Child Not Found

by Ray Daniel

  “And how do you get the inside documents?”

  Anderson smiled. Finished his Manhattan. “I think you know.”

  “How would I know?”

  “Because Jarrod Cooper is loyal to no man.”

  “Huh?”

  “Called me from the Aquarium. Confessed that he had spilled it all. Begged me to not kill him.”

  “You make a decision on that?”

  “No.” Anderson waved to the bartender for the check.

  The check arrived. I took out my phone and my wallet. “A card each?”

  Anderson said, “Sure.” Threw down a Visa card decorated with George Washington from the dollar bill. I threw down my card, undecorated. The bartender took them both.

  I fiddled with my phone and brought up the camera. Took a picture of the bar and tweeted it:

  The new modern, fancy Ritz Bar #nowIfeelsad

  “Oh, right,” said Anderson. “Got to feed the followers.”

  “It’s sort of a diary,” I said.

  “So Jarrod tells me that you know about PassHack.”

  I continued to snap pictures. “Yeah,” I said. “I had already figured it out.”

  “He tells me that you believe I have Maria.”

  “I do.”

  “You’re right.”

  I lowered the camera. The bar slipped from my view. There was Anderson and me, and Maria, somewhere.

  “Where is she?”

  “Unsafe,” said Anderson. “Quite unsafe. She probably needs rescuing.”

  “What does that mean? Unsafe?”

  “It means that she’s with an unstable person who’ll probably wind up killing her one way or another.”

  “What do you want with her?”

  “I don’t want anything with her,” said Anderson. “She’s a burden. A bad risk, really. But I want something from Sal.”

  “What?”

  “I want him to back off.”

  The checks arrived on two little trays. I took a picture of the trays.

  “Receipt?” Anderson said. “Really? For this.”

  “Habit,” I said.

  Anderson pointed at his eyes. “Focus here, Tucker. Right here. I want Sal to call off the hit, forget my manager’s fee. He learned a lesson, so just call it tuition.”

  “Why not just pay him back?”

  “Because now it’s not about the money.”

  “Okay. If you say so.”

  “I’m going to text you some instructions tomorrow, and you and Sal are going to follow them. If you don’t, I’m going to kill Angie and Maria and leave them on Hanover Street.” Anderson held me with a stare.

  I averted my eyes.

  “You got it?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Good.” Anderson stood, turned, and left.

  I opened the photo app on my phone. I had what I needed.

  Fifty-Eight

  Jael Navas sat across the kitchen counter from me, holding a mug of Bitches Brew while eyeing Click and Clack. Elevator music echoed from my cell phone’s speaker. We were on hold, waiting for a live customer support person at Anderson’s email provider. Clack climbed a sponge. Jael’s nose crinkled in an unusual display of emotion.

  “You really don’t like them, do you?” I asked.

  “They are disgusting,” said Jael.

  “Cover your ears, boys. She doesn’t mean it.”

  Jael shuddered, moved across the room, drank her coffee. “I will not eat near those insects.”

  “Okay. That’s a—”

  The customer support person interrupted. A perky female voice said, “Thank you for calling, this is Gretchen. To whom am I speaking?”

  To whom? Gretchen was one classy lady.

  “This is David Anderson,” I said. “I need to reset my password for my email account.” I told her Anderson’s email address.

  “I can help you with that, Mr. Anderson. Can you give me your mother’s maiden name?”

  “I can,” I said, “but that won’t help. I never write down her real name on those things.”

  “Oh.”

  “Unless I did. It’s McGillicuddy.”

  “No sir, you didn’t give us that name.”

  “Yeah, figures. I should keep a list of my passwords.”

  “How about the make and model of your first car?”

  “I think I wrote Nissan Sentra.”

  “No, sir, that’s not it.”

  “This is why I had to call. I’m really stuck, Gretchen.”

  Jael watched me lie with a new look in her eye.

  I pushed mute. “How am I doing?”

  “You are a much better liar than I would have guessed.”

  “Why, thank you.”

  “It is not a compliment.”

  Gretchen broke in. “Sir, without your security questions there is only one thing we can do. Do you know which credit card you used to create this account?”

  When I took the picture of my receipt in the Ritz Bar, I also got David Anderson’s credit card in the shot. I had copied that information off the picture. Now came the big test. Did David Anderson use the same credit card for drinking as for his data services?

  I said, “I do have the credit card.”

  “Could you give me your billing address and that number?”

  “Sure.” I gave Anderson’s address.

  “Thank you, sir. Where should I email the reset link?”

  I knew this question was coming. I had set up a onetime email address on Hotmail in preparation. I gave Gretchen the email address.

  She said, “I’ve emailed you a reset link.”

  I watched Hotmail on my laptop. The email popped up.

  “Got it.”

  “Great! Is there anything else I can help you with today?”

  “No, Gretchen, I’m good.”

  “Because you are such an excellent customer, we have an offer for you to get a new credit card.”

  “No thank you, Gretchen.”

