The Short Drop

by Matthew Fitzsimmons

  Better.

  His phone said it was two thirty a.m.

  On Friday.

  It felt like a Friday. Fridays were always a little grimy and worn out—a week on its last legs. Or maybe it was just that he hadn’t been home since he’d arrived at ACG on Sunday.

  He’d been working for almost five straight days. Was that possible? He often lost track of time once he’d sunk his teeth into a problem, and he hadn’t had a puzzle this interesting since he’d left the Marines. He felt exhilarated—answers beckoned just out of reach. He was close now. Another few hours and he’d know if his suspicion were correct.

  Where are you, WR8TH? What do you know that you don’t want me to find out?

  He could have gone home at night, but the thought never entered his mind. He needed to be near the work when inspiration struck. Besides, there was nothing waiting at home apart from a restless bed. Sleep was out of the question. Bear lurked behind his eyelids, patient and hopeful. Her smile jolted him awake and hurried him back to his keyboard.

  The only meaningful breaks he took were his nightly video calls to Ellie. Once she was tucked in, Gibson would read to her until she got sleepy. They were halfway through Charlotte’s Web, and Ellie was anxious about Wilbur. She loved stories with the same intensity as Suzanne. It was an obvious connection, but somehow he’d never made it before now. That he read to both of them. Well, he could forgive himself for not thinking like that. It was safer that way. But now he couldn’t not see it, no matter how hard he worked to keep the two girls separate in his mind.

  He had worked long into the night that first Sunday. Mike Rilling offered his assistance and set up a workstation for him, but Gibson politely and firmly threw him out of the conference room. He needed to be alone to think. Charles and Hendricks had been none too pleased to be shut out, but Abe got it and laid down the law.

  Around three a.m. that first night, he’d hit a snag and taken a break, making a looping circuit around the empty corridors of ACG. He thought more clearly when he walked, and after a few laps, an answer began to present itself. He was on the way back to the conference room when he’d noticed a light on under an office door that had been dark the last time around. He’d stopped to listen at the door when it opened sharply. He stood eye to eye with Jenn Charles, who in her heels might have an inch on him. She’d taken off her suit jacket, but not her gun—the new office casual.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Sorry,” he said, taking a step backward. “Didn’t think anyone was here. Thought you were a burglar.”

  “Do you need something?”

  “No. Just walking.” He spun a finger in a circle. “Helps me think.”

  Jenn nodded noncommittally.

  Gibson hesitated and then asked, “Actually, can I ask you a question? On your board… why is there a question mark between WR8TH and Tom B.?”

  “A theory circulated that Tom B. and WR8TH were one and the same.”

  “If he was local, then why did she go to Pennsylvania to meet him?”

  “We don’t know for a fact that she met him in Pennsylvania. That’s just another assumption. Maybe he took her in Pamsrest and Pennsylvania was just on his way home.”

  “What do you think?”

  “It’s plausible. Perhaps I’ll get a chance to ask him to his face.”

  “What are you still doing here anyway? It’s late.”

  “Working.”

  “At three in the morning? I don’t need a babysitter.”

  “I have paperwork to catch up on.”

  “All right,” he said, conceding defeat. “Well, you know where to find me.”

  “Yes. I do.”

  She stepped back, moving to close the office door.

  “Where did you serve?” he asked.

  She stopped, her eyes narrowed. “Don’t do that.”

  “Do what?”

  She shut the door on him, and Gibson stood there staring at it, chuckling to himself in disbelief. Okay, well, that was… Actually, he didn’t know what to call that. There was a hard edge to Jenn Charles that he didn’t understand. Probably for the best if this job only took a few days. He went back to work.

  On Monday morning, when the staff began to arrive, Gibson was standing in the conference room, staring at the picture of Suzanne pinned to the board. Abe had ordered a cot to be set up in the conference room. Gibson used it to stack printouts. Someone had been dispatched to buy him a change of clothes, but the bag sat untouched alongside the cot. Food was delivered, and Gibson wolfed it down while he worked. He was on the hunt again, and every day brought him closer.

