Joe Moodey whistled to himself as he walked back to his car. He’d been in the neighborhood for a week; he’d be glad to be out of it. But the job had been easy enough, once the damn girl finally let her guard down. Smoking kills, he thought grimly, and smoking on your fire escape leads to unlocked windows and then to someone stealing your stuff.
He opened the trunk and set his bag carefully inside. That chunky old laptop and the weird box were his ticket to bigger and better things. Been tough, since his boss got blown up. But once he got this stuff to Mr. Piggy, he’d be back in the cash. Back to plenty of jobs with much better pay-outs.
Except, he reminded himself, he needed to never ever call him Mr. Piggy to his face.
Moodey grinned. He couldn’t help it that the man’s eyes were so weird-looking. They were very round and set right next to his nose. He looked like a pig. Probably someone had told him that before. Probably lots of people. Mr. Piggy. It was funny.
Mr. Piggy didn’t seem like the kind of guy who had much of a sense of humor about stuff like that.
So, keep his mouth shut and never made the snout noise, Moodey though. Take the big jobs and the Pig Man’s money and shut the hell up. Maybe he could ever afford a new place. Not that there was anything wrong with his old place, except that his old girlfriend was still living there and he was sick to death of her. She had a wicked temper, so breaking up with her wasn’t an option. Moving out and never going back, that was definitely the way to go with this one.
He closed the trunk and walked around to the driver’s side door. Then he pulled out his cell phone and scrolled through his contacts to the one with no name. Piggy answered on the first ring. “You got it?”
Moodey grinned. “Not much for small talk, are you? Yeah, I got it. Told you I would.”
“The box, too?”
“Yeah.”
“Good. The place we met before. In an hour.”
“You got it.” Moodey clicked his phone off. Not a talker, Mr. Piggy. Joe didn’t care. Put cash in his hand, and he didn’t care if the guy never said a word.
He started thinking about where his new apartment should be.
***
Cameras became Harold Finch’s priority.
He hacked into the exterior surveillance cameras around Chaos. He was already in the one at the front of the café. He found another that gave a partial view of the alley but not the fire escape, and one on the side street, again with a bad angle. He watched as the private security car arrived; the large barista came out to meet the officers, and all three of them went back inside.
The camera at the back door “ if there was one “ was his next problem. The last thing they needed was for the police to have a nice clear video image of John Reese trying to break into her apartment. But nothing Finch tried gave him access to Fitzgerald’s network. All of his routine approaches “ an e-mail coupon, an e-vite to the party of the year “ were certain to fail. Something from one of the companies she beta-tested for might work. He composed an e-mail and sent it, without much hope. In any case, she wasn’t currently checking her e-mail.
She was very careful with the Cassandra side of her life, and very good at firewalling it. It wasn’t surprising, really. She’d learned system security at Nathan Ingram’s knee, and then cut her hacking teeth on those same systems. If she’d stayed in the internship program, it was likely Nathan would have made her his protégé, his apprentice. And he’d been right about her. She had talent and intelligence. And she had the intangible thing that separated an elite hacker from a true genius: she had instinct.
All of which made her incredibly difficult to access.
Finch shook his head. Christine Fitzgerald was so much more than he’d thought she was. She hadn’t settled for running a cybercafé, as he’d first believed. Chaos was no more than a hobby for her. She wasn’t Nathan’s billionaire rock star, either. But that had been her choice, not a product of her childhood. Enough money, she’s said. Enough to travel, to learn, to support a little shop. Enough to make whatever choices she wanted to make. Enough money. Rickel and Piros had had no idea what she was talking about. In times past, Finch wouldn’t have understood either. But he did now.
She’d done, he realized, exactly what he’d told her she could do all those years ago. She’d done anything she wanted.
The odd warmth again. Finch smiled to himself. And then he put it deliberately aside. They still had to keep her alive.
A cab arrived and Christine got out. While she was paying the driver, a police patrol car pulled up. Finch frowned; it was a very fast response time for a relatively minor B&E. But the greeting the officers gave her made it obvious that they all knew each other. Of course, Finch realized: Cops and coffee. The girl probably couldn’t even get a parking ticket in her neighborhood.
