Burning Bright

by Nick Petrie

She kept the dog, a big German shepherd, back from the door with her leg, but it growled deep and low behind her. June bumped Peter slightly with her elbow, signaling him to move out of the way. “Hi,” she said. “We’re looking for Martin Alvarez. Is that your dad?”

  “Not home,” said the girl. And moved to close the door.

  “How about your mom,” said June.

  “She’s gone,” said the girl. “Years now. Just me and Dad. And he’s not home.”

  Peter peered through the crack in the doorway, trying to get some sense of Alvarez. He wasn’t willing to break the door down. He had the logging truck driver’s gun tucked awkwardly into his jacket pocket, but he didn’t want to have to shoot the dog. This girl was going to have worse problems soon enough.

  June kept talking. “Do you know when he’ll be back?” she asked. “We’d like to talk to him.”

  “Home tonight,” said the girl, her mouth tightening up. “What’s this about?”

  She was worried, thought Peter. Maybe her dad was supposed to call, and hadn’t.

  Because he was dead.

  He looked past the girl into the house, looking for anything useful, some piece of stray information.

  The living room was neat as a pin, despite the big dog and absent dad. A few potted plants looking green and healthy, a big sectional couch, a leather recliner, and a wall of shelves built around a giant television. Photos in frames, hard to see in detail at that distance but they looked mostly like just two people, one big, one small. And a teddy bear, sitting up high on a shelf like he was king of the hill, likely some cherished reminder of the girl’s childhood.

  He was starting to wish he hadn’t looked.

  June said, “We’re trying to find your dad. But he’s not answering his work phone. Did he give you any emergency contact numbers? Any other way to reach him?”

  “He works for the government,” said the girl, lifting her chin in a mixture of pride and defiance. “Sometimes he’s hard to get hold of. But we take care of each other.”

  June blinked at Peter, trying to keep the sorrow from her face.

  Peter looked at the girl, so much older than her years. “Thanks, hon,” he said. “We won’t bother you again. If you have someone to call, any other family or even friends, you should do that.”

  They turned and walked down the steps, the girl still staring at them through the crack in the doorway.

  At the car, June handed Peter the keys. “You better drive,” she said, tears running down her face.

  Peter started the engine. He put his hand on June’s arm.

  “You were there on that mountain road,” he said quietly. “Alvarez was no innocent. It was them or us.”

  “I know,” she said. “It was his choice. But not his daughter’s. She didn’t have a choice.”

  Peter took a breath and let it back out. “Yeah.”

  He put the engine into gear and got them out of there.

  35

  June had had the next address plugged into Peter’s phone so he could find his way through the twisting streets.

  She opened her new laptop. “Let’s try the algorithm while we drive. Maybe I can get something more on that lawyer.”

  She took out a piece of paper and copied a URL into the browser on the laptop.

  “Wouldn’t your mom already have tried that?”

  “Maybe. But she also said it’s getting better. Smarter. And we know more about the people who tried to kill us.”

  The URL was just a long string of random-appearing numbers and letters.

  “That’s it? The algorithm? The skeleton key?”

  “Tyg3r,” she said, and hit Return, turning the laptop so he could see the screen.

  He glanced over. The first thing that struck him was how simple it was. Completely blank except for a blinking cursor inside a text box with a single line below it.

  You are not authorized.

  “Shit,” she said.

  “It doesn’t know you’re you,” Peter said, navigating in the slow traffic. “Remember, it found you on your phone because you’d logged in to your email. Which you should maybe undo, actually.”

  He was remembering the surge in Iraq. The NSA had helped take down AQ fighters by getting access to Iraq’s emerging cellular network and tracking all cell and text traffic. There was no reason to think that the hunters couldn’t do the same.

  “I did that yesterday,” she said. “I forgot to tell you. I shitcanned that phone and bought a new burner. I can always go to an Internet café to check my email. But that doesn’t help me here. There’s not even a security question. The name of my first dog or whatever.”

  “Just makes it more secure.”

  Peter feathered the brake as they coasted down the West Seattle Bridge. Ahead was a wide railyard, then two highways and a hillside clad in feathery green trees and condos. The airport was off to the right. To the left stood elegant skeletal cranes of the Port of Seattle with Puget Sound behind it looking like hammered steel. The sky was low and dark. Did the sun ever come out in this town?

  “What’s something that only you and your mom would know? Maybe a pet phrase you had between you?”

  June shook her head. “I don’t know. She wasn’t exactly warm and fuzzy.”

  “What about that video she sent you after she died? Is there something in there?”

  June smacked Peter in the chest with the back of her hand. “Pretty and smart. I like that in a guy.”

  “Plus I can cook. And I’m crazy good in the sack.”

  June ignored him. She’d already opened a different browser and logged in to the anonymous email where she’d saved her mom’s video message as a draft. “Let’s see it again.”