  At first, Gibson became an object of much speculation among the staff. Evidently, no one outside of Abe’s inner circle knew why he was there, and that piqued their interest. But by Tuesday afternoon, curiosities had waned—watching someone work at a computer ranked top five among dullest activities in the world. Periodically, Mike Rilling would stick his head in the door to ask if he needed anything. And whenever Hendricks came in to get a file, he would glower at Gibson. Jenn Charles became his most regular visitor, passing by once an hour like a guard walking a post.

  When the office opened on Thursday, Gibson requested a printout of the firm’s browser history for the previous month. It ran to nearly a thousand pages. He broke it up into four stacks and began sifting through it with a highlighter. Tedious work, but over the next twenty-plus hours he’d narrowed his hunt to a handful of possibilities.

  Now he was sure.

  Gibson checked the time—six a.m., Friday morning. George arrived around seven, so Gibson shut his eyes for an hour. For once, Bear let him be. When he woke, George was working in his office and seemed to be expecting him. Gibson told him what he had found. Abe took the bad news in stride and asked for options.

  Gibson gave him three.

  “Which would you recommend?”

  “Option one. If you want a shot at catching WR8TH.”

  “Why?”

  Gibson explained.

  Abe stopped him several times to ask questions and when Gibson was done, sat in silence for several minutes.

  “All right, I want you to lay it out to the team. Pretend I haven’t heard any of this. I want to hear their unfiltered opinion.”

  “If that’s what you want, but I’m going home first. I need to shower. I need to shave. I’d say I’m just north of toxic.”

  “Agreed. A car will be downstairs.” Abe looked at his watch. “Be back here at four.”

  At home, Gibson stood in the shower until he felt like a human being again. He felt good. Really good. He knew he’d missed the work, but not how much. That his skills might help find Bear… Don’t get ahead of yourself, he cautioned himself. Better not to allow that hope to take root.

  But what if?

  It was after five before they were all gathered back in the conference room. Hendricks and Charles were anxious to hear what he’d discovered, but Gibson took his time fussing with the computer. Finally, Abe could stand it no longer.

  “So, Gibson. Enlighten us. What have you learned?”

  “Okay. Well, initially I was bothered by the fact that WR8TH sent two photographs.”

  “So you told us on Sunday,” Hendricks said.

  “Right, but I mean, why bother? Why send the e-mail of the backpack at all if you have the whole photograph? It’s a waste of time.”

  “Maybe he just likes playing games?” Jenn put in.

  “Right. But what was the game? The person who sent that photo is likely the same person who took it. Agreed?”

  The room nodded its consent.

  “So, what are the odds of WR8TH, if it is the original WR8TH, collecting a ten-million-dollar reward? I’ve got a better chance of being invited to Benjamin Lombard’s birthday party.”

  “So what, then?” Jenn asked.
<
br />   “Well, if it’s not the reward, then what got this guy to break cover? I mean, he got away with it clean. Law enforcement is no closer to catching him than they were ten years ago. Yet here he is, taking an enormous risk to send a highly incriminating photograph to you. What’s in it for him?”

  Hendricks spoke up. “He’s a narcissist. The tenth-anniversary coverage got him all stirred up, and he doesn’t like not getting any of the attention. The picture is a taunt. Get the focus back on him.”

  “That makes sense, but this didn’t get him much attention, did it? Two e-mails, and he had to shut it down. If he wanted attention he would have posted the picture online. Or he could have released the photo to the media instead. Get all… who was that serial killer in San Francisco who wrote all the letters to the papers?”

  “The Zodiac,” Hendricks said.

  “Right. Go all Zodiac on it. Imagine the attention he could get if he released the photograph with a bunch of cryptic biblical passages and vague threats.”

  “The Internet would go crazy,” Hendricks admitted.

