Cold Winter Sun

by Forder, Tony J.

  ‘You said you had to go with someone else to try tracking down the rental. How come?’ I asked, concerned that what we were doing might spread beyond the immediate few people who were directly aware of what was going on. ‘And do you trust them not to talk?’

  ‘I trust them. As for my other source, she won’t pick up and refuses to return my messages.’

  ‘I take it that’s unusual.’

  ‘She’s a young, modern woman, Mike. She is always connected in one form or another. Though for now she seems to have chosen to take herself off the grid.’

  I gave that some thought. Wondered about the coincidence. ‘You don’t think the two things are connected in any way, do you?’ I asked him. ‘I mean, did your hacker know Vern at all?’

  ‘Not that I’m aware of. I told you, she was a freelancer who we had testing our software for gaps in security. She was damned good at it, too. But she worked off the books and never came to the office.’

  ‘Yet she’s been out of contact for a few days now, right? At least since you called her the first time to see if she could access the hotel records. Freelancers respond when there might be money in it for them. I think there’s more to her continued silence than you might think.’

  ‘That’s right. I see what you mean now, Mike. Vern has dropped off the edge of the planet, and she now won’t answer her phone. The truth is, I can’t say for sure that they never met. I guess it has to be possible. After all, they’re in a similar line of work.’

  My heart started to beat a little faster. I heard the rush of it loud in my ears. In a much softer voice I said, ‘Drew, does the name Chastain mean anything to you? Al Chastain.’

  ‘Uh, sure. He’s retired USAF. Way back in the day he debunked the whole Roswell UFO nonsense. That did not make him a popular man, considering he lived right there in the city.’

  ‘Do you know what he did when he left the Air Force?’

  ‘I do. He was one of the early pioneers of computing. A worker bee, but funnily enough he was also a programmer. A pretty good one by all accounts. He went on to work for the Gaming Commission, which is how I first came to hear of him.’

  As he said those words I happened to be looking at Van Dalen in the mirror. The moment our eyes met I remembered what had bothered me earlier, and I suddenly knew what was going on.

  ‘Drew, what’s your contact’s name?’

  ‘I only ever knew her as Neuroses. That was her hacker name.’

  ‘But you paid her for her services. Under what name?’

  ‘Still not her real name. Neuroses Enterprises was the account name. She hid herself away, Mike. These people do.’

  I ended the call promising I would get back to him the moment we had checked out the vehicle. By then, Terry had already entered the location into the GPS and programmed in the Sat-Nav. He had also turned away from the airport and we were headed back towards the desert. Drew’s check of the Track-IT website revealed that since the device came online it had shown movement in and around Roswell, but also a single return visit to the kind of remote location we were looking for.

  I shifted around once more. I looked hard at Chelsea van Dalen. She looked hard back at me.

  ‘Hi, Neuroses,’ I said. ‘We have a bit of a ride ahead of us. It’ll take a while. Time enough for you to come clean.’

  26

  We headed north-west out of Roswell, past Border Hill and into the desert on Route 246. It looked much like the road we had taken out to where Vern’s vehicle had been dumped, or the road into Corona, or the road out of Corona towards the crash site for that matter. Mile after mile of nothing but flat desert soil, with the Capitan mountain range a purplish-grey jagged smudge ahead of us. We stopped off at a petrol station on the edge of Border Hill to fill up the Jeep and grab some fuel for ourselves as well. Fatty snacks and sugary drinks were ideal, given we had no way of knowing when we might next be in a position to eat. We also stopped off at a store where I bought a prepaid mobile phone. I set it up and texted the number to Drew. I did the same to Terry so that he would have the number in his phone. As the desert swallowed us up, I was no longer riding shotgun, having moved into the back alongside our passenger. Easier for us to talk that way. And I had a lot to say.

  After the young woman admitted to being the hacker Drew Jackson knew as Neuroses, the rest of her confession emerged in a torrent of words amidst a flume of apologies.

