Burning Bright

by Nick Petrie

  And this job was starting to look more challenging than any he’d seen since the desert. Not the girl, but her helper. Her protector.

  A bow and arrow, of all things.

  “You have my attention,” he told the salesman. “I’m on my way.”

  His tomatoes would have to wait.

  20

  PETER

  It was after midnight, and the highway ahead was lit only by their headlights. They were driving through the night, staying off the interstate, heading for Seattle.

  June had the cruise control set only a few miles over the speed limit. It was Peter’s idea, to keep her from going ninety. His foot was up on the dash, the protective boot removed, a fat plastic bag of ice draped over the swollen spot. They were trading it back and forth, his leg to her lip. They’d each had some ibuprofen. Peter wouldn’t have minded a beer.

  “Tell me again,” he said. “Your mom said the algorithm, this Tyg3r, would contact you.”

  “Yeah, I don’t get it, either. Is it going to send me an email? Friend me on Facebook?” She took her hands off the wheel and waved them in the air. “Fucked if I know.”

  Peter liked how much she swore. Just like the carpenters he’d worked with in high school. Nouns, verbs, and profanity. Hand me that fucking skilsaw, would you? The carpenters were worse than the Marines.

  “How smart is this thing?”

  “An algorithm isn’t a thing, it’s code designed to perform a task. And my mom said it was like a stupid cockroach. Which is pretty smart for software. It’s also designed to learn and improve its function. I’m not a coder, so I can’t really tell you more than that. I know a guy in Seattle who might be able to help. That is, if this algorithm ever writes me a letter. I’ll start on those names when you’re driving again. Nicolet the lawyer, and those guys, you know. From the mountains.”

  The dead guys, thought Peter. They would have killed him if they could. They’d certainly done their best. It wasn’t like he’d had a choice.

  “I can drive now, if you like,” he said.

  June pulled the car to the shoulder, where the asphalt turned to gravel. Peter strapped on the medical boot and got out to stretch his stiff muscles in the cool wet breeze, looking out into the darkened trees as anonymous headlights flashed by behind them.

  “You’re really okay?” she asked, not quite looking at him. “Pretty crazy day today.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Peter said, smiling into the dark. He was supposed to be taking care of her, but here she was, trying to take care of him. “Today seemed fairly normal to me. Maybe one major event.”

  “Just one? You bullshit artist. Let’s see, which one?” She ticked off each item on her fingers. “You climbed a three-hundred-foot redwood. Got shot at, twice. Totaled my car. Saved my life, at least twice. Fractured your leg, cracked some ribs.” She paused for a moment, and Peter wondered how far she’d get into this. She took a breath. “You also killed at least one man, maybe more, depending on how you see things. You got stuck in the hospital, which made your post-traumatic stress flare up. And now we’re on the run in the middle of the night from whoever is hunting me.”

  “That’s all true,” said Peter. “But not what made the day exceptional.” It was easier to talk like this in the dark, when he couldn’t really see her face. But he could feel the pressure of her attention like a physical thing.

  “Oh, yeah?” she said. “What was it?”

  “We should keep moving,” he said, and began to limp around the front of the minivan to the driver’s side. The headlights ruined his night vision, he could barely see her silhouette. He definitely couldn’t see her face.

  “Hey,” she said. “What made the damn day exceptional?”

  He smiled at her as he opened the door, the dome light illuminating his face.

  “That’s easy,” he said. “I met you.”

  Then he got back in the car and spent some time adjusting the seat for his taller frame.

  By the time he was done, she’d climbed into the passenger side, booted up the little tablet computer, and was nose-deep into the Web, as if the conversation had never happened.

  Peter put the car in gear and got back on the road.

  • • •

  “OKAY,” SAID JUNE. “I found our attorney, Jean-Pierre Nicolet. Lives in Seattle, an equity partner with Sydney Bucknell Sparks. Corporate website lists his specialties as intellectual property and M&A. What’s M&A?”

  “Mergers and Acquisitions,” said Peter. “Any subspecialties?”

  “A long list. Sensitive negotiations, corporate reorganization, blah blah blah. A bunch of honors and awards. He’s all over the Web, but there’s nothing interesting. A bunch of nonprofit boards, some obscure tech incubator, a couple of arts organizations.”

  “What about the law firm?”

  “Sydney Bucknell Sparks. Founded in 1937, they claim over two hundred attorneys, with offices in Seattle, San Jose, and New York.”

  “So he’s not some yahoo operating out of his rec room. He’s the real deal.”

  “Oh yeah,” she said. “But he’s just the mouthpiece. He didn’t think this up on his own.”

  “I’d love to see a client list.”

  “I’m gonna take a look at the guys from the redwoods.”

  She took the wallets out of the black cloth bag—the hood, the kidnapper’s hood—emptied them onto the side console, and sifted through the contents. Then went back to the little computer.

  Eventually she turned on the map light and held up the driver’s licenses to examine each one in turn. She tapped one with a finger. “Jason Ross,” she said. “He’s the one with the Taser. Threw me into the back seat.”

  “You recognize the driver?”

