pulled the SIM out of his phone and put everything in his briefcase. He was out the door and headed to a small electronics shop he controlled on 27th and 7th Avenue. The equipment would be wiped, crushed, and disappeared. Josh Barnes must be Helen’s contact at Cardient, something Murello had not known, and now he was sending Murello emails pretending to be Helen, trying to bait him into exposing himself. Murello feared no man and Barnes was no exception, but he knew from his experience with Barnes twenty years earlier that Barnes had the skill to track him. Murello learned a lot during those few weeks when Barnes had tutored him; enough to start formulating the plan he was now executing. Murello had even tried to recruit Barnes a few years after that, but sensed immediately Barnes didn’t have the right makeup for this.

  It could be just a coincidence; that Barnes worked at Cardient, that he may be the contact, that Helen was acting out of character. But Murello didn’t believe in coincidence. Helen must have picked Barnes to get the Ventrica because he had the technical skill to access it no matter where it was at the company. Barnes had somehow gotten the upper hand on Helen and was now trying to draw her boss out. The only question in Murello’s mind was whether Barnes knew the identity of the man who controlled Helen. This was more than just a loose end. It was something Murello couldn’t hand to a clean-up crew; he had to take care of it himself. And that meant beating Barnes at a game he had introduced Murello to decades earlier.

  Chapter Thirty

  Josh check
ed Helen’s email half a dozen times and kept an eye on the phone. Nothing. Maybe Helen’s boss was deciding what to do. Or maybe he had a couple other people to extort and threaten. Rigas was back to watching T.V. Josh continued working on the Lockheed transactions. Just as an exercise, he’d gone back to the trading records for the past two years and created a database of all the companies that had made large orders. Then he ran a comparison against companies making large trades in just the past two weeks. It came up with a list of nine companies that made their first trade only recently. It seemed promising. Maybe Helen’s boss ran one or more of these companies and they could use this information to track him down. Four of the companies were well-known hedge funds. Josh had run all the names through a search engine and they had long histories with lots of press. That left five. He started tapping a pencil on the desk again, irritating Rigas. He had an idea and it seemed obvious once he thought of it. He re-ran the program he’d created to scan the companies investing in Lockheed, but this time looking for investments in a different company. Two minutes later he really caught Rigas’ attention when he shouted “yes!” loudly enough to break her concentration on the television.

  “You just find out there’s a new wireless thingamajig that let’s you read email in the bathroom?” Josh wasn’t sure he liked the caricatured reputation he was getting with her.

  “No, I think I found something that could help us find him.” She was at his elbow instantly.

  “What is it? C’mon, give.”

  Josh explained what he had done and pointed to the two company names on the screen: Benjamin Investment Fund and Numismed LLC. These two companies had little or no information about them on the Internet, were privately held, seemed to have few if any employees, and both had made significant stock trades in the last two weeks for both Lockheed…and Cardient. Rigas nodded approvingly, which surprisingly made Josh feel a little proud. They talked about how to use the information. They would need help tracking down the two firms, which were probably shell companies anyway, but maybe it would help give an edge in talking to Helen’s boss.