Need You Now

49

“W ho ate the leftover pizza?” asked Connie.

I had no idea that the city that never sleeps extended all the way to New Jersey. Her kitchen was like an active crime scene, more like two o’clock in the afternoon than two in the morning. Before we’d gone to bed, Scully’s tech expert had called to confirm that there was indeed spyware on my BlackBerry, which would have allowed someone to overhear my conversation with Evan before he died. Scully called him in again after the computer crash, so there were five of us in a cramped kitchen trying to figure out what had happened to Connie’s outdated PC, though Connie’s immediate concern was the case of the missing slice.

“I ate it an hour ago,” I said.

Connie grumbled as she closed the refrigerator door, then pulled up a barstool next to Lilly. I stole a quick glance, and all that kept Lilly from doing a face-plant on the floor was her elbow on the Formica counter and her chin resting in her hand. All of us were exhausted, but Lilly especially was struggling to focus on what Scully’s friend was telling me.

“The attempted download completely fried the motherboard and the hard drive along with it,” he said.

Zach Epstein was the same former FBI tech expert whom Scully had called upon to find the spyware on my BlackBerry. Zach was definitely not “retired.” A good techie with as little as two years of “FBI” experience on his résumé could easily land a job in private security that paid ten times his former government salary.

“Exactly what does that mean?” I asked.

Zach said, “Ever see that old public service announcement on TV with the egg in the frying pan: This is your brain on drugs? That’s pretty much Connie’s hard drive.”

“Can we recover Evan’s file?”

“I’ve run every diagnostic test I can run,” said Zach. “The file is not there to recover, is what I’m telling you. The download failed, and in the process it fried the hard drive. I could recover Connie’s address book and probably 80 percent of whatever data was there when you attempted the download. But I can’t recover a file that never made it to the hard drive.”

“There has to be a way to recover that file,” said Scully. “People are always saying that e-mails never really go away.”

“Normally the surest route would be to access Evan’s e-mail account and retrieve his sent messages.”

“Then let’s do that,” said Scully.

“Already tried,” said Zach. “Not only has the account been shut down, but there’s a monster security wall around it. No doubt that’s part of the homicide investigation.”

“Or part of the continued cover-up of Operation BAQ,” I said. “There has to be another option.”

“Just to make sure we’re not overlooking the obvious, is there any way for me to get my hands on Evan’s actual computer?”

“Gone,” I said. “Whoever killed him took it.”

“That’s what I figured,” said Zach. “The other possibility is that even though the message is no longer in your in-box, we could recover it from the bank’s server. Do you think the bank’s IT people would work with us on that?”

“I wouldn’t even ask,” I said.

“I get paid to do things the hard way, but it would be a whole lot easier if I had the bank’s cooperation.”

“That’s not possible,” I said.

“Why not?” asked Zach.

I glanced at Scully, who gave me a little nod that said Zach was cool and that it was okay to share my theory with him. “You said before that the BlackBerry is a highly secure smartphone, less vulnerable to spyware than most. And my BlackBerry was made even more secure by enhancements from BOS security.”

“That’s right,” said Zach.

“Someone still managed to load spyware without ever having touched my phone. It was a remote implant, which makes me think it was the bank that put it there.”

Zach said, “That would be a likely source, at least from the standpoint of technical ease and opportunity. But ‘the bank’ is a big place.”

I didn’t see a reason to be more specific, but Scully overrode me.

“We think Joe Barber authorized the spyware,” said Scully.

Zach was like a walking computer, and I could almost see his mind working as he processed the various puzzle pieces we’d fed him: the phone call from Evan telling me that he’d decrypted the Treasury memo; the e-mail with his decrypted attachment sent minutes later; Evan’s body in the Dumpster minutes after he’d hit Send.

“You’re saying that Joe Barber killed your friend and stole his computer to stop you from getting a decrypted copy of the Treasury memo on Operation BAQ?”

“To keep the world from seeing that memo,” I said. “I’m not saying he physically pulled the trigger. But, yes, I believe he’s behind it.”

Zach glanced at Connie, as if he were suddenly interested in the family consensus. “You agree with him?”

“That depends,” said Connie. “I would need to know more about how that spyware you found on Patrick’s BlackBerry actually works. It’s just hard for me to imagine someone-especially someone like Joe Barber-eavesdropping on Patrick’s BlackBerry in real time, twenty-four hours a day, just in case something of interest came along.”

Zach smiled, as if the statement were naïve. “That’s not the way it works. Virtually all spyware is programmed to alert the master when the target-in this case, Patrick-is actually using his telephone.”

“But I use my phone a lot,” I said. “Someone would have to listen to hours and hours of crap in the hope of getting ten seconds of meat, unless there’s a way to refine it further.”

“There is,” said Zach. “More sophisticated spyware can be programmed to alert the master only when you communicate with certain phone numbers.”

“So it’s possible that when Evan called to tell me about the decryption, the ‘master,’ as you call him, received an automatic alert that I was on the phone with Evan.”

“That’s right.”

“Can you tell by looking at my phone if that alert system was, in fact, part of the spyware?”

“No. That would only be in the master’s equipment.”

“Damn. Nothing’s ever easy,” I said.

“You got a plan to deal with someone like Joe Barber?” Zach asked.

“Is that spyware on my BlackBerry still active, even though you’ve analyzed it?” I asked.

“Yeah, sure,” said Zach.

“Then the answer to your question is yes,” I said. “I do have a plan.”