Finch got out of the car and looked over the café. It looked different by daylight. Less vintage, somehow. Less romantic. The building was old, but the windows were new, the trim and sign freshly painted. It was also a lot quieter.
He forced himself not to look around for Reese. He would be nearby.
John did not approve, Finch knew, of his being there. But he didn’t understand about Christine. Finch could not have told her ’no’, not with that tone in her voice. In an odd way, he was pleased that she’d called him.
He went inside.
Christine was sitting on a stool at the end of the old bar. She had tablet against her chest, her arms wrapped around it. There was movement around her, customers coming and going, tables being cleared, but the woman was absolutely still. Waiting.
She lit up when she saw him. She didn’t smile, but her face softened, grew hopeful. He hurried across the café towards her. Before he was half-way there, though, something changed. Her expression grew hard, withdrawn. She curled her arms back around herself. She seemed suddenly wary, afraid. And most puzzling, she looked disappointed.
Finch paused. Then he glanced over his shoulder.
John Reese had walked in behind him.
Finch stared at him. He couldn’t imagine why he’d come out of hiding. Christine obviously recognized him from earlier. And she had shut down on both of them.
Reese merely nodded, and they walked together to where the girl was waiting.
“Christine,” Finch said carefully, “this is my associate, Mr. Reese. Mr. Reese, Miss Fitzgerald.”
She looked back and forth between them. Those blue eyes, as discerning as ever. But so guarded now. Heartbroken. She took a deep breath. “I don’t have it,” she announced quietly, coldly. “If I did have it I wouldn’t give it to you. And if I’m lying and I do have it, it’s hidden and even you aren’t good enough to find it.” She shook her head, just once. “And how the hell did you end up as a bottom-feeder like this?”
Finch glanced swiftly at Reese; he had no answer, either. “Christine, listen carefully, because I’m not sure I’ve ever said this before: I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Her eyes flicked to Reese, then back. “I don’t have it,” she said again. Her voice became bitter, angry. “And I’m not some frightened little junkie anymore, so take your gorilla and get out.”
“We’re here to help you,” Reese said calmly.
“By tapping my phone?”
“Your life may be in danger, Christine,” Finch said. “We’re trying to protect you.”
“I don’t have it,” she insisted. “And if I did …” She took a deep breath. “I can’t let it slide. Not even for you. If I can find a way to get it back I will, and I’ll flip it to the police in a heartbeat. So take your friend and your network and go. Go as far as you can. Because once I get it back I’m coming after you.”
Finch shook his head. “I still don’t know what you’re talking about.”
She stared at him for a long moment. The eyes. Under all the emotions, the piercing intelligence. She unfolded her arms, tapped at her tablet. “This,” she said, holding it out to them. “This is yours, right?”
He took the tablet. Reese moved to look over his shoulder. They both glanced at video playing on the little screen. And then both looked quickly away. “What is that?” Finch asked, repelled.
“It’s a man and a miniature donkey,” she answered simply.
A man and a miniature donkey doing something that was probably illegal and certainly immoral. “It’s awful.” His stomach roiled. He handed the tablet back, wiped his fingertips on his jacket.
“I pulled it off your network,” Christine said.
“No,” he answered firmly. “Wherever you got that, it’s not mine. I promise you, I don’t have anything to do with that.”
The blue eyes considered him again.
“Is that what this is about?” Reese asked. “Pornography?” She nodded. “And that’s what’s on the hard drive? What they’re trying to get back?”
“I told you. It’s gone.”
“Where did you get it?” Finch asked.
“From your friend Dover.”
“I don’t know any Dover, and I didn’t have anything to do with that.” He gestured to the tablet.
“Then why was he following me? Why did he try to tap my phone?”
“To keep you under surveillance,” Reese told her. “To keep you safe.”
She looked him up and down again, shook her head.
“You said that you knew Random was engaged in some high calling,” Finch reminded her. “Right now that higher calling is you. You’re in danger. We’re trying to identify the threat and eliminate it.” He glanced at Reese. “We tried to accomplish that without alarming you. Without letting you know about it. That was clearly a mistake; I should have realized that you’d be aware of any such attempt. But your life is in danger ...”
“You’re wrong,” she said swiftly. “It’s not me. It’s not my life. It’s the boy.”
Finch’s mind spun. What had he missed? “What boy?”
“Hey!” The barista, Zubek, loomed up behind Reese. “What are you doing here?”
“Take it easy,” Reese said. He put his hands up in front of him, in a gesture that Finch knew was meant to seem peaceful but actually let him get his hands clear of obstructions in case he wanted to throw a punch.
“This is the guy, Scottie,” Zubec said. ”The guy I told you about.”
“I know,” she answered.