As they went inside, Finch stopped his attempts to hack Fitzgerald’s systems. She would be distracted while she was dealing with the police, but she was sure to be back on her computer the moment they left. She might still discover that he’d been poking around “ and she might even be able to discover that it was him “ but by going inactive on that front, he at least would not draw her immediate attention.
Besides, he had a great many other places to look.
From the bank statement on the Cassandra Consulting account, he had the names of the twelve companies that she’d audited “ hacked “ most recently. How many more were there? How many CIOs and IT directors had she infuriated along her way to having enough money? How many had been fired in the wake of her audit? Or had she uncovered something more than security failures, something more dangerous?
The account was eleven months old. Before that the funds had gone somewhere else. Finch sighed. He could find her older checking account, but it might take time.
Clever girl. What had been charmingly clever was quickly becoming maddeningly clever. He wondered briefly if he was this annoying to Mr. Reese.
Finch shook his head. He needed to see her computer files. He needed to know who she’d hacked and what she’d found. Most importantly, he needed to know what she was up to right now, what was on the laptop and the hard drive she’d laid out as bait.
Given her deep paranoia and known intelligence, it was
not going to be easy. Mr. Reese had already learned that first hand.
He glanced up at the first screen. The private security car left; the police remained. For the moment, at least, Christine Fitzgerald was safe.
She was extraordinarily careful. But she worked with people who were not so cautious. He’d already followed her audit through Jared Rickel’s company and hadn’t found anything suggestive. He picked up the name of the previous company and set to work.
***
Carter made her way through the crowded bullpen carefully; she carried two cups of coffee in one hand, a white bakery bag in the other. “Hey, Sherri,” she said, “you got a minute?”
Detective LaBlanca looked up from her computer screens. “Tell me that’s a bagel.”
“Cinnamon-raisin.”
“I love you, Joss.” She stood up and took the bag. “And you must want something.”
“Yeah, I do,” Carter confessed.
The detective gestured with her head toward an empty interrogation room. They went in and sat down. “Okay, go.”
“Christine Fitzgerald.”
Sherri shook her head. “Never heard of her.”
“You sure?” Carter asked in surprise. “You fixed a parking ticket for her last month.”
“Fitz … oh, Scottie. Yeah, I know Scottie.”
“She a CI?”
“Yeah. No. Well, sorta.” LaBlanca spread cream cheese on half of the bagel. “She helps us out, but we don’t pay her.”
“Why not?”
“Because she never asks us to.” Sherri took a bite, chewed, swallowed. “She owns this coffee shop. Little place with computers, called Chaos. It’s kind of a dump, gets rowdy some nights. But in the afternoon she lets the neighbor kids come in and do their homework on her computers, stuff like that. A couple times a year we do a cyber safety meeting there. You know, don’t give out your address to strangers, don’t meet up with some guy you met in line.” LaBlanca rolled her eyes. “Not that it does any good, but we try. And sometimes she trouble-shoots for us, new viruses, new scams, stuff like that. Kind of an unofficial consultant.”
Carter sipped her coffee. “And that gets her tickets fixed?”
“Well … no. Every once in a while she comes in and does a walk-through for us.” She sipped her own coffee. “Women that are being stalked by their boyfriends or whatever, the first thing we tell them is to get off social media.”
“And they never listen,” Carter answered. “Been there, done that.”
“If I get one that I think it will help, I have Scottie come in and meet with her. They sit down at a computer and Scottie has her open her Facebook or Foursquare or whatever, and pick one of her friends at random. And in ten or fifteen minutes, Scottie can tell the woman all kinds of stuff about her friend. Where she lives, where she works, where she shops. What she drives, where she parks … I tell you, Joss, it’s scary as hell, the things she can find out about someone.”
“Sounds like someone else I know,” Carter grumbled.
“Yeah? They looking for a job?”
“Doubt it. So your girl shows them all this stuff, and then what?”
