The Manuscript (8 page)

He absently toyed with the flap of Abe’s satchel, still clutched in his left hand.

That’s right - the manuscript’s still in there.

Given the circumstances, the document wasn’t an issue any more. Even if Abe had thought that it was the biggest hit he would ever see, Abe had now gone to a better place, and the mystery author would have to try his pitch elsewhere. It wasn’t Michael’s problem.

Jim took ten minutes in Abe’s office and then moved to check the central switchboard lines in the reception area. After a few more minutes rooting around the junction, he nodded at Michael – he was done.

Michael again expressed his condolences to Mona, and the two men quietly departed, leaving the staff to grieve in peace.

“That was wild. The joint was hot as a stove,” Jim reported, as they waited for the elevator.

What
? Michael gritted his teeth, and said nothing until they were in the downstairs lobby.

I knew it
, he thought. “What did you find?” Michael asked.

“His lines were tapped, and there was some extraordinarily sophisticated equipment in his electric socket,” Jim told him. “And Michael, I don’t know what this guy was into, but I’m not talking about commercial gear. This is stuff you don’t see outside of special ops,” Jim cautioned.

“Jesus,” Michael said, mind working furiously.

“I can do a removal if you want,” Jim offered.

Standard operating procedure was to leave anything you found in place until you developed a strategy with the client of how to deal with the threat. Knowing someone had bugged you was valuable; you could use the equipment to plant red herrings and false stories, or you could extract the equipment and install countermeasures – and beef up your security.

Michael considered it. “No, I think we’re done. The client’s dead, so the contract expired with him.” He needed time to work out what the hell was going on and wanted to limit Jim’s involvement to strictly what he needed to know. Best to get him out of this now.

“Okay, boss. I’ll send you the bill. Give me a holler when you need something else.”

They shook hands and parted ways.

Michael exited the building and looked at his watch. He was now in full alert mode. His eyes surreptitiously scanned the surroundings, sector by sector. Mostly pedestrian traffic, a few loiterers, and a street full of parked and moving cars, some occupied, some not. No giveaway antennas on any of them. A few cargo vans double-parked, but no way of knowing what was going on inside them.

The hair on the nape of his neck was prickling, which generally meant he was being watched. It was like a sixth sense. Some primitive part of the brain processed all available data and concluded observation was taking place.

All right.

Michael walked down the block to the subway station and passed through the turnstiles. He wanted to buy time to work out what was going on. Why would Abe have this kind of surveillance focused on him? Though he hadn’t sensed anyone watching them during lunch.

What had Abe gotten himself involved in?

The information about the office being bugged with serious hardware changed everything. Koshi’s glib dismissal of the e-mail deletion suddenly seemed glaringly wrong. The whole situation had veered from a benign mystery to something far more ominous.

And now Abe was dead.
Telling no tales
.

Michael didn’t like where his train of thought was leading, but he’d long ago learned to trust himself on these things. What did they actually know? Abe had gotten an e-mail from an unknown source to a confidential, encrypted and highly-secure address. Attached to it was a manuscript Abe was convinced could be the most explosive and important book of his career.

What was it he’d said? Something about bigger than anything he’d ever seen, and potentially catastrophic for powerful interests? Okay. So Abe was the only guy who’d seen it and had bought the farm within thirty hours of it disappearing without a trace, in a manner Koshi described as impossible – and Koshi was as good as it got, if you forgave his dress-sense.

And now, it transpired, the office was infested with Star Wars-level eavesdropping gear and likely a pro team doing surveillance.

He did the equation. It didn’t look positive.

The document that was presumably behind all of this had only been seen by one other person; and that person’s prints were now all over the office.

Best of all, that person also had the manuscript hanging from his key chain and in his dead client’s briefcase, still dangling from his now clammy hand.

This wasn’t good
.

He boarded the uptown train to his apartment. The day had just gotten complicated.

********

Koshi padded across his polished concrete floor, a colorfully labeled plastic bottle of liquid yogurt in one hand and a bag of rice chips in the other. He wasn’t a big eater, but he liked to nibble as he worked, and the chips were addictive. He sat down at his workstation and spread his snack out in front of him – the yogurt, chips, and a can of root beer. The quintessential geek diet.

