Chapter Seven
Diana was mortified that just reading GROB’s message set her tingling. He’d first contacted her months earlier in response to a question she’d posted in a forum for people suffering post-traumatic stress disorder. He’d had problems of his own to deal with, though he’d never told her what they were and she’d never told him hers.
The last time they’d “talked,” she’d shared with him the little forays she’d made—walks into her own backyard and several times around the block—and her determination to return to the real world. He’d written her back:
Small victories here, too. Today I drove to the bank and got out of the car instead of using the drive-up window. Lived to tell. World expands each day. When you are ready to take the plunge, we’ll sit on a beach. Drink a toast. Tell ghost stories and scare each other to death. (Ha Ha!) Build a bonfire and sleep out under the stars.
Diana could almost smell the wood fire, burned down to smoldering coals. It reminded her of the time that she and Daniel had camped in the Grand Tetons. They’d lain twined together in a double sleeping bag, looking up, the sky so close that Diana had felt as if she could poke Jupiter and run her fingers through the Milky Way.
That sleeping bag was one of many things that she’d simply left behind after Daniel died, fifteen months, one week, and three days ago—she knew without having to check the calendar. They had been living in a weather-beaten farmhouse and working in a converted railway container tucked into a ramshackle barn. With their nearest neighbor miles away, the greatest danger was getting mistaken for a deer during hunting season. They’d been major players in the hackers’ underground, and Daniel had achieved both the privacy and the notoriety he’d craved.
To earn the money they needed to support their spartan lifestyle and insatiable lust for the latest technology, they sold copies of Data Sucker, a program Daniel had written that infiltrated computers through the Windows operating system. Always the entrepreneur, Jake had then suggested that Daniel write another software that they called A-Sucker, which protected computers against Data Sucker. Turned out there was an even bigger market for that.
Diana remembered the day she’d had her epiphany. Daniel had been sitting at his computer, intent on a game he was into, his face aglow with colors radiating off the screen. With the sides of his scalp shaved bare like some shock troop commando, and his worktable mounded with coils of cable, jury-rigged circuit boards, hopped-up laptops, and surveillance equipment, he looked every inch his pseudonym, SOK0S. Sow Chaos.
“Daniel,” she’d said.
He was using a headset, but still Diana could hear the apocalyptic drumbeat and gunfire. She waved to snag his attention. When he looked over she mimed taking off the headset. He took it down, letting it rest around his neck.
“You see this headline?” she asked. “ ‘Death in a Medical Mix-up.’ Charles River Hospital.”
He rolled his eyes. “All we did was look around and bring down their database,” he said, his gaze returning to his computer screen.
“We didn’t just bring it down. Listen. ‘Hackers wreak mayhem resulting in the death of at least one patient—’ ”
“Bogus. That is so not our fault.” Daniel clicked the mouse. His screen lit up and Diana could hear the rat-a-tat of machine-gun fire.
“We destroyed their databases,” Diana said. “They had to reconstruct medical orders from scratch. Apparently they got one of them wrong.”
“Not our fault,” Daniel said, his fingers dancing on the keyboard.
“But it was a foreseeable consequence of something we did.”
“A lightning strike could have had the same results.” He put the game on pause and turned to face her. “People like that deserve what they get. They stockpile a mountain of private information and then do a lousy job protecting it.”
“Then once again, mission accomplished,” she said, flashing him two thumbs up. “We’ll get you a banner saying so. And I’m sure the woman who died thanks you too. She was fifty-two years old.”
“All right already.” Daniel looked longingly back at his screen.
“Daniel, she wasn’t fragged in some combat sim. She had a name and a family, and they did everything that they thought they were supposed to do”—Diana heard her voice catch, surprised by the rogue emotion that sideswiped her—“but she died anyway, needlessly, meaninglessly, because we thought it would be a great idea to trash their system.”
He winced. She knew he hated raw emotion. Well, that was just too damned bad.
“Remember when my mother had cancer? She turned fifty-two between rounds of chemo. She could barely swallow a bite of chocolate cake. I can’t even imagine what it would have been like for us if an accidental overdose had killed her.”
Daniel groaned and got up from his chair. He put his arms around her from behind and started to read over her shoulder. “You know as well as I do,” he said after a minute, “these guys were an accident waiting to happen. Their backup systems were for shit and not secured. If not us, then something much more destructive would have bitten them. All we did was wipe out some data. The chaos that followed? All of their own making.”
She looked up at him. “Right. We expose weaknesses and then wash our hands of what happens next.”
“So what’s your point? You knew what you were getting into.”
She held his gaze. “I thought I knew. But this time we’ve gone too far. Even if you don’t, I feel responsible for this woman’s death. Daniel, I’m telling you just as clearly as I can, I can’t keep doing this.”
He stood there, towering over her. “What are you saying?”
“I’m done. And I can’t let you and Jake keep doing this either.”
“You think you’re letting us do this?”
Her heart pounded but for once she didn’t apologize her way out of it. “I’m saying I’ve had enough.”
Diana had been completely stunned when, a few weeks later, Daniel had been the one to suggest that they sell the farm, move back to the Boston area, and open a security consulting company as a trio of rehabilitated black hats.
They’d settled on the name Gamelan. It was sufficiently obscure and she liked the way it sounded. It even made a kind of sense. Gamelan was a Balinese music ensemble of percussion instruments. Drums, gongs, xylophones, bells. The music sounded odd and discordant, like the way the three of them worked together.
