Killer Move (7 page)

CHAPTER NINE

I
had a late lunch of an egg salad sandwich, sitting in the shade outside the grocery store a few doors down from the office. It’s something I do once a week, a little ritual—they make it with a little dill and a touch of Dijon mustard, and it’s very good—but either the bread was a bit stale today or I just wasn’t in the mood.

Karren had received the e-mail, too. So had a couple of private contacts and a few nonwork friends. Only one person on the list had responded, expressing surprise that I’d forwarded something that had nothing to do with realty, as I never normally did that kind of thing.

Well, right. True statement.

I’d stayed at my desk for a while, looking like I was taking care of business. I quickly established that the e-mail was not in my
SENT MAIL
folder, nor had it been filed. I’m very organized about keeping everything I receive and send. Big or small, even if it’s merely a “Great meeting!” or (god forbid) an “LOL!” everything gets given a sensible home. In realty you never know when you might wish or need to demonstrate exactly what was said, to whom, and when. In reality, too, I guess.

The original e-mail was nowhere to be found. Setting that aside, there was the question of who’d sent it out in my name. Clearly not Janine. That left, of course, Karren. But when Karren had walked into the office five minutes after me, and found the e-mail, I’d seen her frown. She read it again, then looked at me.

“Well, it’s technically comedic,” she said. “Ha and, I guess, ha.”

“Forwarded it by accident,” I said. Janine had popped out of the office, thankfully.

“You can do that?”

“If you’re dumb,” I said, going into a prepared spiel. “Meant to pass on a property listing, evidently selected that so-called joke by mistake.”

She nodded. “Figures. Doesn’t seem like the kind of thing you’d send to the world on purpose.”

“Well, right.”

“You’re normally far too worried about what people might think of you.”

She turned back to her work, leaving me smarting. If I’d been entertaining suspicions about Karren sending the e-mail from my computer—laughing an evil laugh as she hit
SEND
—they were dispelled there and then. I had no doubt she was smart and bold, but it would have taken big balls indeed to wrap an unspoken denial in such a blatant diss.

When Karren went to the bathroom twenty minutes later I darted over to Janine’s machine. The e-mail was still sitting there in her in-box, together with about seventeen million others. I forwarded the joke back to my own address, taking care to remove the evidence from her
SENT MAIL
folder when I was done.

Back at my own machine I established that the original e-mail had been sent at 9:33 that morning—when I’d been standing self-righteously in line at the post office waiting to mail a package back to Amazon, thus tying two small, inexplicable things together in a knot.

A book I had not ordered.

An e-mail I hadn’t sent.

I
’d made no sense of either by the time I drifted out to lunch. As I was sitting outside the deli, fingers drumming on the hot metal of the table, I saw Tony Thompson emerge from the reception block. He noticed me and started to head over.

My stomach did a little flip. Tony’s address had been on the distribution list of the e-mail. As he walked down the ramp toward me, I took a slow, deep breath.

“Funny e-mail, Bill,” he said, before I could even get started. “Laughed my head off. You got more like that, send ’em right along. Marie and I are going to have a talk about the matter we discussed, by the way. Probably tonight.”

I shut my mouth, smiled, and didn’t say a thing.

“N
o way of telling,” the geek said. “Bottom line is it could have been anyone in the world.”

“That’s it?
That’s
your professional opinion? How much you get paid for this level of insight?”

I was sitting with him outside the ice cream place at the Circle. It was coming up on seven in the evening but still warm, and getting heavier.

He took a lick of his chocolate sugar cone. “A lot less than you, dude. Plus, no commission. Not to mention I spend all day sorting out shit where the root cause exists between the computer and the chair facing it. By which I mean, you know, the user.”

“I got the joke. I’m laughing inside.”

I’d had the idea of calling the company’s tech guy by midafternoon. It had taken him three hours to extricate himself from the IT needs of the main office, and forty minutes to check over my computer. Getting him to do this without yakking on and on about what he was doing was the hardest part, but luckily by then I was the only person left in the office. As soon as he’d pushed himself back from my desk, I’d nonetheless encouraged him to carry on the conversation elsewhere. Sitting with a spindly midtwenties guy in a tatty Pearl Jam T-shirt was not helping to resettle me, especially as his phone kept beeping at irregular intervals: a single, echoing
ping,
like sonar. He tilted his head to check the screen every single time this happened, but did not pick the phone up or do anything, and this was beginning to get on my nerves.

“You got two issues,” he said, squinting against the slanting remains of the day’s sun. “First is this e-mail. Simplest explanation is someone sat at your machine in the office. This is hardly an exploit of legend.”

“An ‘exploit’?”

“It’s what they call a hacking triumph.”

“Who are ‘they’?”

“Hackers.”

“Assholes with no life, you mean.”

“It’s a point of view. Anyway, an exploit is
not
what that scenario would constitute. Even newbies and script-kiddies would think it beneath them. You’d be amazed how many people leave their computers unattended, though, with their e-mail accounts lying open.” He looked pointedly at me.

“I’m a Realtor,” I said irritably. “I work in a tiny office with two people who are employed by the same company, one of whom has to be reminded how to set the alarm, even though it boils down to pressing four buttons and then another button and has been covered about a zillion times via memo and the spoken word. Concerted campaigns of cyberespionage are not one of my fears. I’m at DefCon Minus Five.”

