Winterlong Page 6

  “Williamson,” was the acknowledgment. The technician sounded bored with her own name as she said it. Faraday could hear keys tapping in the background, could picture Williamson staring at the screen, not breaking from her task, giving the call through her headset the minimum attention required.

  “We’re moving on Prodigal Two. I’ll need you on shift tonight.”

  Faraday heard a tab snap open in the background and knew it was one of Williamson’s ever-present Red Bulls.

  “Good to know. So that means I can forget about working the flights?”

  Faraday thought about it for a moment. “No. Keep at it.”

  Williamson’s shrug was almost audible on the line. “You’re the boss.”

  “That I am,” Faraday said, and hung up. If stage one of the operation went well tonight, Williamson’s work over the last few weeks would be largely redundant. But it was always advisable to have a backup plan.

  9

  PALO ALTO, CALIFORNIA

  There are three ways to go on the run.

  Actually, there are a million different ways. But there are three real options from which to choose before a person starts to think about the details. At one end of the scale, you stay close to home. At the other, you relocate to another country. The third option is midway between the two extremes.

  The people who try to half-ass the whole thing stick around the area they’re familiar with, maybe crashing at a friend’s house where they convince themselves no one will think to look for them. Those people are generally the easiest to find. Then you have the opposite type: the ones who go for broke and leave the country, headed for Europe or, more intelligently, a nonextradition country in South America. This option makes a lot of sense, because if you’re running away from someone or something, it’s a natural instinct to want to put the maximum number of miles behind you to do that. The only problem is that in this day and age, it’s very difficult to leave the country without your point of departure and destination being tracked on about a dozen different systems. Fleeing to a foreign country makes finding you a complicated and expensive task, but at least it gives the people who are looking for you a solid starting point. They know you’re in Barcelona or Ecuador or Timbuktu, or wherever, and they know that without a support network, you’re likely to behave in a certain way.

  The smart people don’t do either of those things. The smart people stay in the country, but get the hell away from whatever they’re running from. They buy a used car for cash using a fake ID, or they take the bus or the train. Better: a few different buses or trains to big population centers. They take nothing inessential with them, they pay for everything in cash, they dump their cell phone, and they don’t keep in contact with anyone. It’s at once very simple and harder than it sounds.

  Given that Scott Bryant was a Stanford grad who had already pulled off a successful data heist in a high-security data center, I was reasonably confident he wasn’t an idiot. That meant he wouldn’t stick around town, and he was smart enough to know the cops might have put a hold on his passport.

  I hailed a cab outside of the coffee shop and gave the driver the address of Bryant’s house. Depending on what happened next, it might be worthwhile to rent a car, but I wanted to hear what Bryant’s wife had to say first. Palo Alto was the next town to the north from Sunnyvale, so it was a short trip on the 101. The house was on Amarillo Avenue, a short distance from the exit off the freeway.

  I called up the details of the house on my phone on the journey. It had commanded a hefty price tag when Bryant and his wife had made the down payment a couple of years before and would probably fetch even more now. Considering the asking price, it was curiously unimpressive—a wide one-story building with a covered parking spot, just three bedrooms, a stone patio, and a reasonably spacious yard. Most other places in the country, it would have been an unremarkable residence for a working professional. Here, thanks to inflated Silicon Valley real estate prices, it nosed into a seven-figure purchase price.

  There was an old lady tending yellow roses in a garden across the street who watched me with interest as I got out of the taxi. I smiled at her and started up the front path. The door opened on a blond woman wearing jeans, a white blouse, and a polite smile. When she saw I wasn’t anyone she recognized, or the mailman, she tilted her head and the smile took on a warier edge.

  A voice came from behind her.

  “Mommy, who’s at the door?”

  Before her mother could answer, a tiny four-year-old girl with her dark hair in a ponytail was trying to squeeze through the gap between the woman’s hip and the doorframe to get a glimpse of me. I smiled down at her and looked up again as Jasmine Bryant asked how she could help me.

