I whispered, because sound carried far in that small house. “Look, you know I’m attracted to you, Patty, that’s obvious. Maybe a little too obvious.”
“So what are you—?”
“You’re a little drunk.”
“I have the right to get drunk. I just buried my husband, for God’s sake.”
“Of course you do. But I think maybe this is too soon.”
It feels like a betrayal, I thought, but didn’t want to say it.
Patty was looking for comfort, that was all, and I had just denied it to her. It felt like the right thing to do, but that didn’t mean it felt good.
46
Breakfast was a little awkward. Not on my part, but Patty seemed embarrassed around me. Brendan was much more communicative than he’d been the day before. I left before Patty and the kids had to head out the door—she to the hospital, they all to school—because I had to get to the office as soon as I could. We all hugged goodbye, and I kissed Patty on the cheek.
I texted Dorothy and asked her if we could meet first thing.
She was there before me. I’d run into some bad rush-hour traffic around Braintree. Dorothy handed me a mug of black coffee as I entered my office. She was wearing jeans and a black sleeveless top.
“Whoever killed Maggie Benson also took her phone,” I said.
“And you want to locate that phone.”
“That’s an interesting idea. I’ll call the detective who’s on the homicide. But I had a different thought. I saw her taking pictures of Kimball’s documents on her phone. Won’t they be backed up to her iCloud account? Won’t they be on some Apple server somewhere?”
She shrugged. “The detective can serve a warrant on Apple. Maybe he did already.”
“I’ll ask.”
“And then they get in line. It’s a long line—takes a couple days. Apple gets a lot of warrants. Unless it’s a missing person’s case, say. Those, Apple will give them within minutes. People think they have some right to privacy—wrong, they do not. Cloud storage falls under their terms of service, which basically says, ‘We cooperate with law enforcement.’”
“So how can I get it?”
“Without knowing her Apple ID and password, you’re stuck. You can’t.”
“Shit.” I picked up one of my Blackwing pencils and drummed its eraser on the desktop, making a rhythmic tattoo.
“Plus, Nick, you don’t know the pics ever got backed up to the cloud.”
“We don’t?”
“Only if her phone was set to automatically sync with iCloud. But there’s different settings. I set mine to sync only when it’s plugged in. I do that to save battery.”
“So the pictures might not even have been backed up.”
She nodded. She seemed to be about to say something. I said, “What?”
“What are you doing?”
“Doing?”
“This case. You said the client wants the investigation shut down.”
“She does.”
“So what, we’re going to work for free? For a woman who’s loaded? My God.”
“This is about Maggie now,” I said. I didn’t explain.
My mobile phone rang. It was George Devlin.
His big white RV, bristling with antennas, was parked outside on the street. I knocked on the exterior to let him know I was there, then opened the door and got in.
Inside the light was dim, and it took my eyes a while to adjust.
George Devlin did not go out in public, not since he returned from the war. He lived in dim light because he didn’t want to be seen. When he joined my Special Forces A-Team, he was a happy, upbeat, and very handsome guy. A chick magnet. Someone on the team dubbed him Romeo, and it stuck.
Until the day that an IED nearly killed him. He survived, but most of his face was gone. Now it was a welter of scar tissue. He had nostrils but no nose, a jagged slash of a mouth. Some might have called him a monster.
George was sitting on a stool in the darkness, in front of a slim counter that held electronic equipment, secured to the walls of the RV. He spoke in a raspy whisper, because his vocal cords were badly damaged. “Do you have any drawings?”
“Blueprints,” I said, and handed him the sheaf of papers on which the drawings had been printed.
He moved his head close to the pages and looked them over in silence.
“You targeting the executive suite?”
“Right.”
“Seventh floor. What’s the company?”
“Phoenicia Health Sciences?”
“Sounds like a government cat’s paw.” He loathed the government and considered all law enforcement agencies to be the enemy.
“It’s not. It’s a CRO—a company that does tests for pharmaceutical companies.”
“What does this have to do with Sean Lenehan?”
I explained quickly about Sukie Kimball and how she wanted proof that her family’s company had buried the evidence that Oxydone was dangerously addictive. After a slight pause, I told him about Maggie’s murder. He didn’t know her, of course, but I wanted him to understand that for me, this was personal.
“Well, I want to tell you something,” he said, and he swiveled on his stool to look at me directly through his one eye. Pulled out a small white inhaler and breathed in through it. “I am constantly in pain, Heller.” His mouth made a clicking sound. “And only Oxydone gets me through.”
I nodded. Said nothing. It sounded like an advertisement. Only Oxydone gets me through. The man had to live his life not only terribly disfigured but in physical agony.
He went on. “Is Oxydone addictive? Of course it’s addictive. I’m an addict. But I can’t imagine life without it.”
I didn’t know what to say. He didn’t mind being an addict. As long as he kept getting a prescription, and he was somehow able to function, who was I to say it was wrong? But that didn’t diminish one bit my determination to find proof of the goddamned study. Because for everyone like Devlin there was someone else—maybe ten people—who were helpless under the drug’s spell.
