Come And Find Me Part 4

Chapter Six.

Diana pushed away from her desk. Talking to Jake always reminded her of Daniel. Again she drew Daniel's driftwood walking stick from the stand by her desk and cradled it in her arms, letting the tang of pine surround her. G.o.d, she missed him. Missed his touch. The sound of his voice. His face. That edge-of-a-cliff feeling of being around him, not knowing what he was going to do next.

She remembered the first moment she'd laid eyes on him. She'd been a junior at UMa.s.s Dartmouth with a work-study job in the office of the dean of students. Her boss was the dean's administrative a.s.sistant, Margaret Brown, a woman who reminded Diana of a lemon with all the juice squeezed out.

Diana had been alone in the office, answering the phones, when Jake-she'd met him at a frat party a year earlier-dropped by. With him was a guy in a biker jacket and torn Levi's. He was hot, with dark and heavy-lidded eyes, and so tall that he'd had to stoop coming through the door to the office. His hair was long and wild. He hadn't yet gone punk and shaved the sides of his head.

The three of them had gone out drinking that night, and ended up on the edge of a granite quarry in Quincy, about twenty miles from school. They'd sat smoking a joint, their legs dangling over a stone ledge, moonlight shining silver on the still black water that filled the pit before them. Daniel and Jake had stripped off their clothing and dived in.

"Come on!" Daniel shouted when he surfaced, splashing his arms in the water, the drops sparkling, ripples shimmering all around him. Even as stoned as Diana was, there was no way she could do it.

They'd returned to that quarry many times, but it wasn't until months later, in the middle of one of New England's hottest summers, that she'd gotten wasted enough to strip off her clothes and reckless enough to dive off the ledge. By then, she and Daniel were lovers.

It was Daniel who'd installed a program on Margaret Brown's computer so that it sounded like an old-fashioned typewriter every time she hit a key, and ratcheted and dinged when the return key was pressed. A built-in time delay guaranteed that the program didn't kick in until the middle of a day Diana called in sick so she wouldn't be suspected.

Diana's artistic talent had been recruited to forge Miss Brown's signature on a requisition for a ma.s.sage table and portable Jacuzzi to be delivered to President McCafferty's office.

Then, a few months before the end of that year, there'd been an uproar when college administrators noticed that a bunch of the student names on transcripts had been altered. Elvis Pretzel and Wile E. Coyote were not students at the college. Diana's name had been changed to Mary Jane Watson, Spider-Man's girlfriend.

No one took Miss Brown seriously when she voiced her suspicion that Diana and her oddball friends had something to do with it.

Diana began her senior year but she never graduated. That October her mother was diagnosed with cancer. Ashley was still in high school and their father was long gone. So Diana had cleaned out her dorm room and loaded boxes into a borrowed Dodge van and headed home. She hadn't known whether to pack her books or throw them away. A brutal regimen of chemo and radiation therapy lay ahead, and Diana had no inkling of just how tough and resilient her mother would turn out to be.

The van's driver's seat was so high above the road and so close to the front b.u.mper that Diana felt unnerved behind the wheel. On the drive home, sometime after midnight on Route 24, somewhere in the middle of Bridgewater thirty miles south of home, she'd started to feel as if the car was driving itself.

Her heart surged, and there was a sharp pain in her chest. She felt smothered, as if the air in the car had no oxygen. She gripped the wheel, trying to keep the van steady and gasping for breath. It was all she could do to keep the steering wheel from veering right and, as she could see clearly in her mind's eye, the van careening into the woods.

Was this a heart attack? It couldn't be. She wasn't allowed to be sick. Her mother needed her. Ashley needed her.

Finally she managed to pull the car over into the breakdown lane and stop. She clawed at the window and cranked it open. The air rushing in didn't help. Instead, impenetrable darkness seemed to fold in around her.

For what felt like hours, she sat hunched over the steering wheel, gasping and sweating, unable to move, unable to get out of the car and find the cell phone she'd stupidly packed in a satchel and thrown in the trunk.

