Deadline (7 page)

Since then, Ramia has been a low key senator, shunning the spotlight and avoiding committee work.

“Lord Jesus,” said Jack.

He shook his head, which hurt his neck. He was sweating at his desk, struggling with the Ramia story, and finding it very difficult to concentrate. Since Flanagan had told him that Sawatski had wound up in the canal, nearly dead, Jack could think of nothing else. He had to file his story before he went to the police station, but as soon as he started to write, his mind wandered to the night before. Guilt gnawed at him, as if Ed’s accident were somehow his fault, but he had only the haziest memory of the evening’s events, which left him running over the few moments that he could remember again and again. He had to force himself to type up his story so he could get to the police station.

He banged out another ten inches, hit save, then send, and called the desk to make sure the file had arrived. Then he left the Hot Room, walked downstairs, and stepped out through the heavy brass doors under the Peace Tower, where he hunched against the cold wind and lit a cigarette. For the first time, as he walked toward the parking lot, he had time to think about the night before, and what he would tell the police.

He had met Ed and Sophie at D’Arcy’s, where he had a shepherd’s pie and the first beer of the evening. The three of them had gossiped about politics. He had tried to draw them out about who would be likely to replace Stevens if he stepped down before the next election. Since Sophie worked for Mowat and Ed worked for Donahoe, the two ministers most likely to get the keys to 24 Sussex, Jack had tried to provoke them into arguing about who had the better chance, in the hope that they would spill secrets, but they saw through him and laughed it off.

When Sophie tapped out after dinner, Jack was tempted to do the same, but Ed was in a drinking mood: animated, funny, laughing, singing, buying rounds, flirting with girls at the bar, and Jack decided to have another drink or two.

They did some shots at the bar, where they chatted up three Inuit girls for a while, bureaucrats from Aboriginal Affairs. Then there was another bar, Quatre Jeudis, in Hull, where they tried to hit on Quebec hotties, but were restrained by their increasing and obvious drunkenness and their bad French.

They ate greasy poutine at 2 a.m. Then they were in a cab, and then they were at Pigale, reeling into the strip bar in time to order two beers each at last call. After that, everything was fuzzy. Jack could remember the naked bodies of the tattooed Montreal biker chicks who danced there, and he could remember Ed going for a lap dance, while he sat and waited, drinking beer and leering at the dancers. Then there was another cab, which he remembered getting into, but after that, nothing.

It wasn’t going to be fun telling the cops about it.

Tim Balfour sat in his office with the door closed, wasting time on one of his computers by trying out a new first-person shooter: blowing up aliens inside a spaceship, flicking from flamethrower to rocket launcher, expertly turning alien gunmen into chunks of meat.

The call was taking longer than he expected. The little Chinese slut must be slacking off.

Then, sure enough, the phone rang.

He paused the game. His screen instantly reverted to his desktop and he picked up his phone.

“Balfour here,” he said.

“Um, excuse me, Tim,” the voice said. “This is Eileen Sing-Chu. I seem to be having a problem with my computer. I can’t access the network. It’s rejecting my password. I’ve rebooted twice, but it doesn’t want to work.”

He grinned, and rubbed his big tummy with both hands.

“Did you make sure caps lock is off?” he asked.

“Yes I did,” she said.

Of course you did, you little hottie, he thought.

“Okay,” he said. “I’ll be right out to have a look.”

During lunch, while she was in the cafeteria, he had reset Eileen Sing-Chu’s password. She was new and by far the cutest girl to work in the encryption section of Canadian Security Establishment, maybe the prettiest girl to ever work there. She wore glasses, but she was pretty and sporty, with an appealingly boyish body, and she didn’t seem to know she was pretty. Perfect.

The encryption section of CSE, Canada’s secretive electronic intelligence agency, employed math geeks, mostly pimply, awkward boy-men like him, the type who knew enough not to wear pocket protectors, but had to fight the impulse. Balfour, an overweight, prematurely balding, socially awkward computer whiz, was unlucky with women, a fact that was not far from his mind when he hired staff. It was at the front of his mind when he hired Sing-Chu, and he was now planning on giving her computer a series of problems that he would have to solve, giving him a chance to hang around her desk, look down her top, get to know her, see if there was any way he could get into her little Chinese panties.

He was standing up to go when his second desk phone rang.

“Balfour here,” he said.

“Hello,” said the deep male voice on the other end. “Do you know who this is?”

Balfour sat down.

“I do,” he said. “Are you calling from a secure line?”

“I’m calling from my desk phone.”

“Hold on,” said Balfour, and he flicked a switch on the side of the phone.

“Okay,” he said. “We’re encrypted. Go ahead.”

“All right,” said the voice. “I’ve got a job for you. I want you to try to locate a stolen BlackBerry for us. This is right from the top, and we need it in real time. Okay? We can’t afford to go through channels.”