And because of what had happened to Maggie.
“I assume Phoenicia’s employees use RFID cards like everyone else, right?”
“Right.”
“Are you looking to clone one card or multiple?”
“Multiple. And choose whoever has the highest access level.”
“Have you used this toy before?” He slid across the counter what looked like a laptop computer in its case. “It’s called the Boscloner. It captures and clones RFID cards.”
I shook my head. “What’s the read range?”
“Three feet.”
“Really? That’s fantastic.” He showed me how to use it, how to control it with my iPhone, how to clone a lot of ID cards and not just one.
“Once you get into the target’s office, what do you want to do?”
“Steal the entire contents of his computer hard drive. Everything.”
“If they have even rudimentary security, their network’s gonna be password protected.”
“For sure.”
“You don’t have the guy’s password, I assume, right?”
“No.”
“All right, so you need two separate payloads.”
“If you say so.”
“Here we go. This is what you need.” He handed me a little black device with a USB plug at the end of it. Maybe a couple of inches long, half an inch thick. “This is called the Bash Bunny.”
“Cute name.”
“From the folks who brought you the Rubber Ducky and the Pineapple. Notice the switch on the side?”
I nodded.
“Up for payload one. Down for payload two. Then you plug it in to a USB port.”
“Okay.”
“Now, we’re going to need to
copy all the files to something, and we’ve got a choice. This guy or this guy?”
One device he held up was a five-inch oblong, three inches wide, fairly thick. The other looked like a black credit card. It said Sandisk on it.
I took the credit card. “That holds two terabytes of data,” Devlin said, “as opposed to four terabytes on the other guy. But two terabytes will surely be enough.”
“If you say so.”
“I should warn you the one you’re holding is a lot more expensive.”
“I have a rich client.” Who’d asked that the investigation be discontinued. But I had a feeling she’d eventually pay.
“What antivirus program does Phoenicia use, do you know?”
“How the hell would I know?”
“Huh,” he said. He swiveled on his stool and hunched his shoulders. Tapped at a keyboard. A flat-screen came to life. He tapped some more. “All right, let’s see. I’m on the Phoenicia Health Sciences website. Help wanted. Positions available. Here we go. Requires familiarity with Office, LANDesk, and McAfee ePO.”
“Translation?”
He shook his head. “These corporations are so stupid. They tell you right there on their website what antivirus software they use. What kinda security is that? All right. Well, good for us.”
Devlin spent a few more minutes programming the little black device, and then I left with my collection of toys.
I also thought it might be useful to do some basic social media research on Dr. Arthur Scavolini. I don’t know of a better invention for eliminating privacy than social media. People post everything about themselves—pictures of their kids, their families, pictures of themselves doing adventure travel, pictures of themselves with more famous people. Where and when they did whatever. All kinds of personal stuff.
So I knew he’d gone to Rush Medical College in Chicago and trained in Chicago and at Duke. He seemed to have no hobbies. He had three kids and worked a lot of hours. Overall he seemed extremely nerdy, but that just made him a perfect fit for the job. He seemed to be well-off, seemed to have come into wealth a few years back. He and his wife, Linda, had gone on a high-end cruise in the Mediterranean a couple of years ago and had posted lots of photos of Morocco.
But the task still remained: I had to figure out how to get into his office. That was going to be the hard part.
47
At four thirty that afternoon, cars were streaming out of the Phoenicia Health Sciences parking lot. I was headed in the opposite direction. I found a space in the visitors’ lot, grabbed my trusty metal clipboard and the Boscloner device, in its laptop bag.
I was wearing a suit and no tie—I’d noticed on my last visit that ties were rare at Phoenicia—and a pair of heavy black-framed glasses. The clipboard was key. It made you look official, like you belonged wherever you were.
I approached the silvery, modernistic building. I passed through a revolving door into a marble-walled lobby, saw the long marble reception desk, saw turnstiles, people hustling through them and exiting the building, leaving for the day. I looped around the lobby, at one point taking a picture of the big Phoenicia logo behind the reception desk (but actually capturing an image of the security guard in his gray uniform).
I stood by the revolving doors, examining my clipboard, generally standing in the way.
And letting the Boscloner do its thing. Stealing the creds, as the expression goes—the credentials. Every time anyone with a Phoenicia Health Sciences security badge passed within three feet of me, it was recording a long series of numbers associated with their badge. All the metadata. I’d turned off the notification sounds on my phone, so it was doing it silently.
I stood there as long as I dared, recording badge numbers and observing security. It seemed fairly tight. No one could just come in and enter the building. You had to either have an RFID card or be issued a temporary one, as a visitor. After about five minutes, it seemed long enough. If everything was working right, I had captured the data off several dozen badges. Any one of them would get me past the turnstiles and into the building itself. But beyond that, I had no idea what level of access they’d get me. How close to the executive suites.
