Beating Ruby (21 page)

TWENTY-ONE

The Chihuahua

“We need you to get back in the game, Samantha! You’re the only hacker hot enough to infiltrate Andreï Preskovic’s sex club and break into his computers.”

—Abby Chuman,
Fatal and Sensual Ukrainian Nights II: Bound Forever

“Swear again!”

Alex rose from the white Louis XVI armchair in which he had been listening to my complaints until now. He flattened his right palm over his heart. “Island, I swear that if you get caught, I’ll cover for you. You won’t go to jail.”

Sitting cross-legged on my bed, I cast a wary glance at my unopened laptop. In a corner of my room, March was leaning against the wall with his arms crossed, and watched the negotiation unfolding before his eyes in silence.

“I won’t get disavowed?”

“You won’t. You’re not even an agent. Worst-case scenario, you’ll get a call and your phone will explode, along with you.” Alex grinned.

“Oh my God
!
”

He doubled over with laughter when I scrambled up from the bed.
“Just kidding! Now can you please . . . ?”

I searched March’s expressionless features for some sort of actual reas
surance. He answered my silent plea with the arching of a haughty chest
nut eyebrow. “You wanted to be a spy. Congratulations on becoming one.”

I drew a resigned breath and grabbed my laptop. Alex sat on the bed next to me, and when I launched the command line and started typing, March joined us, sitting on my other side.

“What are you doing?” he asked, watching the colorful lines of code scroll on the black screen.

“I’m inside their router’s admin. That was the easy part, because their password is super weak. This, here”—I pointed at a particular block of text—“is the list of all devices connected to their network. Mostly phones and laptops, so it’s not really interesting. What I’d like to check is this . . .” My index finger stopped on a specific entry, an old-ass Windows server that seemed like the perfect candidate for hosting temporary video surveillance archives, but it also looked ripe for the taking. There were dozens of critical vulnerabilities to be found in a nearly ten-year-old server, and someone who named their machine
“IchliebeRösti”
—I love rösti (a kind of Germanic hash browns)—couldn’t be trusted to properly install security updates in a timely manner.

I cracked my fingers and set about exploiting a well-documented vulnerability. It was nothing incredibly elaborate, in the end: just a few remote requests in ASP that would mess with IchliebeRösti’s web applications, granting us total access to the server. Hacking is bad, and I should have felt bad, but I have to confess that a thrill of impish excitement sent tingles through my body. There was a joy to be found in sin that I couldn’t deny.

Soon, I was scouring its drives for video files. A long list of results appeared. Now, Alex and March might have cared little for computer shenanigans, but they knew what a several-gigabyte “.avi” file meant.

“Great, can you isolate the recordings for March 13, the day before he came back to New York?” Alex said, placing a hand on my shoulder. March clicked his tongue, but said nothing otherwise.

I was all too aware of the warmth radiating from Alex’s palm as I selected a group of files. “There you go. Are we going to watch them all?”

“No,” Alex said. “According to his agenda, Roth spent most of the day at Machina Tomorrow and came back to the hotel around six. Show me the lobby, starting from five thirty.”

I double-clicked on the file, and we watched as an accelerated ballet of guests, visitors, and employees appeared on my laptop’s screen. The recordings were in black-and-white, but the resolution was decent, allowing us to distinguish faces and some level of detail.

“Look!” I paused the video and pointed at the lean silhouette of a balding blond man walking through the front door. Long gray coat, always that same old backpack. Thom. There was something eerie in seeing him alive again, real and unreal. I felt my heart tighten, watching him cross the lobby and climb the marble stairs. It was hard to see his expression clearly, but I thought he didn’t look particularly stressed.

On my shoulder, Alex’s hand tightened.

March cleared his throat. “Can you show us his floor?”

I squirmed away from Alex’s hand as I searched for the second floor’s security recordings. There were several files, one for each camera. I opened them all, creating a black-and-white mosaic on my screen. As you’d expect from cameras filming an empty hallway, there was nothing remarkable about that particular tape. Thom could be seen reaching the top of the stairs, strolling on the thick carpet, and entering his room—end of story.

The three of us looked at each other, then at the screen. I sped up the video again, watching the hours tick by in each window’s lower right corner. People coming and going, room service, a couple fighting . . . no Thom, who appeared to be still in his room. March’s hand suddenly pressed mine.

“Stop, please.”

