Come And Find Me Part 22

Daniel started to get up but Diana put her hand firmly on his shoulder. "Let me," she said. He collapsed back into his chair.

She picked up his empty coffee cup and her own, still nearly full. "I think I remember how you like it. Good and strong."

Diana prayed that Daniel wouldn't follow her to the sink. When she got there, she turned on the water, and while it was running, she rinsed out Daniel's cup and pretended to rinse out her own. Meanwhile, she felt around in her pocket for her pills. With her thumb, she flipped open the lid of the container and emptied the remaining pills into the pocket.

She dumped out the last bit of coffee in the pot and rinsed it. Threw away the used coffee filter and replaced it with a new one. In the refrigerator's freezer compartment she found coffee beans. She ladled ten scoops into the coffee grinder. Her back shielding the grinder from Daniel's view, she slipped the pills from her pocket. There were five and a half left. She dropped all but one into the grinder.

"You remember the formula?" Daniel asked. He'd crossed the room silently and was standing right behind her.

Diana's heart stuttered. The little white pills seemed to glow among the nearly black beans.

"Of course I do," she said, quickly putting on the grinder's lid and pressing down to turn it on. Daniel put his hand over hers. One, two, three . . . She counted to herself, listening as the pitch of the grinding shifted higher and higher.

Daniel released his hand, but Diana kept hers pressed down and continued counting until she reached twenty. She couldn't afford any telltale white chunks to still be visible. When she removed the lid, the pills had disappeared into the fine, uniformly dark powder.

Daniel leaned close to the grinder and sniffed. "Ambrosia of the G.o.ds," he said.

He returned to his computer. While the coffee dripped through the filter, Diana stood behind him. He shifted to one side so she could see. It was a memo addressed to Andrew. Andrew Moore was Vault's head of IT. The subject line was "Recommendations." Daniel was building a numbered list, and he was up to number seven.

"You're giving them recommendations at a kickoff meeting?" she asked.

"Why not?"

"Because all we've done so far is gather background information, propose an approach, and cash their advance. Coming in day one with answers? Not a good idea."

"But it's obvious to anyone what they need to do."

"Not to anyone. Certainly not to them. They need to feel like you're listening. Your response has to seem agile, not off the shelf. It should grow out of their 'unique' "-Diana drew quote marks in the air-"'situation.' There's a reason we call what we do solutions. No one wants to pay a lot for the quick fix. Besides, it's about ownership. Give them a prescription up front? They'll feel like they could have gone to a wiki and gotten the same answers for free." She bent down, reaching for his keyboard. "May I?"

Daniel pushed away from the table, his arms folded across his chest.

"And-" At the top of the memo she highlighted TO: ANDREW. "This early in your relationship, don't a.s.sume you can use the COO's first name."

"Since when?"

"Since always. But that's a minor point." She scrolled through the doc.u.ment, stopped, and highlighted another line. "Never call what they do engineering." In another she highlighted data storage. "This is even worse. They like to think of themselves as software developers.' "

"You're kidding."

"Sweat the small stuff. Show that you know their marketing niche, what image they're trying to project. Believe me, it matters."

The coffeepot made slurping sounds as the last bit of water dripped through. Diana went over to it and filled Daniel's cup. She made sure he saw her add some fresh coffee to the top of her own unfinished cup. She turned to face him and took a sip, smiling as she did so.

"The main thing," she said, walking back to him and handing him his cup, "is this. We shouldn't be handing them answers at a first meeting. We should be listening." She bent over and read some more, shaking her head.

He got up, offering her his seat. "Go to it."

Diana took her time, revising what Daniel had written, watching out of the corner of her eye as he drank some coffee, then drank more.

"There." Finally, unable to stretch the task out any longer, she pushed away from the table. The page she'd been working on rolled off the printer. She handed it to Daniel.

"Discussion points?" he said, reading the heading. "That's slick."

"Short and sweet. Asking, not telling. Now take the main points and make them into a slide presentation and we're good to go."

"We need slides?" Daniel groaned.

"You want to control the meeting, don't you? Besides, that's what they expect. Oh, and you should use the Gamelan corporate style."

"We have a corporate style?"

"It's amazing what impresses people."

Daniel yawned and stretched. His eyes seemed to have gone flat, the spark of intensity dimmed.

"Why don't you take a break? I can do this stuff in my sleep, and you need to sleep." Diana carried the printout to her computer. As she walked, the paper seemed to flutter like a sail on a little boat floating across the room, and she felt detached and floaty. She'd had just enough of the Xanax-laced coffee to give her some buoyancy and a thin layer of separation between herself and her surroundings.

"Help yourself to more coffee." She tossed the words over her shoulder. "Our meeting's not for hours." She opened the Gamelan presentation template and began to reshape the memo.

A while later she glanced over at Daniel. She recognized the cow-skull logo on the Web site that he was looking at-Cult of the Dead Cow-the online meeting place for hackers worldwide. Daniel had been one of the founders of their Ninja Strike Force, the elitest of the elite.

Soon he was yawning again. More coffee. She tried to telegraph the thought.

