Wired Kingdom

by Rick Chesler

  Which reminded him. Were they going to call, or what? Pictures like that didn't come around every day. One more day, Roger told himself. If he didn't hear from them by this time tomorrow, he'd offer the images to another magazine. There'd be plenty of takers.

  In the meantime, he was bored, fixating on a pair of women in skimpy two-piece suits, tops undone, lying down by the water. He thought about walking over there for a better look, but decided against it. It was a huge beach, not crowded on this late weekday afternoon, and he knew the girls would become uncomfortable if an overweight, old curmudgeon such as himself were to take one step within a hundred feet of them.

  His elbow hit something in his backpack as he shifted positions, and a smile crossed his face. He fished out his Pentax and uncapped the long zoom lens. Here we go, he thought, bringing the viewfinder to his eye. He was trying to decide which sunbather he admired more when a voice mere feet away spiked his heart rate. He lowered the camera and turned around to see a pair of policemen on quadrunner ATVs. How did they manage to sneak up on him like that? Some P.I., he thought bitterly.

  “Hey, Mr. Wildlife Photographer,” one of the cops said, nodding at the camera. “Maybe that's okay in Europe, or wherever you come from, but not on this beach. This is your one warning. Put that thing away and move on, you got it? You're done here for the day.”

  Roger mumbled something about a lens check as he gathered his things. The ATVs left him in a cloud of sand and rolled away toward a bike path. The revving engines came close to drowning out the sound of Roger's cell phone.

  Clutching it tight against his head, he trundled across the sand back into the city.

  Tara wanted nothing more than to go home and take a shower. But on the trip back to the field office, FBI personnel in the car informed her of the diver seen on the web with a hand on the tag. The full video during the helicopter trip would have to be carefully reviewed.

  “And this came back,” the agent said, holding out a file with the results of the background check she’d ordered on Trevor. “I could run over there and put some serious pressure on this tech nerd, given—”

  “Thanks. I got it,” she said, cutting him off, and took the file out of his hand. The case was bigtime news now. She was its lead investigator and wanted to keep it that way.

  WIRED KINGDOM TECH SUPPORT FACILITY

  Tara took the few steps to the door and knocked. It was now Friday evening, but everyone she’d talked to said Trevor was a workaholic. She held her badge up to the peephole as she heard footsteps approaching. Trevor opened the door.

  “Evening, Mr. Lane. I need to see what the whale recorded during the last few hours.”

  “Right this way, detective. Been out jogging?” he asked, noting the sweatsuit and running shoes she now wore in place of the suit she’d been in earlier.

  “Yeah, something like that.” She had stopped in at the field office just long enough to change into the clothes she kept there for her daily gym workouts before driving to Trevor’s office. Out of habit, her eyes swept the room before entering. “You the only one here?” she asked, stepping inside.

  “Yeah. They’re way too cheap to hire any staff for me.” He gestured toward the server room. “This way.”

  She followed him through the office.

  “Looked like quite a ride you had.”

  Great. “I do what I have to do.” The curt response made it clear she wouldn’t discuss the case. She had learned on the ride over that only the helicopter itself, and not her in-water experience, was visible to the whale-cam. For that, she was thankful.

  They entered the server room. Tara surveyed the cramped space and its walls of floor-to-ceiling computers and racks of electronics. Trevor slid a keyboard out from one of the machines and hit some keys. The unknown diver’s cracked faceplate appeared on the monitor, then spun away at a crazy angle as the whale rolled.

  “Run that again.”

  Trevor replayed the segment.

  “Again,” Tara said, moving closer to Trevor’s shoulder for a better look at the monitor. He did as he was told, but Tara was still unable to recognize any of the diver’s features.

  “What are we looking for?” Trevor asked.