“I can take him.”
“I don’t think you can,” Reese answered warningly.
Finch tried to step in “ verbally, not physically. “Gentlemen …”
Christine snapped, “Davey, no!”
Finch turned his head. The smaller barista had both hands under the bar. It was immediately clear to him, as he knew it was to Reese, that Davey was reaching for a gun. But he had frozen at the woman’s voice. Very slowly, he backed away, brought his hands to rest on his hips.
When Finch turned back, Christine was staring at him. The coldness had melted from her expression, replaced by a desperate, unreasoning hope. “Make me believe you,” she said, very quietly. “I don’t care if you lie. I have to help the boy and I don’t know what else to do. Just make me believe you.”
What boy? he thought again. Her brother? Her son? Who was he? And how did I miss him? For a moment words eluded him. What could he possibly say? Her life depended on his ability to convince her. You trusted me once before, he wanted to say, but that wasn’t true. She hadn’t trusted him; he’d simply used his wealth and hired brute strength to force her into rehab. That it had ended well was beside the point …
“Your life,” he said. “Your life and every good thing in it. That’s what you said you owed me. Is that still true?”
She blinked at him, hurt, as if he’d slapped her. But she nodded.
“I want to trade that. Everything you owe me, I will trade. For one day. This day. You don’t have to believe me. Just give me this day. And then we’re even, whatever happens.”
“You can’t …”
“Christine. That’s what I want. That’s what your life and every good thing in it is worth to me.”
After a moment she took a deep breath. “Igor,” she said, looking at the big barista, “Mr. Reese is going to be our friend, at least for today.” She looked them both over. “If this goes south, you can bring in the young Russians and have at him tomorrow. But you’re going to need all of them.”
“I don’t think so.”
“You’re wrong.” She looked at Finch again. “And this is Mr. Finch. Give him whatever he wants.”
“What?”
“You heard me.”
“Yeah. Why?”
She studied him for another moment. “Because if he’s lying I’m going to slash my own throat and it won’t matter anyhow.” She shifted, gestured. “Gentlemen?”
“Wait,” Zubec said.
“Igor …”
“Just wait, Scottie,” he insisted. He grabbed her arm, pulled her into the back office, and closed the door.
Finch glanced at Reese while they waited. “A bit overzealous, aren’t we, Mr. Reese?”
“This place used to be a bar, you know.”
“Obviously.”
“It used to be The Happy Hours bar.”
He felt his stomach coil into a hard ball. “Where her father was killed?”
Reese nodded. “Right out front. And her friend Igor? He was one of her father’s hostages.”
Finch glanced at the closed door. “Oh.”
“She seems to be a nice girl who stumbled into trouble,” Reese said, “and maybe she’s exactly what she seems to be. And maybe she’s a not-so-nice girl who’s in over her head. And maybe she’s a very troubled girl, and when you walked into her coffee shop last week she finally snapped.” Reese shrugged. “I don’t know which one of
those is true, and neither do you. And until we do, she is not taking you behind a door that I can’t kick down.”
Harold started to argue, and then simply stopped. As much as he hated to admit it, Reese’s perception of the situation was probably much clearer than his was. He nodded grimly. “All right,” he said. “And … thank you.”
They waited for the girl.
***
The entire staff was required to attend the seminar. Campanella even brought in a temp to cover for the receptionist. It was supposed to be about diversity, Frey knew, but all he’d heard in the first half hour was about respecting women in the workplace. It was all in response to Dover and his little smut collection. But Dover had been fired, and the rest of the staff had no idea why.
Frey glanced at Campanella. His boss, supposedly. The idiot had no idea that Frey had another boss, a much more dangerous boss, at a much more lucrative and interesting job.
The seminar was reassuring, in one way. It meant that Campanella had no idea how far the problem really went. All he’d seen was Dover’s part of it, and that was just the tip of the iceberg. He was a nice guy, Frey thought. Too nice to see past the tip of his own nose. That was just how Frey liked his bosses.
On the other hand, he had to get into that box. It was probably in the same shape as it had been when the woman had taken it out of the building, but maybe not. If she’d changed the password or encrypted anything, it would take a while to open it. If she’d erased anything … he didn’t even want to think about it.
He looked around the room. Campanella met his eyes, nodded encouragingly. It was impossible for him to sneak out. He was the new golden boy.
There was no point in worrying about it. He would get to the box as soon as the seminar was over. If she’d erased anything, he could probably recover it. If he couldn’t…
He shook his head firmly. Everything would be okay. It had to be.
***
There was an old elevator in what Reese had taken for a closet, the kind with two gates that had to be closed by hand. The three of them got on it. Zubec glared at them until they were out of sight. He might, Reese thought, be a handful. He was big enough, and he looked like he knew how to handle himself.
