The Short Drop (14 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY

Early Friday morning, Jenn woke Gibson unceremoniously by flipping on the lights and clapping her hands like a drill instructor. He was pretty sure he’d locked the door.

“It’s five twenty-eight,” Jenn said.

That was all she’d come to say, apparently. She left the motel room door open behind her and went, he assumed, in search of baby ducks to berate. Hendricks appeared a minute later and put a large coffee on his end table.

“Morning, sunshine. Equipment check in sixty, and then she wants to review the game plan.”

Twenty minutes later, Gibson’s motel room looked like a low-rent command center. He’d flipped his mattress up against the wall and placed an array of laptops, monitors, and keyboards in a semicircle on the box spring. Black-and-gray cables laced it all together, and yellow stickies affixed to the monitors and keyboards helped him keep each one straight. On one set of screens, Hendricks’s cameras, updating every three seconds, relayed stop-motion images of the streets surrounding the library. On another, the program Margaret Miller had so kindly installed displayed a wealth of information about the computers logged in to the library Wi-Fi.

Gibson’s program wasn’t overly complex, but it was brutally effective, relying on the library Wi-Fi to do most of the work for him.

There were myriad ports into a computer. All of those ports relied on a firewall to tell them whom to trust when users came knocking. A firewall was simply a big, burly bouncer who turned away anyone not on the VIP list. That was all well and good until the owner of the club, the human user, called down to the bouncer and, in effect, gave a user VIP clearance. The user was telling the bouncer to hold open the velvet rope and let them into the club, no questions asked. That was what happened whenever the user opened a web page, clicked on a link in an e-mail, or ran a program. Or joined a Wi-Fi network.

In order for a user to use Wi-Fi, the bouncer had to trust the user and open a port for him or her. Once trust was established, anything the user sent through that port was also trusted. That was because the library network had its own firewall and most users relied on default settings when setting up their computers, and default settings tended to be far too trusting where Wi-Fi networks were concerned. Bad idea in general. Really bad idea in this case, since Gibson’s program was already inside the library’s firewall.

As a result, Gibson’s program would allow him to wander in unaccosted and gather information from most computers logged in to the library Wi-Fi. Depending on the computers’ individual security settings, he might gather names, addresses, contacts, cell numbers, credit-card numbers, and outgoing IP addresses—all in a matter of seconds.

In addition, by exploiting the Wi-Fi access points scattered around the library, he could more or less triangulate users’ locations. Unfortunately, there weren’t enough access points to give more than a crude map, but he could tell at a glance how many users were on each floor of the library, how many in the park to the west, and if anyone was on one of the side streets within range.

As he stood to leave for Jenn’s six thirty a.m. briefing, one of his monitors flashed an alert. It showed a solitary log-in coming from the park. Immediately, personal data from the device began to unspool across another monitor: Lisa Davis . . . 814 area code . . . home address . . . work address . . . e-mail . . . contacts . . . web-browser history. He smiled and toggled over to the cameras in the park. No one on a laptop; the only person in the park was a pregnant woman pushing a stroller.

Probably meant her smartphone was connecting automatically to the library network. To be certain, he dialed her number, and then on the camera monitor watched her take out her phone and, not recognizing the incoming number, send him straight to voice mail.

Sure enough, a pedestrian at the far edge of the Wi-Fi’s range connected to the network for a few seconds before passing out of range. It popped up as a blip on his map and then vanished just as quickly.

Gibson frowned. Smartphones would make things messy. It was an obvious enough issue that he kicked himself for not anticipating it. Times had changed since his arrest, and he needed to catch up quickly. He was glad neither Jenn nor Hendricks was here to call him out for it.

He thought through his options, then made adjustments to his program, filtering smartphone traffic into a subdirectory. He wasn’t after a phone, but he’d harvest the data and check it later. If it came to that. His fingers danced lightly over the keyboard. His handwriting might be barely legible, but he could type at nearly eighty words per minute—a child of the times. He hit “Refresh” and watched the cell signature in the park disappear. That ought to clear things up a little.

