“And . . . ?” Travis leaned forward, rested his elbows on his knees, and looked at Derek.
Derek studied the pattern his sneakers had made in the dirt. “Looks like more of the same code that was on the memory stick.”
“You know what it is yet?”
“It looks like some sort of kill command.”
“For shutting down an electronic device?”
“Yeah, but not just shutting it down. This will probably fry its circuits. How’d you know?”
Travis sat back and took a deep breath. “I had a hunch. Can you recreate the missing code?”
Derek shook his head. “I could take a guess, but I might be way off base. Besides, there’s not nearly enough here, given the kind of logic tree this thing follows. You’re missing a big chunk.”
“Another file . . . ”
Derek gave him a nod. “That would be my guess.”
“Well, we just keep watching her e-mails.”
Derek looked like he was about to admit he broke Travis’s favorite coffee cup. “There’s a problem,” he said slowly. “I told you this guy is smart. He must have figured you’d monitor the girl’s e-mails. He told her to set up a new account.”
Travis swore softly. “This is worse than I thought.”
He ran through all the permutations in his mind, but he couldn’t come up with a plan for handling this.
“What are you going to do?” Derek said.
“I’m not sure. Keep a close eye on Tess, I guess.”
Derek shifted on the bench and rubbed his hands on his thighs. “Is that it?”
Travis considered him. “For today. Go on, take off. I’ll check in with you tomorrow.”
“Thanks.” Derek got up and shuffled away, head down.
Travis pulled out his phone and dialed Jack Turnbull’s number as he watched Derek leave. As it started to ring, he reconsidered. His statement to Derek hadn’t been off the mark—he really didn’t know who to trust. Derek turned off the path from the park and onto the sidewalk. When he suddenly picked up his pace, Travis made up his mind, closed the phone, and followed.
CHAPTER 40
Happy to have been dismissed for the day, I drove into Seattle in the rental car. I spent most of it wondering why getting along with Tess sometimes seemed so difficult. Then again, maybe she was right; I should think of it more as an employee-employer relationship. We didn’t have to be friends. I simply had to do what I was told. “Go along to get along,” Pop-Pop used to say. He might have been referring to diplomacy in the workplace, but when he said it I think he really had been talking about how he’d survived more than fifty years of marriage. Either way, it was good advice.
After I found a place to park and walked the block or so to my apartment, I felt uneasy about actually entering. I wasn’t afraid to go in without Red’s bulk to back me up. But the thought that a person or persons unknown had busted in and messed up the place, had gone through every inch of my life, still creeped me out. I felt violated.
Instead, I walked aimlessly, wandering my neighborhood, always good for people watching and usually a good laugh or two at the things they did. Since I lived close to the university, pedestrians littered the sidewalks and street traffic was heavy most times of the day. It was noisy, bustling, a little frenetic, and always interesting. But the creep factor of the previous few days had made me a little paranoid. It didn’t take me a long time to notice a sort of Goth-looking guy in black jeans, tee, and windbreaker dogging me. Thing was, around the U District there were lots of guys that looked like that. What stood out about this one, though, was the fact that he didn’t seem to be doing anything.
The first time I noticed him I’d turned around to watch a couple of really pretty coeds walk past. Down the block, the guy practically had dived for the pavement and fumbled around on the sidewalk as if he’d lost a contact lens. The activity wasn’t all that suspicious, but it had drawn my attention. The next time I saw him, I stopped in front of a shop window to look at the display. I got an itchy feeling between my shoulder blades. In the reflection on the glass, I saw him standing across the street, staring at me. I turned to walk up the street, and as soon as I glanced in his direction, he looked away.
I made a point of turning left at the next corner. Once out of sight, I picked up the pace and hustled up the street. At the next corner, I turned left again and looked down the block. Sure enough, the guy was nearly running to close the gap. I stopped, counted to five, and walked back around the corner the way I’d come. When the guy saw me headed straight toward him, his eyes widened in surprise and he ducked into a video store.
I followed him in. He moved to the back of the store and stared up at the video boxes on a high shelf. I headed straight for him and was about to open my mouth when he turned around, as if he hadn’t found what he wanted.
As he walked by he murmured, “They’re watching us.”
A river of ice flowed up my spine. I took a deep breath and thought about it. I scanned the shelves and casually turned, pretending to look for a specific title. The store specialized in hard-to-find movies on video and DVD, and it stocked thousands of titles. I meandered through an aisle, flipping through some of the cases, pulling one out here and there to read the cover notes. Slowly, I made my way around the store until I was a yard or two away from where the guy still browsed. I pulled a video off a shelf and held it out toward him.
“Seen this?” I said.
He looked up, saw the video, and shook his head.
“Who’s watching?” I murmured.
“Couldn’t tell you,” he said aloud. In a lower voice, he said, “Meet me later. We’ll talk.”
“Where?”
He named a sandwich shop a few blocks away. “One hour,” he muttered. He shrugged, then in a louder voice said, “Sorry I can’t help.” He wandered off.
