1st Case - James Patterson Page 0,70
distractible.
I hated to think about what it was going to take to distract him. As he’d said himself, I knew what he liked. But I’d deal with that when I had to.
In the meantime, I focused on the tech aspects of this hack, laying out contingency plans like a flowchart in my mind.
I don’t know how many miles I covered. My thoughts were spinning as fast as those pedals, and I barely noticed as I went from smooth, even strokes to jerky, sporadic pulls. When I couldn’t manage one more rotation, I eased back the resistance and coasted into a cooldown, arms overhead and sweat streaming.
I knew what I wanted to do now. Or at least I knew what I wanted to try. There were no guarantees, but as that ticking timer made abundantly clear, I couldn’t afford to sit around on my ass, waiting for a better idea.
Ready or not, it was time to flip this game.
CHAPTER 76
I DISMOUNTED MY bike, muscles singing, and peeled off my sweaty tee and bra. Then I put on my hoodie and left the zipper down just far enough to make it look like I was trying to start something with this guy.
I turned the Android’s camera on myself then and did what I could to keep from looking completely disgusted. The truth was, I was about 90 percent fearless, but this was well inside my 10 percent.
Before I could change my mind, I snapped a selfie and posted it into the app’s chat thread.
Are you there? I texted.
Even if he responded soon, I figured I could afford a minute away from the phone. That’s what I needed for the next step. It was a gamble, but there was no way through this without taking some kind of risk.
I picked up my card key, slipped silently out of the apartment, and let myself into the admin office across the hall.
“Hey, hon. What can I do you for?” Rena asked, looking up from her keyboarding as I came in.
“I’m really sorry to ask,” I said, “but I was just working out, and it reminded me that I was supposed to pick up my asthma prescription yesterday.”
And no, I don’t have asthma. There was no prescription.
“Are you okay?” Rena asked with the immediate concern of a mother. “Do I need to call someone?”
“I’m fine,” I told her. “But I’d feel better if I had that inhaler, just in case. It’s at the CVS on Mass Ave.”
Already she was stepping out of her low heels and into a pair of Keen slip-ons. “Don’t give it another thought,” she said. “I’ll go now and knock on your door as soon as I’m back.”
“Thank you so much,” I said. I hated lying to this nice lady, but it couldn’t be helped.
Back in my apartment, I closed the door, turned around, and pressed my eye to the peephole.
Rena came out a second later. I watched her head up the hall and gave it another slow ten count, just to make sure she was gone. Then I went right back to her office, grabbed the laptop, and returned to my apartment in one quick loop. The daily security logs would record every time I used my key card, but hopefully that wouldn’t matter by the time anyone noticed.
I checked the Android as soon as I was back. There were no new texts for me, which was just as well. I still had some humps to get over.
I input my work password to hop on the laptop’s Wi-Fi and then used my credit card to buy a copy of the software I was going to need for this. Twelve hundred dollars down the drain. Oh well. It was the least of my worries right now.
The program was called Stego. That’s short for steganography, which is the practice of digitally hiding information in plain sight. In this case, it was going to be one of the selfies I’d send the Poet, embedded with a bit of geolocating malware. As soon as it reached his phone or laptop, it would self-detonate and send back all the information I’d need.
God willing.
Next, I went looking for the malicious code itself. The dark net is full of spyware libraries, if you know where to look. And geolocation isn’t exactly rocket science in that world. It took me all of two minutes to find something I could use, and a few seconds more to drag it into Stego’s source window.
Now I needed the carrier file. A.k.a., the