Had that been her first panic attack? Probably. But when she was in therapy later, she remembered some earlier moments, like tremors foreshadowing an earthquake. There was the time when she was fifteen supposedly watching Ashley swimming at Wollaston Beach. She'd turned her attention away as a couple of cute boys from her high school sauntered by, and when she looked back, she could no longer see Ashley's head bobbing in the waves. That moment was frozen in time, but she had no memory of throwing herself into the water, of swimming out to where she'd last seen her sister, only to hear Ashley calling to her from the sh.o.r.e and waving Popsicles that by then were dripping down her arms.

The panic attacks had increased through her mother's illness. After her mother's recovery, they'd abated so completely that at times Diana was convinced that she'd only imagined them. After Daniel's death, they'd returned full force.

Her house, and in particular her office, where she now sat, had become her refuge. As long as she stayed inside and took her medication, she was safe from ambush. Just in case, she had Daniel's driftwood to calm her. She slid it back into the stand by her desk. Along with his ashes, it was the only thing of his that she had left.

Diana returned to the living room. Ashley had done what she'd threatened: picked up all the stray bits of garbage, straightened piles, and carried away dirty dishes. Only the UPS box remained in the middle of the floor. The minute Diana picked it up she realized it was empty. Inside there was only tissue paper, a whiff of licorice, and a note.

Just borrowing them for tonight.

Promise.

xx oo Diana lifted the shade and looked out the window. Ashley was standing by her car talking on her cell phone. Squeezing the phone between chin and shoulder, she unlocked the hatchback and dropped the pile of clothing into the car. Then she stood there, hip thrown out. As Diana watched, Ashley ran her fingers through her hair, shot a few heated words into the phone, and snapped it shut. Then gave the world at large the finger. A few moments later, she drove off.

Sure, Ashley would return the new outfit. Just like she'd returned the snakeskin miniskirt Diana had picked up at a secondhand store when she was living with Daniel in New Hampshire. By the time Diana discovered it in Ashley's closet, Ashley had "forgotten" that it wasn't hers.

Too late, Diana noticed that Ashley had left her laptop, half hidden behind the base of the coatrack. At least that guaranteed she would be back sooner rather than later.

Diana returned to her desk. There was a new message from her in-world friend PWNED. This one was marked with a little red flag.

PWNED: nu doc-2G2B tru She had no idea what the person behind PWNED-a term that computer gamers used to mean beaten-looked like, but the avatar was a s.e.xy platinum blonde who moved with the grace of a gazelle and liked to end her messages with G.o.d is just an abbreviation for G.o.ddess. From asides PWNED had dropped, Diana gathered that she lived near Boston. Her QuackPatrol blog was infamous for outing so-called doctors and health-care gurus who preyed on the desperate.

Diana opened the attachment. Results within 7 days, it began. Apparently Dr. Grande in Sedona, Arizona, a.s.sessed patients through a telephone consult and a questionnaire. His revolutionary regimen to cure autism involved a weeklong liquid diet combined with six weeks of chelation therapy. Certainly sounded too good to be true.

Diana shot back a response.

Let's nail him.

She spent the next hour researching chelation therapy. There were boatloads of patient "testimonials" but no hard science. She checked Dr. Grande's financial ties and found that all of his clinics were owned by a corporation with headquarters in Ukraine.

When she finished up, she e-mailed PWNED a summary of what she'd discovered. A message came back less than a minute later.

PWNED: ^5.

Diana high-fived the monitor back. She realized, as she glanced at the time in the corner of her screen, that it had been over two hours since she last checked her security systems. That was progress in her quest to hold paranoia at bay.

Video from the camera anch.o.r.ed over her front door showed nothing more than a cardinal perched on her white picket fence. Her firewall had only logged the usual pinging from drones in the outside world.

She remembered the messages from GROB. She scrolled down to find them. The first one that had come hours earlier began: GROB: Got time to talk?

Chapter Seven.

Diana was mortified that just reading GROB's message set her tingling. He'd first contacted her months earlier in response to a question she'd posted in a forum for people suffering post-traumatic stress disorder. He'd had problems of his own to deal with, though he'd never told her what they were and she'd never told him hers.

