by Dan Koontz
~~~
As the shot of adrenaline from the vivid recollection of his former day care center’s surroundings wore off, Ryan felt the hollowness that had pervaded his morning gradually creeping back in. And he had no interest in burying this like he had with his parents’ deaths for so long.
He had good friends on campus he could talk to – loyal, insightful and trustworthy, but none of them had ever experienced anything even remotely similar to losing a parent, much less a whole family. There were only two people he knew who could possibly relate to what he was going through. One was Dillon, who would probably be twistedly happy to hear about Ryan’s lost little sibling so he could use it as more ammo against Avillage. The other was Annamaria.
Hit with a peculiar giddiness at having a legitimate excuse to call her, he reached for his phone. But as soon as he started to dial, his heart began palpitating and his palms began to sweat; self-doubt began to creep in. Did he really need to bother her with this? Where would he start? Why would she care? She hardly knew him.
By the time her name popped up on the display, he couldn't will his thumb down to the green phone icon on the screen to initiate the call.
It would probably be more productive to look a little further into the emails, he decided.
After a few deep breaths, he opened his laptop back up and logged back in as his dad. The junk-to-personal email ratio remained fairly high, as he continued to sift through the messages. In a way he was fortunate his dad hadn’t deleted much, but it did make for more work for him.
He decided to scroll back a full year, cleaning up the junk as he went, so he could go through the messages quickly and chronologically.
A pattern began to emerge as he continued back through the year. Relatively few of the more recent emails from J.R. had a curved arrow next to them, indicating a reply, while the farther back he went, the more likely the messages were to be marked with an arrow. Somewhat surprisingly though the frequency of the incoming emails seemed to have stayed relatively constant.
Eventually, he made his way back to the day of his sixth birthday, a full year before his parents had died, and then reversed course, reading through each message in its entirety. While Ryan’s dad had sent a fairly high volume of emails to J.R., J.R. seemed to be the originator of every single thread.
One email to Ryan’s mom contained the sarcastic subject line “My ‘best friend’” and was loaded with complaints about J.R.’s never leaving him alone and his paranoia that they wouldn't end up at the same hospital after fellowship. At the end of the message he wistfully posed the question, “how do you break up with a friend?” To which his wife had responded, “You move. Don’t worry. We’ll get those jobs in Boston.”
On he read, as invitations from J.R. to housestaff get-togethers and pharmaceutical-sponsored dinners were repeatedly declined or ignored altogether.
At the end of January there was an email from Massachusetts General Hospital offering Ryan’s dad a spot on the faculty. “I knew it!” Ryan whispered aloud, pumping his fist with a conflicting sense of pride and sorrow at the sight of it. His parents had never told him. Prescott had announced that his dad had accepted a job at Harvard the day AVEX had opened, Ryan recalled, but he had never known if that was really true until now.
His dad had forwarded it on to his mom with the subject line, “Got it!” The body of the email started, “I guess Little Ryan’s going to have to go to a new school next year (and J.R.’s going to have to find a new best friend.)”
A few days later J.R. had sent a message to Ryan Sr., telling him that he still hadn’t heard anything back from Harvard, wondering if Ryan Sr. had heard anything, to which Ryan's dad replied, “I got an offer. I’m thinking about taking it. Michelle’s still waiting to hear about the job at Boston Children’s. Good luck. Would suck to lose my partner in crime.”
J.R. didn’t send another correspondence for the next week. His next message had the subject “Jobs” and read, “I’ve been thinking about it, and I really think we should just stay here. I talked to Dr. Easterbrook. He definitely wants us stay. Positions are there if we want them. Think about it.” There was no reply.
A slew of email invitations to get together to study followed, mostly rejected but with just enough accepted, so as not to seem rude.
In early March a fairly long thread began with the subject “Location.” It started with an email from J.R. to Ryan Sr.: “Hey Ryan, can you to turn the ‘share location’ feature on your phone on, so we can meet up if we’re in the same area. I turned mine on.”
Ryan Sr. then forwarded it on to Michelle with the addendum “UGH!” The following day, he replied to J.R. that he didn’t want everyone knowing where he was all the time, claiming he was worried that he’d probably be tracked down by some crazy patient.
Later that day Ryan’s mom had responded, “Do what you want, but it’ll probably only be a problem until late June. I got the job at Boston Children’s! We’re going to Boston! (and J.R.’s not!)”
Meanwhile J.R. was left pleading with Ryan Sr., “You can choose who you want to see it. You could just allow me and Michelle.”
Days passed as Ryan’s dad tried to kill the issue with a series of claims that showing his location would max out his data usage on his wireless plan, that his phone didn’t support the function, and then finally that he just couldn’t figure out how to turn the feature on. Each time, J.R. replied with detailed solutions to the “problems,” some of which involved a considerable time investment on his part.
Finally at the end of the thread, six days before he died, Ryan Sr. appeared to have caved. “I got it working,” he wrote. “My location is no longer a mystery.”
