“Ah, Katarina, you’re too smart by half.”
The German moved her hands lower, working each arm, then his chest, then lower still. Ian gasped. The hands moved expertly, clinically, one professional working with another. He closed his eyes and let the pleasure engulf him. He was not thinking about a woman or a man or anything remotely physical. He was thinking about Odysseus. Not the warrior, but the software of his own creation, and it was far, far sexier.
Odysseus was malware, a piece of software designed to take control of a computer independent of its user. He’d written it to perform three tasks-to surveil and transmit every keystroke of its host; to copy and transmit the contents of the host’s hard drive and any attached flash drive, backup drive, or auxiliary memory device; and to grant Ian complete control of the platform so that he might roam around it at will and edit, amend, copy, steal, or otherwise corrupt things as he saw fit.
Upon landing, he’d shut himself inside his private quarters and spent much too long surfing the Net in an effort to find the most amusing video of an animal he could. He looked at Zen kittens, talking puppies, dancing fish, laughing giraffes, and a dozen other cute, cuddly, and altogether adorable creatures.
Of course he also looked at the clip of the sloth. The sloth wasn’t the cutest by a long shot, but according to their browser log, the Grant girls must have thoroughly enjoyed it.
Ian quickly found three additional clips of sloths that he found particularly irresistible. Irresistible was the key word in this endeavor. Finally he chose the one he thought the girls would like best.
The trap was simple enough. E-mails would arrive in the mailboxes addressed to Grace and Jessie Grant carrying the header “Cutest Sloth Ever!” Opening the mail, the girls would be presented with a link to the video Ian had selected. The success of Ian’s ploy rested on one of the girls clicking on the link. Once they did, the video of the sloth would begin playing. Attached to it, ready to crawl into the deepest, darkest crevasses of the Grants’ computer, was Odysseus, as stealthy and cunning as the Greek warrior of ancient lore.
Katarina’s fingers stroked him expertly, dispassionately. His back arched and she put her mouth on him. Ian allowed himself release, lips pressed together to stifle any escaping sound.
Katarina cleaned him quickly and neatly. “Ian, may I ask you a question?”
“Yes.”
“What happened to Odysseus?”
“No one knows. He died, I suppose. Everyone must.”
Katarina laughed, fixing him with her cold blue eyes. “Yes, Ian, everyone must. Even you.”
Ian slapped her. “Don’t ever say that again.”
49
“He went dark,” said the Mole.
“How’s that?”
“Signal vanished.”
“But you just had it.” Shanks glanced over his shoulder. The Mole sat at his console, headphones draped around his neck, eyes glaring at the monitor. Shanks returned his attention to the road. Rush hour, and traffic on I-35 was slow. “Find it?”
“There’s no ‘it’ to find,” said the Mole. “One second he’s blasting in the clear. The next he’s dark. A ghost.”
The Mole recommenced the search protocol by entering Tank Potter’s mobile phone number. The handset’s corresponding eleven-digit alphanumeric identification appeared on the screen. Potter was a ONE Mobile customer and theoretically easy to locate. The Mole requested that the number be pinged. A signal was broadcast to the handset in order to establish its real-time location as measured by the internal GPS chip standard in all cell phones. Two minutes earlier the phone, and presumably Tank Potter, had been inside the premises of the Austin American-Statesman at 305 South Congress Avenue. Now the pulsing red dot denoting his location had vanished.
“He knows,” said the Mole.
“About time. You wiped his photos an hour ago. His story just went up in smoke.”
“Continue to his last known location. Let’s hope for a visual.” Shanks pulled into the Statesman’s parking lot five minutes later. “A rusted-out Jeep Cherokee shouldn’t be hard to spot.”
The Mole slid into the front seat beside him and scanned the parked cars.
“No joy,” said Shanks after he finished a circuit of the lot. “You sure he was here?”
“GPS doesn’t lie.”
“He’s gone now.”
“I give him a ten-minute head start.”
“What do you suggest?” asked Shanks. “We lick our finger, stick it into the wind, and guess where he’s headed?”
“Pull over and be quiet.”
Shanks slid the Airstream into a spot at the back corner of the lot. “Better be quick. Briggs wants this guy taken care of.”
The Mole began feverishly typing commands into the console. It wasn’t a matter of guessing where Potter was headed but of analyzing his past actions to predict where, statistically, he was most likely to go, the pertinent question being, where could Tank Potter usually be found at five p.m.?
First the Mole asked ONE Mobile’s servers to provide a history of Potter’s movements between the hours of four and six p.m., based on GPS readings transmitted from his phone. For a data range the Mole chose the past fifty-two weeks, with data points chosen randomly four times each hour. A jumble of nearly three thousand dots clogged the screen. It was immediately evident that he spent the preponderance of his time at or close to the Statesman headquarters.
The Mole narrowed the search parameter to Thursdays while keeping the time period constant. Approximately four hundred dots remained and only confirmed that Potter rarely left a two-square-mile area surrounding his office. The problem was that many of the coordinates had been taken while Potter was driving and failed to offer an establishment where he might be found. Still, there were four smaller but statistically significant clusters of dots at defined locations other than the Statesman.
The Mole accessed a record of all text messages sent from Potter’s phone on Thursdays between four and six p.m., winnowing the time frame to the past six months. He was not interested in the messages themselves but again in Potter’s geographic location when he sent them. A sample set of two hundred dots appeared. The four clusters were now just two, not counting the Statesman.
The Mole activated the map’s tagging feature. The names of all nearby banks, restaurants, boutiques, and gas stations appeared. Potter had sent 107 texts from inside a single 50-square-meter perimeter.
The Mole sampled several texts randomly, the messages appearing on an adjacent monitor.
At P’s. You coming?
Billy boy, get down here. The joint is jumping!
Hi darlin! Hanging at P’s. When can I expect you?
All three had originated from 16415 Barton Springs Road. Pedro’s Especiale Bar and Grill.
The Mole brought up the website on his monitor. The screen filled with a picture of a black velvet painting of Salma Hayek in a bikini. “Throwback Thursdays. Happy Hour 4-8.”
“Good news,” said the Mole. “We got him.”
50
“Well,” said Jessie. “What was that all about?”
Mary waved as the Ford pulled out of the driveway. “I needed to talk with some of Dad’s colleagues.”
“Why didn’t you drive?”
“Someone else gave me a ride.”
The front door opened. Grace stepped outside. “Where’s Tank?” Mary hesitated and Jessie pounced. “Who’s Tank?” she asked, dark eyes instantly suspicious, darting between Mary and Grace for any sign of treachery.