2012
Reese paused in the doorway of the restaurant. It was a nice little bistro with a full bar. This close to Wall Street proper, it probably did a fantastic lunch business. The breakfast crowd had it half-filled. Well-groomed men and woman in conservative suits of black and charcoal and the occasional daring navy, talking too loudly, laughing too much, flashing too many expensive watches and phones. The best and the brightest, he thought, and felt vaguely underdressed. Before he got to a seat, some sort of silent signal ran through the crowd and they began to leave. Nearly time for the opening bell, John realized. In the space of three minutes, fully two-thirds of the crowd was gone.
A few tables remained occupied. There was a couple with a small child and two sleepy-looking teens. An older couple lingering over coffee. A younger couple just ordering. A group of four men in suits, arguing over data sheets. In the far back corner was a big table surrounded by six older men, casually dressed, sporting veterans’ patches on vests and baseball caps. There were six women with them, around the same age, probably their wives. Reese had seen a lot of groups like them around the city,
making the pilgrimage to Ground Zero.
At a table in the center of the room, two men finished their breakfast. One was a tall white-haired man who’d taken his jacket off and was finishing up with a large platter. The other was a much smaller, much darker man who picked at a bagel.
Reese picked up an abandoned newspaper, sat down at the bar, and gestured for coffee. There was a highly polished display case behind the bar that gave him an excellent view of the table. He took his phone out, snapped a picture over his shoulder, and sent it to Finch. “Is that Rickel?”
“Yes,” Finch answered at once. “The gentleman with him is Anthony Piros, his partner. This could be a more important meeting than we anticipated.”
“Where’s the third partner?” Reese wondered.
“He’s been dead for years.” More clicking. “Miss Fitzgerald still has her phone off, but I’m sending you Rickel’s number.”
“Good.” The waitress brought him coffee; he ordered a short stack of pancakes as well. When she left, he cloned Rickel’s phone.
“I thought you never ate in the field,” Finch reminded him.
“Need something to do with my hands,” Reese explained. He flipped through the paper. “And also, I’m hungry. You called me before breakfast.”
The men at the table behind him did not talk, until Rickel suddenly pushed his plate away. “There she is,” he said.
Reese glanced over his shoulder. Christine Fitzgerald was in the doorway. She wore a simple white blouse and ankle-length yellow skirt. It was perfectly presentable outfit, modest, fine for office work. But in contrast to the starkly tailored Wall Street drones that had just left, she stood out like a dandelion on a putting green.
Christine’s hair was pulled back in a wide braid. She wore flat white sandals. Carried a shoulder bag with a sunflower print. It all made her look like she was younger and trying to look older. She seemed naïve,
innocent.
No one, Reese reminded himself firmly, was ever what they appeared to be.
She walked confidently across the restaurant. Rickel and Piros both stood up. She shook Rickel’s hand first; he introduced her to Piros. Then she moved around the table and sat down facing Reese.
Maybe that was nothing. And maybe she didn’t like her back to the door. Sex, drugs or espionage. They all required caution.
“I see you took our money,” Rickel said genially.
“I told you I would,” Christine answered.
Piros growled. “You don’t look like a hacker.” He was not nearly as happy to see her as his partner was.
“What does a hacker look like?” she asked sweetly.
“Aaah,” Reese said quietly. “Tigers and stripes, Finch.”
“Of course,” Finch answered. “I’m on it.”
“Breakfast?” Rickel asked.
“Just coffee, thanks.” He gestured. She reached into her bag, brought out three comb-bound documents and a flash drive. She put them all on the corner of the table.
Reese’s pancakes arrived and he began to eat slowly, still holding the newspaper in his other hand.
“That’s what we get,” Piros asked dourly, “for a hundred thousand dollars?”
“It’s worth every dime,” Rickel countered. “Can you imagine the fall-out if those Anonymous bastards got in? Our exposure could be tens of millions.”
“They wired her twenty-five thousand,” Finch muttered. “Where’s the other seventy-five?”
Reese didn’t bother to answer; the genius was clearly talking to himself.
Piros wasn’t impressed. “So, this report of yours tells us who to fire?”
“It tells you how I hacked your system,” Fitzgerald answered. “Whether you fire anyone is up to you. But honestly, I’d advise against it. Your IT director has a solid security program, and his team is responsive and effective against active threats.”
“But you still hacked us.”
“Yes.”
“So he’s out, and we need to hire someone who can
guarantee we can never be hacked.”
“There’s no such person.”
“What do you mean?” Rickel demanded.