The final email chain from J.R. was dated March 15th, the day before the crash. “Hey Ryan, last chance to stay in Cleveland! Dr. Easterbrook is going to finalize those two faculty slots by the end of the week. We could own this town for the next 30 years...”
“Would be awesome,” read the reply, “but we’re headed to Boston. It’s finalized at this point. You’ll have to come visit once we get moved in.”
“That’s a shame,” J.R. wrote back. “I’ll miss you. You have been a great friend.”
Curious that he’d use the present perfect tense, “have been a great friend” – instead of the simple present “are a great friend,” Ryan thought. No, not curious. Suspicious.
~~~
A steadily intensifying tingling sensation in his lower legs gradually woke Corbett from a sound sleep. Still sitting upright in his office chair, he rolled his ankles back and forth and then stomped his numb feet on the ground, trying to beat the sensation back into them. His windowless interior office was completely black, providing no clue as to what time of day it was or how long he’d been asleep.
Still somewhat disoriented, he fumbled around his desktop eventually bumping into his mouse, which woke his monitor from sleep mode and illuminated the room. It had only been two hours. But he had a new email from Bradford marked urgent with a file attached.
“You need to address this now!” the message read. Corbett could almost hear Bradford yelling it at him.
He clicked on the attachment to open it and then rotely clicked away the annoying warning message that popped up cautioning him to download attachments only from trusted sources. Just as he did, he was struck with an intense panic – a split second too late. He’d already released the mouse button. The file was downloaded.
A text file opened: “Turnabout is fair play. I would suggest you give up this line of investigation you’re pursuing. I’m not working alone. You’re in way over your head, and you seem to have just downloaded something that you won’t know how to deal with. Bradford isn’t going to be happy if he finds out. Of course this could all stop right here. It’s up to you...”
It was probably a bluff. But he had no other option than to leave the decision on how to proceed to Bradford.
Was it too much to ask for just one thing to go right? Now instead of bein
g praised for his diligence, once again he was going to get reamed. With a pit in his stomach, he trudged over to Bradford’s office.
His knuckles hesitated a few inches from Bradford’s door, his eyes closed and his head hanging down almost to his chest as he weighed how he should break the news.
“What are you doing?” Bradford asked loudly, walking up behind him.
Corbett jumped. “Uh, I was just coming over to discuss something with you,” he said, unshaven and looking generally disheveled from spending the better part of two days in his office.
“You look like hell,” Bradford noted, opening his door. “Come in. You’ve got five minutes. I have to get to a meeting with Mr. Prescott.” (Bradford was the only person in the company who addressed the CEO by his first name, but when referencing him to another employee, he always called him Mr. Prescott.)
“Oh. Well perhaps I should just come back when you have more time,” Corbett sputtered.
“When I say I’ve got five minutes, that’s a lot of my time to dedicate to you. Now get on with on it.”
“Well, I’ve got good news and bad news. Mostly good actually...”
“You still haven’t said anything! Spit it out! I’m perfectly capable of making a determination of whether news is good or bad.”
“Yes, of course. In reference to that email you sent out with the corrupted attachment, well, it was downloaded, and I captured the IP address of the snoop in our system. So far I’ve narrowed his location down to the MIT campus. I should have his exact location, and hopefully his identity, by the end of the day today.”
Bradford smiled as his eyes narrowed.
“Now, to get this information,” Corbett continued with a tremulous voice, “I had to sit at my desk, monitoring my computer very closely for more than 24 hours straight with only brief breaks to run to the bathroom.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Bradford groaned, rolling his eyes. “We all have to work long hours sometimes.”
“Well, my point is that I was exhausted. So after I got the IP address, I ended up falling asleep in my chair. Then when I woke up, I saw that I’d gotten an email from your email address about an urgent matter, so I opened the attachment on it, obviously thinking it was from you, and...”
“Damn it, Corbett!” Bradford erupted. “You fell into your own trap?”
“I know,” Corbett sighed. “I was just waking up and I wasn’t thinking, but now I am, and I don’t want to dig the hole any deeper.
“I printed out the text file the hacker attached,” Corbett said, handing Bradford a sheet of paper. “I couldn’t detect anything suspicious on my machine or on the intranet. I ran a virus scan and didn’t pick anything up. I think it’s a bluff, but I wanted to leave the decision to you as to how I should proceed.”
“Find him!” Bradford growled, crumpling the paper into a tight ball as he stormed out of his office.
~~~
“Ryan. Come in. I want to see you,” Dillon called through his walkie-talkie, with his typical corny imitation of Alexander Graham Bell’s first phrase transmitted by telephone. But there was an unusual urgency in his voice.
In no mood to talk to Dillon, Ryan almost ignored it. But sensing something wasn’t quite right, he answered back with his typical “What?”
“Hey, Ryan. I might be in trouble. I downloaded a file from Bradford’s email account that was sent out to six other Avillage employees, who I’ve since found out don’t exist. The file had a tracer on it, and I think it probably gave up my identity.
“They set me up, so they’re definitely aware that someone’s been in their system, and I think there’s a good chance that by now the IT security guy over there knows it’s me.”
