Zee plugged in his coffeepot and stowed his Red Bull in the refrigerator, then settled down at the table and opened his toolbox. The time for small talk was over. He went to work on Sal’s smartphone first, removing it from its orange case and opening its back. He put on a pair of binocular loupes and closely examined its inner contents.
George watched him for a while but became bored. He went to his refrigerator and scanned its contents. “Care for something to eat?” he called out to Zee.
Zee didn’t even respond, which was a good thing, because there wasn’t much of anything to offer. George took what was there and made a sloppy sandwich, eating it while standing over the sink. He again thought about calling Paula in Hawaii but decided to wait until he had some more proof that her beloved iDoc was in trouble. He imagined she was going to resist belief in a big way. He wondered what effect it might have on their friendship. Probably not good.
40
There was a prearranged knock on the back of the van. Steven, the shorter of the two technicians, reached out and unlocked the door. Andor Nagy, a handsome, powerfully built man, climbed in. He wasn’t wearing his suit jacket and his tie was loosened.
“What’s up?” Andor said with a slight Hungarian accent. He took a seat on a small bench along the side of the van.
Steven, manning the visual leads, pointed out Zee sitting hunched over a dismantled smartphone. “Your guess is as good as mine. We have what we believe to be a neighbor working on a smartphone, which we guess belongs to the mark.”
“Any idea why?”
“None whatsoever. The neighbor came in more than an hour ago, but there has been almost no conversation.”
“Where’s Wilson?”
Steven pointed to another, darker screen showing the inside of George’s bedroom. George could barely be seen lounging on his bed, watching TV with the sound turned way down.
Andor called up to Lee, who was manning the headphones a little farther forward in the van, to confirm that the two men in George’s apartment had been silent.
“That’s right. No chatter,” Lee replied.
“What’s he looking at online?” The laptop on the dining room table was angled so the screen wasn’t visible to any of their cameras.
“Nothing. So far,” Steven said. “He’s just been messing with the cell phone.”
Andor shrugged. “We’ll just have to be patient, then. Has Wilson made any phone calls or sent any texts?”
“Nope.”
“Let me know if and when anything changes,” Andor said, rising to leave.
“You will be the first to know,” Steven assured him.
41
George was rousted from a deep sleep when Zee rudely shook his shoulder. George had fallen asleep in his clothes while watching television. The TV was still on.
Zee was in a dither. “I’m done, and I’m out of here.” He looked like a madman. His eyes were red and his face drawn and pale. The combination of the night’s activities plus all the coffee, cigarettes, and Red Bull had given him a visible tremor in his hands, and his voice was raspy.
“What do you mean you’re out of here?” George asked.
“It means I’m out of here!” Zee disappeared out into the living room.
George leaped off the bed and ran after him while trying to get into his shoes.
Zee was throwing his tools and junk into the tackle box while muttering to himself, “Shit, shit, shit.”
“Where are you going?”
“I’m dropping off the grid until this blows over.”
“Until what blows over?” George said, bewildered.
“Everything,” Zee replied cryptically.
“What did you find out?”
“Too much.” Zee snapped his toolbox shut. “Way too much.”
George couldn’t believe what was happening. “What exactly do you mean by ‘dropping off the grid’?”
“It means exactly what it sounds like. I’m heading for the hills until things blow over. I have some friends up north near San Fran. They got a cabin someplace in the High Sierras. That sounds about perfect at the moment.”
George couldn’t believe that Zee was leaving. “Why the rush? What did you find?”
“If you really want to know, you better get your ass up to my apartment while I get a few things together.”
George wondered if he was dreaming. “You’re planning on leaving right away? Now?”
“As soon as I can get my shit together.” Zee moved to the door, then stopped. “The money you promised?”
“I have to go to the bank for that kind of money. I was planning to do so at nine o’clock Monday morning. If you can just wait—”
“How much do you have on you?”
George shrugged. “A couple hundred bucks.” He’d stopped at an ATM after leaving the salvage yard, having been cleaned out by the tow guy.
“I’ll take it. I’ll get the rest later.”
George handed over the money. “What about what I was paying you for?”
“Upstairs.” With that Zee was out the door.
Mystified, George followed Zee up into his apartment. Zee ducked into his bedroom. George tagged along.
“Wait a second,” George said, thinking he could reason with Zee. “Take a deep breath and calm down. What did you learn?”
Zee started throwing clothes into a couple of duffel bags. “You were right,” he admitted. “Something weird is going on with iDoc. I was able to hack into Amalgamated’s servers. I checked the records for all of them: Kasey, Sal, Tarkington, Wong, and Chesney. At first everything looked normal. In fact, I was about to give up. Then I noticed something odd. An artifact is the best way to describe it. It was hardly noticeable, but there all the same. So, in each of the five patient records I backtracked and discovered this artifact that appears exactly seventeen minutes before the physiological data went nuts, signifying the beginning of the death event. Seventeen minutes on the dot for all five patient records. Pretty suspicious.
“I tried to figure out exactly what this artifact was — its reason for being, you know what I mean?” Zee didn’t pause for an answer. “And while I was working through the possibilities, it hit me! Bam! I realized what it reminded me of: Stuxnet.”
George shook his head. He had no idea what Zee was talking about.
Zee explained. “Remember when the U.S. and Israel ‘supposedly’ hacked into the Iranian computers that were running their nuclear centrifuges?”
“No. Can’t say I do,” George said.
“Well, the hack left an artifact behind. That’s how it was discovered. The hackers wanted to show the Iranians one manufactured set of data while hiding the real data showing what was really happening. It’s called a man-in-the-middle attack. The artifacts I found in the iDoc records are very similar, meaning someone hacked into the iDoc servers and did an overwrite of whatever was on those five records prior to the hack.”
“I’m lost.”
“The way I see it,” Zee said while continuing to throw things haphazardly into his bags, “is that someone was trying to cover the tracks of either the application’s dumping of its reservoirs or a hacker initiating the dump. Now that I think about it, it must have been a quick fix, because they intercepted each record at the exact same time prior to the patient’s death. They should have varied that to hide it better, but when you’re in a rush… Anyway — app dump or hacker dump — the records have been overwritten.” Zee stopped packing and counted off the reasons on his fingers. “To hide the dump signal, to hide wherever the dump signal originated from, and to hide the subsequent physiological-signs data that showed the patients’ reactions to the dump up to and including their deaths. The reason I’m confident of this is that Sal’s cell phone definitely received an ‘all-dump’ message. I was able to retrieve his unaltered data records, so I’m absolutely sure in that particular case. Again, whether it originated as a function of the iDoc algorithm or as an outside hack, I do not know.”