Killer Move

by Michael Marshall

  Back at my own machine I established that the original e-mail had been sent at 9:33 that morning—when I’d been standing self-righteously in line at the post office waiting to mail a package back to Amazon, thus tying two small, inexplicable things together in a knot.

  A book I had not ordered.

  An e-mail I hadn’t sent.

  I’d made no sense of either by the time I drifted out to lunch. As I was sitting outside the deli, fingers drumming on the hot metal of the table, I saw Tony Thompson emerge from the reception block. He noticed me and started to head over.

  My stomach did a little flip. Tony’s address had been on the distribution list of the e-mail. As he walked down the ramp toward me, I took a slow, deep breath.

  “Funny e-mail, Bill,” he said, before I could even get started. “Laughed my head off. You got more like that, send ’em right along. Marie and I are going to have a talk about the matter we discussed, by the way. Probably tonight.”

  I shut my mouth, smiled, and didn’t say a thing.

  “No way of telling,” the geek said. “Bottom line is it could have been anyone in the world.”

  “That’s it? That’s your professional opinion? How much you get paid for this level of insight?”

  I was sitting with him outside the ice cream place at the Circle. It was coming up on seven in the evening but still warm, and getting heavier.

  He took a lick of his chocolate sugar cone. “A lot less than you, dude. Plus, no commission. Not to mention I spend all day sorting out shit where the root cause exists between the computer and the chair facing it. By which I mean, you know, the user.”

  “I got the joke. I’m laughing inside.”

  I’d had the idea of calling the company’s tech guy by midafternoon. It had taken him three hours to extricate himself from the IT needs of the main office, and forty minutes to check over my computer. Getting him to do this without yakking on and on about what he was doing was the hardest part, but luckily by then I was the only person left in the office. As soon as he’d pushed himself back from my desk, I’d nonetheless encouraged him to carry on the conversation elsewhere. Sitting with a spindly midtwenties guy in a tatty Pearl Jam T-shirt was not helping to resettle me, especially as his phone kept beeping at irregular intervals: a single, echoing ping, like sonar. He tilted his head to check the screen every single time this happened, but did not pick the phone up or do anything, and this was beginning to get on my nerves.

  “You got two issues,” he said, squinting against the slanting remains of the day’s sun. “First is this e-mail. Simplest explanation is someone sat at your machine in the office. This is hardly an exploit of legend.”

  “An ‘exploit’?”

  “It’s what they call a hacking triumph.”

  “Who are ‘they’?”

  “Hackers.”

  “Assholes with no life, you mean.”

  “It’s a point of view. Anyway, an exploit is not what that scenario would constitute. Even newbies and script-kiddies would think it beneath them. You’d be amazed how many people leave their computers unattended, though, with their e-mail accounts lying open.” He looked pointedly at me.

  “I’m a Realtor,” I said irritably. “I work in a tiny office with two people who are employed by the same company, one of whom has to be reminded how to set the alarm, even though it boils down to pressing four buttons and then another button and has been covered about a zillion times via memo and the spoken word. Concerted campaigns of cyberespionage are not one of my fears. I’m at DefCon Minus Five.”

  The guy shrugged again, as if this was the kind of naïveté he encountered all the time—though I was confident his occupation consisted largely of crawling under people’s desks to check that cables were plugged in. Meanwhile, he slurped another mouthful of his ice cream cone. Although the girl who’d introduced me to it was not working, I’d ordered the mandarin mascarpone again, and it was the only part of this encounter I was enjoying.

  The geek’s phone pinged once more. “Look,” I said. “Why is it making that noise?”

  “The social network never sleeps.”

  “You want to turn the sound off? It’s really getting on my nerves.”

  He pressed a key. “You’re kind of tense, dude.”

  “Yeah, I am,” I said, “because, according to you, someone snuck into my office this morning and, in view of at least one of my colleagues, forwarded an e-mail that I’ve never seen. Then trashed all evidence from my computer. And snuck back out. Right?”