  She watched Hazel Cassidy’s last message twice, and Peter listened while he drove. Traffic was heavy, they’d picked the wrong time of day to do this. Maybe there was no right time of day. June took notes on her flip-top reporter’s pad. Peter was impressed with how quickly she could write. Not that he’d ever decipher her handwriting.

  “A lot of possibles in there,” said Peter.

  June didn’t answer. She clicked back to the algorithm site, clicked on the text box, typed skeleton key, and hit Enter.

  The text box went blank, and the blinking cursor reappeared.

  You are not authorized. Try harder.

  “That is so like my mom.” June looked at Peter. “I’m probably not going to get many chances at this.”

  “You could set your email on your phone again and ask it for the password.”

  “It didn’t give it to me when it gave me the URL,” she said. “I don’t think I’ll get it by asking now. If Tyg3r really has this much potential, my mom would be pretty major on the security.”

  Yeah, thought Peter. Because if the skeleton key was really that good? If the Russians, or the Chinese, or the Iranians got hold of it? That would be the end of the American Experiment. Blueprints for every drone and cruise missile were online somewhere. Hell, what if you could hack the connection to a Reaper drone in the air and take control? The new F-22 joint strike fighter plane was all software-driven, designed to be updated. You could update them out of the sky.

  June ran a hand through her hair, clicked on the text box, typed the scientist’s curse, and hit Enter.

  Again, the text box went blank, and the blinking cursor reappeared.

  You are not authorized. Last chance.

  “Shit,” she said.

  They were still stuck on the ramp behind a long line of cars, waiting to get onto Highway 99. “Give me the laptop,” said Peter. “I know what it is.”

  She gave him a look.

  “I won’t hit Enter,” he promised. “Come on, hand it over.”

  She passed him the laptop. Using two fingers, he typed the best daughter a mother could ever hope for. And handed
it back.

  She took a deep breath and let it out. Peter patted her leg. “What do you think?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “But I don’t have any better ideas.”

  And hit Enter.

  The text box went blank again, but a new message appeared below it.

  Largest error followed by best outcome.

  “Huh?”

  June smiled. “This one I know. She used to say this all the time after the divorce.” Her fingers flew across the keys. The Yeti and Junie.

  The text box went blank again, with another new message below.

  Hello, Junie. What would you like to know?

  “Who the hell is ‘the Yeti’?” asked Peter. But he already knew.

  “That’s what we called my dad.” June’s mouth quirked. A complicated expression, neither a smile nor a frown.

  Traffic was clearing and he could finally get onto 99, the smaller highway heading north along the Sound. He hit the gas. “That’s the Yeti? The guy who bought you a gun for your fourteenth birthday?”

  “I told you I had an interesting childhood.”

  It was the opening Peter had been waiting for. “Tell me about your dad.” He was genuinely interested, but he also was thinking about his last conversation with Lewis.

  She made a face. “I’d rather not.”

  “Come on,” he said. “You keep bringing him up. You must want to talk about him.”

  She shook her head. “My dad was a control freak. He used to work in software, which is how he met my mom. When I was a kid, he started his own business, but it fell apart and he moved us out to this remote little valley in eastern Washington. According to my mom, he was getting really weird, even then. Overprotective, compulsive, the whole thing. He was obsessed with getting the place self-sufficient, so we would never need to leave the valley. My mom got offered a job at Stanford and wanted to take me with her. My dad said no. One day she went off to a conference and didn’t come back. I was ten.”

  “Jesus,” said Peter. “That must have been hard.”

  “Understatement of the year.” June shook her head. “She told me later that she tried to get custody for years, but my dad had a really good lawyer. I guess it got pretty ugly. She had a whole file cabinet just for the legal paperwork. Anyway, I stayed there in the valley while things got worse. He gave me a bracelet once. I slipped on some rocks and broke it, and it turned out to have some kind of electronic chip inside. No wonder he always knew how to find me when I ran away. When I was fifteen, I couldn’t take it anymore. I got serious and made a plan to find my mom. I didn’t take anything with me that he’d given me, and I finally got away. When my mom called my dad to let him know where I was, he showed up at her house. I locked myself in my room while he stomped around and yelled about how we weren’t safe, none of us were safe. Mom had already called the police. When he heard the sirens, he left.”

  Carefully, Peter said, “What do you mean by ‘things got worse’?”

  She gave him a look. “If that’s a polite way to ask if he molested me, the answer is no. He just got more paranoid, more overprotective. We were way out in the country, and I needed a security code to get into the house. We had a big shed where he worked, and he stopped letting me inside. Said it was for my own good.”

  “Did you see him again after that?”

  “He came back to Palo Alto twice more. My mom had helped me get a court order declaring me an emancipated minor, which in California you can do at fourteen. I already had my GED, which made it easier. And we had a restraining order. He started out nice, but got upset pretty fast. My mom always called nine-one-one the minute she saw him, and he always left when he heard the sirens.”

  “Did he hit you? Did he break things?”

