With rush hour traffic at its thickest, they arrived at the apartment forty minutes later. The team went in first. No need to bang down the door. They had a key. Of course they did.
Cynthia and Martin walked in last. Sasha wasn’t there. From the looks of it, she hadn’t come home from work. The satchel she used as a briefcase was nowhere to be found, one of Cynthia’s colleagues noted.
“Over here,” one of them said after popping open Sasha’s home laptop.
Martin walked over. The screen said, “So I guess this is goodbye, Martin. Good luck.”
31» Triangulation
“We need you to go get her,” Cynthia said.
Had Martin heard her? He sat on the couch, elbows at his knees, legs spread wide. His head hung low. Facing down, staring at the coffee table, he continued to disregard her attempts to draw him back to reality.
She came over and sat next to him. The apartment’s search complete, the last of her teammates walked out.
“Martin, we need to go after her. Before she does something stupid and gets herself in hot water with the wrong crowd.”
“The Iranians,” he muttered.
“Or the Ukrainians, or whoever else. She has no shortage of dangerous associations.”
He lifted his head high enough to shoot her a sideways frown. “She gave you the slip. That easy.”
“It wasn’t easy. That she succeeded should suggest what skills other than computing she may have picked up before she came running back to you.”
“You think she’s a spy. She just wanted to get close to get at what I’m working on.”
“Let’s focus on a way forward, shall we?”
“You want me to try to contact her.” He pointed at the laptop. Its screen had gone black, but the way he looked at it one would think he could still read Sasha’s dear Martin note. “In case you didn’t notice, she didn’t leave me a phone number or mailing address.”
“I’m sure you can figure out a way.”
“There’s something else going on here. That woman Stan, Robert, and you met with. She’s got something to do with this, doesn’t she?”
Cynthia couldn’t contain a frown of her own. “Why would you say that?”
He shrugged. “All the hush-hush, right around the time Sasha vanishes.”
Cynthia straightened up. She almost stood up, but restrained the impulse. Why didn’t she see that? Yes, Chana could have snagged Sasha, couldn’t she? Easy enough to blame the Iranians for the disappearance. All the while, Mossad and company carted Sasha to a computer center not so near you and see what she could give them.
“Who was she?” Martin said. “Some big cheese from Washington?” He straightened up, too. “The one delivering the news that Sasha must go?”
Cynthia smiled. She had to. He had no idea, did he? No, she could tell. Stabbing in the dark, trying to sort something way over his head. Going back to the one thing he’d fixated on: keeping Sasha in InfoStream. At his side. Her smile twisted away.
“I need your help, Martin.”
“Has Sasha been hacking? On the side? Is that the evidence they used to deny her clearance?”
This time Cynthia stood up again at the realization of yet one more thing she hadn’t anticipated. That attack on the Iranians, looking as it did like an attack perpetrated by Americans? Sasha did it, didn’t she? Right under their noses she carried out the whole thing. She’d probably done it right out of that doctor’s office. If so, that meant this wasn’t just about recovering a wayward asset. Who knew what tech she’d pilfered from InfoStream and used to whack the Iranians?
“What?” Martin said, peering up at Cynthia.
“We need to go back to InfoStream.” She waited for him to stand up. “There’s something we need you to look at. Maybe it will help us track her down.”
Sasha made him work for it. It went through the computer of a Gynecological practice, and went from there to Sasha’s current location. The trace triangulated way too easy, though. Martin knew Sasha was better than that. If she wanted to vanish, or if she really wanted to protect her home base, she’d make a back-trace nearly impossible. But she hadn’t. That either meant she wanted to be found, or she no longer cared to conceal home base. Because it longer was home base. Because she was long gone.
He found himself wanting that last part not to prove true. Right now, a little before midnight, as he sat with Cynthia in her car, waiting for the FBI agent to talk to Dr. Tsai, Martin pictured Sasha in there. Sitting at a computer. Hands up. You got me, boys. But that wouldn’t happen. Not unless she wanted it to go down that way. Maybe she did. More wishful thinking on his part, for sure. But what if she wanted to prove her prowess, her value to the program? See what I did? I slammed those nasty Iranians hard. All on my own. I left something inside their firewalls, too. Wanna see?
Martin shook his head. No, he couldn’t convince himself Sasha had played that game. He knew otherwise. Whatever she did aimed at one purpose, one final grand goal: him and her escaping it all. Hand in hand, fading into black, with lots of light on the other side, of course.
“You OK?” Cynthia said.
“Those guys are taking a long time.”
“Doing their job.”
“Wasting our time. That Dr. Tsai will know nothing.”
“Oh, I’m sure he knows a little more than nothing. She used his computers. I doubt that she came in under cover of darkness and clothed with invisibility.”
“And your guys never knew about this. Never followed her here.”
Cynthia drummed her fingers on the steering wheel. “She’s good at evasion. But we already knew that.”
“Yeah, we know everything. Until we don’t.”
Martin was about to say more, but Cynthia held up a hand while she listened to her earpiece. She kept listening for a couple of minutes. “Roger that.”
