Chapter Eighteen
When there was a break in traffic, Diana made a U-turn and got over just in time to slip into the space that a van had just pulled out of. At least she still remembered how to parallel park.
She turned the car off, set the emergency brake, and sat there for a few moments, taking in the buildings that surrounded her, imagining that she was angling the view on her computer screen. She picked up Daniel’s walking stick from the floor of the car, anchoring her senses on its familiar feel.
Get out of the car. She tapped her fingers on the stick, as if on a keyboard, typing the command /out.
Diana grabbed her backpack and laptop case and waited, watching her side mirror as cars came from behind and passed her. She opened the door and got out. Slammed it shut and clicked the remote before crossing the street and walking back up the block to the building entrance.
Up close, she could see shadows of graffiti beneath the gray paint on the steel door. A piece of cardboard had been slipped into the doorjamb where the latch would have engaged. Diana pushed and the heavy door swung open.
A naked lightbulb—the spiral-shaped energy-efficient kind—hung from the ceiling, casting a dull glow over a cramped interior. The walls looked battered, like someone had used them for target practice, and the floor was covered with small square ceramic tiles that had once been white. Diana breathed in. She smelled pine cleaner over urine.
Across the adjacent wall was a massive sliding door to what looked like a freight elevator. Opposite that was a door with a little window in it. She pulled that door a crack. Just beyond was a broad concrete stairway going up.
Clank. Diana whirled around. There was a hum and then a breeze inside the vestibule, as if someone had opened a window. The elevator was in motion.
Diana knew it had to be PWNED, doing what she said she’d do—coming down to meet her. But as the hum grew louder, Diana felt as if the space she was in was compressing.
She darted through the door and into the stairwell. It seemed to take forever for the door to drift shut. She watched through the little window.
The humming stopped. Another clank and a scree announced the elevator’s arrival. A rectangle of light fell on the floor of the vestibule—the elevator’s door had slid open.
There was that whirring sound again, and into the vestibule rolled a wheelchair. Sitting in it was the hunched-over figure of a woman. She was pitched forward as if straining to see, her clawed hand gripping the joystick on the arm of the chair.
Diana pulled the stairwell door open and stepped out.
“Nadia?” The woman propped herself up against her chair arm with one elbow and offered her other hand. “I’m Pam. Dr. Pamela David-Braverman if you want to get technical about it.”
“You’re a physician?” Diana asked, grasping Pam’s cool, stiff hand.
“You bet.” Pam’s mouth opened in a generous smile. Despite braided white-white hair, Pam’s smooth, unlined face suggested she was barely forty.
“I’m Diana. Diana Highsmith.”
The elevator door began to close, but before it could do so, Pam backed her wheelchair into the opening. The door crashed into it and rebounded. Then a buzzer started to ring. Pam seemed unfazed.
“Your car is okay parked where it is for now—until the parking Nazis arrive in the morning. Then I’ve got a resident permit we can leave on the dash.” As Pam talked, Diana could feel her sharp gaze picking her apart—as if she were being autopsied. Pam must have recognized the leather jacket and red boots as part of Nadia’s getup. “Let’s go up.” Pam backed the wheelchair up a bit to make room for Diana to slide past.
When Diana hesitated, Pam said, “There was a guy inspecting this thing a few weeks ago. It might look like shit but it runs. Otherwise, it’s five long dark flights up. I understand they’ve had a problem with homeless people sneaking in and harvesting lightbulbs. But hey, it’s your call.”
Pam backed the wheelchair up farther to make more room. Diana stepped into the elevator and pressed her shoulder against the wall as the door clanked shut.
Pam tipped her chair back so it balanced on its two oversize wheels. She raised the seat and pushed the button for the fourth floor.
“This new wheelchair has changed my life,” Pam said as the seat lowered. With a groan the elevator started to ascend. “Stays charged for a week. Turns on a dime. Even climbs stairs.” Pam reached for Diana’s hand, and Diana knew her friend was chattering away to help Diana stay calm.
Finally the elevator stopped and they got out. One of the doors on the dark corridor stood open. Pam rolled toward it. The raucous sound of a bird singing leaked from inside.
“That’s a clock,” Pam said, tossing the words back over her shoulder. “My sister’s idea of a Christmas present. She’s into clocks. She also gave me one shaped like a hen that clucks on the hour and lays an egg. That one’s still in the box.”
“My sister’s into dietary supplements,” Diana said, following close behind. “And body lotions.”
“Equally useful, I’m sure, but not nearly as charming.”
The birdsong clock turned out to be hanging on one of the cavernous apartment’s bare brick walls. The multipaned windows looked as if they’d been original to this turn-of-the-century manufacturing complex. Diana had read enough local history to know that it would have once been waterfront property before landfill extended Boston’s shoreline.
Waist-high bookcases divided the space. Scanning them, Diana saw mostly medical texts and travel books, including a guide to trekking in Tibet and Bill Bryson’s book on walking the Appalachian Trail. Tucked in also was a well-worn copy of Heidi.
Flowering plants—including African violets in a range of colors and shapes that Diana had never seen before—and framed photos lined the top shelves. One of the pictures was of a little dark-haired girl of about eight with huge eyes who smiled at the camera from a wheelchair. The two adults, a man and a woman standing beside her and beaming, were probably Pam’s parents.
Against the back, windowless wall was a bed and about ten feet of built-in closet with a rod chest-high. Computers in a setup that rivaled Diana’s own were arrayed in a front corner under a window. Pam’s wheelchair, with its black-cushioned seat and leather armrests, was the ideal desk chair.