Sherri shrugged. “In theory, they see how easy it is for their guy to stalk them and they cancel their Facebook accounts. In reality, half of them are back on within the month. But at least we showed them.”
“And half of them stay off.”
“Yeah.”
“That’s not bad. Is that it?”
“Pretty much. Why? What’d she do?”
“She got mugged,” Carter answered honestly.
“And why’s Homicide is looking at that?”
“A friend asked me to check up on her. That’s all.”
“Nobody’s trying to kill her, then.” LaBlanca seemed actually relieved.
Carter raised one eyebrow. “You think somebody might be?”
“No. Well … no. I mean, not anything specific. But she, uh, she pisses off some people.”
“You mean besides stalker boyfriends?”
LaBlanca finished the first half of her bagel, licked a little cream cheese off her fingertip. “Just between us?” She glanced toward the door. “She feeds us predators every once in a while. Anonymously.”
“Child predators?”
“Yeah.” She got up and closed the door. “We run our own stings, you know. An operator pretends to be a young girl online, sees who wants to meet up with her. Scottie does sort of the same thing. But she does all the work for us. We get a computer file, with a time-stamped chat and the IP all traced.”
“She IDs the perps for you?”
“I told you she was good. Like I said, the tips are always anonymous, but she uses a little tag, we know they’re from her. And her information is always solid.”
“How do you get a tip like that to stand up in court?”
“Don’t need to,” LaBlanca answered. “Most of the time they’re repeat offenders, it’s a straight-up parole violation. Other times we do a follow-up and get the same results. Once in a while she sets up a meet and we just go pick him up.”
Carter shook her head. “But she never picks up a reward?”
“Honestly? I think she just hunts them for fun.”
“If she’s anonymous, how would anyone know to come after her?”
“They wouldn’t,” Sherri answered. “Unless she decided to meet someone on her own. And she’s too smart for that.”
“Or unless there’s a leak in the department.”
“Maybe. But even dirty cops won’t stick up for pedophiles.” LaBlanca shook her head. “There is one other thing. If she catches one of these guys and finds out he has a kid at home, or a step-kid or whatever, she’ll broadcast the chat.”
“Broadcast?”
“She sends it to us, same as always, but she also sends it to his wife or girlfriend, his boss, his parents, his Facebook page. Anybody he’s connected with. Last time she did it, by the time we picked the guy up he was unemployed and homeless and his brother had beat the shit out of him.”
“She’s got a little vigilante streak in her,” Carter said evenly.
LaBlanca shrugged. “If you found out one of these guys was living under the same roof with a child, would you wait?”
Carter shook her head, stood up. “Can you get me a list of the guys she’s burned?”
“You want the stalker boyfriends, too?”
“Yeah.” Her friend looked worried. “It’s probably nothing, but things are a little slow. Maybe I’ll take a look.”
“You need help, give me a yell.”
“I will. Thanks, Sherri.”
On her way back to her own desk, she dialed John’s number.
“What have you got for me, Carter?” he asked.
Carter chuckled. “I can tell you exactly why you like this girl,” she answered. “Looks like she’s been tearin’ pages out of your friend’s book.”
“They’d both consider that sacrilege, I think,” Reese answered. “But tell me more.”
***
The roof of the parking garage was mostly full. Moodey parked his car in one of the last empty spots and turned it off. He looked around, but didn’t see his guy. He was a little early. He slouched down, pulled his hat a little lower, closed his eyes. Before he could start to doze, there was a sharp rap on the roof of the car. He opened his eyes, straightened up. “Hey,” he said. “You’re early.”
“Where’s the box?”
“Right here.” Joe got out and went around to the trunk. He glanced at the guy and tried not to laugh. Garuccio thought he was badass, but his piggy eyes cracked Moodey up every time. He opened the trunk, pulled out his bag and dug the laptop out of it. “Old as hell, isn’t it? But you know these hackers, always rebuilding stuff.”
“I guess.” Garuccio took the computer, looked at it,
flipped it over, flipped it over again. Moodey got the feeling he didn’t know what he was looking at either, exactly. “What about the drive?” the man demanded.