He went through his various e-mail accounts out of routine and responded to the comments and inquiries he’d received, fielding a few questions from prospective clients with terse, economically-worded missives. Koshi was relatively infamous in the hacking community, so he didn’t have to be diplomatic with those who required his services. That was one of the things he liked about the gig – he could be meaner than a pit viper if it suited his mood, but if you needed his particular skill-set, you needed it, and would put up with whatever he was dishing out.

Koshi leaned over and punched a button on the stereo. Deep house music filled the room. He’d always found it way easier to think if his ears were filled with sound, especially if he was doing something computer-related. He was odd that way – some of his buddies couldn’t stand any noise or disruption when they were coding, and yet he needed it loud and hard to get anything of significance done.

Returning his attention to the problem at hand, he methodically went through all the standard protocols to hack Abe’s office. Part of the secret to being good was embracing flashes of intuitive brilliance, but more often it was just persistence and logic. He always loved the TV portrayals of hackers in front of elaborate screens with complex graphics and flashing strings of code. What bullshit. If only it were really like that…

Koshi spent several hours trying to break into Abe’s network, with no success. There were no backdoors he could detect, no weaknesses to be exploited. He tried all the usual tricks, and then switched to some proprietary approaches he’d invented on his own, but there was no pressure point he could leverage. Koshi had a lot of his ego invested in being one of the best in the business, and if he couldn’t get into an office LAN then there probably wasn’t anyone who could. The network was as ironclad as they came. So that was a non-starter.

He turned his focus to getting in from the other end, namely via the e-mail servers. Koshi had written several programs that would venture thousands of gambits per second – but no go on that, either. It didn’t surprise him, given the level of encryption the e-mail provider employed, but it never hurt to try, and sometimes you got lucky. After a half hour of no success, he discontinued his mini-assault and put his feet up on the desk. There was no way any hacker could have gotten in that he knew of.

There had long been rumors of backdoors on encrypted e-mail servers left in place for government access, however, there was no way to verify whether the rumors were true – the e-mail companies insisted there were none, and the government wasn’t talking.

Koshi viewed the insistence that everything was above-board with a highly skeptical eye, given that people routinely lied, early and often. But he’d never actually met anyone with that kind of backdoor access, and no coders had stepped forward to confirm that they’d written them in, so the stories remained rumors. Koshi just assumed they were probably true, because, if he could dictate terms, he would have forced the providers to put them in – legal and ethical or not.

Now that he had run through his bag of tricks, he was at a standstill. He supposed he could contact his web-based network of hackers to see if anyone else could take on the project to penetrate the server, but it would be expensive, likely fruitless, and take a lot of time – if it was even possible to do. He suspected it would be a big fat waste.

His cell rang.

Koshi picked up. “Speak…”

“Koshi. Listen up,” Michael said, “and don’t talk…please. We swept Abe’s office and it was a hot zone. Very high-end, as in non-commercial. And I think the place is under visual surveillance, so we can assume there’s serious weight behind it.”

“Holy crap, Batman…” Koshi exclaimed.

“It gets worse. Abe’s dead. Heart attack, or at least purported heart attack…”

Koshi digested that. “You don’t buy it?”

“I buy that a document so sensitive it was removed from encrypted servers within hours, and which brought in CIA-level hardware placement and a surv team, could be worth going after civilians to contain,” Michael declared. “You want to bet your life on it?”

“That’s just so…I mean, shit like that doesn’t happen,” Koshi protested.

“Again – Koshi, shut up long enough to hear what I’m saying. When I was in the service there were guys who made us look like featherweights – hard as coffin nails. You know what the SEAL program is, so you know I’m not easily impressed…but these guys would fly into a fire zone, disappear for a day or two, and then show back up with the odd scrape or bullet wound and be flown out. They never spoke to anyone. And they weren’t there to do the dishes,” Michael recounted.