“Have you got the PIN and the phone number?” said Balfour.

“I do. Ready?”

The voice read out the seven-digit code, a mix of numbers and letters, and then the telephone number.

“Got that?”

Balfour read it all back.

“Good,” said the voice. “When you get a read out, let me know the location. Got it?”

“Yup,” said Balfour. “On it.”

The line went dead.

Shit, he thought. No time for games. He quickly reset Eileen Sing-Chu’s password and called her to tell her to reboot.

Then he booted up a computer underneath his desk, and launched a program that disguised his computer’s ISPN on the internal network. After it was running, he plugged the computer into the network. It would now appear to any network administrators bored enough to be watching, that an extra computer had come online in the Digital Intelligence Interception branch of CSEC.

He typed in a password and username he had previously stolen using a keystroke capture program on a computer in his office used by a visiting DII agent.

He found the cell-phone tracking program used by DII agents, opened the interface and started wrestling with the problem.

Every time anyone uses a cell phone, the unit sends a radio signal, which, in a city, is picked up by a number of towers. Those towers send each other signals to decide which tower will handle the call. By measuring the signal strength at each tower and triangulating, the network can quickly estimate the location of any cell phone, but it took 10 minutes for Balfour to figure out how to make the program do that.

Once he had it figured out, he entered the PIN number and phone number and sat back to watch it work.

Jack’s BlackBerry vibrated on his hip while he was waiting for a light on O’Connor Street. It was a message from Sophie asking him to call.

She started crying when she heard his voice. “Oh, Jack. Did you hear about Ed?”

The light changed and Jack pulled into the intersection.

“I’m on the way to the police station now,” he said. “It’s terrible. I wish I had stayed with him. I’m so sorry. I don’t know how it happened. I should have been with him. We were both so drunk.”

Sophie choked back her tears and spoke just as Jack’s BlackBerry beeped in his ear, the signal that the battery was running down.

“What?” he said. “I’m sorry. What did you say?”

“It’s awful,” she said. “He opened his eyes but he’s just staring. It’s like he’s not even there.”

“Oh God,” said Jack. “I don’t know. It’s early days yet. He might come around yet. Jesus. I’ll come see him after I go talk to the police.”

“You can’t get in to see him today,” said Sophie. “Only family can get in until he’s out of critical condition.”

“Oh, Jesus,” said Jack.

“What happened?” said Sophie. “Why didn’t he come home last night?”

“I’m just on my way to the police station now,” he said. “I don’t know what happened. We were out till late, Christ, till Pigale closed. Then we took a cab. I think he dropped me off first. But it’s hard to remember. Christ. We were shitfaced.”

Sophie started crying. “I’d better go back in there,” she sniffled, and she hung up.

“Lord Jesus,” said Jack. He cursed at the horror of the situation, and at his phone, which was running down. At the next light, he remembered that he had another one in his pocket.

“Fuck,” he said, and pulled over and dug it out, thinking he could use the battery from Sawatski’s BlackBerry. He had a vague memory, suddenly, of Ed slipping it into his pocket when he went for the lap dance.

Jack punched at it, tried to look at the inbox, but it was password-protected.

He tried SOPHIE, but that didn’t work.

He lit a smoke and thought about it, then opened the back of the phone, took out the battery and popped it into the back of his own.

The first time the cell phone that Balfour was tracking sent out a signal, it bounced off seven towers in downtown Ottawa. After about thirty seconds, the tracking program he was staring at lit up over Ottawa on a map of North America. He hit zoom and waited while the map redrew itself. The second signal came in while the map was redrawing, and Balfour’s computer crunched it and came up with a fifty-square-metre signal zone, centred at the corner of Lisgar and O’Connor.

“Bingo,” said Balfour. “Bingo, bingo, bingo. Take that, mofo.”

He whipped out his BlackBerry and typed a message.

To:
74X93B4


From:
58K42E6


Subject:
BB location


The BlackBerry in question is at the corner of O’Connor and Lisgar.


As he pressed send, Sawatski’s BlackBerry sent another roaming signal, and when Balfour looked again, the signal zone had moved south, to the corner of Gladstone and O’Connor.

He sent another message.

To:
74X93B4


From:
58K42E6


Subject:
It’s moving


Now at Gladstone and O’Connor.


He quickly had a reply.

To:
58K42E6


From:
74X93B4


Subject:
Can you set up remote tracking?


We need to follow it.


Balfour pulled on his bottom lip and thought about it. Shouldn’t be too hard. Just go under the interface, find the code with the latitude and longitude, set up a little mailer program to forward it. He’d have to write a bit of code for the recipient phone, but that should be easy, an add-on for a mapping program. But just as he started to type a message saying that he could do it, the dot disappeared from Balfour’s screen.