  “Actually, no,” the guy said. “The e-mail could have been set up anytime in the last weeks or months.”

  “You can do that?”

  “Yep.”

  “Oh.” I didn’t like the sound of this. I’d preferred it when it had simply been impossible for me to have sent the e-mail at the time it claimed to have been sent. That gave me a concrete conundrum—and a specific time frame—to grab hold of and shake. This new idea untied the knot and had the potential to pull the event, and thus the intentions of whoever had done it, back in time.

  “Except that probably wasn’t what happened,” the geek said smugly.

  I stared steadily at him. I very much wanted a cigarette. He coughed and sat up straight.

  “Okay,” he said. “Someone with skills could have dropped below GUI level and triggered it from underlying OS. I couldn’t find any sign of that, though, which brings me to Issue Two. You’ll recall I said there were two issues, right?”

  “You did. How are you still alive, by the way?”

  “This Amazon delivery you mentioned. Could be the two are unrelated, but . . . Occam’s razor, right?”

  “What are you talking about now?”

  “Medieval logician guy. He said if you’ve got two competing explanations for an event or situation, always choose the simplest, at least as your starting point. Point is, you have this weird e-mail, plus this morning you receive a book you say you never ordered.”

  “I didn’t,” I said tersely.

  “Your login for the Amazon account is your e-mail address, I assume? Like half the frickin’ world?”

  “Yes,” I admitted.

  “But there’s a password, too, right?”

  I opened my mouth, then closed it again.

  He nodded. “Right. Anyone can find your e-mail address. You probably bandy it about more than your actual name. But your password? That’s not for sharing. So this is where it starts to look concerted. Where do you keep a record of this password?”

  “Nowhere. I just remember it.”

  “Tell me it’s not something like your name or your wife’s name or date of birth.”

  “It’s not. There’s no way anyone could guess it.”

  “Excellent. So . . . how does someone get hold of it? Simplest way is a keystroke recorder. A piece of code that sits on a computer, makes a record of every single thing that’s typed on its keyboard, saves it to disk, or covertly e-mails it to someone out there in the void.”

  “Is there one of those on my computer?”

  “No. What tech do you have at home?”

  “Two laptops. One for me, one for my wife.”

  “You use public wifi much?”

  “No. The machine stays at the house.”

  “You have wireless there?”

  “Yes.”

  “How close is the nearest house?”

  “About thirty yards.”

  “Perfectly feasible for them to be piggybacking. Or else someone could be war-driving past your house.”

  “Which means?”

  “Cruising around with a laptop in a car, scoping out wifi networks, taking data snapshots.”

  “Are you kidding me? We live in a gated community. You can’t even get in unless you’re a resident or a certified guest.”

  “Doesn’t rule it out. So you got three options.” He counted off on his long, slender fingers. “Human engineering—like glancing over your shoulder at work, or in a café, when you’re
using the Web. Two, a keystroke recorder. Three, someone scanning your home wifi.”

  “I don’t like the sound of any of those.”

  “Don’t blame you,” he said, wiping his hands on a napkin. “Whatever way you cut it, someone’s on your case.”

  “So what do I do?”

  He stood up. “Check your laptop—see if there’s anything that you don’t recognize. If you want, bring it in tomorrow and I’ll check it out. Meanwhile, change every password you have.”

  “I will,” I said. “And thanks . . .”

  “Kevin. No problem. I’ll drop you an e-mail later with hints on how to look for black hat wifi, okay? I gotta go now, though. There’s a Chronicles of Dunsany’s Kingdom fragfest waiting for me in Bradenton.”

  “I have no idea what that means, but good luck with it. Kevin.”

  He sloped off, leaving me with a bowl half-full of melted yogurt and a head completely full of questions.