My heart jolted: he was right. At 2:17, Thom had come out of his room. His posture, the way his shoulders hunched as he fumbled with his room key—something was wrong. This had clearly marked the start of his descent into the pit. Before our eyes, Thom walked down the stairs and into the lobby. I loaded the lobby’s security recordings. He was leaving the hotel in a hurry, without his precious backpack. Behind the glass of the entrance door, a man in a black parka was waiting for him in the street.

“Salzgeber.”

I paused the video and turned to Alex. He was staring at the still with a dark expression, his forefinger rubbing his chin mechanically. “Keep playing it, please.”

As soon as I pressed Enter, a visibly shaken Thom followed the Austrian mercenary outside the hotel. The last that could be seen of them were their backs as they climbed into a dark Mercedes.

“They contacted him. Somewhere between six and two that night,” March concluded.

“But we checked his phone calls, his e-mails, and nothing came up,” Alex countered.

“It doesn’t mean anything,” I said. “You know better than I do that it’s easy to reroute a phone call and mask its origin.”

He nodded, brown eyes still locked on the screen. “Could you do the same for the street cameras? Tell us where they went?”

“I’m not sure. I have no idea if they even store the files for that long, and we’re talking about hacking dozens of different cameras in order to re-create their path. I don’t think I’m qualified for this, Alex.”

I saw the disappointment in his and March’s faces, and I kinda felt like a loser because I wasn’t the badass hacker they had imagined. I offered Alex a rueful smile. “You’re gonna have to call for help after all.”

He patted my shoulder. “Don’t worry, I’ll ask the NSA to lend me Colin again. Let’s just hope they cooperate quickly.”

“How long will it take?” March asked.

“Twenty-four hours max, if their boss really wants to test Erwin.”

March’s eyes narrowed. “That ‘boss’ is the handler for the young hacker you’re talking about, correct?”

“Correct.”

“And he’s on bad terms with Mr. Erwin? What’s his name?”

Alex shot a suspicious glance at me. “I’m afraid this is not something I can disclose, Mr. November.”

March indulged in a huff of exasperation. “For God’s sake, stop these pathetic games. We’re obviously talking about Mr. Hendry.”

“I can’t confirm—”

“Save your breath, Mr. Morgan. I’ll call him. He knows me.”

Alex and I blinked like owls while March got up from the bed and pulled out his phone. He seemed to look up a number, his fingers scrolling and tapping on the screen repeatedly. Several seconds passed, during which he waited for someone to pick up. They did.

“Good morning, Mr. Hendry, I’m sorry to wake you up. I’m with Mr. Morgan, whom I’m certain you already know operates under the supervision of Mr. Erwin. I took the liberty to contact you because I believe you might be able to help us with an urgent matter.”

I had no idea what the other guy was saying, but I gathered it had to be something along the lines of “Who are you and how the hell did you get this number?” When March spoke again, his voice exuded the icy cordiality I knew he reserved for clients. “
Who am I?
Well, I’m Mr. November, and I used to kill people for a living. And
you
are the man who shared a photomontage based on what I understand to be a popular children’s movie. A photomontage describing me as
the Tomato Guy
.”

I could hear the daggers in each syllable as March gritted out the nickname Hendry had once given him. If phone calls could kill, that guy would have been dead, and I think he knew it. The exchange lasted for another minute, during which I heard March tell Hendry that, indeed, each life was a sail on a sea of regrets, before inquiring about the well-being of his grandma—who was apparently retired in Miami and had a Chihuahua named Edgar. Once he was satisfied that, on the other end of the line, his victim was pissing himself in terror, he voiced our demand regarding the surveillance camera recordings.

In the end, I think March didn’t care if the NSA could actually fulfill his request. This was about a man to whom life had offered an opportunity for revenge. And it was about a Chihuahua too.

Of course, I cannot condone those thinly veiled threats to shoot Hendry’s grandma and her dog, but I have to admit they did the job. Less than twenty minutes later, the guy sent us a nifty 3D map designed from the partial logs of thousands of various unsecured cameras and security devices in the area—gotta praise how the NSA really is
everywhere
.

We gathered around my laptop again to examine the map. According to this data, the Mercedes had taken Thom for a seventy-minute trip past Lake Zürich and its smaller sibling, the Walensee, and through the border to Liechtenstein. The vehicle had reached its microscopic capital, Vaduz. It had then left the well-lit and camera-monitored streets to drive north toward the Alpspitz—a 6,300-foot peak overlooking the city. The glowing blue line depicting Thom’s trip stopped there, because once on the mountain road, there had no longer been any external device capable of recording the vehicle’s presence.