“Anyone who guarantees that you will never be hacked is lying. There’s no such thing as a system that can’t be hacked,” the woman told them. “There are more secure systems and less secure systems, but there is no such thing as a completely secure system.”
It’s all a ruse, Reese realized. The bright skirt, the girlish hair, the shoes. The smile. The unabashed perkiness of the whole package. They were rich and powerful men, and she was so pretty and childlike that she was completely unthreatening to them. With no power dynamic in play, they were willing to listen to her. They wouldn’t have given their own IT director “ a middle-aged man in a conservative suit, no doubt “ five minutes of full attention, but they would sit and listen to this young woman for as long as she talked.
And apparently, pay her generously for the inconvenience.
It did not escape his notice that parts of Finch’s persona would be just as susceptible to this approach. He was already inclined to believe anything she said. It would bear extra caution on Reese’s part.
“Not one secure system, in the whole world?” Piros demanded.
“No.”
“Not even the government?”
“Especially not the government. Hacking them used to be a party game, until it got too boring.” She gestured vaguely. “There may be a system that I personally can’t hack, but there is no system that someone can’t hack.”
“All the advances we’ve made with computers, there ought to be some way to secure them.”
“It’s not the computers that are the problem. Computers can be perfect,” Christine told them. “The problem is that operators are human, and humans make exploitable mistakes.”
“Then why do we even bother having an IT department?” Piros demanded. “It sounds like we might as well just give up.”
The young woman sipped her coffee. “Think of network security like putting a high-grade lock on the front door of your house. As long as you limit the number of keys, the lock stays secure. But you can’t do business that way. For your company to work, your people have to be able to get inside the house. You have a hundred and forty employees, and every one of them has access. So you gave away three hundred and forty keys to that front door. Some of those people will lose their keys, and some will misuse them. This little wager I made with Mr. Rickel? It’s a sucker’s bet. The more keys you give away, the greater the chances that you can be hacked.
“But,” she continued, “that doesn’t mean you should just leave the door open. A good lock “ a good IT department “ moves you toward the ‘more secure’ end of the spectrum. And yours is very good. That means that only fairly sophisticated hacker can get through your defenses. It keeps you safe from the casual drive-bye.
“The DFHs,” Rickel contributed.
“What’s that?” Piros asked.
“Dirty f’ing hippies.” He looked to the girl “Excuse my French. So what do we do?”
She tapped the report. “You read this, and you give it to your IT department. You increase their budget. If you hire even one more person, you think long and hard about adding a CIO; you’re more than big enough to need one. You develop a revised employee education program, and you back it up with HR enforcement. There’s a list of resources in the back, but it’s not exhaustive.”
“A hundred thousand dollars,” Piros said, “for a list I could have Googled for myself.”
“You can also show it to your Board. They like independent audits. So do liability insurers, especially if you follow up on the recommendations.”
“All right,” Rickel sighed. “Tell us how you did this.”
“Got her,” Finch announced with satisfaction. “A week ago today, Mr. Rickel moved seventy-five thousand dollars into an off-shore account in the Cayman Islands. Yesterday morning those funds were transferred into Miss Fitzgerald’s own Cayman account.”
“It never came on shore, so she doesn’t pay any taxes.”
“I think tax evasion is a side issue at this point, Mr. Reese. I’m in CRP’s system now.”
“That didn’t take long.”
“She left a back door.”
At the table, the conversation had continued. The young woman was holding a private seminar on network security, and the two senior partners were listening to ever word. “Four things every sysadmin knows,” Fitzgerald said. “PBSL. Porn, backup, surfing and lies. Everybody has porn, nobody has adequate backup, everybody surfs the web at work, and everybody lies about the first three.”
“And the surfing, that’s our problem?” Rickel asked.
“That’s always the highest vulnerability, yes.”
“So we should have some kind of block. No personal internet.”
“It won’t work. They’ll find a way around it.”
“Then a zero-tolerance policy,” Piros suggested. “Anybody caught surfing will be terminated.”
“Oh, no, no, no,” Finch murmured.
Christine said, “You can do that, but it would be like ringing the dinner bell.” She touched the pile of reports again. “It’s true that I used personal e-mails “ among other things “ to access your systems. But as soon as your employees realized that there was a problem, they notified IT. And in each case they had the virus cleared within forty-five minutes. If you have a zero-tolerance policy, the original employees would still have been surfing, but they wouldn’t have called for help. I can do a lot of damage in an hour. But if I have a whole day, I can steal everything and burn your network to the ground.”
