Come and Find Me A Novel of Suspense - By Hallie Ephron Page 0,76

past Daniel for his laptop, she heard a sound. It was a faint but precise dinging, as if someone were tapping a key on a miniature xylophone.

Ding-ding-ding. Ding-ding-ding. It continued, irritating and persistent. Daniel twitched in his sleep. She hovered over him, trying to locate the source. Finally the sound stopped. That’s when she noticed that a message-waiting alert was flashing on his screen. But that hadn’t been where the sound itself originated.

Diana shifted the laptop over to the edge of his Daniel’s worktable and pulled her chair up to it. She clicked on the alert.

The text message that popped open was from Jake. It was a short note, saying that his plane was leaving on time and he was waiting to board at Logan.

Diana replied the way she imagined Daniel would have done, with a simple “A-OK.” Anything fancier and Jake might have realized that the reply hadn’t been written by Daniel. She wanted to convey an impression of business as usual.

But what exactly was their “business as usual”? Compromising data—she got that. But then what? There had to be more to it.

She toggled through Daniel’s open applications, pausing at a bright green network management screen. She stared at the network name at the top of the screen. Volganet. This was where data stolen from MedLogic had been copied. This was where her laptop kept trying to send GPS coordinates, betraying its location.

Damn them. They weren’t working with Volganet. They were Volganet.

Diana scanned the screen and found a list of users with registered access to Volganet. She scrolled down through the more than thirty entries. JWILSON. BPACKER. PHREAKANOID. ACIDFI. MKATE. It was a mix of hacker handles and conventional user names.

There was SOK0S—that was Daniel. NADIAV was there too. Account status: LOCKED.

Next, she navigated through the hierarchies of files on Volganet. At the top level, directory names were short and cryptic. One that caught her eyes was ML. MedLogic? NH and UI. Those could be abbreviations for Neponset Hospital and Unity Insurance—Gamelan clients that had bolted the minute she’d gotten a lead on their hackers.

Diana drilled down, through folders within folders. She felt sick. She’d thought she was such a hotshot security consultant when, in fact, she’d been nothing more than a puppet, a front for Daniel and Jake. They’d taken advantage of the trust she’d built and used her as their Trojan horse. She’d given them unfettered access to these companies’ systems, enabling them to help themselves . . . to what?

Opening some files at random, she found a bill for outpatient treatment; a medical history complete with name, address, and Social Security number; a DNA profile like the one stolen from MedLogic; a lab worker’s personnel file; a cancer patient’s treatment regimen; a script for Paxil.

Her gaze traveled from the computer screen to a pair of servers that sat on the floor. They were good-size computers, about the size of mini-refrigerators, each with drawers stacked on top. Those would contain slots for hard drives, a data farm. All told, she guessed there’d be room for tens of thousands of gigabytes—much more than they needed for any business she’d thought they were in.

How long had she been acting the fool? The dates on some of the folders went back six months. That had been during the time when Daniel was still out of the country, or so he claimed. Was there even a single fact in his supposed time line that she could check?

The mill—the property sale had to have been registered. That she could confirm.

She brought up a map of New Hampshire. She found Mill Village, traced the Merrimack River a few miles north to where she guessed the mill was located. Most likely it was in Merrimack County.

She found the Merrimack County’s online registry of deeds, created an account, and got as far as the inquiry screen. She set a range of 2008–2010 in the TRANSACTION DATE field. The only other piece of information she needed was LAST NAME.

She knew it was unlikely, but she tried Schechter, Daniel’s last name. No match. Then she tried Jake’s last name, Filgate. Back came a match for a Michele Filgate, but the property listed was on Main Street in Concord. Then she tried Wilson, then Packer, and on through the surnames she’d extracted from the list of system users.

Out of ideas, she tried typing in her own last name. Bingo. Diana Highsmith had purchased the four-acre parcel with three vacant industrial buildings for $1,660,000 on . . . Diana