Chapter Thirty-Two.

Diana took her time over the presentation, fiddling around with transitions and special effects that she'd normally never have messed with, stretching out what should have been a thirty-minute job. Daniel stayed at Cult of the Dead Cow for about a quarter of an hour. Then he opened a window with a bright green background and boxes and lists-probably a system management tool. After that he was in OtherWorld. He projected a combat sim on the curved silo wall. Diana had to turn away to keep from feeling seasick at the 3-D effect. Finally he pumped his fist and the gunfire and explosions stopped.

Then, for a while, there was just clicking and the odd ding or whoosh. He was probably in e-mail. She heard him yawn. She didn't look around when he got up to pour himself yet another cup of coffee.

A little while later, Daniel leaned back in his chair, stretched his legs out in front of him, and folded his arms across his chest. He yawned and rubbed his face.

A few minutes later, he started to nod off, jerking awake and then subsiding. Finally he nodded off completely, tilting sideways. Diana waited. And waited.

She was about to get up when he gave a snort and sat up.

Diana pretended she was still working. Daniel had gone through more than half the pot of coffee. There should have been enough Xanax to make the average person comatose. But it would be a fatal mistake to consider Daniel average.

He sat forward, looked around, stretched and yawned, then settled back again. His eyes drifted shut and his head fell sideways. Full stop.

Diana waited, not daring to breathe. Daniel didn't stir. She cleared her throat. No response. She sc.r.a.ped her chair and coughed. Still he slept.

She walked over to him. With his mouth and his jaw slack, his face completely relaxed and unwired, Diana could see both the man she'd fallen in love with and the one he'd turned into. Then and always, he was so self-centered, so completely focused on whatever mission he'd set himself at a given moment, that he was willing to throw the people who loved him off a virtual cliff.

Once upon a time, Diana had let him mold her, shape her. If she'd been an apt pupil, then losing him wouldn't have broken her. But she'd allowed herself to depend on him to reflect back her very ident.i.ty.

She looked around. He'd certainly found the perfect place from which to sow his brand of chaos. The mill was isolated, apparently abandoned, the silo like a bunker with its three-foot-thick walls.

She gazed up the wall, tracking a path connecting a rebar that was just a step up from the mesh floor to one just a few feet higher, to another one, and another, and on up to a rebar within easy reach of the hatch that led to the outside world. For any experienced climber, it wouldn't be a challenging ascent. No more difficult than the practice wall she'd once trained on-the "baby wall," Daniel had called it-after she'd mastered her terror of climbing it for the first time.

But climbing even a baby wall, alone and without a safety harness, was suicidal. Just imagining herself, halfway up and untethered, made her want to throw up. Besides, she had no intention of running away.

As she reached past Daniel for his laptop, she heard a sound. It was a faint but precise dinging, as if someone were tapping a key on a miniature xylophone.

Ding-ding-ding. Ding-ding-ding. It continued, irritating and persistent. Daniel twitched in his sleep. She hovered over him, trying to locate the source. Finally the sound stopped. That's when she noticed that a message-waiting alert was flashing on his screen. But that hadn't been where the sound itself originated.

Diana shifted the laptop over to the edge of his Daniel's worktable and pulled her chair up to it. She clicked on the alert.

The text message that popped open was from Jake. It was a short note, saying that his plane was leaving on time and he was waiting to board at Logan.

Diana replied the way she imagined Daniel would have done, with a simple "A-OK." Anything fancier and Jake might have realized that the reply hadn't been written by Daniel. She wanted to convey an impression of business as usual.

But what exactly was their "business as usual"? Compromising data-she got that. But then what? There had to be more to it.

She toggled through Daniel's open applications, pausing at a bright green network management screen. She stared at the network name at the top of the screen. Volganet. This was where data stolen from MedLogic had been copied. This was where her laptop kept trying to send GPS coordinates, betraying its location.

d.a.m.n them. They weren't working with Volganet. They were Volganet.

Diana scanned the screen and found a list of users with registered access to Volganet. She scrolled down through the more than thirty entries. JWILSON. BPACKER. PHREAKANOID. ACIDFI. MKATE. It was a mix of hacker handles and conventional user names.

There was SOK0S-that was Daniel. NADIAV was there too. Account status: LOCKED.

Next, she navigated through the hierarchies of files on Volganet. At the top level, directory names were short and cryptic. One that caught her eyes was ML. MedLogic? NH and UI. Those could be abbreviations for Neponset Hospital and Unity Insurance-Gamelan clients that had bolted the minute she'd gotten a lead on their hackers.

Diana drilled down, through folders within folders. She felt sick. She'd thought she was such a hotshot security consultant when, in fact, she'd been nothing more than a puppet, a front for Daniel and Jake. They'd taken advantage of the trust she'd built and used her as their Trojan horse. She'd given them unfettered access to these companies' systems, enabling them to help themselves . . . to what?

Opening some files at random, she found a bill for outpatient treatment; a medical history complete with name, address, and Social Security number; a DNA profile like the one stolen from MedLogic; a lab worker's personnel file; a cancer patient's treatment regimen; a script for Paxil.