Dillon sounded scared – or maybe just nervous – anyway, something outside his typical spectrum of emotions, which ranged from insulted to angry.
“What are you gonna do?” Ryan asked.
“I’ve got some ideas, but I’m not sure how much they know yet. Let’s just say I could potentially be in a lot of trouble. I've spent all morning kind of re-evaluating my goals. Don’t worry, I’m not planning on going down without a fight, and trust me, at least on some level I will get my revenge.
“Anyway, I have a bunch of Avillage information that only I know, and if I’m taken out of play, that information is gone. You’re the closest thing I have to a confidant, so I’m going to share it all with you. Nothing picked over or edited this time. I probably should’ve done it a long time ago.
“I’ve transferred all my data onto an external hard drive, and I’m mailing it to your home address in Cleveland. I want you to read everything and then destroy the hard drive – really destroy it. Be paranoid for once in your life. Hack it up and dispose of the pieces in different locations. Your brain is essentially a secure hard drive that no one else can access.”
“Yeah, sure,” Ryan said. “I’ll look out for it, but I think you’re overreacting. When they find out you’re one of theirs, you’ll probably get off with a slap on the wrist.”
“We’ll see, but I doubt it. Oh, and don’t waste your time with Jared Ralston's email. It was overrun with spam. All the old stuff’s gone.”
There were a few seconds of radio silence before Dillon added, “You’ve been a great friend.”
~~~
“Sir?” Corbett said, walking right into Bradford’s office. There would be no waiting anxiously outside the door with news this big. “I’ve got the hacker’s identity. And he’s one of ours.”
“An employee?!”
“No. An orphan. Dillon Higley – ticker symbol DILN. He’s a computer programmer and app developer. Actually been quite profitable.”
“Who’s his chairman?” Bradford demanded.
“Tom Erskine in orphan ID.”
“Good. Never even heard of him,” Bradford said, staring at his monitor as his index finger stroked the wheel of his mouse. “I don’t have a single share. Prescott’s got his standard 2%, but he hasn’t been buying.
“Leave me his contact info, and I’ll take it from here,” Bradford said. “Do not tell anyone about this!”
“Yes sir.”
“And Corbett?”
“Sir?”
“Nice work,” Bradford managed, as much as it pained him to do so.
As soon as Corbett left the office, Bradford changed all of his passwords and got to work researching Dillon. He learned that his father was a hacker and that his father’s sentence had been extended on a terrorism charge. Dillon had never gelled with his adoptive family, but he was a consistently productive app developer.
A cursory review of his financial statements though showed that the dividends his stock was paying out were far too high for the amount of money the apps brought in. It turned out that almost half the money he was bringing in was in the form of capital gains – from trading other Avillage listings.
Got him, Bradford thought, his sneer morphing into an icy grin, as he typed out an email to Dillon.
Dear Mr. Higley,
I hope you have enjoyed snooping around our intranet. I am quite confident that you did not find whatever it was you were looking for.
Currently I am weighing my options with respect to what my next step should be. Before I go to the authorities, I’d like to give you the opportunity to tell me your side of the story and, possibly, tell me what you might be willing to do to keep this issue out of the legal system.
Let me remind you that corporate espionage is a potentially serious federal charge, especially when the perpetrator profits from it. And I see that you have done remarkably well trading Avillage equities.
As you have probably already discovered, I don’t conduct any important business over email. I will be in the Boston area next Friday. We can discuss this in person then at a location of your choosing.
I look forward to hearing from you.
Aaron Bradford
Executive Vice President, Avillage, Inc.
Send.
He leaned back contente
dly in his office chair, imagining the panic that would be coursing through Dillon’s veins the next time he opened his email. But his pleasant daydream only lasted half a minute before it was rudely interrupted by the chime of a new email.
It was from Dillon. It simply read, “Northbound rest area Interstate-95 just across New Hampshire border. Noon.”
CHAPTER 12
All packed up and ready to move out, Ryan still had almost twenty-four hours to kill before his parents would arrive to pick him up for summer break, and the last thing he wanted to do was spend that time alone, holed up in his even-more-barren-than-usual dorm room. He needed a change of scenery. He didn’t really care where. Just some place different.
After running into the bank to take out a few hundred dollars cash, he scampered down the stairs of the T station at Harvard Square and hopped on the red line toward Boston South, where he bought a round trip Amtrak ticket to New York.
Maybe Annamaria would be available, maybe she wouldn’t, but after traveling all morning, he couldn’t foresee chickening out on at least calling her. Worst-case scenario, he’d spend the afternoon in Manhattan. Either way, it would beat sitting in his dorm.
As the Amtrak express train squealed to a stop into bay 3 at Penn Station just past noon, Ryan finally willed his thumb down to the green phone icon on his phone’s touch screen – and then froze. Annamaria answered on the first ring.
“Hello?”
Silence.
Having put all his effort into initiating the call, he hadn’t thought far enough ahead to consider what he was actually going to say if she answered.
“Hello?”
More silence. He was about to hang up when he heard her say his name.
“Ryan? Is that you? I can’t hear you.”