“We’ll just have to be extra careful,” she said, close to his neck. “Anyway, it’s not like we’re in Texas. I didn’t expect you to come back with a machine gun.”
When he went out an hour later to bring back coffee and food, she had started assembling the device. On the beach in Boracay, she had come up with a simple and elegant solution to a hard problem. The problem was this: she had the unique device identification number for the hacker’s computer because it had been logged on the FBI server along with the router addresses he’d used to access the system. But a laptop only transmits its device ID while establishing a connection with a new system, so even if she could somehow listen to every wireless transmission in San Francisco, she wouldn’t be able to unwind the right stream of data from that tangled web unless she caught the hacker’s computer at the exact moment it connected with a wireless router and broadcast its ID. So her solution was to build a device that could tackle two jobs, one after the other. The first was to transmit a disruptive signal that would knock offline every wireless device on every channel within its radius. Then its antenna would switch to receiver mode, to scan all sixteen channels and listen as every computer tried to reestablish a connection with its router. If she could get close enough to the hacker’s computer to knock it offline, she would pick up its unique device ID as the wireless card automatically tried to reconnect to the router. The transmitter would disrupt every wireless signal within three hundred feet, and her receiver would pick up every computer trying to reconnect within the same radius. After she narrowed it to three hundred feet, which could still be a couple of thousand apartments in a city as dense as San Francisco, they could sift it further by isolating the signal, reducing the antenna’s reception quality, and rotating the receiver dish to see when the signal faded or strengthened.
She’d thought it through on the beach, watching a storm blow toward their island, a little girl racing along the beach gathering shells in hope of getting pesos. She’d perfected it and mapped the circuitry in her bungalow, listening to the geckos in the ceiling and trying to stop herself from going to Chris’s bed. Drawing it on the airplane and in the hotel room had been easy, and when Chris came back with the parts and she already had a working version of the software, the pieces fit together perfectly. Her laptop’s network window showed twenty wireless networks within reach of her room. With that many access points, there would surely be a few computers actually logged in. She’d be able to test her creation without even leaving the hotel.
A few hours later, Chris came in with two cups of coffee he’d bought in the shop across the street from the hotel. He handed one to her and sat on the foot of the bed. It was six in the evening, but there was still plenty of light. From one of the windows in the corner suite, Julissa could see the Transamerica Pyramid. Through the other window she could see one of the upright supports of the Golden Gate Bridge. She watched a ship disappear behind the cityscape as it steamed towards the bridge. With water on three sides, and wharves along the entire bay side, the thing would be comfortable almost anywhere in San Francisco.
“How’s it coming?” Chris asked.
“It’s done.”
She sipped her coffee and looked at the device. It had been a while since she’d built anything from scratch, but she’d done a good job. She’d stripped apart sixteen wireless routers and run them on parallel circuits through a handmade motherboard that would control the interference burst and then coordinate a scan for Internet devices trying to log back onto the net. A USB cable led from this to her laptop, so she could control everything from its keyboard. At the moment, her creation was spread all over the hotel desk in a mess of wires and green printed circuit boards.
“I can pack it all into one of the cardboard boxes you brought from the store. It’ll fit on the backseat. You can drive and I’ll control it from the passenger seat.”
“How long will it take to run a cycle?” he asked.
“Maybe ten seconds. Some of it will depend on how fast the computers getting knocked offline are able to try to reconnect.”
“Can I drive at a steady pace?”
“In theory, yeah. As long as it’s a slow, steady pace.”
She packed the device into a box, putting a lid on it so the valets downstairs wouldn’t wonder what it was. She put her laptop into her purse and then went to the bathroom to change clothes. It was cool in San Francisco, but Chris had come back from his trip to Chinatown with a pair of jeans, some running shoes and athletic socks, and a sweatshirt for her. The sweatshirt was embroidered with the logo of the San Francisco 49ers. When she was dressed to go out and had run a brush through her hair, she looked at herself in the mirror and thought she looked like a tourist. A sleep-deprived and very worried tourist, maybe.
