Come and Find Me A Novel of Suspense - By Hallie Ephron Page 0,11
him that she’d been banking on the hackers not realizing that they’d been detected and coming back to the same laptop, looking for more. “Before MedLogic wiped the laptop, I planted another data file on it. Only this time it wasn’t just data. It had a program embedded in it—a digital LoJack that goes off when the file is opened.”
“But they wiped the laptop.”
“Not soon enough.”
Jake chuckled. “God, I am so glad you weren’t out there trying to bust us a few years ago.” He added, “So what do we know about them?” Diana noted the shift from “you” to “we.”
She clicked on the message that had come in and opened the attachment. She began scrolling through the lines of code that had come back from the hackers. Some of it she understood; most of it she didn’t. “Want to see?”
“And who’s paying for my time? We’ve got no client.”
“That never stopped us before.”
“Before was different.”
“As you keep reminding me. You wouldn’t have thought twice about doing this in the old days.”
“Diana, I was perfectly happy with the way things were in the old days. You’re the one who wanted to go straight.”
She scrolled through the information that had come back. “Linux operating system. A half-dozen IP addresses. I’ve never heard of this e-mail server software they seem to be running.”
She waited. Then sighed heavily. “I sure do wish I could figure out what this is telling me.”
Jake laughed.
She added, “You know you want to see this. Come on, admit it.”
“All right, all right.”
Diana resisted the urge to pump her fist in the air. She attached the file to a blank message and uploaded it to the drafts folder of their shared e-mail account.
“Okay, it’s in the dead drop,” she said. She could hear clicking on Jake’s end. “Find it?”
Jake grunted a yes. More clicks. She could hear Jake’s intake of breath. “Holy . . . cool, very cool.” Then silence. Combing through the file would be like sorting spaghetti, finding meaningful strands among the junk.
“You’re good,” he said. “Damned good.”
Good at what? Diana wondered—at out-geeking a geek or at emotional blackmail? “I had the best teachers,” she said.
“Let me look through this and see what I can figure out. We may not know who they are, but I should be able to get us in through their back door.”
Chapter Six
Diana pushed away from her desk. Talking to Jake always reminded her of Daniel. Again she drew Daniel’s driftwood walking stick from the stand by her desk and cradled it in her arms, letting the tang of pine surround her. God, she missed him. Missed his touch. The sound of his voice. His face. That edge-of-a-cliff feeling of being around him, not knowing what he was going to do next.
She remembered the first moment she’d laid eyes on him. She’d been a junior at UMass Dartmouth with a work-study job in the office of the dean of students. Her boss was the dean’s administrative assistant, Margaret Brown, a woman who reminded Diana of a lemon with all the juice squeezed out.
Diana had been alone in the office, answering the phones, when Jake—she’d met him at a frat party a year earlier—dropped by. With him was a guy in a biker jacket and torn Levi’s. He was hot, with dark and heavy-lidded eyes, and so tall that he’d had to stoop coming through the door to the office. His hair was long and wild. He hadn’t yet gone punk and shaved the sides of his head.
The three of them had gone out drinking that night, and ended up on the edge of a granite quarry in Quincy, about twenty miles from school. They’d sat smoking a joint, their legs dangling over a stone ledge, moonlight shining silver on the still black water that filled the pit before them. Daniel and Jake had stripped off their clothing and dived in.
“Come on!” Daniel shouted when he surfaced, splashing his arms in the water, the drops sparkling, ripples shimmering all around him. Even as stoned as Diana was, there was no way she could do it.
They’d returned to that quarry many times, but it wasn’t until months later, in the middle of one of New England’s hottest summers, that she’d gotten wasted enough to strip off her clothes and reckless enough to dive off the ledge. By then, she and Daniel were lovers.
It was Daniel who’d installed a program on Margaret Brown’s computer so that it sounded like an old-fashioned typewriter every time she