Kill Process

by William Hertling

  While, against all odds, Enso and the powers-that-be might not be convinced, Pete’s finally convinced. Or maybe he’s taken it as a personal challenge because Angie’s made a mockery of his pursuit. Whatever the case, Pete’s working on his own time, using ONI’s smaller computing resources to continue the investigation, and hiding his efforts from Plaint.

  “Analyzing the network traffic profiles got us to all these different wi-fi spots around the city,” Pete says. “None of the surveillance footage has ever shown Angie in those places at the time of the encrypted traffic streams, although she visited some of the spots.”

  “We knew that a week ago.”

  “Yeah, but now I can tie her to those places.”

  “How?” Chris asks.

  “I found every city street camera, every business surveillance, every personal webcam with a view of the street and sufficient resolution to do facial analysis of vehicle drivers. A hundred and ninety cameras, an average of three thousand vehicles per day per camera, about half a million facial analyses per day, two hundred million attempts in all for the last year’s worth of data.”

  “And? What did you find?” Why did Pete need to draw everything out?

  “Six photos of her driving a ’77 Volkswagen Type 2 camper van.”

  “Placing her at the wi-fi spots?”

  “Not exactly,” Pete says. “Knowing the vehicle I was looking for, I redid the image search looking for the van. There are a lot of cameras good enough to resolve a car, not so many that can make out the person driving it. Every day the van was out and about correlates almost perfectly with the wi-fi encrypted traffic streams, and in the majority of occasions, I can place it within long-range wi-fi distance at the time and location of her data streams. Unfortunately, the van disappeared about eight months ago. I’m guessing she switched vehicles.”

  Chris muses on this. Statistically speaking, the correlation ties her to the network traffic, and Pete’s gradually turned up connections between the network traffic streams and several suspicious deaths, as well as the kid in Brazil. It’s not the same thing as proof. That would require decoding the network traffic streams, which Pete has been unable to do because she’s using multi-layer cryptography. After the photo fiasco, he’s not going to be able to go back to Enso and ask for the kinds of resources it would take to break that encryption.

  However, Chris is not a judge in a court system and he doesn’t need proof. BRI’s game is leverage, and this new information is leverage.

  CHAPTER 42

  * * *

  I SPEND THE REST of the day in damage control, personally reaching out to every employee, explaining the article has been retracted, and it’s clear this is a smear campaign, probably led by Tomo. The problem is most of the article is true, and there’s much more, and worse, that could yet be uncovered. So I fess up a bit, and admit I’ve got skeletons in my closet, and if I could change the past, I would. All I can do is move forward. I tell everyone to take the day off and come in tomorrow prepared to kick butt.

  I go easiest to hard, to give me time to refine my spiel, and so I’ve left Harry and Amber for the end.

  I’m a bit tougher on Harry, both because I’m furious at him for giving away the last of our money, money I literally begged for, and because I know if I go in apologetic, he’ll think I’m guilty. So I go in hard, put him on the defensive, and tell him it’s his responsibility, as our accountant, to straighten out the mess he’s created, otherwise every employee will be without pay and the viability of the company jeopardized, and he could be liable to the investors. In one fell swoop, I’ve applied personal guilt, tribal obligations, and legal ramifications of his job responsibility. Not surprisingly, he caves. Nathan9 said my social game needed work. Hah!

  That leaves Amber. She’s holed up in her office. We’ve avoided each other all day. The door’s closed and locked. I know because I hear her turn the lock each time she goes in. I knock.

  She unlocks the door, pulls it open a few inches, looks at me, turns and goes back to her desk.

  I enter with confidence, determined not to walk on eggshells around her. On the contrary, my mind is in high gear, boosted from an hour of successful employee discussions, and I’ve planned my approach. She’s going to make the same argument she did back when we were working out of the back of her house, about her limited time, and how I’m throwing away people’s lives.

  She pounds at the keyboard for a minute and I wait to let her have the first word.

