Which is why I do a search in the bedroom, too, and find another camera in the ceiling fan.
I don’t like being spied on. I know I’m a flight risk, but there has to be some sort of trust. I told him I’d help; that should be good enough for him to know that I won’t go back on it. The bubble of irritation successfully erases the lingering remnants of the panic attack as I consider the situation. The sooner I can get this job done, the sooner I can leave Zeke’s watchful eyes behind. Still holding the laptop, I go back into the living room and take one last deep breath before sitting on the couch and opening it, booting it up.
The screen is still dark when I get back up, pacing. What am I doing? I could walk away now. The cameras be damned. I could leave this apartment with my backpack, catch a bus or even hitch a ride. I’ve managed to escape before; I have no reason to think I can’t do it again. I could go to Miami city hall and find my birth certificate, apply for a driver’s license, get a passport, all with my own name. I could get a bank account. Legitimately. I would be legitimate.
I don’t have to hide anymore.
I’d told Zeke that I didn’t need to freshen up, but suddenly I want a shower. I leave the laptop on the coffee table and find a towel in the hall closet. I make sure not to get undressed in the bedroom under the camera’s watchful eye. I wonder if Heather knows about the camera.
Within a few minutes, I am standing under a hot stream of water, my eyes closed, thinking about freedom.
Until I have an idea.
My eyes snap open, and I shut off the water, wrapping the towel around me as I pad into the living room. I sit in front of the laptop and hit a few keys. I don’t even think about what I’m doing. I just do it.
He finds me here, like this, my hair air-dried, still wrapped in the towel, the code scrolling in front of me. The apartment is dark except for the light from the screen and the moonlight that splashes through the sliding glass doors across the dingy carpet.
‘Tina?’
His voice startles me; I didn’t even hear the door open. The light comes on, bright, and I blink against its harshness.
I realize I’m wearing a towel and nothing else. My hair springs around my head in ringlets. I have no idea how long I’ve been like this.
I give him a wan smile. ‘Sorry,’ I say, although I’m not sure what I am apologizing for. Maybe it’s because I abandoned the team, abandoned him. Or maybe it’s not. Maybe it’s because I need something to say, and I don’t want to tell him that I looked for him in the chat room, forgetting that he was a few doors down and no longer Tracker. I’d caught myself before I wrote a message, staring at the screen.
‘You OK?’ Zeke asks, still standing, still staring, a worried expression on his face. Maybe he’s reconsidering his decision to leave me here in the midst of a panic attack.
I give a little snort. ‘Sure.’ I force myself to stop looking at the screen, to get up, pull the towel tighter so it doesn’t fall off. I brush past him toward the bedroom, where I shut the door and rummage around in my backpack until I find the oversized T-shirt I sleep in and pull it over my head. Since he is here and not on the other side of the cameras, I feel a little confident that I can change without anyone watching. Still, I make an effort to cover myself. I come back out with the towel and hang it on the rod in the bathroom before heading back into the living room.
I expect to see him still standing, but instead now he is at the laptop, checking out what I’ve found.
The first thing I discovered was the remote access Trojan, one that Beth or Roger – or maybe Jimmy, who set up the new wireless access – had inadvertently installed through an email link. This is the portal that allowed the shadow to upload all of the messages that we exchanged several months ago. I also found a back door, so the shadow could get in even if access was denied, and the port where the shadow managed to reroute the IP address. I see it jumped to three other locations before ending up in Falmouth, Massachusetts, but where it originated is still a mystery, although I could deduce from this that the shadow is likely using Tor, which randomly causes the original IP address to bounce around and makes it less traceable.
‘I didn’t really find anything,’ I say. ‘I mean, nothing you haven’t already seen.’ The galley kitchen is across the room, and I head for the refrigerator. Milk, eggs, bread, a six-pack of beer. It’s not what I’m looking for. ‘Do you have any cognac?’ I ask. I need a short one.
‘Upper right cabinet,’ he says, not even looking up. It’s as though he turned into me – or Tracker – the moment he sat down.
