Catalyst

by Steve Winshel

  “I scanned it and sent it to an email address I set up.”

  “Cute, sweetie. Tell me the address and password. If it’s there, you and your sister live. If it’s not…you’ll think your little struggle with Crawford was a lover’s tango compared to what I can do.”

  Giving her the address would buy time. “It’s boris_and_Natasha@hotmail.com. The password is Ventrica.” She got the reference to the evil characters from Rocky and Bullwinkle right away.

  “I’ll know in an hour if you’re playing me, Josh. And you’ll know right after that if I’m pleased or not.”

  She turned away without another word. Josh had a sudden urge to leap after her, grab her by the neck, break her in half. He could end this now. The beach was deserted. He tensed, shifting his weight forward almost unconsciously. Helen was less than ten feet away. As the rage began to surface and Josh could almost feel her neck snapping in his hands, he heard her voice carry over the light breeze.

  “Patience, Josh. There’s a high-powered rifle with its crosshairs on your head in the very capable hands of my friend on the roof of the other restroom waaaaay down the beach…” She casually pointed at an identical cinderblock hut more than 100 yards away.

  She hadn’t bothered to turn around. She had seen something in Josh’s eyes and knew he was close to a breaking point. Helen continued across the sand and headed to the black Lexus on PCH. Josh waited until she had driven away before slowly trudging to his car, drained and shaken.

  * * *

  Sonofabitch, Helen thought. He would have made a move on me right there. She had adroitly lied about having a colleague on the nearby beach, though Helen was certain she would have been able to shoot him dead before reaching her if need be. But Josh had managed to kill Crawford after Crawford had him in a stranglehold with one of those nasty wires he liked to use. That was a bad sign. She didn’t think anyone could get away from Crawford at close range. If Josh wasn’t lying, and she tended to think he wasn’t, then the cops didn’t know about Helen’s plan. Killing him on the beach would have ruined any chance of getting the design and would have led to a deeper investigation by the police. If they were just thinking Barnes had killed a burglar in self-defense, then she was in good shape. Crawford’s body couldn’t lead back to her and Josh wouldn’t do anything until he was sure his sister was safe. She would get the design, get rid of Josh and sister, then head out of town for a while. She was sure she could do work for her boss from anywhere. Helen was pretty certain he had other operations going all over the world. She would be more anonymous in a different city until ready for retirement. Flooring the Lexus, Helen was irritated by the sand in her shoe. She wanted to get home quickly and see if the design was there.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Murello looked at the clock on the Treo 6100MX wireless handheld device, a next-generation model that wouldn’t be available to the public for another eighteen months. He had seventeen minutes left. Using a stylus with a brushed steel surface that held no fingerprints, he tapped out instructions to a broker in Asia. The message told the head of the trading firm to short six million shares of Lockheed at 7% below the current selling price. This was an expensive bet, on the order of more than two-hundred million dollars, that the price of Lockheed stock was going to drop by more than 7%. What made the bet all the more outrageous was that it had an expiration of thirty-six hours – the drop had to happen within that time frame or Murello would lose. Murello’s instructions divided the transaction among three holding companies he controlled. These three companies would now have the right and obligation to sell the shares of Lockheed at a price 7% below the current value. Anyone who believed Lockheed would stay even or go up would take that order in a heartbeat since it was instant profit. But if the price dropped more than 7%, the contract Murello was purchasing meant he could force someone to buy it at that price, 7% below the current price, and Murello would profit from the difference. By his calculations the price was going to drop, starting in eleven minutes as he looked again at the clock, by at least 17%. When it did, he would buy six million shares at the drastically reduced public price and sell it back at the fixed price he was now setting.

  He sent the email and within four minutes received a confirmation that the transaction was complete. Seven minutes later a dummy warhead atop an ICBM was launched from a submarine in the waters 350 miles southeast of Florida. It was headed for a one-acre target zone deep in an uninhabited region of the Mojave desert. Within forty seconds a much smaller missile leapt off the back of a mobile launcher on a truck in the mountains of Colorado near NORAD. The men and women, both uniformed and civilian, who tracked the progress of the two missiles collectively held their breath. The target ICBM reached its maximum speed and altitude in 65 more seconds. The interceptor was now traveling at 13,000 miles per hour and was dead on course. It would make contact and rain down debris over a dry lakebed in Nevada and the newspapers would describe a flash of light and reports of a sonic boom, but it would be far outweighed by the successful testing of the U.S. government’s missile defense program. The Calypso control software guided the interceptor toward the ICBM using unique algorithms beyond the capability of any developed before. The software had been built by teams working for Bernard Mills. The two blips on the radar at NORAD deep under the Rocky Mountains showed a collision course. At the moment of projected impact, the two blinking dots merged as one and the men and women in locations around the country started to let out their breath and celebrate. Until they saw the two blips start to separate and each continue on their way. A miss. The interceptor had gone directly beneath the ICBM by more than 3,000 feet. A complete failure. There would still be a headline in tomorrow’s paper, just not the one they had been expecting. The harshest disappointment was felt by Lou Tyson and his colleagues at Calypso Software, and at Lockheed, their biggest customer and the ones who had installed the Calypso tracking software in the interceptor missile. Both had been confident it would work this time. Calypso had dodged a bullet when they’d caught Bernard Mills trying to take a copy of the software out of the high-security building a year earlier. They had no way of knowing Mills wasn’t trying to steal the code – he was sabotaging it.

