Winterlong Read online

  “Get it over with,” he said.

  The briefest smile crossed the lips of the man with the glasses and then disappeared.

  “Soon. You know what we want first.”

  “Go to hell.”

  The man in the glasses held his gaze for a moment, then shrugged and nodded to one of the other men. From the sounds of it, there were at least three of them. Another, taller man appeared in his field of vision, holding a cell phone. He crouched down and turned the screen so he could see it. At first he couldn’t discern what was on the screen, and then he realized that it showed a video image. In close on blond hair. The camera moved out a little and a hand moved the hair to reveal a face.

  His next breath caught in his throat. Nika.

  Her eyes were closed, tears glistening on her cheeks. The camera reframed again to show the barrel of a gun pressed against her temple.

  The man with the glasses crouched down beside him, glanced at the screen, and looked back at him expectantly.

  He yelled obscenities at them, tried to lift himself up off the ground, but the bigger one easily suppressed him by pressing the sole of his boot down on his chest as he tried to get up. He yelled some more. And then he told them. He told them everything. Not because he thought it would save him, but because it might just save Nika.

  The man with the glasses listened and nodded.

  “Thank you.”

  “Now let her go. She doesn’t know anything—”

  The man with the glasses reached out a gloved hand, and the other one passed him the cell phone.

  “Ortega?”

  The tinny voice of the man holding the gun on Nika came through the cell phone’s speakers.

  “Copy.”

  “You can kill her now.”

  He screamed out as he heard two quick gunshots over the phone. He struggled against the boot on his chest until he saw the barrel of the gun yawning in front of his eyes.

  And then there was an explosion of light, and then nothing.

  ONE MONTH LATER

  WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 6TH

  1

  SUNNYVALE, CALIFORNIA

  My eyes snapped open and for a moment I thought I was still running.

  I blinked a couple of times and took in my surroundings: hotel bed, blinds open, light from a clear blue sky flooding the room. It took me a second to realize that the illusion of running was caused by the fact I was still breathing hard from the dream.

  I sat up in bed. The hotel room was temperature-controlled to within an inch of its life, but I felt a chill as the covers slipped off and exposed my sweat-drenched upper body to the air. I took a few long breaths through my nose and willed my heart rate to drop to a more medically approved level.

  Breathing and pulse rate dealt with, I gave myself a diagnostic knock on the head. Wow. There hadn’t been a dream like that for a while. Not since the immediate aftermath of Los Angeles. I wondered if proximity was a factor. This was the closest I had been to LA since then, and although I’d been too busy to think much about the whole thing recently, it seemed like my subconscious had been doing it on my behalf.

  My job is to find people who don’t want to be found. Ordinarily, a third party engages my services, but I had made an exception for that case. A serial killer the media had christened “the Samaritan” had been abducting and killing lone female drivers in LA. Some of the details of the investigation that had been leaked to the media reminded me of Dean Crozier, a man I had worked alongside years before. We had been members of a very effective, very secret military intelligence organization that found a great deal of work for our respective talents. I had a strong interest in keeping out of the orbit of our mutual former employers, so it had not been an easy decision to offer my services to the LAPD. But in the end it had been the only decision. My fears had proved grounded on both counts: Dean Crozier was the Samaritan, and I wasn’t the only one who had made the connection.

  I remembered the man in glasses. The cold look in his eyes as he held the gun steady. An unfamiliar face, but he knew who I was.

  Maybe things have changed, he had said.

  I had gotten myself out of that situation though, and things had been quiet ever since. Except that on some level I was still waiting for the other shoe to drop.

  A soft cuckoo noise chirped in tandem with the vibration of my cell phone, getting gradually louder. My morning alarm. I rolled over and hit mute.

  I showered, shaved, and dressed for my appointment. A charcoal two-button Brooks Brothers suit and a light blue broadcloth shirt. I packed my laptop and left the room as I’d found it. I took the stairs to the ground floor, grabbed a bagel from the breakfast buffet, and checked out.

  Outside on the street, the sky seemed even bluer. A cold day by California standards, but I wasn’t the type to complain about the thermometer reading fifty degrees in January. The fresh air soothed the nagging headache the dream had left me with, and I hoped that the images still flashing before my eyes would fade along with it. There was a line of three taxis parked outside the hotel, and I got into the one at the front. I told the driver I wanted to go to Moonola House. Before I could give him the address, he just nodded and pulled out onto the road. I guessed Silicon Valley cabdrivers were accustomed to making most of their trips from hotels to one tech company or another.

  I snapped open my laptop and took another look at some of the documents I had downloaded on the company I was about to visit. It sounded like a straightforward job, but they all do at first. I had time to read a couple of articles about Moonola in tech journals and one from the New York Times before we reached the neighborhood that was my destination.

  The area looked something like an expensively designed college campus from twenty years in the future. Lots of well-maintained stretches of lawn and leafy trees. The buildings were all wide two- or three-story structures with smoked glass and steel exteriors, many of them with tasteful sculptures or water features outside. Almost none of them presented anything so gauche as a lot number or a sign identifying the name of their company. Instead, I saw lots of logos, artfully composed monograms, and the like. The driver pointed out some familiar names like Yahoo! and Google as we passed their outposts. I was grateful he knew where he was going, because I would have had difficulty navigating the maze of hieroglyphics. My job requires that I’m good at finding things, but I have my limits.

