Wired In (Paradise Crime Book 1)

by Toby Neal

  As if reading her mind he said, “I feel bad about DAVID. I’ve set up a priority review discussion with the higher-ups as we discussed. They aren’t going to be in town for some weeks, but if you send me a report or a PowerPoint on DAVID’s capabilities, I will present it on videoconferencing for this meeting. Hopefully we can get something to move ahead.”

  “Yes, sir,” Sophie said woodenly. “When do you need it by?”

  “The meeting is day after tomorrow.”

  “I will get it to you as soon as possible.”

  They stared at each other another long moment.

  “I’m sorry about your friend.” Waxman turned and walked out.

  Things with Waxman were so strange. She wished they could get back to the collegial working relationship she was comfortable with.

  Creating a presentation on DAVID was the perfect project to keep herself busy while she waited for news on Alika and didn’t have anything breaking on her own case.

  That reminded her that she’d told Todd Remarkian she’d talk to Lee again about the tech aspects of Security Solutions. While setting up a new presentation in slide software, she put her headphones back on and rang through to Security Solutions, identifying herself.

  “I’m sorry, Lee Chan never came in today,” the secretary said.

  “Did he call in?” Sophie’s brows snapped together in concern.

  “No, ma`am. It’s very unusual.”

  “Can I speak to Frank Honing, please?” The VP might know something.

  “Yes, ma`am.”

  The transfer went through and Frank Honing’s voice was brusque. “Yes?”

  “This is Special Agent Sophie Ang. I’m wondering if you know where Lee Chan is. I urgently need to speak with him regarding the saboteur situation.”

  A pause. “He’s not at work?”

  “No. And his secretary said he hasn’t called in. Does he have a personal cell?”

  “I’ll call him and get back to you.” The phone banged down. Sophie blinked at the rudeness and frowned thoughtfully.

  She went back to her presentation and composed several sections of description of DAVID’s capabilities. She decided not to get too technical. She was filing a patent on DAVID; she didn’t want to provide any of the agency’s tech agents a way to replicate her program.

  She still hadn’t completed the patent application. This was as good a time as any, so she pulled up the online form for it. Developing that would help her with the description of DAVID, anyway. She was deep in pages of legalese and technical jargon when her phone rang.

  “Special Agent Ang.”

  “Frank Honing at Security Solutions. I’ve sent a staffer to Lee’s apartment. No answer at his door or cell. In fact, it’s been twenty-four hours since anyone at the company has seen him, and he pretty much lives here at the company building. Agent Ang, I’m concerned.”

  “Well, you’re a security company, so I’m sure you have ways of getting into his apartment and checking on his whereabouts that we can’t legally perform without his being declared a missing person. Are you telling me you think he’s missing?”

  Honing harrumphed. “Yes. I had our security staff go into his apartment already, and it appears he cleared out in a hurry.”

  “Why would he run?” Sophie asked.

  “He might be the saboteur,” Honing said. “Other than our man in Hong Kong, Todd Remarkian, he’s the workhorse behind all of our company’s Internet security and no one is in a better position to manipulate our clients than he is.”

  Sophie frowned. This felt too easy. “Do you want us to try to find him? Or do you want to go through local PD?”

  “We’re already involved with the FBI, like it or not,” Honing said tightly. “I’d rather not go through the rigmarole of bringing another bunch of cops up to speed. Here’s Lee’s cell number and address.” Honing rattled them off and Sophie jotted them down.

  “I’m sure you meant that statement as a compliment on the FBI’s work,” Sophie said. “I’ll take this as your authorization to search for a valuable missing employee and go from there.”

  Sophie hung up on him as hard as he had on her. Using voice command, she called Ken Yamada.

  “We need to find Chan.” She filled him in on the tech’s disappearance.

  Ken swore. “I knew things were going to get thicker when we told them about the saboteur. I’ve been hard at work tracking the Takeda Industries situation. It’s a shell corporation. There’s no physical evidence of a real company, so it isn’t going anywhere. I’ll have to bring the team up to speed.”