  Murello saw the AP report about the failed missile test just as the foreign markets started to respond. Lockheed was starting to sell off and the price was dropping. It was just a little, but by this time tomorrow there would be a run on the company’s stock. It would take months to figure out the problem with the Calypso software, fix it, and get Lockheed back on track. In the meantime, Murello would have sold six million shares for a very healthy profit.

  * * *

  Josh didn’t believe there was an accomplice with a rifle at the beach. But he did believe Helen would have sensed him moving toward her and shot him before he reached her. Bleeding to death in the sand wouldn’t have done him any good. Driving too fast, Josh made it home quickly, almost skidding off the pavement and onto the gravel shoulder twice as he whipped along the curves of Malibu Canyon Road. This time of night there were fewer cops and lighter traffic on that route than the way he had come. Leaving the car in the driveway, Josh barely noticed how empty the house was as he raced to his office. Time mattered now and his plan would only work if he could stay a step ahead of Helen. The computer was on and he launched a program that monitored incoming messages very different from regular email. A black window appeared and numbers began scrolling across. Each number was an IP address, the unique identifier used by a computer when it connected to the Internet. The numbers meant nothing to Josh, except one. He waited.

  Josh hadn’t eaten since early that morning. After half an hour of watching the screen, he tore himself away and went to the kitchen. It had every implement known to Martha Stewart and even a few others. Many were left over from when Jenna was alive. In the quiet house, he thought about how she would spend an hour at William Sonoma and come back with a pheasant-baster.

  The house was silent. It was dark except for the refri
gerator light from the door he had left open. Then he heard it; a single, loud beep from the office. Still wearing sneakers he sprinted to the office. On the screen, the numbers had stopped scrolling. Halfway down there was a single line of digits, blinking. Nothing else. This was an IP address, one used by a computer somewhere in Los Angeles. Josh sat at his desk, excitement building. He typed in a command and pressed Return. Nothing happened for a few seconds, then the screen began to fill with numbers again. Only this time the numbers had words next to them: street addresses. Thirty-seven minutes later a second loud beep, but this time Josh hadn’t moved from in front of the screen. A single address was blinking at the top of the black window in front of him. He burned it into his memory. Car keys in hand, he bolted for the door.

  Josh had included a virus with the Ventrica design before sending it to the email address he’d given Helen. The virus was activated when someone downloaded the file, which was what Helen would do when she retrieved the email. It launched a program to read the IP address on the computer it was running on. Then it did a very illegal reverse search and matched a physical address, a house or business, to that IP address. The nasty little program Josh had borrowed and modified while sitting at Kinko’s figured out what Internet Service Provider owned the IP address being used at the moment the machine with the virus launched it. Then it hacked into the company’s records to get the name and address of the customer. When Helen downloaded the Ventrica design, the program started. And it sent Josh her address. If she was working from her home and not using Kinko’s or some other public computer, then he knew where to find her. Right now.

  Josh knew the area and could find the address easily. It was in a very nice part of Studio City, in the canyon. The plan he had constructed was now in motion, not just a theory on how to handle a complex business situation. Now that it was real, now that he was driving toward Helen and she didn’t know it, Josh wasn’t as confident about its outcome. As he pulled out of the driveway without looking either direction, something he had never failed to do in his entire, cautious life, Josh thought about what else the virus he had sent Helen was going to do. He had to hurry if there was any chance of getting out of this in one piece.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Rigas had blown off her 8:00 p.m. rendezvous with her partner and left him a message saying she’d circle back around ten instead. No doubt he was poring over evidence reports and crime scene notes. If there was anything connecting the dead guy at Barnes’ house with the Mills woman, Crevins would find it. Now she drove quickly and quietly back from Pasadena to confront Barnes. She hated the piece of garbage brown Impala the auto pool gave her, thinking it made her look like a dink to anyone who didn’t recognize it as a cop car and announced her presence as law enforcement to anyone who did. She had tried for a while to drive her own car, the one possession she gave a crap about and took great care of. But the endless coffee cups, breakfast rolls, late-night snacks and sweaty, street-stained asses of perps sitting in the back began to erode the calm and beauty of the interior and she had given up.

  Winding around the streets in Barnes’ neighborhood a few minutes later, she spotted his house just as a silver Prius jerked out of the driveway and turned toward her. Since the house was dark and it was only about 8:30, it was a fair bet this was Barnes. From a hundred feet away she could see the car held only him. She pulled quickly into the first driveway on her right and waited. Barnes went by, looking straight ahead. His face was passive, but hard. It was not a look you wear heading to the grocery to pick up half a gallon of milk. Rigas waited until he got to the second stop sign down the street and then she backed out of the driveway. She hesitated only a second before deciding which way to go. Three minutes later she was standing in Barnes’ living room.