  “The thing is, I’m almost thirty years old,” Amber says. “I only get so much time, so many companies I can incubate.”

  Inside I’m smiling. I know her, how her mind works. I own her.

  “I don’t know what you’ve got going on,” she continues, “but no matter what happens, you keep coming back here, you keep pushing everyone to succeed. I don’t understand you half the time and I don’t like the chaos you’ve caused. I can’t do anything about that. What I can do is sit here and code. Spare me whatever argument you’ve prepared, because I don’t want to hear it. I’ll be here until the police come and seize our computers. Go do whatever it is you need to do.”

  “I, umm . . .” Jesus. My mind is blank. Amber’s gone way off script. This is the part where she’s supposed to say I’m wasting the limited years she has available to change the world.

  Amber turns back to her computer and thrashes her keyboard some more.

  “Thank you,” I say.

  Her fingers pause her furious typing. “I don’t need thanks. I don’t even need your friendship. I need you to keep the company going, to figure out the revenue, and fix whatever the hell is going on out there, so we can focus on changing the world and stopping goddamn Tomo.”

  I walk out of the office knowing our relationship has changed. It’s sometimes been stormy, but I thought there was a friendship, too. Whatever we had, it’s lost now, replaced by an alliance made by two parties who find themselves reluctantly on the same side in a war that’s bigger than them. Maybe I can count on Amber to the end, but I don’t have enough friends that I can afford to keep losing them.

  * * *

  As the day goes by, the press and bloggers outside gradually give up. When the door buzzer goes off in the afternoon, someone answers it. A few minutes later, one of our engineers comes into my office.

  “Angie? You got a delivery.” He shrugs sheepishly.

  He’s holding a single rose, the flower petals dyed black. “It came with this.”

  He holds out the rose and a manila envelope.

  I receive the rose with trepidation. It’s the sort of portent we used back in the heyday. I lay it cautiously on the table and grab the envelope.

  “Thanks,” I say, then stare at my engineer who’s waiting around hoping to see what’s in the envelope. He leaves disappointed.

  I grasp the envelope tight under my stump and rip the red pull-tab. I shake out a micro-SD card.

  I stare at it, think back to that night at Death’s party when I was fifteen. For all the years Nathan9 and I were friends, that was the last time I saw him in person. He’s the idolized hacker the kid version of me looked up to, and his reclusiveness, his blindness, the way he reaches out and changes the world from wherever it is he hides out, it’s all added to the mystique, my elevation of him onto a God-like pedestal.

  For all that, he’s the one person who’s always known this side of me, held secrets no one else, not even Emily, can be aware of. He led me into this world, that day at the party, and I assumed he would remain constant.

  To hold something he physically touched . . . No. My shoulders slump. He’s never touched this. He sent the bits on to someone else, had them copy the data onto the SD card. I had hoped for a sign our friendship might continue.

  I find a quarantined laptop and redouble my counter-surveillance precautions. In addition to my usual measures, and the electric tape on my phone to cut the chance of my phone being used as an acoustic backchannel, I also run a frequency jammer and
white noise generator. Only then do I copy the data onto the computer.

  It’s the full deal. Names, aliases. Known phone numbers, email addresses, server logins. Associates. All used IMEI numbers. Hardware MAC addresses. All online profiles. Employee IDs and social security numbers. Nathan didn’t scrimp at all: he must have traded in favors in a big way. Whoever did the work used extensive correlation to determine all the identities used by this man. Chris Daly is merely the current alias of the man trying to destroy my life. His last known location? Portland, Oregon. He’s close, watching me in person, not only online.

  There’s more in the package. Messages between Chris Daly and someone named Joe, concerning the client who’s hired Daly to investigate and destroy . . . me.

  I try to remember to breathe. This is the proof I need!

  Daly is not doing this on behalf of a government investigation. He’s freelancing, selling his access on the open market, using his power and capabilities to earn a spare buck, and ruining my life in the process.

