by Rick Chesler
First he would get out of the country, leaving no electronic trails of any kind, existing on cash. Then he would worry about everything else. He started to bring up Google to search for countries with no extradition to the United States, but then realized how incredibly guilty that would make him look. They would subpoena his Internet Service Provider for his online usage records, and his possible destinations would be given away. He didn’t have time to take all the precautions that he knew would cover his digital tracks while searching the web.
Where to go? He drained the last drops of his beverage and threw the can on the floor, arguing with himself. Canada? No, everyone went there to run and it’s too damn cold. Mexico? He didn’t speak a lick of Spanish. He would need to blend in and could not afford misunderstandings due to a language barrier. The Caribbean? The Caribbean . . . lots of tropical islands, hundreds, no—thousands of them—close together. Hop over here and you’re in one country; hop over there and you’re in another. It had to make legal matters that much more complicated, which was just what he needed. Plenty of American tourists and ex-pats to fit in with. Women on vacation . . . He could skip from one palm-studded isle to the next, moving on when things became either too boring or too sketchy.
He thought about his situation. The TV show would probably only retain his attorney just long enough for them to find a replacement for him. As soon as they knew their web site was safe, they’d stop paying his legal fees and he’d be on his own with a public defender.
Could he make a deal with the prosecutor that would spare him a conviction in return for testimony against the Martin-Northstar insiders who had supplied him with engineering designs? “Reduced sentence” was the phrase his attorney had used. In a post-9/11 world, crimes related to national defense technology were not taken lightly.
No matter how much prison time he did or didn’t serve, he was still going to be a convicted felon. He would never again be able to work in his chosen field. Who would—no, who could—trust him?
Trevor woke up the PC on his desk, looking for any distraction from his grim thoughts, and went to the Wired Kingdom site. The chat rooms were full, and a high percentage of subscribers were currently logged on. Something must be happening.
The whale’s satellite feed took over his screen. He could see and hear a Zodiac boat zipping around the Blue. Other boats could be seen farther back in the field of view. He looked for landmarks but saw only open water.
White bubbles. The whale rolled and dove. Then she surfaced and he heard the sound of . . . applause? What the hell is this? Trevor reached for his desk phone, then stopped. Its blinking light told him he had messages, but they were no longer his concern. Now that he had no stake in it, Trevor grew bored with the whale. He exited the site.
Might as well check my e-mail one last time. He wasn’t expecting anything good. Maybe something from Anastasia? He had mostly routine work-related messages that he left unopened. Nothing about his arrest. One had a .gov address he hadn’t seen before, but it was the subject line that made him open the mail: GPS Interference Test.
He read with amazement:
To: Technical Director, Wired Kingdom
From: U.S. Coast Guard Navigation Center, Los Angeles
ATTN Wired Kingdom:
On occasion, the U.S. Federal Government is required to conduct Global Positioning System (GPS) interference tests, exercises and training activities that involve jamming GPS receivers. This is a courtesy notice to inform you that we are currently conducting such tests off the Los Angeles coast. It has come to our attention that you are operating a GPS unit which may be affected by our testing. The testing will begin on Friday, July 23 at 0500 and will conclude on Saturday, July 24 at 1700.
Additional information was given regarding the specific area of ocean covered by the testing. Trevor confirmed that the Blue had indeed been within the testing area since its GPS ceased to function. The wired whale had swum into a Coast Guard GPS jam-test zone—and only Trevor knew.
He checked his watch: 7:59 A.M. So in about . . . nine hours . . . they’ll be able to track the whale’s position again in real time. “Solved that problem,” Trevor said aloud. Then he laughed like a maniac. He had racked his brain over that puzzle for hours on end, and the solution had turned out to be so simple. Not to mention completely beyond his control, like so much of the rest of his life at this point. Too bad it doesn’t matter anymore. Somebody’s going to have the tag soon, but it won’t be me. I’ll be going off to jail.
Tears welled in his eyes as he comprehended the gravity of his predicament. He shoved the computer monitor off the back of the desk, taking great satisfaction in hearing it crash on the hard floor. An act of pure frustration.
He got up and walked to the front door and picked up a coat rack, tested its weight in his hands. Then he walked back to the server room, opened the glass door and stepped into the chilly space. He looked at the stacks of machines, their blinking lights telling him that everything was okay. He begged to differ.
Trevor wound up and swung the coat rack into a rack of routers and switches. The loud impact startled him at first, but he became accustomed to it after a few more swings. He shattered one monitor after the next. He smashed through glass cabinet doors to get at the computers behind them. Over and over he swung the coat rack, obliterating the machines that had once supported his livelihood.
When it was done, Trevor let the rack fall to the floor. He slumped down next to it, his appetite for destruction momentarily sated, and picked a piece of transistor board out of his hair and flicked it away. He surveyed the server room, daring any lights to show themselves. He saw a green one on the floor that had somehow escaped his onslaught. He promptly extinguished it with a final blow.
Trevor dropped his tool and hurried back into the main office. He had taken the Wired Kingdom web site down. Millions of paying web users were now staring at a PAGE NOT FOUND message. The show’s producers would be calling him soon. They’d paid a lot of money to bail him out to ensure the success of their online enterprise. When he didn’t answer, they would send someone to the technical office to check it out.