  “My name’s Carter Blake,” I said. “I’m here on behalf of Moonola.”

  I left it deliberately short and to the point, because I thought the way she reacted to that sentence would tell me a lot. I was right.

  The smile vanished and her expression took on an awkward, embarrassed look. “I’m afraid my husband doesn’t live with us anymore.”

  Interesting. Either she was an excellent liar, or she had no clue what her husband had been planning. I didn’t catch a hint of suspicion or guilt in her face or her voice.

  “Mommy—”

  “Just a minute, sweetheart. Sorry.”

  “No problem,” I said. “If this is a bad time ...”

  “Is Scott all right?”

  “Actually, that’s what I’m here about. He hasn’t been seen at work for a couple of days and, well, naturally there’s some concern. I just wondered if you’d heard from him in the last week or so.”

  She shook her head. “We haven’t spoken in weeks.” She glanced down at her daughter and her voice went up an octave. “Sweetie, there’s a pack of cookies in the kitchen. Why don’t you go get one?”

  The kid’s head snapped up, suddenly serious. “Three.”

  “One. I’ll count.”

  The two of them held a staring contest for a moment before the daughter relented and ran back into the house.

  Jasmine Bryant watched her get out of earshot and then stepped out onto the porch, letting the door swing most of the way shut behind her. The polite smile had vanished.

  “What did he do?”

  “I didn’t say he’d done anything.”

  “Cut the crap. If they’re looking for him, it’s because he’s done something he shouldn’t have done and skipped out, right? That’s what he did to me. What are you, a private detective?”

  “I’m a consultant. I’m helping them resolve the situation.”

  “So there is a situation.”

  “He’s taken something they’d like to get back. If I catch up to him soon, I think they’ll go easy on him.” The lie rolled off my tongue before I had consciously thought about it.

  “I’d help you if I could. But we haven’t spoken in weeks, like I said. I’ve seen him twice since I kicked him out of this place.” She turned a little and looked up at the house, sighing. “And we won’t be too far behind him.”

  “Do you mind if I ask?”

  “He ran up debts north of two hundred grand in Vegas, and now all of a sudden we don’t have the money I thought we did.” She laughed bitterly. “Hell, we don’t have the ’we’ I thought we did. You know something, Mr. Blake? I don’t think we ever really know anyone.”

  “You must be pretty angry with him,” I said, feeling only a little like a heel.

  “That’s an understatement,” she said. She was looking beyond me at something. I glanced around and saw the old lady across the street bending over her flower beds watching us. She hurriedly looked down. Jasmine Bryant kept her eyes on her for another couple of seconds before looking back at me. “You probably think you can persuade me to help you find him, just to get back at him, right?”

  I thought carefully before replying. “I wish I could tell you it hadn’t crossed my mind.”

  She nodded. “Well, you can’t. I may be angrie
r than hell at Scott, but I wouldn’t sic the police on him just to get even.”

  “I’m not the police.” I held up my hands, palms out. “Look—I don’t even have ID.”

  The corner of her mouth curved upward, and then she sighed. “He’s gotten himself into a lot of trouble this time, hasn’t he?”

  “My guess? It looks like he made a bad decision on impulse.”

  “Did you mean what you said? That they’ll go easy on him if you bring him back?”

  I thought about Stafford’s request for Bryant’s balls on his desk. It wouldn’t be easy. But for some reason, looking through Bryant’s file, meeting his estranged family, I couldn’t believe he was a genuinely bad guy. Just one who had made some bad decisions and was in way over his head. I knew Stafford’s number one priority was getting the MeTime software back. Surely I could negotiate favorable terms in return for that.

  “I think I can arrange it,” I said. “As long as we put things right.”

  She stared at me for a minute, then opened the door. “You can look in his study, if you like,” she said. “I don’t know if it’ll do any good. He left in kind of a hurry.”

  10

  Bryant’s study was in the third bedroom, the one with the window that looked out on the backyard. It was small, and contained only a computer desk and a bookcase with three shelves, the top two lined with a mixture of mystery novels and coding manuals, the bottom containing magazine folders and ring binders.