  “I’m glad my intel was helpful.” Sophie’s brain, still overloaded from the situation with Alika, was having trouble remembering what Takeda Industries had to do with anything. “Want to go to Lee’s apartment and see what we can pick up? I can at least bring in his home computer rigs. We should also send out a Be On Look Out through HPD on him.”

  “I’ll let you call HPD because I know you’ll want to check in with Marcus Kamuela about how Alika Wolcott is doing,” Ken said. “I was sorry to hear he’s in the hospital.”

  “Yes. I’ll call Kamuela and meet you at the vehicle.” Sophie didn’t let any emotion into her voice. “Why don’t you brief Waxman?” She wasn’t in a hurry to speak to her erstwhile mentor again so soon.

  Sophie backed out of her computer rigs, checking the time on the write blockers. They still needed a few hours. She strapped on her shoulder holster with the Glock 19, shrugged into her jacket and switched her headphones for a Bluetooth, calling Marcus Kamuela as she walked through the IT lab.

  “Hi, Sophie. No updates on Alika’s condition yet. We’re just getting started down at his warehouse at the docks and I’m sorry to tell you it’s really looking like he was shipping drugs,” Kamuela said. “I’m in his office and I’m uncovering some irregularities in his shipments in addition to enough drug trace to make the dogs go nuts. I’m trying to believe you when you say Wolcott isn’t dirty.”

  Sophie exited the lab and her athletic shoes squeaked down the shiny hallway toward the main entrance to the elevators as her thoughts whirled.

  “It’s got to be planted. Alika isn’t that stupid. Please keep digging! Anyway, I called you about something else.” Sophie rattled off the situation with Lee Chan. “We’ll handle this as a direct request from Security Solutions to find their missing employee. Could your team post a BOLO on him?”

  “Sure.” She could tell Marcus was glad she wasn’t grilling him more about Alika’s investigation. “Gimme the details.”

  She told him. “I’ll have Security Solutions fax a picture of Chan.” Sophie got on the elevator, pushed the button for the ground floor garage.

  “What else can you tell me about Wolcott?”

  Sophie threw up her hands, frustrated, and remembered Kamuela couldn’t see that gesture. “Just follow the evidence. Do what you have to do. But keep an open mind. Remember who this man’s family is. Do they seem like a bunch of drug dealers with connections to organized crime?”

  He blew out a breath. She could almost see him shaking his head. “My mom knows his grandma Esther Ka`awai, the kahu, and she’s been calling me nonstop to help Alika and get the gangster sonsabitches that beat him. So I’m hearing it from all directions, believe me, and so far, Alika’s looking like a Boy Scout if you don’t count his heroin-sprinkled office and weird shipping receipts. I’ll let you know what I find.”

  “That’s all I ask. And call me if you hear of any change in his condition.”

  “Will do.”

  Sophie hung up with a flick of her finger to the device in her ear and broke into a jog to join Ken Yamada standing by the shining black hood of the Bureau’s Acura SUV.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Sophie and Ken Yamada pounded on Lee Chan’s door at his modest apartment building on the outskirts of Honolulu. “Open up! FBI!” Ken barked.

  When no one answered, Ken gestured to the building’s manager. The stocky Filipino unlocked the door
for them. Sophie and Ken kept weapons drawn in ready position per protocol as they entered.

  A simple front room was decorated with a flat screen TV, a sleek lounger, and a coffee table. All was immaculate, the furniture black and the carpet and walls gray. Sophie had the impression that Lee had created his interior living space to feel like the inside of a computer: efficient, monochrome and dust-free.

  They swept through the space and, as the VP had confirmed, empty hangers, missing clothes and sundries confirmed the tech was gone.

  Sophie pulled Lee’s desktop rig out from under the small modern desk in the bedroom and unplugged it. As she straightened up, with the computer in her arms, she felt a shifting inside the metal housing.

  She set the computer back on the desk, pulled open a small desk drawer and rooted around until she found a set of small graduated Phillips-head screwdrivers in a plastic case.

  Ken returned. “Don’t see anything that tells us where he went. What are you doing?”