“I’m ready,” she said, stepping back into the main room of the suite.
They rode the elevator to the lower lobby, passing through the to the valet stand. Chris handed his ticket to a young woman in a red jacket and they waited for the rental car. When it came, they loaded the box into the backseat, and while Julissa got things set up in the passenger seat, Chris drove them slowly onto Post Street. At the first red light he turned on the GPS mounted to the dashboard.
“When it’s up and running, I’ll turn on the track function. So we’ll know what streets we’ve covered.”
“Good idea.”
Julissa dropped the car’s cigarette lighter into a cup holder and plugged the device’s power cable into the empty jack. Then she turned on her laptop and started the program. They heard a low whine from the box in the backseat as the sixteen parallel rows of capacitors built up a charge for the first interference burst.
“Here it comes,” Julissa said. “Let’s hope no one calls the FCC right off the bat.”
The capacitors in the backseat reached their full charge and then they heard a click, like the sound of a flashbulb going off. A popup window appeared on the GPS screen with the message 1. The green numbers on the dashboard clock glowed brighter. Then she looked at her computer screen and watched the column on the left-hand side. One by one, 128-bit ID numbers filled the screen. The device was scanning all channels and picking off computer ID numbers as they tried to reconnect to wireless routers.
“It’s working,” she said. “Thirty computers on the first sweep. We’re between two hotels so a lot of people are online.”
“How will you know when we find the right one?”
“There’ll be an alarm. I’m monitoring the laptop to make sure nothing crashes, but I won’t have to keep a sharp eye on the numbers.”
She looked up and saw they had turned onto Market Street. Chris was taking them west, away from the Bay and across the tip of the peninsula towards the ocean. The GPS found its satellites again, but as she watched, it blinked out as another burst of interference from the backseat cut out its reception.
“All the coffee shops he used were on Irving Street, so I thought I’d start us there,” Chris said. “Soon as we hit Inner Sunset, I’ll slow down and take it street by street.”
She nodded. The street was packed with cars leaving downtown. A streetcar crowded with riders passed them on the left. Julissa noticed several people on the streetcar and two women in a crosswalk take smart phones away from their ears and stare at them blankly. The GPS was on the fritz again. A few seconds later, ID numbers began to scroll in.
Chris turned north on Van Ness, then took them towards Golden Gate Park. By the time they edged past Haight Ashbury and entered the park, she had collected over a thousand device numbers. Her invention was working beautifully. Chris sped up as they drove through the park, passing huge green lawns and stands of Monterey Cyprus and joggers out with their dogs. Even in the park, Julissa picked up two computer IDs, probably from one of the museums. Then they turned onto Lincoln Way, which ran along the southern boundary of the park. A neighborhood of two- and three-story row houses stretched away for blocks on their left. This was the beginning of the Sunset District. One b
lock south was Irving Street, where the hacker had gotten online at five different coffee shops and wine bars.
“We can start in the center and work out, or we can follow Lincoln all the way to the beach and work back in,” Chris said. “You choose.”
“Center.”
Chris nodded and made a left turn on Ninth Avenue. There was an Irish pub on the corner of Ninth and Lincoln. Julissa picked up three computers as they passed it. Then Chris slowed to a pace not much faster than a walk. He pulled to the curb to let another car pass and they worked down Ninth towards Irving at five miles an hour. Julissa’s device was grabbing computer IDs from both sides of the street. She looked at the digital clock just as its numbers began to glow brightly from the interference surge. It was 6:45 p.m.
“I bet from now until eleven a lot of people will be online. We’ll probably get a hundred computers on every block,” Julissa said.
“Will it make sense to keep looking after that? Or should we go back to the hotel and call it quits for the day if we don’t find him before midnight?”
“After eleven we should start again and re-cover the same ground. That way, if our guy’s a night owl, we won’t miss him by driving past his house too early.”
