“Get me his name or get me someone else to confirm the data. Otherwise you’ve got nothing,” the editor had said.
After weeks of cat and mouse, Solarman finally slipped up by using the same Starbucks cafe for one of his calls a second time. Sue had told her editor she had a lead on who he was, and had gone out to watch the cafe.
Here she was, on the fifth straight day of her stakeout. As she watched the parade of people coming in and out of the cafe, Sue made a game out of guessing which one was Solarman. She thought it might be the bald, fat man with the pug dog in tow. What looked like a computer case turned out to be a binder of wall paper and paint samples he was considering to redecorate his apartment. A young man with glasses and a backpack fit the bill, but he was a student from the local community college studying for exams.
Just after lunch, a neatly dressed man with a salt and pepper business cut strolled into the cafe, piquing her interest. He carried a laptop, and fit her mental mockup for Solarman to a T. Five minutes later her phone rang. She had arranged her office calls to be forwarded to her cell. She could see the man inside wearing a headset and sitting in front of a laptop. Adrenalin jacked up her heart rate. It had to be him.
“Sue Storm,” she said with bated breath.
“It’s me,” said the familiar voice she knew as Solarman.
Sue couldn’t wait any longer. She stepped out of her car and walked directly toward the cafe, still talking on the phone. She was so intent on the man inside, she almost walked into a cab that had pulled over in front of her as she crossed the street. She leaned over to say something nasty to the driver when a loud explosion blew all the glass out of the cafe windows and rocked the cab. The blast wind concussion wave knocked her brutally to the ground. As she lay there, the image of the man in the cafe flashed through her mind. A heavy sadness settled over her when she realized she would never meet Solarman face to face. Sue decided to forgive the cab driver who had rudely cut her off. After all, he had saved her life. Then everything went dark.
Chapter Twenty-four: Invisible
Sue Storm had been lucky. The use of Semtex in the Starbucks bombing had been devastating, killing Solarman and everyone else inside the cafe. Semtex was a military grade explosive with a nasty blast radius. However, other than a severe concussion, a cracked rib and a few scrapes and bruises she had survived in one piece.
Homeland Security and the FBI had been all over the bombing investigation. The Feds had interviewed Sue in the hospital, but she withheld any mention of why she was at the Starbucks that day. She wasn’t going to lose the story that could make her career as a journalist. After a day in the hospital for observation, Sue decided to take a few weeks off and, without telling anyone, went to her sister’s in Monterey to recover from her injuries.
The fed’s investigation dead-ended, and after a public funeral service to pay homage to the victims of the bombing, the Starbucks story moved to the back page. A small obituary piece revealed that the man Sue called Solarman had been one John Smiley, the CEO of a small tech company in the valley developing solar batteries for commercial use.
When Sue returned to the TV station in LA, she had a pile of messages and voice mails waiting. There were the usual perfunctory get-well cards from acquaintances, and several heartfelt voice mails from friends. Two had been from Randy Hope, a tennis player with whom Sue had a brief romance in college. She puzzled over why he called until, on his second message, he mentioned something about fraud. When she called the number he left, it was no longer in service. She reached his home number, and found out from the housekeeper that Randy had died only two days after his last call to her. Sue immediately left the television station and did not return. It was time to use her superpower.
Chapter Twenty-five: Linchpin
When the feds had taken over the Starbucks bombing investigation, they slammed a tight lid over most information on the case, including the names of the injured parties. As with most police investigations, everyone is a suspect until they are not. Add a bomb, and the feds see terrorists behind every tree. It’s reminiscent of the communist scare during the McCarthy era. Only now it’s not just a few luckless individuals hauled in front of Congressional hearings or being blacklisted. Now we have the Patriot Act. Any citizen can suffer the indignity of getting groped at the airport, or having their phone or internet or banking monitored while the fact is kept secret under the omnipresent blanket of protecting national security. Ironically, Stalin would have approved.
Getting anything but cursory information on the Starbucks bombing incident required tunneling into government files. Luckily, Vinny was intimately familiar with the government communication systems from her days working for the feds. For Vinny, it was like taking candy from a baby. She got the list and showed it to Raja.
“You find anything of interest?” asked Raja, as he looked over the names.
“That’s a big ten-four, Bubba. One of the injured bystanders was a girl working for the local TV news department. Her office number showed up on Randy Hope’s call records.”
“I think we just found our linchpin. What’s her name?”
“Sue Storm.”
“That name sounds familiar. How do I contact her?”
“There you may have a problem,” said Vinny. “Sue Storm has disappeared for all intents and purposes. I find no trace of her starting about three weeks back.”
“Looks like she went into hiding after the bombing.”
“Can you blame her?”
“Not a bit, considering it may be the only reason she is still alive—if she is. Vinny, we need to find her.”
“I’m running facial recognition in present time in the Greater Los Angeles area. It’s slow, but we might pick her up. Of course, she could have gone anywhere in or out of the country.”
“She was on to a story big enough to get people killed. If she’s like any of the reporters I know, she won’t be able to give that up so easily,” said Raja. “Let’s assume she’s still here.”
