Burning Bright

by Nick Petrie

  “Shit,” she said. “We just hacked a law firm.”

  “Not me,” said Peter. “Definitely not me. But you should search Nicolet’s work email.”

  They crossed a long high bridge over a canal, a lake on the right and a narrow channel through to the sound now on the left. Peter made himself keep his eyes on the road. He didn’t like the clouds, but he definitely liked the geography.

  June wasn’t looking at the view. “I just did a search on his work email using my mom’s name,” she said. “But all I got was the same email string back and forth between her and Nicolet. We’ve seen these already.”

  “What about anything coming in? We want to know who asked Nicolet to make the offer.”

  June scrolled through her search. “These look like the only emails with Hazel Cassidy anywhere in the From, To, or the body of the email.”

  “What about another member of the law firm?”

  June clicked over to the dashboard and worked her way through to a server-wide email overview and did the same search. It took a few minutes. The same email string. No other mention of June’s mom.

  June said, “I’m going over to his personal computer to look at his email there.” She clicked and typed while Peter navigated the off-ramp and worked his way west through surface streets. Newer mid-rise condos competed with heavily renovated homes, old apartment buildings, and beat-up shacks that looked like one minor quake away from collapse.

  “Three email addresses. His work email, another address with messages about, let’s see, dinner plans, eighth-grade basketball games, a guys’ night out. And a third address that it looks like he uses when he’s shopping online. His new North Face raincoat has shipped.”

  She ran the search again on all three and came up with nothing.

  “We’re here.” Peter pulled up in front of the next address on their list. Jason Ross had lived in a row of two-story town houses with underground parking and high steel gates protecting the courtyard.

  “Hang on,” said June. “I’m going to do another search. This time for the word ‘algorithm.’” She typed and clicked. “Shit. The list is like, three thousand emails.”

  “I’m just going to look,” Peter said, and got out of the car. Both the courtyard gates and the garage door had no card or button access, and probably required some kind of electronic key fob to open. A round black camera lens eyeballed him from each location. To top things off, someone had posted a sign on the gate that read, “To help maintain building security, please do not allow anyone you do not know personally into the building.” And a little smiley face.

  If the goal was to limit casual burglars, it sure worked on Peter.

  He walked along the fence, looking for Ross’s address, more to have done something than in any expectation he’d actually learn anything. It was the middle unit, with a little overhang and a big picture window. The blinds were open, and Peter could see a giant television, a framed Army recruiting poster, and a plush teddy bear perched on an end table, facing the gate, almost like a pet waiting for its owner to come home. A little sad. And now Ross was dead.

  Peter got back in the car. “Too tight to just walk in,” he said. “A good choice, actually. Come and go in your car, use the garage, never meet your neighbors. You’re two miles from the freeway, the surface streets are a tangle, and there are three or four marinas within five miles. Unless they catch you walking out your door, you’re a ghost.”

  June said, “You really should be on one of those real estate shows on cable TV.” She deepened her voice. “‘This condo is ideal for the intelligent criminal. Note the multiple exits for a quick escape, and easy access to mass transit in case of government surveillance.’”

  “You could learn a thing or two,” he said. “You’re living some kind of invisible life yourself.”

  “I’m just trying not to have my dad show up on my doorstep.”

  37

  Back on Highway 99, Peter drove north toward the next address. Four lanes of low-rent commercial strip, auto parts, gun shops, and sporting goods. June was on her laptop again, still inside the law firm’s server.

  “I’m sorting Nicolet’s files by date,” she said. “Correlating with his emails to my mom. Maybe he wrote a report to his client.”

  “Or the client signed a contract,” said Peter. “That would be in there, too, right?”

  “Gotta be somewhere,” she said. “There’s an awful lot of work product here. This guy’s a beast. I’m going to be reading all night.”

  Peter glanced over at her. “All night?”

  “Well,” she said, eyes still on the laptop. “Maybe not all night.”

  “You could ask Tyg3r,” he said. “Is it smart enough to make those correlations?”

  “I doubt it,” she said. “What would I ask it to find?”

  Peter turned left. “Fucked if I know,” he said. “That’s your area, not mine.”

  “What is your area, exactly?”

  He grinned. “Get the bad guys,” he said. “Save the girl.”

  “So I’m the brains of the outfit?”

  “I thought you knew that already. If you didn’t, maybe I’m wrong.”

  She smiled at her laptop. “I was just being polite.”

  Peter saw a gas station ahead. “I’m going to fuel up.”

  She looked at the gauge. “We still have half a tank.”

  “Rule number one when you’re on the run,” he said. “Never get below half a tank. And if you’re a girl, never pass up the chance to pee.”

  “That’s sexist.”

  He shrugged, pulling into the gas station. “I can pee anywhere. In an old soda bottle, while you drive, if I have to. Can you do that?”

  “Why would I want to?” she asked. “But maybe I’ll use the bathroom for a minute, while I have the chance.”

  She went inside and Peter called Lewis.

  “What’s up?”

  “I got a first name on the ex-husband.”

  “About time, Jarhead. We can narrow it down.”

  “Oh, it’s already narrowed down,” said Peter. “The name is Sasha. Sasha Kolodny.”