  “Right, so if it’s about attention, then there are better ways to get it. Agreed?”

  “Agreed, but let’s not forget the guy is crazy.”

  “Fair enough, but in my opinion this wasn’t about attention at all. So I come back to why he sent two e-mails, two photographs. Unless the first photograph was a test run.”

  “A test of what?” Rilling asked.

  “A test of whether you would open it. And when you did, and replied, he knew it was safe to send the second one. He did just what I told you to do.”

  “Which was?”

  “He baited the hook and got you to take a big bite.”

  “Are you suggesting there was a virus?” asked Rilling.

  “Embedded in the second photograph.”

  “No. No way,” Rilling said. “Not possible. We’ve got a topflight antivirus service, and we scanned both those attachments before we opened them.”

  Rilling looked around the room for confirmation that what he was saying was true, but he wasn’t getting much love. Abe sat back, observing his people. Charles stared at the ceiling like she’d just been told she had six months to live. Hendricks was eying Rilling like a hyena sizing up a wildebeest too dumb to stay with the herd.

  “We scanned it!” Rilling protested when no one spoke.

  “Let him explain,” Abe said. “Gibson, walk us through what you found.”

  “Look. All antivirus services do is check incoming files against a definition database of known viruses and malware. And you’re right, Mike, 99.999 percent of the time for 99.999 percent of the people that’s good enough. But if the virus is new, if it’s been written with a specific target in mind, then antivirus scans are about as useless as a four-foot fence against an eagle.”

  “And you’re saying that’s what he did?” Abe asked.

  “Apparently so. It’s not on file with any of the groups that track malware. I’ve only had a couple of days to dissect it, but it looks like a variant on Sasser. Has some Nimda DNA floating around in it too.”

  “English, Vaughn,” Hendricks said.

  “It’s a well-written virus by someone who knows their trade. And he’s crafty. Whoever it is learned the lessons of some of the big viruses of the last ten years and improved on them. It’s not destructive so far as I can tell. So that’s the good news.”

  “And the bad?” Jenn asked.

  “It’s busy downloading files from your servers.”

  “What!” she said. “What files?”

  “Anything it wants. I assume it’s targeting files pertaining to Suzanne Lombard, but it would take a cyber forensics team to know for sure. And that’s not my area.”

  “Jesus Christ.” Hendricks threw his pen against the wall.

  “Again, no,” Rilling said. “We monitor outgoing traffic. Everything’s been normal. We haven’t seen any uptick in volume, no abnormal IP address hits.”

  “Well, unfortunately, he was prepared for that too. It’s downloading at a rate of twelve kilobytes per second. Slow but steady. Taking its time. That volume would just blend into the background of a company this size. Right, Mike?”

  Rilling nodded morosely.

  “If it’s been working around the clock since we opened that e-mail,” Abe said, “how much could he have?”

  Rilling scribbled figures on a legal pad and slid the pad across to Abe, who nodded grimly.

  “Actually that’s the cool thing about it. It isn’t working around the clock,” Gibson said. “It stops every day at five.”

  “Oh, does it take weekends off too?” Hendricks asked.

  “Actually, yes,” Gibson replied. “This is strictly a nine-to-five virus. See, it’d look strange if someone was surfing the Washington Post at two in the morning.”

  “The Post?” Rilling asked.

  “Yeah, WR8TH is using an ad on the Washington Post home page as a relay point.”

  “That can be done?” Jenn asked.

  “Sure, it’s increasingly common among hackers. Corrupt an ad on a mainstream website that won’t look unusual in a company’s browser history and use it as a relay point to send hacked data to its intended recipient.”

  “Well, we need to pull the plug immediately,” Hendricks said. “Shut down until we can scrub this thing from our system.”

  “Agreed,” Jenn said. “This is a disaster.”

  “You could do that, but I wouldn’t advise it. Not if you want to catch this guy.”

  Abe raised a hand to quiet the others. “Why not?”