  Case in point: The company I was looking for was called Moonola. The building was another sprawling glass and steel block, distinguished from the others only by a cartoon image of a smiling cow. I wasted a few seconds trying to work out the correlation between the logo and the name before realizing that I was probably giving it more thought than the marketing team had.

  “This is the place?” I asked as the driver pulled to a stop at the bottom of a path of black slate paving slabs that led to the entrance of the building.

  “Mmm-hmm,” he answered in the affirmative, checking the mileage and telling me the fare.

  “You don’t look like you belong here,” he offered as I handed over the cash.

  “Too old?” I asked, figuring the average age of a software guru was probably about twenty-two.

  “Too dressed up.”

  I glanced down at my suit. Even with my natural inclination to go tieless, he was probably right.

  I walked the length of the path, noting the security cameras watching me the whole way. The entrance was a double glass door, with the cow motif reproduced in frosting on the panels. It was a welcoming image to put on the front door, although the effect was undermined a little by the cameras and the sign warning that all visitors must be checked in, everyone had to swipe their pass, and NO TAILGAITING. There was an intercom. I pushed the buzzer and a female voice answered immediately.

  “Moonola, how may I help you?”

  I gave her my name and told her I had a meeting with John Stafford, and she buzzed me in. I entered a small lobby with a flight of stairs leading to the second floor. The stairs were car
peted, and the place had a vague smell of newness. Like the recent memory of cut wood and fresh paint. At the top of the stairs was another locked door, although this one had a window into reception that let the receptionist see me. She waved at me and I heard a click as she unlocked the door remotely. Reception was another small, low-ceilinged room with no windows. The receptionist was a blonde in her mid-twenties wearing a black blouse. She sat behind a high desk.

  She smiled welcomingly, but before she could speak I heard an abrupt voice from my right.

  “Carter Blake?”

  I turned to see another door leading to the interior of the building. A short man in jeans and a Led Zep T-shirt. He had a lanyard around his neck holding a white card, which I assumed was a security pass, but it was facing the wrong way. He had dark hair, glasses, one of those little tuft beards under his bottom lip.

  “That’s me,” I said. “You’re with Mr. Stafford?”

  John Stafford was the name I’d been given. It hadn’t rung any bells with me when I’d heard it the previous evening, but a little Googling had revealed he was something of a hot young gun in software. Not a Mark Zuckerberg or anything like that, at least not yet, but the kind of guy who would probably be commanding the front cover of Wired within the next year, and Forbes the year after that.

  The guy with the tuft beard sighed, as though accustomed to but still mildly resentful at being defined by his association with Stafford. “I’m Greg. John’s downstairs. Come on.”

  He had already turned to go back through the door when the receptionist piped in. “He needs a visitor’s pass.”

  “You haven’t given him a pass yet?”

  “I was just—”

  “Give him a pass, Hayley.”

  I exchanged a brief, knowing look with Hayley as she showed me where on the form to sign, and then she gave me a red credit card-sized pass in a holder and lanyard. I took it and thanked her. “Security first,” I said.

  Greg snorted. “Yeah. Lot of good it did us.”

  I followed him through the door, and we headed along a corridor, through another security door, and down a flight of stairs. The decorators had obviously been commissioned only to cover the public-facing areas. As we got deeper into the building, it reverted to function rather than form: no carpets, cinder-block walls, strip lighting. It felt more like a bunker down here. I supposed it was, in a way.

  We passed a series of doors, and I could hear a faint rumble, like the engines on a cruise ship. Greg saw me looking and nodded at one of the doors.

  “It’s not all ours. We host for a couple dozen companies.”

  “Do they get a room each?”

  “The big ones do.”

  We passed through another security door, which was the fifth time we’d had to swipe a pass, by my count, and entered a space not much larger than a phone booth. Greg waited for the door we’d used to swing shut until it clicked.

  “You can’t open the next door until the first one locks. This is the highest security area. Moonola servers only in the next room.”

  “Do you have any idea where he might have gone?” I asked, to fill the time.

  He looked unimpressed. “Isn’t that what you’re here for?”

  I didn’t answer that. A green light clicked on in the last panel, and Greg swiped his pass.

  We walked out into the Moonola server room. It was difficult to judge the dimensions of the space because everywhere you looked were arrays of locked cages the height of jumbosized refrigerators. Inside each cage were the servers. The noise was much louder in here, so much so that I didn’t catch Greg’s next words. I went out on a limb and guessed it was something dismissive and nonessential. The temperature was noticeably hotter in here, despite the big air-conditioning vents in the ceiling that were blowing away, contributing to the din. I removed my jacket and folded it over my arm as I followed Greg.

  We turned a few corners and made our way deep into the heart of the maze. I couldn’t help but think it seemed a little anachronistic; all of these tin boxes whirring away in secrecy behind the sleek shiny devices we all take for granted these days. A moment later we arrived at what I assumed was our destination.