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  “Oooookay.” Feeling awkward, and put out, he replayed the scene three more times without being told and wondered how long they’d be at it. And then it occurred to him that the diver’s identity might be of interest in the investigation. He opened his mouth as if to speak but stopped himself when he saw Agent Shores’ reflection in the screen, lost in thought, her expression hard. “You okay, detective?”

  Shores bit back a sarcastic reply. Fantastic, I just saw a killer whale use a man as a chew toy. “Back it up three hours and record from there,” was what actually came out of her mouth, and she turned away.

  Trevor set up the file transfer and initiated the burn.

  “What would happen if all this equipment was destroyed somehow—say in a fire? Is the data backed up somewhere off site?”

  “Right now, this is it. I recommended to the producers that the data be replicated in a second location, but they didn’t want to get involved with setting that up yet.”

  “So if this building were destroyed, they’d lose all the data?”

  “Not all of it. Dr. Reed backs up her own stuff.” Tara’s mind flashed to the scientist asking her to accompany her to her place. She shivered. “. . . ANASTASIA REED database at her university office,” Trevor was saying. “But it doesn’t have the actual video, just the oceanographic data from the telemetry stream, and a pointer to the video time code so it can be located from the archives. So if something were to happen to this equipment, they would lose the thousands of hours of blue water, but footage with something happening, they could probably get back.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Once something gets on the Internet, it can never be completely destroyed. It ends up on a million PCs, laptops, servers, PDAs, smart phones, and various storage appliances. I guarantee every piece of footage from that whale exists somewhere in the world outside this room; it’s just locating it when you need to that might be tricky. But with the resources of the FBI, you could do it. Especially the video segments with something happening—like the murder, or the Orca diver. Those little clips are sure to be around forever, whether you want them to be or not. I heard somebody’s already posted the murder video clip on YouTube,” he said, before hastily adding, “but it wasn’t me.”

  Tara studied Trevor as he tended to a machine. He was comfortable in his environment, in control. Meanwhile, she was getting nowhere. Time to shake things up and see what falls out.

  “Mr. Lane, there’s one thing I don’t understand.”

  “What’s that?”

  “How were you able to develop the whale-cam?”

  “I’m sorry?” He turned to face her.

  “Our records indicate that you have a background in computer science—worked as a programmer and software developer—but the whale-cam uses state-of-the-art telecommunications engineering that doesn’t fit with your training and work history. So how did you develop it?”

  “Well, as I told you before, my father was a telecom engineer, before he retired—”

  “Retired from Martin-Northstar.”

  “That’s right.”

  “But according to our records, your father hadn’t actually worked in that capacity for years. He’d been transferred to a management position where he was in charge of the hiring program for new telecom engineers. He hadn’t worked on any designs himself for about ten years, so he wasn’t giving you cutting-edge ideas.”

  Trevor said nothing, but she noticed a tremor in his lower lip. She went on. “The FBI’s engineering consultants tell me that they’ve got no idea how certain aspects of that whale-cam work, Mr. Lane,” she continued matter-of-factly. “And for these consultants—some of whom have access to top secret military technology—to have no idea about how somethin
g works can mean only one thing: it’s brand new technology, still in the pipeline.”

  The whir of a disc ejecting cut through the awkward silence that followed.

  “Video’s ready.” He retrieved the disc and held it out to her, an offering.

  She ignored it.

  “We understand that you personally visited your father’s office at Martin-Northstar on several occasions, the first of which was a career day where you accompanied him to work.”

  “Yes, yes I did. He brought me there on a routine visitor’s pass, which I signed for.”

  “You could have used your time there to set up remote access for yourself that would look authorized to the system administrators. Is that something I should look into, Mr. Lane?” Tara knew she was pushing hard, reaching even. But she’d been pushed pretty hard herself by the men in the bureau. She wanted to bust this whale B.S. wide open so she could prove her real worth.

  Trevor laughed in response. “If you think you can enlighten a bunch of frickin’ rocket scientists as to the vulnerabilities in their networks, then be my guest.”

