Come and Find Me (6 page)

“Oh, shit,” said GROB.

Instinctively Diana grabbed her chair arms and pushed back. A downward whirling vortex grew in the sand, and up from its depths shot an avatar clad head to toe in gleaming battle armor.

“This is what you wanted to show me?” Diana managed to say.

“Hell, no!” In an instant, GROB was standing over Nadia, planted between her and the armored avatar that hovered over them. It raised its arm and an avalanche of blue phalluses fell from the sky and seemed to bounce off a barrier, like an invisible bubble surrounding her and GROB.

Flying phalluses. Soon there’d be tumbling toasters. It was completely ridiculous—Diana realized that. But still she felt assaulted, and when she tried to move Nadia and found she couldn’t, she started to panic. She smashed down on the mouse, clicking over and over as she grew short of breath. She should never have come here.

“Take it easy,” GROB said. “They can’t hurt you,”

It took three tries before Diana typed /home correctly into the transporter, but Nadia simply disappeared and reappeared right where she was. She typed in random coordinates. Once again, Nadia faded and came back. Diana clicked all over the screen, trying in vain to get a menu to come up so she could get out of there.

Two more armored avatars circled overhead

“Assholes!” GROB said. “I hate this. Jesus, don’t these people have anything better to do?”

More blue phalluses rained down around them, bouncing off the invisible barrier that she assumed GROB had created. Diana reared back each time one of the freakish objects splashed into the water or crashed into the sand and exploded.

Her hand shaking, Diana reached for her computer’s power switch. It was the only way she could think of to make it stop.

She could barely hear GROB’s voice over the sound effects. “I’m sorry . . . never should have . . . let’s get . . .” GROB extended his hand toward Nadia. “Let’s go now!”

Diana recoiled, standing and knocking over her desk chair. Was there anywhere safe? She had to turn the computer off. Press the power switch and hold it down until the system surrendered.

“Come on!” GROB moved closer to Nadia, his hand overlapping hers. For the moment, at least, the explosions had stopped. “I can get us out of here. Trust me.”

Could she trust anyone? Her breath came in gasps as she steadied herself against the desk and stared at the monitor.

“Give me your hand!” GROB said.

It felt as if the sound still echoed as the empty voice balloon over GROB’s head faded and disappeared.

She reached for the keyboard and watched her fingers as they typed link/, almost as if someone else were in control of them. Why would that work when nothing else she’d typed had made a difference? But Nadia’s hand connected with GROB’s, and instantly new surroundings materialized around them—the ocean and beach littered with phalluses became an old-fashioned town green with a pergola and trees.

With a click Diana had Nadia release GROB’s hand and she could breathe again.

“I’m sorry,” GROB said. “I’m so sorry. Did that freak you out? I thought it was safe to go there, but OtherWorld has become infested with griefers.”

“I know,” Diana said, wiping a skim of sweat from her upper lip. “I’ve run into them before.”

“I shouldn’t have taken you there. Are you okay? I’m really, really sorry.”

“I’m okay,” Diana said, even though she wasn’t. “I have to go.”

There was a pause. “Okay, okay. I understand. Can I see you again?”

Diana didn’t answer. She could still feel lingering shock waves from the explosions.

“We might be safer in the real world,” GROB said with a laugh.

“If only,” Diana said. She watched the clock in the corner of her screen pulsing, pulsing, like a tiny beating heart until the minute was updated. “I really have to go.” She clicked in the transporter window.

“Wait! Listen, if your sister doesn’t show up soon, I might be able to help. I have connections.”

That stopped her. “You don’t think she’s going to show up?”

“Me? You sounded worried that she wouldn’t.”

Diana had to admit, she was worried. “What kind of connections?”

“Access. I can check hospitals. Jails. Passenger lists of transatlantic flights. Reservations at fancy restaurants. Parking tickets. All I need is your sister’s real name, DOB, stuff like that, and I’m on it.”

REAL name?
Alarms went off in Diana’s head. Suddenly she was acutely aware that GROB’s voice was synthesized. “I . . .” She managed a weak, “I’ll let you know.”

Before he could respond, she transported Nadia home.

Diana sat at her desk, still shaking, feeling as if someone had reached out in a dark alley, clamped his icy grip around her bare shoulder, slammed her against a wall, and pinned her there. She knew the griefers weren’t his fault. And his assumption that she’d used a fake name for her sister was just common sense. The guy was just trying to help. But Ashley had said she’d be back to get her computer during the weekend, and the weekend wasn’t yet over.

