by J. A. Jance
49
Neither Bella nor Leland Brooks was pleased when Ali showed up at the house and stayed only long enough to change clothes. She came back through the kitchen in a turquoise-blue sleeveless sheath and a pair of matching three-inch heels. The dress showed her figure to good advantage, and the shoes did the same for her legs.
As Bella gave her a baleful look from her bed beside the fridge, Leland handed her a sandwich wrapped in clear plastic.
“Leftover meat loaf,” he explained. “I know you. When you’re running around like this, you forget to eat.”
It wasn’t so much what he said as it was the chiding tone behind the words that let her know he was unhappy, probably because his carefully thought-out meal plans for the week had just been thrown out the window.
“Thank you for looking after us,” she said. “I’m sorry this week has turned into such an uproar.”
“How are your folks doing today?”
“Better than yesterday,” she said, “and if I can pull off the appointment in Phoenix, maybe tomorrow will be an improvement, too.”
“Good luck,” Leland said, seemingly mollified. “But drive carefully.”
She left the house. Back on the highway, she was about to dial Stu’s number when he beat her to the draw.
“Hey,” he said. “Are you on your way to that meeting with Lowensdahl?”
“I am,” she said. “Wish me luck and hope there aren’t any traffic tie-ups. Otherwise I’m going to be late.”
“The traffic cams show everything flowing smoothly right now,” he said. “But I’m glad I caught you. I’ve got some news that you need to have before you go to that meeting, and your parents—both of them—are the ones who’ve saved the day.”
That was the last thing Ali had expected. When his number appeared on her caller ID she had figured he’d be on the warpath about still having Bob and Edie under hand and foot as well as about Cami being among the missing for so long.
“What did they do?”
“Your mom came in here a while ago with a handful of printouts—a dozen or so—that had been copied from posts on Jason McKinzie’s Facebook page, all of them signed by someone named Ana Stander. Your mother came in to see me, all hot and bothered because she thought the Stander posts were different from all the others. Once I took a look at them, I had to admit she had a point. Most of the posts on McKinzie’s Facebook page have faces on them—usually of Jason and some woman or other. These didn’t. They were scenic shots only, accompanied by little notations like ‘Wish you were here,’ and ‘Remember this?’ ”
“So maybe Ana Stander and McKinzie had been to all those places together?” Ali asked.
“That’s what I thought,” Stu answered, “but Edie insisted that didn’t fit, either. The Ana Stander messages have been coming in for months now—for the better part of two years. Edie insists that when it comes to dating, Jason McKinzie is a ‘one and done’ kind of guy.”
Ali laughed aloud at that. Edie Larson was big on commitment and heartily disapproved of people who routinely “played the field.”
“So she comes into my office with a fistful of paper,” Stu continued. “I don’t do paper. I told her to have your dad send me the links. As soon as I downloaded the first one, I recognized it as a stock photo—the kind of thing people can use without having to pay the photographer a royalty. It turns out that’s what they all were—one stock photo after another of scenery from all over South Africa. Seeing them got me to thinking: if McKinzie and Ana had been to all those places together, why didn’t they post their own pictures or else pictures of themselves being there?”
“Maybe they’re bad photographers?” Ali suggested.
“So I located another copy of one of the photos online, downloaded it, and guess what? The Ana Stander file was a hell of a lot bigger than the other one.”
“Steganography?” Ali asked.
“You’ve got it. Steganography all the way.”
Ali knew a little about steganography. It allowed for the easy encryption of messages by simply concealing the real correspondence within the pixels of a seemingly harmless photo. It was a tool B. and other High Noon employees often used for handling internal communications that had to be sent over easily penetrated public Wi-Fi systems in hotels or airports.
“In other words,” Ali said, “you know messages are there, but you can’t read them, right?”
“Wrong,” Stu replied with a chuckle. He seemed to be in uncommonly high spirits. “It turns out we can read them,” he added, “and it’s all because of your father. Just call it the revenge of the non-nerds.”
“My father?” Ali asked. “He doesn’t know the first thing about steganography.”
“He didn’t before today,” Stu said, “but now he does. The first time I mentioned steganography, he asked me if it was some kind of dinosaur, but he’s on track now. In fact, he’s the one who found the password.”
“To the encryption? Where?”
“Right there in plain sight in the stuff that came up in my data mining. He was doing just what you told him to do. He and your mom were going through that huge pile of links to find the ones applicable to our particular Jason McKinzie. Guess what? He found him right there in the middle of one of the downloaded hacks for the Ashley Madison Web site.”
“As in the Ashley Madison?” Ali asked.
“The very one. Ashley Madison is widely regarded as a cheaters’ Web site. A bunch of hackers, armed with a raging case of righteous indignation, tried to blackmail the owners into shutting the site down by threatening to release private information concerning their members. Ashley Madison didn’t budge, and neither did the hackers. The information went public on the Web. It includes the clients Web site names—their Ashley Madison fictional noms de plume—as well as their real names, billing addresses, private e-mail addresses, credit card information, and passwords.”
Stu stopped speaking. As silence came over the line Ali wondered briefly if he had hung up. “So?” she asked finally.