Thom had been brought back to the Eden au Lac around six thirty, something confirmed by the hotel’s own surveillance recordings.

“So, Vaduz it is,” Alex said, his eyes set on the interrupted line on the screen.

“A charming city,” March remarked.

I closed my laptop. “What’s next?”

Alex looked past me and at March. “I suggest we split. Island and I will go to EMT Switzerland to question Professor Premfield. I gather he knew Roth well. Meanwhile, Mr. November, you could put your knowledge of Liechtenstein to good use and see if you can find where they took him after the car left Vaduz.”

The plan made sense—and there was a good-cop smile to help the medicine go down—but it was obvious in the way his shoulders stiffened that, for March, the very notion of receiving an order from Alex was akin to eating an apple Skittle. Obscene.

“I’ll make sure to let you know if your opinion is needed, Mr. Morgan,” he retorted coolly. I saw the way his fingers were drumming on his thigh, though. Alex’s plan was the best one and he knew it.

“March, I think Alex is right. I won’t be of any use to you in Vaduz, and maybe Premfield can tell us more about what happened during Thom’s trip.”

That one earned me a Tomato glare as he produced his precious tube of mints from one of his pockets. The only answer I received was the ominous sound of the candy being ground in his mouth as March got up and left the room.

TWENTY-TWO

The Beacon of Tomorrow’s Science

“I can’t reveal anything yet, but we’re working on something you’ll find under all Christmas trees next year!”

—Kerri Lavalle,
EMG
Mag
, March 2014 issue

By the time Alex and I reached the small municipality of Tuggen, at the other end of Lake Zürich, it was past ten, and I was seriously considering asking for a transfer to EMT Switzerland. The headquarters of this local division exclusively dedicated to R&D had been built on the outskirts of the town in a postcard setting, nestled between the lake’s shore and the mountains and surrounded by lush greenery where a few cows grazed lazily. There was even a golf course and a steakhouse nearby, dammit!

Alex took a right turn to enter the enclosed facility, and the curve of the building’s roof appeared, like a smooth, white shell protecting a low structure made of wood and glass. After we had identified ourselves and parked, we made our way toward some sort of futuristic banana-shaped awning that guarded the building’s entrance. A wave of hot air hit me when we entered the lobby, which carried a whiff of pinewood, no doubt from the tangle of curved beams supporting the ceiling.

Alex approached the desk behind which two receptionists chatted in German. He good-cop-smiled at them and they exchanged a few words. “Professor Premfield will be here in a moment,” one of the girls announced, batting her eyelashes at him under her colleague’s amused gaze.

“You’re making friends,” I said with a chuckle, leafing through an issue of
EMG Mag
featuring Ellingham on its cover.

Alex cocked his head. “I didn’t picture you as the jealous type.”

I was about to jump on this opportunity and tell him that I actually didn’t mind at all if he turned to new horizons, but I never had the time to. A croaky laugh echoed through the lobby, and an elderly voice greeted us with a British accent. “Hey, hey, hey, welcome to the Matrix, my friends!”

We turned at the same time to see a
fricking metalhead
walking toward us. I had never seen any pictures of Prentis Premfield, and nothing in his scientific papers hinted at this sort of commitment. Or maybe those frequent references to Norse mythology and Nietzsche should have tipped me. Anyway, his gray hair was gathered in a long ponytail, a fierce beard covered most of his face, and the guy wore a Black Sabbath T-shirt over worn jeans. And spiked wristbands. And green flip-flops. So, a metalhead, indeed. Except for the shoes, but maybe it was because they heated the building so much—I didn’t dare ask.

Alex introduced himself with a firm handshake, and it seemed an immediate understanding passed between the two men when they took in their mutual state of careful disarray.

Premfield extended his hand to me as well. “Ah, nice bird you brought, brother,” he said, addressing Alex while he crushed my fingers in his wrinkled ones.

“Not like them tarts over there.” He shot a slanted look in the direction of the receptionists’ desk; the blonde one returned the favor, burying her head in her shoulders and narrowing her blue eyes at him. He grabbed Alex’s arm, his voice dropping to a low hiss. “Don’t waste your time with them. You’re gonna buy ’em chocolate, flowers and shit, and you’ll never see a tit!”

