Come and Find Me A Novel of Suspense - By Hallie Ephron Page 0,7
me. This has nothing to do with you. You can bet they’ve got some hidden agenda, some internal thing going on.”
Diana stared at Ashley. Of course she was right.
“They pulled the rug out from under you?” Ashley went on. “So? Big frickin’ deal. Move on.” She stood, held her hands together in prayer, and drew them up and down, slicing the air in front of Diana. “I grant you absolution. As of this moment, it is officially not your problem.”
More excellent advice. But once Diana saw a pattern, she was like a terrier going after a bone. That’s what had drawn her into hacking in the first place—one puzzle after another, each more complex than the last, waiting for her to connect the pieces.
Besides, it pissed her off when clients hired them to stop the hemorrhaging, then opted for a Band-Aid. Each time it happened, it pissed her off more.
“This isn’t the first client who’s done this,” she said. “Hit the panic button and shut us down rather than track the problem to its source.”
“Maybe it’s easier for them to just pay someone off. They definitely wanted you to stop digging.”
“Pay someone off?” Diana remembered Chander’s words: We’ve been assured. If they’d been hit up for payment in return for silence, then the last thing they’d want would be for her to keep sniffing around.
“You’re right,” Diana said. “The publicity could have done serious damage. They warehouse data for some of the biggest hospitals and health-care companies in the country. If someone’s got them by the short hairs, dammit, I’m going to find out who.”
“You are, are you?” Ashley narrowed her eyes at Diana.
Diana didn’t answer. But with or without their client’s cooperation, she was going to find out what was going on. Otherwise Gamelan was doing nothing more than playing a glorified version of Whack a Mole. At least this time she’d anticipated the speed bump. Only time would tell if she’d baited the laptop in time.
“I know that look,” Ashley said. “What are you up to?”
Chapter Four
“Come on, spill,” Ashley said as Diana transported Nadia back to her virtual office.
“You like this outfit?” Diana asked as she turned Nadia’s hair back to short and blond and traded her going-to-meeting clothes for leather jacket and jeans.
“Yeah, but—”
“You’d wear it?” Diana added a line of chalky black beneath Nadia’s eyes.
“I know what you’re doing,” Ashley said, but Diana knew she had her. Ashley couldn’t resist the question. Clothes had always been the perfect distraction. “Absolutely. Those business clothes are so Marian the Librarian. Does she have a Cheerleader Barbie outfit, too? Remember when we used to play Barbies?”
Diana did remember. They’d play for hours on end. They had Bride Barbie, Ballerina Barbie, Cheerleader Barbie, and Western Barbie. Western Barbie, Diana’s hands-down favorite, came with a pair of six-shooters, each with a cylinder that actually rotated. All the Barbies had lived in the Barbie house, swam in the Barbie pool, and argued over which one got to drive the pink Corvette.
“All you ever wanted to do was change their clothes,” Diana said.
“Which was hard because you kept losing the shoes and hair accessories,” Ashley shot back.
“Hair accessories? You lost their arms and legs.”
“Those were scientific experiments and sacrifices to the gods.”
“Sure they were.”
“So what’s this?” Ashley asked, pointing to the corner of the screen where a stack of messages had queued up. Atop the stack was a message from PWNED, a friend Diana had made in this virtual world. “E-mail?”
“Just like.”
With a ding, a new message appeared on the top of the stack.
GROB: Hey!
“Grob?” Ashley leaned toward the screen and slowly turned her head to face Diana. “What kind of a name is that?”
Diana felt her face flush. A moment later, another ding.
“Spontaneous Combustion? Sounds like a band. There’s a Copley Place in this Fantasyland?”
“OtherWorld. Probably. There’s an Eiffel Tower. A Moulin Rouge. A Taj Majal. A downtown Detroit. However, this event”—Diana indicated the message—“is right here in Boston. The real one. Spontaneous Combustion is an improv group. Like a flash mob? They’ll pile into a subway car and fill it with balloons and streamers and serve cake. Or show up in a clothing store and all try on the same dress, guys, too, then walk out onto the floor and freeze like mannequins. They post videos of their events on YouTube.”
“Like those people standing frozen in the middle of Grand