“It’s Mrs. Corso and her son Mark . . . He’d just come back from California . . . A lovely woman, husband died of a heart attack several years ago . . . Been a struggle since . . . Lived here all their lives . . . A good boy, studied hard, went to Brown University . . . Working at Moto’s to earn pocket money . . . Seems like yesterday he was playing stickball in the park . . . A tragedy . . .”
When the information from the ladies had been exhausted, they retreated to the edge of the crowd. Ford’s face was dark. “What was his title in the personnel file?” he asked Abbey.
“Senior data analysis technician.”
Without another word, Ford flipped open his cell phone and called the NPF switchboard, and in a moment was connected to Derkweiler.
“This is Ford from the Agency,” he said in a clipped voice. “This fellow Corso who was working for you—what exactly did he do and why was he fired?”
There was a long silence as Ford listened into his phone. Abbey could just hear the squawk of Derkweiler’s voice on the other end. Ford thanked him and hung up.
“Yeah?” Abbey asked.
“He was in charge of processing radar and visual data from the Mars Mapping Orbiter.”
“And?”
“He was fired for cause. Derkweiler said he didn’t have ‘adequate prioritization skills,’ became ‘obsessed with irrelevant gamma ray data,’ refused to follow instructions, and caused a scene at a scientific meeting.”
Abbey thought for a moment. “Obsessed, huh?”
Ford cleared his throat. “What do you know about gamma rays?”
“That there shouldn’t be any from Mars.”
52
Harry Burr sat in a Greek diner opposite McGolrick Park with a cheeseburger, coffee, and the Post, watching the rain run down the plate glass window in ever-changing rivulets. There were mathematical rules in the rivulets, rules that described chaos. It was sort of like the rules that described a hit. Controlled chaos. Because you could never anticipate everything. There was always a surprise: like dear old mother being in the house after Corso told him he was alone. Or being forced to kill Corso.
Always a little surprise.
He refocused his eyes farther away and had a clear view across the corner of McGolrick Park to the row house where he’d done Corso and his mother. The geek had been about to tell him where the drive was, he was pissing his pants with eagerness to tell him—and then the old lady walks in.
He nursed the strong coffee, leafed through the Post, and watched the show. He hadn’t found the hard drive but he knew the bar where Corso worked and he knew his ex-roommate’s address. The hard drive would be at the bar or the friend’s place. He’d check out the bar first. If Corso were really smart he might have mailed it back to himself or even stuck it in a safe-deposit box. But he was pretty sure he’d have kept it close by.
He took another sip of coffee, turned the pages of the paper, pretending to read. It had been slow in the restaurant and now it was empty, most of the customers having finished up quickly and gone into the park to check out the show. He kept an eye on the crowd, looking for anyone who might be a relative, a friend—a girlfriend—to whom Corso might also have given the drive.
Two people in the park began attracting his attention, a black girl and a tall, craggy man. They seemed just a little too alert, a little too detached from the rest, to be neighborhood rubberneckers. They were watching, observing. They were involved.
He marked them in his memory in case he saw them again.
53
Abbey slid onto the bar stool at Moto’s, Ford taking the stool beside her. It was an ultra-hip New York bar along the waterfront in Williamsburg, done up in black and white, with faux zebra-striped shoji screens and lots of black-and-white enamel, frosted glass, and chrome. Behind the bar stood a wall of liquor bottles, gleaming in a cool white lighting. The place was empty at four o’clock on a rainy weekday afternoon.
As they took their seats, a bald Japanese man with a bricklike physique and black-rimmed glasses, dressed in traditional garb, came over. He slid his hand along the bar holding a small napkin by the corner, which stopped in front of Abbey. “Lady?”
Abbey hesitated. “Pellegrino.”
The hand slid down in front of Ford with another napkin tweaked between thumb and forefinger. “Gentleman?”
“Beefeater martini,” said Ford. “Straight up with a twist. Dry.”
Sharp nod, and the man began making the drinks with virtuosic efficiency.
