Come and Find Me A Novel of Suspense - By Hallie Ephron Page 0,4
in Peru when she and Daniel had gone there to climb Machu Picchu. “But this”—she took in the computer equipment—“looks like some kind of command central. And what are these?” She indicated the bank of monitors. “Surveillance?”
“With infrared for night vision. Plus an alarm system. Redundant Internet access. Firewalls. Motion sensors. Welcome to Gamelan Security headquarters. Aka, my office.”
“How did you manage to set all this up?”
“Jake helped me.”
“So all that experience hacking into other people’s systems finally pays off.” Ashley paused, but when Diana didn’t rise to her bait, she gave a brittle smile and asked, “So, how is charming Jake?” Ashley and Jake had gone out on one spectacularly awful date during which he’d spent the whole evening texting.
“He’s good. I think. We’re working together, but I haven’t seen him seen him in months.”
Ashley picked her way past a dead ficus, over an empty can of Red Bull and some open boxes filled with foam packing material. She settled herself in Diana’s desk chair—white fiberglass molded into a tulip shape with a red seat cushion and polished aluminum base. Daniel had given Diana that chair, a period piece from the sixties, as a Valentine’s Day gift a few years earlier.
Before Diana could stop her, Ashley reached for the mouse and jiggled it. The monitor flickered to life. The replica of the room they were in came up. Nadia was frozen in the middle of it. The queue of waiting messages in the lower corner of the screen had grown.
“How cool is this?” Ashley said.
Diana closed the office door. She crossed the room and tapped Ashley on the shoulder. “You mind?”
“Sorry.” Ashley relinquished the mouse and stood. She leaned forward, staring at the screen, her long blond hair falling almost to the keyboard. “OtherWorld?” she read aloud. “So what is this, some kind of game?”
“Game?” Diana choked on a laugh. “No. It’s—” She paused, searching for the word. “Just like the name says, it’s another world. There are stores and other offices here. You can go to parks and hear concerts. I meet with clients.”
“Wow. Video conferencing with cartoon characters.” Ashley snickered.
Diana massaged her forehead. “Sort of. But I don’t get paid in Monopoly money.” She edged Ashley aside and slipped into the chair. “And the cartoon characters are real people.”
“You’re sure about that?”
“Reasonably so.”
Ashley gave her an astonished look. “This, from a woman who trusts no one?”
“No one but you, my dear.”
Diana noticed the timer: minus two minutes, thirty seconds. She was officially late. She eyed the message-waiting flag on Skype. Probably Jake, trying to raise a response out of her.
With a few clicks, she transformed Nadia’s hair from short, spiky blond to conservative brown done up in a French braid.
“Meet Nadia,” Diana said as she exchanged her avatar’s leather jacket, jeans, and boots for a dark tailored suit jacket, a short skirt, and ballerina flats. “She’s my alter ego in-world. And this is Gamelan Security’s in-world headquarters. Her office. You can think of it as my very own 3-D MySpace.”
“Or Rapunzel’s virtual tower?” Ashley said.
Diana remembered the green cover of the book of Grimm’s fairy tales, its spine peeled away. Rapunzel had been their favorite. Over and over they’d play out the story, taking turns at being the princess who lets down her long hair so that a wicked enchantress, and later a handsome prince, can climb up to her tower prison.
“Except Nadia doesn’t need rescuing,” Diana said. “Business is booming. And she’s late for her meeting.”
Clients had been lining up ever since Gamelan exposed a young medical student as the mastermind behind the breach of a prominent health insurer. They uncovered a massive theft of patient and physician medical records, though unfortunately not before the hacker’s customers abroad had used the information to manufacture thousands of counterfeit health insurance ID cards and generate thousands of phony prescriptions. After the story hit national and international papers, Diana and Jake had more work than they could handle.
Diana dragged the red cap and wraparound sunglasses back to her inventory. The gold charms that her avatar wore around her neck—just like the real pair of gold Ds that Diana often wore around her own—were barely visible.
“Okay. Here we go.” She swiveled toward Ashley and put her finger to her lips. “Remember”—she lowered her voice to a whisper—“you’re a mouse.”
“Where do you want me?” Ashley squeaked.
Diana pointed to a chair. Ashley held her hands like paws in front of her, minced over to the chair, and sat.