“Anybody would want it,” she said. “If you had a tool to sneak into secure systems? The G would want to keep it for themselves. Private groups would use it for corporate espionage, to steal government information, industrial secrets, intellectual property of all kinds.”
Peter leaned against the minivan and rubbed his eyes. June had clocked a pair of decent naps that day, but Peter had been on the go since first light, and had slept in a tree the night before. June talked on, powered by the idea, walking and talking and checking her email on her phone at the same time. The woman clearly had a lot of energy.
“You could sell it as a service—place your order, tell us what you want, we’ll get it for you. The Chinese and the Russians would go crazy for that. Want the design specs for the Reaper drone? No problem, but it’s gonna cost you. If you aren’t that ambitious? Shit, just break into the banking system and transfer a bunch of money into a few hundred numbered accounts, then send it all over the world. If you were smart, you’d take a hundred dollars from two million people’s accounts over a few months’ time. Most people wouldn’t even know it was gone, they’d just think they lost an ATM receipt. If you went into corporate accounts, you could steal billions. It might not even be reported, because it would be so embarrassing. Hide your tracks in Belize, and your money in Switzerland.”
“A killer app,” he said, then felt bad about it. Her mom.
She glanced at his face and stopped pacing. She put her hand on his upper arm. “You look pretty wiped. My turn to drive, okay?”
He nodded. Her fat lip was turning purple, the dark stitches still shocking in her pale skin, but the ice seemed to have stopped the swelling. Her freckles were arrayed across her face like some complex constellation whose meaning he was still trying to fathom. Her eyes shone with intelligence and humor and, maybe, something else. There was no way the heat of her hand could make it through the thick fleece of his jacket, but he felt its warmth anyway.
She said, “Give me a minute to grab coffee and Twizzlers. You get some sleep.”
He cleared his throat. “Yeah,” he said. “Sure.”
? ? ?
HE WOKE AS they were coming up on Seattle from the south, June humming softly in the driver’s seat. The medical boot was tight on his left leg. He hated it already, the limitations. What if he had to move fast to protect her?
The clock on the dash said 11:45 a.m. Freeway traffic was heavy and rain splattered on the windshield in fits and starts. The airport sprawled on their left, then a futuristic elevated commuter railway. Dense vegetation and thick stands of trees climbed the fog-shrouded hillsides to their right. Everything was so green, and it was only March. In northern Wisconsin, where Peter grew up, the ground would still be covered with snow, with more snow falling into April. And May.
June pulled off the freeway well before downtown. “I want to make a quick stop before we go to my place. The address for that company SafeSecure is only a mile or so from here.”
Rainier Avenue was a commercial strip four lanes wide, lined with big apartments, commercial buildings in their second or third incarnation, and a surprising number of Vietnamese restaurants. SafeSecure’s address was an older single-story brick building, the kind of place that might have once held a small machine shop repairing logging equipment, or making specialty parts for Boeing. Now it was semi-affordable square footage for whatever the tenant needed. The original concrete loading dock had been turned into the main entrance, with a faded awning to keep the rain off and a group of big clay pots overgrown with plants. There was no name on the door, but the street address was displayed above it. June cranked the minivan into a parking space.
Peter said, “I thought you said this was going to be some kind of a PO box.”
June shrugged and turned off the engine. “Let’s go see.”
They stepped through the glass entrance into a long narrow reception area, where a middle-aged woman sat behind a reception counter.
Peter felt the white static flare up immediately. The place was like a shooting gallery, with a solid pair of double doors at the far end and no cover between them. He reminded himself there were no armed insurgents in Seattle, at least not to his knowledge. And not likely at this address. Breathe in, breathe out. It’s not going to kill you, remember?
The woman was large but not soft, and her face was set in a permanent frown. As if she didn’t get many visitors and liked it that way. She wore jeans and a faded blue man’s dress shirt. Ornate tattoos peeked out past the ends of her rolled-up sleeves.
Behind her was a long wall with numbered slots, well over a hundred of them. The slots were wide enough for large envelopes, but Peter couldn’t read the numbers from the far side of the counter. He imagined an array of mail bins behind the slots. A vast low hum came through the wall behind her. The doors at the far end of the room would lead to the rest of the operation.