“Ah,” she said.
“What?”
“That’s why you ran from the feds.”
“Yes,” he admitted. “Perhaps I’m fooling myself, thinking I can do something about Justin’s disappearance. But I’ve got to try. If I don’t, I’ll always wonder if I could have changed things.”
She patted his shoulder awkwardly. The Honda dipped and jostled them as it swung into a parking lot. They rattled and lurched over a speed bump then pulled up to a dimly lit ATM. No one was near.
Ray looked around the car and found a candy wrapper on the floor. He scooped it up. “Got a stick of gum?” he asked.
She gave him a funny look, but dug one out of her purse. “This doesn’t seem like an appropriate moment to make jokes about my eating habits,” she chuckled, thumping her ample belly.
Ray snorted and climbed out of the car. The gum snapped in his working jaws. “I’ve got a James Bond plan. Be right back,” he muttered.
Holding his hand up to his face, he approached the ATM machine. These things always had cameras built into them, so he put his hand on it as soon as he reached the machine and found it. He took the gum out of his mouth, stuck the candy wrapper to it and then slapped the sticky side on the mirrored plastic dome that hid the camera.
He smiled to himself as he withdrew his limit in cash on all of his credit cards and his bank accounts. He felt lucky that the thing didn’t run out of cash on him. When he was done he had amassed a little over thirteen hundred dollars in twenties.
As he climbed back into the Honda, she looked at him strangely, “Gum and a candy wrapper? Did you do what I think you did?”
“Yup. I kind of always wanted to do something like that. It was that or flip them off. Either way, the feds are bound to check this video to see if it was me at some point so I wanted them to feel they got a show out of it.”
She shook her head. “You always joke around at the oddest times.”
“It’s an occupational hazard. Programmers all have goofy senses of humor,” he replied. “Besides, it relieves stress.”
He stuffed the cash into his wallet. It was so fat he could hardly fold it over and shove it into his pocket.
“Brenda, I need an active account on the net,” he said. “Let me still use some of the dead student accounts. If you see something happening there, just ignore it.”
“Can do. Where to now?”
“I need some food, a few necessities and at least a change of underwear. Then I suppose you can drop me at a cheap motel somewhere.”
“Well, I can do you for the food and stuff, but skivvies are going to be hard to find after 10:00 PM in Davis,” she laughed. She was quiet for a moment. “You know, you’ll need a car if you’re actually going to get something done.”
“No, Brenda,” he said, “I can’t accept. You’ve done enough already.”
“You can’t rent one, you would have to use a credit card, then the fed computers would trip on it.”
“Well yes, I suppose that would be too easy to trace.”
“And you can’t steal one, because that would kind of complicate the mission of proving your innocence.”
He sighed. “But Brenda, you said you didn’t want to get any more involved in all this.”
“Ahem,” she said, taking on the air of one reading a prepared statement. “You came to me and told me you wanted to borrow my car because you heard Justin had been sighted in San Francisco, and your own car had broken down. What could I do? I was overwhelmed by compassion and handed over the keys.”
He thought about it and realized she was right. He didn’t like getting her involved, but he felt he had to take her offer if it could possibly help Justin. He wondered about her kindness for a moment. They had known each other for two years now, and had the bond that grows between techies who labor together late at night. Did she have a thing for him? He had to suspect it. His female students did often enough. He grimaced. Somehow, that made it all worse. He felt he was taking advantage of her. For Justin’s sake he could do it, but not without regrets. He hoped that after this was all over he could make amends.
“Okay, you’re right. I need your car. How are we going to do this?”
… 67 Hours and Counting…
The Motel 8 was so close to the highway that it seemed like part of it, like a watchtower overlooking the endless stream of white and red lights. As a hideaway, it was far too obvious for Ray’s comfort. He all but expected the FBI to be doing a room-by-room search of the place in the predawn hours. But with Brenda’s name on the registry and her credit card on the bill, it would serve well enough to conserve his cash and provide him shelter to think and act. The room itself had that cookie-cutter look of all the roadside, fifty-dollar-a-night flophouses that dotted the nation’s highways. Headless, unstealable coathangers hung in the closet. A battered box with curled-up, unreadable directions pasted on top sat bolted to the TV. A TV remote matched the pay-per-view box, bolted firmly onto the nightstand. Brass-plated reading lamps on swinging stalks hovered over each of the incredibly hard-mattressed beds.
None of these things interested Ray. Finding the room typically devoid of outlets, he had unplugged the TV and the box atop it in order to power his computer. He plugged his notebook into the wall to preserve the batteries. The motel had wireless internet service, but of course it was not free. It came up and asked for a credit card number. Ray didn’t mind paying, but he couldn’t use a credit card that would get him pinpointed on every fed map in the state. So he ran a few programs and hacked his way past the router.
Sitting in his underwear, he sipped a cup of fake coffee as he pecked at the keys and worked the mouse. He worked at the letter desk, staring intently at the flat screen of his notebook computer. The mouse he had attached to the port in the back. He had never been able to get used to those tiny, infernal touchpads.
Clicking the mouse again, he noticed it took far longer than it should have to connect to the university servers. The internet had indeed slowed down. Logging in as Rita Hapgood, he slipped into the system unannounced. Rita was someone who had enrolled in one of his classes this semester, but who had never attended. The system had automatically created an account for her which had never been used and would be automatically deleted at the end of the semester.
The password he would normally have given to Rita the first day of class worked like a charm. He allowed himself a sip of coffee and a grim half-smile. He was in.
Clicking with the mouse and typing in occasional codes, he quickly gained operator permissions, which allowed him to do things that students normally couldn’t do. One of them included reading other people’s electronic mail. He also was able to identify programs that others had executed recently, and review conversations they had had via the computer system with one another. Most people didn’t realize how public their private matters could be when they used electronic media for communications.
What he found in the files wasn’t anything incriminating. It was what he didn’t find that was interesting to him. Certain things seemed to be missing, or incomplete. He knew the system well, and knew what it tracked and didn’t track. Some of the tracks weren’t there when they should have been. To him, this was a clear sign of tampering.
He sat back with this information and cogitated. He tapped his lips with a finger for perhaps a minute. Then he leaned forward again and searched the listing of accounts. Soon enough, he found a group of unfamiliar ones. Super-users that he had never heard of before. Only one was currently logged in, someone who had a login name of: HUNTRESS. He chewed his tongue, fairly certain who that someone was.
“Very cagey, Agent Vasquez,” he said aloud. “My tax dollars aren’t wasted on you.”
There she was, he felt sure, not out cruising the streets for him, but rather lying in wait for him where he was most likely to show up. He envisioned a lioness, choosing a shady spot to stakeout the waterhole. He considered initiating a conversation, but held himself back. Just such antics always seemed to get people caught, people who were too impressed with their own cleverness.