Cut and Run (23 page)

“Do you want to know?” she asked.

“Of course I do.”

“Then find her. Take a good long look at her. You'll know.”

His chest tightened as his heart ran away from him at a full gallop. “I've known all along,” he said softly. He wasn't sure she'd heard him.

“And I've waited for you to ask.”

“And I've waited for you to tell me.”

“I thought it would be cheap of me. Manipulative. Unfair. ‘It's your daughter, so do something.' How could I say that?” She didn't take her eyes off him. “Are you okay with this?”

His throat caught. He found himself overwhelmed with wonder. Curiosity. Anticipation. “I'm great,” he managed to whisper.

“Light's green,” she said.

He took an enormous risk by bringing her along. But it seemed a bigger risk to leave her behind and without protection. He could easily justify her being here because of her computer expertise, but what good would justification be if something went wrong?

He drove.

“Why haven't they called?” she asked yet again.

“What's she like?” he asked.

She pursed her lips, looked away from him, and attempted to conceal her eyes, now glassy with tears. “Not now. You wanted to know. That's as far as I can go right now. Please don't push me on this. The more I think about her . . .”

He said, “Look . . . they probably don't know what to do next. They never meant to have Penny instead of you. They tried to trace your phone and we cut that off, and now all that's left is to hunt you down while we hunt them. They're not going to try to negotiate Penny's release until they've figured a way to beat us, and there is no way to beat us. They know that. We know that.”

He pulled to a stop at the next light, the university now directly in front of them.

She fidgeted in her seat. Larson pulled through the intersection and found a place to park. He shut off the motor, and she popped open her door.

“Which one is Earth and Planetary Sciences?”

“Macelwane Hall.”

“Which one?”

“We'll find it.”

She was out of the car. Larson climbed out, locked up, and caught up to her on the sidewalk. The neo-Gothic architecture towered over them.

Her shoulders slumped, she trudged, head bent, up the incline.

He caught up to her for the second time. “You came to St. Louis because of you and me. For Penny.” He waited. “Tell me why you came to St. Louis, Hope,” he persisted. “Did you want me in Penny's life, or both of your lives?”

“I didn't choose it for the weather,” she said. “But do me a favor and don't go all warm and fuzzy on me because I don't think I can handle that right now. Okay?”

He moved closer to her as they walked. He held his hand out to her.

And she took it, their fingers interlaced. Entwined.

Larson squeezed, and she squeezed back. Just for a moment it felt as if he were floating.

“We can't do this,” she said. “We can't get everything all confused.”

“Sure we can,” he said. “It can't get any more confused than it already is; it can only get better.”

“Later,” she said, increasing her pace to keep up with him.

The Earth and Planetary Sciences office was staffed with a combination of salaried assistants and graduate students. The walls were lined with photographs of tornados and satellite images of hurricanes. Dr. Herman Miller, a man in his late sixties, had sad brown eyes, wet lips, and a runny nose he tended to with a white handkerchief. He wore a navy blue cardigan sweater populated with pills of yarn, some the size of bunny tails.

“Why more questions about Leo?” he asked. “I spoke to someone just yesterday.”

Larson introduced Hope as Alice. “She's our contract I.T. specialist.”

“We're interested in reviewing your mainframe's access logs,” Hope said. “Specifically, the past six weeks.”

“And we've been looking them over, just as your guy asked. ‘No stone unturned,' ” Miller said to Larson. “That's how your other guy wanted it.”

That was Stubby by the sound of it. Trill Hampton was too street-cool to bog down in clichés.

Nonetheless, Hope and Miller got started, talking their own language. ID log-ons, pattern recognition software, spyware, key-trackers. Hope pushed for specifics each time Miller fired off too quick an answer.

Miller asked rhetorically, “Could Leo Markowitz get in and out of the Cray and the Silicon Graphics without our knowing it? Of course he could.”

“But if Markowitz is on the system, decrypting these records one by one, which we know for a fact he has to do because that's the way he set it up in the first place—and there are
thousands
of records, don't forget—then your processor logs are going to reflect that, even if they don't tell you exactly who's doing it.”

Larson asked for a definition of a processor log, and at the same time both Hope and Miller met him squarely with expressions of exasperation. He took a step back and let them go at it.