“Makes sense,” Chris said. He crossed Irving Street and Julissa could see one of the coffee shops their hacker had used. It was tucked between an organic grocer and a Thai restaurant. There was a chalkboard sign on the sidewalk that said Free Wi-Fi and Live Music. The sidewalk was crowded with people walking out to dinner or drinks, and as they passed through the intersection Julissa saw scores of people at outdoor tables in front of the cafes and wine bars up and down Irving. She hoped their quarry lived on a quieter street. She doubted things would stay quiet once they found him.
Then they continued south on Ninth Avenue, grabbing computer IDs by the dozens. Chris pulled to the side once to let a police car go past and then pulled back into the lane and kept driving at the same slow pace.
“If we get pulled over because it looks like we’re casing the neighborhood, I’ll say we’re moving to San Francisco and trying to decide where to buy.”
Julissa glanced at the mess of wires and antennae poking out of the box in the backseat.
“Maybe focus on not getting pulled over.”
Chapter Thirty-Seven
When Westfield woke, the faux-leather of the pool table cover was gone and instead he was in the stifling rubberized darkness of the body bag. It had been zipped closed again and the stench of his urine was what had finally brought him back to consciousness. He must have been given a drink of water, though, because his tongue wasn’t swollen, and he could swallow. He remembered the bright light of the room and the man with the English accent crushing his chest, and something about needing to sort out the answers to a few questions before he got thrown over the side. The dream of the pool table slipped away.
He couldn’t remember anything after the man crushed the breath from his lungs.
Then he remembered the tweezers. Something about the dream tried to surface, then sank away. The tweezers might have had a place in the vanished dream, but they had been real too, hadn’t they? He bent his left wrist and felt a sharp object pushing into his skin underneath the cuff. Now he remembered there’d been a scalpel too, but he’d lost it somehow. He rolled his body slightly to the left and could feel the scalpel under his left buttock. There was no chance he could get it. But the tweezers, maybe. That would be the first step, and he went to it.
The fingers on his right hand were all broken. That much was clear when he tried to use them to pry the tweezers from under the left cuff. He remembered the thing flying at him from the window of the SUV in the motel parking lot outside of Carlsbad, the way it had smashed the pistol out of his hand with one crushing blow while it was still entirely airborne. But his right thumb was mostly okay and he could use it to push the tweezers up towards his left palm. He realized he would have to sit up a little in the last moment so the tweezers would fall into his palm instead of away from it. Until that moment he hadn’t wondered whether anyone might be watching. Maybe the thing itself was there, hanging like a prey-swollen spider from the underside of the catwalk, watching with its yellow eyes.
He could only hear the engine’s steady throb. It went on and on the way ship’s engines do, stretching out a noise with such constancy that it just became a new kind of silence.
There could be twenty people standing around him in a quiet circle, for all he knew. He imagined that for a moment, then let it go. Hanging above him however many hours ago, the thing had touched his mind somehow, but it hadn’t gotten in. At least, not all the way. He’d caught it at the threshold and forced it out. It was like finding a white worm in a shovelful of turned earth, a hidden thing, used to its secrets and stunned to be caught in the light. He would know when it was watching him; he’d be able to feel the way it wriggled and squirmed behind his eyes.
But it wasn’t here.
If the man with the English accent had drugged him and questioned him, but he was still alive now to consider all these things, then they were checking whatever answers he’d given. There’d be no sense in throwing him overboard before that. They might need another session. So he was alone.
Without wasting more time, he sat up halfway, used his right thumb to push the tweezers free of the cuff, and caught them in his left hand before they fell away. Then he lay back and held the tweezers in his hand and listened again, but there was nothing. With the tweezers secure between his left thumb and his palm, he felt the edge of the right cuff until he found the keyhole. He then held the tweezers between his thumb and forefinger, pushed one tip into the keyhole until it was no more than a quarter of a centimeter in, and used the keyhole as leverage to bend the tweezer tip to a forty-five degree angle. He did all of this by feel and without allowing himself to stop and think. He owned handcuffs for his own pursuit of the killer and had tested them at his breakfast table overlooking Puget Sound. It was good to know the limits of whatever you depended on. Handcuffs only went so far.
