Proof (Caroline Auden Book 2)

by C. E. Tobisman

  They all showed the same message: No network access.

  Everywhere around Southwestern Law School, people would be getting the same error.

  Moving quickly, Caroline exited the computer lab. She hurried down the hall to the door of the server room.

  The red light on the keypad beside the door told the tale: the keypad was down.

  Even though the door remained locked, Caroline lingered nearby. She knew that soon the administrator would come to try to fix the downed router. And when that happened, she’d learn the last bit of information she needed to gain access to the server.

  Picking up the school newsletter, Caroline leaned against a wall and pretended to read.

  Her patience was rewarded by the sound of swift footsteps hurrying toward her.

  A woman with short, spiky hair and glasses stopped beside her. The woman scowled at the keypad and then stabbed at it with her index finger: 5-8-9-1-5-2.

  Watching her over the top edge of the newsletter, Caroline memorized the sequence.

  Then she drifted closer to the door and gave the woman a concerned look.

  “I was working in the computer lab and got kicked off. Are you here to fix the server?”

  Without looking over, the short-haired woman nodded. “Router went down.”

  The woman tried the password one last time then exhaled. She pulled a physical key from her pocket and used it to open the server room.

  “It’ll be just a second,” said the administrator. “Sit tight and I’ll have it fixed soon.”

  Nodding, Caroline withdrew.

  Walking down the hall, Caroline stopped in front of a display case that used to hold clothes back in the building’s Bullocks Wilshire days but that now held a visual history of the building. She waited, her eyes unseeing, her body attuned to the server room door twenty paces down the hallway from her.

  Finally, the door opened, and the administrator strode away in the opposite direction.

  Even from where Caroline stood, she could see the light on the keypad was green again.

  Time to get in.

  The warmth of the school’s servers hung thick and buzzing in the room.

  Caroline took quick stock of the setup. A single computer sat on a metal desk surrounded by thick ropes of cords and connectors that threaded off to an array of humming machinery. The single terminal ran on a KVM switch so that one keyboard, video, and mouse controlled all of the servers in the room. Now she just needed to tell the KVM which server to bring up.

  Sitting down, Caroline pulled up the interface.

  As she’d hoped, the servers contained no further layers of security. Most admins were lazy when it came to that extra layer. They figured that once you’d gotten into the server room, your credentials had already been checked. And so Caroline easily accessed the server containing the faculty accounts allowing professors unlimited access to one another’s lectures.

  She slipped the memory stick into the USB port and ordered the computer to run the code she’d written. A bar across the center of the screen appeared, tracking the upload’s progress. The code she’d written was short. It wouldn’t take long.

  Her eyes darted to the door, begging it not to open. There was nowhere to hide if someone entered the server room. And there was no possible explanation she could offer for her presence. No student should be inside.

  A sound from the hallway made her freeze.

  Voices. A laugh.

  A pause. More muffled conversation.

  Students, Caroline decided.

  She eyed the screen. Just another couple of seconds and she’d be done.

  But then there were louder voices, coming near the door. A fragment of conversation. Close enough that Caroline could make out words. Something about a football game.

  Caroline’s eyes flickered back up to the screen.

  The server had stopped loading her code.

  Something was wrong.

  Pushing the sounds in the hallway from her mind, Caroline opened her code, then scanned the letters and numbers, looking for the flaw. She forced herself to focus until there was nothing but coding. The hum of electricity fell away. The voices fell away. Even her awareness of herself fell away until all she knew were the commands she wrote.

  When she finished, she tried loading again.

  As her eyes obsessively tracked each pixel of movement on the upload bar, Caroline recognized her mother’s mania in herself. A furnace of energy lived within her, every bit as much as it lived within her mother. When directed toward a goal, it made Caroline effective. An effective hacker. An effective lawyer. But the raw materials were the same as the restless intensity in her mother. Her brilliance was harvested madness.

  Finally, the upload bar filled and disappeared. The malware was in.

