“I don’t have a light, miss,” he said. “Sorry.”
“Then buy me a drink,” said the woman, in German-accented English.
* * *
Dunne bought her a glass of wine, and one more vodka for himself. They retreated to a balcony at the back of the club, where it wasn’t so noisy and she could smoke her cigarettes. Dunne took her for a high-priced call girl.
“Where do you work, pretty lady?” asked Dunne.
“A bank.” She winked.
“Which one?” he countered dubiously.
“Maison Suisse. Private Wealth Management.”
Dunne had heard of it. It was one of the oldest private banks in Switzerland. If she was a hooker, she had a fancy pimp.
“So, what’s your name, Miss Private Wealth Manager?”
She moved closed. “Veronika.” She put her finger to her lips. “What’s your name, Mr. Red Hair?”
“Joe,” answered Dunne, using his cover name. “Plain old Joe.”
“Why don’t you dance, Mr. Joe? You have a nice body.”
“Shy,” he answered. His eyes were hungry. He was intoxicated by the sight of her more than by the booze.
“I don’t believe it.”
“So, what are you doing here, Miss Veronika?”
“I like to dance. And I like it when people watch me. I get a kick, you know. Is that okay?”
Dunne shook his head as he said yes. “Hey, sweetheart, everybody likes to look at a pretty girl.”
“I like to be sexy, that’s all. Every woman does. Is that okay?”
“Yeah, that’s okay.”
Get a grip, Dunne told himself. He was falling through space. He was lucky that it was so late, and that he was tired, or he would have been out the door with her already. She was leaning against him as they talked, so that he could feel the swell of her breast against his arm.
Adrian came looking for Dunne eventually. He had a woman on his arm, a dark-haired girl from Belgium who called herself Marina. Seeing his colleague shook Dunne out of his trance.
“Hey, man, we’re leaving,” said Adrian. “Marina is going to take me to see the water jet on the lake. You cool with that?”
Dunne knew that the right answer was no. But he had never, through his career, been a stickler for rules, and he wasn’t about to become head nanny for his group.
“Yeah, sure,” he said. Marina tugged Adrian toward the door. Dunne turned to Veronika, who had nestled closer. His eyes sharpened.
“Take a walk?” she asked.
Dunne was unsteady for a moment. He felt a rush he hadn’t experienced for a long while. It excited him and frightened him. He closed his eyes and took several deep breaths until the vertiginous feeling went away.
“Sorry, sweetie, time for me to go home. It’s a school day tomorrow.”
“You don’t go to school.”
“Just an expression.” He held up his ring finger, as if she hadn’t seen the gold band already. “And I’m married. Wrong night, wrong person. But it was fun watching you dance.”
“Maybe you’ll come back,” she said, fluttering those heavy lashes.
“I don’t think so. But you never know.”
She wagged her finger at him. “You are a naughty boy, mister. You can’t fool me.” She smiled and walked away.
* * *
Dunne walked back to their apartment. Arthur was still awake, binge-watching episodes of the fourth season of Game of Thrones. Dunne went into his room. He felt sad and empty, in addition to a little drunk. He missed his wife. He was a fool to be looking at pretty women, when he was married to the prettiest of all. He had a phone with photographs of her that he had taken on their honeymoon. Not pornographic, just sexy. Her body naked, after making love. Her sleepy face, rising from bed in the morning.
He told Alicia he’d deleted the pictures, but he never did. He sometimes took the phone with him when he traveled, to remember how beautiful she was. The soft curve of her bosom; the brown marble of her skin; the fullness of her lips. He thought he’d been careful with the phone. He’d disabled the Wi-Fi antenna and removed the SIM card to prevent any link to the Internet.
Tonight he wanted to see her, as a way of erasing what he had done at La Minette. He illuminated the old phone in airplane mode; no connection, nothing to worry about. And there she was. Alicia.
