Zelda turned up fifteen more images from the sifted samples. One of them was an extreme close-up of an arm or leg. Another was part of a foot. The rest were blurs, indecipherable. Christine muttered darkly under her breath, in Russian. Finch simply nodded. “Moving on, then. Let’s see what’s left of the backup.”
“There’s nothing left of the backup,” she told him. “When I destroy something, I make damn sure it stays destroyed.”
“Nonetheless.” He sat down at the keyboard. “I suppose you left a back door.”
“I always do.” She worked on her floating numbers and brought it up for him.
“Everywhere?”
Christine raised one eyebrow at him. “Everywhere. I don’t plan on going south again, but if I do, I’m taking every dime in Manhattan with me.”
“Except mine, of course.”
“Sure. We can go with that answer, if it makes you happy.”
The location came up on Finch’s screen and he tried to access it “ and failed. “And possibly you’ll be leaving Mr. Campanella’s funds as well. It doesn’t work.”
“What?” She tried it herself. The opening was blocked; the back door had been repaired. “Well, damn. Getty’s got a little game.”
Finch nodded. “Game on, then.” He searched for another way to breach the company’s firewall.
“I have Sam’s password,” Christine said. “But I don’t imagine we want to go that way.”
“No.” She was watching again, watching him hack this time. It tweaked his habitual caution, nothing more. He was getting used to her. Which was, in itself, dangerous.
A pretty girl brings you a cup of tea, he heard Ingram say again in his mind.
He found a way into Sam Campanella’s company computers.
“Do you think he’s in danger, too?” Christine asked suddenly.
“Who?”
“Sam. They went after Dover, and then after me. When they find out they don’t have what they think they have, will they go after him?”
Finch considered. “They’re more likely to go after Dover’s replacement. If they think the files might still be at the company …” He shook his head. “That would have been the first place to look. Before they bothered with Dover or you.” He sat back abruptly. “How did they even find you?”
Christine frowned at him, not following.
“You had a phone call with Campanella, and an off-hours meeting. Did anyone see you at his office?”
She shook her head. “The security guy in the bobby. But I was with Sam, so he didn’t even make us sign in.”
“They’ve been into the surveillance records, then.” He reached for the keyboard again.
“Wait,” Christine said. “Narrower search. They knew about the flash drive around my neck. So they had to see the surveillance from his office.” She slapped her palm against the smart screen and the qwerty keyboard of light stuck there. Her fingers flew over it. “Here.”
It wasn’t hard for Finch to locate the breach. It had happened on Sunday night, just before midnight. The hacker had been inside the system for five hours. Searching. “They didn’t find it,” he said finally. “They found you, but not the data.”
“It was already gone,” Christine answered. “And what was left they didn’t even recognize.”
“Show me.”
She found the sequestered area of the backup for him. He opened the code and studied it. Tiny pieces, shrapnel of data. The girl was right; she had well and truly destroyed it all. “This might have been Dover,” he said.
“He hadn’t been fired yet.”
“If he tried to access his pornography collection remotely and found he couldn’t, he might have gone searching.”
Christine nodded. “But he would have had access. He wouldn’t have needed to hack in.”
“Unless he wanted to remain anonymous.” Finch shook his head. “But he wouldn’t have known he needed to, until he knew his data was gone.”
“Whoever the web belonged to would have known the minute it went off-line,” she pointed out. “Maybe they called him.”
“We can have a look at his phone records,” Finch agreed.
She watched for a moment while he hacked in. It was obviously something she already knew how to do, which didn’t surprise him. After a moment she moved to the other screen and brought up a live picture. He glanced over; it was the Chaos. The café was half full, fairly quiet.
“Why do you live here?” he asked quietly.
Christine shook her head. “I already went through this with Reese. We are not discussing my living arrangements right now.”
“I’m sorry.” Finch found the right record and scrolled back through the days. “I thought you were still submitting to my obviously superior judgment.”
“You thought wrong,” she answered lightly.
All of the contacts he could find in Dover’s call history were within Venture East. There was nothing at all on the Sunday in question. “Why a cybercafé?” he asked.
“The bar was failing. Zubec needed a job.”
“So you started a business to give a man something to do?” Finch shook his head. He had been one of her father’s hostages, Reese said. Perhaps she still felt like she owed it to him.
“Well, partly.” She shut down the picture. “I don’t really do well with people. But I don’t do well without them, either. If I didn’t have Chaos, I would sit in this room and eat chocolate and stare at screens and talk to Zelda and never see real people at all. I’ve tried it. It’s not good for me.” She shook her head. “So I brought the geeks to me. Zubec runs the place, I almost never really have to be there. I go down, I socialize, and then when I get tired out I come up here and lock the door.”