  “Show me the Martin-Northstar manual I saw the last time I was here. I’d like to see its publication date.”

  His pale face expressed annoyance more than concern. “I gave it back to my father. He said he would return it to the company.”

  “Maybe you should get a lawyer, Mr. Lane.”

  He shrugged. “I will if I have to, but I’ve done nothing wrong.”

  She stared again at the bloody Orca scene on the monitor, but she wasn’t seeing it. She whirled around and left the server room. “I’ll be back with a search warrant, Mr. Lane,” she said, heading for the front door.

  “That’s fine, detective. I’ve got nothing to hide,” he called after her.

  “I hope not, because until that whale’s GPS is working again, I’ve got nothing better to do than crawl through your life with a microscope.”

  CHAPTER 10

  WEST LOS ANGELES

  Rivulets of steaming water raced down the curves of Tara Shore’s body, washing away the salty residue left by the ocean’s brine, and in spite its warmth, she shivered as she recalled being in the cold ocean with the dead diver. It frustrated her to no end that she’d gone through such an ordeal for nothing.

  She left the shower, wrapping herself in a towel, and walked to her living room. Its Spartan simplicity reflected the fact that she didn’t spend much time there. On a small table next to an easy chair sat a framed photograph of a ten-year-old Tara with her father. He had been an L.A. cop. After confiding in her father that she, too, wanted to become a police officer, his face had become stern.

  “You can do better than that. You’re FBI material, girl. Never forget that.”

  “Do they shoot guns in the FBI?” She loved guns. She often sat with her father as he cleaned and maintained his extensive firearms collection. He had taught her to target shoot on a Remington .22-caliber Scoremaster at the age of nine. When she was ten, he won a few hundred bucks when he bet some of his police buddies that his daughter could strip down and reassemble their standard-issue Beretta 9mms faster than they could—blindfolded.

  “Yes, they use guns,” he had explained, “but there’s more to the FBI than just shooting. You have to be smart too, and you’re a smart cookie, girl. Remember that.”

  Tara’s eyes lingered on the picture. A handsome dark-haired man in his thirties cradled his daughter in his arms on the deck of a small sailboat. The picture had been taken by Tara’s mother on their last day together during their fateful vacation to south Florida.

  A succession of grief counselors had enabled Tara to cope with her parents’ sudden death as well as could be expected. But they couldn’t fix everything.

  Tara traced her fingers lightly over her father’s stern face in the picture. It’s not about guns, Dad. I know that now. You taught me that. You—

  The phone rang, snapping her thoughts back to the present. She picked it up.

  “Agent Shores, this is Trevor Lane. Check the whale-cam now. You’ve got to see this.”

  Tara rooted her laptop out from under a pile of Guns N Ammo magazines. Activating the computer, she told Trevor to hold while she accessed the whale’s live feed.

  She stared in disbelief at the scene on her monitor. The whale-cam’s night vision enabled a clear, but grayish green-tinged view. The blue whale’s back was split open. Copious amounts of blood—appearing black in the light from a rising moon—drained in sheets from the cavernous wound, coating the leviathan’s sides. More startling was the whale’s environment. The view around the marine mammal was not of water, but rocks. Tara cringed as a low moan sounded through the speaker. The cetacean exhaled bloody froth from its blowhole.

  Tara scrambled for the phone.

  “What happened?”

  “She beached herself, to die. Because of the Orca injuries. You didn’t know?”

  For the first time, Tara saw the whale not simply as the bearer of a key piece of evidence, but as an animal, a sentient being capable of suffering. She averted her gaze from the tortured beast long enough to look at the GPS coordinates in the corner of the screen: still frozen.

  “No. But the GPS is still out. So where is this?”

  “It’s on a rocky point not too far from here.”

  “Maybe I should give Anastasia a call, see if she’s seen this,” Tara said.

  “I wouldn’t do that if you want to be the first one to get that tag.”

  “Why not?” She heard Trevor exhale sharply.