Then he dismissed the thought and focused on the woman. “Who is the boy?” Finch asked. “Where is he?”
“I don’t know,” Christine answered. Her voice was breathless. She was very pale, and her lips were blue. “Zelda found him.”
“Who’s Zelda?”
The elevator reached the top floor. Finch opened the gates and the girl took a few steps into the little lobby. There was a door there, heavy steel with the serious lock, exactly like her back door. Christine stopped, made no attempt to open the door. She swayed slightly.
They were losing her. Reese moved around in front of her.
“It’s harder than it looks, you know.”
“Huh?” Her eyes were glassy; she blinked repeatedly, but they didn’t clear.
“Slashing your own throat,” he explained. “I mean, it’s easy enough to do, but getting it right, so you bleed out before the wound clots, that’s tricky.”
“Mr. Reese …” Finch began.
“If you’re serious about it, you’d be better off using the gun under the bar. It’s a twelve-gauge, right? Sawed off, just like your dad used?”
In the instant that followed, Reese learned two very important things about their client. The first was that given the choice between fainting and fighting, Christine Fitzgerald would fight. The second was that someone had taught her to throw a punch, and taught her well. She barely telegraphed, just a shift of her feet, a flex in her knees, and then she came around at him, swung not from the shoulder but from the hip. It was smooth, compact, faster than he expected. Every ounce of power she had was behind the fist that flashed toward him. A fist, he noted, not an open slap. And she didn’t try to hit him in the jaw; she aimed at his throat, where the impact would do the most damage.
She wasn’t a big girl, and not particularly strong. But Cara Stanton hadn’t been large, either, and Reese had seen her lay out a man twice her size. Christine wasn’t in Stanton’s league, not by a long shot, but she had the right idea.
He caught her fist in his palm and closed his fingers over her hand. Her breathing grew heavy; the color flooded back to her cheeks.
In that second instant he learned two more things. She’d known she wasn’t going to hit him before she’d taken the swing. She hadn’t pulled the punch, she’d thrown the best she had, but she’d known it wouldn’t connect.
And she wasn’t afraid of him.
That last realization caught him off guard. He’d already seen her size him up, first as Finch’s gorilla and then as compared to the much larger Zubec. It wasn’t that she underestimated his abilities. She seemed to have an unusually good understanding of them. But she had guessed “ no, knew “ that he wouldn’t hurt her, at least not without a lot more provocation than she’d offered.
Her eyes were clear again, and he could almost feel her looking right through him. She recognized the monster within him. But she understood too that she had no reason to fear it. It was that simple for her.
How do you know?
Finch said, “Mr. Reese!”
“There’s our girl.” He opened his hand and released hers. “She looked better with a little color, don’t you think?”
“Stop it,” Finch said. He moved to put his arm around her, but Christine shook him off. She cupped one hand over the top of the door lock, to block it from their view, and keyed in the code. There were seven numbers. The door clicked open.
Reese quickly cataloged the floor plan of the apartment. The door opened at the side of the main room. To his left was the little kitchen, separated by a breakfast bar. Next to it was a big space with a bare floor that should probably have been the dining area. It had bookcases against the wall, floor to ceiling, divided in the middle, ten feet wide total. They were completely full of books “ precisely arranged by size. There was an office chair, high-backed, sturdy, against the wall, but no other furniture.
Directly across from the door was the window that had been open when the burglar came in. By its location, he knew it was over the fire escape. It was tightly closed now.
To the right was a fairly standard living room, two big chairs and a couch, a TV and a stereo. At the back of the room was a short hallway with four doors off it “ bedrooms, Reese guessed, and a bathroom, plus the interior side of the steel back door. By the back door there was a stand with two umbrellas and a golf club. He glanced behind him. There was a similar stand by the front door.
As a defensive weapon, a golf club was a better choice than a baseball bat, because it concentrated the force of the swing more effectively.
A girl with golf clubs was unlikely to also have a gun.
Christine kicked her shoes off right inside the door, clearly out of habit. “Mr. Reese,” she said clearly, “I’m sorry I tried to hit you.”
No excuses, he noted. No qualifiers. Just a simple apology. Reese nodded, gave her a little smile. “No problem.” He went to the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. It was absurdly neat, with everything in it lined up, the interior sparkling. He closed it and opened the freezer. It was similarly tidy. He moved on to the cupboards.
“What are you looking for?” she inquired mildly.
“Drugs, guns, whatever.”
Finch started to say something again, then thought better of it. In any case, the young woman didn’t seem to need his protection.
“Ah. I don’t have either, but tell me what your sweet tooth is and I can probably hook you up.”