  Now Caroline just needed to get out of the server room unseen.

  Stretching out her senses, she listened for the voices on the other side of the door.

  They seemed to have gone.

  She crept to the door and peered through the small window.

  The pane was too tiny to provide a view of anything except an empty patch of hall directly beyond the door. She couldn’t see in either direction. There was no help for it, though. She had to take a chance. So long as no one else was coming down the hall when Caroline exited the server room, she’d be safe.

  Gathering her courage, Caroline opened the door.

  The hall was empty.

  She ran for the exit. She needed to find Enzo at the soup kitchen near City Hall and get back to Curtis in time to hack Security Images before the video feed was dumped.

  “It’s the damn APB,” Uncle Hitch grumbled, ducking back behind the tree twenty yards from the tarped area next to City Hall where a line of homeless people waited for food.

  It had taken Caroline almost two hours to hitch a ride downtown, collect her uncle and Jake, and head to the soup kitchen. Their meeting spot with Enzo had been in sight, but they’d stopped their progress toward it upon sighting the two police cars parked nearby.

  “They’ve figured out you could be on the street,” Hitch said. “Someone must’ve told them about me.”

  “Do you see anyone you know?” Caroline asked.

  “No uniforms. Just cars.”

  At the reassurance, Caroline risked another look at the food line. Dozens of people in stained clothes and old hats waited to be served from a row of plastic folding tables. Three black-and-whites sat parked on the street next to the temporary pavilion erected by Oasis’s Homeless Services branch. No officers were visible, but Caroline knew they couldn’t be far away.

  “You stay here,” Jake said. “I’ll go find Enzo.”

  Though his offer worried her, Caroline didn’t protest. If someone had seen her with Hitch, they’d probably also seen her with Jake. And yet, she didn’t have a better solution.

  She watched Jake approach the food line. His head swung back and forth as he studied faces, looking for someone who might be named Enzo.

  Caroline considered the prospects.

  Not the short white guy with the drooping mustache and Dodgers cap. Not the black guy holding a dog. Perhaps the portly Latino guy wearing the flannel jacket? The one Jake was talking to now, his head bent down close enough to communicate with the man without anyone overhearing?

  When Flannel Guy shook his head no, Jake continued down the line.

  “That guy isn’t homeless,” Hitch said, breaking Caroline’s reverie.

  “Who?” Caroline asked.

  “The big guy. Toward the front,” Hitch said.

  Caroline focused on the people gathering milk boxes from a bowl of ice water before gathering sandwiches from Oasis volunteers in green shirts.

  “With the beard,” Hitch continued. “Look at his pants.”

  “They’ve been ironed recently,” she agreed. With his fresh crease and neatly trimmed beard, he wasn’t ratty enough to be standing in a food line.

  “Plainclothes detective?” Caro
line asked.

  “Maybe. I don’t know him,” Uncle Hitch said.

  As Caroline watched, someone else came to join the bearded man. Even before she saw the newcomer’s face, she recognized him. His posture. Shoulders hunched to offset his height. His hair. Long and blond, lashed back in a ponytail. When he turned toward the grove of trees in the park adjacent to the shelter, Caroline’s blood froze in her veins. It was the hit man.

  “That’s him,” she managed, ducking back behind the tree.

  “The man from your apartment?”

  Caroline nodded, her head filled with sudden dizziness. They needed to get away. Jake could find them later, but they had to leave. Now.

  “He’s coming,” Hitch said.

  Caroline’s heart squeezed up into her throat.

  “Jake, I mean,” Hitch added, but not quickly enough.

  Seconds later, Jake came into view, holding two sandwich bags in one hand. Behind him, a skinny kid with wavy dark-brown hair followed. His muscle shirt showed off biceps that were no wider than his triceps. A constellation of blue-black bruises darkened the inside of his left elbow. Heroin addict.

  “You got what Curtis wants?” said Enzo.

  Caroline gathered herself and nodded again.

  “Yeah,” she said, glad her voice didn’t quaver.

