Jackie seemed to know exactly where to go. He followed her to an area in the back of the building next to the loading dock. Handy information if you need to get out of here quick, Leo thought.
A man was crouched over a work bench with a soldering iron clutched in a meaty fist.
“Ryan,” Jackie said.
She had to repeat herself several times before the man looked up. He had magnifying goggles over his eyes, giving them a buggy appearance. “Jackie!” he said, tossing the soldiering iron down onto the bench.
He stepped away from the bench and Leo saw that he was at least a foot shorter than Jackie. Wrapping his arms around Jackie, he said, “I just heard about Nathan. I'm so sorry that I didn't hear in time to get to the funeral. How you doing?”
“Just fine. I need some help with something, though.”
Then the man noticed Leo.
“Who's your friend?”
“Ryan, this is Leo. He's helping me.”
“Really?”
“Yes. And I need your help with something that Nathan dropped into my lap.”
After appraising Leo, Ryan stepped over to Leo and held out his hand, he shook it, noting that despite being pudgy, the grip was strong and calloused.
“Ryan Rees,” he said.
“Leo Marston,” Leo replied. Jackie better be right about this guy helping them or he was going to have to kill him to protect their identities.
Turning back to Jackie, Ryan said, “So, what can I help you with?”
She pulled out the plastic bag containing the chips she had taken from James Phillips' Blackberry. “I need you to dump these. Contacts and messages are what I'm looking for.”
He sat down at a computer, typed for a minute. Turning to Jackie, he said, “Let me have the SIM card.”
Despite that the card was dwarfed in his hand, Ryan dexterously slid it into a slot on the computer.
“What kind of phone is it from?”
“Blackberry. It looked like the model 9700.”
“Cool. You heard about the processor? It's a 32 bit XScale PXA900, made by Marvel. Cooks along at about 624 MHz, but the specs say that it can run up and over 800. I haven't had a chance to see if I could over clock and make it really fly.”
“Yeah. Lots of extra stuff on the processor to make it handle wireless faster. I played with the ARM instruction that it runs and as a RISC OS, it's a major pain if you have to write to the SVC as it will throw up in your lap if you look at it cross eyed.”
This techno-babble was too much for Leo. “What's the card say?”
“Give me a second.”
The screen filled with information, looking like mostly gibberish to Leo.
“What am I seeing?” Yes, Leo could sit all day waiting for the perfect shot to present itself, but they had spent way too much time screwing around when they should be tracking down who was trying to kill them.
“It's just a dump of a SIM card.”
“Which is what?”
Jackie, seeming to sense Leo's impatience, said, “A SIM card is the Subscriber Identity Module. It contains subscriber information, phone contacts and any SMS text messages.”
“SMS text messages?”
“Yes. What you see teenagers doing all of the time with their cell phones — texting each other.”
Leo hadn't really noticed much of that as he ran in different social circles than most teenagers. Kids who were interested in coins didn't text while in his store, and the kids who were probably into texting didn't hang out in a boring coin store with a bunch of coin dinks.
Ryan continued to page through the information.
“Bad news, only subscriber information, no phone book, nor any messages.”
She handed him the thumbnail sized chip from the phone. “How about on the SD card?”
“Only if he saved his e-mails to it. Blackberrys 'push' e-mails from the mail server, and it's saved to the internal memory. Since that's only like sixty-four meg, that ain't a lot of memory. Though, you do need some secondary software to save it to the SD card.”
“No matter, try it.”
“Still, it may not even be on there. I'll need the phone if I'm gonna be sure about getting it all.”
She looked at Leo and he shook his head. His paranoia about what that cell phone could do when turned on was something that he didn't have the experience or ability to be able to deal with.
Jackie had described the Blackberry as a small computer. What kinds of software could be installed on it? While he wasn't a computer hacker like her, he had a suspicious mind. How hard would it be to install GPS software on it? While, in his experience, GPS didn't work at all inside buildings, it worked just fine outside where it could see satellites. And hadn't he read something about using the signal strength between various cell towers to triangulate a position? Developed for emergency calls, it sure wouldn't take much to bend it towards evil intent.
Ten minutes of typing and muttered sentences between Jackie and Ryan amounted to nothing useful being found.
“We're going to have to power up the Blackberry,” Jackie said.
Leo shrugged and fingered his pistol. She got the idea that this was insanely dangerous. He would count her judgment as if it was worth it and apparently she thought it was.
Jackie dug out her jammer, which on seeing, Ryan said, “Are you fucking nuts? That thing is like a $10,000 fine and five years in jail if you are caught with it. And this is a cell phone store, what do you think is going to happen if you power that thing up and everyone's cell phone in the store goes dead?”
“It has a rather limited range.”
“Still unacceptable. Listen, we'll be in and out in a moment. I'll power it up, dump the internal memory, load it up into a simulator, power down the Blackberry and it'll be over quick, maybe a couple of minutes.”
“Which version of the simulator are you using?”
“Something I threw together from the Software Developer Kit. Trust me, it works just great. I use it all the times for the cops — the damn technophobes.”
Leo knew that he was one of those technophobes, though he doubted that either Jackie or Ryan could hit the bulls eye at six hundred yards in forty mile an hour gusting winds using an iron sighted rifle.
Ryan pulled out an inhaler and, after shaking it several times, took a deep puff.
“Asthma still bothering you?” Jackie asked.
“Yes,” he coughed. Then he cleared his throat and said, “I've got to get my prescription renewed as I'm almost out. I thought I'd outgrow asthma, but working back in here with all the dust and crap only makes it worse.”
Stuffing the inhaler back into a pocket, he plugged the Blackberry into a cradle, booted up something with the computer, powered up the Blackberry and then turned it back off.
“Got it. Software dump, including the e-mails.”
He paged through the data. “It looks like any e-mails are just a link to a web site. We can access that, if you want.”
Jackie, who was leaning over Ryan, said, “Yes. But be careful. Can you spoof our IP Address?”
“I don't think I need to. Besides, I don't have the software and I don't think that they can lock onto me without a major pain as this is a corporate computer and there are thousands of IP's that it could come from.”
He typed some more and pulled up a web page.
“Wow. I wonder what all this data is — contains everything that you would want to know about someone, address, bank accounts, even places on the Internet that you hang out.”
Leo said, “It's called a targeting package — and contains everything you need to find and kill someone.”
“That stands to reason seeing the type of information it contains. But I wonder who this bad ass, Max Jennings, is. He's killed a bunch of people and looks to be a bad ass dude otherwise.”