An hour later, Dunne and Howe were in big seats on the EVA Air flight. Dunne ordered a glass of champagne. The flight attendant asked him if he wanted pajamas to sleep in on the flight to San Francisco. Dunne said yes, he would like pajamas, then fell asleep.
36 Whippany, New Jersey – June 2018
Tom Goldman took a seat at the bar, next to two young men who had just finished their shifts at Data-Save, a data-recovery center that had opened a half mile down the highway in one of the pitted exurbs west of Newark, New Jersey. One had a sleeve of tattoos; the other had gold rings piercing the lobes of each ear. They were watching the Yankees and talking about the dumbass mistakes that other engineers had made in designing the server farm where they worked.
Goldman drank his beer and listened. With his bland, unlined face and noncommittal smile, he was easy to overlook in the bar. He wore jeans and an untucked blue shirt. He seemed to be listening to music through his earbuds, but they were microphones that amplified the sound nearby.
“The heat sensors are kludgy on the third floor,” said the first engineer. As he drank his beer, the scales of the lizard tattooed on his left arm seemed to ripple at the joints. “I mean, really. They. Do. Not. Work. How fucked up is that?”
“We are working for morons. They could be one degree away from frying every circuit in the place and they wouldn’t even know it,” said the young man with the pierced ears. He pounded the bar with his fist and said, “Yes!” A Yankee batter had just hit a double off the left-field wall at Fenway.
The engineer with the tats burped loudly.
“Yowzah!” He gulped down the rest of his beer.
“The NYSE techs came out today to test the system,” he said, after he had wiped the foam from his mouth.
“Charlie and them?”
“Yup. They spent an hour in the data center, punching their tickets. They checked the bandwidth, sort of, checked the certificates, blah, blah. Then they drove back to Manhattan as if they had a clue whether we meet the specs.”
The Yankees fan got a mock-serious look on his face.
“This is a test,” he said in a radio voice. “For the next sixty seconds this data-recovery center will conduct a test of the emergency response system. This is only a test. If this had been an actual emergency, you would have been instructed to jump out the fucking window. This concludes this test of the emergency response system.”
They both laughed. Data security was a joke to people who understood how porous most of the systems were.
Goldman sat atop his barstool, seemingly preoccupied with his music. He doodled with numbers on a piece of paper in front of him. Four thousand four hundred thirty-six. That was the number of companies that were publicly traded on U.S. financial exchanges. Thirty-one trillion dollars. That was the market’s current capitalization, the three thousand biggest companies multiplied by the price of their stocks. One-point-eight billion. That was the number of trades per day.
He looked at his numbers, smiled, and then began to add little fillips: extra digits and half-written numbers, dividing lines and misplaced commas. And then, to cover the whole thing, a sprout of dragon’s wings and sine curves and oscillating rays, so that it was a compendium of nonsense.
Life happens at the margins. That was what Goldman understood. The integrity of a system wasn’t the big aggregates, but the smaller individual numbers that summed to the large ones. Reality was degraded a decimal point at a time. Once the individual numbers became suspect, so did the composites. Trust eroded in small fissures, and as they widened, people began to doubt the integrity of the entire system.
The Yankees game ended. The two engineers finished their beers. The one with the tattoos, who had been in the control room with the visitors from the New York Stock Exchange, paid with a credit card. Goldman took a picture of it, the name and card number, with a camera hidden in his sleeve. Joseph Zelwig. Finding his address and other contact details would be comically, tragically easy.
The two friends walked noisily to the door. Goldman quietly followed twenty seconds behind, as if he were heading to the men’s room, but then slipped out the side entrance. From the shadows of the parking lot, he registered the make, model, and license plate number of Zelwig’s car.
Goldman went back to his seat at the bar and closed out his tab. Fifteen minutes later, he left the bar and walked back out into the sticky New Jersey summer night.