“Thanks for the heads-up, man,” Alex whispered. “Can we talk somewhere private?”

“Yeah, come with me.”

I rolled my eyes at their antics and followed Premfield’s lead through quiet hallways and open spaces in which dozens of nerds worked hunched over their keyboards. The sound of a
Star Wars
ringtone or Techno Chicken video occasionally tore through the silence, punctuated by adolescent snickers. As we progressed into the facility, security door after security door, the atmosphere turned colder. There were no longer any wooden inserts on the white walls, and behind the windows, most of the employees wore lab coats, or even white coveralls sometimes.

Premfield noticed the direction of my gaze. “Nanoprocessors. One grain of dust and you’re bloody fucked.”

“I see.”

I should mention that while the horned skull on the front of his T-shirt might have been misleading, Premfield was in fact a world-class authority on a variety of computer-engineering-related areas, and the mastermind behind EMT Switzerland’s research facility. The giant lab was his love child, an incubator for the best and worst promises of digital hardware, and he had been overseeing its futuristic projects for more than three decades. From actually useful projects like nanomachines capable of destroying cancerous cells, to perhaps supererogatory ones, such as the fridge that tells you you’re too fat and shocks you if you grab ice cream, Prentis Premfield was shaping our future.

He led us to a cluttered office with an extraordinary view of the lake and Swiss Alps. His desk reminded me of Thom’s; it was covered with papers and computer parts, as were the floor and chairs. Premfield made room on two metal armchairs, stopped to blow his nose with a large tartan handkerchief, and eventually sat across from us.

“So,” Alex began. “Do you know why we’re here?”

“Because Thom jumped headfirst into a shit pool without a life jacket?”

Alex cocked an eyebrow but said nothing otherwise, allowing him to go on.

“Listen, brother, I don’t put my nose in Hadrian’s business, but I know shit when I smell it, and that shit with Thom stinks real bad. He was a good chap, brilliant one too. Didn’t deserve to bite the dust—not with a wife and kid.”

I nodded, my chest tight, fighting the pain I could feel reawaken as Premfield talked about Emma and little Tobias. Two details stood out from his tirade: First, the man liked to say
shit
. A lot. Second, he called Ellingham by his first name. I had never known the two were this close.

“Did you speak to Thom during his stay in Zürich? Did he come to you?” Alex inquired.

“Yeah, of course. We both had a speech slot at MT, so we talked about work, life . . . went to grab a bite. He was still fine, at the time.”

“
Still?
What about
after
the conference?”

“He called. About a week after that. That’s when I knew something was wrong. He wouldn’t say, but he kept saying shit like ‘Maybe I won’t stay with EMT for that long.’ I thought he meant he had gotten an offer somewhere else, that maybe he didn’t know what to do with his life.” Premfield bowed his head, and in his tired gray eyes, I read that all the metal bravado was probably an act to some extent. Like me, he blamed himself for what had happened, for having failed to understand the kind of hell Thom had been trapped into.

“Did he say anything else?” Alex insisted.

“Well, we talked about work. He was interested in one of our nanotechnology projects,” Premfield said with an evasive gesture.

I leaned on his desk. “What kind of stuff, exactly?”

“Hot stuff. I’ll show you.”

Alex and I exchanged looks and followed him out of the office and down the hallway. Security appeared to be reinforced in this area of the facility. We passed through two thick steel double doors with fingerprint authentication.

Premfield beckoned us with a wave of his arm. “You’re gonna love this little asshole.”

This . . .
what?

He brought us into an empty lab that seemed a little different from the other ones. On the long metal tables lay some tubes and syringes still wrapped in plastic, what looked like meds, but also half-chewed dog toys—the damage had been considerable. I looked around. There was a fridge filled with colorful tubes, but also chicories and carrots.

I heard a rustling sound behind me. The noise had come from a long cage lined with straw, inside which stood a pink rodent house.

Premfield opened the fridge and took out a few leaves of chicory. A series of increasingly loud wheeks rising from the little house answered this initiative.

“Come out. Come out, you little piece of shit!”

I imitated Alex as he bent toward the cage with a childish grin. “It’s a cavy?”

A tiny, quivering pink nose darted out, confirming his diagnostic.