  “I think this one,” she said. “Martin Alvarez. Although I didn’t get as good a look at him.” She held up a third license. “This guy, Dexter Smith, I don’t recognize.”

  Peter thought about hanging at the end of a rope, listening to the four men talk to each other. He’d only gotten three wallets. The fourth guy was crushed under the Tahoe.

  She said, “I’m pretty sure these are their real names. Which makes me feel a lot better, because if they were fake names, I’d have nothing to grab onto.”

  “Why do you think they’re real?”

  “I got inside their Facebook and LinkedIn profiles and checked the timelines. The photos seem to match the faces on the licenses. Social media is easy to fake, but it’s also an easy path to getting caught, because you can end up tagged in other people’s photos. For a good fake identity, people tend to focus on institutional paper, like a birth certificate and credit cards, because they’re mostly trying to fool the government.”

  “You got into their social media? How do you know this stuff?”

  She gave him a look. “I’m an investigative reporter and my beat is technology. You don’t think I know a thing or two?”

  “But wouldn’t these guys have the privacy settings turned way up?”

  “Oh, they do.” June smiled. “But there’s a back door into Facebook. It’s even legal. Although Facebook gets really mad if they catch you.”

  “You ever been caught?”

  “What do you think?” The smile got wider. “Anyway, most people aren’t very tech-savvy. They post shit online like nobody will ever see it. You wouldn’t believe how many times the cops catch people because of something stupid they did online. Our guys’ accounts were started years ago, and the posts span a long period of time, so they likely weren’t faked or made by bots.”

  “What do you mean, ‘made by bots’? Like robots? Robots have Facebook pages?”

  “Oh, sure. Facebook even said publicly a few years back that something like five to ten percent of its profiles are false, some of them made by automated software systems. Even if they’re not wildly underreporting the nu
mber, that’s fifty to a hundred million fake accounts. You know how much product marketing gets done through Facebook?”

  Peter just shook his head. The digital world wasn’t really his thing.

  “Anyway, from what they’re posting on Facebook and LinkedIn, our guys are definitely ex-Army, although it looks like they served in different units. And the two younger guys were pretty heavy on Facebook until a few years ago. Then they basically stopped. They both updated their profiles showing they’d been hired by SafeSecure, a corporate security company based in Seattle. And that’s also the name on the registration for their SUV.”

  “Aha!” said Peter. “Right?”

  “Not so much,” said June, still tapping away on the tablet. “SafeSecure doesn’t seem to have a website, which is odd for a business today. The car registration gives its physical address in Seattle, somewhere down in the Rainier Valley, although it’s probably some kind of PO box. According to the State of Washington, SafeSecure does exist, but is a subsidiary of Western Holdings, based in Belize.”

  “Belize?”

  “Small country in Central America? South of Mexico, east of Guatemala. Used to be called British Honduras.”

  “I know where Belize is,” he said. “But why there?”

  “Belize has become another tax haven,” she said, her face back in the tablet. Screens everywhere, Peter hated them. It was convenient for everything except actual human interaction. “Like the Caymans, the Bahamas, the British Virgin Islands, a bunch of other places. A good place to hide both your income and the names behind your corporate identity.”

  “So how do we find out more about Western Holdings?”

  “This isn’t really my area,” she said, “but my guess is we don’t. I’m on that right now. Give me a few minutes. This cheap-ass tablet is really slow.”

  She tapped and read and the night rolled past outside the windshield. She had the bag of ice on her lip again.

  “Okay,” she said finally. “Apparently, incorporating in Belize gives you a lot of protections. You’re required to disclose almost nothing, not even any company personnel or shareholders. You only need a single registered agent, which can be you or any person working for a specialized company that provides that service. You’re not required to disclose any information about the actual shareholders, which could be you, or could be one or more corporations. This would provide still another level of identity protection.”

  “But we have a place to start, right?”

  “Sure,” she said. “But if they want to be really tricky, they use more than one country. A global web of registered agents from Belize to the Caymans to Singapore to fucking Luxembourg. It’s a way to exhaust the resources of anyone trying to track them, because every added step costs more time and more money. So unless we have serious allegations against the corporation itself, and we can get the U.S. government involved, this is a dead end.”

  “What about the algorithm? Can the skeleton key get in there?”

  “Fucked if I know,” said June. “I don’t even know how to find it, let alone use it. We better not count on it.”

  Peter sighed. “So we’re back to physical locations. SafeSecure in Rainier Valley. What about the addresses on the driver’s licenses? Are those real?”

  “Let me look.” More tapping. “Google Maps thinks they are. So we can start there.”

  “Well, that’s something,” he said. “Anything else you can do from here?”

  “Not on this machine. When I get home, I’ll have more resources.” She set down the tablet and picked up her phone. “I just want to get my email accounts set up.”

  “Right,” said Peter. “If you can’t check email every ten minutes, your head will explode.”

  “We can’t all be antiques.” She was swiping at the small screen, not looking at him. “Do you even have an email address?”

  “Sure.”

  “When was the last time you checked it?”

  He had to think. “A month ago?”

  She snorted. “How are you even employed?”

  “I’m on sabbatical,” he said. “And I’m not interested in the virtual world anyway.”