I put the video back on the shelf and browsed a different aisle. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him leave the store. I picked out an old black-and-white comedy from the 1940s, walked it up to the counter, and paid the rental fee. When I left the store, the guy was nowhere in sight. Nor did I see any sign of anyone watching me. But the thought that someone was out there crawled over my skin like an invisible spider.
I killed most of the hour in a bookstore not far away, checking the street occasionally to see if I could spot who might be following me. Either Goth Guy had been yanking my chain or my watcher was very good. Nothing appeared out of the ordinary.
At the appointed time, I walked over to the restaurant. Inside, two employees wearing bored expressions, tan short-sleeved shirts, and baseball caps embroidered with company logos lounged behind the counter. The shop was empty, which seemed odd given the time. I figured I must have gotten there first, and I wondered if the mystery man would even show. Then I spotted him sitting on a stool in back, at a high counter facing the wall. Realizing I was famished, I went up to the counter and ordered something to eat. The order came up quickly, and I took it back to where the guy sat.
“This seat taken?” I waved my sandwich at the stool next to his.
He looked up, glanced around the restaurant, and shook his head. “You can drop the act.”
“Look, I don’t know you or what you want, but you followed me. No need for sarcasm. You got something to say, spit it out. If not, I’ll take my sandwich home. I don’t need this crap.”
I turned away, but he grabbed my arm and stopped me. “Sorry. This is weird. Sit down.”
He was about my age, maybe a little older, and I wondered if he meant for the closely trimmed beard to make him look older.
“This is new to me,” he said.
“Stalking people?”
He reddened. “Okay, yeah, I checked you out. But it’s not like you think.”
“All right, you know who I am. Let’s start with who you are, then.”
“Sorry. Derek. Derek Hamblin.” He paused. “I work at MondoHard.”
I waited. I had a million questions, bu
t silence was often a better way to prompt someone who had something to say into talking.
He sighed. “There’s a guy who’s been sending you e-mails. Well, not you, but Tess Barrett. He sent me one, too.”
I didn’t see that coming.
“Why? Do you know Tess? What’s he want?”
He raised his hand. “It’s a long story. I don’t think we have time for the whole thing. They’ll wonder why it’s taking you so long to eat a sandwich. So I’ll give you the bare bones. The head of the company, Travis Barrett—well, you know who he is—Barrett came to me to check out a flash drive. I guess he got it from his niece. Tess.”
“Why you?”
“Because I’m good. You know, with computers and stuff.” He waved his hand. “I retrieved part of a program from the memory stick. Source code. Interesting stuff. I think it’s designed to give a device the ability to think.”
I blinked. Computers weren’t my forté, but I ended up with a lot of extraneous crap stored in my head because of they way it’s wired—my eidetic memory. “Artificial intelligence?”
He nodded. “That’s only part of it. Next day, he wants me to work on a project that’s stymied the company’s best coders for a year. The software for one of the big defense contracts they’re working on somehow got infected by a worm. He asked me to take a look at it and see if I could figure out how it works because no one’s been able to eradicate it. It adapts, changes.”
He closed his eyes, erased an imaginary blackboard again, and started over. “Doesn’t matter. Next thing Barrett did was ask me to hack Tess’s e-mail account and find out what she’s been sending and receiving. Like, okay, so she’s still a kid, but that’s a little over the top. That’s a real invasion of privacy. So, I’m not sure I should trust Barrett, but he’s the president of the company so I can’t really say no. On the other hand, I don’t know who I can trust. You with me so far?”
I nodded. I still had a million questions, and some of it didn’t make sense because he was skipping over a lot of details, but I got the gist.
“What about the e-mail you got?” I said.
Derek nodded. “I was getting to that. So this morning, I get this e-mail from someone I don’t know that says he knows who I am and what I’ve been asked to do. He says I need to help Tess. Well, it’s pretty obvious it came from the same guy who was sending her e-mails, too. But I don’t know this person, so I try to back-trace the e-mail. But he’s bounced it from server to server around the world so there’s no way I can track it.
“So I think about it. I wondered why someone would involve Tess—and you—in something this big, something obviously this dangerous, unless it was legitimate. Unless he really needs the help and it truly is a matter of life and death like it said in the e-mails to Tess.”
I chewed on what he said along with a bite of my sandwich. I swallowed and said, “So, who’s sending them?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know. But I can tell you this much. Whoever it is knows as much about game theory as James Barrett did, and knows his video games inside out.”
I frowned. “Game theory?”
He tipped his head. “It’s kind of like a form of psychology. You form games in such a way that players must make intelligent, rational decisions based on strategies of either conflict or cooperation. It’s a way of seeing how people behave to get what they want from others. All kinds of people use it, including the military. That’s why the DoD came to MondoHard in the first place. They wanted James Barrett.”
“You can tell this from some e-mails?”
He nodded. “Look at what he’s gotten you to do. Look at what he’s gotten me to do.”
“Why are you telling me all this?”
He looked away for a moment, formulating his thoughts. “I read more than graphic novels, okay? The accident that killed James Barrett and his wife was big news. Everybody knows Tess Barrett was blinded in the crash, even dweebs like me. It wasn’t hard to check you out. You’re listed as a TA on your UW advisor’s web page, along with your thesis topic. Pretty easy to backtrack from there and get your history. Whatever I can’t find in the public domain I can get anyway, since I can hack just about any network out there.