  “Cool,” Enzo said. “Come on.”

  Hurrying away from the shelter in the wake of a teenage heroin addict, Caroline frantically raced through the possibilities. How had the hit man found her? The food line at City Hall was one of Hitch’s regular lunch spots, so it was the logical place to look for him—and therefore her. It meant the hit man had deduced she was living on the street . . . which meant she needed to get off it.

  But how?

  Until she’d found a way to exonerate herself of the paletería crash, she couldn’t go to Albert without turning herself in to the police. But her dad could still help, she decided. As soon as she reached Curtis’s computer, she’d call him. Nothing else mattered. Not her stepmother’s bad opinion. Not her tenuous relationship with her dad. Survival was all that mattered right now.

  Up ahead, Enzo walked, high on the balls of his feet, a rocking motion that made him look jaunty despite his stained clothes. Caroline wondered at the combination of brain chemistry, circumstance, and bad luck that had doomed him to the streets. Where once she might’ve asked, now she kept her eyes focused on the narrow path she walked, hoping it didn’t lead to her doom.

  The University of Southern California soon came into view, its red brick warm and inviting against the tan-grays of the city streets. The area around the school thrived, spawning rows of fast-food joints and Laundromats, late-night munchie hangouts, doughnut shops, and sports bars. But Caroline didn’t see student hangouts. She saw possibilities. Each place contained people that might be manipulated. Phones to borrow. Computers. If Curtis didn’t come through, she’d need to try something else. Her mind formulated contingency plans. None were great, but she’d try every one of them if she had to.

  Enzo stopped in front of a dilapidated Victorian mansion. Four stories tall, it had a facade like a mouse-eaten gingerbread house. At least eight labels plastered each of its mailbox slots, the names torn off, replaced, erased, or scratched out every other semester.

  “This is it,” Enzo announced.

  Caroline regarded the house. It had been owned by some prosperous family in the 1800s. But as harder times had fallen on the neighborhoods to the south of downtown, the once-grand dame had fallen with them. Then, finally, the most egregious disrepute of all: it had become a boarding house for an ever-changing menagerie of USC students.

  “He lives here?” Caroline asked.

  Enzo answered with one word: “Under.”

  Without further explanation, he headed around the exterior of the house, into the backyard. The legacy of its occupants lay mounded amid overgrown weeds. Old bikes and discarded lawn furniture. Empty kegs. An agave cactus, baking in the sun, its spiked fronds wilting and withering, untended.

  At the edge of the property, he crouched. Embedded in the ground, there was a set of double doors that looked as old as the house. They were invisible except to someone standing directly before them.

  Reaching down, Enzo looped a finger in the metal hasp that kept the door shut.

  With a muffled groan, one side of the door opened against its hinges until it lay back against the weeds. A row of dusty stairs dipped into a subterranean world.

  Enzo gestured for Caroline to enter first.

  “Seriously?” Caroline asked.

  Enzo shrugged.

  As Caroline stepped gingerly onto the first of the wooden risers, Enzo put a hand on her shoulder. “Be real quiet when you’re under there, ’cause no one knows he’s down there.”

  Once Caroline, Jake, and Hitch had cleared the door, Enzo closed it behind them. Then his footsteps receded aboveground as he left, off to go find a fix or food or whatever he was doing when he wasn’t leading beleaguered ex-hackers to a man who lived beneath a student rooming house.

  CHAPTER 21

  The scent of the earthen passageway sparked a sense of déjà vu for Caroline.

  Where had she smelled that loamy odor before?

  Her grandmother’s funeral.

  Shivering, Caroline forced herself to focus on the faint light at the end of the passageway. Judging by the length of the tunnel and the direction they were walking, they were now directly beneath the house.

  The passageway broadened into a low-ceilinged basement, supported by two-by-fours and unfinished redwood planking. The space was rough, but what Caroline beheld in it was almost beautiful: screens from the early 2000s. Dot-matrix printers. Stained keyboards. Dozens of desktop computers, some missing their sidings, their motherboards opened to the dust.