“Concur.”
“If you put Sue Storm at the center of our case, what does our diagram look like?”
Vinny manipulated the computer screen. The program created a diagram that now looked like a planet with two smaller moons. Sue Storm was being orbited by Judge Griggsby and Governor Black.
“There’s our friend the governor again,” said Raja. “As little as I like politicians, this is definitely not helping. I may never vote again.”
Chapter Twenty-six: Pay It Forward
Vinny did everything she could to search for Sue Storm, but found no trace of her. Sue had a head start in doing her disappearing act. And, being a reporter, she knew all the tricks to find someone, and how not to be found, as well.
Raja decided it was time to get Vinny some help. He would look up a friend and former client, Akeen Patel.
While the phone was ringing, Raja remembered a quote from Martin Luther King, “The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.” Raja had seen Akeen Patel in just such a circumstance. They had first met as classmates at Oxford. Three years after graduating, Raja had gotten a desperate call from Akeen. His family had been stuck in Afghanistan when the Taliban took over. It was before the American military had returned. While the Taliban had succeeded in stopping the opium production for the first time in a century, it was only by beheading anyone found near a poppy plant. Their scorched earth policy also extended to outsiders, and especially to people of different faith. Akeen’s family members, who were Hindus from Pakistan, were hiding in the hills during one of the bloody ethnic purges the Taliban were conducting.
Raja had flown immediately into Pakistan and from there requisitioned a small plane to attempt a rescue. There was no easy place to land in the mountainous Afghan terrain, but somehow, as soldiers swept through the hills, Akeen’s father had managed to light enough torches for Raja to convince the pilot of the small p
lane to land. Akeen’s family crowded into the plane as soon as it was down. They were about to take off when Akeen’s mother spoke rapidly in their Hindi dialect. Before Raja could ask what she said, Akeen leaped to the ground and ran off into the darkness. Raja suppressed the urge to yell after him. The lights of the searching Taliban soldiers were getting too close. Raja waited until the last possible moment, and reluctantly gave the order to start the plane.
At that moment, Akeen staggered out of the darkness, carrying an old man who was too sick to walk unaided. A stranger who had been hiding near Akeen’s family, he was a Muslim cleric who had fallen into disfavor for questioning the Taliban leaders, and who would have been tortured and killed by the soldiers once found. Akeen’s mother had simply asked Akeen to help the old man, which he did without question or hesitation.
The plane flew out of Afghanistan under a hail of bullets and arrived back in Pakistan. Akeen had been eternally grateful to Raja for saving his family. Perhaps now it was time for Akeen to pay it forward.
“Hello.”
Raja recognized Akeen’s voice. “Akeen, it’s Raja Williams.”
“Raja, my friend.” Akeen’s tone brightened considerably. “How are you?”
“Doing well. I’m on a case in Los Angeles.”
“Helping someone in trouble, of that I am sure.”
“Trying to. I’ve run into a stop.”
“How can I help? You never did let me pay you for all that you did for me and my family.”
“Perhaps now is the time,” said Raja. He explained the situation briefly, and his need to find Sue Storm. He also told Akeen about Vinny, whom Raja had not yet met at the time he helped Akeen’s family.
Vinny had two problems. One, she needed to get into the NSA’s highly-protected data storage. Many of the feeds from security cameras around the country were on loop programs that erased and recorded over the video after a set, relatively short period of time. Only the NSA had the capacity to maintain full recordings from all sources, which they did. And two, although Vinny was a genius savant with computer code, there were some places even Vinny couldn’t breach. The NSA had been building supercomputer complexes for years—billions of dollars worth of storage and computing power. It wasn’t that their technicians were smarter than Vinny. They weren’t even close. But they were faster than Vinny because they had computing power at their command beyond anything else on the planet. Hacking their system was like digging into dry sand. You could dig, but the sand would fill the hole faster than you could scoop it out. Their lightning-fast, redundant security program could close any hole before a hacker could access information. Nearly infinite computing power and speed simply outmatched what Vinny had available to her. That is, unless she could pool enough power from enough sources simultaneously.
That’s where Akeen came in. He had left Pakistan after rescuing his family and made his fortune in Silicon Valley by developing an architecture for utilizing satellites to transmit computing power over long distances without the usual bandwidth limitations. It had revolutionized outsourcing and partly leveled the playing field for independents like Wikileaks.
“You aren’t asking me to hack the NSA, are you?” asked Akeen.
“No, of course not,” said Raja. “Could you? No. Never mind. I was hoping you could somehow supercharge Vinny so she could do her thing and find our missing person. No crimes, no hacking, no trouble for you.”
“I wish it were that simple. Since 9/11, there are monitors to monitor the monitors that monitor those who monitor. Regardless of how removed I remain, there will be consequences. However, I will do as you ask. I can do nothing less.”
“Thanks, Akeen.” Raja admired Akeen and recognized him as that rare being with a fully developed sense of integrity. “Tell me what you need.”
“I’ll need to speak to Vinny.”