  He wasn’t going to admit to being unemployed. Or living out of his truck, for that matter. Regardless, he didn’t need to be employed, not ever again, although he had complicated feelings about that.

  June didn’t seem to be paying attention to him, anyway. After a few more minutes with her nose to the screen, she set her phone on the center console, pillowed her jacket against the door, and closed her eyes. “I think I’ll crash for a while.”

  Peter started to answer, but stopped himself. She’d already fallen asleep, her mouth partway open.

  He watched the darkened landscape, dimly lit. From inside the car, he couldn’t tell whether he was moving through the land or he was stationary and the land was passing beneath him.

  After a few minutes, June began to snore.

  She sounded like a rhino with a sinus infection.

  But those freckles. And that attitude.

  Oh, man.

  21

  Three hours later, the fuel gauge getting low, Peter pulled off the highway.

  June came awake on the ramp and hopped out of the minivan at the pumps. She paced back and forth under the unearthly gas station lights while he filled the tank. She talked a mile a minute, as if she’d been thinking in her sleep.

  “So our guys, they’re definitely pros,” she said. “They’re ex-Army, and working for somebody who doesn’t want to be known. Some kind of hidden operation.”

  “Yeah,” said Peter. He needed more coffee. “They actually could be government, you know. Off-book groups have been known to pretend to be in the private sector. It’s the easiest way to hide from oversight. And you could understand why Uncle Sam would want the algorithm.”

  “Anybody would want it,” she said. “If you had a tool to sneak into secure systems? The G would want to keep it for themselves. Private groups would use it for corporate espionage, to steal government information, industrial secrets, intellectual property of all kinds.”

  Peter leaned against the minivan and rubbed his eyes. June had clocked a pair of decent naps that day, but Peter had been on the go since first light, and had slept in a tree the night before. June talked on, powered by the idea, walking and talking and checking her email on her phone at the same time. The woman clearly had a lot of energy.

  “You could sell it as a service—place your order, tell us what you want, we’ll get it for you. The Chinese and the Russians would go crazy for that. Want the design specs for the Reaper drone? No problem, but it’s gonna cost you. If you aren’t that ambitious? Shit, just break into the banking system and transfer a bunch of money into a few hundred numbered accounts, then send it all over the world. If you were smart, you’d take a hundred dollars from two million people’s accounts over a few months’ time. Most people wouldn’t even know it was gone, they’d just think they lost an ATM receipt. If you went into corporate accounts, you could steal billions. It might not even be reported, because it would be so embarrassing. Hide your tracks in Belize, and your money in Switzerland.”

  “A killer app,” he said, then felt bad about it. Her mom.

  She glanced at his face and stopped pacing. She put her hand on his upper arm. “You look pretty wiped. My turn to drive, okay?”

  He nodded. Her fat lip was turning purple, the dark stitches still shocking in her pale skin, but the ice seemed to have stopped the swelling. Her freckles were arrayed across her face like some complex constellation whose meaning he was still trying to fathom. Her eyes shone with intelligence and humor and, maybe, something else. There was no way the heat of her hand could make it through the thick fleece of his jacket, but he felt its warmth anyway.

  She said, “Give me a minute to grab coffee and Twizzlers. You get some sleep.�
��

  He cleared his throat. “Yeah,” he said. “Sure.”

  • • •

  HE WOKE AS they were coming up on Seattle from the south, June humming softly in the driver’s seat. The medical boot was tight on his left leg. He hated it already, the limitations. What if he had to move fast to protect her?

  The clock on the dash said 11:45 a.m. Freeway traffic was heavy and rain splattered on the windshield in fits and starts. The airport sprawled on their left, then a futuristic elevated commuter railway. Dense vegetation and thick stands of trees climbed the fog-shrouded hillsides to their right. Everything was so green, and it was only March. In northern Wisconsin, where Peter grew up, the ground would still be covered with snow, with more snow falling into April. And May.

  June pulled off the freeway well before downtown. “I want to make a quick stop before we go to my place. The address for that company SafeSecure is only a mile or so from here.”

  Rainier Avenue was a commercial strip four lanes wide, lined with big apartments, commercial buildings in their second or third incarnation, and a surprising number of Vietnamese restaurants. SafeSecure’s address was an older single-story brick building, the kind of place that might have once held a small machine shop repairing logging equipment, or making specialty parts for Boeing. Now it was semi-affordable square footage for whatever the tenant needed. The original concrete loading dock had been turned into the main entrance, with a faded awning to keep the rain off and a group of big clay pots overgrown with plants. There was no name on the door, but the street address was displayed above it. June cranked the minivan into a parking space.

  Peter said, “I thought you said this was going to be some kind of a PO box.”

  June shrugged and turned off the engine. “Let’s go see.”

  They stepped through the glass entrance into a long narrow reception area, where a middle-aged woman sat behind a reception counter.

  Peter felt the white static flare up immediately. The place was like a shooting gallery, with a solid pair of double doors at the far end and no cover between them. He reminded himself there were no armed insurgents in Seattle, at least not to his knowledge. And not likely at this address. Breathe in, breathe out. It’s not going to kill you, remember?