“You found a balance,” he said.
“It works for me. No matter what you and John think.”
“You could keep the café and live somewhere else.”
“Not discussing that now,” Christine repeated firmly.
Finch shrugged. “I am not finding anything on Dover’s phone.”
“Maybe he has more than one.”
“It’s possible.” He started a search.
“I will concede that your judgment on this topic may in fact be superior,” she said. “But I am in no place, emotionally or intellectually, to hear anything you say on that subject right now.”
“Understandable,” he agreed. “We’ll take it up another day.”
“Wonderful. I’ll look forward to it.”
“I’m not finding another phone.”
Christine growled. “Where the hell is my hard drive?”
Finch stood up and walked to the big screen. He brought up the remnants of the backup files she’d so completely destroyed. “Can you de-encrypt this?”
“Sure. But it’s still shredded.”
“I know. I’d just like to see it.”
She brought up her keyboard of light and set to work.
***
Reese studied the front of the adult book store. There were the usual neon advertisements “ peep booths, private movie viewing, new and used DVD’s, accessories. And interestingly, a large hand-written sign in one window that encouraged patrons to ask about ‘custom videos’. The building’s windows were painted white from the inside, so the patrons couldn’t be seen from the street.
He glanced at his phone and moved closer to the front door. The signal from Fitzgerald’s stolen laptop grew fainter. Reese paused, then turned to his right. The laptop apparently wasn’t inside the store. Instead, it seemed to be in a garish silver Cadillac parked around the corner of the building. Reese looked through the windows, but didn’t see the computer inside. He tried the door. The car wasn’t locked. He wasn’t surprised; when they rose to a certain level of criminal prominence, punks started to think they were untouchable. The kind of man who put massively expensive rims on his Caddy didn’t think anyone would mess with it outside his own business.
Obviously, he’d never met a man like John Reese.
Reese reached inside and pushed the trunk button. There was a canvas duffle bag in the trunk. The laptop was there, together with a handful of thumb drives and SD cards. There was no sign of the stand-alone hard drive.
Reese closed the trunk quietly and retreated to the shadows. He called Finch.
“Mr. Reese?” Finch asked. “You’re on speaker.”
“Good to know. I’m sending you a license plate number. It looked like Mary and Honey broke up. The laptop’s here, but the hard drive isn’t.”
“Hmmmm,” Christine said. “I got nothin’ on that one.”
“That doesn’t make any sense at all,” Finch agreed. There was a brief pause. “The car is registered to a William Garuccio. I’m sending you his picture. He looks to be a small business owner, a place called Adult Movies and Peeps Incorporated. Very original.”
“I’m there now,” Reese said. “Does he have a record?”
“I can ask one of our friends.”
“Call Fusco. He needs to feel useful.”
Christine said, “Lionel Fusco?”
“Do you know the detective?” Finch asked.
“Yeah. He’s, uh … you know he’s dirty, right?”
John nodded to himself. The tone in her voice told him what he needed to know: Their girl was surprised that Lionel’s name had come up, but she wasn’t upset by it. If they needed him later, she’d be okay with Fusco. “We know,” he assured her. “But he’s trying to make better choices these days.”
“Huh,” she answered. “Okay.” And then, “I really ought to apologize to him some time.”
“I’ll get you his number,” Finch said tersely. From his tone, Reese could tell that he wasn’t pleased to be out of this particular loop. But in Reese’s opinion, it was good for the genius to be shown he didn’t know quite everything once in a while.
“No sign of the hard drive tracker?”
“Not a damn word,” Christine said.
“Let me know.” He clicked off his phone and settled back to watch the Cadillac.
***
Frey took a quick glance at his cell phone. There were three missed calls, all from an unknown number, at precise fifteen minute intervals. He knew who was trying to call him.
Naturally, she hadn’t left a message.
“Hey,” Someone jostled his elbow.
Frey looked up. Lopez from Accounting and Davis from Risk were both looking at him eagerly. “What?”
“What happened to Dover?” Davis asked.
Frey looked around quickly. Campanella wasn’t around. He was probably taking a leak. “I don’t really know.”
“Oh, come on,” Lopez pressed. “You have to know.”
“I really can’t … “
“It’s porn, isn’t it?” Davis said.
“You know about that?” Frey blurted.
“Everybody knows about it,” Lopez answered. “Well, everybody but the boss.”
“And you.”
Frey shook his head. “I don’t know the details. And if I did I couldn’t tell you. But yeah.”
‘And, uh, where is it now?” Lopez asked.
“What?”
“The porn,” Davis said. “Damn, that must be some serious sh….” He stopped, because Campanella was walking toward them.
“I don’t know,” Frey said honestly, innocently. “I’ve been checking into that, but I don’t have any good results yet.”