Reese nodded. In the cupboard above the single-cup coffee brewer, there were six varieties of coffee “ from dark-roast to double espresso “ and two kinds of tea. There were also roughly ten pounds of assorted chocolate. She didn’t look like a hacker, but only the Cheetos were missing from the basic hacker diet.
“And for what it’s worth,” she continued, “if I did have them you couldn’t find them.”
He closed the cupboard and looked at her. “That sounds like a challenge.”
She shrugged. “Knock yourself out.” She’d already let one strange man search her apartment; a second one hardly seemed to matter to her.
Reese scanned the room again. Aside from the small and now empty desk, there was no sign of any computer equipment.
Finch had noticed the same thing. “Where do you work?”
Christine got an odd expression on her face, a blend of reluctance and mischief. She walked over to a wall switch next to the bookshelf. It looked like a standard fixture, light switch on the top, outlet on the bottom. There was what looked like a baby-safe plug in the outlet side. But when she pressed her thumb against it, it glowed green. And then the shelves started to move.
In near-silence, the bookshelves parted in the middle and moved apart sideways, then cornered and slid to a stop facing each other, at right angles to the wall they’d vacated, ten feet apart. Behind them was a slender counter with two keyboards, a second set of shelves, and a whole rack of computers.
“Ahhh,” Finch said quietly, “someone watched classic Trek.”
Christine smiled, small and wistful. “Never had much use for Kirk, but I loved Gary Seven.”
There was another thumb pad just over the counter. Christine activated it and a screen unrolled from the top of each bookcase. They looked like standard projection screens, six feet wide by four feet high, but once they were fully deployed they made a snapping sound, turned clear, and began to glow like touchscreens.
“These are from ScionTec, aren’t they?” Finch tapped one; it echoed, solid. “I heard there were issues with the beta version.”
“They caught fire,” Christine confirmed. “Rather impressively. And the gamma version smoked. Delta version quit working in three days. This is epsilon. It’s not as robust as I’d like, and it’s a little sluggish. But it doesn’t try to burn the place down.”
“Cool toys,” Reese said. “You know, though, that all I’d have to do is cut off one of your thumbs to access your whole system.”
Finch groaned.
“Nope,” Christine answered calmly. “If my thumb doesn’t have a pulse when it hits one of those buttons, the hard drives slag in ten seconds.”
“Why does a girl like you need security like this?”
She considered. “Did you ever own a sports car?”
“Yes.”
“Did you ever actually need to drive a hundred and forty miles an hour?”
“A couple times,” Reese allowed.
“Oh.” She paused. “I expected that analogy to hold up better.” She shrugged, looked at the ceiling and called, “Zelda, light it up.” The whole system sprang to life.
“Zelda?” Finch asked.
“Frequently irrational and utterly co-dependent. What else would I call her?”
“What track today, Scottie?” the computer asked. The voice was female, soothing and with a mild British accent. It sounded completely human.
“No music, Zelda.”
“No music?” the computer asked. “Do you want me to call an ambulance?”
“I want you to stop being a smart-ass, Z.”
“I only do what I’m programmed for.”
“Your computer is programmed for sarcasm?” Reese asked.
“Naturally,” she answered. “All right, Z. Let’s get back to it. Where is Mary now, and where’s Honey?”
“Your computer components have names as well?” Finch asked in a carefully neutral tone.
Reese turned away, to look through the little drawers of an end table and to hide his grin. Finch, who called his greatest achievement ‘The Machine’ only because he had to call it something, clearly had trouble with the woman’s habit of treating computers like people.
The screen to the right lit up with a city street map. There was a green X over the apartment, and about thirty blocks away a red X with a circle around it. It was not moving.
Christine shrugged. “The laptop is named Mary Mallon.”
“Typhoid Mary,” Finch answered. “And how many viruses is Mary carrying?”
“Two hundred and seventeen. Viruses, worms, Trojan horses. Everything I could find.”
“It’s unlikely to be successful in crippling their system.”
“I know. It’s just shiny.” She tapped the left screen. “Zelda, display Mary’s file list.” The list appeared, and Finch stepped over to study it.
“Shiny?”
“Distracting. A shiny object to draw their attention. Zelda, where’s Honey?” she asked again.
“Honey is inactive at this time.”
“Damn it.” Christine glared at the projected map. “They wanted it so bad, why are they screwing around now?”
“Lo-jack?” Reese asked.
Christine nodded, then shook her head. “The same concept, but the home-cooked version.”
She opened a drawer and pulled out what looked like two slender copper bracelets. She put them on her wrists and waved her right hand; a light appeared at her fingertips, a red hovering projection of a qwerty keyboard. Reese looked up; there were two tiny projectors on the ceiling that moved to follow the bracelets. Christine moved her fingertips over the lights -- numbers, letters, symbols. She got another pair of bracelet and offered them to Finch.
