Pulse

65

New York City, the present

J erry Lido said, “We’ve got a problem.”

Quinn and Pearl were in the office with him. They stopped what they were doing at their desks and looked at him.

“Someone’s been here,” he said.

Quinn glanced around as if to find what Lido was talking about.

“Not here,” Lido said. “But here virtually. Our virtual here.”

“On our computers?” Pearl asked.

“Of course.” For Lido the virtual world of computers was the real world. Then there was Lido’s world where other people lived. And his world when he was drinking.

“My computer’s been acting a little funky,” Pearl said, wondering how Lido kept it all straight.

He grinned at her. “Exactly! We’ve been hacked. In fact, we’re in the process of being hacked right now.”

Helen the profiler entered the office, looking tall and lean as a fashion model, only a little too muscular. As usual, there was a fine sheen of perspiration on whatever bare flesh showed, as if she’d been working out. She’d caught the tail end of the conversation. “Somebody wants to know what’s on our computers,” she said.

“Somebody knows,” Lido corrected her. He explained to her about having been hacked.

“Can you find out who he was?”

“Is,” Lido said. “And that’s what I’ve been trying to do the last two hours. He’s put up Chinese walls, firewalls, indestructible walls. Our computerized information is going only one way-out.”

“He’s toying with you,” Helen said.

Pearl immediately started to close down her computer.

“Better unplug it, too,” Lido said.

She did. Quinn and Helen went around unplugging the other desk computers.

“You think he could turn them back on if they were plugged in?” Helen asked.

Lido grinned. “He might have installed the software to do that without us knowing about it. He might be online here at two in the morning, for all we know.”

“If he can do that kind of thing to us,” Quinn said, “can we do it to him?” Like Quinn to go on the offensive.

“If we knew about him what he knows about us, yes,” Lido said. He stood up from his darkened computer screen.

“Where you going?” Pearl asked.

“Home, where I don’t have to work using this limited equipment.”

“I thought you installed new memory in our computers,” Quinn said.

Lido gave him a pitying look.

“Doesn’t Q and A have virus protection and firewalls and Chinese walls and all that stuff?” Helen asked.

Lido’s expression turned to one of contempt. Not for Helen, but for whoever had trespassed in his world and made his skills seem minor. “The hacker got in somehow, then deleted all possible links, so a trace, even by an expert like me, is impossible. Supposedly.” He snatched up a few items from his desk and then stalked out.

“His alcohol-tainted blood is up,” Helen said.

“I wouldn’t bet against him learning everything about this hacker,” Quinn said.

Helen went to the desk Lido had just vacated and perched on the edge. Quinn couldn’t help noticing her legs could use a shave. “Think about this,” she said. “The hacker might have been secretly browsing your computers for information for a long time.”

“He probably has been,” Quinn said. “But Lido inevitably caught up with him.”

Helen gave him her thinnest of smiles. “That’s one way of looking at it. Another is to figure that if the hacker had the skills to hack into your system without being noticed, then circumvent your high-tech security and learn what you were doing, wouldn’t he also have the skills to withdraw unnoticed?”

“Probably,” Quinn said. “But that would mean-”

Helen’s smile widened. “That the intruder wants you to know your computers have been hacked.”

At two minutes to midnight Lido called Quinn’s cell phone and woke him up. His words were slurred, and it took him a while to arrange his sentences with enough order for Quinn to understand that whatever precautions the mystery hacker had employed, they had worked. Lido gave Quinn a lot of tech talk he wouldn’t have understood even if Lido was sober and speaking clearly. The message was, there was no way to backtrack the hacker’s online footprints to the source.

Quinn lay awake in the dark for a long time after the phone call, wondering who would have the ability to outfox Lido on a computer.

Every possibility he came up with was a worry.