The other nodded, just as innocently.
And then the boss was back.
***
Finch gazed at the tiny fragments of code. “How to you know Detective Fusco?”
“He killed my father,” Christine answered casually.
Finch looked at her.
“Not kidding,” she assured him. “He didn’t have any choice.”
“I’m sorry.”
She shrugged. “It was a long time ago.”
Something tickled at the corner of Finch’s brain. Something about the pattern of the code fragments. He shook his head impatiently and brought up the complete list of her system files again. “And what do you need to apologize to him for?”
“Alphabetically or chronologically? I abused the hell out of him while I was using. I can’t even count how many times I made him get me out of lock-up.”
“That’s why you don’t have a juvenile record,” he realized.
“Yep.”
He scanned through the list of files. He wasn’t even sure what he was looking for. And then something entirely different occurred to him. His mouth went dry; his chest felt tight. He turned to look at her again. “If I had turned you over to the police that night …”
“I’d have been on the street before you even got home,” Christine confirmed. “I’d have burned IFT to the ground and been dead of an overdose before you could catch up to me.” She shrugged, just a little. “There’s nothing wrong with your instincts.”
Finch grabbed his mug and took a drink of tea. It was awful and cold, but least it was wet. “Christine …”
She moved closer, put her hand on his shoulder and gave it a squeeze. “I’m right here,” she reminded him.
“Only by the grace of God, apparently.” And then, as frequently happened when he was distracted by something else, he realized what he was looking for on the computer. “What did you use to shred the data?” he asked.
“Old program called Vorpal Blade.”
Finch smiled to himself. The pieces clicked into place. “Where’d you get it?”
“I scrumped it a long time ago.”
“From where?”
“I don’t remember. I was probably high. I’ve had it forever.”
“Have you modified it much?”
“I’ve done some updates. But basically it was tight and right from the start.”
“Yes.”
“Why are you smiling?”
“Because I like it when you like my programs.”
“Vorpal Blade is yours?” She stopped. “Of course it is. I stole it from IFT.”
“Yes, you did. I don’t know how you kept it, though, since I took the laptop back.”
“Backups,” she announced cheerfully. “It’s a beautiful program, Random. But how does that help us?”
“I have a great dislike for computing actions that are completely irrevocable.”
Christine stared at him. “Meaning there’s a … are you freaking kidding me?”
“A reversing program,” Finch confirmed warmly.
“Are you serious? You’re serious. You can un-shred … seriously?”
Finch chuckled. “Seriously. Well, assuming your modifications are compatible.” He located and pulled up the actual program. ”We’ll need to partition off your hard drive and bring the fragments back in.”
After a moment, he became aware of her silence. “Christine?”
He looked over his shoulder. She had settled back on the stool, and was holding on to the seat with both hands, as if she might fall off. She was simply, unabashedly, staring at him. “Christine?” he said again. “Are you alright?”
“I don’t … know,” she said. “It’s so strange.”
“What?”
“For a while there … I actually thought … I was keeping up. That I was … playing in the same league with you.”
He laughed, but gently. “You’re keeping up just fine. For a novice. Now make me a partition.”
***
Garuccio came out to his Cadillac with a young woman. She was a peroxide blonde with improbable cleavage, flagrantly displayed in a tight, white, half-buttoned sweater. She wore a similarly tight white skirt, very short, and high heeled sandals. She seemed willing enough to get in the front seat with him.
Four men followed them out of the shop. Two wore muscle shirts and tight jeans. The other two were more conventionally dressed and carried equipment cases, two apiece. They got into a van parked up the block and followed the Cadillac.
Reese followed them both.
Ten blocks away both vehicles stopped in the end of an alley. The van parked sideways, blocking the Caddy in, and also blocking most of the view from the street. John parked up the block and walked back. Before he got there, his phone buzzed. “Lionel?” he said quietly.
“Hey,” Fusco said. “That green car from the burglary? We found it.”
“And the guy who was driving it?”
“Yeah, found him, too.” Fusco sighed. “He’s dead. But it’s got nothing to do with our girl.”
Reese peered down the alley. The men with the cases were putting together long poles with small spot-lights on one end. The other two and the girl were walking around, chatting. Garuccio was talking on his cell. He had odd-looking eyes, round and set very close to his nose. “How do you know that, Lionel?”
“Well, partly because I know you been sitting on her all afternoon. But mostly because twenty witnesses heard his girlfriend scream, and I quote, ‘I told you I’d kill you, you two-timing son of a whore’ right before she shot him in the chest. Six times.”
“That’s convincing,” Reese allowed. “Are you still at the scene?”
“Yeah.”
“Take a look around for a stand-alone hard drive.”