“The what? Oh, this thing.” Moodey brought out the portable hard drive. “Got these little things, too.” Moodey dug around in the bag, brought out the flash drives and SD cards he’d found. “Don’t know if they’re anything.”
Pig Man gestured and he put everything back in the duffle. “That’s it?”
“Yeah. That’s everything.”
“Good.” He held out a wad of bills.
Moodey snagged them, trying not to look too eager. “So, you got another job for me?”
Garuccio looked at him, blinked his little pig eyes. “Yeah. Maybe we can do some business.”
“You got my number.”
“Yeah. I got your number, Moodey.” Garuccio took his computer stuff and wandered away.
Moodey watched him back to his car. Then he pulled out his phone and called his girlfriend. Not his old scary girlfriend, but the new girl, the pretty one with the soft voice. “Hey, baby,” he said, counting the bills with one hand. “Get pretty. I’m comin’ to pick you up.”
***
Detective Carter had just gotten back to her desk when Fusco stormed in. “Fusco, you okay?”
“What?” The man was red-faced. He slammed a fat file down on his desk and pulled his chair back so hard it fell over.
“You look mad.”
“Yeah. I guess I am.” He recovered his chair, sat down, started pounding on his keyboard.
“Anything I can help with?”
“No. No.”
“Okay.” Carter sat back, worked on her own report for a moment. She could almost see the steam coming off Fusco. She glanced at the file he’s slammed down. It was yellowed, worn. It was also marked CLOSED. “Old case?”
“Yeah.” He scrawled something on a post-it note and stuck it on the file. Glared at his computer screen, swore, and wrote something else on the same note. He spent a minute reading the screen; it didn’t make him any happier. He shook his head, swore under his breath. Then he stood up, nearly knocking his chair over again. “I gotta go do something. Be back in a while.”
“Don’t worry about it.” Carter shrugged. “Nothing going on here anyhow, for a change.”
“You better knock wood.”
Carter tapped on her desk. “Sure I can’t help?”
Fusco waved the file in frustration. “No. I think I got way more help than I need.”
He stomped out. Carter thought about following him, but it didn’t seem like that kind of problem. She shrugged and went back to checking on perverts.
***
John Reese stood in the alley next to the old post office and looked at Chaos again. The café was not busy; a few people milled around inside. Through his camera, Reese could see the big man with the mustache behind the bar. The NYPD squad car had been parked out front when he got there; it was gone now. According to Finch’s surveillance, Christine Fitzgerald was still upstairs, locked behind her heavy-duty security door. Unless someone showed up with a cutting torch, she was safe.
Sometimes the Machine gave them numbers where the people and problems involved were perfectly straight-forward. Troubled people with serious problems, to be sure, but easy to understand, easy to solve. This obviously wasn’t going to be one of those times. They knew a lot more about Christine Fitzgerald than they had when her number came up, but they weren’t any closer to knowing who was after her or why.
Or who she was after and why.
His phone chirped. “I’m here, Finch.”
“I have the police report on the robbery.”
“How’d you manage that?”
“The officer typed it on his in-car computer and filed it electronically. I was able to download it. I’d thought that might be possible, but I needed to know the precise location of the patrol car and to be standing by when the transmission was sent. You can tell Detective Fusco we don’t require his assistance. ”
“He’ll be heartbroken.”
“Let him down easy,” Finch advised. “We caught a break, Mr. Reese. There’s no mention of security footage in the police report.”
“She didn’t turn it over to them,” Reese said. “Interesting. She was mugged and she let someone break into her apartment. Then she called the police, but she didn’t hand over the surveillance footage. What’s she up to?”
“She did give them a description of the vehicle she believes the thief is driving, with a full license plate number. They’ve issued a BOLO on it.” Finch paused again. “She let them steal a laptop and a hard drive, both of which probably have some kind of lo-jack trackers on them. That’s not mentioned in the police report, either.”
“Which suggests that she’s tracking the computer herself. But then why bother calling the police at all?”
“To make it less obvious that it’s a trap,” Finch suggested.
“She knows she’s in trouble, Finch.”