I find the bottle and pour two glasses, bringing one out to him. He sips it, his eyes still trained on the screen. The liquid is hot and warm against my throat, and I welcome the small diversion. I’m curious, though, and I lean over to see what he’s doing.
The code is splashed across the screen, and I see where the photographs were inserted, the ones of Steve and Jeanine. I stick my hand out and point at it. ‘The pictures,’ I say. An uncomfortable feeling washes over me. I don’t like that someone had been spying on them, taking their pictures without them knowing, and then using them in the ransom demand.
‘Yeah, but that’s not all. What else do you see?’
My breath catches in my throat. What else do you see? I can close my eyes and see the question on the screen, the question Tracker always asked when we were working on something together. He was constantly quizzing me, forcing me to push myself, to see the whole picture myself and not rely on him.
Zeke is watching me, waiting for my answer, waiting to see if I can see what he’s already found.
Does he know what he’s done? I can’t tell from his expression.
I shake off the memory as I try to concentrate on the screen. There. There it is. ‘That’s not all he inserted,’ I say, always the dutiful student. This isn’t a mystery to Zeke, who’s had this laptop in his possession since the FBI found it in the bike shop. He’s been poking around inside it, as I wanted to when Agent Tilman had it on the table in front of me. He knows how to try to unearth its secrets. Zeke is a few steps ahead of me, just like Tracker always was.
I don’t have time to ruminate on that, however, because a picture of Adriana DeMarco fills the screen and makes me forget all about Tracker.
‘Why would the hacker put in a picture of Adriana?’ I ask softly, the sound of my voice startling me, since I wasn’t even really aware I’d spoken out loud.
As far as I know, the circle of people who know that Adriana is my half-sister and not Tony DeMarco’s biological daughter is quite small. I don’t even know if she knows. So there’s only one explanation.
Whoever is setting me up may not have necessarily only wanted the police to arrest me for Tony’s hit.
He wants me to know that he knows about me. Everything about me. And he is taunting me.
‘This has to be the same person who shadowed me,’ I say. ‘He knew things; he knew about the bank job. He knew about you.’ The shadow had gotten into my laptop through a URL he embedded in a link Tracker had sent me for a private chat room.
Zeke settles back on the couch. We’ve both taken our eyes off the laptop screen.
‘He doesn’t know who Tracker is,’ he says slowly, as though he’s thinking about what he’s going to say at the moment that he says it. ‘I mean, he doesn’t know it’s me. But he does know about Tracker. He’s created conversations in the chat room archives, but conversations I never had. Stuff having to do with the deep web. Instructions to a few hackers about how to navigate Tor.’ He pauses. ‘I wouldn’t do that. Most of the people on the chat know about Tor, are using it, and they don’t need any help with it.’
‘Who did you supposedly have these conversations with?’
‘A few people.’ He hesitates, then says, ‘You.’
ELEVEN
I am not quite sure how to react, what to say. Finally, ‘Me?’
‘Well, your screen names, anyway. Tiny and BikerGirl and p4r4d0x, mostly.’
> ‘I haven’t been using anything for the last month,’ I protest.
‘Like I said, this started before you gave me your laptop.’
‘It’s not me.’
‘I know. It’s not me, either. But someone wants everyone to think it is us.’
I think for a second. ‘Who even knows who “us” is?’ I ask, making quote marks with my fingers. ‘We haven’t had public conversations in the chat room for a long time.’
Zeke stares at me thoughtfully. ‘You’re right,’ he says after a few seconds. ‘But it’s someone who knows about the French phrases.’ We’d devised a way to identify each other, to prove that we were who we said we were.
‘The shadow knows about them,’ I point out. He used them to get me to click on the link that let him inside my laptop. ‘So we are back to him. An unknown person who clearly knows who I am, and possibly knows who Tracker really is.’ I begin to feel a little paranoid. ‘No one here knows who I am?’
‘No more than they know I’m Tracker.’