She pulled over Daniel’s walking stick and cradled it in her arms. Eyes closed, she concentrated on her breathing. In, out. In, out. Moving the inhalations deeper and deeper, feeling as if healing pine resin, Daniel’s essence, were flowing off the walking stick and coating her throat, being drawn deep into her lungs and opening the tiniest alveoli. Her breathing slowed.

Being with GROB, or whatever his name was, scraped up memories, not to mention sensations that Diana thought had been smothered. The good news was that she could still feel.

Chapter Eleven

B
y Monday morning, Diana was acutely aware that the weekend was over. It was barely ten and her in-box was full of messages from Jake that she’d left unanswered but not even a text message from Ashley. Diana was still shaken by her adventure with GROB in OtherWorld, and far too distracted to work. Her morning pill was barely calming the gremlins in the pit of her stomach. Ashley should have been at work, and it seemed unfathomable that she hadn’t bothered to come by and pick up her laptop. Equally unfathomable that she hadn’t answered her e-mail.

Diana called Ashley’s office extension at International Palm Court Hotels headquarters. The line rang five times before the call went to voice mail. Diana pressed zero. An operator picked up.

“Hello, I’m looking for Ashley Highsmith,” Diana told her. “I tried her office, but there’s no answer.”

The operator put her on hold to strains of Vivaldi, then came back and gave her what Diana knew was Ashley’s cell-phone number. “Or I can leave a message for you,” the operator offered.

“So you haven’t seen her today?” Diana asked.

“I’m sorry. Who were you looking for?”

Earth to operator.
It was all Diana could do not to shout. “Ashley Highsmith? Your event planner?” She took a breath. “She’s doing such a great job, helping us plan for our big annual meeting there. So calm and competent. I had a question. It was a little complicated to leave as a message, so I was hoping you could tell me if she’s there and if you could find out when she can get back to me?”

“Of course. Highsmith, Ashley,” said the ever-polite voice. “I’ll put you through to her extension.”

“I already—” Diana started. Too late. She’d been transferred. This time she let it go to voice mail.

“Hey, Ash, it’s me. Again. How’d it go at Copley? Curious minds need to know. Please—” Diana heard the offhand tone in her voice turn brittle. She gave in to it. “I know you’re a big girl and I shouldn’t worry. But I can’t help myself. Humor me and give me a call.”

She hung up the phone. Her hand was trembling. She tried to identify the feeling that was giving her hand the shakes. Giving things names, she’d found, often made them easier to control. Not fear. Not anger. Anxiety. Not unwarranted, but still, there were a million explanations for why her sister hadn’t called. If she’d merely overslept, she’d be furious with Diana for calling the hotel and drawing attention to her lapse.

As she imagined Ashley yelling at her to “get a life and stay out of mine!” her anxiety abated a notch. But not so much that it stopped her from opening the Spontaneous Combustion video on her computer and watching it, yet again, hoping to catch a glimpse of Ashley that she’d missed.

Systematically, Diana inspected the three-minute clip. There was Ashley, raising her cell phone skyward. Then the camera cut to close-ups of other participants, of pedestrians, of the hotel window and Superman’s flight. It wasn’t until near the end of the footage that the camera once again panned over the empty spot where Ashley had been standing. Diana ran the video forward and back in slo-mo, zoomed in and out, but she couldn’t find any additional glimpses of Ashley.

According to the time stamps, the short clip represented thirty minutes of elapsed time. It looked like a montage of footage spliced together from at least four different cameras. So that meant at least two hours of footage had to have been taken, most of which hadn’t made it into the final cut.

Diana found the Spontaneous Combustion Web site and shot off an e-mail, asking if there was any way she could see the raw footage from the various cameras filming at Copley. She explained why. Then she left the same message on their office phone. While she was at it, she found Spontaneous Combustion’s Facebook page and posted an entry asking anyone who’d been to the event and seen a woman wearing a red newsboy cap to please, please, please get in touch with her.

There was nothing more she could do. None of this was getting her any closer to finding her sister. Meanwhile, more messages had stacked up in her queue. On top was another from Jake.

He began with “How’s the Vault proposal going?”

“It’s going,” she typed back.

This was the third time he’d asked. Jake, a person who rarely resorted to all caps, had written in a previous message that Vault Security was a VERY BIG DEAL. Vault had been contracted by the federal government to process medical insurance for everyone from government employees to elected officials to judges to federal prison inmates. SERIOUSLY DEEP POCKETS, Jake had added.

