Now that the crisis with her own computer had been averted, Ali found that idea appealing. “In other words, now that we’ve had our immediate gratification, we’ll let someone else take a crack at him.”
“Exactly,” B. agreed. “In the meantime, I’m hoping that having access to his files will give us some clues about who this guy is and where he lives.”
“Any ideas on that?” Ali asked.
“My first guess would be that he’s one of the employees on the Singleatheart server farm in South Dakota-some low-level minimum-wage guy who figured out how to circumvent the system. I’ll start by doing some unofficial background checks on a few of those folks and see if anything jumps out at me.”
“How?” Ali asked. “Will you ask the cops for help?”
B. chuckled. “Are you kidding? There are background checks, and then there are underground background checks. For what I do, the second one is far more useful, and those will have to wait until later. Right now I have all my computer power working on breaking that encryption code. And since my computers can churn out logarithms without any help from me, I’m on my way to bed.”
Having just abandoned her own, Ali was a little surprised. “You’re going to bed at six o’clock in the morning?”
“What I do crosses international datelines, so local time zones tend to fade into the background,” he replied. “I sleep when I’m tired, eat when I’m hungry, and don’t punch a time clock.”
“Luckily for me,” Ali said. “And thank you for this good news, but are you sure it’s safe to use my computer?”
“Relatively safe,” B. told her with a laugh. “From that one source, at least. It doesn’t mean someone else won’t try to pull the same stunt, but you can rest assured that if there’s another problem, it’ll show up on my system as well.”
“Good night, then,” Ali said. “Or should I say good morning? Sleep well.”
Fully awake, she scrambled out of bed and reached for her robe. Out in the kitchen, the coffee grinder howled into action as Chris started brewing fresh coffee. She followed the heady aroma into the kitchen, where she found her son looking questioningly at the two computers and the two thumb drives that still littered the dining room table.
“What happened with all the computer drama?” Chris asked.
“Thanks to B. Simpson, good has prevailed,” Ali replied. “When whoever it was tried to access my e-mail account early this morning, our worm knocked him out and collected all his files in the process.”
“Way to go,” Chris said admiringly.
While Ali waited for the coffeepot to finish, she sat down at the table. Her old computer, left on as bait, clicked with a new mail announcement. Reassured that whoever had been spying on her had been taken offline, Ali was relieved to see a familiar name in the address line-Velma T, her longtime correspondent from Laguna Niguel.
Dear Babe, I’ve had the most wonderful surprise, but now I’m in a bind and don’t know what to do about it. You maybe remember that earlier this year, when I went on that long trip, I met up with a wonderful lady from Oak Harbor, Washington, Maddy Watkins. She just sent me an e-mail that she wants to come down to see me over Thanksgiving. I think she’s really trying to get away from her kids, but that’s another story. The problem is, I had just told you that I’d come to your place for Thanksgiving, and now I don’t know what to do. I’ve never been to Sedona, and after you brought it up, I had my heart set on coming to see you. Should I e-mail Maddy and tell her not to come or what? Velma T in Laguna.
Ali sent off an immediate reply.
The more the merrier. Invite her to come here. Will she be coming from Seattle, or will she be coming with you? Please let me know so I can make suitable travel and room arrangements for you.
After punching send, Ali reached over, absently picked up one of Bryan Forester’s thumb drives, and held it in her hand. She had fallen asleep the night before while still wondering what to do about them. Now that B. had cleared the way, Ali felt she could risk looking at them on her own computer. If there happened to be another computer virus lurking in the background of Morgan’s files, Ali could be reasonably sure that she wouldn’t be putting B.’s equipment at risk. And since there was no love lost between Bryan Forester and B. Simpson, it was a relief to Ali that she wouldn’t have to ask for B.’s help in dealing with the Foresters’ situation.
She was about to insert the drive when the doorbell rang. Company? she thought. At six-thirty in the morning?
Except what she found waiting on her front porch wasn’t company at all. It was Leland Brooks, lugging a humongous carpet-cleaning machine. “What are you doing here so early?” she wanted to know.
“Sorry,” he said apologetically, wrestling the machine through the front door. “I thought I mentioned it to you last night. It turns out everyone else is trying to get ready for Thanksgiving company, too. They told me I could use this today on the condition that I have it back by nine A.M., when it’s booked to go out again.”
Sam took one look at the load of equipment and bolted for the relative safety of the laundry room, where she would no doubt squeeze herself behind the dryer and then need to be coaxed out with offers of food. For right now, however, it was a good place for her.
Chris emerged from his room dressed for school. He paused in the kitchen long enough to fill his coffee cup. “Good morning, Leland,” he said. “I hope you’re not planning on doing any cleaning down in my studio.”
“Let’s see,” the butler said. “Would your studio happen to be the source of all the metal filings and BBs I vacuumed out of the carpet yesterday afternoon?”
Chris’s metal sculptures did leave behind a certain amount of debris. He looked slightly crestfallen. “Yes,” he admitted. “I suppose so.”
“In that case,” Leland replied, “since I expect to do a thorough job of cleaning the carpet, you can also expect that I will clean your studio. There’s not much sense in doing one without the other. You can also rest assured that I’ll put everything back where I found it, which won’t necessarily be where it belongs.”
It was a statement that brooked no disagreement. “Right,” Chris said, backing down. “I’ll get out of your way, then.”
Ali concealed a grin behind her coffee mug. She had already learned that when it came to cleaning, Leland Brooks was not to be denied. Chris was coming to that same conclusion.
“Why don’t I get out of your way, too?” Ali offered. “I’ll get dressed and go have breakfast with my parents.”
As someone accustomed to taking full advantage of other people’s lax computer security measures, Peter Winter was surprisingly blasé about his own. His dealings with Singleatheart were concealed through multiple layers of identity that protected him. For his personal computer, he employed a sophisticated encryption routine, but for the most part, he didn’t worry about it. People like Matt Morrison and his ilk were nothing but chumps, and Peter was willing to bet this Ali Reynolds woman was the same-stupid beyond bearing.
By five A.M. on Thursday morning, after a restless night, Peter took his cup of coffee over to the desk and sat down at his computer. The little notes people sent back and forth to their friends and relations often gave away much more than they knew. And that was where he went-straight to Ali Reynolds’s computer and her e-mail records.
The moment he tried to log on to Ali’s e-mail account, however, something strange happened. The egg timer showed up and stayed there. After a moment or two, he tried control/alternate/delete, but nothing happened. The egg timer wouldn’t go away. And that was when he knew he’d been hacked. His computer froze up. He knew that even unplugging the damn thing would accomplish nothing. As soon as the power was restored, the inevitable destruction would continue. For the next three minutes, unable to stop the slow but inexorable process, he sat and watched helplessly to the end, until the words FATAL ERROR flashed across his screen.