  ‘I’m so sorry. I know I should have told you the truth from the beginning, but I was too scared to. I needed help to find Vern, and when you two came along I was terrified that if you knew the truth you might not help me. I’m sorry. I really am.’

  ‘And that truth is?’ I refused to be harsh with her, my manner remaining considerate in spite of my fury. She had already been through so much, it did not feel right to berate her for lying to us. I’d also experienced this exact same situation before, and I knew than anger was not the best solution.

  ‘As I can tell you’ve already figured out, it’s Vern I am close with, not Bruce. I’m sorry I lied, but you were hunting for Vern and I didn’t want you putting the two of us together that closely. That night in the bar at the pool table that I told you about happened pretty much the way I described, only it was the other way around. It was Vern I went there to meet. The drive up to Area 51, the Black Mailbox, being followed, the tyre slashing, all of that happened exactly how I said it did. But as you rightly mentioned earlier, there are some important things you don’t know. Things I didn’t tell you. And I apologise for that, because I chose to keep those things from you.’

  I processed what she had told us, and said, ‘Okay. I knew there was something iffy about your meeting with Chastain, and even when it was mentioned earlier I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. But it clicked back there and fell into place. The only photo either you or Chastain mentioned was Vern’s. But according to your version of events, Kelper was supposed to be your boyfriend, so why would you be showing Vern’s photo to anybody?’

  ‘I never even thought about that. I guess I didn’t cover my ass as well as I thought I had. Chastain didn’t know either me or Vern, but he knew Bruce. He told me Bruce had stopped by briefly, but that he was on his own. I showed him Vern’s photo in case he’d been sitting in the background somewhere, but Chastain said he didn’t recognise the face. I am sorry, and I know I’ve probably only hindered things so far. I couldn’t help myself. I was just so frightened.’

  ‘I understand. More than you perhaps realise. Did Chastain mention what it was Kelper wanted with him?’

  ‘No. And I didn’t ask. I got the impression he was nervous about it.’

  I nodded. I believed her. ‘As long as you’re being truthful now and continue to be, then you can still help us find Vern. So start with why this whole gambling and UFO enthusiast rubbish got thrown our way. I know there’s a connection to both, but I also know that neither are why this is really happening.’

  Van Dalen took a breath. Tears glistened on her eyelashes. She looked pale and vulnerable beneath her dark beauty. A woman lost, in search of a direction.

  ‘We were running. That’s totally genuine. But not from some hired muscle looking to claw back a minor gambling debt. Though you were right – casinos are a part of this whole deal. As for the UFO stuff, that was pretty much all Bruce’s idea. Vern is into that whole deal, don’t get me wrong, but not like Bruce. He’s a total conspiracy nut. Anyhow, we thought we’d follow the trail because we could lose ourselves down here.’

  ‘The trail?’ I frowned as I asked the question.

  ‘Yeah. Area 51, the Extraterrestrial Highway, the crash site, Roswell. It’s the trail UFO nuts follow. It’s like some kind of pilgrimage for them, I guess.’

  ‘Okay. So you and Vern went along with Bruce Kelper’s fascination with all this, using it as a distraction and a way to get out of Las Vegas and to try and lose yourselves down here.’

  ‘Yes. Exactly that. I talked it over with Vern and it seemed like a way to be on th
e run without feeling the pressure of it that way all the time. It felt like a good opportunity to get our minds off the trouble we were in. I guess it must sound lame to you, but I thought maybe we could get so wrapped up in all the UFO and crash site bullshit that we might not spend every minute of every day dwelling on all the trouble we were in. So yeah, we drove down from Vegas, we visited Corona, hit the crash site just like I said, and then we did all the Roswell Museum stuff as well. We thought we were in the clear after ditching those men at the crash site. And I think we could have been, if it weren’t for Bruce.’

  I squinted at her. ‘What role did he have to play in this? And did he know, by the way? I mean, was he aware of what you and Vern were really running from?’