It had been a stupid move, physically destroying the web site, Trevor knew, but he’d made a lot of those lately. He stood there in the office, head down, rubbing his temples hard, trying to concentrate.
Trevor rummaged through a desk drawer looking for his passport. He had been told not to leave the state, pending his court appearance, but he doubted that airport officials would be aware of his charges yet. He found the passport and put it in his pocket.
The desk phone rang.
He waited for the phone to stop ringing and then recorded a new greeting message: “Hi, this is Trevor Lane, Wired Kingdom technical director. If you’re calling about the web site being down, it’s just a minor problem that I should have under control shortly. If it’s anything else, please leave a message. Thanks.”
Let them think it’s just a routine outage for as long as possible. He knew that they’d be able to restore the site, but hell if he was going to make it easy for them. Let the greedy bastards figure it out on their own.
Trevor grabbed the Martin-Northstar manual. No reason to leave them a key piece of evidence while they work to nail me in absentia. The phone rang again. He headed for the front door. He stepped outside as he heard his new message begin to play. He looked up and down the street. Seeing nothing suspicious, he walked to his car, a ten-year-old black Celica. As he opened the door his cell phone rang. Wired Kingdom.
After his first cell had been destroyed on the boat, he was pleased when he remembered his spare handset in the office. But as his thumb descended on the TALK button, he stopped himself. The handset would only be used against him at this point, to trace his calls, maybe even his whereabouts. He flipped it open and ripped it in half. He walked to a trash dumpster around the corner in an alley. He checked to see that no one was watching and threw the phone and manual inside.
As he started back t
o his car, an SUV Trevor had never seen before crept to a stop in front of his office.
ABOARD THE WIRED KINGDOM SCARAB
“We lost the damn connection,” Anastasia said. She shoved aside the laptop, its screen black. The bad news was overshadowed by Ocean Liberation Front’s schooner pulling up to the site. Once again, the schooner positioned itself broadside in front of the Scarab’s bow. Eric Stein stood in the ship’s pulpit.
“You’re a little late, Eric Slime,” Anastasia sneered. “Maybe next time.”
Stein raised a can of Tecate beer in a gesture of cheers. He took a swig and said, “No hurry. We’ll catch up. Radar sees a long ways off.”
“Hit it,” Anastasia said to a crewmember at the Scarab’s wheel, who promptly put the engine into gear.
“What you’re doing is wrong,” Stein shouted in their wake. “Stay away from the whale.”
Anastasia flipped him the bird, laughing as the Scarab sped off. They took the direction the Blue was last seen heading.
Five minutes later, when they were sufficiently far from the schooner, Anastasia ordered the Scarab to stop. All around them was nothing but unbroken, blue water. On the clearest of days, land might be visible from here, but now there was just enough marine layer to prevent it.
She fussed with the laptop some more. Perhaps a visual cue from the whale’s current whereabouts would help. It would at least tell them if the Blue was on the surface. A few more minutes without a sighting and the whale would be lost again, she thought, and who knew when its GPS would be back online?
Anastasia tried again to log on to the Blue’s feed. She cursed the error message displayed there. She handed the machine off to an assistant. “Call Anthony and tell him we’re showing a 404 on the sat-feed. Ask him what he sees on the site now.” The guy with the ponytail hurried off toward the marine radio.
The boat was oddly quiet while everyone on deck searched for the whale—some with binoculars, some with camera zoom lenses, others with the naked eye. Everyone, that is, but Tara, whose eyes searched from behind polarized sunglasses for a seaplane. She considered her own options while the call was patched through to Anthony. As long as they were in close contact with the whale, it made sense for her to stay out with Wired Kingdom. The Blue seemed to attract key elements of her case, after all.
But there were now other leads to follow. She could check to see the latest video from the tag—did it offer any additional clues about the divers or the plane? The plane. She could check with airport officials to try and trace it—she had a good enough description. The diver whose mask had been removed was Latino. That was something. She could request assistance from a marine unit. Relying on Wired Kingdom’s modes of transportation was getting old. She was more of a bystander than anything else, able to observe but not act. Next time she saw the Blue, she wanted to be with an FBI dive team.
The ponytail guy left the radio and walked back on deck, shaking his head. “Anthony says the site’s down. They’re swamped with calls about it. Says he’ll get back to us when he knows something. He’s checking with Trevor now.”
There was an uncomfortable silence at the mention of Trevor’s name. The assault was only last night, but that kind of news travels fast. Eyes focused on Tara.
“Is the guy really going to be working the day after getting busted for attempted murder?” a cameraman asked no one in particular.
“For the amount we paid to bail him out, he sure as hell better be,” Anastasia replied.
There was laughter while Tara avoided any eye contact. She could not and would not discuss Trevor’s charges. She was here only to locate a central piece of evidence in what she now thought of as a murder case.
They motored south at low speed, towing a hydrophone array so that they might hear the Blue’s vocalizations, but the sea was silent. A sprawling, acrobatic pod of Pacific white-sided dolphins brought with them a moment of excitement, triggering a few seconds worth of B-roll footage, but the Blue was not making itself known.