* * *
Goldman sat in his car, with the lights out, in the shopping center down the road from the Data-Save recovery center. He was surrounded by the charmless, anonymous landscape of far suburbia. Glowing beyond the Applebee’s he had just left were a Taco Bell, a McDonald’s, and a Chili’s. So many choices; so little choice.
Goldman took his phone and called a number in Italy, using an encrypted Signal connection. It was early morning there, but he had promised a report, and Ricci probably hadn’t gone to sleep yet.
“Ciao, Lorenzo,” he said. “Questo è Tom.”
“’Sup?” answered the Italian.
“This is doable,” said Goldman. “I’m at the backup site. We can, what shall I say – adjust – the trading records here in a way that will produce a panic.”
“Stai calmo, amico mio. We don’t need a panic. We just need a ripple. A demonstration. As my countryman Niccolò Machiavelli advised his prince: ‘Never attempt to win by force what can be won by deception.’”
“I’m a lawyer. I want what my client wants.”
“What about Michael Dunne? Did you hear the news from Taiwan? Quest’uomo è noioso. We squeeze him, box him, bribe him, and he doesn’t go away. Sono stufo di lui, you hear?”
“I’ll make him go away.”
“I thought we did that before. But here we are again. Basta.”
“Heard. Understood. Acknowledged. It will be party time soon. The wires are ready. You just have to plug them in.”
Heat radiated from the server farm as the summer night grew steamier. Goldman turned the ignition and the car rumbled off down the highway toward Paramus and then Hackensack and, beyond, the lights of New York City, which on this night seemed suspended from heaven as if by a billion invisible digital threads.
37 San Francisco, California, and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania – June 2018
Michael Dunne arrived in San Francisco with his mind in the traveler’s in-between state, where pills couldn’t quite put him to sleep and coffee wouldn’t really wake him up. He’d been trying to think through all the activities he needed to set in motion now. Jason Howe clambered after him on the jetway; he was visibly delighted to be back in San Francisco. He put a fist in the air like a 1960s radical, and said to nobody in particular, “Right on!”
Dunne had warned Howe on the flight, before the sometime-Buddhist had had his fourth glass of wine, that he needed to be careful. After his escape from Taipei, his “colleagues” might be suspicious of him. But Howe insisted that he would be fine. He was a career bandit; he knew how to take care of himself. And the Bay Area was his safe place. He’d gone to Stanford. He’d get high for a week and stay in touch with Dunne on Signal.
“Slow down, Mr. Bandit,” said Dunne, as they walked down the terminal toward the exit. “This is just starting to get serious. I want you to ping your friend Jake. You said he’d help you.”
“Sure. I hired him, washed him, waxed him. He’ll talk to me.”
“Get in touch. Tell him you need a favor. Tell him you want to come East and see him. Reconnect. Find out what he’s preparing for the Party. I need to know when and where it is. He may be the only way to find out.”
“You got it!” said Howe, with a star-child buzz in his eyes.
Howe turned toward the TSA exit sign and freedom. He grabbed his backpack, with its flopping sneakers and sandals, and trotted off toward the door. Dunne thought of chasing after him, but he was tired, and it was pointless. He’d rescued the young man and downloaded what he knew. If Howe wanted to play outlaw again, that was his problem. Just so lo
ng as he made the connection with his former colleague.
* * *
Dunne spent the hours of his layover shopping in the airport. He bought himself two new Android phones that were unlocked, so he could install any chip he wanted. To connect them, he purchased four prepaid phone cards. He bought a fancy new backpack, too, to carry his expanding tool kit.
Flying over the Pacific was the easy part, but the two hops back to Pennsylvania were crushing. Flight delays, overcrowded planes, surly passengers. Dunne was in a foul mood as he rolled his bag to his apartment building in Shadyside and mounted the steps to the second floor.
* * *
The first sign that anything was wrong was that the door had been splintered and sloppily repaired around the lock.