‘The conversations don’t seem like anything that should be particularly suspicious, though.’ I pause when something strikes me. ‘They lead directly to the hit on Tony DeMarco, don’t they?’
He shifts a little. I’ve struck a nerve.
‘My team found an anonymous instant messaging service. They traced the chat log, where there’s a conversation about how to take DeMarco out.’
I sit next to him, put my glass on the table. ‘Show me.’
It only takes him a few minutes. I would be impressed if I didn’t know he’d already been here; he already knew how to find it. I scan the messages, which don’t seem too incriminating. Tracker and p4r4d0x, a screen name I set up when I lived in Quebec last year, are merely having a conversation about how they haven’t been in touch for a while. If my shadow is the culprit behind this, then I’m not surprised he found p4r4d0x, since I was using that screen name when he first showed up in my laptop. I hadn’t realized, however, how deeply he’d infiltrated it, since I had been very careful about clearing everything. But it shows how, even when you think you’re being careful, it’s extremely difficult to wipe a computer completely clean.
I scan a few screens and am about to say that this is nothing, when the conversation turns.
p4r4d0x: He sent someone to kill me.
Tracker: Are you sure?
p4r4d0x: Yes.
Tracker: What do you want to do about it?
p4r4d0x: What we did before.
Tracker: I don’t know if we can. There are more firewalls now.
p4r4d0x: That wouldn’t stop us. But that’s not what I mean. You know.
Tracker: I have a few connections.
p4r4d0x: I can pay. It’s left over. Saved for a rainy day. This is the rainy day.
I stop reading. Zeke is watching me.
‘Someone went to a lot of trouble,’ I whisper.
‘Yeah. It gets worse.’
‘I don’t want to know. If I keep reading, the words will be stuck in my head, and what if they come out? What if someone’s questioning me and I accidentally repeat something from here?’ I close the laptop cover. ‘No, I can’t read anymore. Just tell me the gist of it.’
‘OK. p4r4d0x talks Tracker into getting in touch with his connections, and then the conversation ends. But in another conversation, a couple of days later, Tracker tells p4r4d0x that it’s all set up and it’ll happen over the weekend. He tells her to transfer bitcoins. We found the transaction, but it went into the wind. We’re still trying to figure out where it originated and where the bitcoins ended up. DeMarco got hit on Sunday, in front of his daughter’s apartment building.’
‘And all that’s in there?’
He nods.
‘But is DeMarco ever mentioned by name? How would this be connected to him?’
‘His daughter’s address in New York. It gives the time and place, where he’s going to be.’
I think for a few seconds. ‘So your team finds these messages and they trace them—’
‘To the bike shop. That’s right. They followed p4r4d0x.’
‘But I haven’t been online as p4r4d0x since Quebec.’ When the shadow infiltrated my laptop. Whoever is setting me up has to be connected to the shadow, if not the shadow himself.
There is no other way to know my screen name.
But then I realize something. ‘They haven’t found Tracker,’ I say slowly.
Zeke shakes his head. ‘No, and I haven’t been online as Tracker. Not since you left New York.’
When I went to Cape Cod.
‘The team isn’t after me, they’re after him.’ He pokes at the screen, where ‘Tracker’ lives.
So if we can trace this Tracker, we may be able to find out who’s behind the hit on Tony DeMarco.
‘If they’re as good as you say, they might figure out everything.’ I think about those four kids in that room down the hall. It’s a ticking time bomb. If they find out who I am, who Zeke is, and if the evidence points at us, we will both be on the run.
‘That’s why I brought you here.’
I make a face at him. ‘You’re kidding, right? You’re setting me up, more than even the shadow is.’
‘No, that’s not right. I brought you in because I know you and I can stop it. We have to be here, keep an eye on them.’
‘I could’ve done this from anywhere, and so could you. We don’t have to be in Miami.’
‘You don’t get it.’
‘Enlighten me.’