He took them, turned them in his hand, gave them back. “No. Thank you.” He rolled the chair over to the keyboards on the narrow ledge, but remained standing. “Tell us about the boy.”
She took a deep breath. “Zelda, left screen, show them the boy.”
A blurred picture came up. It was a very close-up shot of a young boy’s face. He was five or six years old, with had black hair, dark eyes, olive skin. His head was tilted to the right. It was impossible to see anything in the background; it was probably a single frame of video, rather than a photo.
The expression on his face was heartbreaking. He was obviously screaming. His eyes were full of terror and pain. Tears ran down his cheeks.
After a moment, Finch asked, very quietly, “Where is he, Christine?”
“I don’t know.” Her voice cracked; she had gone pale again. “The picture’s off the box, but … I destroyed it. I don’t know how to find him. I can’t …” She stopped. “Please help me. Help him.”
“I will,” he answered. He put his hand on her shoulder, and this time she didn’t pull away. The two of them stood and stared at the picture. It mesmerized them.
Paralyzed them.
Reese stepped closer and tapped the screen. The picture vanished. “All right,” he said briskly. “Start at the beginning. Where did the box come from?”
“It was on the desk of an IT managed named Larry Dover.”
“Where?”
She hesitated, glanced at Finch. “The company doesn’t matter.”
“If we can leave your clients out of it we will,” Finch promised. “But we need to know.”
Christine nodded. “Venture East Financial.”
“They were never a client of yours.”
“How do you know…” She stopped herself. “Never mind. Sam Campanella was my first client.”
“And this box was at his company?” Reese pressed.
“Yes. But he’s got nothing to do with it.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m pretty sure, yes. Although … God knows my judgment isn’t very good this week.”
“How did you meet him?” Finch asked. ”He doesn’t seem like the cybercafé type.”
“Neither do you,” Christine pointed out. “Six, seven years ago, one of Campanella’s employees accused him of sexually assaulting her in his office. But she didn’t call the police; she said if he gave her five million dollars she’d just go away.”
“Blackmail,” Reese said.
“Yeah. And not very clever blackmail. Sam Campanella is …” She looked to Finch. “Do you know him?”
“I may have met him once or twice,” he answered. His voice told Reese he was lying. “I know his reputation, though.”
“Campanella’s a rare bird,” she told Reese. “He’s deeply religious. And profoundly married. So the first thing he did was call his wife. And then his pastor. And then his lawyer. They found out this woman had been playing the same game all over town, usually walking away with nuisance money. She ended up in jail.”
“You think she’s involved?” Now that Reese had her talking, he resumed his cursory search of the living room, but he listened to every word.
“No. That was all before I knew him. But after that, Sam decided he wanted a surveillance system in his office. It was the only place in the company that didn’t have one. But he wanted it private, off the network, and he didn’t want any of his employees to know about it.”
“Why?”
“I didn’t ask, but I got the impression that he and his wife use the office to get a little time away from the kids. Which is actually kinda sweet.” She shrugged. “Anyhow. His wife was in a Bible study group with my librarian. She introduced us and I put a camera system in Sam’s office. And then, being me, I poked around in his network a little bit.”
“And you found holes in the security,” Finch predicted.
“Big ones. I showed him where. He offered me a job. I told him no. But he introduced me to one of his friends. And that’s how Cassandra got started.”
“And you’ve gone peer-to-peer ever since,” Finch said.
“Yes.” She looked at the right screen again. The box
still hadn’t appeared. “When you showed up here last week, I got to thinking about things. About gratitude, about people who had helped me that I’d never really thanked properly. Campanella was one of them. ”
Reese caught Finch’s eye, knew they were thinking the same thing. It was a small connection between Finch’s visit to the café and Christine’s Number coming up, but it was clean and logical. Finch wasn’t cause, just catalyst. Maybe.
He moved into the bathroom and swiftly checked the drawers and cupboards. As in the kitchen, everything was unnaturally neat. There was a hugely overstocked first aid kit in one side of the linen closet. There was also a small wooden box. He opened it with some concern; it contained latex gloves and alcohol wipes, but also an assortment of sterile disposable acupuncture needles. The only drugs in the bathroom were the over-the-counter variety. He moved to the bedroom, still listening to the woman’s story. The bed was not only made, but it was boot camp tight.
