Chapter Thirty-Two
Diana took her time over the presentation, fiddling around with transitions and special effects that she’d normally never have messed with, stretching out what should have been a thirty-minute job. Daniel stayed at Cult of the Dead Cow for about a quarter of an hour. Then he opened a window with a bright green background and boxes and lists—probably a system management tool. After that he was in OtherWorld. He projected a combat sim on the curved silo wall. Diana had to turn away to keep from feeling seasick at the 3-D effect. Finally he pumped his fist and the gunfire and explosions stopped.
Then, for a while, there was just clicking and the odd ding or whoosh. He was probably in e-mail. She heard him yawn. She didn’t look around when he got up to pour himself yet another cup of coffee.
A little while later, Daniel leaned back in his chair, stretched his legs out in front of him, and folded his arms across his chest. He yawned and rubbed his face.
A few minutes later, he started to nod off, jerking awake and then subsiding. Finally he nodded off completely, tilting sideways. Diana waited. And waited.
She was about to get up when he gave a snort and sat up.
Diana pretended she was still working. Daniel had gone through more than half the pot of coffee. There should have been enough Xanax to make the average person comatose. But it would be a fatal mistake to consider Daniel average.
He sat forward, looked around, stretched and yawned, then settled back again. His eyes drifted shut and his head fell sideways. Full stop.
Diana waited, not daring to breathe. Daniel didn’t stir. She cleared her throat. No response. She scraped her chair and coughed. Still he slept.
She walked over to him. With his mouth and his jaw slack, his face completely relaxed and unwired, Diana could see both the man she’d fallen in love with and the one he’d turned into. Then and always, he was so self-centered, so completely focused on whatever mission he’d set himself at a given moment, that he was willing to throw the people who loved him off a virtual cliff.
Once upon a time, Diana had let him mold her, shape her. If she’d been an apt pupil, then losing him wouldn’t have broken her. But she’d allowed herself to depend on him to reflect back her very identity.
She looked around. He’d certainly found the perfect place from which to sow his brand of chaos. The mill was isolated, apparently abandoned, the silo like a bunker with its three-foot-thick walls.
She gazed up the wall, tracking a path connecting a rebar that was just a step up from the mesh floor to one just a few feet higher, to another one, and another, and on up to a rebar within easy reach of the hatch that led to the outside world. For any experienced climber, it wouldn’t be a challenging ascent. No more difficult than the practice wall she’d once trained on—the “baby wall,” Daniel had called it—after she’d mastered her terror of climbing it for the first time.
But climbing even a baby wall, alone and without a safety harness, was suicidal. Just imagining herself, halfway up and untethered, made her want to throw up. Besides, she had no intention of running away.
As she reached past Daniel for his laptop, she heard a sound. It was a faint but precise dinging, as if someone were tapping a key on a miniature xylophone.
Ding-ding-ding. Ding-ding-ding. It continued, irritating and persistent. Daniel twitched in his sleep. She hovered over him, trying to locate the source. Finally the sound stopped. That’s when she noticed that a message-waiting alert was flashing on his screen. But that hadn’t been where the sound itself originated.
Diana shifted the laptop over to the edge of his Daniel’s worktable and pulled her chair up to it. She clicked on the alert.
The text message that popped open was from Jake. It was a short note, saying that his plane was leaving on time and he was waiting to board at Logan.
Diana replied the way she imagined Daniel would have done, with a simple “A-OK.” Anything fancier and Jake might have realized that the reply hadn’t been written by Daniel. She wanted to convey an impression of business as usual.
But what exactly was their “business as usual”? Compromising data—she got that. But then what? There had to be more to it.
She toggled through Daniel’s open applications, pausing at a bright green network management screen. She stared at the network name at the top of the screen. Volganet. This was where data stolen from MedLogic had been copied. This was where her laptop kept trying to send GPS coordinates, betraying its location.
Damn them. They weren’t working with Volganet. They were Volganet.
Diana scanned the screen and found a list of users with registered access to Volganet. She scrolled down through the more than thirty entries. JWILSON. BPACKER. PHREAKANOID. ACIDFI. MKATE. It was a mix of hacker handles and conventional user names.
There was SOK0S—that was Daniel. NADIAV was there too. Account status: LOCKED.
Next, she navigated through the hierarchies of files on Volganet. At the top level, directory names were short and cryptic. One that caught her eyes was ML. MedLogic? NH and UI. Those could be abbreviations for Neponset Hospital and Unity Insurance—Gamelan clients that had bolted the minute she’d gotten a lead on their hackers.
Diana drilled down, through folders within folders. She felt sick. She’d thought she was such a hotshot security consultant when, in fact, she’d been nothing more than a puppet, a front for Daniel and Jake. They’d taken advantage of the trust she’d built and used her as their Trojan horse. She’d given them unfettered access to these companies’ systems, enabling them to help themselves . . . to what?
Opening some files at random, she found a bill for outpatient treatment; a medical history complete with name, address, and Social Security number; a DNA profile like the one stolen from MedLogic; a lab worker’s personnel file; a cancer patient’s treatment regimen; a script for Paxil.
Her gaze traveled from the computer screen to a pair of servers that sat on the floor. They were good-size computers, about the size of mini-refrigerators, each with drawers stacked on top. Those would contain slots for hard drives, a data farm. All told, she guessed there’d be room for tens of thousands of gigabytes—much more than they needed for any business she’d thought they were in.
How long had she been acting the fool? The dates on some of the folders went back six months. That had been during the time when Daniel was still out of the country, or so he claimed. Was there even a single fact in his supposed time line that she could check?
The mill—the property sale had to have been registered. That she could confirm.
She brought up a map of New Hampshire. She found Mill Village, traced the Merrimack River a few miles north to where she guessed the mill was located. Most likely it was in Merrimack County.
She found the Merrimack County’s online registry of deeds, created an account, and got as far as the inquiry screen. She set a range of 2008–2010 in the TRANSACTION DATE field. The only other piece of information she needed was LAST NAME.
She knew it was unlikely, but she tried Schechter, Daniel’s last name. No match. Then she tried Jake’s last name, Filgate. Back came a match for a Michele Filgate, but the property listed was on Main Street in Concord. Then she tried Wilson, then Packer, and on through the surnames she’d extracted from the list of system users.
Out of ideas, she tried typing in her own last name. Bingo. Diana Highsmith had purchased the four-acre parcel with three vacant industrial buildings for $1,660,000 on . . . Diana blinked . . . August 11, 2008.
Diana felt as if she’d been dropped, the air knocked out of her. Daniel and Jake had used her identity to buy this property four months before her life had been shattered by Daniel’s disappearance. They’d been planning, knowing that they’d need a bunker where Daniel could live off the grid.
Now she knew for sure what she’d been afraid to contemplate. There’d been no accident. Daniel hadn’t been free-climbing without a harness. He hadn’t been climbing at all. It was all a sham, orchestrated for her as an audience of one. She felt sick and angry, furious with herself. How could she have loved this man, trusted his friend? She was a complete fool.
Daniel must have started hiking back to civilization as soon as Diana had cleared the first ledge and was safely out of sight. He’d cried out from below and thrown his helmet into the crevasse. She might even have passed near him as she scrambled down, racing to base camp to bring help.
Had he felt even a twinge of regret or pity, or only relief at the baggage he’d shed and excitement at the new opportunities that were about to open up to him?