  Van Dalen shook her head. ‘No, Bruce had no idea. Which is part of the problem and I suppose why we are where we are now. To him it was all a great big adventure. Bruce is still very much a big kid. He was following the trail and loving every minute of it. I wish now that we’d told him, but we didn’t. At the time it didn’t feel right involving him. We couldn’t have known how bad a decision that was at the time we made it. Anyhow, when we were back in Vegas, Vern said he wanted to go off the grid, so he stopped using social media. I never use it anyway, so there was nothing for me to quit. Vern knows Bruce as a friend he sees from time to time, but they’re not best buds, so we didn’t think there was any way people would tie us in with him. We thought it would be helpful having him along, in case we needed anything requiring a credit card. I have a couple of fakes I could risk in an emergency, but you never know when you might need some additional help.’

  ‘So you used Bruce as a sort of buffer?’ It was an observation rather than an accusation. The more I thought about it, the less it all seemed like a bad plan.

  ‘I guess. Plus, his knowledge of all that UFO stuff made us seem all the more legit when we were around others who are into it all. But what neither Vern nor I knew until much later was that Bruce was using social media to lay breadcrumbs for his UFO buddies. By the time we found out it was too late.’

  ‘Why, what happened?’ I asked.

  ‘He told me and Vern that all he wanted was for his like-minded friends to follow our journey, join the trail with us online. Vern and I thought we’d managed to go dark, when all the while Bruce was putting our movements out there for anyone to pick up on.’

  ‘He sounds like a bit of an arsehole,’ Terry observed drily.

  Van Dalen hitched her shoulders and blew out a sigh. ‘It was a game to him, a bit of fun. I don’t think it was malicious or anything. I guess he never even considered the downside. He had no idea what Vern and I were running from, so he had no idea he was hurting us. But that’s why I went to see Chastain myself. Because Bruce had decided to go see the guy on the day they disappeared.’

  ‘So how did you find out about these breadcrumbs?’ Terry asked. It was the first question he had put to the young woman since discovering her duplicity.

  ‘He told us. Just blurted it out. We would never have known otherwise. Like I say, we were not connected to the grid. He happened to mention it, thinking it was hilarious, and Vern blew up on him. He came close to telling Bruce everything at that point, though I managed to pull him back. That was the point at which we decided Vern’s minivan had to be dumped. Only, like I told you before, I’ve not heard from Vern since he and Bruce drove away from the hotel.’

  I saw it all unravel inside my head, like a spool of film. The journey they had made, the UFO-related sideshow that allowed them to forget why they were being pursued, the lame social media game Bruce had been enjoying. It was the kind of shit young people did. All that was missing was why any of it needed to have happened at all.

  ‘Okay,’ I said, ‘Now we know what you did after Vegas. What happened before that? What kick-started this whole sorry mess?’

  She hung her head for a moment. Then she sniffed, wiped her eyes with the back of her hand and looked up at me with a determined expression lacking regret. ‘Vern and I were ripping off a number of casinos. Before I get into all that, do you know what Drew Mason’s business is?’

  ‘I know it’s an IT company. A successful one, if his home and private jet are anything to go by. That’s all.’

  ‘They design software. One of their contracts is to supply various items of software for casinos and hotels. Most of it controls their gaming machines, but their accountancy tools are also installed in quite a few of the complexes. A significant number use both. Vern is a programmer, but he also travels around installing and upgrading and providing health checks and training. He knew of me from the times I tested out Drew’s products, and we also collaborated on one project. For some reason he and I hit it off when we were online, and we decided to meet for a drink when he came out to Vegas. That led to dinner, a few more dates, and that was us together. We got to talking about the work, and one night I happened to mention how a black hat hacker might run amok where so much money was flying around and trapped inside the ether.’

  ‘So you’re what’s known as a white hat,’ I said. ‘You’re on the side of good, not evil.’

  ‘That’s right. Or, at least it was.’

  ‘You went rogue. Vern, too.’

  Van Dalen nodded, biting her lower lip as if the pain might somehow cause all her problems to disappear.

  ‘So what did you do, and whose idea was it?’

