The Garden of Betrayal (23 page)

“So, what was the box?”

“That’s what I wanted to know. Little pieces of network kit like that always have a part number or a description on the case somewhere, but this didn’t have anything stamped or printed on it, which also seemed strange. I took it back to my room and used a screwdriver to pry the
faceplate off. The box had a microprocessor and some flash memory wedged inside, and the processor had a serial number. I searched the serial number on the Web and ended up in a bunch of hard-core hacker forums. The processor is a repeater, a chip that’s designed to capture Internet traffic and forward it to some third location.”

“What third location?”

“Any third location. In our case, to a server somewhere in the Cayman Islands.”

“Wait a second,” I said incredulously, her import penetrating. “Are you telling me we were bugged?”

“Exactly. Everything any of us have done on our home network the last couple of days—all our mail, all our chat, and all the Web sites we’ve visited—has been copied to this other server.”

Much as I wanted to know who’d bugged us, and why, I had a more important question to ask first.

“Let me get this straight. This box you found was physically inside our apartment, right? Which means that whoever put it there had to be inside our apartment.”

She nodded, her scared expression returning.

I was scared also, and confused, but more than either, I was furious. Someone had broken into my home. What would have happened if they’d bumped into Kate or Claire?

“I’m calling Reggie,” I said, starting to stand up.

“Wait,” she said, grabbing my wrist. “There’s more.”

“How can there possibly be more?”

“Sit,” she urged. “Come on. I asked you to listen until I was done.”

I settled next to her again apprehensively.

“I’m listening.”

She let go of my wrist and sighed.

“After I figured out what the repeater was, I got really mad at you.”

“At me? Why?”

“Because I read in the hacker forums that these things are mainly sold to employers snooping on employees, and to parents checking up on their kids.”

It took me a beat to catch her drift.

“You thought that I was spying on you? Why would I do that?”

“I could tell you picked up on something between me and Phil when you met him the other day,” she said, cheeks turning pink, “and that you
were a little freaked out. I thought maybe you wanted to know what was going on between us, and didn’t feel comfortable asking.”

“You’re right that I noticed,” I admitted, reminded of how adept she was at reading me. “And that I’d been meaning to ask you about it. But I’d never spy on you. I trust you.”

“I know,” she said, nudging my knee with hers. “And I’m sorry for jumping to the wrong conclusion. But this was a pretty slick installation. Mom couldn’t have done it—she doesn’t have the tech skills. You have a bunch of smart network guys at work, though. I figured maybe one of them helped you.”

I made an effort to set my anger aside and think about what had happened objectively. Frick and Frack certainly had the tech skills, but they operated only at Walter’s behest. Was it possible that Walter was spying on me? Why?

“Do you have any idea when the bug was planted?” I asked, hoping the time line might shed some light on the situation.

“Some,” she said. “But let me finish. I was really pissed at you all yesterday afternoon, and then after the concert, I decided to teach you a lesson. I hunted around on the Internet and found a program that let my computer emulate our modem.”

“Remember who you’re talking to here, please,” I said, wary of her slipping into jargon. “Keep it simple.”

“Sorry.” She hesitated a moment, lips pursed. “What I wanted to do was hook the repeater up to my computer but trick it into thinking it was still attached to the modem. The repeater has a limited amount of memory. When it runs low, it has to send the information it’s captured somewhere else. That’s why our network was acting so strange when I was downloading the big video files—because the repeater kept interrupting to dump data to the remote server. By hooking the repeater directly to my computer, I was able to fill the memory with garbage and force a call to the server. And since it was communicating through my computer, I could see where the repeater had called.”

Again, I only partly followed, but I caught the gist.

“Which is how you know the server is in the Cayman Islands.”

“Right.”

“And you can just find programs on the Internet that let you do stuff like that?”

“Pretty much. I needed some help to make it work with my configuration.
I got started talking to a Hungarian guy named Gabor in one of the hacker forums, and I was able to persuade him to walk me through it.”