She turned to Martin. Something in her eyes suggested more concern—or a different type of concern—than he’d expect.
“Ready?” she said to him before he could ask anything.
“Let’s do it.”
Martin struggled to keep up with Cynthia’s fast pace. Once at the entrance, an FBI agent let them in. He pointed down a short hallway. An open door led into a closet. The humming of loud—and old—CPU fans welcomed Martin. So did the smell of dust overheating on microchip ceramic.
“Could we move all this into a bathroom stall so I have a little more room?” he quipped, all the while thankful the size of the room would preclude anyone else from looking over his shoulder.
Through the thin walls, he could hear the sound of muffled voices. Dr. Tsai, getting the once over from the FBI investigator. Martin knew the feeling, how they repeated the same questions over and over again to catch you in contradictions, or expose previously unshared details by coming at you from a different angle. He imagined they were working him pretty good, especially on whatever concern he’d seen reflected on Cynthia’s face earlier.
It didn’t take long for Martin to uncover the next bread crumb. She’d made it easy enough to find. Right there, front and center on the desktop of the main server. That gave him some time to do additional snooping. First he verified what he’d learned back at InfoStream. Yup, the attack had originated here. When he tried to retrace connections to the Iranians’ node, though, his attempt failed. He found evidence of missing pieces of application code. The callouts were still there, but the callbacks were missing. Sasha had shredded them, too. No way to forensically recover the deleted files.
He’d more or less determined he’d uncovered all he could when he came across a data directory containing patient files. He found a file in a side directory. It contained little more than a link to Sasha’s first visit. Routine examination, it said. No billing record. He compared it with other patient files. In every instance at least one billing record accompanied the visit or service rendered file.
All right. No big deal there. Back at InfoStream they’d theorized that Sasha had gotten access to
Dr. Tsai’s office computers while posing as a computer tech or IT specialist. The lack of billing suggested she’d made a trade for her consultation fee. Nothing much to conclude there. Or was there?
“Anything?” Cynthia asked from the hallway.
“I’m working it, OK?”
Out of the corner of his eye he saw her step away.
He dug around some more, this time around the appointment database. Once more, the current database only contained a record of Sasha’s original visit. For kicks, he reviewed older backup versions. Same thing. He almost gave up on his line of inquiry when another thought occurred to him. What if she’d traded more than one visit? Surely a computer consultant’s fees could pay for more than a simple examination?
After some doing, he located two deleted copies of the appointment database. He recovered them, and after minor rebuilding, called them up one at a time through the appointment application. Presto. There they were. Two additional appointments. One read “procedure,” and the other, “follow-up.”
Three times they’d lost track of her. Three appointments, two of them off the books.
Cynthia’s voice startled him. “Any luck?”
He rushed to dismiss all screens and recalled the original file. “Yeah.” He turned the screen so that she could see it. “Sasha wants me to go on a scavenger hunt.”
32» Cut Out
Martin grinned at Sasha’s intended irony. He found the burner cellphone where her initial message said, duct-taped under a payphone. Releasing it from its sticky restraints, he turned it on and walked back to the car where Cynthia awaited him.
“You know what happens next, right?” he said as he regained his seat.
She looked straight ahead and nodded. “We wait for her call.”
“And we figure who’s going to give you a ride.”
She didn’t respond.
“You know she’s going to want me to move alone.”
“I know how it works.” She reached behind her to retrieve her purse from the back seat. “And so do you.” She handed him a bracelet.
He forced what he knew had to come across as a bitter smile. How long since he’d worn one of these trackers? At least a year.
“So much for trust.”
“It’s for your own safety. We don’t know her intentions, who else might be after her, or who is the more dangerous of the two. Or three or four, as the case may be.”
“Are you sure it’s her intentions that worry you the most?”
She looked away. “Like I said, there may be others.”
“And among them, the guy sitting next to you right now.”
She faced him, but he could hardly make out her features in the dark.
“OK, so since we’re having trust issues, how about you tell me what that Dr. Tsai told you guys.”
She turned to look over the steering wheel again. “Like you suspected, he hired her as an IT consultant. She fixed his computers. Insisted it all be kept off the books.”
“And by all, would we mean more than her paycheck?”
Cynthia drew a long breath. “Something like that.”
“I know she went in for medical services. From that I can guess he gave her a free pass, and she returned the favor.”
Cynthia nodded almost imperceptibly, but didn’t respond.
“Three visits in all. Off the books, but not off the bytes. Not all of them, from what I was able to recover.”
Cynthia stayed silent.
“So can we stop being coy? Can we put all the cards on the table?” He slapped the dashboard a little harder than he’d intended. “Can we be straight with each other?”
“It’s a distraction. I suggest we focus on the way forw—”
“Yeah, the famous way forward. You think it might be a good idea if I go forward knowing what she had done in that office? You know. Just in case it comes up in conversation or becomes a relevant point of discussion?”
“I suggest you don’t make it a point of discussion. It’s only bound to… heighten tensions.”
“What did she have done, Cynthia? And don’t tell me it was just a routine visit. Those bytes I recovered spelled out the word procedure.”