“I had to ask myself, if push came to shove, who would I believe? My money’s on the blind girl and the squeaky-clean grad student. Someone wants me to help you. Since you’re at a distinct disadvantage, well . . . ” He shrugged.
“What if we’re all being played? I mean, if this guy’s as good at game theory as you say . . . ”
He grinned. “I say we play both sides against the middle. Let everybody else figure it out.”
I didn’t see the humor in it. “I count at least three people dead, two of them killed right in front of me. This is no game.”
His smile disappeared. “No, right. I mean, of course this is serious. That’s why I want to help. I could lose my job just for talking to you.”
“Yeah, and Tess and I could lose our lives.”
He dropped his gaze, cowed under my stare. I backed off and mused, taking some of my irritation out on my sandwich.
“Look, man,” he said finally, “I didn’t know anybody had been killed over this. I’m sorry. But that’s all the more reason you need my help.”
I swallowed and took a deep breath. “Okay, what next?”
He reached into his pocket, took out a cell phone, and glanced around the restaurant before handing it to me.
“This is a burner, a throwaway. Two people have the number, me and our mystery man.”
I took it. Derek’s gaze remained on the phone until I slipped it into my pocket.
He let out the breath he’d been holding. “Okay, he wants me to tell you it’s 10:50, whatever that means. And he sent me this.”
He handed me a slip of paper with a series of odd marks that looked like squares and right angles set in different positions.
His eyes searched my face. “You know what it means?”
I shook my head.
“Well, I did my part.” He stood. “Guess it’s up to you now.”
“Wait. Who’s following me?”
“Does it matter? Look, it’s better if they don’t know you know. So don’t go looking over your shoulder all the time.”
“So that’s it?”
He shrugged. “Until I find out differently.”
He paused, but there was nothing more to say. I watched him walk out and then turned my attention back to what was left of my sandwich. I scanned the marks on the slip of paper while I ate, and called up my memory of the page in Tess’s book, The Eleventh Hour, with a clock face whose hands read 10:50. When I took the last bite of sandwich, I wadded up the wrapping paper and napkin and dumped it in a nearby trash can. Then I walked up to the counter and asked to borrow a pencil. I went back to my seat and sketched out what I recalled from the page in the book. In five minutes I had deciphered the message.
It read, “Dig deep inside yourself.”
I frowned. Riddles within enigmas. This guy was driving me nuts.
I nearly jumped out of my skin when the throwaway phone Derek had given me vibrated against my thigh. I fished in my pocket, yanked it out, and dropped it on the counter as if it had burned my fingers. The screen said, “1 MSG.” I opened it and read.
Tess needs you. Help her do this.
CHAPTER 41
For a moment, Tess froze in terror, awakened from a sound sleep by the scent of something familiar, something that signaled danger. She struggled into wakefulness, knowing despite her fear that she was safe at home. She pushed herself upright in bed. Out of habit she screwed her knuckles into her eye sockets and rubbed the sleep out of them. She still couldn’t see, but she felt more awake. And now she sensed someone’s presence in her room. She cocked her head, listening intently, hearing the rustle of fabric as the person moved, the soft thud of someone’s tread on the carpeted floor.
“Ah-so, good morning, missy.”
“Yoshi,” she said
, relief flooding through her. “You nearly scared me to death.”
“You must have had bad dream. Nothing scary here. I bring you nice coconut orchid today. Brighten up your morning.”
“Thank you. Is it pretty? I wish I could see it.”
“Very beautiful. Bright red. One petal white with red spots, like tongue of child with measles.” He chuckled.
Tess tried to imagine the flower in her mind. But the image failed to appear. The scent kept nagging at her, forcing the picture out of her head. Finally, she recognized what bothered her. The smell reminded her of the whiff of scent she’d picked up at Helen’s just before the shots that killed her and the confusion that followed.
Strange.
She yawned and stretched, wondering why her muscles felt so sore. Then she remembered: from her practice with Yoshi the day before. The rest of the day’s events came rushing back, too.
“Yoshi?” she said. “Can I ask you something?”
“Hai, missy.”
“I don’t know what to do. Someone keeps pushing me to do things. But it seems every time I do, someone gets hurt. I think I might be going crazy. I don’t know who to trust anymore.”
“You can trust Uncle Travis.”
“I hate Uncle Travis. He grounded me. Look at me, Yoshi! I’m a prisoner.”
“He care about you, is all. He try to protect you. He is a good man, an honorable man.”
“Why?” she grumbled. “Just because he was in the army?”
“No, because of what he try to do with his life. Always about serving others, not himself.”
“He’s got himself a pretty nice life here. He just walked into it. Didn’t do a thing for it. My parents built all this, not Uncle Travis. They worked hard and earned it. What did he do?”
“Maybe, if not for you, he would choose to be somewhere else. Maybe this not the life he want, just the one he accept because he is needed here.”
She felt a pang reverberate through her like the peals of a gong. Swinging her legs out from under the covers, she flounced onto the floor.
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