“Exactly,” Finch agreed. “Mr. Reese, I’ve followed Miss Fitzgerald through their systems. As we knew, she is quite a gifted hacker. She found multiple weaknesses in their system.”
“Could she be our hacker?” It would be too easy, Reese thought, for the Machine to simply deliver the woman who had breached Finch’s security to them.
“Root? I considered it, but it’s unlikely. She was in Italy when Michael Delancy was killed.”
“You could run an operation that complex from overseas,” Reese mused. “But you’re probably right.”
They listened to the young woman’s talk for a while more. Reese could hear Finch tapping in the background. “Mr. Reese, Christine Fitzgerald has multiple off-shore accounts with a combined balance of just over five million dollars. All of the deposits are in increments of seventy-five thousand dollars.”
“So we know what Cassandra Consulting consults about.”
“Yes. But how in the world does a woman with no visible credentials negotiate this sort of arrangement?” Finch sighed. “In the income that she does declare, there are two distinct income streams. One is composed of twenty-five thousand dollar deposits, and there are twelve of those in the past eleven months. The other deposits are much smaller and more sporadic, but more numerous. They’re coming from hardware and software companies worldwide. I wonder… ”
At the table, RIckel said, “All right, young lady. Let’s cut to the chase. What’s it going to take to get you on board?”
Reese watched the young woman in the reflection. She smiled, unsurprised by the question. “Thank you, Mr. Rickel, but I’m not looking for a job.”
“Oh, of course you are. And you just aced the interview.”
He pulled a little pad out of his pocket, wrote on it swiftly, tore off the top page and put it face-down on the table. “Try that number on for size.”
She didn’t even reach for it. “I’m sorry, but I’m not interested.”
“Take a look before you decide. It’s a very generous offer.”
“Mr. Rickel, you do not have enough money to persuade me to work nine to five.”
He took the paper back, scratched out the number and wrote a new one. Slid it across the table, face-down. “How about now?”
She smiled sweetly and shook her head. “I am not looking for a job, Mr. Rickel. I am not built for the corporate world. I hate cubicles, I hate wearing shoes, and honestly, I don’t like most people on a long-term basis. And they don’t really like me.”
The man chortled. “You can work any hours you want. Come in at midnight, leave at dawn. I’ll get you a corner office. Shoes don’t matter; you can work naked for all I care, as long as you keep your door shut. And you don’t have to like anybody. You get steady money, job security, paid vacations, health insurance “ company car if you want. Hell, you can have my car.”
“I should have held out for a deal like that,” Reese grumbled.
“I’m sorry, John. It never occurred to me that you’d want to work naked,” Finch answered. “But we can certainly re-negotiate.”
“You can secure our company,” Piros said. ”We’ll name you CIO if you want.” This announcement seemed to startle his partner, but he didn’t back down. He snagged the little paper, wrote his own number on it, and held it out to the woman. “Here. Take this.”
Fitzgerald shook her head again. “It would end in tears. I wouldn’t last three days before I’d be storming into your board room and knocking heads together.” She tapped the reports again. “Two of your board members use ‘Password1’ as their log-ins, and another one uses ‘1-2-3-4-5’. I can’t work with people like that. I don’t have the patience.”
Piros put the paper down in disgust.
“Besides,” the woman went on, “I have enough money.”
Rickel snorted. “Enough money? What the hell is that?”
“Enough that I can do whatever I want.”
“But you could have a lot more.”
“I don’t need more.”
The men shared a look. For the first time John sensed that they were absolutely flummoxed. “You’re a funny little thing, aren’t you?” Rickel finally said.
“Yes, sir, I am.”
He sighed. “And there’s no number I can name that will change your mind?”
“No. Sorry.”
He shook his head, gestured for the check.
“But there is one more number I’d like,” Christine reminded him gently.
Rickel grunted, reached for his jacket. He brought a business card out of his pocket and gave it to her. “Tim Taddeo,” he said. “Coastal Finance. I called him yesterday. He’s out of the country, but he’ll be back a week from Monday. He’s expecting your call.”
“Thank you,” Christine said. She tucked the card into her bag. All of them stood up.
“That’s how she does it,” Finch said. “Personalref erence, peer to peer. One CEO to the next. Very clever.”
“If Ted makes you a job offer …” Piros said.
“I won’t go to work for him, either,” Christine answered.
“You’ll give us a chance to counter-offer,” Rickel pressed.
“I promise.”
“Give you a ride somewhere?”
The woman glanced around the restaurant. “Thanks, but I have a few things to do here.” They shook hands; Rickel paid the check, and the partners took their reports and left.