  A man with his back to us, dressed in khaki skateboard shorts and a tennis shirt, was standing in front of an open server cabinet. He was tapping away at the keyboard of a kind of oversized laptop that seemed to have slid out of the section of the server tower just above waist level. Greg called out, but his voice was lost in the din. He reached out and tapped the man on the shoulder, but he ignored it, finishing tapping out whatever he was doing on the keyboard. Ten seconds later he hit the return key, snapped the lid of the laptop down, and slid it back into place. He swung the grilled door back into place in front of the tower and locked it before slipping the key back into his pocket. Only then did he turn around to acknowledge us.

  I recognized him from the pictures I had seen on the website and on many of the articles I’d read on the company. Except that in every one of those pictures, he’d been wearing a wide grin that was just on the acceptable side of cocky. He wasn’t grinning now. The confident light blue eyes were the next thing you noticed in pictures after the grin, but they were the first thing that stood out today. Only today they looked different—wounded, but purposeful. His thick, dark eyebrows were bunched close together above those eyes. His shaved head gleamed under the fluorescent lights as he walked toward me, his hand outstretched. I shook it.

  “John Stafford.”

  “Carter Blake,” I replied. “What do you need from me?” He answered without hesitation.

  “I need that son of a bitch’s balls. On my desk.”

  2

  SUNNYVALE, CALIFORNIA

  I’ve had clients who would have been speaking entirely literally when they made a request like that, but I was reasonably sure that John Stafford was employing hyperbole.

  “I’m afraid that’s not part of the service.”

  Stafford didn’t smile. “Let’s talk upstairs.”

  Five minutes later, we had ascended to the second floor again. Out of the noise and the heat and the strip lighting. Back to smoked glass and expensive design and the smell of newness. The view from Stafford’s office window looked out on the leaves on the trees at the front of the building. On the journey back up from the server room, we’d managed to off-load Greg, so it was just the two of us discussing the terms of the assignment.

  Stafford was sitting behind the aforementioned desk: a piece of plate glass balanced on steel legs, supporting three screens arranged around a flat wireless keyboard. Far too tasteful a setup for what he had requested a few minutes before. He was a little older than I had estimated from the photographs: in his early thirties, perhaps. Not old old, but not exactly a spring chicken for this line of work. He looked away from me, glanced at one of his screens, then out of the window, and sighed. He considered his response to my initial question. I could see that this was a frustration for him, having to tell somebody else what he wanted done. Technical people can be like that—they’re used to solving their own problems, dazzling laymen with their mastery of the occult arts of coding or hacking or whatever.

  “His name is Scott Bryant,” he said after a minute. “One of my senior developers. He’s worked here for the past eighteen months. Yesterday evening he walked into our secure data storage center—which you’ve just visited—and downloaded some very confidential, very valuable proprietary software belonging to me onto a flash drive. He hasn’t been seen since.”

  “And you want him located so you can get your flash drive back.”

  “So I can get my company’s future back, Blake.”

  “You’ve tried the police?” A question I generally ask. Often it’s rhetorical, but not in this case.

  “Of course. They sent a car around to his apartment, but of course he had cleared out. He’s technically wanted, and they’ll do their best to pick him up. You know what that means?”

  “The same thing it means when th
ey tell a burglarized homeowner they’re looking into it?”

  “Exactly. They don’t get it. They don’t care, because they’re not paid to care.”

  “Which is why you’re paying me to care, I take it.”

  “I hope so. I wanted the best, and your name came up.”

  “Okay. You’re paying me to care, so why don’t you start by telling me about this software? Starting with how time sensitive this is. Is Bryant planning to upload it to the Internet? Because if so—”

  Stafford shook his head impatiently. “No. This isn’t some Ed Snowden thing. This is about money. If he makes this public, it’s worthless to him.”

  I nodded. “So he’ll need to find a buyer, or meet up with them if he’s found one already.”

  “Right.”

  “So what is it? What exactly has he stolen?”

  He hesitated, as if it took an effort of will to discuss it with an outsider. “It’s called MeTime. It’s going to revolutionize social networking. Think about your Facebook page. If—”

  “I haven’t gotten around to Facebook yet.”

  He stopped and looked at me as though I’d walked off a UFO.

  “But you know what it is, right?”

  “Sure, an electronic tagging system that lets you upload pictures of food.”

  For the first time, he cracked a smile. “This will blow Facebook out of the water. It’ll make Facebook look like a paper journal.”

  “So it’s potentially lucrative.”

  “You could say that.”

  He began to give me an explanation of how unique and special his software was. He started out reasonably intelligibly, before descending into techno-babble. My attention wandered. From the lower levels, I could hear and feel the rumble of the thousands of servers. It reminded me of the thought I’d had earlier on. I pointed in the opposite direction, up to the ceiling. “I thought everything was in the cloud these days.”

  Stafford shook his head again. “If we’d stored this on a private cloud, there wouldn’t have had to be an inside job, Blake. Some hacker in China would have had it six months ago. Physical is still best for security.”