  Who hired Daly? That’s the question. If I can expose them, cut them off at the source, that’s the power I need. But the identity of the client is not here anywhere. The “client” is all Joe and Chris Daly ever refer to. The client wants background info. The client wants Angie discredited. The client wants Angie to go away. Is the client Lewis Rasmussen? I never uncovered anything to prove Lewis’s active malfeasance, and yet, who else could it be?

  Daly has to know. There’s no way he, with all of his government access, would not be aware of who his own client is. In fact, he even makes reference to the client having the money to pay more. He must know the identity.

  I want to scream, but I’m conscious of my surroundings. I’m at the office, and there are people all around. I’m probably being monitored. I can’t give anything away. A random outburst, if they’re listening in, could give away the significance of the flower delivery, lead them to investigate even more.

  I lean over, rest my forehead on my desk. I must stop Chris Daly and expose the client. Think, Angelina Benenati, think for all you’re worth.

  For long minutes, I sit there motionless. Suddenly I bolt upright, fear and certainty running through me in equal measures. There’s something I can do. Something awful. Something that makes me want to puke right here, that has me shaking in my seat. But it will work.

  * * *

  “You don’t have to do this,” I say. “Hell, I don’t want you to do it.”

  “I can help, and I want to.” Igloo’s arms are buried somewhere deep inside her oversized hoodie. I’m afraid sometimes that if I blink, she might disappear inside it.

  “You have no idea what risk you’re putting yourself under.”

  I don’t like it. I really don’t. But Igloo is an adult, even if she seems like a kid to me. I can’t stand in her way and decide for her. I was younger than her when I made bigger decisions.

  “Fine,” I say. “Go to the store and buy a dozen prepaid cell phones with data plans. Pay cash. I’ll pack up the equipment here and secure us a ride.”

  Igloo leaves, and I prep a bunch of laptops, a mobile router, and a slew of chargers and spare batteries. Of course, I call Danger.

  My preparations come to a screeching halt when a message from Thomas pops up.

  Thomas> You okay? Read some news about you and the company, something about a fake article about you?

  I’ve been focused on myself, the company, and our employees. Meanwhile, Thomas and Emily are my family, my support system. That means they’re my vulnerabilities, and Chris Daly will certainly use Thomas and Emily against me.

  Angie> I’m surviving. I’ll fill you in a little later.

  I need to squirrel them out of town without letting anyone know. I grab a spare hoodie from Igloo’s desk. Even though she’s half my size, the sweatshirt is baggy enough to fit. I stuff the sweatshirt and a random cap from the coatroom in a bag, then take a car-share downtown, which drops me off at a hotel. Once inside, I give my purse, with my cell phone and other electronics to the bellhop. In an empty hallway free of cameras, I don the hoodie and hat, do my best to keep my face covered, and exit the hotel through the service entrance, squeezing my way past a delivery truck. I hoof it over to Thomas’s office.

  I sneak into his office and hold a finger to my lips when the receptionist spots me. She smiles and gestures towards his office with a nod. I feel ridiculous pretending everything is normal when I’m on the edge of panic. For the next twenty-four hours, though, there’s going to be a whole lot of pretending.

  I enter his office, and Thomas looks up from his computer. I keep my finger to my lips, and stay away from his webcam. I gesture for him to come to me. He’s puzzled, but stands and walks over.

  I pull his ear to my lips.

  “We need to talk outside your office.”

  “What—”

  I put my finger to his lips. “Shhh.”

  I turn and walk out of his office. He’s in a third floor suite in an older mid-rise building. There’s not much tech in the building, so I’m mostly concerned about the computers in his office. Unfortunately, he approaches with his phone in his hand. Careful to stay away from the camera, I take it from him and drop it on the receptionist’s desk, then go back out to join him.

  “Okay,” he says, laughing. “Can you be any more mysterious?”

