“The big man who hurt Brenda.”
“Uh-huh.”
“If I asked you to fly around the city and look for him, could you do that? I can get you some more mushrooms.”
“Uh-huh, okay.”
“And then tell me when you find him,” I added. You have to be very specific with pixies.
“Uh-huh.”
She buzzed off.
Once it was clear she was safely out of the room, Tchekhy looked up from his hacking. “It is not natural,” he muttered.
“What, her? She’s no less natural than you are,” I said.
“I know my Bible, Efgeniy. You should not traffic with such beings.”
“I’m a lot older than the Bible, my friend, and I can tell you from experience the world is a good deal stranger and more interesting than anything in that book.”
He fell silent and continued to work. That’s usually what happens when someone brings up the Bible with me, mainly because I was around for most of it. Let’s just say if you’re looking for historical accuracy there, you’re looking in the wrong place. And the stuff that is accurate—or at least fact-based—is horribly skewed. Take Joshua, from battle of Jericho fame. Joshua was a ruthless and violent man who was looking to carve out an empire without any particular concern about how much blood was shed to do it, just like every other megalomaniacal world-conqueror from that time. Having the God of the Old Testament on his side didn’t make any kind of difference, nor did it make the blood on Joshua’s hands justifiable.
I’m willing to concede that the wisdom contained within the Bible is worth at least a little pondering, but anyone who thinks, for instance, that because pixies aren’t featured they are therefore bad in some way needs to re-evaluate.
I returned to the matter at hand. “So, where are we?”
“I am on my third company,” he said. “I was able to trace the first email address to a forwarding address at a tech firm in Colorado, and from there to a savings-and-loan in New Mexico.”
“This guy knows a lot of email administrators,” I commented.
“Da. But fortunately, things are going faster now, because…” He stopped and did a staring-off-into-the-distance thing.
“Because what?” I asked, but it was as if I was no longer in the room. He started typing faster, and then paused. Then he wheeled over to another computer and engaged a search engine.
“There,” he said. “I should have figured it out earlier.”
“What?”
“All three of the companies have the same security profile. They contracted the same firm to establish their firewalls.”
I almost understood that. “Is that unusual?”
“Possibly it is simply a coincidence. Do you believe in coincidences?”
“Not really,” I said.
“Nor do I.”
I looked at the search engine results. “Securidot,” I read.
“They are in Seattle. I believe your mystery pursuer is associated with them. He or she must have established a back door to the security program the company sells and is using it to create the phantom email accounts.”
“Can you tell exactly who it is within the company?”
“I doubt they would be foolish enough to allow for that possibility. The very fact that there is a back door access into a supposedly impregnable firewall program puts the entire company in danger. Discovery might even land them in prison.”
“Can you keep tracking the emails anyway?” I asked. “And keep a record of all of them. It might come in handy.”
“Of course.”
I sat at the computer with the Securidot web page displayed and started reading, while Tchekhy returned to his work.
According to their website Securidot was started in the mid-1990s by Robert Grindel. His story read like the prototypical dot-com success story. Geeky guy comes up with a neat-o idea, lots of companies pay lots of money for the product of his neat-o idea, geeky guy makes a bundle, and buys a professional sports franchise. All except for the sports franchise part.
Aside from this well-burnished history, the site itself wasn’t very useful, especially since I wasn’t a major corporation looking for a good security program.
“Anything else?” I asked. “This is pretty basic stuff.”
“Try Lexis/Nexis,” he suggested. “You can look up old newspaper articles there. I have an account.”
“A legal account?” I asked.
“Does that matter?”
I followed a bookmark to Tchekhy’s illegal Lexis/Nexis account. (Honestly I don’t think he pays for anything.) Results there proved more interesting. Securidot had just hit the jackpot on a buyout deal with a company called Secure Systems International doing the buying. I wondered if SSI knew Securidot’s program came with a back door.
Information on Grindel himself was a bit more compelling. For starters, the legend on the Securidot website was, as I’d suspected, a very polished version of the truth. He’d actually founded the company with a man named Brian Standish. Brian was the techno-geek and the founder of the technology the company made its millions on. Robert was a different kind of ideas man. He got the backers, founded the company, ran the business, and eventually marginalized Brian entirely. Brian Standish took a buyout six months before Securidot was sold. Reading between the lines, I got the impression Robert knew he was going to sell out and forced out Brian beforehand.
Which was only sort of interesting. Nothing in the articles I found was a smoking gun. Still, I began to think that Robert Grindel was the guy I was looking for. Or rather, the guy who was looking for me. He just seemed like the type. I bounced the idea off Tchekhy.
“It’s possible,” he said. “But I think you should be looking for someone who is more wealthy. Perhaps even a government.”
“Maybe so.” The bounty on my head was roughly one fifth of what Grindel had earned from the sale. Tchekhy had a good point.
“You know,” Tchekhy said, “there is a very easy way to find out more about who is after you. We could simply call him.”
He picked up the phone I’d taken from Stan and tossed it to me. The phone had been the proverbial 300-pound gorilla in the room for the entire day. We both knew it was the fastest way to get quick information but we also knew that using it could be entirely too dangerous. If the person on the other end of the line recognized that neither of us was Stan they might be able to do something we weren’t prepared for. Like activate a tracking device. Or set off an explosive charge in the phone. It sounded paranoid, but at this particular juncture, paranoia was a useful impulse.
Hesitantly, I flipped the phone open.
“Oh, hell,” I said.
“What?”
I held up the phone so he could read the small display screen. It read “NYC.”
“Does this mean a demon is about to arrive at my front door, Efgeniy?” He’d been ignoring the possibility, just as I was avoiding having to admit I’d put him in danger.
“Um, maybe,” I said.
He looked rather cross. “Then you should leave,” he suggested. “Contact me later and perhaps I’ll have finished this trace.”
“Not that easy,” I said. “He might still show up here.”
“I can care for myself,” he argued.
I held up the photos of Gary and Nate. “You haven’t dealt with anything like this.”
“The Lord will protect me,” he declared stubbornly. “I will be fine.”
“Yes, well… just in case He’s busy, maybe I should come up with something else.”
“Then you had better come up with it quickly,” he said.
I’d been working on an idea for the last hour, actually. “Did you say you could post to this MUD thing?”
“Yes. Why?”
“How far is Central Park from here?”
Chapter 14
Viktor just showed me a speculative article he wrote for Discover magazine. It’s about me, which is a little scary considering he wrote it five years ago. Well technically speaking it isn’t about me. It’s about someone like me. A purely theoretical me, if you will.