  “Because I can’t see beyond the relay point. Once it passes through the ad on the Post website, I don’t know where WR8TH’s virus is sending your data. If you shut down now, then he’ll know we’re onto him. Then we really are dead in the water.”

  “So what do you suggest?”

  “Business as usual.”

  “Let him keep stealing our clients’ data?” Jenn asked. “Do you have any idea how damaging that would be?”

  “It’s not ideal, I know. It comes down to how bad you want this guy. So that’s your call.”

  The room exploded in heated debate. Abe let it go on for a few minutes before holding up a hand again. His people lapsed into an uneasy silence, all watching Abe think it through.

  “What do you think WR8TH wants?” he asked at last. “What’s his endgame?”

  Gibson shrugged. “That’s an excellent question.”

  “So if I allow this to continue, with potentially calamitous fallout with my clients, what would be our next steps?”

  “WR8TH is hunting for something. I’d recommend luring him in with something he wants. Something new about Suzanne.”

  “And write our own virus,” Abe said.

  “Exactly. He thinks he’s slick, and he’s already gotten away with it. He won’t be expecting you to play back at him like this. But if we want him to fall for it, we need to embed our virus in something tempting.”

  “What about the internal FBI documents we were going to post to the revamped website?” Jenn asked. “Something that hasn’t been released to the public?”

  “That would probably do it,” Gibson said.

  “I’ll need to make a call,” Abe said. “How long would it take you to write a virus?”

  “Already written,” Gibson said.

  All heads turned to stare at him.

  Abe was smiling. “What will it do?”

  “Well, if he goes for it, our virus will travel upstream through the corrupted ad, and when he opens the files at his end, my virus will ‘phone home’ with GPS coordinates and an IP address.”

  “If he opens the files,” Hendricks said.

  “If,” Gibson agreed.

  George glanced at Jenn Charles, and something meaningful passed
between them that Gibson couldn’t decipher.

  “Make it happen,” Abe said.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  For the next two weeks, WR8TH’s virus kept to its routine—waking up at nine a.m. and systematically nibbling away at ACG’s database. It was a model employee that way. Didn’t take a lunch break and never called in sick.

  Gibson knew from studying the code that the virus could be directed remotely and given fresh batch instructions by WR8TH. Otherwise it would just continue relentlessly on its current task forever. But so far nothing. Either WR8TH wasn’t keeping close enough tabs on changes to ACG’s registry to notice the new FBI documents, or he was too smart to go for the lure.

  It was a well-laid trap, Gibson reassured himself. Over the last two weeks, he had uploaded a few more FBI files each morning. The idea being to make it appear to be an ongoing ACG project, converting paper files into digital records.

  “Come on,” Gibson whispered to his monitor. “You got away with it. You’re smarter than us. We’re a bunch of dummies. Help yourself. We’ll never know.”

  When staring at his monitor and willing something to happen lost its charm, Gibson began digging through the boxes of evidence. Curiosity led him to a thick folder labeled “Tom B.” The mysterious boyfriend who had never identified himself. The folder contained a staggering amount of data for a lead that hadn’t gone anywhere. Not surprising given how little the FBI actually had to go on. Besides a name, all they had was a vague physical description cobbled together from her teenage coworkers at the pool: dark complexion, stocky build, thick brown hair, bright-blue eyes. Not even an exact age, only a shared sense that Tom was “older,” which left a disquieting range of possibilities.

  Were WR8TH and Tom one and the same? If they weren’t, then why hadn’t Tom B. ever come forward? If they were, could Gibson really see Bear calling an Internet pedophile her boyfriend? Keeping his love letters? Running away with him? None of it made much sense.

  Gibson flipped through the rest of the folder and put it back. You couldn’t really appreciate the tedious nature of criminal investigations until you looked at the Everest of paperwork it generated. Looking through it was almost more mind-numbing than staring at his stubbornly unchanging computer screen.