Kill Process (38 page)

I put the hardware back together again, which requires tediously positioning everything exactly right and matching screws
—
half of which roll away before I can seat them
—
to holes, and need to be found all over again. For all that, it’s still easier to reconstruct computers than to take them apart, which has always puzzled me.

I finally boot the computer, but before I enter the first of several passwords, I examine my office. I make sure no webcams point in my general direction. Nothing the screen might reflect off. I have no idea what a physical government bug might look like, and in the end decide to take no chances. I grab an empty cardboard box from the lunch room, cut one side off with scissors, and place it upside down over the laptop so the screen can only be seen from exactly where my head will be. I’d like to cover the box in layers of aluminum foil, but the lunch room is out. It’s not paranoia when they’re really out to get you, right?

My absurd preparations complete, I finally decrypt the hard drive, and pray everything I’ve dumped will be enough to tell me Lewis’s role in this. I begin with the obvious: searching his email for mentions of Tapestry and my name. Not surprisingly, there are many matches.

The oldest message in the search results is from January, when I began looking for angel investors. The email is from an angel investor, and he tells Lewis about my pitch. I don’t even remember the guy. Although Lewis doesn’t reply by email, I have a separate list of his text messages, and I see he sends a text saying thanks.

I switch to my regular computer, access my own email, and search for messages from Lewis there. The first message he sent me, back when I was looking for investors, was the very same day he learned about it from a guy I pitched.

I clench my fist and hold myself back from hitting the computer. That asshole betrayed my confidence. He never should have talked about my company to anyone, but he went running to Lewis immediately.

After that, there’s nothing relevant in his inbox for a few months. Then an email from a mid-level Tomo manager whose employee is friends with someone we hired. Then a bunch of messages over the next few weeks from people all over the tech community.

While I thought we were keeping things quiet, the reality is everyone’s been talking about us for months. Our use of IndieWeb, our partnerships, our revenue-sharing model, who we’ve hired, the top-secret chat system we’re working on. Together, all the pieces add up to a complete picture of everything we’re doing.

Still, there are almost no messages from Lewis on the topic. Then I find an email from Lewis’s chief of staff with meeting minutes. They discussed an investigation into my non-compete agreement, and consultation with legal on whether they could win a case without the signed document. Four weeks after that, another set of meeting notes on ways to mitigate the threat of Tapestry. Notes from R&D on replicating our chatbots. Biz dev arrangements to lock up the top twenty content sites with exclusivity agreements tying them deeper into the Tomo ecosystem.

I jump at a sharp knock, and my heart races until I realize someone’s merely at my office door.

“Come in.”

It’s Igloo. She sits in my spare chair, oblivious to the fact that I’m staring into a cardboard covered box like Spock monitoring his scope. She reaches under her hood and rubs her ears.

“I, uh, of course, can go without pay.” She clears her throat. “I also asked my mom for some money. She’s going to send us ten thousand.”

That gets my attention. I didn’t dig deeply into Igloo’s family, but there’s no way that’s spare change for them. I abandon the computer and turn to her. As usual, she’s buried inside her hoodie.

“We can’t take your mother’s money,” I say. “I’m totally committed to Tapestry, but the overwhelming likelihood is we’re going to fail and we won’t be able to pay your mother back.”

“This is my dream. I want to make it happen. Since I was a kid I believed I could make a digital friend for people who have nobody. Tapestry is the best way of getting it out to everyone.” She sticks her fingers in her ears, pulls them out.

Right now that dream feels like a million pounds weighing down on my shoulders. I have no idea of what to say to her. I want her dream to live just as I want my dream to live.

“Let’s talk to the lawyers, and make an agreement so even if Tapestry goes down, you keep all the rights to your chat software.”

Igloo’s got her hands over her ears. “What’d you say?”

“I said we should . . . Forget it. Why are you covering your ears?”

“That heinous noise. How can you stand it?”

“What noise?”

“Like fingernails on a chalkboard,” she says, “although much higher pitched.”