Her gaze traveled from the computer screen to a pair of servers that sat on the floor. They were good-size computers, about the size of mini-refrigerators, each with drawers stacked on top. Those would contain slots for hard drives, a data farm. All told, she guessed there'd be room for tens of thousands of gigabytes-much more than they needed for any business she'd thought they were in.

How long had she been acting the fool? The dates on some of the folders went back six months. That had been during the time when Daniel was still out of the country, or so he claimed. Was there even a single fact in his supposed time line that she could check?

The mill-the property sale had to have been registered. That she could confirm.

She brought up a map of New Hampshire. She found Mill Village, traced the Merrimack River a few miles north to where she guessed the mill was located. Most likely it was in Merrimack County.

She found the Merrimack County's online registry of deeds, created an account, and got as far as the inquiry screen. She set a range of 20082010 in the TRANSACTION DATE field. The only other piece of information she needed was LAST NAME.

She knew it was unlikely, but she tried Schechter, Daniel's last name. No match. Then she tried Jake's last name, Filgate. Back came a match for a Michele Filgate, but the property listed was on Main Street in Concord. Then she tried Wilson, then Packer, and on through the surnames she'd extracted from the list of system users.

Out of ideas, she tried typing in her own last name. Bingo. Diana Highsmith had purchased the four-acre parcel with three vacant industrial buildings for $1,660,000 on . . . Diana blinked . . . August 11, 2008.

Diana felt as if she'd been dropped, the air knocked out of her. Daniel and Jake had used her ident.i.ty to buy this property four months before her life had been shattered by Daniel's disappearance. They'd been planning, knowing that they'd need a bunker where Daniel could live off the grid.

Now she knew for sure what she'd been afraid to contemplate. There'd been no accident. Daniel hadn't been free-climbing without a harness. He hadn't been climbing at all. It was all a sham, orchestrated for her as an audience of one. She felt sick and angry, furious with herself. How could she have loved this man, trusted his friend? She was a complete fool.

Daniel must have started hiking back to civilization as soon as Diana had cleared the first ledge and was safely out of sight. He'd cried out from below and thrown his helmet into the creva.s.se. She might even have pa.s.sed near him as she scrambled down, racing to base camp to bring help.

Had he felt even a twinge of regret or pity, or only relief at the baggage he'd shed and excitement at the new opportunities that were about to open up to him?

Chapter Thirty-Three.

When Jake had brought her the urn, supposedly from Switzerland and supposedly containing Daniel's ashes, Diana had finally stepped through a portal from before to after, from together to alone. Holding the urn, she'd realized that she'd never again feel Daniel's arms around her. Hear his ready laugh when she teased him. Watch pleasure suffuse his face as he enjoyed her body.

Now, looking at Daniel asleep in the chair, his face as tender and vulnerable as a child's in repose, she wondered if she'd ever really known him at all. If she had, she'd certainly lost him long before he catapulted himself out of her life.

Maybe he'd loved her-for five minutes. But longer than that? He couldn't love anyone but himself.

One thing was clear: Daniel had never intended to give up hacking. His offer to partner with her and go legit had been a setup designed to gull her into traveling to Switzerland in order to celebrate the transition. He and Jake had had other plans, and she was the witness they needed to make them happen. After that, she'd become the docile, blindfolded helpmate, the princess in the tower whom they needed to bring their plans to fruition.

What could have been worth the betrayal? As if Diana had finally asked the right question, the dinging sound started up again.

"Huh? What happened? Where's . . . ?" Daniel flailed, looking wildly around the room and tipping sideways, nearly falling out of his chair.

"Whoa, take it easy." Diana jumped up and grabbed his arm.

Ding-ding-ding. The sound seemed louder, and Diana spotted the source-barely visible in Daniel's pocket was the tip of the distinctive plastic arc of his Bluetooth receiver. It occurred to her that though cell phones didn't get a signal in the silo, his computer probably had a voice messaging program like Skype. He'd need a headset like the Bluetooth in order to hear and talk.

"Di?" Daniel looked at her, confused, his pupils dilated.

As she steadied him, she hooked the receiver and slid it from his pocket, folding it in her hand to m.u.f.fle the sound. "You just fell asleep," she said.

"Jesus." Daniel tried to push himself to his feet but fell back, and all the while the d.a.m.n thing kept dinging. She fumbled with the receiver until she found the b.u.t.ton that turned off the sound and pressed it.

"What the h.e.l.l's the matter with me? Feels like . . . feels like . . . I dunno . . ." His words slurred together. "Am I sick?" He touched his face. "My computer. Where . . . ?" He put his hands down in the empty spot on his desk where his keyboard should have been and sat there hunched over, his mouth hanging open.

"You're not sick. You were just exhausted. You fell asleep practically on top of your keyboard, so I moved it aside. See? It's right over here."

Daniel glanced over at it. "Log out. Need to log out," he muttered. "Need to . . . shut down."

"You already did that."

"Did I?"