“Able to persuade him how?”

“I sent him a picture of Vanessa Hudgens that I grabbed from a fan site and told him it was me,” she said, looking a little embarassed. “We have a date this Sunday afternoon in Budapest. Lunch at his mother’s house.”

I didn’t know what to say. She cleared her throat and carried on.

“Once the repeater made the connection, I was able to cut it out of the loop and communicate with the server directly. The fact that the server was in the Caymans shook me up—I’d assumed it would be in your office. My plan was to erase the files you’d copied and leave you a message telling you what I’d done, but I poked around some instead, and I found a folder filled with media files. I clicked on a few and played them.” Her voice dropped. “They were all voice recordings of you, talking to different people.”

I was confused again.

“This repeater thing was hooked up to our phone also?”

“No. The recordings were made in lots of different places, not just in our apartment. A bunch of them sound like you’re talking to people at restaurants, or in the street.”

“How’s that possible?”

“I asked Gabor. He thinks someone reprogrammed your cell phone.”

“You can do that?” I asked, stunned.

“A cell phone is just a simple computer and some memory attached to a radio. The computer has an operating system, like every other computer. All someone has to do is physically get hold of your phone and make changes to the operating system. Then the phone becomes a bug, like the repeater, recording everything you say and transmitting it to the server. You said you lost the phone last Friday, right? And that it was returned on Monday? That’s more than enough time for it to have been reprogrammed.”

Son of a bitch
. I should have known better than to believe in cell phone–returning Good Samaritans in New York City.

“Have you noticed that your phone hasn’t been holding a charge well recently?” Kate asked.

“I replaced the battery Wednesday morning, because it died overnight.”

“The recording function can be programmed to be voice-activated, so it will capture everything you say, instead of just your calls. Gabor said hacking a phone like that makes it consume a ton of battery.” She shook her head. “I’m going to have to send him some cookies or something. He was really helpful, and he’s going to be upset when I don’t show this weekend.”

“Bottom line, our network’s bugged, and my phone’s bugged.”

She nodded.

“And I’m guessing that we’re out here on the fire stairs because you think our apartment might be bugged as well.”

“It’s possible. And I didn’t want you to bring your pants or anything else, because we can’t be sure that it’s only your phone. Lots of small things can be microphones—a button, or your belt buckle, or something in your shoes. But the phone’s the best, because you charge it up every night, and it can transmit over greater distances, and—”

“Because I carry it around with me everywhere,” I said, finishing her sentence.

“So, what’s going on?” she asked quietly.

“I wish I knew. You said you had some idea when the bugging started?”

“The oldest files on the server were from Sunday night, which means at least since then. It could be longer, if someone’s been erasing stuff, but I don’t think too much longer, or I would have noticed.”

Sunday night. Before I generated the scoop on Nord Stream, before I met with Theresa Roxas, and before I had my falling-out with Walter. It didn’t make sense. There wasn’t any reason for anyone to have been that interested in me last week.

“Just to be clear, how sophisticated do you have to be to do something like this?”

She shrugged.

“It’s like a lot of things in the tech world—simple in concept but tough to get right. I could probably do it if I had enough time, but whenever you monkey around with hardware at the BIOS level, or try to get different systems to communicate, you’re going to have a million tiny problems to work through. Whoever did this seems to have gotten everything right, so I’m guessing they’re experienced.”

Her mention of experience brought Frick and Frack to mind again. But if Walter had been monitoring my conversations and my e-mail, he wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that Alex had introduced me to Theresa Roxas. My head ached. I was missing something big—nobody would have gone to these lengths on a whim. There had to be some deeper pattern to events that I wasn’t perceiving.

“Is that everything?” I asked.

“You were expecting more?”

We shared a weak smile.

“How much of this have you told your mother?”

“Nothing yet. She went to bed early. She seemed upset.”

“I tried to get her to open up to me about San Francisco.”

“And?”

“And it’s complicated.” I slapped my knees with both hands, attempting to project more confidence than I felt. “We can talk about that later. Come on. It’s time to go.”