The guy shrugged again, as if this was the kind of naïveté he encountered all the time—though I was confident his occupation consisted largely of crawling under people’s desks to check that cables were plugged in. Meanwhile, he slurped another mouthful of his ice cream cone. Although the girl who’d introduced me to it was not working, I’d ordered the mandarin mascarpone again, and it was the only part of this encounter I was enjoying.

The geek’s phone
ping
ed once more. “Look,” I said. “Why is it making that noise?”

“The social network never sleeps.”

“You want to turn the sound off? It’s really getting on my nerves.”

He pressed a key. “You’re kind of tense, dude.”

“Yeah, I am,” I said, “because, according to you, someone snuck into my office this morning and, in view of at least one of my colleagues, forwarded an e-mail that I’ve never seen. Then trashed all evidence from my computer. And snuck back out. Right?”

“Actually, no,” the guy said. “The e-mail could have been set up anytime in the last weeks or months.”

“You can do that?”

“Yep.”

“Oh.” I didn’t like the sound of this. I’d preferred it when it had simply been impossible for me to have sent the e-mail at the time it claimed to have been sent. That gave me a concrete conundrum—and a specific time frame—to grab hold of and shake. This new idea untied the knot and had the potential to pull the event, and thus the intentions of whoever had done it, back in time.

“Except that probably wasn’t what happened,” the geek said smugly.

I stared steadily at him. I very much wanted a cigarette. He coughed and sat up straight.

“Okay,” he said. “Someone with skills
could
have dropped below GUI level and triggered it from underlying OS. I couldn’t find any sign of that, though, which brings me to Issue Two. You’ll recall I said there were two issues, right?”

“You did. How are you still alive, by the way?”

“This Amazon delivery you mentioned. Could be the two are unrelated, but . . . Occam’s razor, right?”

“What are you talking about now?”

“Medieval logician guy. He said if you’ve got two competing explanations for an event or situation, always choose the simplest, at least as your starting point. Point is, you have this weird e-mail, plus this morning you receive a book you say you never ordered.”

“I didn’t,” I said tersely.

“Your login for the Amazon account is your e-mail address, I assume? Like half the frickin’ world?”

“Yes,” I admitted.

“But there’s a password, too, right?”

I opened my mouth, then closed it again.

He nodded. “Right. Anyone can find your e-mail address. You probably bandy it about more than your actual
name
. But your password? That’s not for sharing. So this is where it starts to look concerted. Where do you keep a record of this password?”

“Nowhere. I just remember it.”

“Tell me it’s not something like your name or your wife’s name or date of birth.”

“It’s not. There’s no way anyone could guess it.”

“Excellent. So . . . how
does
someone get hold of it? Simplest way is a keystroke recorder. A piece of code that sits on a computer, makes a record of every single thing that’s typed on its keyboard, saves it to disk, or covertly e-mails it to someone out there in the void.”

“Is there one of those on my computer?”

“No. What tech do you have at home?”

“Two laptops. One for me, one for my wife.”

“You use public wifi much?”

“No. The machine stays at the house.”

“You have wireless there?”

“Yes.”

“How close is the nearest house?”

“About thirty yards.”

“Perfectly feasible for them to be piggybacking. Or else someone could be war-driving past your house.”

“Which means?”

“Cruising around with a laptop in a car, scoping out wifi networks, taking data snapshots.”

“Are you kidding me? We live in a gated community. You can’t even get
in
unless you’re a resident or a certified guest.”

“Doesn’t rule it out. So you got three options.” He counted off on his long, slender fingers. “Human engineering—like glancing over your shoulder at work, or in a café, when you’re using the Web. Two, a keystroke recorder. Three, someone scanning your home wifi.”

“I don’t like the sound of any of those.”

“Don’t blame you,” he said, wiping his hands on a napkin. “Whatever way you cut it, someone’s on your case.”

“So what do I do?”

He stood up. “Check your laptop—see if there’s anything that you don’t recognize. If you want, bring it in tomorrow and I’ll check it out. Meanwhile, change every password you have.”

“I will,” I said. “And thanks . . .”

“Kevin. No problem. I’ll drop you an e-mail later with hints on how to look for black hat wifi, okay? I gotta go now, though. There’s a Chronicles of Dunsany’s Kingdom fragfest waiting for me in Bradenton.”

“I have no idea what that means, but good luck with it. Kevin.”

He sloped off, leaving me with a bowl half-full of melted yogurt and a head completely full of questions.

I was confident “human engineering” was not the answer. I’m not a freak, but I do have a clearly defined personal space. I’d have been aware if someone had been invading it sufficiently to visually eavesdrop on what I was doing on my phone. That left two options. Home laptop, home wifi. Both featured the word
home,
which I did not like. Being fucked with out in the world is one thing. Someone doing it where you live is another matter.

As I stood up, I heard someone speaking.

“Hey hey,” the voice said.

I turned to see the goth/emo girl I’d met a couple days before, walking along the sidewalk toward the shop.

“Glad to see you slipping into Mascarpone Madness again, Mr. Moore,” she said. “Hope you didn’t give Craig as big a tip, though. I’m sure he won’t have served it with anywhere near as much panache.”

“He did not,” I said, forced into a smile. “I thought you worked afternoons . . .” I racked my brain, and then added “Cassandra,” just in time for it not to sound like too much of an afterthought.

“I like to mix it up,” she said, appearing pleased I’d recalled her name. We like being singled out, most of the time. “You never know who’s watching, right?”