After an hour of fruitless searching, there were no arguments about returning to shore.
CHAPTER 24
FBI FIELD OFFICE, LOS ANGELES
While Anastasia and her crew headed for the studio to edit the day’s filming for a network special on the wired whale’s rescue, Tara checked in at her office. Although it was Saturday morning, multiple messages awaited her. Many were from reporters. One took the form of a note from the same assistant who had alerted her to the Blue being trapped: Wired Kingdom site entirely offline.
Tara logged onto the TV show’s web site herself. SITE NOT FOUND. It had only been a few hours since Trevor was bailed out of jail. He probably hadn’t been in the office yet, and there would have been heavy traffic for the Blue’s rescue, which could have overwhelmed the site.
Another message was a memo from Imaging. Results of a frame-by-frame analysis of the murder video were waiting in the lab two floors below hers. Tara had been there several times before, usually to pick up enlarged prints made from convenience store or bank branch surveillance cameras. Submitting the whale video to Imaging had been something of a formality—nothing to lose—but she hadn’t expected to get much from the static-ridden murder clip beyond the picture of the victim’s body they’d already provided.
She hurried to the elevator, ignoring stares from passing co-workers. Her case was grabbing headlines. She reached a mostly empty break lounge where the television was tuned to Fox News.
She ducked inside, poured herself a small coffee and watched as the whale-cam’s footage of a knife plunging into the whale’s smooth flesh was replayed while the caption “Murder video sliced from tagged whale?” crawled across the screen. Tara ducked back out of the room before a pair of newly minted agents staring at her in awe could say anything. She found the elevator, mercifully unoccupied, and rode it down to Imaging. She presented her badge to a receptionist and handed her the memo. The receptionist waved her through the entrance area to the lab beyond.
Imaging Lab director Herb Shock’s bald head popped over a divider. He smiled at Tara and waved her over. “Good news,” he said as she walked around to his work area. Racks of video monitors and digital tape machines occupied most of his desk space. Computers took up the rest.
“What have you got?”
“Well at first, I didn’t think we’d be able to get much of anything. The resolution is pretty good—better than your average in-store security camera—but because it’s underwater, there’s a fair amount of backscatter. Add to that the intermittent static, the whale’s constant motion, and it’s a miracle we were able to get anything besides the victim photo I gave you for the case file.”
Tara nodded patiently. Herb always had to preface what he gave her with a story.
He pecked at his keyboard and called attention to a color video monitor. The murder sequence played, and once again Tara watched as the unknown victim fought a losing battle for her existence. Tara wondered what the last day of life had been like for the dead woman. Had she had any idea she was in danger when she’d woken up that morning? That the white bikini she put on would be the last outfit she would ever wear? At least she looked good in it, Tara thought. She took a quick look down at her own boring outfit. This is definitely not what I'd want to die wearing.
“And here it is,” Herb said, stopping the video.
A pale, shapely leg dominated the frame. Tara watched as Herb clacked away at more keys, zooming in on the lower part of the leg. After a few more seconds of manipulation he had the woman’s ankle enlarged many times on the video screen. A splotch of color was visible on the ankle. It was heavily pixelated due to the image magnification, but was clearly a skin discoloration of some sort.
“This is as good as it gets here,” Herb said, seeing Tara squint at the blurry image. “But if we move over here,” he continued, switching his attention to a different workstation, “I’ll show you the results of some software manipulation that you may find of interest.”
Tara wondered why he hadn’t just started with the software-enhanced version, but she understood that Herb wanted her to see for herself just how important his work was. There’s nothing but a blurry ankle in that video frame, right? his expression suggested. Wrong! Look at this . . . .
“This is a ninety-nine-percent accurate rendering of that blob of color we saw on the ankle in the original video,” he declared, striking the ENTER key with a flourish.
Tara stared at a purple dolphin.
“Tattoo!” she exclaimed, with great appreciation. Tattoos were a tremendous aid to law enforcement professionals, particularly when working with unidentified persons, both suspects and victims. She concentrated on the screen. The tattoo was small, not encircling the ankle but residing entirely on the right side. Granted, there must be thousands of women with dolphin tattoos on their ankles, but it sure was a good place to start. And this one was purple.
“We’re not sure how true the color is,” Shock said, reading her mind. “It looks purple, but it’s underwater, so it could be due to the filtering out of short wavelength colors—your reds and yellows are the first to go.”
“Print it out,” Tara said. She didn’t care what color the damn dolphin was. Somewhere out there were people who would remember this woman. The tattoo artist . . . whoever might have been with her when she had it done. Finally, something concrete to go on for IDing the victim, she thought.
Shock handed her an enlargement of the tattoo.
Tara studied it while wondering what other secrets the video might divulge. “What about the audio track?”
“Still working on the sound. We’re checking for voiceprint IDs now. I’ll let you know if anything comes of that.”
ABOARD PANDORA’S BOX
Eric Stein squinted at his radar screen. “The Wired Kingdom boat is heading back to the coast,” he declared.