  I was confident “human engineering” was not the answer. I’m not a freak, but I do have a clearly defined personal space. I’d have been aware if someone had been invading it sufficiently to visually eavesdrop on what I was doing on my phone. That left two options. Home laptop, home wifi. Both featured the word home, which I did not like. Being fucked with out in the world is one thing. Someone doing it where you live is another matter.

  As I stood up, I heard someone speaking.

  “Hey hey,” the voice said.

  I turned to see the goth/emo girl I’d met a couple days before, walking along the sidewalk toward the shop.

  “Glad to see you slipping into Mascarpone Madness again, Mr. Moore,” she said. “Hope you didn’t give Craig as big a tip, though. I’m sure he won’t have served it with anywhere near as much panache.”

  “He did not,” I said, forced into a smile. “I thought you worked afternoons . . .” I racked my brain, and then added “Cassandra,” just in time for it not to sound like too much of an afterthought.

  “I like to mix it up,” she said, appearing pleased I’d recalled her name. We like being singled out, most of the time. “You never know who’s watching, right?”

  I didn’t say anything, and her face turned serious. “Sorry—did I just touch a nerve?”

  “It’s fine. Really.”

  “Okay. Just, you look as if you bit into a lemon. And not in a good way.”

  “Long day,” I said, and walked away to my car.

  I drove home slowly, taking the time to run a detailed damage appraisal in my head.

  The Amazon incident was done and dusted, and might even pay out, if Steph rolled with her response to my SMS of the morning. The e-mail didn’t seem to have materially offended anyone, had even hit the right note with Tony Thompson. It could be that this intrusion into my life might actually lead to improvements.

  Conclusion: minimal negative impact sustained.

  That didn’t mean it was okay.

  By the time I pulled into the driveway, I had my ducks in a row. Step one, check for weirdness on my laptop. If I found some, throw it off. If I drew a blank, then I had to look into someone stealing stuff out of the air. I’d got the sense from Kevin the Geek that this was going to be a lot harder, but hoped the promised document would point me in the right direction. Either way, I could reset the minimal number of passwords in my life, keep a low online profile for a few days, and see if that killed the problem.

  I parked and got out, full of purpose. As I was locking the car I heard the house door opening, and looked round to see Steph storming down the path.

  “You okay?” I asked.

  She slapped me hard across the face.

  CHAPTER TEN

  I don’t know if you’ve ever been slapped by your wife, but it’s not a great experience. It hurts, for a start, especially when delivered by a woman who plays her tennis old school, with a fiercely single-handed grip.

  “You loser,” she said. It wasn’t a shout. It was throttled way down, rasping deep in her throat.

  “Steph,” I stammered. “What the hell?”

  “Inside. Now.”

  She turned on her heel and marched back up the path. I followed quickly, casting a glance down the drive to see if any of the neighbors happened to be in view. I couldn’t see any, though that didn’t mean there wasn’t someone in one of the three houses visible from our yard, standing beyond a window that had just turned into a screen featuring an intriguing new TV show. Shocked and nonplussed though I was, I still found a second to worry about whether the incident had been witnessed by others. That was part of it. But I realized I was also wondering if someone might be watching us.

  Or watching me.

  Steph turned back to face me the moment I’d shut the front door. I’d had time to wonder whether she’d received the joke e-mail—I couldn’t recall whether she’d been on the list or not—and if this was a weirdly extreme reaction. Steph’s not a prude or too obsessed with being politically correct, but that was the only thing I could think of. Her face destroyed whatever minimal credibility the theory/hope had. She was furious, but there was something else in her eyes. They weren’t hard enough for it to be anger alone. There was the softness of hurt in there, too.

  “Honey,” I said, reaching for the voice I used with clients when a deal had gone belly-up and the world needed making right. “Tell me what’s going on.”

  “The sad thing is,” she said, her voice still at the reined-back snarl that I found more worrying than shouting, “I’m actually slightly relieved. In a bizarre way. I’d thought there might actually be something going on between you two. Okay, I didn’t think it, but the possibility had entered my mind.”

  “Between who?”

