Child Not Found

by Ray Daniel

  “I can’t discuss it.”

  “Proprietary hacking algorithms?”

  Jarrod said nothing. Another head duck.

  “Jesus, Jarrod, what happened to you?”

  “What?”

  “What? You know what.”

  Jarrod crossed his arms again. Actually pouted. I couldn’t believe it.

  I said, “You’re the Bernie Madoff of computer science.”

  “Shut up, Tucker.”

  “And a disgrace to MIT.”

  “Oh, the hell with MIT!”

  “Keep your voice down.”

  Mothers pushed strollers past us. Kids Maria’s age ran up and down the ramp. The Aquarium was busy during the Christmas school vacation.

  “How did this happen?” I asked.

  “How did what happen?”

  “How did you become a crook?”

  “I’m no crook.”

  “By what definition are you not a crook?”

  Jarrod stared at me.

  “I know all about PassHack,” I said. “What it really was. What you tricked me into developing.”

  “I didn’t trick you. I really wanted to make PassHack.”

  “Oh, I see.”

  “It started as an investment.”

  “What?”

  “An angel investment in PassHack. Anderson, Sal, and Hugh offered me half a million to get started.”

  “You took their money?”

  “Of course I took their money. I had been pitching venture capitalists for months. I must have made fifty pitches. That was my first bite.”

  I could see the way this had played out. “You burned through the angel round,” I said.

  “I never got the chance. Those guys took me to the North End to celebrate, sat around a table in a little restaurant, and told me how it was going to be. How I was going to hack passwords for them.”

  My curiosity got the better of me. “How? Some cracking algorithm?”

  “No. You know, the usual. You send some executive an email with a link, and get them to click on it.”

  “Phishing.”

  “Well, more like spear phishing. You send an executive a real-looking email from someone they know, get them to click on a plausible link.”

  “Executives still fall for that?”

  “They’re cautious, but you can trick them once you know who their friends are.”

  “Facebook?”

  “Yeah. And LinkedIn. You just gather every bit of data and use it to get that one click.”

  “So then why the hacking servers you had me make?”

  “I’d also try to get the executive’s personal passwords. You wouldn’t believe how many of these guys use the same password for both.”

  “Is that all you guys do?”

  “No, we just throw everything at them. You can get people’s credit card number, or parts of their credit card numbers, then you call the website and see if you can trick them into emailing you a password reset link. You find one website that thinks the last four digits of the credit card are the Holy Grail of security, and another that thinks that the last four digits are public domain knowledge. You put it all together and you hack the account.”

  “A holistic approach.”

  “Exactly!” Jarrod was getting excited, giving off a weird passionate vibe. “Then there’s the key logging. We record their keystrokes.”

  “You do key logging?”

  “If the spear phishing works, you install a key logger first thing.”

  “Is that how you got Hugh’s password?”

  Jarrod rolled his eyes. “Hugh’s an idiot. He came over to the office to get his weekly cash and asked to use my computer. He logged into webmail and told the browser to save his password. He must have clicked the box automatically, didn’t even notice.”

  “So you just had his account all this time?”

  “Yup.”

  “What’s this weekly cash?”

  Jarrod’s lips clamped shut.

  I said, “Sal and Hugh tell me that Anderson was skimming.”

  Nothing.

  “Jarrod, talk to me. I’m Sal’s cousin. I can put in a good word for you. I can save you.”

  “You actually think you’re going to save me by talking to Sal? I don’t give a shit about Sal. If he’s lucky, he’s out of business; if he’s not, he’s a dead man. I’m not afraid of Sal or Hugh. I’m afraid of Anderson and Kane.”

  “Did Kane tell you to hack Hugh’s account?”

  “He just made me send the email. I don’t know what he did after that.”

  “He kidnapped Sal’s daughter.”

  Jarrod looked into the tank, watched a tarpon flash past. “I’m sorry.”

  I left him there and spiraled down the ramp, picking up speed. Bundled myself into the cold, considered my next move. According to Jarrod, Angie and Maria were being held by a highly trained killer and his supervillain boss. Right. Nothing I shouldn’t be able to handle with a little help.

  I whipped out my Droid and called Sal. “Hi, Sal.”

  “Fuck you.” Connection broken.

  I called Bobby. “Hey, listen— ”

  “Bite me.” Connection broken.

  Called Hugh. “Hugh—”

  “Don’t call me.” Connection broken.

  I called Jael. “Please don’t hang up on me.”

  Fifty-Six

  The Legal Seafood Restaurant on Long Wharf sits across from the Aquarium, a warning to aquarium fish that refuse to toe the line. I sat at the bar amidst wood and blue glass, slurping a bowl of clam chowder and drinking a Harpoon IPA. Jael sat next to me, eschewing the clams and opting instead for a dinner roll and spring water.

  “You should not be drinking at this time of day,” she said. “It will slow you down.”

  I said, “It doesn’t matter. I’m going home. I can’t do this alone. I quit.”

  Jael reached over to me, grabbed the beer, and dumped it behind the bar into the sink. The bartender walked over.

  “Something wrong with the beer?” he asked.