“Didn’t you hear what I said? The hack download contained everybody’s passwords,” Stu said forcefully. “Jason McKinzie is one of those arrogant assholes who thinks of himself as the smartest guy in the room, only he’s not—not even close. I’m sure he thinks he’s got the world’s greatest password, and that’s the whole problem—all he has is one. He evidently uses it for everything—Facebook, LinkedIn, his private e-mails, probably even his bank accounts, for all I know, right along with Ashley Madison.”
Ali knew a little something about this particular topic. Not too long ago she’d been hauled on the carpet and read the riot act by both Stu and B. for not changing her passwords on a regular basis. She did so now, just to keep peace in the family.
“He never changed it?”
“Nope,” Stu said gleefully, “not even after the Ashley Madison hack went public. So I tried it on the South African photos and voilà!”
“Voilà what?”
“They opened right up.”
“And they are?”
“Receipts for diamonds—hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth—purchased through a Dutch diamond cartel, and not conflict diamonds, either. I asked Lance to look into this, and he got right back to me. The diamonds are purchased through a third party, a money laundering service that operates on the dark web. Once purchased, the diamonds are warehoused at various banking institutions located all over the EU, places McKinzie could stop by anytime and pick up some as needed and turn them into bankable cash.”
Ali’s jaw dropped. She could barely believe what she was hearing. “So the SOB does have hidden assets,” she exclaimed, “and you’ve found them!”
“We’ve found some of them,” Stu cautioned. “Maybe not all, but a big chunk of them—one large enough to have a lot of zeros on the end of it. By the way, the most recent transaction—and by far the largest so far—happened a little over two months ago, a couple of weeks after the closing date on the sale of OFM’s
headquarters building.”
“Bingo,” Ali said.
“Bingo indeed.”
“And my parents did this?” Ali asked. “Can I talk to them?”
“Not right now,” Stu said. “They’re still in the other room and still up to their eyebrows in sorting. Now that we have McKinzie’s tried-and-true password, we have access to a lot more material than we never could have seen before.”
“Promise me,” Ali said, “that the next time you see my mother, you’ll give her a hug.”
“I’m not exactly a hugging kind of guy,” Stu replied.
“In this instance, I think it’s worth your making an exception,” Ali told him. “What about B.? Does he know about any of this?”
For the first time in the entire conversation, Stu hesitated. “Not exactly,” he admitted. “I’m supposed to be working on Basel, and I do have people working on that issue, but this one turned out to be too much fun. I couldn’t help myself.”
“Don’t worry,” Ali said with a laugh. “Considering the results, I think B. will give you a pass. And as long as you’re not in the Basel loop so far, maybe you could give me a hand with something else.”
“What’s that?”
“Dave Holman is working his own double homicide, the Sun City one, which we now have reason to believe is directly connected to the Fraziers’. He needs traffic cam information from an area in Phoenix last Friday night. We’re looking for a specific vehicle that may or may not have entered the parking lot at a bar called Wheels Inn. It’s on 43rd Avenue, somewhere between McDowell and Osborn.”
“Okay,” Stu said. “I’ll call him and verify all the details. In the meantime, what about Cami? Do you have an ETA on when she’ll be back here?”
“Cami,” Ali said. “I was so caught up in what you were saying, I almost forgot to tell you. She’s on her way to you right now, coming from Sedona. A little while ago, Haley Jackson gave us a password-protected memory card that she found in Dan Frazier’s safe-deposit box. We need to hack into it to see if it has anything to do with this whole mess.”
“Okay,” Stu said. “Once it’s here, we’ll get right on it.”
Ali couldn’t help smiling. For Stu Ramey, hugging was hard; hacking was easy.
“Right,” Ali said. “You do that. In the meantime, I’ll call B. and give him the good news.”
50
Seated behind the wheel of her Prius, Cami fought to control her breathing. As she did so, her hands steadied. Her limp limbs were once again capable of operating the floor pedals. “Who are you?” she asked. “What do you want?”
“Who I am doesn’t matter, but I want the memory card.”
“What memory card?”
“Don’t play dumb. I know you have it. Ali Reynolds gave it to you. Hand it over.”
How could she possibly know that? Cami wondered. Only four people—Haley Jackson, her grandmother, Ali, and Cami—had been involved in the conversation that had ended with Ali handing her the card. Clearly the woman had been listening in on that conversation, but how? Was one of Haley’s employees a traitor of some kind?
As for the memory card, was that what this was all about? With no other options, Cami had no choice but to comply. She plucked the tiny memory card and USB adapter out of the pocket of her jeans and handed them over. To Cami’s astonishment, the woman immediately buzzed down the window and threw the card, adapter and all, out through the opening, where it disappeared into a sea of dry grass and underbrush.
“Why did you do that?” Cami demanded. “I thought you wanted it.”
“As long as no one else has it, I’m good.”
Minutes later, they reached the intersection with I-17, and Cami turned south toward Phoenix.
“Remember,” the woman warned. “No speeding. Do nothing to attract attention to this vehicle. No flashing your lights or your brakes. If you try any of those tricks, you’re dead. And don’t think you can crash this car into something and still get away. You can’t.”
