As he opened the e-mail, he automatically started up the familiar daydream of ways he could remove Griffin from his life. Most involved scenarios viable only in video games, but the truth was, the virtual world was probably the only place he could ever beat Griffin. The Mole was not a physically imposing individual. He could probably outthink the asshole, but—
He shook it off. He just needed to get the damn work done, and Griffin would be out of his hair.
For a while, anyway.
He read the message.
Identify. You have one hour.
Griffin
Four image files were attached to the e-mail. The first picture was of a woman in the passenger seat of a car. A Toyota Camry, by the looks of it. The second was of a man driving the same car. This one included a shot of the license plate. The subject of the third was another man behind the wheel of a BMW, and the fourth was the same man again, only this time he was looking directly into the camera in what was most likely a passport shot.
Identify.
No problem, that was right up the Mole’s alley. It was the second part of the message — the “you have one hour” part — that concerned him.
A good fifteen minutes of that hour had been wasted while his team of dweebs had offered themselves up for slaughter to the Jellys. Still, with clear photos, license plate numbers, and three quarters of an hour left, he should be able to get enough information to keep Griffin from getting angry.
Both license plates were from Washington, DC. Utilizing a hack he’d used a million times, he entered a national motor-vehicle database that linked information from all states and US territories. He selected DC, and decided to start with the BMW. Turned out it was registered to a corporation with a New York City address. He minimized the database window, opened a new one, and did a search on the company. It didn’t take him long to realize it was a dummy corporation.
“Wonderful,” he muttered. While he had no doubt he could eventually track down the real owner, it would likely take more time than he had left. Best, he decided, to save the BMW for later.
He went back to the database and typed in the number for the Toyota. A part of him expected it to be owned by the same phony company, but when he hit ENTER, the response he got was:
NO MATCH
The Mole gave the database the benefit of the doubt, and reentered the plate number in case he’d mistyped.
NO MATCH
That couldn’t be right. He highly doubted the car’s owner had hammered out replica DC license plates. Perhaps the number had been altered in some way.
He brought the picture back to the front of the screen, enlarged it until the license plate filled the window, and examined the image. The magnification caused a loss of resolution, but he could still make out the letters and numbers, and, as far as he could tell, none of the characters had been tampered with.
So why wasn’t the plate in the database? A glitch, perhaps?
He accessed the source code, and quickly determined that while the software was not even close to being the best written one he’d ever come across, there didn’t seem to be anything blocking him from finding the info on this particular plate.
He checked the clock and cursed. No way was he going to make the deadline.
He switched over and checked the logs, not only the ones associated with the national database, but also those that were DC specific. With his trained eye, he rapidly scrolled through the data, looking for anything unusual.
He stopped on an entry from the previous day. A file deletion notice. In and of itself, that wasn’t unusual, but what had caught his attention were the last four characters of the file name. They corresponded exactly to the license number in the picture.
He followed the trail and realized the deletion had gone a lot deeper than just the DC and national databases. The worm that had removed the file had also gone through backup servers for both systems, destroying all previously saved versions.
The Mole’s fear of Griffin started to fade into the background as his curiosity grew. Why had someone felt it necessary to make this car disappear? He leaned back in his chair, thinking. There had to be somewhere else he could find what he was looking for.
Pistol, he realized.
He pulled his headset on, plugged it into the vocal modulator, and used one of his anonymous Skype accounts to make an audio-only call.
“Yay?” Pistol answered, his rough, smoker’s voice making him sound twenty years older than he actually was.
“It is…me,” the Mole said, falling easily into his work persona.
“Hey, buddy. What’s going on?”
“I…have a…question for you.”
“Shoot.”
“Motor vehicle databases…do you have?”
Pistol was a collector, only he didn’t collect baseball cards or Star Wars action figures. He was interested in digital information, illegally obtained by hacking into databases and downloading them onto his own server farm. One never really knew what might capture Pistol’s fancy. Some things the Mole was sure Pistol would have? Turned out to be of no interest to him. While other things, esoteric crap no one would ever need, took up large chunks of space on Pistol’s drives.
“Depends,” Pistol said. “Are we talking in or out of the States?”
“In.”
“Hmm. Hit or miss. I got some, not all, though. Now, if you were interested in India, I got you covered. Of course, not everyone there registers their car.” He laughed.
“My interest is specific…to…Washington, DC.”
“DC, huh? Hold on.”
He was gone for less than a minute.
“You’re in luck,” Pistol said. “I do have it, but it’s about a year out of date.”
The car in the picture was considerably older than that.
“I…need you to…run a plate…for…me.” He gave Pistol the number.
“Hey, it’s not like I’m just sitting around, you know.”
“I will pay…you.”
“It’s a grand per request.”
“Understood,” the Mole said. Last time it had been only five hundred bucks, but a check of the clock told him he only had ten minutes left before Griffin’s deadline, so quibbling over fees was not a luxury he could afford. If he at least had the name of the woman, that might mollify Griffin.
He could hear Pistol enter the number on his keyboard. After a pause, the man said, “Here we go. You got a pen?”
The Mole had already opened a blank document on his computer screen. “Go…ahead.”
“The license plate belongs to a 1994 Toyota Camry. Color dark gray, no reports of accidents.”
“The owner,” the Mole said, impatient.
“Let’s see. It’s registered to Misty Blake.” He read off an address that was located in the Dupont Circle area of DC. “Anything else?”
“Hold…please.”
The Mole brought up the national auto database again, changed the search parameters from vehicles to licensed drivers, and entered the woman’s name.
Three seconds.
NO MATCH
Surprise, surprise.
“Is your…information…limited to vehicles…or do you have…driver…data also?”
“I got both,” Pistol said.
“Please…retrieve Misty…Blake’s information.”
“That’s another grand.”
“I am…aware.”
Pistol’s illegal database copy came through again. Instead of writing down the information, the Mole requested that Pistol make screen grabs of the data, and e-mail it all to him.