Once inside, Pam rode smoothly, despite the uneven pine-plank floors. The chair must have had shock absorbers, maybe even a gyroscope to keep it so perfectly balanced.
Sitting on a cushy white couch accented with hot-pink and deep purple silk throw pillows and drinking a cup of dark, smoky oolong tea that Pam prepared for her, Diana told Pam about Ashley’s disappearance and apparent reappearance. Pam listened, absorbing each revelation as if she were listening to the weather report.
“And you don’t think your sister came home at all,” Pam said. “Someone else left the clothes and picked up the mail to make it look as if she did.”
It sounded preposterous. “I’ve left her a gazillion messages. On her home phone. On her cell. At work. She’s got the number of the cell phone I’ve got with me.” Diana slipped it from her pocket to make sure she hadn’t missed a call. “If she’s back, why hasn’t she called me?”
“And you think someone tampered with your security systems?” Pam paused to consider this, as if it were a completely rational possibility. Diana felt herself relax another notch. “Seems like there ought to be a connection. Think back. Did anything unusual happen before your sister disappeared?”
“Ashley broke up with the guy she was seeing. That’s pretty unusual. For Ashley. And he wasn’t too thrilled.” Diana told Pam about the scene Aaron had made in the bar. How he’d followed her to Copley Square to apologize, then backed off.
“You think he might be the person your sister’s neighbor saw in the hall?”
“He could be.”
“And you know for sure that your sister was at Copley Square three days ago?”
“She called me from there. And there’s video footage, posted online, that shows her at the improv event.”
Diana went over to Pam’s computer. The forum in the amphitheater on OtherWorld was still going on. Pam had left PWNED sitting on the stage, watching the speakers.
“May I?” Diana asked, her hand poised over the mouse.
Pam nodded.
Diana opened a new browser window and typed in the Spontaneous Combustion address. She clicked the “Up in the Sky” video they’d posted. As the opening music played, Pam rolled her wheelchair over.
“This was Friday,” Diana said. She fast-forwarded to the clear shot of Ashley. “And that’s my sister, Ashley. There are just a couple more glimpses of her.” She fast-forwarded to the next one, and then to the next.
“That’s it?”
“That’s all I could find in the montage they posted. But of course there’s got to be more footage. Lots more.” She told Pam about the different video cameras that had filmed the event. “I called, and they offered to let me examine the rest of the footage. But I’ve got to get over there to do it.”
“So what are we waiting for?” Pam said. “We can go right now.”
“They’re closed,” Diana said. It was nearly seven o’clock already. But Pam called anyway, hitting the speakerphone button so Diana could hear.
The phone rang three times. Then: “We’re here from 10 A.M. until 6 P.M.,” a recorded voice informed them.
Pam stabbed at the phone and disconnected the call. “First thing tomorrow we head over there.”
Over dinner—a meze platter and kabobs that Pam brought back to the apartment from a Middle Eastern restaurant around the corner—Diana reconsidered Pam’s question: Had anything unusual happened before Ashley disappeared?
She explained to Pam the kind of work she and Jake did, resolving security issues for clients in health care. “The same day Ashley disappeared, another client blew up in our faces. As soon as we’d found the breach, before we could track down the hackers, they called us off. It’s the third time that’s happened. I was furious.”
“Can you tell what these hackers were after?”
“I can show you one of the files they took. It didn’t mean a thing to me.”
Diana connected her laptop to Pam’s wireless network and got into her e-mail account. She opened the data file she’d left in the drafts folder and turned her laptop so Pam could see.
All it took was a glance. “That’s a DNA profile,” Pam said. She scrolled through it. “A unique individual, somebody somewhere. If we knew what we were looking at, we could find out all sorts of things about him.”
“Him?”
“Him.” Pam pointed to a line of data. “But that’s just the beginning. An expert could analyze the genetic code and tell us something about this man’s ethnic background. Certain genes make a person susceptible to specific viruses and immune to others. Or deadly allergic. Or—”
“But what good is it? I mean, why would someone want to steal this stuff?”
Pam propped herself up, straightening her spine and shifting in the chair. It occurred to Diana how uncomfortable it could get, sitting in the same chair all day long.
“Assuming they could link the profile to a person, like through a Social Security number, I can think of lots of information in a DNA profile that someone wouldn’t want others to know—and that you certainly wouldn’t want your insurance company or your employer to get wind of. Just suppose, for example, that you have the gene for ALS. Or you’ve got a chromosomal abnormality that’s been linked to violent behavior? Or sexual perversion? I can easily imagine—”
Pam was interrupted by what sounded like a dog barking. It was coming from her computer. “My network watchdog,” she said.
She rolled over to her computer, clicked the mouse, and the sound stopped. “It just stopped a message from going out.” Frown lines deepened on her forehead as she stared at new information that had popped up. She turned to Diana. “Looks like it blocked an outgoing message that originated on your computer.”
“But I didn’t send anything.”
“Well, your computer sure as hell did. Or at least it tried to. Must have been when you connected to the Internet.” She swiveled the screen so Diana could see.
OUTBOUND LEVEL 1 BREACH INTERCEPTED.
Below that was a message addressed to USER003 on Volganet. All it contained was:
42.33765016859684–71.07173681259155
“I have no idea what those numbers mean,” Pam said. “Do you?”
“They’re geocodes,” Diana said. She pulled up the Web site WhereUAre.com and pasted the numbers into a search box. “Shit,” she said, the back of her neck prickling as a map of the South End came up with a virtual pushpin on Harrison Avenue in the precise location of Pam’s apartment building.