Cami had already arrived at that same conclusion. Ali had used that strategy on a carjacker months earlier, and it had worked. That, however, had been a low-speed crash. The bad guy hadn’t been belted in, and the resulting blow had been enough to knock the weapon out of his hand. In this instance, both Cami and her captor were wearing seat belts. Even so, a seventy-five-mph crash was likely to be catastrophic for all concerned. For right now, her best bet was to do as she was told and lull her opponent into a false sense of security. Cami had been caught by surprise earlier. The next time, she’d be ready.
“I suppose you’re going to shoot me the same way you shot Alberto Joaquín and Jeffrey Hawkins?”
Out of the corner of her eye, Cami caught the startled look her captor sent in her direction. “My, my,” she said. “You’re quite the little detective.”
“And you work for Jason McKinzie,” Cami added.
“Right again. So you know I’m serious. Now shut up and let me work.”
Moments later, the woman was speaking into her phone. “It’s me,” she said without needing to identify herself. “Something’s come up. We’re going to have to move up our departure. Midnight tonight. Everything else remains the same—same passengers, same location, same destination. . . . Okay, see you then.”
They were passing the Cordes Junction exit when Cami saw Ali’s Cayenne racing up behind her. Cami was doing seventy-five; Ali, who was known for having a lead foot, was driving in the left lane and going several miles over the limit. As Ali sped past, Cami hoped that Ali would at least glance in her direction, but she didn’t. Ali’s mouth was moving. Most likely she was talking a mile a minute on her Bluetooth, so there would be no help from that quarter, at least not anytime soon. Not until someone noticed Cami had gone missing.
She understood that Stu Ramey, tucked in among his bank of computers, was the person most likely to find her, but only if he came out of his virtual world long enough to realize she was in trouble. Cami’s challenge was to stay alive long enough for that to happen.
At the moment, her captor was under the impression that holding Cami at gunpoint gave her enough of an upper hand. The fact that it had worked to begin with made Cami flush with shame. In the shock of those few first moments while staring down the barrel of a pointed weapon, she had been completely unable to summon her gym-based Krav Maga training.
She had been studying the Israeli form of self-defense ever since the incident in Bisbee where a giant of a man had plucked her out of a vehicle through an open car window and nearly strangled her. Determined never again to be that helpless, she had signed up for Krav Maga.
To her instructor’s surprise and to her own as well, she had turned out to be proficient enough that she had already achieved a green belt ranking. Her childhood training in kung fu had served her well in terms of learning the moves, but there was nothing ceremonial or polite about Krav Maga. There was no bowing; no formality; no philosophizing; no rules about not harming your opponent. This was street fighting, plain and simple—kill or be killed.
The problem was, all of Cami’s previous Krav Maga training had happened in supervised situations—artificial situations. None of those had been a matter of life and death. This was different.
Cami stood at only four ten. She knew it was easy for other people to look at her and dismiss her and her capabilities based on size alone. That was one of the primary reasons she had signed up for Krav Maga in the first place.
The woman was still on her phone, making one call after the other. She exhibited not the slightest concern that Cami was privy to every word she said. That in itself served as a warning, telling Cami exactly where she stood. By the time those plans went into effect, the woman expected Cami to be out of the picture. It also meant that Cami had to take her captor out first.
She drove steadily onward, doing her best to appear scared and compliant, hoping her opponent didn’t catch on. What Cami was really doing, though, was calming her jangled nerves and priming both her
mind and body for action. One by one she silently recited the lessons Amir had required that she learn by rote: attack preemptively; establish possible escape routes; do the most damage possible—throat, eyes, fingers, feet.
Yes, she thought, consciously suppressing a smile. Her green belt, although invisible to the naked eye, constituted a concealed weapon. Enough of one, Cami hoped, to give her at least a Krav Maga fighting chance.
51
Ali’s next call caught up with B. in the British Airways lounge at Sky Harbor. “On your way to that Phoenix appointment, I trust?” he asked.
“Yes, sir. As requested.”
“And what are you wearing?”
“The turquoise silk shantung with matching heels.”
“Wish I could be a mouse in the corner,” B. murmured. “I’ve never met the man, but I spend my life dealing with corporate yahoos who think the sun rises and sets in their butts. I’d like to be there to watch the fireworks when you nail his feet to the floor.”
“I’m going to, too,” Ali said. “Wait until you hear what Stu and my parents found.”
It took the better part of ten minutes to bring B. up to date. When she related the story about Facebook, he burst out laughing. “Count on Edie to notice something like that. I’ve never understood the appeal of Facebook or the need to compulsively look at photos of you and your nearest and dearest in every possible pose. For sure the SEC would go looking back through Jason McKinzie’s e-mail history, but I can’t imagine them bothering to check out his Facebook entries.”
B. listened quietly, waiting until Ali ran out of steam before he spoke again. “It seems to me that Haley Jackson was surprisingly close to Dan and Millie Frazier. What about Dan’s other PA, the one down in Phoenix? I wonder if she would know anything about the memory card issue, because it sounds to me as though the card may be an important piece of the puzzle.”