A few heated exchanges later, Miller said something like: “If you want an exercise in futility, be my guest.”

“Thank you,” she said. “Lead on.”

Miller, annoyed with her, walked down a hall covered with weather-radar printouts and time-lapse photographs of lightning. They passed through a steel door and down two flights of stairs that took them into a subterranean lab. They arrived at a door where Miller used his ID card to gain access.

The expansive room was chilly and the equipment it contained—mostly rack-mounted black and blue and yellow boxes with thousands of multicolored wires—hummed loudly. Row after row of them. Wires and lights, routers and hubs, all interconnected.

“Your networking,” Hope said.

“Our routing center,” Miller answered. “One of three such hubs on campus. On any one day, we have around fifteen thousand PCs hanging on this system. Every student, every department that wants access.”

Hope glanced down the long rows of machinery and narrow aisles. She studied the racked routers as Larson and Miller continued on without her. Eventually, Miller turned back toward her to hurry her along.

Familiar with that searching look in her eyes, Larson placed a hand on Miller's arm to silence him as he was about to call out to her.

“The Cray is down this way,” Miller finally said.

“Dr. Markowitz is a
systems expert,
” she said, repeating what Larson had originally told her.

“A description that hardly does him credit,” Miller added from a distance.

“He served as a consultant here?”

“Yes. Our weather simulators, our forecasting modules.” He walked a few steps back toward her. Larson followed. “Leo is far more than a systems analyst. He's a designer, a code writer. Custom apps, source code. He ramped us up to full integration. He identified nearly thirty percent more processor headroom than we thought we had. Stabilized the platform. All without touching the Cray.”

“The additional processing power,” she said. “Did he, by any chance, set up grid computing for you?” Before Miller could answer, she asked, “Has anyone checked the network logs?”

“Good God,” Miller mumbled. To a confused Larson he said, “I assure you the oversight was unintentional.”

“What the hell are you two talking about?”

Miller held up a finger. “She just might be onto something,” was all Miller would give him.

Miller's office, a sanctum of order, overlooked a campus lawn and intersecting pathways. An extra chair had to be brought in, crowding the space.

Miller worked behind his desk, consulting two computer screens and an accordioned stack of printouts.

Hope explained to Larson in a hushed voice: “Grid computing is the poor man's supercomputer. Any personal computer or server, at any one time, is only using about fifteen percent of its processing power. You link machines together, you take advantage of the headroom—the unused processing power. You link together a thousand, or ten thousand, you have what amounts to a homemade supercomputer.”

“What we've just established,” Miller explained, “is that our grid, the one Leo set up for us, has shown massive additional usage from midnight to seven
A.M
. for the past three weeks.”

“Markowitz has been using the system undetected,” Hope interjected. “With everyone asleep, he has six or seven hours of power processing available. He's been working the swing shift.”

“We were focused on our Cray and our Silicon Graphics. But someone tapping directly into the grid? It's so obvious in hindsight, but at the time—it's so new to us—it just wasn't on our radar.”

“Can we shut him down?” Larson asked.

Miller looked up sharply, meeting eyes with Hope, who then said, “No, no! You don't want to do that.”

“Yes, we do.”

“Each night he stays on the system for hours,” Hope said. “Dr. Miller can peek behind that curtain and trace what port he's coming in on, which Internet provider he's using.”

“We've collected enough data points—six nights' worth. We'll identify the ISP and, with their help, should be able to nail down his exact location. If he's moving around, that may not help you. But if he's stationary . . .”

“Of course he'll keep moving,” Larson said. “He's not going to give us a way to find him.”

“Unless he's innocent.” Miller made sure he met eyes with Larson. “You're in such a hurry to prosecute him.”

“He could be being watched, or like me, maybe they hold something over him,” Hope said. “He doesn't dare send out a distress signal, for fear of being caught, but he's smart enough to leave us an electronic trail to follow.”

“We've interviewed his extended family,” Larson said. “There's nothing they gave us to suggest extortion.”

“Nothing the family's willing to share, at any rate,” Hope said.