  “I have a sense Lee is pretty careful. If there is a clue to where he went, it’s going to be on this computer, not lying around on the coffee table,” Sophie said. “I’m checking inside. Thought I felt something shift around in here.”

  She applied the right sized driver to the screws on the back of the panel and opened it.

  Inside were stacks of cash. She removed them and drew a sharp breath. Currency from China. Taiwan. Korea. Japan.

  “Lee Chan could be anywhere,” she murmured.

  “That explains these minor digs.” Ken gestured to the neatly made twin bed, impersonal as a motel. “He made plenty at Security Solutions. He was keeping a small footprint.”

  Sophie took an evidence bag out of the Kevlar vest she wore and dropped the money into it. “Maybe he is the saboteur after all. Though he didn’t seem to have the nerve for something like that.”

  “Maybe he’s being set up to look like it, though,” Ken said. “He seemed smart enough when we met him.”

  “I don’t know.” Sophie picked up a black plastic comb from the drawer and lifted a hair with a root bulb from it, slipped it into an evidence bag. “It’s time to dig deeper into Chan’s life, for sure, but frankly, I hope he doesn’t turn up floating in the Ala Wai Canal because he’s someone’s loose end.”

  Interviewing the building manager after the search, they got an idea of his habits. Lee left early for work, returned late, was quiet, had never been seen with anyone else in the apartment, was tidy, and paid rent on time. “The ideal tenant,” the manager concluded.

  In the elevator on the way down, Sophie mulled the situation over.

  “Think he was the saboteur?” Ken asked, his arms around the computer. She’d planned to carry it but he had taken it from her with old-fashioned courtesy.

  “Why else would he run?”

  “Maybe he knew who it was? Was being threatened? Maybe he could tell Security Solutions was going to throw him under the bus in any case.”

  “It’s true that Honing was quick to do that. Lee would make a handy person to blame,” Sophie said. “But the Lee I went to school with in Hong Kong—he had an impulsive side. I once saw him delete a whole day’s work because he’d made a mistake. Maybe this was like that.”

  “You mean, he got spooked and pulled the plug?” Ken was better with the colloquialisms.

  “Exactly.”

  Sophie hooked up Lee’s computer to one of the write blockers that had finished copying one of the previous hard drives. Ken had taken the DNA and fingerprint evidence as well as the cash to the lab for processing. Hopefully, they’d soon have more physical information on Lee, and in the meantime she had a lot of work to do.

  Hours passed in wired-in oblivion as Sophie made headway on the analysis of the hard drives left on her desk, finished the presentation on DAVID, and sent that off to Waxman via encrypted email.

  Sophie revisited the back trace that had tracked her computer to her building and looked at the two destinations: the Arches building, with a hundred and fifty units, and the building Security Solutions was housed in.

  Most likely it was Lee who had tracked her. Did she feel threatened by him? No. He probably was the saboteur and his tracking of her was just necessary counterintelligence of someone who was trying to break into his system.

  So who was Todd Remarkian and what was his role? He and Lee had to be connected if they’d worked closely on developing proprietary software like the surveillance monitoring program that was Security Solutions’ crown jewel.

  She began a file on Todd Remarkian and found it challenging to assemble. He seemed to have very little cyber presence. His credit card was issued by the company. His apartment was paid for by the company. He drove a car owned by the company. He had a squeaky-clean credit score and a phone issued by the company.

  It was as if he’d been invented by Security Solutions.

  She shivered. But she’d heard his voice, that light Aussie accent. He was real. On impulse she called him, clicking on the trace app for the number she’d dialed. A little skull spun in the corner of her monitor as the trace ran. The number rang.

  Rang.

  Rang.

  “Special Agent Ang. G’day.”

  “You knew it was me.”

  “Who else would be calling from the FBI? Assume this is regarding Lee’s disappearance.”

  “Yes. I was hoping you might have some more information for us.”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t. I know he’s missing because Frank Honing called the boss and me a few hours ago. We’re worried he’s made off with some of our customer information, if you must know.”