  “He should not be drinking,” said Jael. “He needs water.”

  Bartender gave me a look. You gonna let her run your life? I shrugged. He poured me the water. I pulled out a twenty, made a keep the change motion.

  I turned to Jael. “What was that about?”

  “It is ridiculous that you should quit,” she said.

  “I thought you’d be happy. You’re the one who told me not to get involved.”

  “That was before you were involved.”

  “Well, there’s nothing I can do now. Kane has Maria and Angie. I can’t rescue them alone. Sal’s mad at me. Bobby’s mad at me. Hugh’s mad at me. Lee just wants to arrest me. It’s a clusterfuck.”

  Jael reached for my hand. Grabbed it. Bore into me with her gray eyes. “You are not alone,” she said.

  Shame sloshed around my gut. “I know, but—”

  “You are doing a good thing,” Jael said.

  “Yeah, doing it badly.”

  “But still.”

  “I have no idea what’s going on. I’m just going to get somebody killed.”

  “Tell me what you know.”

  “You know what I know.”

  “Just do it.”

  So I told her everything, starting with losing Maria, almost getting her back, losing her again in Pupo’s. Told her about Victor trying to kill me in a shipping crate. Told her about Angie’s phone and the ice and how I still hadn’t warned Bobby about Cantrell. About how everyone was after me about Hanover Street and about Angie’s reputation. I even told her about Caroline’s booty call. It was the only thing that shocked Jael.

  “She is an aggressive woman,” Jael said.

  “You’re te
lling me.”

  “Why would she do that?”

  “Because she thinks I’m sexy?”

  “It is possible, but unlikely.”

  “Oh, thanks. That was the bright spot in my day.”

  “I am just saying that you should not let your guard down.”

  “I am so tired of having my guard up.”

  “Still.”

  “I just want this to end. I want to stop hurting people.”

  “You are not hurting people.”

  “Oh, c’mon. Everything I touch turns to shit.”

  “And you think it would be different if you were not involved?”

  “Of course it would be different.”

  “Would Sal still have been arrested?”

  “Well, yeah.”

  “Would Hugh have sat in Sal’s spot and started a war?”

  “Sure.”

  “What would have happened to Maria?”

  “I guess that she would have been taken.”

  “Or killed with her mother.”

  “Well, probably not. Pupo knew where to find her.”

  “And someone would still have killed Joey Pupo. Taken Maria from him.”

  “Either way.”

  “Correct. Either with you or without you.”

  I drank water. Cold water on a cold day. “You’re saying that I’ve accomplished nothing and that I might as well go home?”

  “Yet the righteous holdeth on his way, and he that hath clean hands waxeth stronger and stronger.”

  “Is that the Bible? Why does everybody quote me the Bible?”

  “It is from the Book of Job.”

  “Am I supposed to be the guy with the clean hands?”

  “You have worked hard to reach this point. You are getting strong enough to turn the tide, and yet you want to quit.”

  “I don’t have clean hands.”

  “You have the cleanest hands of any of us.”

  I had nothing to say to that. Stared off at rows and rows of delicious whiskey behind the bar, drank my water. Poked at my congealed clam chowder. I could still quit, head home, and—and what? Set up a Google alert for “Maria Rizzo”? Wait for the body to turn up?

  “What if we assume that David Anderson has taken Maria and Angie?” I asked.

  Jael said, “It is a good assumption.”

  “What will he do with them? You said there were three options: kill them, do unspeakable things to them, or use them for leverage.”

  Jael did not answer, looked into her water glass instead.

  I said, “It’s pretty clear he’s going to use them for leverage to get Sal off his back.”

  “He will probably do three things,” said Jael.

  “Which three things?”

  “Use them as leverage to get Sal into a vulnerable position. Then kill Sal. Then kill them.”

  “He’d kill Maria?”

  “And Angie,” said Jael. “They are all witnesses.”

  “So what do we do? Confront Anderson?”

  “I do not think that would help. In fact, it would hurt. It would give him information.”

  “Do we break into his apartment?”

  “Probably not possible.”

  “Maybe we get some evidence somehow. You know. Hack his email?”

  “I do not know how to do that.”

  “No,” I said, “but I do.”

  I dialed my phone. Got an answer. “This is David Anderson.”

  “Dave, this is Tucker. We need to talk.”

  “My name is David. You want to talk? Talk.”

  “I’d rather meet on neutral ground.”

  “Oh,” said Anderson. “It’s that kind of talk.”

  “I was thinking of the Ritz Bar.”

  “You buying?”

  These guys. Always with the negotiations. “It was down to either calling you or my friends in the FBI, Dave,” I said. “Want me to call them instead?”

  “It’s David. I think you know I have something you want.”

  “Yeah.”

  “We’ll split the bar bill.”

  “Okay.”

  Fifty-Seven

  There was a time when the Ritz Carlton lived in a stately brick building overlooking the Public Garden. This building was sold and the hotel renamed Taj Boston (a case of Indian insourcing). The new Ritz Carlton hid behind a movie theater and overlooked what had once been the Combat Zone, the porn center of the city. The Combat Zone was destroyed by technology, as VHS, DVD, and the ability to Google “boobs” had replaced its core business.