Still working the printouts, Miller observed, “Only Leo would understand the risks involved by using the same entry port, the same ISP, night after night. If he is remaining stationary, if we are able to trace it, then it has to be intentional. He's leaving you a string to follow.” Looking up from the paperwork, his finger still marking a spot, Miller said, “And if you're smart, you'll follow it.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

A woman with bright green hair passed Rotem's office.
She wore a black cape and had pointy ears. He thought she must be part of the secretary pool, but the lime green hair threw him.
Do they have Goths working here now?
He hoped like hell she wasn't one of his deputies.

Reminded then of yet another Beltway Halloween he felt burdened by his responsibilities as a father, restricted by the twenty-minute drive to a safe neighborhood where they'd trick-or-treat with friends, the fathers drinking a little too much as the mothers went door to door with the kids. He felt the day slipping away from him, the quitting hour quickly approaching, even though it was barely after lunch. He slid the well-marked legal pad in front of him and reconsidered his list of priorities. He drew a few arrows and then pushed the pad away, feeling helpless. The discovery of a mole in their midst, and the ongoing investigation into damage done, had crushed morale within Fugitive Apprehension. Rotem's mood wasn't much better.

He'd had a latte and some biscotti for lunch and was already beginning to feel hungry again. With four meetings scheduled this afternoon, he had his work cut out for him.

Wegner entered his office without knocking. A redheaded man so thin he couldn't find shirts to fit, Wegner's boyish face belied nearly a decade of experience in the department. His deodorant failed to mask his body odor. A desk jock devoted to intelligence gathering, he approached his job with the eagerness of a field operative.

“May have something.” When overly excited, one of Wegner's most annoying habits was his tendency to either truncate his sentences, leaving the recipient to decode them, or talk so quickly you couldn't understand a word. Or both.

Rotem had not heard from Larson. Nor had he tried to make contact. He had two dead officers—murdered—and a safe house that was no longer safe. Larson would find cover and check in. He'd recalled Hampton and Stubblefield, who'd both been pursuing Markowitz leads. With Rotem's department in disarray, Wegner's enthusiasm seemed surreal.

The man placed a printout in front of Rotem, gave him about an eighth of a second to examine it, and then began talking at a furious rate. Rotem slipped on a pair of reading glasses.

“ATC. General aviation aircraft. Flight plans, into the greater St. Louis metropolitan area. Last thirty hours. Current as of one-zero hundred . . . a little over an hour ago.”

Rotem had reported the missing child to the FBI's St. Louis field office, requesting they make it a priority. He'd not told them who Penny was, nor how she connected to WITSEC or FATF, nor that
Laena
was missing. Train stations, rental-car agencies, bus stations, truckers, truck stops, and state troopers were all on the alert, as were the general aviation airports and St. Louis International.

Rotem didn't recall requesting that one of his guys work with Air Traffic Control's computerized flight plans. He hadn't asked anyone to filter general aviation for first-time visits to the area, but he wasn't complaining.

“Give me the short form,” he told Wegner. “And slow down.”

“Homeland Security requires ATC to track every bird in the sky for variations from their regularly filed flight plans. Since the abduction of the Stevenson girl, ATC has recorded a half dozen first-time single-engine aircraft into the St. Louis area, and we've accounted for the pilot and the reason for the visit in each case. Eleven twins, most of which simply landed and refueled. Employees at FBOs are encouraged to keep track of passenger pickups and drop-offs, something initiated by Homeland. All FBOs have been advised of the little girl. Intel gathered an hour ago from ATC concerns”—he leaned over Rotem and turned the page, directing him to a line about halfway down—“a fractionally owned private jet. In and of itself, it's not too remarkable; in the past day we've logged seven privately owned jets landing there for the first time. But in
each
case, the paper trail made sense—that is, the fractional owner was a corporation, or at least a known entity, and the passengers listed on the manifest checked out. This one,” he said, tapping his finger strongly on the open page, “is the exception. We've been on the horn with Sure-Flyte, the corporation that sells and maintains the fractional ownership fleet, and we've also run a background on the fractional owner—a corporation out of Delaware—and it's murky, to say the least. Past flights, and there haven't been many, have been Seattle to Providence, round trip. Seattle to here, Washington, D.C. Seattle to Reno a half dozen times. Always originating with a passenger in Seattle. The passenger names listed on the manifests are for people who certainly exist—of course they do—but I'm betting ten to one they're recent victims of identity theft. You look at their incomes, these people did not ride a private jet around the country.”