54
12:32 p.m.
I had Lien-hua’s cell on my desk beside my laptop in anticipation of Alexei’s text.
She sat on the bed, typing on her laptop.
We still hadn’t had a chance to sort through everything from last night, but just like my near-drowning incident yesterday, Amber’s visit to my motel room seemed to have become buried, at least for the time being, beneath the forward movement of the case and the pile of new problems that the passage of time inevitably brings.
As for Amber, I’d seen her briefly when I was searching the motel for Alexei and Kayla. I hadn’t said anything and neither had she, but she looked subdued. Sad.
It was hard being this close to Lien-hua and yet feeling so distant from her. However, the fact that she’d chosen to work here in my room while Natasha and Jake had gone to their own respective rooms felt like at least a small reprieve. I had the sense that Lien-hua did believe me when I assured her that nothing had happened last night with Amber, or at least she was willing to look for a reason to trust what I said.
Regarding the ELF site, Windwalker was bringing the trail groomer over, but he’d been at home when Jake called and first had to ride his snowmobile to the sawmill to pick up the groomer before coming here. It didn’t look like he’d arrive for another forty minutes or so.
I went online to see if we had a solution yet to the puzzling snowmobile tracks leading to the open stretch of water on Tomahawk Lake.
Lately, I’d been dabbling with the use of wiki-based approaches to gathering nonsensitive case information. It seems to me that it’s going to be the next step in the evolution of criminology, and, if I’m right, it’ll revolutionize law-enforcement and intelligence-based policing in the near future.
Rather than do all the research yourself, let the experts and enthusiasts do it.
When I pulled up the site, I saw that not only was it possible to get a Ski-Doo 800 XL to travel over one hundred meters without a rider, apparently it wasn’t that difficult.
Since I’d posted my offer on the website forum for Ski-Doo fanatics at just past 11:30, offering $500 to the first person who could figure out a way to do it and send me a video of the process as well as of the sled traveling the distance, I had six replies.
Within thirty minutes of my posting, a snowmobiler in Marquette, Michigan, had figured out a way to crimp the throttle closed and jam the sleds straight by altering the support plates and readjusting the spindle calibration to the skis. On his video, the Ski-Doo went nearly two hundred meters, and I figured that on a smooth lake and without obstructions, it would have traveled in a relatively straight line pretty much until it ran out of gas.
Five other solutions from five other Ski-Doo lovers followed.
If, within one hour, six people could figure out a way to keep the snowmobile straight just in the hopes of earning $500, certainly a group of eco-terrorists framing someone for murder could come up with a way as well.
My friend Ralph was the head of NCAVC, so I sent him an invoice for $500 for “consultation fees,” emailed my winner a note of congratulations, thanked the others for participating, removed the posting, and then returned to evaluating the map of our area. I was studying the most likely areas Alexei might be using as his home base-i.e., where he was keeping Kayla-when an email from Angela arrived detailing what we knew about him.
“I’m still investigating Valkyrie,” she wrote at the top of her report. “Looks like some arrows point toward a specialty in communication technology and hacking. That’s about it for now.”
That would fit with Eco-Tech.
I read on: “Nothing on the back trace of the email Chekov sent you, but here’s what Alyssa dug up on him.”
Apparently, Ellory had been right yesterday when he told me that Chekov was a ghost-Prague, Johannesburg, Rome, Hong Kong-Alexei would materialize out of nowhere, do his work, and then disappear. But at least now, thanks to the video surveillance cameras at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, we had a photo of him.
I studied it.
Dark hair, knowing eyes, a haunted intensity about him.
It wasn’t confirmed, but it was believed that he was a former member of the Russian Air Force. According to the dossier Alyssa had worked up, if he was the same man, he’d flown experimental aircraft for twelve years and then began working for the GRU, Russia’s foreign military intelligence directorate, four years ago.
The GRU has always been responsible for many more assassinations than the KGB ever was, so I found the scenario believable. Their psych profile listed him as “of volatile and irregular temperament,” in other words, slightly unstable. He seemed remarkably self-controlled to me so I was a little surprised to see that. But on the other hand, you probably would need to be a little disturbed to be an assassin. He’d disappeared unexpectedly in May after returning from an assignment in Dubai.
I clicked the chat icon at the bottom of the email, and Angela’s picture popped up.
“Did he ever kill women or children?” I typed.
“Not as far as I can see,” came the reply.
“Any affiliations? Accomplices? Causes?”
“He’s a freelancer. Seems to prefer taking care of problems no one else wants to touch. His wife was killed last spring in Moscow. A head shot. Point-blank range. It looks like it might have been another assassin, unless he did it himself. After that he dropped off the radar screen.”
I wondered if his wife’s murder might help explain why he was so insistent that he didn’t kill women or children.
That is, if he loved her. If he’s ever really loved anyone.
I wrote, “Look closer for any connections he has with law enforcement or with our government. He has a source somewhere.”
“Got it,” she typed. Then, “Lacey’s analyzing the Queen 27:21:9 alphanumeric sequence as well as the phone number you gave me.” Lacey was the name Angela had lovingly given to her computer. To say they were close would be an understatement.
Despite the fact that Lacey was much more qualified to decode the cipher than I was, I found myself analyzing the numbers. All divisible by 3, also, 27 is 6 higher than 21, which is 12 higher than 9-also all divisible by 3.
But what does that mean?
I had no idea. Maybe it was just a random series of numbers.
I trusted that Angela and Lacey would figure it out.
“Thx,” I typed.
At the end of the email, Angela had also included background on the Eco-Tech members whose photos I’d forwarded to her. Ted Rusk had the most extensive hacking experience of the group and had earned a Carnegie Mellon undergrad computer science degree. Other than that, two of the others were ideologues who’d participated in various protests and civil demonstrations, and one, Clifton White, was a felon who, based on his record, might have been working for Eco-Tech as security or maybe as a bodyguard.
After the chat, I recalled my conversation with Alexei and found myself staring into space, thinking of Eco-Tech’s connection, the ROSD hack. After a moment I noticed Lien-hua looking my way. “Yes?” I said.
“Something’s going on in that head of yours.”
“What motivates professional hackers?”
“Professional hackers? Well, the same thing that motivates mountain climbers.”
“Challenge. Wait…” It took me a moment to see where she was going with that. “Maybe telling them it’s unclimbable. Newbies will walk away, but the pros will be more committed than ever to be the first one to scale it.”
“You understand motives better than you like to admit.”
“You must be rubbing off on me.”
She accepted that with a kind nod. “Besides challenge, add in the rewards that come from accomplishing what no one else has. Why do you ask? What are you thinking?”
I tapped my computer knowingly. “There’s more going on here than meets the eye.”
“Really.” There was a friendly touch of sarcasm in her voice. “And let me guess, Captain Cliche-you’re going to find out what it is.”