  I sat at the white marble horseshoe of the Ritz Carlton’s bar, waiting for David Anderson and watching some schmucks on TV prattling about whether tomorrow’s New Year’s Eve festivities (called First Night) were to be doomed by snow.

  Anderson walked through the front door, searched the room, saw me. I waved. He sat next to me, shaking my hand while looking at the bourbon bottles. His hand was cold.

  “You don’t believe in gloves?” I asked.

  “Gloves are for the weak,” he said.

  Anderson ordered a Booker’s Manhattan, twist instead of a cherry. I got an Allagash White, Maine’s best Belgian beer.

  Anderson said, “So, what you got?”

  “I got Angie’s cell phone off the Charles River.”

  “Good for you. You should return it. You were going to call the FBI for that?”

  “I’ll do that once I find her—and Maria.”

  Anderson looked me up and down. “What’s your game?” he asked.

  “I don’t have a game.”

  “Everybody has a game.”

  “I don’t.”

  Another long look. “Are you wearing a wire?”

  “No.”

  “Because if you’re wearing a wire—you don’t want to be wearing a wire.”

  “I’m not. I won’t.”

  “Why not?”

  I didn’t answer. The drinks arrived.

  Anderson took a sip of his Manhattan. “Oh, I get it,” he said. “That whole omerta thing.”

  “The what?”

  “The Mafia code of silence.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I lied.

  Anderson clapped my shoulder. “Rule One: There is no omerta.”

  I drank my beer. Anderson was just as smart as he looked.

  “Here’s what I don’t get. What the hell are you doing in the Mafia?”

  “I’m not in the Mafia.”

  “Yeah, whatever. You’re a young guy. Educated. Intelligent. Where did you go to school? BU?”

  “MIT.”

  “Even better. So you’ve got a worldview that’s bigger than the North End.”

  I took another swig of Allagash, thinking back to the Peroni I’d drunk in the North End. Anderson was right. Allagash was definitely not a beer you’d find in the North End.

  “What’s your point?” I asked.

  “My point is that you could do better than a has-been like Sal.”

  Family pride kicked in. “Sal is at the top of the heap.”

  “The top of what heap? The drugging, whoring, robbing, numbers heap?”

  I said nothing.

  “Sure, don’t confirm it,” Anderson said. “But for a second, look at it like a private equity guy.”

  “Private equity? I’m more comfortable with the drugging and whoring.”

  “Yeah, sure. Funny. Just think about it for a second. What kind of businesses are those? They suck!”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “From a business perspective, they suck. They don’t scale. Take whoring.” Anderson grabbed a napkin off the bartender’s pile. Took out a green plastic pen from a local bank.

  �
��Cheap pen,” I said.

  “Mont Blanc is for suckers,” said Anderson. He drew a stick figure on the napkin, two circles for boobs, two lines made a road next to her. “Your average street whore can turn five tricks a night. Oh, they’ll tell you ten, but that’s ridiculous. There’s only about six hours of prime pickup time, like eight p.m. to two a.m. The whore stands on the corner with her friends. Cars drive by, pick up her hotter friends first—remember, I said average—then they take her. Assuming a car every five minutes, that takes 15 minutes.” Anderson wrote 0:15 on the napkin with the word Marketing next to it.

  “She gets in the car, collects the money, and either takes him to a room or they park the car,” he continued. “That takes another fifteen minutes.” He wrote 0:15 and Sales next to it.

  “At worst, fifteen minutes to blow the guy or screw him, and fifteen back.” Anderson wrote 0:30 and the word Operations.

  “So you add these up and every trick takes at least an hour. Take into account slow guys, bad weather, peeing, maybe doing drugs, and you don’t get a trick an hour. So maybe you get five at an average of $75 each. That’s what?” Anderson wrote 75 and a 5 under it. He opened the calculator app on his phone.

  “$375,” I said.

  Anderson tapped at the phone. Showed me the number: 375. “Wow,” he said, “good job. You did go to MIT. So there you have it: 375 dollars a night revenue per employee. And there’s no way to get more money without hiring more girls. You got to feed them and their manager—”

  “Pimp.”

  “Whatever. Titles are unimportant. So, say half of that $375 is profit, about $180.”

  “$187.50,” I said.

  “Precision really doesn’t matter here. Call it $200 to make the math easy, she works 350 nights a year, each employee makes me $70,000, maximum.”

  “Seems like a good deal.”

  “It’s mouse nuts,” Anderson said. “And for each of these women I get one more person for the police to flip, one more chance of a murder to cover up, and don’t forget legal fees when she gets caught. You have to be a hard worker to run this business.”

  “Probably why Sal was good at it.”

  “Right tense there. Was.”

  I hadn’t noticed my tense. Shit.

  Anderson asked, “Do you know how much you can make by reading an internal document and shorting a stock?”

  “More than $70,000?”

  “Millions—in one deal. I can do one of those deals a month, sometimes two. A girl would have to work fourteen years to make me a million bucks.”