But only a little. The citizens of Somerset were clearly eager to embrace the unseasonably cool weather. After weeks of days in the upper eighties, a day in the seventies felt like a gift from God. By lunchtime, downtown Somerset bore little resemblance to the ghost town that had greeted them on Sunday. The park beside the library was packed with mothers and their young children, workers on their lunch break, and people out to enjoy the sunshine. A group of high-school girls had spread out beach blankets and were sunning themselves on the grass, which in turn had brought shirtless boys and their Frisbees. An ice-cream truck set up shop on the corner and was doing brisk trade in cones and Popsicles. As the afternoon wore on, the crowd didn’t dissipate but rather swelled as people decided to play hooky from work and start their weekends early.

“How are we doing?” Jenn’s voice asked through his earpiece.

His eyes wandered over to the camera aimed at the park. Jenn was sitting alone on a park bench with a good view of the area. In her employment photo, she'd worn a business suit and her hair was down. Today, she was dressed for a workout—hair pulled back tightly in a ponytail, baseball cap and oversized sunglasses obscuring her face. She sipped a water bottle looking like she was taking it easy after a run. Given the tailored suits that he was accustomed to seeing her wear, he’d taken Jenn for one of those StairMaster-obsessed women whose goal in life was spaghetti arms and a size two. But the tank top and shorts made him realize how mistaken he’d been. She was an athlete and an incredibly fit one at that. But he knew that her extreme fitness was practical; her sculpted shoulders and thighs spoke to a coiled, lethal strength.

“Looking good,” he said.

She glanced toward the camera, but he couldn’t read her expression behind her sunglasses and Steelers cap.

“You better be talking about the weather,” she said.

“What else?”

“Uh-huh. Hendricks, status?”

Hendricks was stationed in the Cherokee a block away from the library, where he had a clear view up and down the street in front of the library.

“I’ve got some foot traffic into the library and park, but not a lot out. I count five, maybe six, possible matches for our profile that are inside the library. Another seven inside that fall outside our profile’s parameters.”

“I’ve got six in the park. Gibson, are we missing anyone?”

“No, that conforms to what I’m seeing too. Computer traffic has been steady, and I’m not seeing anything sneaky from the perimeter.”

“And all quiet at ACG?” she asked.

Too quiet, unfortunately. The screen that displayed inbound and outbound traffic on ACG’s network showed nothing out of the ordinary. And no matter how hard he glared, it seemed resolutely determined to keep on doing nothing out of the ordinary. It had led him to worry that maybe they’d tipped their hand and didn’t know it.

Were they waiting for someone who would never show and was already a thousand miles away, running hard? Or what if this guy were simply taking the week off? Gibson tried to imagine waiting until next Friday to find out. And the Friday after that, and the Friday after that. Suzanne’s memory weighed heavily on him each day, and it was beginning to wear him out. Hendricks had mentioned that his longest stakeout had been seven weeks. Gibson prayed that they wouldn’t be out here that long.

“Gibson. All quiet at ACG?” Jenn asked again.

“Nothing so far,” he said.

“All right, well, next move is his.”

Although they were focusing on men who fit the FBI’s profile, their cameras captured stills of everyone, man or woman, who came within a hundred yards of the library. Jenn had explained the approach to him during her briefing that morning. The woman did like a good briefing.

“In all likelihood the profile is right. A profile isn’t a hunch. It’s statistics, and the numbers say that whoever took Suzanne was probably a white male now in his forties or fifties.”

“But . . . ,” he said, feeling one coming.

“But there are always outliers. Maybe it was a woman trying to replace a lost child, or someone older or younger than we usually see in cases like this. A person of color hunting outside their ethnic group. A terrorist or some other politically motivated abductor. Truth is, the FBI had no way of eliminating any of those possibilities and neither do we.”

“So play the odds, but cover our bases?”

“Play the odds. Cover our bases.”

He passed the afternoon in his motel room, reviewing the surveillance footage for clear face shots, compiling them as stills and matching them, when relevant, with the compiled personal information from the computers logged in to the Wi-Fi. Every hour, he forwarded all-new photos and personal data to ACG—but not directly.

Out of fear that WR8TH had compromised ACG’s corporate servers, Gibson and Mike Rilling had set up independent servers to receive all case-related communications and data. Rilling was running the faces through facial-recognition software tied into federal and state databases. Putting names with faces, essentially, and hoping to get really lucky with a criminal record. A home run would be a hit on the National Sex Offender Registry.