  ‘Vern had the idea that we could quite easily skim off some of the money casinos brought in. The plan was that we’d take the finished products and recode them so that in between the take from machines and the accounting, a few dollars here and there were electronically siphoned off to a different account which we would set up ahead of time. Each individual transaction would be too small to notice immediately, but it would amount to a fair slice per casino. We would also code it from a hacker’s perspective and that way if anyone ever suspected or it was discovered in some way, the investigators would believe the software was legit but that it had somehow been hacked. You can code it so that the string of code responsible changes the modification date every thirty days or so. It didn’t mean the hack would never get discovered, only that it could never come back to bite us.’

  ‘Only it did.’

  ‘Only it did.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘That’s just it. We don’t know. Not exactly. I guess it happened because we got greedy. Actually, that’s not it entirely. We felt we needed to spread the load more, so that each casino took less of a hit. So Vern involved other software engineers whose employers’ products went into other casinos. People he knew from conventions, that sort of thing. People he thought he could trust, especially if they were making a shit-load of cash. And believe me, they would have. We agreed to run the scam for three months, and then we’d blow the US and set up a life for ourselves in the Caribbean someplace. But then that night in Vegas, before he went to the bar where we played pool, Vern barely got away from a couple of guys he said looked mean and tough and who told him he had fucked with the wrong man.’

  I puffed out my cheeks. Money and greed. Somehow it often came down to one or both of those things. ‘So another one of the reasons New Mexico felt right was because Drew’s company don’t have any casinos down here.’

  Van Dalen nodded. ‘Not even any connection with one via his friends. So far as we knew, anyhow. I guess we may never be sure about that, because greed engenders more greed. So that’s why all this is happening. We still don’t exactly know how the casino owners found out about it, nor how they became aware that Vern was involved. Our guess is that one of the friends, or maybe even a friend of a friend, got stupid, got discovered, and ended up giving us up.’

  Only after being unmercifully tortured, I thought but did not say. When you question somebody you don’t accept the first answer they give you – if they give up anything at all. Whoever the source was, they were dead now. Disposed of somewhere out in the desert was my guess.

  I thought again about what had happe
ned back in Roswell. ‘You think Kelper might have gone to see Chastain because of his expertise with both programming and the Gaming Commission? Could be he thought the man might have been able to propose an easy way out.’

  ‘Could be. Yeah, that sounds like something Bruce might do.’

  ‘I don’t want to interrupt you in full flow,’ Terry said, ‘but we’re coming up fast on the location, and I don’t want to approach it head-on.’

  I checked my new phone, saw that it still had a signal. ‘Okay. Pull over when you can. See if you can manage to get us out of sight somewhere. We’ll run up Google maps and take a look at what’s out there.’

  ‘I don’t like relying on that, Mike. It can be years out of date.’

  ‘I know. It’s just a guide. And we don’t exactly have access these days to real-time satellite feeds.’

  ‘Roger that.’

  ‘We’ll check the lay of the land. Get some food and drink down our necks. Make some plans.’

  ‘Okay. There’s something up ahead and to our left, Mike,’ he called out. ‘Looks either closed or abandoned. Might be the right place for us to pause.’

  I looked back at Van Dalen, who appeared crestfallen and emotionally wrung out. I was livid with her for lying to us, but I also felt sorry for her. Young and stupid often went hand in hand, and I’d been both back in the day. I could not hold on to my anger.

  ‘You got in out of your depth,’ I told her softly. ‘What’s done is done. Now we’re going to try and help you safely back to shore.’

  27

  After some persuasion bordering what he thought came close to being full-blown nagging, Special Agent Eugene Wilson eventually agreed with his partner that they should take no chances where Barclay and Garcia were concerned. The tracker would not do them any good if, overnight, the pair figured out what was going on. Green painted an entire scenario for him whereby they remained sitting in their office watching the computer monitor, while the men they were tracking rented another vehicle and left Roswell behind in a cloud of dust. That was why, since shortly after their shift began, the two FBI agents had been sitting in a parking lot next door to an office complex watching the Mayo Lodge opposite.