Inside the apartment, they hadn’t bothered to clean up. The closet and drawers were still open, and loose papers and articles of clothing were strewn across the floor. The mattress and pillows had been cut open to search for hidden material, as had the cushions for the sofa and chairs in the living room. Dunne had taken his laptop with him on the trip, but all the other computer equipment, the monitor, printer, even the mouse, had been looted. The burglars’ goal had been information, obviously, but also raw intimidation.
Dunne called his office on Forbes Avenue. His assistant Jenny didn’t answer the main number, and a call to her cell phone rolled to voice mail, too. That worried him.
Dunne found his Ford Explorer on a side street, untouched, and he was at the office in fifteen minutes.
The scene there was worse than at the apartment. Broken glass, a smashed copying machine, desk drawers ripped off their tracks and left in a heap, files either carted off or dumped on the floor. The burglars had even trashed the nice De’Longhi espresso machine that Dunne had bought when he had his first big payday. The office computers were gone, along with the peripheral equipment. Dunne didn’t see any surveillance devices, but he assumed they had been installed.
Dunne’s first thought was for Jenny, who must have discovered the upheaval when she came in for work and panicked.
Dunne called her cell again and left a gentle message advising her not to worry and to return his call as soon as she could. Then he called the police, who sent a squad car, and then a van with a forensics team.
While he waited, Dunne went to the place in his mind where he dealt with operations that had been disrupted. The process was more like spontaneous muscle memory than thinking, less conscious and more intuitive. He was getting close now, and he had to push on through.
* * *
The police did the standard crime-scene investigation. They took photographs, dusted for prints, and made an inventory of items that were stolen or damaged. They interviewed neighbors along the corridor and the guards in the lobby, and they examined the video archives of the surveillance cameras.
The detective took a statement from Dunne. He asked about motives and possible suspects. Dunne was politely unhelpful. He said he was in the private-security business and probably had a lot of enemies, but he couldn’t think of anyone in particular. When the detective asked about his previous employment, he recited his State Department cover jobs. His résumé had a bland, not-quite-real quality, with so many seemingly unrelated overseas postings.
Dunne described the break-in at his apartment, too, and asked the police to go gather evidence there. The detective asked skeptically why Dunne hadn’t immediately reported that other break-in and had come to his office instead. What was he worried about?
Dunne volunteered, since he knew the cops would find out anyway, that he had served a year in prison for making false statements to the FBI. After that, the detective quizzing Dunne subtly switched gears. Dunne was a certified bad guy; he’d been to prison; now some other bad guy had messed with his stuff. Maybe they’d find the perpetrator, and maybe they wouldn’t.
The detective handed Dunne his card and advised him to contact his insurance company. The police department would do its best, he said, but since this wasn’t an armed robbery and nobody had been hurt, they’d have to fit it in with other work. Meaning, don’t hold your breath.
After the police had left, Jenny returned Dunne’s phone call. Her voice was tight, and it sounded like she had been crying. She said she had discovered the break-in that morning. She knew her boss was traveling, so she had waited until he returned.
“Should I be scared?” she asked. “They have my cell phone number and email address. They know where I live.” That information had been in her employment file, which was missing from the cabinet along with every other important record the little start-up company had gathered.
“Don’t worry,” said Dunne. “We’ll keep you safe.”
She was trying not to cry. Dunne told her to pack a bag and wait outside her apartment in Squirrel Hill. He would pick her up in fifteen minutes. Dunne retrieved his dusty SUV from the parking garage. He unlocked the glove compartment, removed a thick stack of bills, and peeled off a wad. He stopped at an AT&T store on Forbes Avenue on his way and bought a cheap cell phone and ten gigabytes of data, for cash. He opened the phone, noted its number, and put it in his pocket.
* * *
Jenny was sitting on the concrete steps in front of her building, with a suitcase and a shopping bag of clothes beside her. She was wearing a Pitt sweatshirt. She waved when Dunne rolled up.