The last time they'd "talked," she'd shared with him the little forays she'd made-walks into her own backyard and several times around the block-and her determination to return to the real world. He'd written her back: Small victories here, too. Today I drove to the bank and got out of the car instead of using the drive-up window. Lived to tell. World expands each day. When you are ready to take the plunge, we'll sit on a beach. Drink a toast. Tell ghost stories and scare each other to death. (Ha Ha!) Build a bonfire and sleep out under the stars.

Diana could almost smell the wood fire, burned down to smoldering coals. It reminded her of the time that she and Daniel had camped in the Grand Tetons. They'd lain twined together in a double sleeping bag, looking up, the sky so close that Diana had felt as if she could poke Jupiter and run her fingers through the Milky Way.

That sleeping bag was one of many things that she'd simply left behind after Daniel died, fifteen months, one week, and three days ago-she knew without having to check the calendar. They had been living in a weather-beaten farmhouse and working in a converted railway container tucked into a ramshackle barn. With their nearest neighbor miles away, the greatest danger was getting mistaken for a deer during hunting season. They'd been major players in the hackers' underground, and Daniel had achieved both the privacy and the notoriety he'd craved.

To earn the money they needed to support their spartan lifestyle and insatiable l.u.s.t for the latest technology, they sold copies of Data Sucker, a program Daniel had written that infiltrated computers through the Windows operating system. Always the entrepreneur, Jake had then suggested that Daniel write another software that they called A-Sucker, which protected computers against Data Sucker. Turned out there was an even bigger market for that.

Diana remembered the day she'd had her epiphany. Daniel had been sitting at his computer, intent on a game he was into, his face aglow with colors radiating off the screen. With the sides of his scalp shaved bare like some shock troop commando, and his worktable mounded with coils of cable, jury-rigged circuit boards, hopped-up laptops, and surveillance equipment, he looked every inch his pseudonym, SOK0S. Sow Chaos.

"Daniel," she'd said.

He was using a headset, but still Diana could hear the apocalyptic drumbeat and gunfire. She waved to snag his attention. When he looked over she mimed taking off the headset. He took it down, letting it rest around his neck.

"You see this headline?" she asked. " 'Death in a Medical Mix-up.' Charles River Hospital."

He rolled his eyes. "All we did was look around and bring down their database," he said, his gaze returning to his computer screen.

"We didn't just bring it down. Listen. 'Hackers wreak mayhem resulting in the death of at least one patient-' "

"Bogus. That is so not our fault." Daniel clicked the mouse. His screen lit up and Diana could hear the rat-a-tat of machine-gun fire.

"We destroyed their databases," Diana said. "They had to reconstruct medical orders from scratch. Apparently they got one of them wrong."

"Not our fault," Daniel said, his fingers dancing on the keyboard.

"But it was a foreseeable consequence of something we did."

"A lightning strike could have had the same results." He put the game on pause and turned to face her. "People like that deserve what they get. They stockpile a mountain of private information and then do a lousy job protecting it."

"Then once again, mission accomplished," she said, flashing him two thumbs up. "We'll get you a banner saying so. And I'm sure the woman who died thanks you too. She was fifty-two years old."

"All right already." Daniel looked longingly back at his screen.

"Daniel, she wasn't fragged in some combat sim. She had a name and a family, and they did everything that they thought they were supposed to do"-Diana heard her voice catch, surprised by the rogue emotion that sideswiped her-"but she died anyway, needlessly, meaninglessly, because we thought it would be a great idea to trash their system."

He winced. She knew he hated raw emotion. Well, that was just too d.a.m.ned bad.

"Remember when my mother had cancer? She turned fifty-two between rounds of chemo. She could barely swallow a bite of chocolate cake. I can't even imagine what it would have been like for us if an accidental overdose had killed her."

Daniel groaned and got up from his chair. He put his arms around her from behind and started to read over her shoulder. "You know as well as I do," he said after a minute, "these guys were an accident waiting to happen. Their backup systems were for s.h.i.t and not secured. If not us, then something much more destructive would have bitten them. All we did was wipe out some data. The chaos that followed? All of their own making."

She looked up at him. "Right. We expose weaknesses and then wash our hands of what happens next."

"So what's your point? You knew what you were getting into."