“A what now?”
“It looks like a small video game console.”
“Like a Wii?”
“Yes. But half that size, dark gray, with a couple ports and a light.” Reese moved into a dim space between the van and the wall of the building. The men stood up the lights and turned them on, illuminating the shadowy alley. He didn’t see any cords, so they had to be battery powered. They went back for the other cases and brought out two video cameras. One set up a tripod. “I don’t think he has it, but it might be in the car. Let me know if you find it.”
“I’ll take a look. You figure out what’s going on with her yet?”
“Mostly.” Reese hung up before the detective could ask any more questions.
Garuccio had finished his call, as well. Reese took the opportunity to bluejack his phone. “Alright, alright,” the man said. “Let’s get this done before it gets dark. Sweetheart, come on over here.” He draped his arm over the blonde’s shoulder. “Here’s how this goes. It’s kinda dark and you’re walkin’ down this alley all alone and it’s scary, right?”
“Why?” she asked.
“What? Why what?”
“Why would I walk down the alley alone if I’m scared?”
“It’s a shortcut,” Garuccio told her. “Why do I give a shit why you’re doing it? You’re doing it because I tell you you’re doing it.”
“Okay. But it doesn’t make any sense.”
“Whatever. You start down there, you walk down the alley. Nice and slow, okay? And then …”
“If I’m scared, why would I walk slow?”
The man tightened his arm around her shoulder. “Kitten, just do what I tell you, okay?”
“Okay.”
“When you get to right here,” he pointed toward a spot in the center of the lights, “these two guys come at you. Corner you. Got it? And at first you struggle a little, try to get away, whatever. But then they get their hands on you … you know what I mean, guys, hands on her? All over her? Yeah? And then, sweetheart, you start to think hey, maybe this could be fun, right?”
She nodded. “And then we do what we do.”
“Yeah. Well, get that far and we’ll see what’s next. Everybody got it?”
“Wait,” the taller of the guys in the muscle shirt said, “so what are we supposed to say to her?”
“What, you want dialog or somethin’?” Garuccio asked. “Just say whatever.”
“Yeah, but …”
“I thought you said you’d done this before.”
“I have, but …”
“You see a girl built like this in the alley and you decide you’re gonna do her on the spot. So what would you say to her?”
Even from a distance, John could see the would-be actor’s face go red. “I don’t know, I never …”
Garuccio geared up to yell at him, but the shorter guy stepped in. “You just keep your mouth shut. Be the silent scary one. I’ll do the talking.”
“Yeah, good, whatever.” Garuccio threw his hands up. “Can we just do this?”
It was sad, Reese thought, but also a little funny. He wondered if it was a crime to film a commercial video in the city without a permit. Probably. And the next part of the plot would obviously involve all sorts of misdemeanors, at a minimum.
But everyone was adult and consenting. He wasn’t planning to step in.
It took them eight tries to fulfill Garuccio’s artistic vision. By that time the porn king was ready to tear his hair out.
Fusco called back to say that he hadn’t found the hard drive. Reese wasn’t surprised. He settled on the back bumper of the van and called Finch.
“Where are you, Mr. Reese?”
“I’m watching the magic happen, Finch.”
“What?”
“You don’t want to know. How’s our girl?”
“Feeling profoundly outclassed,” Christine called to him. She sounded more cheerful that she had all day.
“We think we’ve found a way to reconstitute the data from the backup,” Finch said.
“I thought it was shredded.”
“It is. But Miss Fitzgerald’s habit of scrumping is proving advantageous.”
“Good,” Reese said. “I always preferred steak anyhow.”
***
Kevin Frey flopped into his massive leather chair. He was exhausted, and he’s had one too many drinks. At least. Two more than Campanella’s unwritten two-drinks policy. But finally he was free of Sam, of seminar leaders, of his damn fake co-workers. Finally, it was just him and his box of secrets.
He fiddled with the chair’s adjustments again. No matter what he did, it still felt like Dover’s chair.
He turned on his laptop, checked his phone while he waited for it to boot up. There were three more missed calls. No messages. Miller’s silence was unnerving. She was scary enough when she was barking at him. Once she went silent …
Frey listened intently. The building around him was quiet. Nothing but the hum of sleeping computers. He doubted there was anyone else in the office. The cleaning crew came in at midnight.
He should have gone home. Should have taken the stupid box home, instead of coming back here. At least at home he could hear traffic, neighbors. The silence here put him on edge.
You’re an idiot, he told himself firmly. And you’re a little drunk. That’s all. Everything’s fine. Just get this done, and then you can go home and actually sleep. Tomorrow everything will be back the way it should be.
He pushed Dover’s chair back from the enormous desk and went in search of coffee.
***
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