  There was a pause at the other end of the line.

  “You’re shitting me. Sasha Kolodny? As in, Sasquatch? The Mad Billionaire? Man, you in deep doo-doo now.”

  Sasha Kolodny was an early employee of a certain giant Seattle software company. A notable eccentric in an industry known for eccentrics, Sasha Kolodny was a bearded giant who earned the nickname Sasquatch because of his tendency to wander off into the steep evergreen forest that surrounded Seattle. Apparently he said it helped him think. His net worth including stock options was once reported at over a billion dollars.

  In the mid-1990s, Kolodny left the company and used his fortune to launch a new business focused on, if Peter remembered correctly, the technology of sustainability. Hardware, not software. Renewable energy, urban agriculture, that kind of thing. Good ideas, but apparently ahead of their time in the boom years of conspicuous consumption. When the dot-com bubble popped, the whole enterprise went down in flames, taking most of his fortune with it. Kolodny went some flavor of crazy and disappeared. His story resurfaced from time to time in the media, both legend and cautionary tale. The intersection of genius, commerce, finance, and mental instability.

  Peter’s knowledge of the man was limited to an article he’d read in Wired magazine years ago. The writer had made a comparison to Howard Hughes, and called Kolodny “one of the principal architects of the modern world.”

  The title of the article was “The Mad Billionaire.”

  Peter said, “What do you know about him?”

  “Prob’ly no more’n you do. Let me look him up.” Peter heard the clicking of the keyboard.

  “I don’t have long,” said Peter. June would be back from the bathroom any minute.

&n
bsp; “Hold on, Jarhead. Let’s see. Yeah, here’s a ‘where is he now’ article, they interviewed some people who knew him. ‘Brilliant, very driven, and very private.’”

  Lewis stopped talking, and Peter knew he was reading.

  “Seems like something happened to him in the late nineties. Nobody really knows what, but he really changed. He got manic, obsessed, paranoid. Says here, ‘His focus on sustainability was rooted in his obsession with the collapse of civilization.’ Huh,” said Lewis. “Never knew the man was such a whack job.”

  “Can you find out where he is now?”

  “According to Wikipedia, he’s off the map. As in vanished, location unknown. The Internet thinks he’s dead.”

  “The Internet thinks?”

  “You know what I mean. The general fucking consensus, okay? The man wandered into the woods and never came back. Although some conspiracy geeks out there say Sasquatch is alive and well and running a secret lab for the United States government.”

  “Was he ever declared dead?”

  “How the fuck should I know? I just got started.”

  “Maybe you should stop. I’ll do some digging on this end.”

  “Jarhead. What the fuck is going on up there?”

  June emerged from the gas station. She’d bought a few snacks.

  “I’ll call you back,” Peter said, and hung up.

  He wondered if a paranoid genius ex-billionaire could muster the enthusiasm to kill his ex-wife over a promising software application.

  He thought maybe so.

  If he only had one percent of his earlier wealth, he’d have the resources to make it happen.

  June looked at him and smiled. She dug into a plastic bag and held out her hand. “Twizzler?”

  38

  They turned off the commercial strip into a dark, quiet neighborhood of long looping streets in a modified grid. No sidewalks, just gravel shoulders and low ditches to carry the runoff of the near-constant rain. Ranch houses and split-levels and a few older bungalows, some with elaborate landscaping, some adrift in a sea of thriving weeds. Lots of tall pines and cedars and hemlocks, their deep greens clogging up the light.

  Dexter Smith’s most recent address was a sprawling 1960s split-level with a big attached garage in Seattle’s North End.

  It sat at the back of an enormous corner lot, almost entirely concealed by a dense wall of overgrown cedars and evergreen shrubs along all four edges of the lot. A heavy wooden gate blocked the driveway, held shut by a fat padlock in a wrought-iron hasp. The padlock was closed, although floodlights were lit at the corners of the house, bright in the dim, damp afternoon.

  A security camera stood atop the gatepost, facing the driveway.

  June cruised by, slightly slower than the speed limit.

  She said, “What do you see?”

  “A soft fortress in disguise. All that plant growth will keep out prying eyes, burglars looking for an easy target, maybe even neighborhood kids. I’d guess there’s some fence inside those bushes, too, maybe even barbed wire. Inside the perimeter, it’s probably lawn, mowed short, and cameras showing everything. This is someone who thinks about layers of protection and fields of fire.”

  “Crazy?”

  Peter shook his head. “Just careful. He probably can’t help himself. It might not even be a set of conscious decisions, just choices that felt right. He sure didn’t plant all those trees. Those have been there for fifty years.” Peter shrugged. “Or maybe he just liked the house.”

  June came to a stop sign and glanced at her notebook. “Dexter Smith. He was the oldest of them. Twenty years in the Army, a master sergeant.”

  Peter nodded. When he was hanging from June’s redwood at the end of a rope, eavesdropping, one of the men had been silent, working his way slowly through the brush, intent on the search. He was the one that Peter had been most concerned about, the one that had finally noticed him. That was probably him. The master sergeant.

  “You understand these guys,” she said.