“Go where?”

“To pick up your mother and move to a hotel until we figure out what’s going on. Someone’s already broken into our apartment once. I don’t want to take any chances.”

She nodded, her face troubled.

“There actually is one more thing. This probably isn’t the right time, but I’d like to ask you about it.”

“Shoot.”

“These past couple of days, I’ve felt there was something important you weren’t telling me. That’s the other reason I thought maybe you were spying on me—because I had the sense you were keeping a secret. Is there anything else I should know?”

She looked at me searchingly.

“Kate …” I said, unsure how to begin.

She gasped, a hand flying to her face.

“It’s about Kyle, isn’t it?”

I wrapped an arm around her and gently lifted her upright.

“It’s nothing definitive. Let’s go find your mother. I’ll tell you everything on the way.”

Kate ran down the location of Claire’s charity event while I threw on some old jeans and a pair of ratty tennis shoes, mindful of her caution about listening devices. The breakfast was at the Parker Meridien hotel, on West Fifty-seventh Street. I brought her up to speed on everything I’d been doing with Reggie as we rode downtown in a cab, again omitting the beating I’d given Vinny. Like Claire, Kate wept when I told her what the e-mail Reggie received had said.

The ride to the hotel took us about fifteen minutes. Kate went hunting for Claire in the hotel’s reception rooms while I used a lobby pay phone to try Reggie’s numbers. Both his office and cell kicked to voice mail. Recounting the morning’s events to his machine, I felt my rage mounting again. Forget the eavesdropping—someone had broken into my home. I asked Reggie if he could enlist some forensics guys to dust for fingerprints and do whatever else they did. I wanted to catch whoever it had been, and to make sure they paid the price.

The Meridien was a good hotel, and convenient, so I booked a suite for the week, assuming that would give us enough time to have our apartment swept clean and figure out what had been going on. Kate showed up with her mother as I was pocketing the plastic room keys. Claire had dressed more Park Avenue than Upper West Side for the benefit, in a navy dress, black pumps, and a wide, black, patent-leather belt. Her hair was loose around her shoulders. She looked young, and vulnerable, and frightened. I reached for her hand. She took it and clung tight.

Our rooms were too contemporary for my taste, with odd inversely
colored photographs of flowers on the walls, but they were also airy and light, with rooftop views of the southern skyline. We settled at an asymmetric breakfast table beneath an oversized close-up of a pale green rose while Kate reexplained the bugging.

“So, this has something to do with your work?” Claire asked, turning to me when Kate had finished. She looked pale but composed.

“It must, although I can’t imagine what. I don’t want either of you to be concerned, though. I have a call in to Reggie. He and I will figure this whole thing out and take care of it.”

Kate glanced at her mother.

“You and Reggie are going to take care of it. So Mom and I should just hang around here at the hotel and wait. Maybe book a massage and a pedicure.”

“That’s not what I meant,” I said, stung by her sarcasm.

“Isn’t it?” Claire asked quietly.

I hesitated, afraid of getting them involved in anything dangerous, but recognizing that I’d made things worse between me and Claire in the past by being overprotective.

“I’m sorry. This is difficult for me. I worry about you both, and I want to protect you, and I feel guilty for having brought this into your lives.”

“It’s difficult for all of us,” Claire said. “I think we should try to understand it together, as a family.”

I was a little surprised to hear her be so forceful, and more than a little happy to hear her emphasize our being a family. It made me feel hopeful. Kate spoke up again before I could formulate a reply.

“Which brings us back to Mom’s question,” she said, looking at me. “Are we sure this has to do with your work?”

“As opposed to what?”

“As opposed to something to do with Kyle.”

“I’m not following.”

“I was thinking about what you told me in the cab. The e-mail Reggie got was sent through an offshore remailer. Your phone and the repeater in our house were both forwarding information to an offshore server. There’s a similar level of technical sophistication. Maybe the e-mail and the bugging are related somehow.”