“I don’t hear a thing.”

“You’re really old. No offense, but you lose hearing at the upper frequencies when you’re old.”

Jeez. “I’m not that old.”

“Old enough. Hold on, I’ll show you on a sound meter.” She leaves with her hands still over her ears.

When she comes back a few minutes later she’s got earplugs in, and she’s carrying a tablet with a fancy microphone plugged into the USB port.

“This is a sound spectrum analyzer. We use it when we’re recording. This graph is by frequency along the bottom, amplitude vertically.” As she speaks, the graph jumps up and down on the left hand side. “That’s my voice. Now look over here.” She pinches and zooms into the right hand side of the graph. “The area between twenty and twenty-two kilohertz is pegged,” she says.

Indeed, the graph jumps up and down in that range.

“You can’t hear that, most people can’t. I’m pretty sensitive to high frequencies. This is right at the upper limit of what regular speakers produce.”

She moves the microphone around and the graph jumps even higher as it nears my phone, and high again when it nears the cardboard box.

Oh, God. “Is there anything you can do so I can hear it?”

She nods. “A frequency shift. Hold on.”

A few seconds later I hear a warble similar to an old-fashioned modem. My heart jumps into my throat. Oh, God.

I grab my phone and hold the power button down until the phone does a hard shutdown, or appears to. The screen blinks and goes dark, but the sound meter is still active.

I seize my desk lamp by the gooseneck and smash the weighted base down on my phone, splintering the screen. I keep pounding until shards of electronics go flying.

“Holy shit!” Igloo ducks away, shielding herself from debris. Then she stands upright and turns the display toward me. The frequency meter has dropped to zero.

Igloo stares at me, then the desk and the remnants of my phone. She pulls back her hood. “That’s, uh, weird, dude. What’s going on?”

I’m breathing heavy, a rush of adrenaline kicking in from my act of violence.

“I isolated that computer,” I say, pointing to the cardboard box, “so nobody could access the data on it. That sounded like an old acoustic modem. It must be an ultrasonic exploit to work around air gaps. I didn’t think . . .”

I sink into the chair. I’m not merely being investigated by the government. I must be on active watch. There are probably agents sitting outside the building right now, waiting for me.

“Who would do that?” Igloo asks.

“The government,” I blurt out.

“You think the government is spying on you?”

I nod, afraid she’s going to conclude I’ve mentally lost it.

“That makes sense,” Igloo says. “Imagine what a threat Tapestry would be to their ability to spy on us. Decentralized. Encrypted. Power to the people. Of course the NSA will be pissed.”

“Oh,” I say, suddenly feeling dumb. I assumed the government was after me for
killing
people. That’s my guilt speaking. It makes more sense they’d watch me because I’m threatening their ability to monitor the population.

C
HRIS
D
ALY
parks a few blocks away and shoulders a large black backpack. Angie’s condo is a mid-rise building on a street straddling a residential neighborhood and a mixed-use district. Coming through the neighborhood, he’s able to avoid the more prevalent security cameras in the businesses. The condo has a digital security card reader next to the door. Without stopping, he sticks a small scanner to the underside of the reader, and continues past the door.

The analysis detail started in on Angie this morning. Computers, phones, work security cameras, home network. They’re all being cracked right now. Her security is good, her patches up to date, her accounts and ports all locked down, but there are ways in.

Her home has been particularly resistant. Despite several hours of trying, they haven’t been able to connect to a single webcam or microphone.

He walks around the block, back through the neighborhood, and stops a block and a half away. He can see the entrance from here, where he won’t be suspicious. He waits until someone enters, then walks back toward the building. Once there, he peels the scanner off the bottom of the badge reader, and gives it a squeeze. The door unlocks.

Inside, the building has its own security cameras, of course. The team back home assured him they’d erase today’s footage at midnight and replace it with yesterday’s footage. Angie’s at work, so he can do anything he wants for the next couple of hours.