“You must be Mr. Moto,” Ford said.
“That’s me!” Moto’s face broke into a dazzling smile as he shook the drink and poured it out with a flourish.
“Name’s Wyman Ford. Friend of Mark Corso.”
“Welcome! But Mark isn’t here. He’ll be in tonight. Seven.” He poured the drink out with a flourish, flipping the shaker in the air, catching it, rinsing it, and sliding it into a holder.
“I’ve just come from McGolrick Park,” said Ford. “I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news.”
“Yes?” Moto paused, stopped by Ford’s look.
“Mark and his mother were killed sometime last night or this morning. Break-in and robbery.”
Moto stood immobile, thunderstruck.
“The police are there now.”
Moto slapped the bar and slumped, put a hand to his head. “My God, oh my God, this is terrible.”
“I’m sorry.”
Moto remained silent for a moment, his face covered. “The things these punks do. His mother, too?”
Ford nodded.
“Punks. He was a good kid. Smart. Oh my God.” He was deeply shaken.
Ford nodded sympathetically. “Did he bartend for you?”
“Every night since he came back.”
“What happened, he lose his job in California?”
Moto waved his hand. “He worked for the National Propulsion Facility. Got laid off. Punks, they catch them?”
“Not yet.”
Abbey said, “I hope they fry ’em.”
Moto nodded vigorously. His eyes were red.
“Mark was an old friend of mine,” said Abbey. “Changed my life.”
Ford turned to look at her rather sharply.
“Tutored me in math when I was a freshman in high school, kept my ass from failing. I can’t believe it, I saw him just yesterday. He was telling me he’d discovered something important out there, at NPF. Something about gamma rays.”
Moto nodded again. “They wouldn’t pay his severance so he was going to get back at them. Broke him up, getting fired. I never seen him so broken up.”
“How was he going to get back?”
“Said he found something and they were ignoring it. He was going to make them pay. Ah, the poor kid, started to take a few at work. When a bartender starts getting into the sauce . . .” His voice trailed off, the man unwilling to speak against the dead.
“What did he find?” Abbey said.
Moto wiped his leaking eyes. “Jesus. These punks.”
“What did he find?” Abbey repeated gently.
“I don’t remember. No, wait—he said he found something on Mars. Something emitting rays.”
“Rays? Were they gamma rays?”
“I think that’s what he said.”
“How, exactly, was he going to make them pay?”
“One night, he’d been dipping into the sauce pretty bad, he showed me a hard drive he got from NPF.”
“How? What was on it?”
“Said a professor friend of his had stolen it, given it to him. There was something on the drive going to make him famous, change the world, but he wouldn’t say what. He wasn’t making a lot of sense.”
“Where’s the drive now?”
Moto shook his head. “No idea. What does it matter? The punks—killed his mother, too . . . Too many punks in this crappy world.” A tear trembled on the end of Moto’s nose.
There was a rattle and the door chimed. Moto quickly wiped his eyes, bl
ew his nose, and composed himself. A man walked in wearing a gray turtleneck with a tweed jacket and khaki pants, and took a seat at the far end of the bar. Abbey narrowed her eyes; he looked just like her old calculus professor at Prince ton.
Moto ducked his head. “Excuse me,” he said softly, “got customer.” He walked down the bar.
Abbey turned to Ford. “There are those gamma rays again.”
“The hard drive is what the killer was looking for when he tossed the house.”
“Yeah, and I bet the gamma ray data is on that hard drive.”
Ford didn’t answer. Abbey saw his gaze flicker over to the man at the end of the bar, the new customer, who was leaning over the bar and talking to Moto in a low voice.
The conversation went on for a while and Moto’s voice started rising, taking on a querulous tone, still not loud enough to make out individual words. Abbey tried to ignore it, pondering instead the problem of gamma rays from Mars, but she noticed that Ford was staring intently at the man and she wondered what he found so interesting.
“I tell you nothing, you punk!” Moto cried out suddenly.
The stranger said something in a low voice.