“Yes. Whatever the Machine is seeing, she’s already aware of it.”
Reese looked up at the iridescent windows again. “How are you doing with our suspects?”
“I have dozens to look at. But no one seems especially promising yet. I’ll call you when I know something.”
“I’ll be here.” Reese shifted, settled his shoulder against the brick wall, and waited.
***
Kevin Frey sat at a wide, polished desk, behind a name plate that did not have his real name on it. He’d been there for a week and a half and he still couldn’t get the big executive chair adjusted quite right. It still felt like some other guy’s chair. But he’d get used to it in time.
If he got the time.
The cheap phone in his expensive suit’s pocket vibrated and he grabbed it quickly. “You got it?”
“Geez, keep it in your pants,” Garuccio muttered. “Yeah, I got it.”
“You’re sure it’s the right one?”
“It was the only one there. Figure it’s gotta be the right one.”
Frey frowned across his shiny desk. Then he shook his head. “Bring it down. I’ll meet you out back.”
“Hey,” Garuccio said, “you’re gonna get all my stuff back, right?”
“I told you I would.”
“’Cause I’m losin’ a ton of money here. Every day I’m off-line, my customers are goin’ somewhere else.”
“I’ll get your stuff back,” Frey promised. “Just bring me the equipment. And don’t touch anything, all right?”
“Yeah. You said that before. Don’t see what the big deal is. I know how to use a computer without breakin’ it.”
Frey took a deep breath and let it out slowly. He hated dealing with amateurs. “Just … take my word for it. Call me when you get here.”
“On my way.”
Frey put his phone away slowly. Then he spread his hands over the top of his big shiny desk. Maybe he’d get to keep it after all.
***
Finch had worked his way through two more of Christine’s clients when the textchat window popped up.
>RANDOM?
He hesitated. He hadn’t expected her to catch him so quickly. He didn’t know what to say. Everything he could think of sounded alarming or insane, or both. Finally, he typed back:
>I’M HERE.
>CAN YOU HELP ME? PLEASE?
Finch cursed, not for the first time, the impersonal letters on the screen that gave him no indication of the emotion behind them.
>I’LL HELP YOU. WHAT’S WRONG?
Instead of words, she sent a phone number. He already had it, of course, but she didn’t know that. Maybe. He snagged his cell phone and dialed. His hand was shaking,
but he tried to keep his voice steady when she answered.
“Christine? What’s wrong?”
“I screwed up,” she said. Her voice was very small, and not precisely frightened. Something else. Something worse. “I screwed up something really important, really badly, and I thought I could fix it but now I’m not sure I can and it’s way more important than I thought it was…”
Broken, Finch thought. It wasn’t fear he heard in her words, but brokenness. His heart lurched. He’d heard that tone from her before. “I’ll help you, Christine. Stay where you are. I’m coming for you.”
She took a ragged breath. “I know I don’t have any right to …”
“Christine,” he said firmly, “whatever it is, we can fix it. I’ll be there as soon as I can. Wait for me.”
There was a very long pause. “Okay.”
The phone went dead.
Finch grabbed his jacket and his bag. He felt sick, cold. That tone “ he’d never wanted to hear that tone again, not from her, not from anyone. And he had, too many times. It was the voice of no more options, no more hope.
But she was safe, he reminded himself. John was close by, and he’d said her apartment was secure from outside …
He paused long enough to grab his phone again, pressed ‘redial’ as he walked. It rang five agonizing times before she answered. “Random?” She still sounded small, lost.
“I’m on my way. But I want you to do something for me.”
“Okay.”
“Go downstairs to the café.”
“Huh?”
“Go downstairs and wait for me there.”
“Oh.” And then, with a little more comprehension, “I’m not suicidal, I promise. Not yet, anyhow.”
“Humor me. Just go.”
There was a very long pause. Finally, resigned, she said,
“Okay.”
“Thank you.”
As soon as she hung up, he called Reese.
***
Click here to visit the official POI website 'CBS:POI'.
Click here to register and post POI fics 'Register'.
Click here to read the latest POI fics 'Recently Added'.
|