He doesn’t know what security Angie has inside her apartment. That’s why he knocks on the neighbor’s place, which is guaranteed to be less secure than her place. No one answers, as expected, since the analysts told him one neighbor was traveling and the other at work, so he spends a minute getting the neighbor’s door open.

He undoes the backpack, pulls out four devices on tripods, and stands them, evenly spaced, throughout the neighbor’s condo facing Angie’s. When he’s done setting them up, he goes around to the neighbor on the opposite side of Angie’s condo, and repeats the process with four more tripods.

He pulls out a small tablet and initiates the 3D scanning process. Each device sends out tens of thousands of pings at different angles and frequencies, while the others listen. Then the next device sends out pings, until they’ve all had turns to broadcast and listen.

Materials like wood, metal, plastic, and fabrics each block or deflect different frequency ranges. With the listeners positioned at many different places, they track every signal as it passes through the condo, bounces off materials. The massive quantities of raw data are sucked up into an array of servers that process the signal measurements and experimentally retrofit a three-dimensional model that best fits the deviations in path, intensity, and frequency shifts.

When signal capture is done, twenty minutes later, he packs up the equipment while the data is crunched in the cloud. By the time all the equipment is back in the car, he’s got a 3D model of everything inside Angie’s condo, accurate to within a few millimeters. The software continues to work, correlating patterns of shapes and materials against a database of known objects. As each object is identified, the model is updated. An outline of a pot in a kitchen cabinet is identified as an All-Clad Stainless Steel 2 Quart Boiler.

In the bedroom, her clothes closet is a haze, the soft fabrics difficult to resolve. The software can never match such soft items individually, though it incorporates her purchase history, and the vague confusion of clothing is overlaid with the constrained list of possibilities.

When the analysis is complete, Chris knows the model of webcam she has monitoring the front door and windows. Radio frequency monitoring identifies both the router talking to the webcams, as well as the wireless NAS hard drive hidden inside her IKEA hollow-core headboard, inductively charging off a power cord that passes behind the bed. He’s startled by the appearance of motion inside the apartment during the scan, but it’s only her robotic floor cleaner beginning its rounds.

The webcams by themselves indicate someone seriously obsessed with security, and the hidden hard drive demonstrates a level of paranoia typically reserved for criminals and crazies. Unfortunately, there’s nothing in the apartment directly incriminating Angie. Crazy on the other hand . . . maybe.

When the FBI team dispatched to San Diego finally turned up the solar-powered Raspberry Pi router sitting on a downtown building rooftop, they had a courier take it directly to a lab. The lab technicians are still trying to recover the contents of the overwritten flash memory, but Chris has complete specs on the hardware. Nothing in the apartment matches. Angie has some electronics tools, but no soldering iron, and the techs were clear the onion router had been hand-soldered. There isn’t any proof she fabricated them here.

At every step he becomes more convinced Angie is hiding something huge, even though they lack evidence tying her to anything specific.

The client paid him to derail Angie, and he has to deliver. However, there’s an opportunity to make a genuine break in a previously unknown string of crimes, and he hates to pass that opportunity up. Imagine meeting the deliverable by legitimately arresting her? It doesn’t get more elegant than that. Yet despite all the resources at BRI’s disposal, he’s been unable to make a connection.

That brings him back to the alternative. The psych boys say she’s unstable, and it won’t take much to push her over the edge. He’ll need to resort to a smear campaign based on what they know about her past.

T
HAT AFTERNOON
,
I clean up the splintered fragments of glass and circuitry from my smashed phone. Part of me wishes I’d taken a less destructive approach to shutting down the ultrasonic modem, though I was too panicked to think clearly at the time.

There are some older phones lying around somewhere. I rummage through my drawers until I find one. The SIM card from my broken phone is destroyed. Fortunately, my bin full of odds and ends has a few blank SIM cards and an old SIM reader/writer I built for a few bucks in parts from an electronics shop. A handy thing if you want to clone other people’s SIM cards to make and receive phone calls as them. In this case, I restore my own backed up SIM card, and I’ve got a new working phone.