  “He definitely broke stuff, but he never hit me or my mom. Angry, but not necessarily at us. He seemed kind of frantic, actually. After he left the last time, I remember thinking if it wasn’t so scary, it would have been sad.”

  “Do you remember what he wanted?”

  “He wanted me to come back home, where it was safe. He kept saying it, over and over. Come back home, where it’s safe.”

  “That’s it?”

  She shrugged. “That’s it. I haven’t seen him since. It must be twelve years now.”

  “But why do you call him the Yeti? That’s not his name, is it?”

  “His same is Sasha,” she said. “He’s kind of a giant guy, and his friends used to call him Sasquatch. When his business began to fail, his hair turned white overnight. So Mom and I started calling him the Yeti. At the time it was a joke. We didn’t realize there was something really wrong with him.”

  Sasha Kolodny, thought Peter. Why is that a familiar name?

  Then he remembered.

  “He’s still there? In that valley?”

  “I have no idea. Like I said, I haven’t seen him in years.”

  “So you were pretty close, you and your mom.”

  “Yeah.” She didn’t look at him. “Can we stop talking about this?”

  “Sure,” he said.

  36

  June was typing again, reading aloud as she did. “Is Tyg3r aware that an unknown entity tried to purchase Tyg3r from Hazel Cassidy?”

  Yes.

  “Did Hazel Cassidy attempt to use Tyg3r to discover the identity of that unknown entity?”

  Yes.

  “Was Hazel Cassidy successful in that attempt?”

  No.

  “How many attempts did Hazel Cassidy make?”

  Thirty-one attempts.

  “When was the last attempt?”

  February 7, 2:37 p.m.

  It was late March now. Peter wasn’t sure of the exact day. It’s what happened when you lived outside, without anything that might be called a job. He thought about how June’s mother had described the algorithm. A stupid cockroach, she’d called it. But getting smarter.

  June kept typing. “What did Tyg3r discover at that time?”

  See below.

  A small window popped up in the lower corner. June clicked on it. It was a string of emails.

  June scrolled through.

  “These are the emails from Nicolet to my mom. He says he represented a third party. He offered her ten million dollars for exclusive rights to an unfinished private project.” June scrolled down. “She wanted to know what project he was talking about, but either he doesn’t know what it really is, or he’s not saying. He calls it a search algorithm.”

  “I guess that might be technically correct, right?”

  “Whatever, she wasn’t interested. He kept raising the offer. She stopped returning his emails when he hit forty million dollars.”

  “Wait,” said Peter. “Where did Tyg3r get that email? It just pulled that out of some server somewhere? Out of the cloud?”

  “Sure,” said June. “It probably already had all her passwords.” She looked at him. “Forty million dollars?”

  Peter had spent eight years in the Marines and two more in the mountains, but he also had a degree in economics. “What’s Google’s market cap right now? Four or five hundred billion? That all started with an algorithm, right?”

  “Yeah, but Tyg3r was her baby,” said June. “She wanted to make the world a better place. To make powerful groups and individuals more accountable for their actions. What if you used Tyg3r to disclose all campaign contributions? That information alone would change the world.”

  “So forty million was a lowball.”

  “Not even in the ballpark,” said June. “But she wouldn’t have taken any amount. She was pretty stubborn.”

  Just like her daughter, thought Peter as June turned back to the keyboard and typed another message.

  “Did Tyg3r discover the identity of the third party mentioned in the email?”

  No. This program was unable to penetr
ate the security of law firm Sydney Bucknell Sparks, where the email originated.

  “Has Tyg3r discovered more information since February 7?”

  This program was not requested to do so.

  “Has Tyg3r advanced in its capabilities since the last request?”

  Yes.

  “Please try again. Do this and every future action in a manner that cannot be traced back to this computer or this user personally.”

  Multiple variable proxy servers are already in use. Please wait.

  A blur of smaller windows popped up on the screen, overlapping each other in a fractal pattern, like tree leaves, in a constantly shifting and growing pattern, tens of windows, then hundreds. The effect was hypnotic. Peter glanced from the road to the screen and back. This went on for ten or fifteen minutes, long enough for Peter to make it through downtown, Puget Sound on the left with the Olympic Mountains on the far side, the raised highway providing an excellent view, then through a tunnel and back on the surface in a dip between two big hills, getting closer to their destination.

  Then the windows began disappearing, one by one, slowly at first, then more rapidly, until the screen was left with only four small windows open in the bottom right corner of the home screen with its simple empty text box and a response below:

  Sydney Bucknell Sparks’s corporate servers and Jean-Pierre Nicolet’s personal computer are very well protected against intrusion. This program has obtained administrator-level access to both systems.

  The cockroach, thought Peter, was definitely getting smarter.

  He wondered if that tone of pride had been programmed into the software’s interface.

  June opened the windows. One was a Mac desktop with a photo of an empty racquetball court, which Peter took to be Nicolet’s personal computer. The second window was open to the law firm’s website. The third was a commercial email program with Nicolet’s work email address at the top. The fourth was the server’s main dashboard.