  “Sure. We were forged in the same fire. But I’m the flip side of their coin. They went one way, I went the other.”

  “Which way did you go, exactly?” She glanced at him as she turned the corner.

  “I’ll let you know when I get there.”

  She feathered the gas, easing her way back around the long, irregular block.

  “Would you need to live in a house like that? Like a fortress?”

  Peter kept his head on a swivel. “I have no idea. I haven’t slept inside anything but a tent or my truck for almost two years.”

  “But is that the kind of place you’d want?”

  “Honestly, I have no idea.” He looked at her now. “But I’m starting to think about it.”

  She pulled the car up to the gate and he got out with the bolt cutters and a can of spray paint. They already had their hats on to shield their faces from the cameras. Keeping the brim of his hat down, Peter took the can of spray paint and hit the lenses with a quick blast. The cops would be here as soon as the master sergeant’s body was identified by the burned Tahoe. No reason to give them any more information than necessary.

  The fat padlock’s shank was hardened steel, and he was glad he’d sprung for the long-handled version of the bolt cutters. Leverage is all. The shank broke with a distinct pop.

  He removed the ruined lock and swung the gate wide. June pulled the van inside and he walked the gate shut behind her. There was a piece of heavy steel channel that slid in a track to lock the gates together from the inside. The master sergeant didn’t fuck around.

  Peter saw another camera above the attached garage and hit the lens with his spray can.

  If there was anyone watching the monitors, he didn’t show himself.

  June parked behind a big orange-and-black three-quarter-ton Dodge Power Wagon from the eighties, the truck looking like new and freshly waxed, raindrops beaded up on the paint. This was one of three vehicles June had found registered to Smith. The other two were a Harley-Davidson motorcycle and a Lexus sedan, which were not in evidence. Probably parked wherever the burned Tahoe had been garaged.

  She got out and stood looking at the house. The windows were covered with some kind of reflective film, so they couldn’t see in. Peter walked very carefully around the building, finding three more cameras and touching them up with spray paint as he went. The man’s perimeter defenses made him nervous. He didn’t figure there were claymores on tripwires, but Peter was finding his life more valuable by the minute.

  He’d feel pretty stupid if he got himself killed due to a basic lack of attention.

  The only thing out of the ordinary was the garage, which was bigger than it looked from the front. It was only two cars wide, but it was also two cars deep. Twin white pipes poked through the roof at the back, looking like the exhaust and air intake for a sealed-combustion furnace. So the garage was heated. There was also a big sheet metal vent, eight feet off the ground, with a chemical smell. A spray hood. The master sergeant was fabricating something in there.

  When Peter got back to the deep front porch, the door was open and June was gone.

  He ran up the steps and inside, the truck driver’s gun still in the tool bag. “June!”

  He found her wandering through the house, blue gloves on her hands, turning on the lights. “He had a fake rock with his key inside,” she said, almost apologetically. “I have the same one by my front door.” She spread her arms with a flourish. “Surprise!”

  The first floor of the house was immaculate, especially if you considered that it was being used primarily as a warehouse for motorcycle parts.

  Heavy-duty steel shelves lined the walls of the living and dining rooms, with brightly painted gas tanks and fenders and fairings neatly arranged with manila tags noting the make and model and sometimes a name and phone number. The wall-to-wall carpeting wa
s gone, the old plywood floors covered with gray epoxy paint. The house was full but didn’t feel like it, because the light shone through the open shelves. The elaborately renovated kitchen, breakfast nook, and den appeared to be fully occupied. They were spotless. Only the small bank of video monitors linked to the security cameras seemed out of place. Peter smiled to see the miniature motorcycles on shelves and windowsills and at the center of the round dining table. A teddy bear sat atop a cabinet, as if waiting for supper.

  Maybe the master sergeant wasn’t paranoid. Maybe he was just looking after his investment in motorcycle parts.

  Up the stairs, the bedroom was equally immaculate with T-shirts on hangers, organized by color. Personal photos on the dresser and walls, mostly guys and their bikes. There were two other bedrooms, one made up as a guest room, the other used as an office. June sat on an old wooden chair to work her way through the shelves and filing cabinet and the old desktop computer while Peter walked down through a mudroom to the giant garage, which was set up as a complete motorcycle repair shop.

  The guy seemed to specialize in the big bikes, mostly Harleys but also a few old Indians and Nortons in various stages of repair or renovation. Peter saw a pair of bike lifts, multiple heavy workbenches, a giant rolling steel Snap-on toolbox, and a welding rig. Everything was clean and orderly, as if the maid had just been through to tidy up. Engines and engine sections sat on stained cardboard pads, and a small plastic booth with a paint hood took up half of the back wall. That was the sheet metal vent he’d seen outside.

  The other half of the back wall looked like a big walk-in closet. A heavy-duty steel door was locked with three commercial deadbolts, at the top, middle, and bottom. The walls had metal plates bolted to the studs, with each bolt head spot-welded to the steel.

  Peter was back to the paranoia hypothesis. His little pry bar wouldn’t do shit here. He went back to the van for the sledgehammer.

  As it turned out, when you hit a serious deadbolt with a twelve-pound sledge a few times, it opens right up.