  “When you sign up, you get five more gigabytes of disk space.” Gretchen pronounced gigabytes as “jigabytes.”

  I said, “No, thank you, Gretchen. I have all the jigabytes I need.”

  “Okay, thank you, Mr. Anderson. Please remain on hold.”

  “On hold, why?” Stalling? Were the police on their way?

  “For a short survey on your experience at this ti—”

  I hung up on Gretchen. Let her think David Anderson was a jerk. She’d be right.

  “God, I hate the phone,” I said.

  Jael said, “You would prefer to trick people by email?”

  “As a matter of fact, yes. Do you have a problem with this?”

  “It is … unsettling.”

  “What?”

  “That you were able to get into Anderson’s account so easily.”

  “I know, right?”

  “Anyone with a picture of his credit card could do that.”

  “Well, they’d need to know his address too.”

  “Didn’t you originally find David Anderson’s address on the web?”

  “Yes.”

  “So anyone could take a credit card and break in?”

  “Depends on the service.”

  Jael crossed her arms, shuddered.

  I said, “What’s gotten into you? I’ve watched you shoot a guy in the face and go on your way.”

  “That was a different situation,” she said.

  “Well, yeah, but—”

  “He could see me. He could shoot back.”

  “And why was that good?”

  Jael was silent. Glanced at Click and Clack, took her coffee into the living room. I followed. We sat at the dining room table.

  �
��What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “It was very easy,” she said.

  “Hacking Anderson?”

  “Yes.” Jael pulled her smartphone from her purse, looked at the email application. “Who else could be reading these?” she asked.

  “Probably nobody but you,” I said.

  “Probably.” Her voice trailed off. I’d never seen her rattled.

  I took her mug into the kitchen. Poured us both more coffee. Came back.

  “How do we live in a world like this?” Jael asked.

  “Like what?”

  “Where it is easy to see …”

  “You mean see our secrets?”

  She glanced at me, surprised. “Yes. Our secrets.”

  “Welcome to my world,” I said.

  “The computer world?”

  “No. The world of being afraid.”

  “Why would you be afraid?”

  “Pistol Salvucci almost shot me. Then Vince.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “I’ve almost died twice this week.”

  “I know.”

  “And it would have been so easy for them. They don’t need my credit card number and address to blow my head off.”

  “No.”

  “So I have to ask you …”

  “Yes?”

  “How do you live in a world like that?”

  Jael sat, silent.

  “I’m serious,” I said. “How do you live in a world where anyone could kill you?”

  She said, “I trust.”

  “Trust? Trust what?”

  “I trust that people are not killers. I trust that they will not randomly attack me.”

  I nodded. “So do I. If I didn’t, then I’d never leave the house.”

  “But this is different.”

  “No,” I said, “it’s not different. It’s the same. Trust makes it livable.”

  Silence.

  “Besides,” I said, “it’s getting harder all the time to do these hacks. I’m going to tell Rittenhauser about this one. He’ll run a story and these guys will close their hole. But guns, they’ll always be just as easy to use.”

  “I see your point,” Jael said.

  “Now, let’s read Anderson’s email.”

  Fifty-Nine

  This hack was only going to last until David Anderson checked his email and discovered that he was locked out. I needed a warning. I set up his account to send password-reset emails to my Hotmail account so that I’d get a warning when he clicked on the “Forgot My Password” link. Then I went to work.

  I launched the Thunderbird email reader on my laptop, typed in Anderson’s account information, and started downloading the most recent emails first. I had run for ten minutes, downloading a couple of years of emails, when the Hotmail account told me I had new mail. Anderson wanted back in. I changed the reset email back to his original and logged off. I had not forgotten Anderson’s warning about Googling his name; he’d probably be pretty pissed about my stealing his email.

  “Do you want to look these emails over with me?” I asked Jael.

  “No,” she said, “I do not.”

  I couldn’t blame her. Fishing through Anderson’s emails made me feel like a particularly nasty form of voyeur. There were emails from his sister wishing him a happy birthday, a realtor pitching new condos in the North End, a Tesla store saying “Happy New Year” to one of its favorite customers, and Anderson’s brother, who wrote about their mother’s dementia: She almost recognized me yesterday.

  I felt like a shit.

  Then I got to an email unlike all the others. It started with a single line:

  -----BEGIN PGP MESSAGE-----

  Followed by a blob of textual gobbledygook and then the final message:

  -----END PGP MESSAGE-----

  “Son of a bitch,” I said.

  “What is it?” asked Jael.

  “David Anderson is using Pretty Good Privacy email encryption. We can’t read his emails if he’s using PGP.”

  “Is all of his email encrypted?”

  “No, just some of it.”

  I checked the header. It read kane23223@gmail.com. That made sense. You an only use Pretty Good Protection if both people in the conversation have the software.

  “He’s encrypting his emails with Kane,” I said.

  Jael said, “So your hacking was worthless.”

  “Oh no,” I said. “We still have the metadata.”

  “Metadata?”