With a final glance at my clipboard, I turned around and entered one of the revolving doors and left the building.
Then I walked around the building all the way to the back, where the loading dock was located.
Sure enough, there was an outdoor smoking area next to it. Smokers, in our censorious times, are often relegated to undesirable locations, like next to a loading dock.
A couple of smokers stood far apart from each other on a freshly paved asphalt square, near a parking area for trucks, on either side of the loading dock. The dock was still operating; the doors were open. I glanced at my watch. Twenty minutes before five o’clock. Still early in the evening rush hour.
The two smokers were a man and a woman, apparently unconnected to each other. They could have been executives, or lab techs, or administrative assistants. You couldn’t tell from the way they were dressed. I took out a pack of Marlboros, shook one out. Put it in my mouth. Made a show of feeling my pockets, looking for a match or a lighter. Then I approached the woman, who looked to be in her forties. I took the cigarette out of my mouth and said, “Could I bum a light?”
She said, “I think I can do that,” in a heavy smoker’s rasp, pulled out a cheap Bic lighter, and handed it to me.
While my Boscloner captured the data off her ID badge, I looked at it, clipped to her purse over her left shoulder, and mentally recorded its appearance. Light blue with Phoenicia Health Sciences’ logo and her last name in big letters on top—O’GRADY—and her first name on the bottom: DARLENE.
“Thanks,” I said.
“No problem,” she replied with a pleasant smile.
We stood, smoking for a while in companionable silence. If I needed any intel about the company, now would be the right time to strike up a casual conversation. But all I needed was her badge data.
A white van pulled up nearby, and a number of navy-blue-uniformed men and women got out. One of them opened the van’s rear doors and began taking out mops and buckets and distributing them. The cleaners were here for their evening shift, just as people were vacating their offices.
I walked over to the van and, while my device was capturing their ID card data, I asked one of them, a small woman of indeterminate age, how to get to Route 95 South.
Depending on the company, and the security precautions it takes, cleaners of office buildings often have wide access. Their RFID badges could be particularly valuable.
“Pardon?” she said.
“Ninety-five south,” I repeated, gesturing toward the exit.
She shrugged and kept wheeling her mop-and-bucket. She joined a line of blue-uniformed employees, all pushing carts or pulling buckets behind them.
I had what I needed now. I’d stolen enough creds.
I drifted away from the loading dock and headed back to my car.
48
That handy device that Devlin had lent me, the Boscloner, could generate its own blank keys, but because I wanted it to look as close to a real badge as possible, I preferred to use the ID card printer I’d bought for around a thousand bucks.
Dorothy figured out how to operate it, and back at the office she made me one that looked a lot like the real thing. A medium blue PVC card key with the Phoenicia logo on it. The name “GRANT James.” Meanwhile, my receptionist, Jillian Alperin, was hunting down for me the simple gray uniform that Phoenicia’s security staff wore. I had a small collection of uniforms, but not that.
At seven in the morning, I arrived at the silvery cube that was Phoenicia Health Sciences’ headquarters in Waltham. Very few cars in the parking lot; several in the CLINIC and CLINICAL PATIENTS spaces. There was a separate entrance to the research clinic at the back of the building, by a row of manicu
red cedars, just for people taking part in medical studies here.
A very nice receptionist guided me to a waiting room, where a very nice nurse greeted me and handed me a bunch of forms to fill out. All the chairs and couches in the waiting room looked brand-new. There were just a few other people there, two small, dark-haired young women, who seemed to know each other, and a heavyset guy of around thirty with long, greasy blond hair.
I found myself filling out a consent form that indemnified the company in case of all types of possible calamities, including “mutilation or death.” I didn’t like the sound of that one. And there were all kinds of other forms that protected Phoenicia from being sued.
Within a couple of minutes the waiting room had filled up with twelve visitors. The head nurse led us all into the adjoining room and made us watch a short video that was basically propaganda about all the good we were doing for science and humanity. The guy with the greasy blond hair turned around and said, “I’ve seen this one, like, ten times already,” and he chuckled. He sounded like a regular.
Another woman came out, a research coordinator. She was tall and broad and clearly comfortable being in charge. She explained to us how the study was going to work. Nothing very complicated. They were testing a new acid-suppression medicine. They’d give us a pill, give us three meals, and measure our stomach acid throughout the day and night.
She didn’t explain how.
She gave a little wave to the guy with the greasy blond hair. “Hi, Winston,” she said. “Welcome back.” By now I was starting to get hungry. They required you eat nothing after midnight the night before. I could drink water; that was all. Don’t take any antacids.
A few minutes later my name was called and I was shown to a curtained-off area full of medical machinery, like blood pressure monitors and such. A sprightly redheaded nurse named Denise measured my blood pressure and drew blood. She gave me a cup, asked me to fill it with urine. I went to the nearby bathroom and did it.
Meanwhile, I was looking around at the layout, the floor plan in my head. Looking for cameras. Making mental notes of where the exits were located and how visible they were.
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