Christine moved to the end of the counter, three stools over from Reese, and sat down again. “Coffee to go?” the waitress asked.
“No, thanks.” She leaned forward and murmured something to her. Reese couldn’t catch all of the words, but the waitress looked past him toward the back of the restaurant and grinned. There was a little more discussion; Christine brought out a credit card”platinum Amex “ and handed it to her. The waitress kept smiling, a full partner in their little conspiracy, and took it away.
Reese turned his head. The women had been looking at the big table where the old veterans and their wives were finishing their breakfasts. He glanced back at Christine. She was studying him. She gave him a small embarrassed smile and looked away.
While she waited, the woman brought out a small tablet and powered it up. She keyed a few buttons; Reese could see some kind of video on the screen. He turned his face away from her. “Finch?” he murmured. “She’s on a tablet, probably on the restaurant’s WiFi.”
“Hang on.”
Reese finished his pancakes, pushed his plate away. He pulled out two bills and tucked them under the edge of the plate. Sipped his coffee, glanced at his watch.
“I’m on the WiFi,” Finch announced, “but she’s got the tablet password protected.”
“You sound annoyed.” Reese shifted so that he could see the woman in the reflection again.
“I am beginning to be, yes.”
The woman’s posture shifted abruptly. She put her free arm across her chest protectively; her shoulders hunched, her expression darkened. Whatever she was watching on her tablet frightened her.
“I’m in,” Finch said. “Backwards, but I’m in.”
“I don’t even want to know what that means.”
“I’m not logged into the tablet. I’m in through the WiFi …”
“Don’t care, Finch. What’s she looking at?” She had begun to rock back and forth subtly. For a young woman who had just charmed two Wall Street titans so confidently, she seemed very uncertain now.
The waitress returned with a check and the woman’s credit card. She held them out, but Christine didn’t notice until she said, “Miss?” Then the girl jumped. “Sorry,” the waitress murmured. “Didn’t mean to startle you.”
“No problem.” Christine took the check, added a tip, signed it quickly, gave it back. She glanced at the back booth once more, smiled tightly to herself. Then she tucked her credit card away and left the restaurant, still staring at her tablet.
Reese moved after her, but stayed inside the door. As he’d expected, she sat down on the bench just outside; she didn’t want to go far enough to disconnect from the WiFi.
“It looks like a surveillance camera view of a room,”
“A room where?”
“I don’t know. It’s just a living room. It’s … Mr. Reese, it’s her apartment. And there’s someone there.”
“You said she lived alone.”
“He doesn’t live there, I’m sure of that.”
“Show me.”
His phone chirped. Reese keyed it and watched on the small display what both Finch and their target were watching. The man “ medium build, black sweatshirt with the hood up, dark pants, sunglasses “ was searching the apartment. He moved quietly, carefully, opening drawers, taking small items, putting them into the duffle he carried over this shoulder. There was a little desk with a laptop on it; he unplugged the computer and tucked it into the bag. The he reached under the desk and brought out a portable hard drive. He seemed very pleased about this; he grinned as he put it in the bag. Then he kept searching.
One of the windows was open. From the lay-out, Reese guessed it was the one over the fire escape.
The intruder moved into one of the back rooms, out of camera range. Reese glanced up at Fitzgerald. She touched her tablet and the picture shifted; now they were looking past a small breakfast bar, across the living room and down a little hall. The man came out of one room, crossed to the other. Bedrooms, Reese guessed.
“She’s watching this man rob her apartment,” Finch said.
“She’s letting this man rob her apartment,” Reese answered softly. He looked up again. The young woman was still huddled, making herself as small as possible, a little ball of anxiety. Her fingertips drummed incessantly on the edge of the tablet. But she didn’t act, didn’t make any move. She watched intently.
The view switched again. The man was back in the center of the living room. He looked around once more, then climbed out the open window. He pulled it most of the way shut behind him.
Christine Fitzgerald tapped her table.
“Mr. Reese,” Finch said, “a silent alarm’s just been sent from the apartment.”
“Police or private?” A call to the police would take a while to elicit a response.
“Private.”
The woman turned her phone on. Within ten seconds it rang and she answered it.
“And that would be them calling her,” Finch said.
Reese keyed his phone to clone hers.
A blast of sound exploded from his earpiece.
Reese stepped back away from the doorway and snagged the piece out of his ear at the same time. He put his thumb on the power button of his phone and held it down. The shrill alarm stopped. Reese shook his head to clear it, rubbed his ear. It hurt, a lot. He peeked around the doorway. Christine Fitzgerald was on her feet, moving; she hailed a cab and got in very quickly.
