here?” he asked.
Carver stood up and rolled the chair back into place at the empty workstation.
“I’m running a program in my office and just wanted to check something on Mercer and Gissal.”
McGinnis didn’t seem to care. He looked through the main window into the server room, the heart and soul of the business.
“How’s that going?” he asked.
“A few routing hiccups,” Carver reported. “But we’ll work it out and we’ll be up and running before the target date. I may have to go back out there but it will be a quick trip.”
“Good. Where is everybody? You alone?”
“Stone and Early are in the back, building a tower. I’m watching things up here until my night shift comes in.”
McGinnis nodded approvingly. Building another tower meant more business.
“Anything else happening?”
“We have an issue in tower thirty-seven. I moved things off it until I can figure it out. It’s temporary.”
“We lose anything?”
“Not that I can tell.”
“Whose blade?”
“Belongs to a private nursing facility in Stockton, California. Not a big one.”
McGinnis nodded. It wasn’t a client he needed to worry about.
“What about last week’s intrusion?” he asked.
“Taken care of. The target was Guthrie, Jones. They’re in tobacco litigation with a firm called Biggs, Barlow and Cowdry. In Raleigh-Durham. Somebody at Biggs—a low-ranking genius—thought Guthrie was holding back on discovery and tried to take a look for himself.”
“And?”
“The FBI has opened a child porn investigation and the genius is the primary target. I don’t think he’ll be around to bother us very much longer.”
McGinnis nodded his approval and smiled.
“That’s my scarecrow,” he said. “You’re the best.”
Carver didn’t need McGinnis to say it to know it. But he was the boss. And Carver owed the older man for giving him the chance to create his own lab and data center. McGinnis had put him on the map. A month didn’t go by that Carver wasn’t wooed by a competitor.
“Thanks.”
McGinnis moved back to the mantrap door.
“I’m going to the airport later. We’ve got somebody coming in from San Diego and they’ll take the tour tomorrow.”
“Where are you taking him?”
“Tonight? Probably Rosie’s for barbecue.”
“The usual. And then the Highlighter?”
“If I have to. You want to come out? You could impress these people, you know, help me out.”
“Only thing they’ll be impressed by will be the naked women. Not my scene.”
“Yeah, well, it’s a tough job but somebody’s gotta do it. I’ll leave you to it, then.”
McGinnis left the control room. His office was up on the surface in the front of the building. It was private and he stayed there most of the time to greet prospective clients and probably to keep clear of Carver. Their conversations in the bunker always seemed a bit strained. McGinnis seemed to know to keep those times to a minimum.
The bunker belonged to Carver. The business was set up with McGinnis and the administrative staff up top at the entry point. The web hosting center with all the designers and operators was on the surface as well. The high-security colocation farm was below surface in the so-called bunker. Few employees had subterranean access and Carver liked it that way.
Carver sat down again at the workstation and went back online. He pulled up Angela Cook’s photo once more and studied it for a few minutes, then switched over to Google. It was now time to go to work on Jack McEvoy and to see if he had been smarter than Angela Cook in protecting himself.
He put the name into the search engine and soon a new thrill blasted through him. Jack McEvoy had no blog or any profile on Facebook or anywhere else that Carver could find. But his name scored numerous hits on Google. Carver had initially thought the name was familiar and now he knew why. A dozen years earlier McEvoy had written the definitive book on the killer known as the Poet, and Carver had read that book—repeatedly. Check that, McEvoy had done more than simply write the book about the killer. He had been the journalist who had revealed the Poet to the world. He had gotten close enough to breathe in the Poet’s last breath.
Jack McEvoy was a giant slayer.
Carver slowly nodded as he studied McEvoy’s book jacket photo on an old Amazon page.
“Well, Jack,” he said out loud. “I’m honored.”
Angela Cook’s dog did her in. The dog’s name was Arfy—according to a five-month-old entry in her blog. From there it took Carver only two variations—for fitting it into the six-character password requirement—to come up with Arphie and to successfully