She held his gaze. "I thought I knew. But this time we've gone too far. Even if you don't, I feel responsible for this woman's death. Daniel, I'm telling you just as clearly as I can, I can't keep doing this."

He stood there, towering over her. "What are you saying?"

"I'm done. And I can't let you and Jake keep doing this either."

"You think you're letting us do this?"

Her heart pounded but for once she didn't apologize her way out of it. "I'm saying I've had enough."

Diana had been completely stunned when, a few weeks later, Daniel had been the one to suggest that they sell the farm, move back to the Boston area, and open a security consulting company as a trio of rehabilitated black hats.

They'd settled on the name Gamelan. It was sufficiently obscure and she liked the way it sounded. It even made a kind of sense. Gamelan was a Balinese music ensemble of percussion instruments. Drums, gongs, xylophones, bells. The music sounded odd and discordant, like the way the three of them worked together.

Daniel was the one who'd suggested they celebrate the impending transition by climbing the Eiger. But only two of them had come back alive, and instead of a dissonant trio, Gamelan Security turned into a fractious duo. Numbed by loss, Diana had been reluctantly dragged along by a determined Jake.

The Klaxon alarm startled Diana back to the present. Her palms turned sweaty and the back of her neck felt like someone laid an ice pack across it. She wasn't expecting a delivery, and besides it was too late for that.

She silenced the alarm. Couldn't be Ashley-she was supposed to be meeting Aaron downtown. Had to be a false alarm, the calm voice in her head reasoned, but she could barely hear it over the alarm that kept right on screaming inside her head.

She checked the surveillance feeds. It was already dark out, and the lights around the house had automatically turned on. None of the cameras showed anything amiss. She toggled the sun icon to a moon, and the images changed to velvety black.

There! In the feed from the camera alongside the house, she saw a bright green mottled shape moving across the screen. It disappeared from view and was picked up in the security camera angled behind the house. It could have been a person on all fours. Low to the ground. But it would have to be a small adult or a child.

Diana watched as the shape meandered back to the side of the house. It was more likely a racc.o.o.n or a large dog with a longish tail. She wanted it to go away, and then finally it did, pa.s.sing back through the electronic security perimeter and off the screens.

Diana pushed away from the monitors, feeling as if she'd been picked up and shaken. Even though she knew it was insane, she toured the house, checking that every window and door was latched.

She ended up in the kitchen. Rational a.n.a.lysis kept her bogeymen at bay, but just the unexpected jolt could stir up that still-potent residue of grief and trauma. She'd been on such an even keel that she'd gone a week without a single remote session with Dr. Lightfoot. She knew what her shrink's advice would be: Try to stay in the present. And along with that: Remember, you can't control what you can't control.

Diana checked that the back door was secure. Recognized the acrid smell of burned coffee. She'd left an empty pot on the warmer. Again. She shut off the machine and turned on the exhaust fan.

She opened the refrigerator. She hadn't eaten since breakfast. Her therapist had repeatedly warned her not to miss meals. Low blood sugar left her shaky and even more emotionally vulnerable.

She opened the package of American cheese Ashley had brought her and ate three slices. She was working on a Granny Smith apple when the phone rang. She lifted it off the wall. Ashley's cell-phone number glowed on the readout.

She checked the time. A few minutes to six.

"Hey, hon, you at Copley yet?" she asked.

"Getting there. What are you up to?" Ashley said. Diana could hear the sounds of a city in the background. Traffic. A horn honking. Voices.

"I took a nice long walk on the beach."

"Really?" Ashley said. Then laughed. "Sure you did. But you had . . . me going . . . for a minute there." She huffed. It sounded as if she was walking.

"Sooooo?" Diana asked.

"So I dumped him . . . Aaron and me . . . we're history." There was the sound of a siren and laughter, not Ashley's. "I did it."

"Really? That's so great. How do you feel?"

"Sore. Wet," Ashley said.

"What?"

"I told him that I just wasn't that into him. The relationship wasn't going anywhere and I'd had it with his weirdnesses. So he just sits there, drawing circles on the bar with his swizzle stick. He goes, 'You sure?'

"I'm like, yeah. Completely. You okay with that?