“I not answer your questions! Get out or I call police!” Moto pulled a cell phone out of his pocket and started punching in a number. “I dial nine-one-one!”
The man lashed out at Moto, knocking the cell phone from his hand, at the same time reaching into his jacket and pulling out a large handgun.
“Get your hands above the bar,” he said, and then as Moto raised his hands, he swung the gun toward them. “You two—I know your game. Get the fuck over here.”
Before Abbey could respond, Ford leapt up and tackled Abbey off her stool, flinging her to the floor behind the curve of the bar. A moment later the man began firing, a strangely high-pitched kwang! sound shaking the bar, kwang! kwang! and the glass wall behind the bar exploded into fragments. Ford dragged her along the floor. “Get moving! Crawl!”
Kwang! Broken glass and liquor cascaded down around them. Abbey could hear Moto screaming obscenities in the background, the word punk rising above all others, and then a series of shots from another gun, much louder. Boom-boom-boom-boom! followed by the word, “Punk!”
She frantically crawled behind Ford toward the back.
Kwang! Kwang! More glass and bottles came crashing down, with splinters of wood and pieces of insulation and wallboard whirling through the air. Moto roared something in Japanese.
Kwang! Kwang! The bar above their heads exploded into splintered wood, pieces of metal, and chunks of drywall and insulation.
“Get back here!” the man screamed.
Suddenly Moto was staggering along beside them, wheezing and coughing, blood spraying from his mouth. He clutched an enormous revolver in his hands and turned to fire two more shots, which went wild.
Kwang! Kwang! came the response and Moto, struck in the chest, was thrown backward into the shattered wall, one hand clawing away at the shower of broken glass, before crashing to the floor.
Kwang! Kwang! A small bar refrigerator tumbled to the floor in front of her, several bullet holes in it, spraying Freon in a cloud of condensates—and there, duct-taped to the back of it, was a slender, brushed-aluminum case with a stenciled logo of which Abbey saw only the initials NPF.
Almost without thinking she ripped it off, stuffed it into her belt.
“Run!” Ford said, turning around and seizing her by the arm; they bolted through the door, into a little stockroom filled with boxes. Another door stood in the back of the stockroom and Ford slammed through it and they tore down a narrow flight of stairs into a basement corridor, turned a corner, sprinted up another set of stairs, busted through a pair of metal crash doors into a back alley. Still gripping her arm, he hauled her along the street and around the corner to a busy intersection. They paused, gasping for air.
“You all right?” Ford asked.
“I don’t know.” She gasped, sucking in air, her heart galloping in her chest. “You’re bleeding.”
He pulled out a handkerchief, wiped his face. “It’s nothing. We’ve got to get out of here.” He raised his hand, whistled for a cab.
She shook glass out of her hair, trying to get herself under control. Her hands were trembling. It was horrible to see a man killed in front of her; it reminded her all over again of Worth lying on the deck, blood welling up from his caved-in head. She leaned over and vomited on the sidewalk.
“Taxi!” Ford yelled, handing her a handkerchief.
She gasped, tried to straighten up, wiped her mouth with the handkerchief.
“Taxi!”
“Aren’t we waiting for the police?”
“Absolutely not.” He flagged down a cab, opened the door, and shoved her in. “La Guardia,” he said to the driver. “Take Grand to Flushing. Stay off the expressway.”
“Your call, man. Gonna add ten minutes.”
The cab lurched forward into the rush of traffic. “Why are we running?” Abbey almost shouted.
Ford leaned back, his face covered with sweat. A cut on the bridge of his nose was welling blood. “Because we don’t know who just tried to kill us.”
“Kill us? Why?”
Ford shook his head. “I don’t know. He was a professional. If our late, brave friend didn’t have that cannon behind the bar, we’d all be dead. I’ve got to get you to safety. I should never have involved you in this.”
Abbey shook her head. She could feel it pounding. “This is insane. What the hell’s going on?”
“Somebody’s looking for that hard drive. From what he said, it seems he might think we have it.”