Chapter Twenty-seven: The Policeman Only Rings Once
Clarice paced across the bearskin rug that covered the floor in the spacious living area of her Santa Barbara ranch house. She stopped and looked down at the head of the bear, with its open mouth full of sharp teeth and those cold glass eyes. It was one of few remaining tokens of her first husband. She never liked that rug or the violence it represented.
There was a loud knock on the front door.
Clarice jumped, her nerves already on edge. She raced to the door and peered through a gap in the side curtain. A uniformed policeman stood patiently, squinting under the bright porch light. She quickly unbolted and opened the door. “Am I glad you’re here. I think someone has been following me.”
“If you want, I can take a look around.”
“Yes, do come in.” Clarice turned and walked to the bar. “Did Raja send you?” she asked over her shoulder while she poured a snifter of cognac from a crystal bottle.
The policeman stepped through the doorway, peered left and right and then drew his weapon. A loud bang echoed from behind Clarice that made her jump. She whirled around just in time to see the policeman pitch forward like a felled tree. Her glass slid from her hand and shattered on the floor a second after the policeman hit the ground. Clarice looked down at the golden liquid running along a seam in the floor tile and thought about going to the kitchen for a towel. Then she slowly raised her head.
Standing in the doorway was the blond-haired man she had noticed in town, in his hand a smoking pistol that pointed right at her.
Clarice tried to scream, but a tiny squeak like the air from a leaky balloon was all that came out. Then she fainted onto the bearskin rug.
Chapter Twenty-eight: Dueling Hard Drives
Much like two computers that establish an interface in order to communicate, Vinny and Akeen tuned in to each other for the task at hand. After a half an hour of geek-speak, Vinny’s tunneling program coupled to Akeen’s power grid got them into the NSA data files undetected. In addition to being immediately discovered, the search Vinny was attempting would have taken weeks or months without sufficient computing power. The problem with finding someone who doesn’t want to be found is having only the most general inputs to use as search parameters. Sue could change her appearance in many ways. That left only non-unique markers that allowed millions of matches and required multiple samplings. The computing power diverted through Akeen’s unique program allowed Vinny to narrow the search to fifty thousand possibilities within an hour. However, no amount of power could narrow the search any further without more specific input. Vinny had none. Her frustration was showing.
Akeen spoke to her through the live video call they had established between their computers. “Do you need more power?” he asked.
“No. That’s not the problem. You’ve got me jacked up on steroids already. In the immortal words of Number Five, I need input. After eliminating data like hair or eye color that can easily be altered or hidden, I’m left with certain measurements that can’t be changed. The problem is, those are rather general, leaving over fifty thousand matches. I tried matching anything like credit cards, IDs, family, facial recognition or habit patterns. I got next to nothing. Without something more to match up to, I still have thirty-seven thousand identities in the Greater Los Angeles area alone. So, if Sue avoids the usual markers, which she obviously is doing, I can’t narrow the search. We need something special, something unique to Sue Storm. I’ve dug up every bit and byte on her going back to before her birth. Nothing has hit.”
“You need something unique, right?”
“Yes.”
“So let’s forget about her past. What is unique about her in the present?”
Vinny looked at the idea. “O-M-G. I can’t believe it.” She fiddled on the computer.
“What?” asked Akeen from the screen.
“Wait for it.”
“What?” repeated Raja.
“Wait for it.”
The search results counter number on the screen was dropping—twenty thousand, ten thousand, then one thousand. Still, it kept counting down until it finally stopped at one.
“Bam shizzaam,” said Vinny.
There was only one match.
A picture with a blurred out of focus face appeared on the screen. The computer analyzed the image for every possible detail. Then other images and data files began flashing up onto the screen as the program now called up everything it could find on that one identity. Finally a clear photo of a woman with short blond hair and sunglasses settled on the screen.
“What just happened?” asked Raja.
“You are looking at Sue Storm,” said Vinny.
“That doesn’t look at all like her,” said Raja, peering at the screen. “How can you be sure?”
“Oh, I’m sure, bro. It was something Akeen said. What is unique about her now. I was doing my search ass-backward, looking for specific matching data to narrow the search. Because Sue is hiding so well, I found almost nothing. But, since only one of those thirty-seven thousand people is trying not to be found, all the rest of them would have other data available—IDs, money transactions, cards, facial recognition from security cameras, etc. So, a simple Boolean exclusion function eliminated them.”
“Nice work, Vinny. You found the needle.”
Raja looked to the small window on the screen with Akeen’s face. “And thank you, Akeen.”
“My pleasure. Nice to meet you, Vinny.”
“Ditto.”
“Now, I’m afraid all hell is going to break loose,” said Akeen. “I better go and see if I can cover my tracks.” Akeen’s face disappeared from the screen.
“And now we find Sue Storm,” said Raja.
Chapter Twenty-nine: Cop Killer
Early on Tuesday morning, a call came in from Detective Rafferty. “Raja, I got a phone call from the Santa Barbara police department. Apparently, there is a crime scene out at Clarice Hope’s ranch.”
“Is she okay?” asked Raja.
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