Reese’s impulse was to grab a cab or steal a car and follow her, but it was impractical here at this time of day; traffic was too tight and too slow. He started out on foot. He could move as fast as the cab, at least for a while. But he had to keep a little distance and stick to the crowd. She’d had a good look at him.
As he walked, he cautiously, he turned on his phone. It remained blessedly silent. The screen came up with a new message: CLONE FAIL. It chirped and he answered the handset against his left ear, unwilling to replace the earwig. It felt like a smoke detector had gone off against his right eardrum. “Finch?”
“She has her phone alarmed.”
“No kidding.”
“Are you all right?”
“A little deaf.” Reese rubbed his ear again, looked at his hand. He was surprised there was no blood on it. “She’s moving. And she’s spooked.”
“Of course she is. Can you stay with her?”
“Finch.”
“Of course. Sorry.”
“What about the apartment?”
“The security firm’s dispatched a car; they should be there in less than five minutes.”
Reese nodded. “That’s where she’ll be going, then.” The cab was headed the right direction. In ten more blocks the traffic would thin out, but they knew where she was headed. “Finch, who has an alarm like that?”
“I do,” Finch answered simply, “and you do. Ours are silent; they prevent cloning and alert us to the surveillance attempt. Some government agencies may have access. Some very high-end tech companies. The technology is cutting edge. It’s not cheap, and it’s not easy to obtain.”
“Can you track it down?”
“Mr. Reese.”
“Of course. Sorry.” Reese smiled grimly. The girl’s cab stopped at a light; he dropped into a doorway and waited until they were rolling again. “Finch, if she has active surveillance inside her apartment, she’s likely to have it on her back door as well.”
“I don’t know that there’s anything I can do about it. I haven’t been able to access her network.”
“Try.”
“Trying,” Finch said. “I have learned something about that second income stream. Cassandra Consulting receives an average of six packages per week. From the same tech companies that are paying her the smaller amounts. I believe she’s working as a beta tester.”
“What does that mean to us, Finch?”
“It probably means that she has access to the very newest technology.”
“Like the phone alarm.”
“Yes. I should have realized that her Austin trips are significant; she probably went to the South by Southwest conference. You’ll need to be very careful until we find out what else she has up her sleeve.”
“Wonderful.” John brushed his ear again. It was still ringing. “This one is way too clever, Finch. High security, staged robberies, phone alarms. She’s going to be trouble.”
“Yes,” Finch agreed grimly. “I did warn you.”
They were both silent for a moment. Reese knew that Harold was probably thinking the same thing he was. If they showed her even a corner of their operation, she might be bright enough to unravel the rest for herself. And if this Number exposed them, they wouldn’t be able to help any of the ones that came after her. That was always the risk they took. The judge, Carter “ there had been others. But this one felt more hazardous than most.
And yet she secretly paid for old soldiers’ breakfasts in a restaurant.
He followed her cab. He wasn’t going to stop. And Finch certainly wasn’t going to ask him to. It was what they did.
As if he’d been following his thoughts, Finch said, quietly, “She donated ten thousand dollars to a crisis nursery last month.”
“A what?”
“A shelter for abused women with small children. She also has a soft spot for veteran’s organizations and … libraries.”
“Let’s hope she doesn’t donate enough to get yours reopened, Finch.”
“She doesn’t have enough to get mine reopened, Mr. Reese.”
“She could if she put her mind to it.”
Finch chuckled dryly. “Enough money. What a very subversive notion.”
“It’ll never catch on.”
“I’m sure it won’t.” Finch paused. “Mr. Reese, they’ve just placed a call to the nearest police precinct.”
“What is she doing?” Reese mused. “If she wanted this guy
caught, she could have called them earlier. Hang on,
Finch.” Reese pulled out his phone and dialed another number.
After three rings, Fusco said, “What?”
“Good morning, Detective.”
“Kinda busy. What do you want?”
“I’m sending you an address. There was just a break-in here.”
“What did you steal this time?”
“I had nothing to do with it,” Reese answered serenely.
“That’s a switch.”
“They just called it in. When it’s in the system, I need you to send me the report number.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
“I’ll call you.” The phone went dead.
“What do we do now, Mr. Reese?” Finch asked.
“You find out more about our girl,” Reese answered. “I’ll catch up.”
“You think it’s wise to leave her alone?”
“She’s not alone,” Reese pointed out. “The rent-a-cops will stay with her until the police get there, and I’ll be there before they leave. And she’s got her counter guy.” He hung up the phone and rubbed his ear one more time.
***
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