Daniel was the one who’d suggested they celebrate the impending transition by climbing the Eiger. But only two of them had come back alive, and instead of a dissonant trio, Gamelan Security turned into a fractious duo. Numbed by loss, Diana had been reluctantly dragged along by a determined Jake.
The Klaxon alarm startled Diana back to the present. Her palms turned sweaty and the back of her neck felt like someone laid an ice pack across it. She wasn’t expecting a delivery, and besides it was too late for that.
She silenced the alarm. Couldn’t be Ashley—she was supposed to be meeting Aaron downtown. Had to be a false alarm, the calm voice in her head reasoned, but she could barely hear it over the alarm that kept right on screaming inside her head.
She checked the surveillance feeds. It was already dark out, and the lights around the house had automatically turned on. None of the cameras showed anything amiss. She toggled the sun icon to a moon, and the images changed to velvety black.
There! In the feed from the camera alongside the house, she saw a bright green mottled shape moving across the screen. It disappeared from view and was picked up in the security camera angled behind the house. It could have been a person on all fours. Low to the ground. But it would have to be a small adult or a child.
Diana watched as the shape meandered back to the side of the house. It was more likely a raccoon or a large dog with a longish tail. She wanted it to go away, and then finally it did, passing back through the electronic security perimeter and off the screens.
Diana pushed away from the monitors, feeling as if she’d been picked up and shaken. Even though she knew it was insane, she toured the house, checking that every window and door was latched.
She ended up in the kitchen. Rational analysis kept her bogeymen at bay, but just the unexpected jolt could stir up that still-potent residue of grief and trauma. She’d been on such an even keel that she’d gone a week without a single remote session with Dr. Lightfoot. She knew what her shrink’s advice would be: Try to stay in the present. And along with that: Remember, you can’t control what you can’t control.
Diana checked that the back door was secure. Recognized the acrid smell of burned coffee. She’d left an empty pot on the warmer. Again. She shut off the machine and turned on the exhaust fan.
She opened the refrigerator. She hadn’t eaten since breakfast. Her therapist had repeatedly warned her not to miss meals. Low blood sugar left her shaky and even more emotionally vulnerable.
She opened the package of American cheese Ashley had brought her and ate three slices. She was working on a Granny Smith apple when the phone rang. She lifted it off the wall. Ashley’s cell-phone number glowed on the readout.
She checked the time. A few minutes to six.
“Hey, hon, you at Copley yet?” she asked.
“Getting there. What are you up to?” Ashley said. Diana could hear the sounds of a city in the background. Traffic. A horn honking. Voices.
“I took a nice long walk on the beach.”
“Really?” Ashley said. Then laughed. “Sure you did. But you had . . . me going . . . for a minute there.” She huffed. It sounded as if she was walking.
“Sooooo?” Diana asked.
“So I dumped him . . . Aaron and me . . . we’re history.” There was the sound of a siren and laughter, not Ashley’s. “I did it.”
“Really? That’s so great. How do you feel?”
“Sore. Wet,” Ashley said.
“What?”
“I told him that I just wasn’t that into him. The relationship wasn’t going anywhere and I’d had it with his weirdnesses. So he just sits there, drawing circles on the bar with his swizzle stick. He goes, ‘You sure?’
“I’m like, yeah. Completely. You okay with that?
“And before I know it, he grabs the leg of my bar stool and yanks. And just like that, I’m sitting on the floor, my drink is all over me, and Mr. Wonderful is staring down at me. The place goes dead silent. Longest ten seconds of my life. Finally, a waiter comes running over. Aaron is still there, shell-shocked, like he can’t believe what just happened either. Then he grabs his coat and heads for the door. On top of that, he leaves me to pay the bill. Again.”
“What a prince.”
“You know what? It was worth it. Wish you could’ve seen his face.” Ashley hooted. “Looked like someone had popped his . . . Wow, you should see this crowd. Diana. It’s like—” For a few moments her voice was smothered by competing voices.
“So, other than sore and wet, how do you feel?” Diana asked.
“Strong. Tough.”
“I’m so proud of you,” Diana said. She was. For once, Ashley had broken up with a guy without having his replacement waiting in the wings. And now she was on her way to meeting new people. Alone, without a man on her arm.
“I knew you’d be impressed,” Ashley said. A pause. “Uh-oh.”
“Uh-oh what?”
“I thought . . . never mind. False alarm. Listen, I gotta go. Looks like this is about to happen. Call you tomorrow?”
“Hang on! You know you left your computer at my house?”
“I did? Shit. I thought I left it in my car. I’ll come by for it Saturday or Sunday morning. Not too early.”
That went without saying. On a weekend, “morning” usually started around noon for Ashley.
Diana could hear a man’s voice shouting. “Synchronize! It’s six o’clock . . . NOW!” Then applause.
“Diana,” Ashley said, her voice a whisper. “Do you think I did the right thing? About Aaron, I mean.”
“Of course I do!” But a burst of static cut across her reply. “Ashley? Are you there?” But all she heard was silence.
Diana stared at the dead phone. “You idiot. Of course you did the right thing.” She threw the phone back into its dock.
Later, when she tried to get back to GROB, there was no response. Fair enough. She’d ignored him, now she deserved the same treatment.