  Jasmine gave me the password for the computer, and I spent half an hour checking the usual things on Bryant’s profile. Internet search history showed nothing out of the ordinary—no queries for flights to Timbuktu or research into how to effectively disappear. Either Bryant’s crime hadn’t been planned far enough in advance for him to have left a trail here, or he had been sensible about not leaving clues behind.

  I browsed through the file space, not even attempting to look at everything. There were thousands of files, and it would take a team of people a long time to meticulously check each one. If I struck out on leads, it might be worth asking Jasmine if I could turn the computer over to Stafford’s people, but I wasn’t sure if she would go that far. Instead, I spent some time superficially looking at his file structure. He had been conscientious with his filing—keeping documents from previous jobs, along with a whole lot of stuff from his time at Moonola. I happened on a folder buried in the Moonola file called “Nevada” that held spreadsheets with dollar amounts with strange notations that I guessed were Bryant’s way of keeping track of his gambling. Unfortunately, it hadn’t helped him keep on top of his losses.

  I was about to give up and start looking through the folders in the bookcase when I noticed a folder within the Work section with an unfamiliar title. All of the other titles were either easily understandable, or matched the names of companies I’d seen on his resume. But this one stood out. It was titled “Aella”. I clicked into the folder and found documents similar to the ones stored under the names of other companies he’d worked with: meeting notes, system requirement specifications, source code files, contracts. I took a break from that to Google the word Aella. It was the name of a software company based in Seattle.

  I clicked back into the Aella folders and looked at a few of the files. Bryant’s labeling convention was so diligent that it took me a matter of minutes to find the information I needed. He had worked for Aella as a freelance consultant, managing on a project that had rolled out over a six-month period the previous year. The dates matched precisely with the time Bryant was in Seattle, supposedly because of his mother-in-law’s chemo.

  So for some reason, Bryant hadn’t wanted to tell his then-employer about what he was really doing in Seattle, hence the sabbatical. It didn’t take a rocket scientist—or a tech genius—to work out the reason. He didn’t want his employers to know he was taking on a lucrative fixed-term project for a competitor.

  I printed out a copy of one of Bryant’s invoices, detailing the hours billed and showing Aella’s address, folded it and put it in my pocket. I knelt down by the bookcase and started going through the binders and magazine files, just to be thorough. I found some mortgage statements, family documents, birth certificates, but nothing work-related. As I replaced the last binder on its shelf, I felt a little resistance at the back. I pulled it back out and reached in, feeling my fingers wrap around a small lump of plastic. I pulled my hand out to see that it held a small cell phone.

  I came out of the study a minute later. From the doorway, I could see across the hall and through the open kitchen door. Jasmine was sitting at the table with her daughter, who was playing a game on some kind of handheld device while Jasmine drank coffee. The sunlight was streaming through the Venetian blinds, bathing the room in golden stripes. For a brief moment, it looked almost as though all was right with the world. Jasmine heard the study door open and met my gaze.

  “Any luck?”

  “I don’t know,” I said truthfully. I held up the phone. “Is this your husband’s?”

  She squinted at it before shrugging. “I guess so. Maybe an old one. Do you want to take it?”

  “It might be worth having a quick look, if it isn’t password protected,” I said.

  “Three-nine-one-one.”

  Both Jasmine and I looked down at Alyssa, who’d chirped up without bothering to look up from her game.

  “Excuse me?” I said.

  “Three-nine-one-one. That’s Daddy’s pin on most things, except the cable.” She looked up and blinked at me. “It’s my birthday. I’m nearly five.”

  Jasmine and I exchanged an amused glance, and I held the phone out to her. “Got a charger?”