If hackers were targeting their clients, Diana foresaw SERIOUSLY DEEP RISK.

After Vault’s head of IT approached them, Jake had flown to their corporate headquarters in Bethesda. He’d been given access to a ton of information about the company and about the computer system that they’d recently adopted with supposedly state-of-the-art security.

But Vault hadn’t been bitten by a high-tech breach. Their head of billing—correction, their
former
head of billing—had left his laptop in a briefcase on a Metrorail train. He said it wasn’t until after he got home that he realized he’d lost the computer, and not until the following day when he got back to work that he realized it had a flash drive attached with nearly 4GB of customer billing records. He couldn’t explain why he’d felt the need to make himself a copy of the records. In any event, the data that should never have left the building contained tens of thousands of names, Social Security numbers, insurance ID numbers, and medical records. All the data was encrypted, but elsewhere on the laptop were the decryption algorithms.

Though no one had said as much, Jake suspected that the laptop also held access codes and passwords that could be used to open detailed medical histories, test results, and more, all of it intensely private information, some of it belonging to very public individuals.

The project was, of course, shrouded in secrecy. There was no way to know who’d ended up with the laptop, but if it was someone who knew how to exploit what was there, Vault wanted to be the first to find that out. Gamelan’s reputation for discretion and insider knowledge of the computer netherworld was their wedge, their competitive advantage. Wearing a gray hat, they could be the underground eyes and ears of a legitimate company.

Diana opened the proposal she’d been working on. It was nearly finished. She’d taken special pains, referring frequently to the specifics of Vault’s business and inserting statistics that would impress upon their management team how thorough, knowledgeable, and trustworthy Gamelan was. She wasn’t about to take this client for granted.

A new text message popped up.

JAKE: You there? Call me.

Automatically she reached for the phone. Stopped. What if Ashley were trying to call her? She didn’t want to tie up the line and she didn’t own a cell phone—didn’t need it since she never left home. Or . . . Then she remembered. Months ago, Jake had sent her a prepaid cell phone so she could make untraceable calls to various 800 numbers that hackers were using to hijack bank accounts.

She found the phone at the back of her top desk drawer. Flipped it open. Of course it was dead. She scrounged in the back of the drawer and found the charger. Plugging it in, she started to punch in Jake’s number. Five digits in she changed her mind. Instead she started a message back to him.

Not now. Distracted. My sist

She stopped. Her concerns would only cement Jake’s opinion that Ashley was an airhead. Texting his way through his one date with her had been his way of dealing with terminal boredom.

She deleted the words and wrote:

I’m here. Busy. Expecting a call. Working on Vault proposal. 30 min.

Work was usually good therapy—most of the time it occupied the mind and anesthetized the gut. But today she had to force herself to focus on finalizing their proposal. As she reread and edited, she had to admit it sounded pretty impressive. She’d hire them.

Satisfied, she opened the e-mail account that she shared with Jake, attached the proposal to a message, and saved it to their drafts folder. Then she shot Jake a text message telling him she’d left it for him.

Soon after, she found herself pacing through the house. She peered out between slats of the living-room blinds. Flinched as a minivan drove past. A Volvo station wagon was parked across the street. There was no sign of a gold Mini Cooper.

She turned back and surveyed the room. She’d done a sterling job of destroying what little order Ashley had restored. She did a quick tour of the room, collecting the discarded T-shirts and socks, a sweatshirt and a pair of sweatpants, and one sneaker. Where was the other one?

She checked behind the chairs and sofa, stacking books and newspapers as she went. There was the white toe of the sneaker, poking out from under the side of the couch. She reached down and pulled it free. A silver lipstick tube rolled out. Diana picked it up and stood. Not hers. It had been aeons since she used lipstick except virtually on Nadia.

She opened the tube and twirled the base. Touched her finger to the smooth stub of hot pink that remained. As she did so, a snap of licorice filled her head and she felt Ashley’s presence so strongly that she had to sit down.

Ashley was the only person Diana knew who actually loved Good & Plenty candies. For her seventh birthday party, Ashley had wanted only pink and white balloons, pink paper plates, pink plastic forks, and candy to match. She’d been delighted when most of her friends left their candy-filled party cups untouched. Their mother, in a rare burst of domesticity, had baked white cupcakes and iced them with pink frosting.

Diana wondered—maybe Ashley had called their mother.