When he’d bent the tip to the correct angle, he reinserted it into the hole, twisted it, and pulled back on the tweezers.
The cuff fell off his right wrist. Even so, he couldn’t pull his left arm free, because the cuff chain was bound to something at his waist that felt like a leather belt. So he gingerly transferred the tweezers to his right hand, holding his tool awkwardly with his thumb pressed against the shattered knuckle of his forefinger. The left cuff was harder to open but manageable because at least he had the freedom to move his right arm. In thirty seconds he had his left arm free, and in another two seconds he had found the scalpel in the cold puddle beneath him. He sliced the bag open from head to foot, and sat up. Now he was sure he was alone, because the compartment was dark except for the red and white lights of an electrical switchboard on the bulkhead, and the glow of LCD monitors. He cut away the rest of the bag, saw his ankles were cuffed with a regular set of handcuffs, and had them off in under a minute. Then he stood slowly, taking off the leather belt that had been clasped around his waist. The cuffs fell into the remains of the body bag.
It might have been days since he last stood on his feet. A slight shift of the deck nearly tossed him across the compartment. He caught himself against the bulkhead and then got his bearings, noticing first the chill after the swampy heat of the bag and then the fact that he was utterly naked.
He thought he was in an electrical control room just forward of the main engine room. He assumed the watertight door wouldn’t be locked if they’d gone to the trouble to keep him cuffed in a body bag. When he tried the wheel, it turned freely. He hesitated over the threshold, considering another echo of the dream he’d had. But it was too faint, so he set it aside and stepped into the engine room, closing the door behind him. He still carried the scalpel in his left hand, though he knew it was perfectly useless as a weapon. There would be tools in the engine room and at least two ways to reach the deck.
&nb
sp; There was a mechanics’ locker behind the main power plant. He stood in the warmth and roar of the engine and went through the crew’s belongings until he found an oil-stained engineer’s jumpsuit. He put it on and zipped it up the front. His chest was a patchwork of bite marks, each one a scabbed-over hole from which white tendrils of infection spread under his skin. No wonder he’d been delirious with fever. There was no time to look for shoes, but in the sliding drawers of the machinists’ area he found what he really wanted: a twenty-inch cast-steel pipe wrench. He’d have preferred a gun, but the wrench would work well enough in close quarters.
The moment he’d unlocked the cuff on his right wrist, he’d started working out a plan. It was unfinished, but he knew he needed to find the steering room before he went topside. That would be aft of the engine at the stern of the ship. He didn’t expect to come across any crewmen, but he walked quietly anyway, bare feet silent on the non-skid rubber matting. He clung to the shadows on the right side of the passage, so he could swing with the wrench in his left hand. But he met no one.
He’d inspected plenty of container ships in the past, and though the machinery had evolved somewhat over the years, he had no trouble recognizing the steering gear when he found it. There were hydraulic levers port and starboard that turned the rudder post, which was heavily mounted just forward of the transom. He saw no security cameras, but knew they could be mounted anywhere. There would certainly be a few cameras topside on the stern. Any big cargo ship that ran shorthanded on the high seas would have them.
But that was a worry several minutes in the future.
What he needed to do now was sabotage the steering gear so it would fail if someone tried to turn the ship around. The tools for repairing the gear would be kept in this room, and what could be used to fix that equipment could rig its failure. He found a supply cabinet next to a workbench and opened its drawers one at a time until he found what he was looking for. He gave himself five minutes to do what needed to be done, measuring the time by counting to three hundred as he drilled holes in the main hydraulic lines and weakly patched them with hose clamps and cardboard which would burst at the first rise in pressure from a major movement of the rudder. He didn’t want to simply drain the fluid from the system because the loss of hydraulic pressure would set off an alarm in the bridge. That alarm couldn’t come until later. In the last sixty seconds of his countdown, he went to the wall-mounted fifty-five gallon drum of spare hydraulic fluid, and punched through its bottom with a hammer and a screwdriver. The viscous yellow liquid began to spread across the floor of the steering room. If they had a good engineer aboard, they would get the rudder working again—but it would take hours.
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