“But–”

“I’m trying to tell you there are a lot of things going on that civilians don’t know about. Look, you know I had a classified tag, so you’ll just have to trust me that the world’s an ugly place if you get sideways of the wrong people.”

Koshi finally got it. “So this is bad.”

“It’s really bad…potentially. If someone gets in tonight and goes over the office, they’re going to find your prints all over the keyboard and desk, as well as mine on a bunch of Abe’s stuff. Let’s just assume they can access enforcement databases if they can take e-mails off encrypted servers like it was nothing, okay? Then they want to chitty-chat with you, and me.” Michael breathed in for a beat. “I’m not so sure I want to be on the receiving end of that discussion,” he concluded.

Koshi took a half minute to process the ramifications. “Is there any way you could have gotten this wrong?”

“Only if this is one bastard of a dream and the alarm clock’s about to go off.” Michael stopped, and drew a deep breath. “Koshi. You’ve known me for a long time, and I’m saying as clearly as I can that it’s time to get worried.”

Michael didn’t want to be alarmist, but he wanted Koshi to understand that this wasn’t their usual nine-to-five corporate espionage stuff. He didn’t know how big a deal whatever he was carrying around with him was, but he figured it couldn’t hurt to exercise a little prudence.

“Koshi. We’ve known each other a long time. Have I ever called you like this before? Ever?” Michael paused to collect his thoughts. “We’re in something way out of our league here. This isn’t a drill. Spy-level eavesdropping equipment, military-grade encryption hacking…I’m not sure what Abe was into, but I’m going to lay low until I find out,” Michael concluded. He needed a safe place to spend a few hours reading Abe’s manuscript so he could figure out what exactly they were dealing with. Until then, he’d assume the worst.

The line went silent; seconds followed seconds and stretched into a chasm.

Koshi broke the silence. “All right. I’ll play along. Let’s assume there are serious bad guys who were all over Abe, and maybe they even helped him to the afterlife. All we’ve done is routine security work. You think it’s a good idea to go to ground for a while? Fine. Do what you have to do. I’ll call you later with a web address and a password so we can communicate online outside our usual accounts. Best if we assume the whole world’s watching our normal channels. Use an IP mask at all times when accessing it, as well as when you’re doing anything online. It’ll slow you down a little, but so does a Kevlar vest,” Koshi reflected.

Good old Koshi. Always level-headed and pragmatic.
Michael was glad he was on his side.

“Okay. I’ll check in later, maybe around dinner time. I’m going to have my hands full till then,” Michael explained. “I’m sorry I got you into whatever this is.”

“Yeah, you don’t pay me nearly enough. Your rate just skyrocketed…”

Michael chuckled humorlessly. “I don’t blame you.”

“Watch your ass,” Koshi advised.

“You too.”

********

Michael approached his building cautiously, hyper-aware of everything in his periphery yet without telegraphing as much. He didn’t spot any of the telltale giveaways of surveillance. It was probably the office that was the draw, and no connection to Michael had been made.

Yet.

He whistled as he climbed the steps to his building’s façade and unlocked the front door, taking his time to ensure he was alone. There were no obvious threats, so he mounted the stairs to his third floor apartment, taking a few moments to study his locks for any signs of tampering before entering. They looked fine.

Once inside, he worked quickly. First, he filled a black duffle bag with some clothes and his shaving kit. Next, he went to his bookcase and removed the lower row of books, revealing a panel that was invisible to the eye unless you knew it was there. He pressed one end and raised the panel from the base, setting it on the floor next to the books. Below was a floor-mounted safe recessed into the concrete slab. He spun the dial the correct number of digits and opened it.

Reaching into the tight dark space, Michael carefully extracted several small bundles, which he packed into Abe’s bag. After confirming the safe was empty, he closed the door, spun the dial, and returned the panel and the books to their original position before moving to the bedroom. He hurriedly stripped off his blue suit and donned a pair of jeans, a hooded sweatshirt, and a baseball hat. Surveying his closet, he decided to forego his suits in favor of jeans and cargo shorts. He emptied several drawers into his duffel, then returned to the living room.