  Everything was held together with cords and duct tape, snaking like tree roots across the earthen ground, and up the posts and unfinished interior siding of the house.

  At first glance, it was a mess. A trash heap of burned-out leftovers retrieved from dumpsters across the city. But the more Caroline looked, the more she could see there was a method to it. Curtis might be insane, but he knew what he was doing.

  She tracked the cables to where they disappeared into the ceiling and realized that Curtis was borrowing power and bandwidth from everyone in the house. It struck Caroline as impossible that no one above had noticed the drain. But perhaps there were so many unrelated people that everyone blamed someone else or no one at all for why their Internet ran so slow. No one guessed they had a torrent freak living under the floorboards.

  At the center of the tangled mess sat Curtis himself. He hunched over a keyboard atop two repurposed road barriers and a plank of plywood. His glowing screen illuminated his craggy face. His dog curled at his feet, unbothered by the arrival of strangers. Or perhaps trained not to bark at them.

  “This is impressive,” Caroline said. She wasn’t sure whether she meant the computer setup or the fact that Curtis had created a home in the basement of a college boardinghouse.

  “Have you brought me what I want?” Curtis asked.

  “I’ve got Professor Graverstein.” Caroline stepped toward the terminal. “May I?”

  Curtis rose and moved aside.

  Caroline navigated to Southwestern Law School’s faculty log-in page. Using the code she’d inserted into the server, she generated a fake account. Now—at least until some savvy admin noticed the dummy account—Curtis would be able to log in just like the rest of the faculty.

  Behind Caroline, she heard Curtis lightly clapping his hands.

  But then the clapping stopped.

  “What about my movies?” Curtis asked.

  Caroline looked at the piles of discarded junk in the corners of the basement. When Curtis had mentioned at the dumpster that he collected old equipment, she’d hoped he’d have the rudimentary materials she needed. Now it was time to find out.

  “I need some Ethernet cable, a wireless
antenna, and”—Caroline scanned the dimly lit space until she found the last item she sought—“that Pringles can over there.”

  “I’ll be right back.” Hunching over, Curtis disappeared into the darkness.

  He returned wearing a pair of blue-tinted, wire-rimmed John Lennon glasses.

  He put them on his face and smiled broadly.

  “Ah, the Blueniverse,” he said, seeming to mean the entire world.

  Then he gestured to the far corner of the basement space.

  “Everything you need is there,” he said, “or not.”

  Ducking to avoid hitting her head on the low ceiling, Caroline retrieved a coil of Ethernet cable and a wireless antenna. Neither was new. Both were covered with dust. But they’d work. Last, she retrieved the can and popped the top off.

  “Do you have anything I can use to punch a hole in the side of this can?” Caroline asked, holding up the empty Pringles can.

  “I have many tools.” Curtis pointed toward the brick substructure of a fireplace. In front of it, there was a row of discarded tools. Screwdrivers. Hammers. And a rusted hand drill.

  “What are you doing?” asked Hitch, coming to squat beside Caroline as she measured the Pringles can, judging how far down the chamber to make a hole for the antenna.

  “I’m making a cantenna,” Caroline said, beginning to drill. “I’m going to use this Pringles can to focus the Wi-Fi signal from USC.”

  “Will it work?”

  “We’re only about a mile away from the campus,” Caroline said, digging through a pile of adapters. She needed something she could use to hold an adapter in place. Her eyes fell on the insulation lining the unfinished walls. “So long as I build the cantenna right, it’ll work.”

  “Cantenna?” Hitch’s eyebrows rose in amusement.

  “Sometimes low-tech does the trick.” Caroline threaded an adapter into the Pringles can and then plugged the space around the hole with putty she’d scraped off the wall’s insulation. Once she’d gotten the adapter set firmly into the hole, she hooked it up to the Ethernet cable. She plugged one end of the Ethernet cable into Curtis’s computer, then began backtracking down the dirt-sided hallway.