Coding Isis (23 page)

‘I did. I’ll be there in twenty minutes. I take it I’m buying lunch am I?’

‘I do hope so, I’ve been having some trouble being understood. Besides I seem to remember I bought lunch last time.’

Chris drove across to Woodside along Georgia Avenue heading towards the Beltway. He spotted Wyn a good fifty yards away, he was quite distinctive, tall, skinny, with short-cropped red hair. He had a large kit bag by his feet—some habits were hard to break. He pulled the car in to the side and wound down the window.

‘Hey soldier, need a lift?’ he said.

‘How do I know you’re not some queer, murdering freak?’

‘There’s only one way to find out.’

Wyn opened the car door and threw his kit bag in the back seat. ‘I’m starving,’ he said. ‘Is there anywhere I can get fish and chips?’

Chris laughed. ‘Jesus Wyn,’ he said, ‘what the hell are you doing? You fly half way across the world with some woman you only just met and then decide to go on a sight-seeing tour. Don’t you have a job back home?’

‘I was owed some leave. I’m being transferred to a new post soon. Training at Hereford. How’s about that? Me, a teacher?’

‘What is the world coming to?’

‘Anyway, I heard about your exploits. We were taking bets on whether you killed that girl and how many others you might have done. I reckoned they were going to start digging up bodies in your basement. It’s always the quiet ones you need to look out for.’ Wyn wore a wide grin. ‘How did you get off?’

‘I hid in a laundry cart and escaped.’

‘Nice.’ Wyn was picking at something on his jeans, trying to scrape it off with his finger nail. Chris tried not to think of what it might be. Wyn had his feet against the dashboard of the car.

‘You still shacked up with Michelle?’

‘Yes. We’re married remember? I invited you to the wedding.’

‘I don’t do weddings mate. Gives me the shits. All those needy women.’ Wyn made a fake shivering gesture.

‘Anyway,’ said Chris, ‘I told Michelle you were going to be staying with us. And do you know what she said?’

‘That she fancied a three-way?’

‘You’re a real prick.’

Wyn laughed. ‘Go on,’ he said. ‘What did she say?’

‘I’ve already told you. She said you’re a real prick.’

They both laughed. ‘At least she remembers me,’ he said.

Chris turned down Blair Road and pulled in at a Roy Rogers.

‘It’s not fish and chips,’ he said, ‘but they do a great roast beef sandwich.’

Chris and Wyn ordered their food, Wyn flirted with the girl at the counter and Chris paid. They walked over to a booth with their food on plastic trays and sat. Wyn took an enormous bite from his sandwich and slurped his drink letting the two mix in his mouth, he nodded his approval.

‘Wyn, I need you to be serious for a minute,’ said Chris. ‘Can you do that?’ Wyn shrugged with a lack of commitment.

‘The girl that was killed, Jasmine, I’ve been trying to figure out what really happened to her. She worked with me, you know? Anyway she was in to something dodgy. I went through her transactions before she died and found out she’d been hacking into some company here in D.C. I’ve no idea why, maybe it’s got nothing to do with how she died, but I want to go over there and find out. I was hoping you’d come with me?’

Wyn took another bite of his sandwich and with his mouth still full another slurp of coke. Chris had forgotten what a pig he was. Then he remembered that Wyn hadn’t changed at all but
he
had. Michelle had tamed him. Refined him.

He knew he could trust Wyn. They’d been through some tough times together, seen a lot of death and misery, but through it all, through all that weird shit, he knew deep down that Wyn had his back and he had Wyn’s. Even after all these years he still felt the same.

‘So, will you?’

‘Will I what?’

‘Come with me, asshole.’

‘You’ve got the car. I don’t see as I have much choice. You got a gun?’

‘No I haven’t got a gun, it’s not like that. I just want to find out what they do. Try to find out why Jasmine was hacking them.’

Wyn started eating Chris’s fries. Chris pushed them across to Wyn’s side of the table and ate his sandwich. He wondered whether he should really be taking this guy into his home. Maybe he should put him up in a hotel instead.

The drive over to North George Mason took less than ten minutes. As they passed the building, they both had a good look. The place seemed innocent enough, like any regular office complex. It appeared as though there were some warehouses or possibly light manufacturing facilities to the rear, but other than that, it could have been any office building.

Chris parked the car a little farther on down the street and stopped the engine.

‘So what now?’ asked Wyn.

‘I don’t know, I guess I didn’t think this one through.’

‘Maybe we should go in and ask for the head of the assassination division.’

‘You’re not funny.’

‘Or the chief executing officer?’

‘Wyn, shut up I’m trying to think.’

Chris shut his eyes, and concentrated. Wyn was right, this was stupid, what the hell was he doing here? What did he really hope to find? Then he had an idea.

‘I’ve got it,’ said Chris. ‘You go in and pretend you’re an annoying Welsh prick who’s trying to find casual labor to earn some holiday cash. I’m sure you can be convincing.’

‘Go on,’ said Wyn.

‘You try to find out what they do, get as much information as you can, obviously keeping it low key.’

Wyn gritted his teeth and stared ahead, as though he was thinking it over, then he smiled and nodded slowly.

‘So,’ he said, ‘if I get access to the top man, do you want me to take him out?’

Chris sighed. ‘Yes Wyn, that’s exactly what I want, I want you to go in to an office building and murder a complete stranger for no reason.’ Chris knew the sarcasm wouldn’t be lost on Wyn, but just in case there was any doubt, he leaned over and cuffed him around the ear.