10 Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania – May 2018
Before Michael Dunne’s new company was even registered, he printed up cards with the Paladin LLC name and his new email address. He thought of adding a logo, but the images he found showed medieval superheroes in outlandish capes and armor, so he let the mysterious word stand, with a brief explanatory phrase below: “Active Cyber Defense.” He ordered a thousand cards.
True to his word, Rick Bogdanovich gave Dunne a quick $100,000 contract from his FBI center, so that his new consulting company had some working capital to get started. Dunne used some of the money to hire a young tech assistant named Jenny who had just graduated with a computer science degree from Pitt. He bought himself more office furniture, and a new couch for his apartment so that it didn’t look quite so bare.
Dunne created a website, too, and a LinkedIn post that, in a matter of a few days, was visited by a dozen of his former colleagues, many of whom wished him good luck. His assistant logged a score of cold calls or emails from potential clients in the twenty-four hours after his Paladin website went live. As Bogdanovich had said, it was a hot market.
From his office on Forbes Avenue, Dunne could see the slope of Mount Washington, south across the river. When he had been a student at Pitt, he liked to take his dates up the tramway known as the Duquesne Incline to see the view of the three rivers. He rarely had enough money to buy them dinner at one of the fancy restaurants along Grandview Avenue, but it didn’t matter; it was romantic, and he could usually convince his dates to come back home with him to his apartment. What an ass he’d been, Dunne thought.
The darkness that had enveloped Dunne’s life while he was in prison had started to lift: A trickle of clients began making serious inquiries, thanks to referrals from Bogdanovich’s former FBI colleague Vijay Prakash.
* * *
Prakash invited Dunne to lunch at a local club, an almost comically old-fashioned establishment in a Gothic stone fortress downtown. The former FBI-man-turned-cyber-mogul was one of the few people of color in the dining room, a situation that he seemed to enjoy. Dunne hadn’t thought to bring a tie, but the doorman insistently loaned him one as he walked into the club.
Prakash had a shaved head and a sprinkle of beard below. He was dressed in a pin-striped suit and a Ferragamo tie. He was a compact man, with an incongruously muscular upper body from too many workouts; he looked somewhere between a rich Indian oligarch and the oligarch’s bodyguard.
Dunne looked around the room at the gnarled old gentlemen sitting at their luncheon tables. They ate slowly and talked loudly. They were hearty white men, nearly all; people you might see at a country club or an eleven-fifteen church service where children were discouraged. Prakash could see that his guest was curious about the membership. He thought Dunne was impressed, but it wasn’t that.
“My father and grandfather worked for men like these,” said Dunne. “They ran the steel industry into the ground.”
Prakash shrugged. His family were engineers who had gone to work for technology companies the moment the airplanes landed from Delhi.
Prakash was something of a celebrity in the cyber consulting world. He was said to have operated for several years as an undercover personality in the “dark web,” entrapping some of the nastiest people who did business there. Now he worked for one of the big cyber consulting firms and made so much money that he needed a portfolio manager to invest it all for him.
“How can I help you?” said Prakash. “Bogdanovich said you got seriously fucked over by the agency. What do you need?”
Dunne thought a moment. He wasn’t used to people being generous. “Basically, I want
to do the same thing as you. Cyber defense. To me, that means helping people who got chewed up the way I did.”
“Hacked, you mean?”
“Yes, hacked, taken down, turned inside out.”
“Do you know who hit you?”
“Other than the Justice Department? Honestly, I’m still trying to find out. I know who I was chasing when all this stuff came down, but they’ve vanished. To an apartment in Hong Kong, or a villa on the Black Sea, or the Faculty Club at Stanford, I don’t know. If I’m lucky I’ll find the thread again. I’ve got some tips. But right now I need to make some money.”
“Okay, friend, here’s the deal: People hire consultants who look safe, and they don’t ask a lot of questions. They’re scared. Bad guys have come at them from cyberspace and then vanished. They need help. That’s my job now, but I do it for big banks and law firms. They’re not going to hire you. But other folks might. The ones who want protection, maybe vengeance, no questions asked. That’s business we turn away, but maybe I can steer some your way.”