  “I wish this was a joke of some kind, but it’s serious. You heard about the article this morning?”

  “Yes,” Thomas says. “What is it all about? They retracted the article and said someone hacked their website. It keeps popping up in my feed, though.”

  “I know this will sound crazy, but it’s part of a scheme to discredit me. Tomo hired a computer hacker to plant the story.”

  “Was that true? Your husband, the car accident?”

  “That’s the most insidious kind of lie, one blending truth and fiction. Because anyone who cares to investigate will find out he died in an accident, and once part of the story is confirmed, they’ll believe the rest must be true, too. We’re standing out here in the hallway right now because whoever they hired to do this is still out there, probably spying on our phone conversations, our computers.”

  “We aren’t talking on the phone or the computer.”

  “It doesn’t matter, a skilled intruder can listen using the microphone whether you think you’re being watched or not.”

  Thomas raises an eyebrow, leans back an inch. “That’s not—”

  “It is possible,” I say, raising my voice. “I worked in computer security for ten years. I know what can be done.”

  “Go to the police,” Thomas says. “Surely they can figure out who is behind this.”

  If it was anyone else, I’d roll my eyes. That would be like asking a lawnmower mechanic to build an interstellar spaceship.

  “No, I contacted some friends I used to work with in computer forensics, and they’re investigating right now. But they said it was critically important to get you and Emily out of town and off the grid, because I’m close to you and the criminals might go after you next.”

  I’ve invented this third party, because it’s a sad fact of life people are more likely to believe experts they don’t know over the people they do. The lies roll off my tongue with ease, leaving behind a taste like burnt petrochemicals.

  “I’m not leaving you,” Thomas says. “I’m staying right here with you.”

  Here’s the catch-22. If he hadn’t said that, things wouldn’t be right with the world. He loves me, he wants to protect me. Unfortunately, his presence is as much help as a load of bricks in the trunk of a race car. There are a dozen things I could say to distance him, hurt him, and make him leave. I’m not willing to take that approach anymore.

  I grab his hand in mine. “If you could help me by staying here, I would keep you by my side. I need to work with my old coworkers on this. I’m not in any physical danger, but I must be able to concentrate. If you’re here, the hackers will go after you, expose you an
d your work, for the express purpose of distracting me.”

  “I have nothing to hide,” Thomas says.

  “Everybody has something they want to keep private. Some website they’ve visited, some photo they’ve taken, some message they sent. Can you honestly say there’s nothing embarrassing you’ve ever done online or that’s been recorded on a computer? Nothing that, if it was suddenly shown in a courtroom in front of a judge, wouldn’t discredit you in some way?”

  He pauses, shrugs. “Well . . . Why do I need to leave, exactly?”

  “Hackers like to taunt people. If you’re online, if you’re using your phone, if you’re anywhere around your computer, they will know. They will spy on you through your webcam, talk to you through your speakers, and generally act like elementary school bullies. They’ll call the police, claiming someone is being raped in your office. They’ll dump all your case files on the Internet, every confidential file you’ve ever had, for no reason other than knowing it will annoy you and distract me. If you’re not around, on the other hand, if they can’t see the immediate effect, watch and rebroadcast videos of you crying as the police raid your office and take you away in handcuffs, then it takes away half the reason for toying with you.”

  Thomas runs a hand through his hair. “I don’t know, Angie. This is all strange. I have work I need to bring with me, calls I need to make.”

  “No,” I say. “Nothing electronic. No phone. You can bring paper files only.” I give his hand a squeeze. “I’m in no danger, but I need to focus and know you’re safe. I’m giving you the hardest job of all. Grab Emily from work and force her to leave her computer and phone. Stop at an ATM, withdraw the most cash you can, and after that, don’t touch your credit cards again. Then take the train to Seattle with Emily.”

  “The train?”

  “You won’t need identification. Once there, find a cheap hotel or something where you don’t need ID, and hang out for two days. Then you can call me and find out if everything is okay.”