“So I called him,” Christine continued. “Just to touch base, to tell him thank you. We chatted a little, and he mentioned that his systems were running like a two-legged dog. All kinds of slow-downs, freezing up, error messages, spam. Classic virus behavior. He wasn’t getting answers from Dover, and Dover’s assistant, who he thought was pretty sharp, was on sick leave. Had his appendix out. So I offered to take a look. And the first thing I saw was this box. A stand-alone external hard drive, three terabytes, on Dover’s desktop. Not on the company inventory. Protected. So I hacked it.”
“And it was full of pornography,” Finch guessed.
“Yeah.”
Reese returned to the hallway. “Isn’t that one of your rules?” he asked. “Everybody has porn?”
“Not like this. I showed you, it’s not any sort of standard porn. It all contains animals. Specifically barnyard animals.” Her cheeks went pink. “When I first found it, I ran all the search terms I could think of to make sure it wasn’t kiddie porn. Children, child, girls, boys, young, youth … finally tried kids.” She shuddered again. “I still hear those little goats in my sleep. But there were no children. Not there.” She shook her head. “It was … shocking’s not the right word. Stupefying. And it worked. I got stupid. All I thought about was how fast I could get rid of it.”
“That’s an understandable reaction,” Finch said. “It’s what I would have done.”
She shook her head. “You would have thought it through before you actually did anything. I just reacted.”
Reese went back into the bedroom. There was a beaver-tailed sap under the girl’s mattress, black leather, filled with buckshot. He nodded approvingly and put it back. If Finch provoked the woman enough to make her sap him, he had it coming.
“For as skeezy as Dover was, he was still an IT guy. His box was sending a regular backup every night, to a subscription cloud site call SexStorm. But it was automated and he wasn’t paying attention to it. The FBI shut SexStorm down a couple weeks ago. So the box defaulted to backing up on Venture East’s servers.”
“It was bleeding into the regular operations,” Finch guessed. “Causing the symptoms that Campanella saw.”
“Yeah. Not the porn itself, but all the crap that was coming in with it. The system was mainlining viruses.”
Reese crossed the hall to the second bedroom. It was very sparsely furnished, just a daybed, a small desk, an empty dresser, and of course more bookshelves.
“I called Campanella,” she continued. “We met at the office and I showed him what I’d found. He was sick about it. And he was right onboard with my ‘just get rid of it’ solution. Some of it’s illegal, probably “ cruelty to animals, maybe, but it’s not clean-cut. He didn’t want to get the company involved. Of course I couldn’t just reformat the entire company’s backup data. So I sequestered the porn, erased it, and shredded the remnants. Then I encrypted everything.”
“So it’s gone,” Reese said. He moved back into the main room.
“It’s still there, technically, but it can’t be recovered.”
“Are you sure?” He looked to Finch. “Some kind of scanning program, maybe? Review the available data fragments … “
Christine shook her head. “You’re thinking about paper through a shredder. Think meat through a grinder. It’s like trying to make hamburger back into steak.”
“What did you do with the original drive?” Finch asked.
“We took a screen cap of the file names and saved five three-minute samples. Lawsuit protection. Then we drove the box out to Fresh Kills and burned it with thermite.”
Finch seemed unsurprised. “Why? There are much simpler ways of disposing of it.”
“Campanella was rattled. I mean, so was I, but … sometimes a man like him needs a big hot fire to get right with the world.”
Worth remembering, Reese thought, that their pretty little girl had no problem getting her hands on thermite, and apparently no fear of using it.
“Monday morning,” Christine continued, “Sam fired Dover and promoted Getty …”
“Getty?”
“Matthew Getty. The assistant. He was just back from sick leave. Sam promoted him into Dover’s job, he sent me ten pounds of Godiva chocolate, and that should have been the end of it.”
“But the next Monday you got mugged,” Reese said. “How did you know that was related?”
“I didn’t at first. Until he asked for the necklace.”
“What’s special about the necklace?”
“Nothing. It was pretty much like the one I’m wearing now.”
Reese looked at her closely. He could see the outline of a slender chain over her collarbone. It was tucked inside her blouse; he hadn’t noticed it before. “He knew you had it.”
“Yes.” She slipped the necklace over her head and handed it to him.
The pendant was gold, rectangular, studded with small rhinestones. He pulled it apart to reveal the flash drive. “What was on it?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing at all?” Finch asked.
“No. I only ever carry one company at a time on it, and I hadn’t started on Rickel’s audit. I’d reformatted it over the weekend. It was clean. I carry a drive everywhere. Never know when I’ll run across something worth scrumping.”
“Scrumping?”
“It’s a British term I stole. Means climbing the wall and stealing the best apples out of your neighbor’s orchard.”
“Ah. A practice you’re quite fond of, if I recall.”