“Hi, boss,” she said. “I’m sorry about the phone call. I was a little nervous. Everything’s okay, right? The office was such a mess. But it’s just a burglary, yeah?”
Dunne laughed. “It’s all good,” he said. “We just need to chill for a little while.”
She laughed, too, and then looked perplexed. “What do you mean? Chill how?”
“Where do your parents live? You told me, but remind me.”
“Weston, Massachusetts. Boston Post Road.” She rattled it off as if she were reciting a lesson.
“Well, maybe you should go there and spend a week with them. All expenses paid. I’ll give you your salary, and a bonus, now, and money for the airfare. You can’t come back to work, anyway, until we clean up the broken glass and fix the office.”
Dunne took five banded packs of ten bills each and handed them to her. She counted the money carefully.
“There’s five thousand dollars here,” she said. “I can’t take this. I don’t make that much in a month, for gosh sake.”
“Give me anything that’s left over when you get back. Deal?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“Do you have your cell phone?”
“Of course! God, I can’t get rid of it. I am so sick of social media.”
“Me, too,” said Dunne. “Listen, do something for me. Go to ‘Settings,’ and then ‘Privacy,’ and turn off ‘Location Services.’ Can you do that?”
Jenny clicked away at the device. When she had completed the change Dunne had requested, she looked up at him. Real concern showed on her face.
“What’s wrong?” she asked. “Is someone after you?”
“I’m just being careful. There are a lot of screwballs out there. Until I know who trashed the office, I don’t want anyone to know anything. It’s none of their beeswax.”
Dunne laughed again. She wasn’t convinced.
“Have you called the police?” she asked.
“Yes. I just finished with the detective before coming to get you. They’re doing all the right stuff. Fingerprints, photos, lists of what’s stolen. I’m sure they’ll catch the guy. And I’m going to call the FBI, too, my friend Bogdanovich. You remember him? He helped me set up the business. Anything the police can’t solve the FBI will figure out. It’s all cool.”
She looked at him skeptically. “What aren’t you telling me, Mr. Dunne?”
“Nothing interesting.” He smiled. In the afternoon summer sun, on the sidewalk of a neighborhood full of college kids, he might have been her older brother.
“I’ll drive you to the airport. I think there’s a flight to Boston on American at five.�
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“It’s JetBlue. And it leaves at five twenty-four. My roommate can drive me. She’ll want to say goodbye.”
“Well, all right, then. One more thing.”
Dunne took the burner phone out of his pocket and handed it to her.
“When we’ve put the office back together and everything is cool and it’s time for you to come back to work, I’ll call you on this phone. I have the number. Use your regular phone for everything else but keep this one clear for me.”
“What if I need to get in touch with you, Mr. Dunne?”
Dunne offered one last, unconvincing laugh.
“I’ll be kind of hard to reach for the next while. Send me an email on my Paladin account. I’ll call you back.”
Jenny shouted for her roommate, who had been waiting just inside the screen door. Dunne climbed into the cab of his big Ford.
“See you soon,” Dunne called out. She nodded but couldn’t form the words of an answer.
* * *
Dunne’s last stop that day was Rick Bogdanovich’s office at the FBI’s cyber lab on the banks of the Monongahela.
In the fading light, there was a fragile, temporary look to the new office parks that occupied some of the empty space on either side of the river where the vast Jones & Laughlin steel complex once stood. In their day, the mills and furnaces here had looked so solid they would last a thousand years: the blast furnaces on the north side feeding molten steel to the rolling mills on the south side, to be welded and pounded into cars, trucks, trains, and buildings. How could that tower of steel ever crumble?
Now it was a technology park, feeding off bits and bytes from Carnegie Mellon and other local universities. The soot in the sky that had blackened men’s shirts, and lungs, too, was gone. Fish swam in the river again, and so did people. So maybe it was better, but it was different. The strong, sturdy men and women had been replaced by coders, processors, and marketers.
The Paladin Page 23
