The wave of cars ahead sped up, and the refrigerated truck moved right, taking a space that had opened in front of the Volvo. Art shook his head, adding a breathy sigh when he saw the small inspection door, about as big as a license plate, flapping freely open in one of the truck’s twin rear doors. “A lot of ice cream is going to waste.”
Anne nodded. “I could use a sundae.”
“Me, too,” Art agreed, but his thoughts swerved back to more important matters with little hesitation. “I guess it’s hard knowing only one place for sixteen years and then out of nowhere you’re in some stranger’s house. Especially for him.”
“We’re not strangers, remember,” Anne said, tapping her chest.
“That’s right,” Art concurred. “He’s got it in writing.”
The lightness of the moment, the freedom of a jesting observation, opened a space in Anne’s thoughts for a possibility more concrete. Something that might, just might, bring some measure of peace to Simon, and to their nights. “Babe, you have the key to his house, right?”
“Yeah.”
“You can go in,” Anne continued.
“Yes…?” Art confirmed warily, knowing that tone. “Why?”
“You should take him,” Anne said. “Tonight. Not where there might be, you know…” She mouth spelled B-L-O-O-D. “To his room. Let him see that it’s there, that it’s okay. Maybe he has a pillow or something that he can bring back. We got him out of there so fast last week that there was no time to think of taking anything other than some underwear and clothes. Let him show you what he’s attached to.”
Art hardly had to think on it at all before deciding that she was on the mark. “You’ll come, too, right?”
Anne shook her head and smiled. “Get past it, G-Man. You don’t need me there. He likes you. And you’re good with him.”
“Come on,” Art protested, though his heart wasn’t in it. “I’ve never even had kids.”
“I’d say that was a waste from what I’ve seen.”
Traffic slowed again, bringing Art close to the truck ahead, and the tailgater right up on his ass. But nary a curse was uttered, though a few were carefully thought in higher decibels.
“I’ll have sundaes waiting when you get back,” Anne said.
“Wonderful,” Art said as traffic began to inch forward. “I get to get back into this.”
Lying on his stomach on a grossly inadequate pad of some variety, a former Marine named Georgie burned through the last roll of thirty-six exposures and came to a cross-legged sit in the back of the truck now yards ahead of the silver Volvo. He lifted a radio to his mouth in the dark and empty box of the truck, light entering only in spurts as the inspection portal slammed open and shut.
“Done,” Georgie said.
In the cab, Ray, a once promising Green Beret officer who’d had the misfortune of riding in a Humvee that hit a mine in the Kuwaiti theater of operations, pressed the gas pedal with his titanium and Kevlar right foot and brought a radio up from the seat. “Four rolls?”
“Four rolls,” Georgie replied, pressing a button on the camera that began rewinding the film. “The kid ain’t photogenic.”
“I doubt that matters.”
Georgie peeked through the inspection portal a final time and squeezed the transmit key hard. “The guy driving is going to be out of the way before we grab the kid, right?”
“You weren’t told to take any more of him, right?” Ray responded with a confirmatory question.
Georgie popped the canister or film out as the rewind motor stopped. “I sure as hell hope he’s gone.”
“Why?”
“The guy’s eyes never stop moving. I doubt he’d go quietly.”
Ralph changed lanes right and caught a glance of the driver in the truck’s side view mirror. His eyes checked the lanes, his head moved, all while he talked, and drove. Ralph brought the radio up a final time as he peeled off toward the exit. “It’s supposed to be taken care of.”
Before Rothchild was Rothchild, he was a man named Kirby Gant, but even Kirby Gant was known by another name. A more prominent name. One feared and respected by the denizens of cyberspace and the heads of corporate computer security alike. Once he was known as Mr. Tag.
Mr. Tag was a cyberspace resident, a net surfer of the highest and most dangerous order, a computer age equivalent to Jesse James or Attila the Hun, though it was joked that even those criminals and savages knew some limits. Mr. Tag knew no limits, be they legal or moral.
He trafficked in digitized child pornography and shut down regional telephone switching systems at will. He played havoc with computer systems from Japan to South Africa. When Hurricane Miranda was twenty four hours from landfall in the Florida keys, Mr. Tag tweaked the National Hurricane Center’s computer to erase its data every ten minutes. He raided New York stock brokerages and had millions of dollars transferred to accounts he had electronically created, then directed the computers of the banks holding those accounts to disburse cash in steady streams from ATM’s in Minnesota, much to the delight of the fortunate few to be in the vicinity.
He lived on the run, the feds always on his heels, half wanting to lock him up for twenty years, the others wanting to talk shop with him and learn how he did it. One bank offered him a quarter million dollars if he would turn himself in and help them make their system secure. Later, when he thought about it, he realized they would have gotten off cheap, considering he’d placed an order in their name for three hundred million dollars in municipal bonds, a mess that had cost the bank more than a million just to fix.
Yes, Mr. Tag was a fugitive, a criminal, a hacker, a danger, and he loved every second of his existence. So, when the cuffs were finally on him and after a few weeks in federal detention, the offer relayed to him through a soft-spoken government attorney seemed attractive. And when he met G. Nicholas Kudrow while out on a suddenly agreed-to bail, the offer became irresistible.
Do what you do best, but for us, now. And without risk.
And so, after a tragic accident on the Chesapeake, with Mr. Tag’s body written off as food for the fish, Rothchild came into being. Doing what he did best from a smallish office deep in the earth beneath the most secure installation on the planet. Phone lines came in, phone lines went out. Fiber optic cables snaked in, and out. Satellite up and down links were wired in.
All to a place that, like Rothchild, did not exist. No records. No mess. No worry.
Hacker heaven.
And in that heaven, Rothchild stared at a screen and dreamed of a way to ruin Special Agent Art Jefferson of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Chicago Field Office. Dreamed and plotted, culling useful tidbits from the seemingly endless streams of data pouring through the display.
At one spot he suddenly paused the scroll, a disbelieving glint lifting from his eyes. “You used a credit card?! What a fool.” With a few keystrokes he cross referenced that with a check Jefferson’s former wife Lois had written to a private detective several months earlier, when she had put him on her husband’s trail. An obvious case of cold sheets. “Jefferson, Jefferson. Who was she?” Rothchild scanned the credit card info from the motel. “And only once. Well, you weren’t that bad of a boy.” Especially considering what your ex was doing back then, Rothchild thought. Phone records gave her away. “Dumb and trusting, Jefferson. You should have checked the phone bill. Called a number or two. Man, she was burning up beds all over L.A.”
But an affair, or dozens of them, as titillating as they might be, were far too mundane to be of use in what Rothchild needed to craft. “The demise of a man,” he said aloud as the information once again flashed by. “The end of a career.”