She nodded. “I didn’t think it was Dover right away. It might have been any former client. But then I started seeing the car. Beat-up Chevy, dark green. Tuesday morning it was across the street. Wednesday afternoon it was out back.” She moved to the screen and waved her fingers. “Zelda, show them the car.”
The screen to the right changed. It looked like surveillance footage of the street in front of the bar. There was a battered green Chevy, exactly as she’d described it. After thirty seconds it changed to another time stamp and a different street, but the same or an identical car.
“You’re tapped into outside surveillance cameras,” Finch said.
She bit her lower lip and nodded.
“Do you have live feed?”
She nodded again. “Zelda,” she called again. “Left screen, live feed, all cameras.”
The screen lit up with sixteen different squares. Some were moving, real-time; others held the same image, then took a new picture at intervals. Reese rook a minute to look them over. It didn’t look like anything usual was going on outside the apartment. “Very nice.”
“Yeah,” Christine said grimly. “Also illegal as hell.”
“We’re not generally concerned with technicalities,”
Finch told her.
“He does this all the time,” Reese clarified.
She relaxed a notch, almost smiled. They turned back to the other screen. The photos of the car continued, exactly as she’d said, throughout the day Wednesday.
“You knew they were watching you,” Reese said. “What made you decided to invite them in?”
She hesitated again, considered. Then she tapped a little
arrow at the side of the screen. “This.”
A new video came up, surveillance from her own back door. A man in sun glasses, trying to force the lock. It was time-stamped near midnight on Tuesday. He wasn’t successful.
“Were you at home?” Finch asked.
“No.”
“And he would have known that,” Reese said, “since he was watching the apartment.”
She nodded. “And then yesterday, during the day. Also while I was out.” She ran the next clip. It was the same man, apparently. Same size, anyhow. The second time he’d brought a pry bar. It didn’t get him through the door, either.
Reese brought his phone out. “I’ll get our friend to run the plates for us.”
“Why?” Christine asked. Before he could answer, she gestured with her air-keyboard again. A driver’s license came up on the left screen, and a rap sheet came up next to it. “Joseph Moodey. All-around small-time punk.”
Reese studied the documents. Moodey was five foot ten, one-fifty, just the right size for the man who’d tried to break in. He’d done time for armed robbery, been suspected but not charged in several burglaries, picked up for fencing stolen goods. And done a second short stint in jail for sale of salacious materials to minors.
“He’s a pornography dealer,” Finch said.
“More likely he’s muscle for a dealer,” Reese said. “Got caught trying to peddle on the side.”
“Either way,” Christine said, “the magic word led me back to Dover and his files.” She‘d grown pale and quiet again.
“Show me,” Finch said.
She bent her wrist and the red light keyboard appeared at her fingertips. Her fingers moved; the pictures of the green car vanished and were replaced by dense lines of computer code. “I kept copies of the video samples we’d taken from Dover’s files, just as backup. And once I got it broken down I could see it.”
Finch studied the code intently for a moment. “It’s a black web.”
She sighed heavily. “Yeah. This whole big hidden site, running under Dover’s animal porn. It’s no wonder it was such a memory hog. And why the bleed over caused so many problems.”
“They couldn’t have thought the whole thing would be on your flash drive,” Reese said.
“They were looking for an address. I could have put it in a cloud, or off-site somewhere. That’s what I should have done.”
“Is this a government site?” The Agency, John knew, loved to conceal its internet operations under civilian covers, and hiding in some sucker’s animal pornography sounded just like something Mark Snow would do.
But Finch shook his head. “No. It’s another porn site, as far as I can tell. A commercial site.”
“And if it’s worth all this effort to recover,” Christine said grimly, “it’s something really perverse.”
“So we’re looking at kiddie porn after all.”
“Almost certainly,” Finch answered. “You have the other samples?”
She brought them up in four more small squares. “You see the stupid now, right?” she asked sadly.
“I see it,” he said. “But I still would have done the same thing.”
“I had them,” Christine said. “I had their whole damn operation right there in front of me. And I burned the original and scrambled the backup.” She shook her head again. “The worst of it is, it took hours. I held that box on my lap all the way to Staten Island. And even before that, waiting for Sam “ I had literally hours to think about what I was doing, and it never once even crossed my mind to look closer. I saw those damn goats and my whole brain just shut off.”
“I’ve made worse mistakes,” Finch said. “Next time you’ll know better.”
She folded her arms over her chest again. She was miserable. “I could have shut down a child pornography ring and I blew it. I can’t believe I was so damn stupid.”
“Why did you decide to call Finch?” Reese asked.
