Conspiracy

150

The e-mailed threats had several things in common: they’d all been sent by e-mails, they had all come from e-mail accounts created only a few minutes before they were sent, and they had all been sent over the Internet by a user who had found an unprotected wireless network.

And that was about it, at least as far as Gallo could determine. He sent a number of e-mail messages to the addresses used to send the messages; each contained tracers that would have helped him track down the sender’s “true” address. Not one was opened. The e-mail ser vices that provided the accounts were of little help, since the information that had been provided was quickly shown to be fake.

What else did he know? Gallo got up from his computer to give his eyes and neck a break. He started doing push-ups on the floor.

The sender had oldish laptops; the working theory was that they were secondhand and disposed of after being used.

The sender knew at least a little bit about computer networks.

The sender moved around a lot. A message had been sent from Washington, D.C., one from suburban New York, and one from Las Vegas.

Gallo was on push-up seventy-three when his phone rang.

Usually the phone meant trouble, but he was getting winded and decided to answer it anyway.

“Robby, this is Hernes Jackson. The Secret Service has been looking at the last of the threatening e-mails, the one sent to Dalton.”

“No kidding. I’m, like, working that thing right now.”

“That’s why I’m calling, Robby,” said Jackson. “A custodian found the laptop in Las Vegas, and the police tracked the own er to the Washington, D.C., area. He said he’d sold it at a used-computer meet in Washington several months ago.

When the Secret Service showed up looking for the e-mail sender, the police told them about the notebook.”

“Um, the thing is, Hernes, there aren’t going to be records of the same, right?” said Gallo. “I’m going to guess it was a consignment thing.”

“I know, but I thought you’d like to know.”

“Yeah.”

“I did have another idea.”

“Fire away.”

“You compared the e-mails to make sure they had the same author, right?”

“Sure. Didn’t really need the text compare, but I did anyway.”

Text compare was a software tool that took two or more pieces of prose and examined them for “commonalities”; it could tell whether they were written by the same person or not. In this case, the messages were so similar, the tool was superfluous.

“The constituents whom McSweeney had trouble with — can we compare those letters to the e-mails?”

“Yeah,” said Gallo. “On it.”