“Is it legal, the stuff you could send me?”
“Sort of. It’s a gray area. You’ve got to be smart. Don’t do stupid shit.”
Dunne nodded. “I know about you. The Bogo case, where you broke the ring in Thailand for the FBI. How did you survive all that time underground? Those people are the worst of the worst.”
“You know the Bureau. They train you for everything, even this crap. You get ‘certified’ for undercover. You go silent, no talking to anyone, sleep deprivation, nasty stuff. It makes sense, the Bureau is sending undercover people into Mafia families, terrorist cells.”
“Must wear you down, though. Never talking to anyone. Like being in prison.”
“Hey, the cyber stuff I did was easy: You make your bones with these deep web freaks by being an anarchist prick. You look at lots of sick pornography, and you sell a ton of illegal shit. But you get the hang of it, if you’re a good liar. The FBI used to test us every six months to make sure we weren’t getting too weird.”
“I understand machines, but I’m not so sure about people,” said Dunne. “I’ve made so many mistakes. If a client hires me, I want to do it right. The only client I ever had until now was the United States of America.”
“You want some advice?” asked Prakash. “The clients who will hire you are the ones that can’t afford me or are too embarrassed to tell me what happened. They need someone less visible. Which is you.”
“Got it. That’s where I want to operate.” Dunne took a sip of his water from a heavy glass embossed with the seal of the club. “People with nowhere else to go, whose privacy has been ripped away. Naked people, emotionally. Can you help me find people like that?”
Prakash sat back in his chair a moment. He looked up at the frescoes and ornate moldings of the club dining room, and then back at Dunne.
“You’re pretty passionate about this, man. What happened to you, anyway?”
“The worst,” Dunne said. “Hacked, filleted, gutted. Whatever you can imagine, it was worse than that.”
“I have one person to get you started, as a matter of fact. She runs a movie studio in California. Hackers took down all her company files, all her personal emails, every text. There’s nobody in Hollywood who doesn’t hate her now. She’s gone to ground, up near Santa Barbara. She tried to hire my firm, but we can’t touch her. She’s desperate. Why don’t you go see her, offer to help? Rick and I can vouch for you. I’ll tell her that you’re coming.”
“What if she doesn’t want to see me?”
“Be creative, my friend,” said Prakash. “Get your foot in the door. Honestly, what have you got to lose?”
Dunne took the late plane to Los Angeles and was in Santa Barbara by the next morning.
11 Montecito, California – May 2018
Michael Dunne approached the big house on San Ysidro Road warily from the back. The Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office had thrown up a loose perimeter around the front, with orange tape that said CAUTION. It wasn’t a crime scene so much as crowd control. A few cops stood outside the house, arms folded across their tan shirts and legs apart, telling people to go home. But that didn’t stop the nosy neighbors and would-be paparazzi from snapping cell phone pictures through the windows of Hollywood mogul Pia Zimmerman and her actor boyfriend, Shawn Harris. They had the irresistible attraction of famous people who had been hit by a calamity.
The morning fog had burned off, and the air smelled of the pine trees above and the sea below. A television truck was parked outside the house, and a correspondent was doing a stand-up, in which she spoke with feigned horror about “the Hollywood hack of the century.” She held up naked photos of the couple inside the house, with black squares covering their private parts.
“And sources tell KERT News Channel Four that some of the hacked material is much more personal and private than this!” said the reporter, puckering her cherry lips as she finished the stand-up. “Back to you, Stacey.”
Zimmerman had retreated to the kitchen, in the back of the house, where her teenage son, Paul, kept telling his mother not to worry. She was a woman in her late fifties, a former actress and now studio chief, her face and figure sculpted by the finest cosmetic surgeons. Harris, the boyfriend, was a decade younger, but toned and dyed and waxed as expertly as she was. He was the sort of Hollywood personality that was featured in In Touch magazine, who was famous for being famous.