Christine looked at him. “Because some guy followed me to Wall Street and tried to tap my phone, and he had way better tech than these idiots had shown before. And then I found out the same guy had been to my apartment.” Then she looked back at the screen. “But mostly … while I was out I had Zelda sift the data again, and she came up with the picture of the boy.” She touched the screen and the haunting photo came up. “Once I knew exactly how bad it was and how badly I’d screwed up, I just … reacted. Because apparently that’s what I do now. I don’t think, I just react.”
“It was a good reaction,” Finch assured her. “We’ll find him.”
“The odds of finding this child …” Her voice cracked; she dropped her head. “I had them. I had everything.”
“We’ll get it back,” Finch promised. He was still studying the data lines, and from his posture, he had options in mind.
“So you replicated the external drive and let them steal it,” Reese said. “What’s the rest of the plan? Why the laptop?” He touched the screen, pushed windows aside until he found the street map again. The signal still hadn’t moved.
“It’s just back up,” Christine said. “Without a power source the hard drive is mute. I figured they’d pick up the laptop if I left it sitting there, so I’d have some idea where they were headed. And if they catch a virus or two from it, that’s just gravy.”
“What did you load on the hard drive?” Finch asked.
“Every Disney movie ever made,” she answered. “Heavily encrypted. And a tracker, of course.”
“How’s the signal hidden?”
“It embeds and piggy-backs on their WiFi.”
“Oh, very nice,” Finch said. “Not only do you know where they are, but you don’t even have to hack into their system. They’ll log in for you.”
“That’s the plan. The encryption should give me three, four hours before they know they don’t have what they wanted. That should be plenty of time. If they ever plug
the damn thing in.”
“It’s in transit,” Reese told her. “This guy, Moodey? He’s just the thief. He took what he was told to take. He doesn’t know what to do with it, he’s just waiting to pass it off. Be patient.”
“Maybe.”
“What do you expect to find, once it’s connected?”
“Best case, a mirror of the files I destroyed. Clients
and operators, names, addresses, buying history, credit card numbers. I copy it all off and give it to the police, FBI if it’s interstate. Worst case, three guys with an e-mail address and a server in somebody’s basement, and all I can do is burn them down and wait for them to rebuild. Most likely, something in the middle “ and then I figure it out from there.”
Reese and Finch shared a look. “I like it,” John said. “I like it a lot.”
“It should work,” Finch agreed. “We need to see what Dover’s connections are. Whether he was profiting from this business endeavor or simply allowing it to operate from his desktop.” Finch sat down at the keyboards and tapped the keyboard.
Nothing happened.
He looked at Christine. “I need access to your system.”
She froze. Reese could tell that until that moment she hadn’t considered that Finch would want to take over her computer. It was equivalent to the difference between Finch letting him stroll around the library and Finch giving him his passwords. But finally she took a deep breath. “Of course you do. Zelda, this is Mr. Finch.” Her voice shook. ”Say hello, Mr. Finch.”
“Hello,” he said tentatively.
Christine shook her head. “She knows there’s more than one of us here. If you don’t say her name, she assumes you’re not talking to her.”
With great and obvious exasperation, Finch said, “Hello, Zelda.”
“Hello, Mr. Finch,” the computer answered.
“Zelda, give Mr. Finch access to your data for the next two hours.”
“I may need more than that,” Finch protested.
“Zelda, prompt at fifteen minutes prior to access expiration.”
“Prompt scheduled. What data?”
“Everything,” Finch said.
Christine shook her head, and Zelda said, “I’m sorry, Mr. Finch. I don’t have a protocol named ‘everything’.”
“Of course you don’t, Z,” the woman answered. “Display all.”
Both screens lit up with tiny blue letters, file names, system names “ too small for Reese to read.
“Mark all,” Christine prompted. The tiny letters turned red. “Now save as protocol name: Everything.”
There was an audible whirring sound. After about ten seconds, the computer said, “That is a significant amount of data, Christine. I will need a hard-keyed authorization.”
“Good girl, Zelda.” Her fingers flew over the light-up keyboard. Reese lost count after the first twenty components. She hesitated just for an instant before she hit the final enter key.
“Access assignment accepted,” the computer responded. “Welcome, Mr. Finch.”
“Thank you … Zelda.”
Reese smiled to himself. He’d never seen Finch completely nonplussed by technology. It was all very flashy, very impressive. Totally unlike anything Finch would have put together.
But it cost the girl; she was pale, visibly shaky again. Her pupils were huge. Reese moved a little closer to her; he gave her a fifty-fifty chance of trying to hit the floor. Provoking a second fight from her wasn’t an option. “Christine …”
Finch looked at her, and then looked stricken. “I’m sorry.” He glanced at the gleaming computer system behind him. “If there was another way …”
Christine shook her head. “I need a smoke.” She quickly palmed something out of the nearest drawer, then opened the window and climbed out.
***
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