She nodded again. This time, when she turned to him, the slightest hint of light caught a moist glint in her eyes. “She was pregnant. Past tense.”
She held his gaze for only a few moments, as if she could barely manage to do so. Then she faced the front of the car again. Her hands came to rest on the bottom half of the steering wheel. They wrapped around the leather and gripped it harder than necessary.
“How long did you know?” he said.
“The records said bladder infection.”
“But you knew better.”
“I suspected. Decided to leave it alone.”
“Alone enough to not check those computers.”
She nodded. “It’s still best we leave it alone.”
Why? Why had she kept a lid on it? He almost asked that, but he knew the answer in another instant. And like she suggested, he decided to leave it alone.
He turned away from her and propped his elbow on the door. With his chin on his forearm, he stared vacantly at the strewn bits of paper and trash on the nearby sidewalk. He stayed like that until the burner cellphone rang.
Cut outs. That’s what Cynthia had called each of these points. All part of the spy craft hocus pocus she knew so much about and claimed Sasha to know as well. At each cut out, Sasha would change things up. With each new set of instructions, she’d throw a curveball—one she hoped would lose the various flavors of tails following in his wake. And here he stood before the second cut out.
Sasha’s latest message contained nothing but a set of GPS coordinates. These brought him to another phone booth. He needed no further instructions. Reaching under the phone, he felt the duct tape. He ripped it and took out another burner phone. This one came powered on and with a flashing text message notification.
The text said, “Toss the other burner.” Just like he’d predicted when Cynthia and team insisted on tapping it, both for intercepting further communications, and to use it as a backup tracking device.
All right. Choice number one for him. Toss the phone, or pocket it.
He looked around. Was Sasha watching him? She’d love to see him stomp on it. Of course, somewhere out there—or up there—Cynthia’s team had eyes on him, too. If they saw him stomping the phone, they might think he was going rogue on them. He unplugged the battery on the first burner, stashed it in his left pant pocket. How was that for compromise? If Cynthia asked later why he’d done it, he’d say he could always reassemble the phone and let them track him that way. Besides, he had that ankle bracelet. And if Sasha asked, he’d tell her he saved it for backup. You never know when you need a backup. If nothing else he had an extra battery, seeing as to how the two burners were nearly identical.
Another text lit up the live burner’s screen with a second set of GPS coordinates. As before, he imported these into the phone’s GPS app—the Sasha version, not the app store kind. The location popped up in the map. Somewhere in San Francisco. He zoomed in and recognized it: Embarcadero.
He checked his watch. Dang, two in the morning already. This was going to turn into one long night. The thought didn’t discourage him. Of course not. He liked this kind of game too much. He’d missed it. That Sasha was orchestrating the whole thing exhilarated him a little more. Until he recalled Dr. Tsai’s office. What had happened there.
He walked back to the car and drove toward the 101 Freeway. Once there, he turned onto the north-bound onramp and settled in for the fifty minute drive the GPS app predicted.
The fifty minute drive turned into a forty minute one ten minutes later, and then it more or less stayed there when traffic ground to a halt. Up ahead, not a mile away, he could see the bright flashing lights of emergency vehicles. Here, on the empty passenger side seat, the burner phone screen’s lit up.
“On your right,” it said.
> Through the side mirror he saw it. A single bouncing light approached on the shoulder. Fast. A motorcycle, he realized when the roar of the engine reached him.
The bike screeched to a stop right at the passenger window. The rider bent down and removed her helmet. Sasha. Of course. One more cut out to get rid of the car—Cynthia’s car—which no doubt had a tracker of its own.
He nearly froze, there, gripping the steering wheel. One more decision to make. One step closer to disdaining his benefactors and the life they promised. One more acceptance of Sasha’s way over theirs. Somehow he freed himself from the weight of his fear. He stopped. He popped the transmission into park. With little care for traffic at his left, he pushed open the door and stepped out.
He rounded the car along the front hood. Sasha met him with a serrated knife. She didn’t have to instruct him. The last tracker had to go. He took the knife and used it to saw through the ankle bracelet. Though he wanted to fling it into the nearby bushes, he set it on the roof of the car, calmly. Neither did he rush to don the helmet Sasha was handing him. He put it on, adjusted the straps, and mounted the bike behind her.
She waited for him to wrap his arms around her midsection before she ripped up the shoulder and down the next off-ramp.
33» Departures
They hid under the cover of trees. Up above they could hear a helicopter circling. When its sound faded to the east, Sasha pulled out and drove through the neighborhood. Finding a street that paralleled the 101 Freeway, she aimed south. At the next major avenue, they turned back toward the Freeway and rejoined it, this time headed south. They rode hard until they hit the turnoff to the 156, and rode that west until they met Highway 1. The rest of the ride came as a blur until they reached the docks of Monterey’s Fisherman’s Wharf.
Sasha parked the bike behind a Japanese restaurant. She let Martin dismount while she removed her helmet. Then she helped him remove his.
Feral: An Our Cyber World Prequel Page 22