  “Oh shut up. You really think that’s going to play now? Don’t insult me.”

  “Steph,” I said, disconcerted at how hard my heart was beating, “I have not the slightest clue what you’re talking about. Really.”

  She started to say something, and this would have been a shout, but the words collided in her mouth and canceled each other out. Instead, she shook her head and marched off in the direction of the den. I followed.

  The den, or family room (if you’ve got a family), is on the other side of the kitchen, a continuation from its open-plan cooking/eating area and sharing its view out onto the pool area. As I entered I saw that both of our laptops were lying open on the L-shaped sofa.

  I stopped in my tracks. “What are you doing with my computer?”

  “What you said you’d do two weeks ago,” Steph snapped. “And again a couple of nights ago. Pulling off the pictures from Helen’s birthday party. Remember?”

  I started to protest, but I had nowhere to go with denial or self-righteousness. I had said I’d do those things, and it was also long-established practice for us to access each other’s computers as and when required. Why not? Neither of us had anything to hide. But it felt like an intrusion nonetheless, especially today.

  I watched as Steph stormed over to my machine and banged a key. This caused the blank screen to blink back into life. Steph tried to say something, but once more it died in her mouth. She gestured at the screen instead.

  I bent over the back of the sofa and looked. At first I couldn’t make out what I was seeing. A picture of some kind, but oddly framed: a skewed, multicolored oblong surrounded by near black, a short series of numbers in orange down at the bottom right.

  Then it snapped into sense, and I realized I was looking at a photograph taken at night, through a window. The colored area showed the inside of someone’s house. A small, blurry blue-gray section was presumably a television screen. A portion of a blood-red sofa—which is what broke my first half-assumption, which was that the picture had been taken through one of our windows, of our den. Our sofa is pale blue.

  The other thing that had broken it was the figure visible a third of the way along from the right side of the window. Also blurry, but flesh-toned, apart from a black bra. The hair that hung down almost as far as its hor
izontal line was a very dark brown.

  “What the hell is this?”

  “Bill, please. Spare me.”

  I reached out and hit the cursor key. This brought up another picture, which was similar but in better focus. The edges of the objects within it were still fuzzy, suggesting that the photograph had been taken twenty or thirty yards from the window, using some kind of zoom. It was, however, sharp enough to tell both that the woman had removed her bra, and that she was Karren White.

  There were twelve photographs. In all but four, the identity of the woman was clear. The others caught her from behind or at a nonrevealing angle, before and after she had removed her clothes and put on a terrycloth robe. They began and ended what was evidently a sequence taken from some vantage point near Karren’s apartment. I knew the building, near the bay at the north end of Sarasota, having sold an apartment there several years before.

  “I have no idea how these got on my laptop,” I said.

  “Yeah, right. I mean, for god’s sake. How lame do you have to be to do this? Never mind the lying.”

  “Lying?” I said, confused.

  “Good lord. You don’t even realize how clearly you’ve screwed up, do you?”

  She jabbed her finger at the screen, where the last of the sequence of pictures—a relatively innocuous one, showing Karren in the process of leaving the room via a door—was still in view. I saw that Steph was indicating the sequence of numbers in the corner.

  09•14•2011

  A date, of course. The fourteenth of September. Yesterday. So the lie had been . . .

  “Steph, I’ve got to see a client,” Steph snarled, seeing the penny had dropped. “Steph, it’s so cool, I’ll get the commission. Oh no, honey—Karren won’t be there. And of course, she actually wasn’t—except via what you could see through your putrid lens.”

  “Steph,” I said. I was mirroring how she’d just spoken, but couldn’t help it. I was starting to get angry, but defensively assuming the offensive. “I don’t even have a zoom lens. I’ve got a three-hundred-dollar compact. You know that. You bought it for me.”

  “Sure, I bought that one,” she sneered. “But who knows what other gadgets you’ve picked up in the meantime? From Amazon, maybe? Your favorite online retailer, from what I gather.”