“Yeah. Careful, fucker’s been biting lately. He’s depressed or some shit.”

“He’s in a cage, and you’re experimenting on him—of course he’s depressed,” I huffed, taking one of the chicory leaves to bait the creature.

Soon, a ball of golden and white fur waddled out of its shelter, calling me—or the chicory—with enthusiastic squeaks. He looked almost normal. Almost. Save for the fact his eyes were glowing blue.

Premfield opened the cage and lifted the struggling cavy with a level of care that belied the many expletives he used against the animal. “This,” he said, rubbing the rodent’s back while I fed it one of the leaves, “is the beacon of tomorrow’s science. It’s the fucking future.”

“What’s up with his eyes?” I asked.

“MicroLEDs. That way the owner knows if he’s connected or his batteries are low.”

Alex poked the cavy’s forehead gingerly. “His batteries?”

Our host looked jubilant as he presented his creation. “We call him Ricardo3000. He’s fifty percent wireless server and fifty percent guinea pig. This is the most advanced nanotechnology in the world as I’m speaking. And it’s happening here, at EMT Switz! Right, little twat?” He patted Ricardo’s butt affectionately.

I fed the rodent another leaf. “But what’s the point?”

“You’re asking me that? When all the good families in the world only want two things: to store entertainment shit on portable devices and to have a pet to love! Well, I give you a user-friendly custom Linux distribution with a two-terabyte server
and
a best friend for your kids!”

Next to me, Alex’s mouth hung open in horrified awe. “How does it work? Do you . . . don’t you need to plug it in to something?”

Premfield made room on one of the tables to lay down Ricardo. “Watch this.” He started fiddling with the cavy, who remained surprisingly impassive. “You tug on the left ear to turn the Wi-Fi on and detect devices; right ear to turn it off. Scratch his butt to scroll, like that, you see?”

Alex and I watched in fascinated horror as Ricardo’s eyes flashed successively red, green, and purple.

“What about the server’s batteries?” I murmured.

Premfield held the small furry butt with a firm hand. “I’ll show you. You just plug it in here—”

Alex lunged to pull Ricardo away from the alimentation cable just in time. “It’s okay! We get the general idea!”

I helped him put the poor thing back in his cage. “So it’s still at the experimental stage, right?”

“Yeah. EMT pulled the plug on the project. Got cold feet.”

I cleared my throat. “Wow . . . it’s . . . super unfortunate.”

“Right, huh? They whined about ‘concerns regarding animal cruelty and marketability,
’
” Premfield said in a grating falsetto voice, complete with air quotes. “They don’t know shit. Thom found him great, and Ricardo liked him.”

He let out a weary sigh and looked at Alex. “Sometimes I don’t get this world, brother.”

I smiled. “So you’re not really experimenting on him anymore—you’re just keeping him?”

A gruff tenderness filled Premfield’s eyes as showed us out of the lab. “Yeah, you could say that.”

Once we reached the lobby, Premfield exchanged a virile handshake with Alex, and his hand landed on my shoulder. “Sorry I couldn’t help you catch Hadrian’s dough.”

I stared at him, my eyes wide. “Oh my God, you know about this?”

He just blinked. “Did you two really think I didn’t know? Nana always tells me everything she hears.”

“Who’s that?” I asked.

Behind me, Alex was scratching his chin until I feared it would fall off. The situation had to be critical. “I’m sorry, Island, I should have briefed you—”

I held my hands up in the air. “Hold on a second. Who’s
Nan
a
? And what did you forget to tell me?”

“Nana is Hadrian’s mom. She’s my little sister.” Premfield shrugged.

I’d have been less surprised if they had told me that N = NP, after all. I gaped at Premfield, at the ponytail, the Black Sabbath T-shirt, the green flip-flops. “You’re Hadrian Ellingham’s
uncl
e
? On his mother’s side?”

He drummed his palms on his stomach proudly. “In person!”

“Wow, I would have never guessed.” I winced as soon as the words left my mouth.

He just laughed it off before his lips pursed in apparent respect. “Yeah, his old man and me, we had a hard time getting on. But he had a good vision for this place, and that brought us together. The man knew his beer too.”

I responded with an awkward smile. Indeed, it was difficult to imagine the late Marcus Ellingham III—ten times the iceberg his son would ever be, according to the rumors—sharing a beer with Premfield.

Oh well. I’d have to text Prince as soon I had a moment for that.