  The word metadata became all the rage back when Edward Snowden leaked the fact that the NSA was spying all over us by storing our metadata. It’s data about the data. It tells you who emailed whom, but not what they said. Metadata was all I had when it came to Anderson’s encrypted emails.

  Of course, his encrypting created its own security leak. It allowed me to ignore emails about Anderson’s mother, shopping habits, and, perhaps, embarrassing health issues. The encrypted emails were the only ones that mattered.

  “I’m going to write a script and extract the list of people Anderson has been emailing with PGP,” I said, and settled into some nice quality coding time.

  We’re told that we have to get out of our comfort zone, push ourselves to try new things, and stop doing what makes us feel fat, dumb, and happy. But after a week of being chased, shot at, and abused, I was ready for a little comfort. Writing a script would be the perfect way to unwind.

  I opened an editor on my laptop, thought a little about what I wanted to do, then slipped into the warm embrace of a programming flow state. The cold, the danger, the urgency, and the fear all slipped into a small place in the back of my mind while I wrote a script that found all the PGP-encrypted emails, scanned them for email addresses, put the email addresses into a database, and presented the information to me in a nice sorted table that contained ten names. Five of the names were strangers. Five were not. Of the five I knew, three were expected: Kane, Jarrod, and Hugh.

  But two were surprises: Frank Cantrell and, lo and behold, Caroline Quinn.

  “Sonovabitch,” I said.

  “Who?” asked Jael.

  “Oh, no one in particular. Just the situation.”

  I went back to coding. Added in a bit that showed me the dates of the oldest and most recent emails from all of the encrypted folks, then made a histogram of their communication frequency by month and year. Of the five I knew, Hugh had the longest relationship with Anderson. I had managed to capture two years’ worth of data from Anderson, and Hugh’s emails were littered throughout all the way back in time. They had emailed at least once a month.

  Next came Kane, whose emails started infrequently about a year ago. Jarrod’s emails started about eight months ago and continuously picked up in frequency. There was even one today from after the time Jarrod and I had watched Myrtle circle her tank. That must have been when he told Anderson about our meeting.

  The surprising fourth name on my list started emailing using PGP ten days ago, when Hugh had received his first encrypted email from Frank Cantrell. PGP doesn’t encrypt subjects, and Cantrell’s first encrypted email said, What do I Need to Do? I had to wonder why Cantrell was talking to Anderson, but it could have been for many reasons.

  This left me with the last surprise person to be emailing Cantrell using PGP: Caroline Quinn. She had sent Anderson only one email, while I was driving around Chelsea looking for Hugh Graxton’s mother.

  Which secrets had I divulged to Caroline?

  Oh, yeah. All of them.

  The timestamp showed that Caroline Quinn had left my bedroom, gone to her computer, and emailed David Anderson.

  I looked at the clock. I was supposed to have dinner with her in an hour.

  “What do you boys think?” I asked Click and Clack.

  They did their best hermit crab impres
sion of Admiral Ackbar: It’s a trap!

  Sixty

  The famous New England phrase “You can’t get there from here” is really a paraphrase of the more common situation in Boston: you can get there from here, but it is a major pain in the ass. Which was why I was sitting in a cab next to Jael, letting a cabbie try to figure out how to get to Fan Pier from the South End. You’d think it would be easy. Both neighborhoods are south of the downtown; you can practically see Fan Pier from my rooftop. Yet the cabbie was swearing, swerving, and diving into tunnels as he yelled into his cell phone in what I assumed was Arabic, but could have been Portuguese.

  “I told her everything,” I said.

  “Including Hanover Street?” asked Jael.

  “Yeah.”

  “This is not your finest moment.”

  “I trusted her.”

  “Sex is a good way to create trust.”

  Instant intimacy.

  “But it is not clear that your trust was misplaced. The message was short, correct?”

  I looked at the printed message in my hand, the one I would use to confront Caroline:

  From: Caroline Quinn

  To: David Anderson

  -----BEGIN PGP MESSAGE-----

  Version: GnuPG/MacGPG2 v2.0.22 (Darwin)

  Comment: GPGTools - https://gpgtools.org

  jA0EAwMCsyIpOFIfzMLPySLTw4/7pbmVUl5JyHwYBeVNAoUF1+vAfe3ahvM7Qdhj

  x7bF

  =cmUN

  -----END PGP MESSAGE-----

  “Yeah,” I said. “It’s pretty short.”

  “So it was not a full report.”

  “No. It might just say ‘Mission Accomplished.’”

  “We do not know what it says. It does not help to assume.”

  The cab burrowed farther into a tunnel, then stalled in traffic. The weather reports were talking about a big snowstorm tomorrow. People seemed to be getting a jump on their panicking.

  I fiddled with the printed page, folded it, stuck it in my pocket. “So what now?”

  Jael said, “Your original reason for reading Anderson’s email was to gain leverage on him and avoid a meeting.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did you accomplish that?”

  “I don’t know. I mean, Anderson must know that something is up, but I didn’t really learn anything.”