‘Okay okay,’ he said, ‘no need to beat the help. Softly softly catchy monkey. I get it.’

Wyn walked across the street and when he got just outside the building, he turned to Chris and gave a thumbs up and a big grin.

So much for the subtle approach
, thought Chris. Wyn entered through the sliding glass doors and when they closed he was completely out of sight—the glass in the doors were tinted making it impossible for Chris to see through.

Chris waited a while and then put on his headset; he realized how stupid he was. If Wyn had been wearing the glasses, they could have recorded everything he saw and heard. There was nothing he could do about it now. He decided to use the time to do something constructive, something he had been meaning to do for a while.

He accessed his playback of Jasmine’s activities and spun it back a couple of weeks. He started to watch the playback looking for anything that might tell him why Jasmine had started hacking this company in the first place. There was a lot of work activity that he fast-forwarded through. Chris thought that maybe this was a waste of time after all and was about to stop when he noticed something familiar. He stopped the playback and backtracked a little, then resumed the playback at normal speed. Jasmine appeared to be reviewing the firewall logs, just as Chris had done the night before. Was she looking to see if her hacking activity was being traced? He watched some more. Instead she seemed to be investigating attempted access, she skipped through the logs showing hundreds upon hundreds of attempts to break through the firewall and then she slowed and saw that someone had broken through. She traced through the activity of the hacker and found that they were searching through directories of source code that was used to build their project. Then, he could see from the record of activity that they had proceeded to copy all of the code. They were stealing his code; they were stealing Jasmine’s code. So that’s what she was doing. She was trying to find out who had been hacking
them
. She had decided to turn the tables on the hackers and try to gather proof that their programs had been stolen.

Chris sat back in the chair and removed the headset. Suddenly it all started to make sense. Jasmine was not stealing work, she was trying to protect it. He guessed that the program she had run on the hacker’s site was some method of finding out if the hacker was using her programming code. The code she had just written. Then it hit him. The idea had always been there in his mind, lurking in the background, but now it came forward and was clear and focused. Jasmine had written her Easter Egg code so she could hopefully prove that someone had stolen her facial recognition algorithms. She must have uploaded an image of herself to see if the result was her pink love hearts image. Chris laughed and thought how clever she was.

Chris wondered whether he should watch some TV, or maybe call Michelle. Where was Wyn? He’d been inside over half an hour. How long should he give him? He had no doubts that Wyn could look after himself, but why did he feel something was going wrong? He decided to take a look around the building. He locked the car and walked across the road, keeping an eye on the glass doors but being careful not to stare. He avoided the entrance and headed to the side of the building. There were cars in the car park, but no windows he could look through. There was no sign of activity. At the side there was a series of loading bays that made the building look like some sort of distribution center, but all the doors were closed and there were no trucks. The fencing around the building looked ordinary. Just menacing enough to keep opportunist thieves and vandals away but not serious enough to keep a determined raider out. Chris thought that a pair of ladders and a thick blanket was all that would be needed to get past this defense. He continued his walk around the building and still it was deserted. Eventually he reached the front again and there was no sign of Wyn. He wasn’t in the car and the glass doors to the building were still closed. Chris would need to go inside, but first he put his glasses on and started recording what he was seeing. He really hoped he wouldn’t need his “black box” recording but thought if he was walking in to trouble it would be good to leave some evidence behind. Before he entered the building he made a statement for the recording.

‘My name is Chris Sanders and I’m investigating the death of Jasmine Allan. I’ve managed to trace some computer-related criminal activity to this location, and I’m about to enter an office facility on 451 North George Mason Drive.’ He felt an idiot.

Chris stopped his narrative and decided to go in. He walked to the doors and the large tinted glass slid open. He stood for a couple of seconds, just staring. He couldn’t believe his eyes.

Ben looked at his list of names and locations. If there really was a link between these killings, then this case would be taken by the FBI as it spanned multiple states and was possibly the work of a serial killer. He would have to get some more facts before bumping this one up the chain. He’d worked with special agents on a number of cases and had gotten on with them well and found them extremely professional and courteous. In truth he was a little jealous of their manpower and technology.

He found the numbers for the investigating detective for each of the cases and started with the murder in LA. The phone rang three times before being answered by a gruff male voice.

‘Detective Whitmore.’

‘Hello Detective, my name’s Detective Ben Naylor, I work at Metro PD. I’m calling because you were the investigating officer for the murder of Robert Sereno in July 2009.’

‘We get a lot of murders here Detective, what can I do to help you?’ He sounded like he was short of time and didn’t want to be wasting it talking to some guy from D.C. Ben tried to make it as brief as possible.

‘I think there may be some connection between that case and a case I’m investigating.’

‘Go on.’

‘According to your case report, Robert Sereno was killed by a single gunshot wound to the head. Eyewitnesses reported seeing no shooter and no one fled the scene. Forensics found a steel .50 caliber round. That’s quite an unusual round don’t you think?’

‘I remember that case now. We thought we had a sniper on our hands, like that crackpot you had in D.C. that was taking potshots at commuters on the beltway. We didn’t find anything to support it. We searched rooftops and vacant offices of the surrounding buildings that had line of site. We found no cartridges and no one reported suspicious activities of any kind. We drew a big fat blank. So what have you got?’