“And this time?”
“The guards caught them trying use our computers and held them for the cops.”
“Do we know what they were trying to access in those machines?” Megan said.
Nimec shook his head.
“Security closed in too soon, a mistake I won’t let them forget,” he said. “But we did find out the women are members of a certain group I’ve been talking about.”
Megan raised her eyebrows.
“No,” she said.
“Yeah,” Nimec said. “And there’s more. You remember those jerk kids who got busted trying to crack our system a few months ago, plaster our Web site with smut?”
“The two UCLA students,” Megan said. “Brothers, weren’t they?”
Nimec nodded.
“They did recon for months,” he said. “Internet port scans, network sweeps, everything they could do to probe us. At its peak it was happening once, twice an hour. Our techies figured an attack was coming, waited for our intruder detection software to backtrace their IP signatures, fed them phony passwords and entry codes. When the college boys tried using them to compromise our system, we nailed them.”
Megan looked at him again.
“Pete, are you telling me they were… ah, how shall I put it… agents of WOW?”
“Something like that,” he said. “Probably less stupid than calling them Brothers Opposed to War.”
“BOW,” Megan said. “Cute, Pete.”
Nimec shrugged. “Anyway, one of the ladies that got nabbed in Cupertino happens to be Mom,” he said.
Megan sighed heavily.
“Tell me that Ricci’s their dear old dad, and it’s your fault if I keel over sideways with an embolism.”
Nimec smiled.
“The day before yesterday, we got a phone call from the feds about the case they’re building… this was late, after I’d let Ricci know about our conference and headed on home,” he said. “What I started explaining to you before is that Ricci’s the one who took the call. Spoke to the lead investigator, who told him about a meeting scheduled for early the next morning between the FBI and prosecutors from the attorney general’s office. They offered to let us have somebody sit in and listen, give input, whatever — a last-minute courtesy invite. The law still hasn’t caught up to computer crime, and they’re looking at different statutes that are already in the books, figuring out what sort of case they can build. Ricci thought he ought to head out to the capital, and you won’t hear me argue he was wrong.”
Megan considered that. “He could have given you notice,” she said. “Phoned, e-mailed, dropped a quick memo on your desk. Done anything but leave us in the dark.”
Nimec nodded.
“Agreed,” he said. “I’ll talk to him and ask why he didn’t.”
“While you’re at it,” Megan said, “you might want to find out about the bruises he’s been sporting on his face and knuckles since Monday morning.”
They exchanged looks in the momentary silence.
“If they got there over the weekend, on his own time, I’m not sure that’s any of our business,” Nimec said.
“I’d like the chance to make an informed judgment,” Megan said. “There’s been a developing pattern of conduct with Ricci. No, scratch that. A worsening pattern. Whatever’s behind it, you know it isn’t good. And it won’t help to lay cover for him.”
“You think that’s what I’m doing?”
“If ‘looking away’ is easier for you to swallow, I’ll go with it,” Megan said. “Let’s not play word games here. We both know Tom isn’t right. He hasn’t been for a while.”
“And so you’re express-mailing him east.”
Megan started to say something, appeared to reconsider.
“What precisely bothers you about my decision, Pete?”
Nimec shrugged.
“Nothing to fuss over,” he said. “It’s just that you making it on the spot caught me by surprise.”
“The truth is, I caught myself by surprise… but I wouldn’t take a do-over if I could,” she said. “It was really two thoughts coming together on their own. I’ve been thinking a change of scenery might be in order for Ricci. That some distance might give us all a clearer perspective on what’s wrong, and maybe some ideas about how to fix it. When he didn’t arrive for the conference, that part of it solidified in my mind. And as things developed, and I saw there was no wearing down Noriko’s opposition, I decided it would be best to send someone from our office to New York.”
Nimec grunted.
“I noticed she rubbed you the wrong way,” he said.
“Noriko sees the Sullivan matter as a disruption to her work. She makes no bones about resenting our interference. And I feel she needs to be kept honest.”
“Doesn’t change how you came off,” Nimec said. “A few hours before the conference you were at my gym preaching patience. But you undercut her. Did it in front of me and Rollie.”
“It isn’t anything personal,” Megan insisted with a shrug. “I have high regard for her abilities, Pete. But let’s say there are some people who need to be shown the stick before the carrot.”
Nimec looked at her a moment, pulled at his ear.
“Sounds belligerent and agitating to me,” he said.
Megan smiled thinly, shrugged, leaned forward across her desk.
“Bow-wow,” she said.
Which Nimec guessed was as good a way as any to call their meeting to an end.
Industrial parks with billowing smokestacks filled Zaheer’s view out the windshield as he turned his leased Mercury sedan off the New Jersey Turnpike just west of Trenton, checked the route directions he’d generated with a free Internet-based mapping service, and went through a quick series of turns and traffic signals. The closeup street map guided him to his desired junction in minutes.
Zaheer drove past long bands of strip malls and fast-food restaurants interspersed with vacant weeded lots, the dead stalks piercing scales of dirty ice and snow to shiver stiffly in the wind. He soon found himself among the sprawling waterfront factories he’d spotted from the highway and read the corporate names above their entrances. The one penned onto his map was over to his left, a fenced-in employee parking area beside the plant’s main building. There were between fifteen and twenty vehicles slotted inside.
Going very slowly, noting the security cameras high up on either side of its otherwise unguarded gate, Zaheer passed the factory and turned up a street that ran back along the width of its parking area. His map coordinates showed that he was headed north, cruising past the east side of the plant. Perhaps halfway down the street a chain-link divider crossed the parking area and restricted admittance to another outdoor site behind it. The perimeter fence had been hung with metal CHEMICAL HAZARD and NO TRESPASSING signs as it stretched on back.
Here Zaheer’s attention was caught by a large number of cylindrical storage tanks. Thirty to forty feet tall, they rose in close groupings from level concrete support platforms, six tanks to a cluster, frameworks of galvanized-steel ladders and handholds climbing up their dull gray sides. He could see tangles of curved, narrow pipelines snaking between the rail-encircled domes of each tank cluster, with a wider pipe leading along the ground from the platform bottom to the factory’s rear wall.
Zaheer slid his car down the block toward a four-way intersection.
With few other vehicles on the road, Zaheer stopped at a red light in the crossing and glanced around. He could see an abandoned gas station directly behind the yard containing the storage tanks, bounded off from it by a planted copse of evergreen trees. The trees looked withered and neglected, their gnarled roots buried in a deep carpet of shed pine needles. Around the intersection’s three opposing corners were the type of satellite businesses that would have deliberately sprung up near the station before it shut down, their owners hoping to attract spillover customers. There was a small Mc-Donald’s on the far side of the exchange. Also across the street, but running off down the sidewalk from the northwest corner, were a coin-operated car wash, an automotive supply shop, and a nameless bar with dark, sooty windows. On Zaheer’s immediate right a U-Haul rental lot filled with trucks and trailers of various sizes occupied the intersection’s southwest corner.