Abbey reached into her jacket and pulled out the aluminum case, duct tape dangling. “We do. This was taped to the back of the fridge.”
Ford stared at her. “Did the shooter see you grab that?”
“I think so.”
“Shit,” said Ford quietly. “Shit.”
54
Abbey sat cross-legged on the rucked-up bed, laptop in front of her, FireWired to the mysterious hard drive. Stenciled on the side was the information:
#785A56H6T 160Tb
CLASSIFIED: DO NOT DUPLICATE
Property of NPF
California Institute of Technology
National Aeronautics and Space Administration
The five-dollar motel clock, screwed to the Formica night table to prevent it from being stolen, glowed midnight. They had gotten into Washington-Dulles at eight and driven for an hour into the middle of nowhere in suburban Virginia to a hotel that Ford seemed to have once used as some kind of safe house. The Watergate it wasn’t and Abbey didn’t like it at all. There was no room service, the room smelled of old cigar smoke, and the sheets looked suspiciously dirty. Ford had registered without showing an ID and had paid in cash. The sleazy clerk had leered at them, and Abbey had a pretty good idea of the kind of vile thoughts that were going through his mind.
Ford had ordered her pizza and disappeared, refusing to say where he was going, promising to be back before dawn. He had left her with a laptop and the hard drive and told her to break into it.
Easier said than done. She’d been at it for hours with no success. The hard drive was no brand she recognized or could find on the Web; it looked proprietary, very high density. No normal drive this size could possibly hold 160Tb. An NPF special. And password protected. She’d been running through all the obvious candidates, “password,” “letmein,” “qwerty,” “12345678” and a zillion other common combinations, taken from Web sites that listed common passwords. Then she had started in on combinations of Corso’s names, birthdate, his mother’s names and birthdate, various street and place names near his house, local bars, names of his high school and college teams, mascots, the top bands and hit songs of his teen years—in short, anything she could guess about him from his age and digging up information on him on the Web. But then she considered that she was going about it all wrong. The password would have been created by th
e mysterious professor who’d stolen it from NPF. She knew nothing about this man, not even his name. How could she possibly guess his password? Or even worse, it might still have an NPF password, which would be well-nigh uncrackable.
She downloaded several programs from the Web and tried a brute-force attack using hashes and rainbow tables, to no avail. It was starting to look hopeless. For all she knew, the drive was locked up with military-level cryptography.
Still, the drive did ask for a password and that was a good sign. There had to be another way to solve the problem. She cracked her sixth Diet Coke and guzzled it. Feeling the need for further sustenance, she rummaged in the pizza box and pried up the last cold, hard piece from the cardboard, scarfed it down, and chased it with more Coke.
She thought about her own passwords and how she chose them. Most of them were dreamed up on the spot, often curse words mingled with the first digits of π or e, two numbers she had memorized to many digits for no good reason back in junior high. Her favorites were E3a1t4s1h5i9t and F2u7c1k8y2o8u. Simple to remember, impossible to crack. For the hell of it she tried both of those, again with no result.
She sipped the Coke, imagining this professor’s last day at work, what it would be like to get fired and told to clear out his desk by five. He was pissed enough to steal a hard drive with classified data. As soon as he got home, he would have changed the password on the drive to prevent anyone from NPF being able to access it.
She sighed and tossed the Coke can toward the wastebasket. It bounced off the rim and rolled across the floor, dribbling liquid on the already stained rug. “Fuck,” she said out loud. If only she had a joint to relax her, help her mind drift a little, figure things out.
She picked up her earlier train of thought. He would have changed the password when he got home, first thing. She closed her eyes, trying to visualize the scene: this imaginary professor arriving back at some shabby bungalow in Southern California, stained carpeting, wife upstairs complaining about having no money. The guy pulls the hard drive out of his underwear or wherever he’d put it, plugs it into his laptop. He’s furious, he’s upset, he can’t believe what’s happened to him. He’s not thinking clearly. But he has to change the password—that’s essential. So he pulls a new one out of his head and types it in.
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