  The little spinning skull stopped. The location bubble appeared. HONG KONG pulsed in it.

  Sophie relaxed. She didn’t know what she’d been expecting. “I’m sorry to hear that. Tell me more.” There was an art to interviewing a witness. One had to appear to be sympathetic and grateful for any information, while not revealing anything in return.

  “Frank, Sheldon, and I suspect he’s the saboteur. We think he’s taking his chance to run now that we’re onto him. We’ve sent one of our private investigation teams after him. No offense, but we thought you might appreciate the help.”

  “None taken. Your company has its own private army and it’s true that there are only two of us on your case,” Sophie said. “But we expect to be apprised as soon as you find him. He hasn’t done anything that we can charge him with yet.”

  “Except steal our information and sabotage our customers.” Remarkian’s tone was silky and deadly at the same time. “But of course. We’ll let you know the minute we find him.”

  A silence. She could hear Remarkian breathing, which was amazing considering he was halfway around the world in Hong Kong.

  “Anything else?” she asked. “Anything at all?”

  “Yes. Lee isn’t all he appears. Dig into his financials.” Abruptly, Remarkian hung up.

  Sophie immediately revisited Lee’s identity file. She’d been able to crack into his employee file at Security Solutions through her backdoor into the company’s server, and saw there was a direct deposit for his paychecks.

  It was a simple matter to follow that to locate his account at Bank of Hawaii. A few phone calls later, the email alert on one of her rigs beeped with the receipt of faxed copies of his bank statements.

  Sophie set one of her smaller analysis programs to weed through the reams of information to find any payments or extraordinary data, and quickly identified a pattern of nine thousand, nine hundred ninety-nine dollar payments twice a month in cash, payments that wouldn’t trip the federal reporting laws designed to track drug traffickers.

  She printed up the anomalies and further wire transfers out of his bank to another account in the Cayman Islands. Lee had been stockpiling. Perhaps for this move. His current balance was zero. Her phone rang in her headphones, jarring her out of hypnotic analysis mode.

  “Special Agent Sophie Ang.”

  “Sophie? This is Alika Wolcott’s
mother, Lehua. The doctor has allowed Alika to have visitors. We’ve just been in sitting with him and I thought you might want to stop by.”

  Sophie’s heart began pounding. “Is he okay? Any change?”

  “No.” Her voice came out on a sigh of released sorrow. “But no change for the worse, either. Come down and we’ll update you more fully.”

  Sophie glanced at the clock on the wall. It was well past the dinner hour and she’d done enough today. “See you soon.”

  On the drive to the hospital, she ticked over Alika’s situation. It was frustrating not to be able to do anything for his investigation. She mulled over the similarities between what Alika was being investigated for and what she suspected her ex, Assan Ang, of actually doing.

  She’d heard about the investigation against Alika that her friend Lei had initiated on Kaua`i, the murder of a young woman involved with the drug trade. He’d been completely exonerated, but the fact remained that he’d been associated with those accusations and it had left a stain, made him vulnerable.

  Sophie didn’t believe Alika was a drug smuggler because it went against everything he believed in as an athlete and a mentor to so many. But Assan was a different story. The only thing he loved more than power was money. For him, they went hand in hand.

  Assan had an operation that shipped into Honolulu. Perhaps he had ties to the Boyz. She had to remember to ask Kamuela to look into it.

  A uniformed police officer was seated outside Alika’s room when Sophie arrived just as Lehua was coming out. The older woman’s rich brown skin looked gray with fatigue and stress, and her sleek black bun was unraveling. Still, she forced a smile and took Sophie’s cold hands.

  “He’s stable,” she said. “Try not to be too shocked when you see him. The doctors say the coma is the best thing for him right now because of the swelling in his brain.”

  Sophie bit her lip. “I’m so sorry, Mrs. Wolcott. I’m just sick about this.”

  “My boy is strong. He wants to live. My mother, Esther, has been communicating with him in the gray place between and she says he has every intention of coming back. It’s not his time yet, and we’re all supporting him with prayer.” Lehua’s large brown eyes shone with conviction.