Then he got back in the car and spent some time adjusting the seat for his taller frame.
By the time he was done, she’d climbed into the passenger side, booted up the little tablet computer, and was nose-deep into the Web, as if the conversation had never happened.
Peter put the car in gear and got back on the road.
? ? ?
“OKAY,” SAID JUNE. “I found our attorney, Jean-Pierre Nicolet. Lives in Seattle, an equity partner with Sydney Bucknell Sparks. Corporate website lists his specialties as intellectual property and M&A. What’s M&A?”
“Mergers and Acquisitions,” said Peter. “Any subspecialties?”
“A long list. Sensitive negotiations, corporate reorganization, blah blah blah. A bunch of honors and awards. He’s all over the Web, but there’s nothing interesting. A bunch of nonprofit boards, some obscure tech incubator, a couple of arts organizations.”
“What about the law firm?”
“Sydney Bucknell Sparks. Founded in 1937, they claim over two hundred attorneys, with offices in Seattle, San Jose, and New York.”
“So he’s not some yahoo operating out of his rec room. He’s the real deal.”
“Oh yeah,” she said. “But he’s just the mouthpiece. He didn’t think this up on his own.”
“I’d love to see a client list.”
“I’m gonna take a look at the guys from the redwoods.”
She took the wallets out of the black cloth bag—the hood, the kidnapper’s hood—emptied them onto the side console, and sifted through the contents. Then went back to the little computer.
Eventually she turned on the map light and held up the driver’s licenses to examine each one in turn. She tapped one with a finger. “Jason Ross,” she said. “He’s the one with the Taser. Threw me into the back seat.”
“You recognize the driver?”
“I think this one,” she said. “Martin Alvarez. Although I didn’t get as good a look at him.” She held up a third license. “This guy, Dexter Smith, I don’t recognize.”
Peter thought about hanging at the end of a rope, listening to the four men talk to each other. He’d only gotten three wallets. The fourth guy was crushed under the Tahoe.
She said, “I’m pretty sure these are their real names. Which makes me feel a lot better, because if they were fake names, I’d have nothing to grab onto.”
“Why do you think they’re real?”
“I got inside their Facebook and LinkedIn profiles and checked the timelines. The photos seem to match the faces on the licenses. Social media is easy to fake, but it’s also an easy path to getting caught, because you can end up tagged in other people’s photos. For a good fake identity, people tend to focus on institutional paper, like a birth certificate and credit cards, because they’re mostly trying to fool the government.”
“You got into their social media? How do you know this stuff?”
She gave him a look. “I’m an investigative reporter and my beat is technology. You don’t think I know a thing or two?”
“But wouldn’t these guys have the privacy settings turned way up?”
“Oh, they do.” June smiled. “But there’s a back door into Facebook. It’s even legal. Although Facebook gets really mad if they catch you.”
“You ever been caught?”
“What do you think?” The smile got wider. “Anyway, most people aren’t very tech-savvy. They post shit online like nobody will ever see it. You wouldn’t believe how many times the cops catch people because of something stupid they did online. Our guys’ accounts were started years ago, and the posts span a long period of time, so they likely weren’t faked or made by bots.”
“What do you mean, ‘made by bots’? Like robots? Robots have Facebook pages?”
“Oh, sure. Facebook even said publicly a few years back that something like five to ten percent of its profiles are false, some of them made by automated software systems. Even if they’re not wildly underreporting the number, that’s fifty to a hundred million fake accounts. You know how much product marketing gets done through Facebook?”
Peter just shook his head. The digital world wasn’t really his thing.
“Anyway, from what they’re posting on Facebook and LinkedIn, our guys are definitely ex-Army, although it looks like they served in different units. And the two younger guys were pretty heavy on Facebook until a few years ago. Then they basically stopped. They both updated their profiles showing they’d been hired by SafeSecure, a corporate security company based in Seattle. And that’s also the name on the registration for their SUV.”
“Aha!” said Peter. “Right?”
“Not so much,” said June, still tapping away on the tablet. “SafeSecure doesn’t seem to have a website, which is odd for a business today. The car registration gives its physical address in Seattle, somewhere down in the Rainier Valley, although it’s probably some kind of PO box. According to the State of Washington, SafeSecure does exist, but is a subsidiary of Western Holdings, based in Belize.”
“Belize?”
“Small country in Central America? South of Mexico, east of Guatemala. Used to be called British Honduras.”