  Ten minutes later, I was scrolling through Bryant’s e-mails, looking for something that might confirm my suspicions about his direction of travel. I had been lucky that he had never bothered to wipe this old device when he upgraded, because it was still linked to his personal Microsoft profile, although not his Moonola account, by the looks of the e-mails. I was unlucky in that he didn’t seem to have conducted any e-mail conversations about his plans to skip town with Stafford’s software. That was hardly surprising.

  But it’s always worth checking to make sure the person you’re looking for hasn’t made that one mistake in among the hundred other things they’ve been careful about.

  I gave up on the e-mails and thumbed through some of the photographs on the phone. I went back to the Seattle period and found some touristy shots of the Space Needle, the Pike Place Market and the zoo. Alyssa looking much younger, Jasmine and Scott looking much happier.

  “Did you enjoy Seattle?” I asked.

  “I liked it okay.”

  “And your mom’s doing okay now?”

  Jasmine studied me for a second. “Why do you ask?”

  “Your husband told the company she had cancer. That’s why you moved to Seattle for a while, why he had to take a sabbatical.”

  She sighed. “My mother hasn’t been sick a day in her life. She lives in Ohio.”

  I nodded sympathetically and closed the photo gallery. I decided to look at one last thing: the calendar. Like the e-mails, it automatically backed up from the Microsoft profile. I didn’t expect to find anything, so I was surprised when I saw three recent appointments this week.

  I tapped on the first one: it was a one-hour appointment at six p.m. the day before titled Shopping. There was no location or additional notes, but that matched exactly with the time Bryant had stolen the MeTime software from the server. The second one was three hours later. Again, there was no location, and the title of the appointment was simply Car. Could he have been saving vague-sounding appointments in his calendar as a way of making sure he kept to a timeline? Shopping could be a code for stealing the software. Car—picking up a rental, perhaps, or buying one second-hand in order to skip town without leaving a trace.

  There was one final appointment in the calendar for eleven a.m. tomorrow. No location, just a vague title again. It said, simply, Deliver
y—EWK. For a moment I wondered if the three letters stood for an airport, or perhaps an abbreviation for a building. And then I thought about what I’d found out about his work for Aella, and I knew exactly what they stood for.

  Bryant had made his one mistake, and with everything else I now knew about him, I was pretty sure it was going to lead me straight to him.

  11

  NEW YORK CITY

  Faraday took a break from staring at her computer screen and closed her eyes, massaging the center of her forehead with her thumb and index finger. She swiveled around in her chair and looked out at the skyline, wondering if it would snow tonight. The news said a major blizzard was coming later in the week, but for now the night sky was clear. That was good. It would be a late night tonight, and the last thing she needed was to make it later if her driver was delayed.

  She swiveled back around when there was a knock at her door. She raised an eyebrow when Murphy entered, the usual ironic twinkle in his eye absent.

  “Not like you to knock,” she said.

  “Stark’s team is all set up,” he said. “You asked me to let you know.”

  She nodded, noting that he had passed up the opportunity for a snappy comeback. Definitely not himself. Again Faraday thought about how different Murphy had been since the Crozier thing. Ever since they had gotten a lead on the man now calling himself Carter Blake, there had been a subtle change in him. When Faraday had been brought in to replace Drakakis, she had found Murphy a reliable asset, but one who never seemed to take things too seriously. He approached each task with an unflappable air, giving you the sense that he didn’t really care about the outcome. The ongoing hunt for Blake was different. Whenever the subject came up, he was serious, focused. Like now.

  Faraday got up and followed Murphy out. They crossed the corridor, and Murphy keyed in the daily code to access the ops room. It was a large, windowless room that felt a little like a cross between a movie theater and NASA mission control. There was a well-lit area up front, with chairs arranged around a horizontal table screen. After that there were four rows of computers, arranged on descending levels to the bottom of the room, where the far wall was taken up completely with a screen, divided up into nine rectangles. A different image could be shown on each one, or they could combine to display a single image. Right now the top six rectangles were showing what Faraday assumed was a live satellite feed. It displayed a series of buildings arranged around a swimming pool, the underwater illumination making it shine like a sapphire in the midst of the sprawl.