  “Interrupt her precious data stream that’s making her famous? No way. She knows you’ll want not just the video from it, but the whole device, to hold as evidence. So if she can, she’ll get it and put it on a different whale. Or a great white shark, or who knows what she and her show think will make even more money. But what they won’t be doing is looking forward to having it sit in an FBI evidence locker.”

  Tara shook her head, now pacing her living room, looking down at the evening traffic on Wilshire. “She’d be interfering with a federal investigation. We can get a court order to make her hand it over to us.”

  “But how long would that take? The network can afford an army of attorneys that can generate a hurricane of red tape. Sure, the FBI would probably win in the end, but that could take years. Every week that goes by is millions of dollars they’re making off that whale-cam.”

  Tara was silent for a moment while she considered this. Maybe Trevor had a point. She needed her involvement in the case to end with a murderer in jail, not a tangled legal fiasco. “If the tag’s GPS is still out, how do you know where the whale is?”

  “I have some special GIS (Geographic Information Systems) software that I used to analyze local shorelines for a terrain match with what’s on the video feed. Right now I have a ninety-percent match. If you want to meet me at Marina del Rey, by the time we reach open waters I’ll know exactly where it is.”

  “Tell me where you think it is, and I’ll go there to check it out.”

  “Look, Agent Shores, I’m not officially admitting anything here, okay. I’m not on the record. But let’s just say that some people might not believe I didn’t borrow part of the design for that device. So if I’m publicly seen helping the FBI to recover it, that should help my situation, right?”

  “Yes, but just telling me the information that leads to the tag’s recovery is enough—”

  “It’s not good enough! I want to be seen on camera. I want to be there when you come back with the tag to a bunch of reporters, so that everyone can see that I’m helping.”

  “You ready to go now?”

  “Meet me at the marina in thirty minutes.” He gave her a slip number.

  “Oh, and Lane?”

  “Yes?”

  “This had better work. I’m really tired right now and I can name about a hundred things I’d rather be doing than going out in a boat at night with you. If this dead ends, I’ll see you tomorrow with search warrants for y
our office and your apartment while I wait for this whale to wash up somewhere. You got that?”

  He clicked off.

  CHAPTER 11

  MARINA DEL REY

  An hour later Trevor Lane leaned on the throttle of a twenty-four-foot, open-cockpit Sea Ray Sundeck as he and Tara left behind the marina breakwater for the open ocean. For Tara, the boat was small to the point of being claustrophobic. And Trevor’s inexperience as a boat operator only added to her anxiety.

  With the darkness making it difficult to judge the sea state, Trevor took the boat over a swell too fast and they went airborne before slamming back down.

  “Who was crazy enough to give you a license for this thing?” Tara chided, rubbing an elbow that had bashed into the boat’s rail.

  “Sorry.”

  Tara was glad for the seasickness patch behind her left ear. She watched the lights of the beach towns grow dimmer as they motored out. After thirty bonejarring minutes Trevor cut speed as they approached a rocky point. A lighthouse beamed atop a cliff, a warning. The area was littered with the wrecks of vessels that had come too close.

  Tara aimed a searchlight ashore, illuminating a formidable landscape. Steep cliffs shot up from the water. Access to the narrow band of jumbled boulders looked equally difficult from water or land. If she did see the whale there, how would she get to it?

  Trevor read her thoughts as he watched her play the beam along the treacherous shoreline. He paused a moment to witness a thunderous explosion of whitewater as sea met rock. “The area she beached at looks easier to get to than this,” he said.

  “Where?” Tara saw no signs of a whale.

  “According to the GIS”—he briefly consulted a handheld device—“it's right around this point.”

  They approached the end of a rocky promontory jutting out to sea. Random pinnacles of rock thrust out around them. Trevor had to slow the boat to a controlled drift. He asked Tara to use her light to watch for rocks while they picked their way around the point. Before long Trevor asked her to take the wheel.