Outside, there was a rustle of noise. Harris had closed the curtains, but an agile busybody had climbed a tree behind the house and was shooting pictures through a skylight. As a camera flash went off, illuminating the darkened kitchen, Zimmerman screamed as if the house had been struck by lightning. Her son bounded from his chair.
“You fuckers!” screamed Paul Zimmerman.
He leapt toward the door and scrambled down the side-porch stairs. He grabbed several of the rocks that lined the driveway and began hurling them toward the snooping photographer in the tree. One of them hit the climber, who wailed as he clamored down, dodging more missiles and drawing more gawkers and police. It was pandemonium until one of the cops took the boy firmly by the arm, told him to calm down, and led him back to the porch.
* * *
In the disturbance, a figure moved to a door on the other side of the house. He was wearing a white shirt and gray flannel trousers; his red hair was combed neat, and his beard trimmed. The lenses of his dark glasses were glinting in the morning sun.
When a neighbor shouted to him as he neared the rear door, the man said, “Stand back, please,” as if he were a plainclothes cop, and the neighbor retreated. He quickly picked the lock and entered the living room. There were noises in the kitchen, as Zimmerman hugged her returning son. The intruder walked quietly through the dining room and entered the pantry next to the kitchen before anyone noticed him.
“Hi, folks,” said the man with the russet beard. He was perfectly calm, the opposite of threatening. “I think I can help.”
“Who the hell are you?” demanded Harris. “Are you a cop? We already said, no police inside. Get out of here. Please.”
The visitor reached toward the woman to give her his card.
She turned away, but the man’s hand was still gently outstretched, and there was something in his demeanor that was reassuring. She took the card and studied it.
“Are you the person Mr. Prakash called about yesterday?”
“Yes, ma’am. My name is Michael Dunne. Paladin LLC. I am in the cyber business. As it says on my card, ‘Active Cyber Defense.’”
“What does that mean, Mr. Paladin or whatever it is?” asked Zimmerman.
“It means that I will find the people who invaded your lives and make it impossible for them to do it again.”
The woman shook her head. “Nope.” She folded her arms tightly.
“Why not? I can help you.”
“We have nothing left to steal,” she said bitterly. “That’s what I told your friend Prakash. You’re too la
te.”
“I didn’t get the message. But it’s never too late to protect yourself, Mrs. Zimmerman.”
“It’s much too late. It’s all online. Every email I ever wrote. All my business messages. Every nasty word I ever said about anyone who wanted to work for Padaro Pictures. Every image that was on my phone. And Shawn’s, too, that I stupidly backed up for safekeeping. Photographs that I would never want anyone to see, especially my son. And more. Lies and lies. It’s all too horrible.”
“I can help you fight back,” said Dunne, speaking each word slowly and precisely.
“How are you going to do that, for Christ’s sake?” broke in Harris. “We don’t even know who these people are.”
“Shush, honey!” said Zimmerman. There was something in the visitor’s manner, so steady and deliberate, that made her want to hear his pitch.
“In our business, we call it attribution. It’s not easy, but it’s not impossible, either. Everything leaves tracks, electronically. It’s like following a trail of crumbs. Eventually you find the cookie. Then you find the person holding the cookie. And then you make sure that he won’t bother you again.”
Zimmerman studied this calm, deadly serious man who had broken into her house to offer his services. She was a Hollywood studio executive. She had read a hundred pilots like this, but never encountered one in real life.
“What do you do to these people when you find them? Kill them?”
Dunne laughed and shook his head.
“Of course not. There are easier ways to disable an adversary. They have the same electronic vulnerabilities that you do. You just have to find them, and then shut down the capabilities that hurt you.”
“You mean, like, hack them back?”
“I won’t explain all the details of our services. I just promise you that this attacker will not cause you more trouble. The damage that’s been done to you, I can’t undo. But I’m confident I can find the attacker, disable him, and tell you who he is. I’ll give you all the information I get – and then you can take whatever action you want. But not through me. I’m just the digital guy.”
The Paladin Page 6