‘What happens is that you’re on the team. You have to be here because I have to be here. We have to keep an eye on them, watch what they’re doing, set it up so they don’t find out anything. In the meantime, you and I can actually try to find out who’s doing this.’
I grab my glass, go into the kitchen, and pour myself another drink. When I’ve drained the glass, I finally speak again. ‘I think you’ve completely lost your mind.’
‘You and I can do this, Tina.’
‘Do you think whoever is doing this knows who you are, too?’
I see from his expression that the thought has crossed his mind. ‘Perhaps. If he does, he’s pretty damn smart, but I’m not sure he’s smarter than we are.’
I’m not as confident as he is. ‘You and I,’ I start, hesitating because I don’t quite know how to put it.
But he does. ‘You don’t think we can do it. Like before.’
I shake my head. ‘It’s not like before. You and I are definitely not like before. So, no, I’m not sure that we can do this.’
‘But what if we could?’
‘We can’t go back. You should never have told me who you are. It might actually be your greatest regret, like you always used to tell me.’
Zeke gets up and comes over to me. I take a step back, but I am standing too close to the wall and I’m trapped. The light from the moon spills across his face. His hand slips around my waist, and I hold my breath as he leans in, his lips brushing mine, but he doesn’t kiss me. Instead, he whispers, ‘I will never regret this.’ And then he does kiss me.
For a moment, I melt into him, his mouth warm, his desire infectious. I feel his hand under my shirt, against my skin, and I press myself further into him, wanting him right now as much as he wants me.
I don’t know why it’s at that very moment that I realize something. I had always suspected that Tony DeMarco was behind the shadow, but all of this mixes it up a little bit. Why would Tony have me set up for the hit on him? He could merely find me and kill me himself.
So if the shadow isn’t the one framing me—
I jerk away from Zeke, moving around him quickly, as though the laptop is going to disappear before I reach it. I am sitting in front of it, scanning the code, my fingers on the keypad, scrolling through it.
‘There,’ I say, turning the screen around so he can see it.
Zeke is watching me, and I am more than aware of what I’ve done, that I’ve interrupted an intimate moment, but he seems rather
nonplussed. I don’t know if I should be upset or relieved. Either way, it proves one thing: he is like me. This addiction – this need that we have – supersedes any desire we have for each other. Realizing this makes me unbearably sad.
He stoops down and studies what I’m showing him. ‘Holy shit,’ he says softly.
‘You do see what I see, don’t you?’ What I see is a string of beautifully written code, code that I’d be proud to write. But it’s like a masterpiece that’s been spray-painted with graffiti. Right in the middle of it is a small string that’s so sloppy that the same person couldn’t have written it.
‘Someone added to the code,’ Zeke says. ‘It’s not just one person doing this. It’s at least two.’
TWELVE
I tell Zeke my suspicion that someone has piggybacked on to the shadow in order to set us up.
‘But that would mean that person—’
‘Is also setting up Tony DeMarco,’ I finish for him.
He runs a hand through his hair and sighs. ‘OK, let’s play devil’s advocate for a moment. Let’s say it’s still just the shadow, but what if it’s open source? Anyone can modify it.’
‘So one person wrote the code and then opened it for anyone to see or modify? What’s the motive in that? If the shadow wants to get at us, why let anyone else in? Why make it open source? That doesn’t make any sense.’
‘Can we get in there? Maybe there’s a back door.’
I am already one step ahead of him.
I can’t find any sign, however, that it’s open source, which leads us back to two people – at least – behind this. I lean back on the couch and close my eyes. None of this makes any sense.
‘This is almost too personal,’ Zeke says. ‘Who would be after you or me – us – like that?’
I sit up straight and shake my head. ‘Tony has been after me ever since the bank job, and I’m pretty sure he was the one behind the shadow. But he didn’t know about you, doesn’t know who you are online. I didn’t even know about Adriana until you told me, so no one I’ve ever had contact with – except you – knows she’s my sister. Tony knows, though. It all leads back to Tony DeMarco.’
Betrayed Page 5
