The Red Room

13

Grace has arranged herself an apartment rented by the week in a building suited for Westerners. The idiosyncrasy — that in a Middle Eastern nation she might be considered Western — is not lost on her. She and Besim made three stops: grocery store, pharmacy and liquor shop. She has everything from feminine products and mascara to Greek yogurt and vodka.

The apartment is furnished and well appointed, with a kitchenette, nice linens, Wi-Fi and a flat-screen television with full satellite. It keeps her out of a hotel, allowing a lower profile.

Already at work attempting to hack Mashe Okle’s investment accounts, she maintains an open videoconference with Xin in Rutherford Risk’s Data Sciences division, which operates 24/7/365. Her VPN connection has been pinged around the world, aliased and encrypted. Slipping into an investment server undetected is impossible, so once again she must cloak herself. The going is tedious. Data Services is advising her as to the exact time to make the hack. She waits, her finger hovering above the Return key.

Her phone rings, the caller ID on her screen. She mutes the video and takes the call.

“Ma’am.” She doesn’t like being addressed this way but didn’t have the heart to tell her driver. By arrangement, he remains parked outside, on call through midnight.

“You have man friend maybe watching building?”

“Explain, please, Besim.”

“Man park twice. First time, west of building. Get out. Walk around building. Move car to see east side.”

“How alert of you, Besim,” she says.

“This is man you follow, perhaps?”

“Perhaps.” She thanks him for his attention. Asks him to let her know if anything changes.

Ending the cell call, she takes the videoconference off Mute. “Xin?”

“Wei.” Yes. Thousands of miles away on an island in the South China Sea, Xin sounds as if he’s next to her.

“You have my coordinates?”

“Within one meter.”

“How long for you to account for every cell phone turned on within one hundred… no, let’s say, fifty… meters of me?”

“How many carriers?”

“Enough to cover in the ninetieth percentile of coverage.”

“Soonest? Fifteen minutes. Longest? An hour.”

“Put someone on it, will you please?”

“Copy.”

A symbol indicates he’s muted his line. She does the same, taking note of the time. The minutes drag out. After five minutes, she’s reconnected as Xin gives her a countdown to the hack.

She’s in. She celebrates the success by pouring herself warm vodka. Wishes she’d given it time to cool. Now, data-mining a major investment firm, she envisions herself as a salmon or sperm swimming upstream, seeking out a specific destination. It’s a journey. She knows she must be patient. As in a video game, there are dragons and demons lurking, traps set, awaiting a misstep on her part. Having extracted Mashe Okle’s password from the bank server, she uses it here, hoping he’s a man of convenience, and gains entrance to his investment portfolio.

She laughs at the irony of the Iranian’s savings being heavily invested in the U.S. stock market. She’s feeling the vodka.

He’s a wealthy man, but it’s not the kind of money she might have expected. The stocks and mutual funds favor scientific companies. She is annoyed by the worming thought that this doesn’t pass the sniff test for an arms dealer. Did Dulwich ever confirm that, or was it her assumption? She’s eager to speak with Knox; he knows Dulwich better. At the very least, he’ll have a keener sense of what’s at play. Knox is not one to take on in a game of cards.

She clicks through to the portfolio’s history, increases the time sample and prints to a PDF file. On point, she flies through menus so quickly another’s eye would be unable to keep up. Multiple files are saved and archived in a matter of seconds for later analysis. This is not a time for window-shopping. She prides herself on the speed and agility with which she extracts every morsel of relevant data. When she logs out of Mashe’s account, she’s at forty-seven seconds. She closes the firm’s web page at forty-nine, giving her a total of under a minute. She celebrates by throwing her arms in the air, an Olympian sprinter at the tape.

“Three hundred seventy-one.” It’s Xin from the video window in the corner of her screen.

“Within fifty meters?”

“Affirmative.”

“Of those, how many have called or been called by known law enforcement, domestic or foreign, in the past ten days?”

“Published, or known to us?”

“Known to us,” she says.

