Come and Find Me A Novel of Suspense - By Hallie Ephron Page 0,24
girl and I shouldn’t worry. But I can’t help myself. Humor me and give me a call.”
She hung up the phone. Her hand was trembling. She tried to identify the feeling that was giving her hand the shakes. Giving things names, she’d found, often made them easier to control. Not fear. Not anger. Anxiety. Not unwarranted, but still, there were a million explanations for why her sister hadn’t called. If she’d merely overslept, she’d be furious with Diana for calling the hotel and drawing attention to her lapse.
As she imagined Ashley yelling at her to “get a life and stay out of mine!” her anxiety abated a notch. But not so much that it stopped her from opening the Spontaneous Combustion video on her computer and watching it, yet again, hoping to catch a glimpse of Ashley that she’d missed.
Systematically, Diana inspected the three-minute clip. There was Ashley, raising her cell phone skyward. Then the camera cut to close-ups of other participants, of pedestrians, of the hotel window and Superman’s flight. It wasn’t until near the end of the footage that the camera once again panned over the empty spot where Ashley had been standing. Diana ran the video forward and back in slo-mo, zoomed in and out, but she couldn’t find any additional glimpses of Ashley.
According to the time stamps, the short clip represented thirty minutes of elapsed time. It looked like a montage of footage spliced together from at least four different cameras. So that meant at least two hours of footage had to have been taken, most of which hadn’t made it into the final cut.
Diana found the Spontaneous Combustion Web site and shot off an e-mail, asking if there was any way she could see the raw footage from the various cameras filming at Copley. She explained why. Then she left the same message on their office phone. While she was at it, she found Spontaneous Combustion’s Facebook page and posted an entry asking anyone who’d been to the event and seen a woman wearing a red newsboy cap to please, please, please get in touch with her.
There was nothing more she could do. None of this was getting her any closer to finding her sister. Meanwhile, more messages had stacked up in her queue. On top was another from Jake.
He began with “How’s the Vault proposal going?”
“It’s going,” she typed back.
This was the third time he’d asked. Jake, a person who rarely resorted to all caps, had written in a previous message that Vault Security was a VERY BIG DEAL. Vault had been contracted by the federal government to process medical insurance for everyone from government employees to elected officials to judges to federal prison inmates. SERIOUSLY DEEP POCKETS, Jake had added.
If hackers were targeting their clients, Diana foresaw SERIOUSLY DEEP RISK.
After Vault’s head of IT approached them, Jake had flown to their corporate headquarters in Bethesda. He’d been given access to a ton of information about the company and about the computer system that they’d recently adopted with supposedly state-of-the-art security.
But Vault hadn’t been bitten by a high-tech breach. Their head of billing—correction, their former head of billing—had left his laptop in a briefcase on a Metrorail train. He said it wasn’t until after he got home that he realized he’d lost the computer, and not until the following day when he got back to work that he realized it had a flash drive attached with nearly 4GB of customer billing records. He couldn’t explain why he’d felt the need to make himself a copy of the records. In any event, the data that should never have left the building contained tens of thousands of names, Social Security numbers, insurance ID numbers, and medical records. All the data was encrypted, but elsewhere on the laptop were the decryption algorithms.
Though no one had said as much, Jake suspected that the laptop also held access codes and passwords that could be used to open detailed medical histories, test results, and more, all of it intensely private information, some of it belonging to very public individuals.
The project was, of course, shrouded in secrecy. There was no way to know who’d ended up with the laptop, but if it was someone who knew how to exploit what was there, Vault wanted to be the first to find that out. Gamelan’s reputation for discretion and insider knowledge of the computer netherworld was their wedge, their competitive advantage. Wearing a gray hat, they could be the underground eyes and ears