Gibson had the TV on mute for company and, once he’d seen the same highlights on SportsCenter three times, he switched over to the news. Benjamin Lombard’s campaign was continuing to battle Governor Fleming’s. Lombard had hired a new campaign manager and had performed surprisingly strongly in California, Fleming’s home state. The pundits discussed the pros and cons of his new, more aggressive strategy. The vice president was in the middle of a swing through New England and was giving a speech in Boston this morning. Turnout was expected to be heavy.

Gibson wondered what would happen if they actually found Suzanne. What kind of a bump would it give Lombard’s campaign? The American people were suckers for a good narrative, and the sight of a reunited family might be too much for them to resist. Would it put Lombard over the top? He wasn’t sure he’d live through the irony of being Benjamin Lombard’s savior.

“I need a cup of coffee,” Hendricks muttered grumpily. “Don’t anyone talk to me unless they spot someone wearing an ‘I kidnapped Suzanne Lombard’ T-shirt, all right?”

Five minutes later the next best thing arrived in the form of a tall, awkwardly thin man with a bowed back and skin that looked to be made of candle drippings. The Wax Man sat down at a worktable, took off a backpack, and laid it on the table. Then he proceeded to stare at the kids playing by the fountain like a tourist picking a lobster from a tank. There was definitely something not okay about him.

“Are you seeing this guy?” Gibson asked.

“Yeah, I’ve got eyes on him. He’s giving me the creeps from a distance. Does he have a laptop?” Jenn asked.

“Negative. He’s just sitting there like he’s posing for a NAMBLA recruitment poster.”

As if on cue, the Wax Man unzipped his backpack and took out a shiny silver laptop.

“He appears to be taking requests,” Gibson reported. “One laptop by popular demand. See if he knows any Radiohead.”

The Wax Man began typing, and Gibson watched a device connect to the Wi-Fi. In moments, his program began pulling pertinent information from the laptop’s system registry.

“What do you have, Gibson?” Jenn asked.

“Meet James MacArthur Bradley. I have his home address and cell-phone number.”

“Good. Forward it and his picture to Washington. Let’s see if Mr. Bradley has a criminal record,” she said.

They watched Bradley for ten tense minutes, urging him silently to do something. Periodically, the Wax Man would pause typing and look over the top of his laptop toward the kids on the grass and lick his lips wetly.

“What’s he doing?” Hendricks asked.

“Besides making my skin crawl? Not a lot,” Jenn said.

“I’ll second that.”

“Yeah, well, him being creepy is all academic if he doesn’t actually access ACG,” Hendricks said.

“I wish I had good news, but no joy there,” said Gibson.

Abruptly, the Wax Man shut his laptop, shoved it into his backpack, and walked briskly toward the street.

“Where the hell is he going?” Jenn asked.

“Did we spook him?”

“I don’t think so,” she said. “Hendricks, he’s rounding the corner toward you in three, two, one . . .”

Hendricks grunted an affirmative. “Got him. Oh, yeah, I see what you mean. That is not a well guy. He’s getting into a late-model Ford. Started it. Annnnnnnd, he’s out of here.”

“Damn it,” Jenn said.

“Well, I got model and plates,” Hendricks said. “But if that was our guy, then yeah, I’d say we just got made.”

“And if he isn’t?” Gibson asked.

“Then I guess he had somewhere to be.”

“Do we go after him?”

“No,” Jenn cut in. “Nothing we can do about it now. We maintain the stakeout and assume he wasn’t our guy. We have enough data that we can follow up later if we need to.”

With that, the three of them settled into a state of advanced, professional waiting otherwise known in the trade as excruciating boredom. By four o’clock, the park was still busy but fairly static. No one new using a Wi-Fi-enabled device had come or gone in thirty minutes. Gibson was tracking fourteen users logged in to the library’s Wi-Fi. Nine outside and five inside. Outside, he had four on tablets or e-readers—two white women, a white man in his twenties, and a silver-haired African American man who had to be at least eighty. That left five outside on laptops, also a mix of genders and ethnicities, with three of particular interest.