“Back at you.” His line mutes. Xin loves this stuff as much as she does.

She pours herself another drink, this one on the rocks. Warns herself to take it easy. She likes vodka a little too much. Has no remorse about drinking alone. She’s always alone. Even in a mixed group she feels isolated, believing her mind more facile than most, her personal history more complicated. The truth is, most people bore her.

“No joy,” says Xin.

The trouble with vodka: it skews her sense of time. Ten minutes have passed. She’s been surfing Mashe Okle’s investment files offline. The vodka level is halfway down the ice.

“Calls and texts placed outside Turkey in past ten days,” she states.

“Hang on. That shouldn’t take but a moment.”

She finds the British accent on her fellow Chinese appealing. It’s either Xin or the vodka warming her.

“Fifteen.”

“Better,” she says. “We can work with that. You’ll need a phantom caller ID. Untraceable. Australia. UAE. Israel. UK. Washington. Maybe a rotation.”

“Copy.”

“I want you to ring each of the fifteen numbers in thirty-second intervals. Wrong number, but sell it. Maybe a child’s voice asking for mother.”

“Copy.”

“Let me know when you’re ready. I’m here.” She mutes the video window. Considers another three fingers of vodka. Convinces herself it doesn’t negatively affect her thought process — if anything, it enhances it. Knows damn well it’s a lie. Pours more anyway.

Yum.

She calls Besim. “Can you see him?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“He can see you?”

“Not probably. My seat low whole time. Resting. Who knows?”

“I’m going to keep you on the phone. You need to tell me if he answers his phone. The moment he answers his phone. You un… derstand?” She slurs. Thinks nothing of it. Checks the glass. Half of what she poured is gone. She obviously shorted herself. Wouldn’t mind topping it off.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Good. Stay on the line please.”

Feeling incredibly good, she closes her eyes, celebrating the vodka’s ability to cleanse her fatigue, settle her racing mind and warm her limbs. What’s not to love? Opens her eyes again when Xin speaks.

“You napping on me?”

“Ready?”

“Will call all fifteen, thirty seconds apart.”

“Correct.”

“Here we go.” Her head clears; she is instantly sober despite her efforts otherwise. This is not the first time this has happened; where the alcohol haze goes, she has no idea, but it’s undetectable. She has the cell phone to her ear. She watches Xin. He’s gotten a young woman in her early twenties to make the calls. The woman’s face glistens with a sheen of nervousness. Grace wants to caution her to do it right, but knows it would only add to the woman’s anxiety. She has to trust Xin. She chuckles to herself — his name, a common one, means “trust.”

“Something amusing?” Xin asks.

“You had to be there,” she says. She drains the remaining vodka. Trust is not found in her personal lexicon. She knows its absence is the source of much of her inner struggle.

The calls go out. The young woman does an excellent voice, sounding about thirteen and troubled. Three calls. Five. Grace keeps eyeing the vodka bottle, knowing she’s over her efficacious limit but wanting more.

“He’s on phone,” Besim says in her left ear.

“Joy!” Grace says to Xin, whose typically quiet face registers a thrill. “That’s the one we want.”

“Got it.”

“Off phone.”

She mutes the video. “Thank you, Besim. That’s all for the night. But please, don’t leave for at least another thirty minutes. I will tell you when.”

“As you wish.”

She will turn off the apartment light before allowing Besim to drive off. She wants as little connection to the wrong number as possible.

Back with Xin, she says, “I need all calls, text messages and web access to and from that number over the past ten days to two weeks.”

“It will take a few hours. Likely a lot of data. I will post here. You can access it once I post. I will let you know.”

“Give me the GPS data as well.”

“Copy.” Xin ends the video call.

Grace is left with nothing on her computer screen but her wallpaper photo of a dog and cat curled together at the foot of a wingback chair. They’re not hers. She has no pets. No wingback chairs.

She isn’t who she pretends to be. She isn’t who she is.

As bad as that makes her feel, she feels damn good.