  * * *

  It took Josh less than fifteen minutes to get to her house. Helen’s business must be doing well. Her home was out of his price range. He went past the brick inlaid driveway and despite the gravity of the situation automatically noticed the elegance of the house and the flawless landscape. He parked fifty feet further up the hill on a hunch Helen would turn the other direction when she left, heading down toward the Valley. Josh was pretty sure she was going to leave, if she hadn’t already. In addition to surreptitiously sending her physical address to him, the virus he sent Helen had a couple of other tricks. As soon as the person downloaded the email, it installed a program called a keylogger. A keylogger was a pretty common piece of spyware – software that sat on your computer but you don’t know was there. This one recorded every single button press you made and stored it to a file. Every letter, every word, every document you typed was copied onto that file. If you were the one who sneaked the keylogger onto the unsuspecting person’s computer, then you knew the special series of keystrokes that would pull up the secret file and the password to open it. Then you could read everything that had been typed into the computer. Josh needed to know what Helen was typing if his plan was going to work. Unfortunately, he also needed to spend some time sitting in front of her computer for his plan to work: viruses and sneaky spyware can’t do everything. He needed Helen out of her house long enough for him to install several very large programs he had on a memory stick in his pocket, and to look around to see what other equipment she had. Josh’s plan was simple: set Helen up so the police would know what she was doing. He couldn’t use the anonymous emails she had sent him. He needed to prove what she was up to and let the police do their job.

  Josh wanted her out of the house now, before she had a chance to do anything with the design or he would lose his chance. He would rely on the last piece of the virus to clear the way. It would wait until she tried to send an email. Then it would throw onto the screen an ominous, flashing message saying there had been a catastrophic failure of the network card. A network card was a slim, credit-card sized device connecting your computer to the Internet. The message was very official looking, exactly what you would expect to see if your network card really had burned out. No virus Josh knew of could actually destroy a piece of equipment like that, but it could make you think that had happened. If Helen were moderately sophisticated but not a real techie, she would try a few things to make her computer work and then follow the advice on the screen: go buy a new network card. They slipped into a slot on the side of the computer, so it would be easy for her to replace. This may have seemed a leap of faith, but after a lifetime of being the go-to tech guy in a world of borderline Luddites, Josh had a good sense of how technically skilled someone was. What he didn’t know was whether she was so anxious to send the Ventrica design to someone else –her boss – that she would leave the house immediately and go to the Fry’s Electronics store just a few miles away that stayed open until all hours to service the expanding population of late-night geeks. He might be wrong about that, or about her technical skill, or if she knew she could get a replacement card. There was a lot he didn’t know. He might end up waiting here all night. As Josh thought about this, and about how stupid it must have looked for him to be sitting outside the house of a ruthless killer, he saw Helen’s black Lexus slip out of her driveway and head down toward the Valley. It would take her fifteen minutes to get to the Fry’s, ten to find what she needed or get one of the nitwit sales guys to help her, and fifteen to get back. He had forty minutes to do what he needed.

  * * *

  Inside Barnes’ house, Rigas didn’t waste time tossing any of the rooms. Barnes had a home office and if her hunch about why Mills killed himself was any indication, this was going to be about work. She knew the layout from her visit the previous night and went straight back, not turning on any lights until she was standing at his desk. A small lamp shaped like a football helmet, Washington Redskins, sat on the desk. She shook her head; men were all children. She turned it on and looked around the room. Standard home-office fare, though maybe a little more equipment than most. The whole house screamed bachelor, Rigas remembered from her earlier visit in the day. But not exactly – the r
ooms had a touch, like someone had thought carefully about the furnishings and paint. It had the feel of having been well-designed. She had no way of knowing Barnes’ history, of the fiancé who had died shortly before the wedding and had lived here for more than a year. If she had, she would have understood Barnes much better.

  Rigas started to rifle through the papers on the desk and open the drawers when she realized a guy like Barnes’ did everything on his computer. There was a large plasma screen on the desk. She snorted, figuring it cost about a month’s salary in her world. She was no computer whiz but she could poke around. Sitting down at the keyboard, she looked at the screen. It was filled with addresses, but not like she saw when she went on the web and used MapQuest to get directions to a restaurant or shooting range. The screen was all black, with just the addresses and a bunch of other numbers next to each address. No pictures or buttons to click on. Rigas didn’t have a clue. But instinct told her this was important. She picked up the phone and dialed the stationhouse.

  “It’s Rigas. Gimme Freddie.”

  Freddie was the civilian worker who set up all the fancy software the cops used to track cases, locate people, do witness IDs and a bunch of stuff Rigas didn’t care about. He wasn’t the slug who went around setting up desktops systems and plugging them in; he was the brainy guy who spent all day working with computers then went home and stayed up all night figuring out how to write a program that could hack into Fort Knox, or something like that. She figured he’d know what this garbage was.

  “Hey, Detective Rigas! How ya doin’? What’s going on tonight???” Freddie liked being around cops. Especially Rigas.

  “Here’s what I’ve got. Computer screen, black window doesn’t look like a web browser, bunch of addresses running down the screen, bunch of numbers next to each address.”