Invasion of Privacy: A Novel Page 26

  “She said she was seeing her TA, too. He was going to help her figure out the clue.”

  Mary turned on the reading lamp above Jessie’s desk and looked around for a notebook or a handout from school that might contain the TA’s number. There was a PC Magazine and a copy of Wired. But nothing from the university about Jess’s classes. What had happened to spiral notebooks and black speckled composition books?

  She opened the drawer. Complete pandemonium. Pens and pencils and erasers and receipts. She freed a photograph. Jess and Joe at a symposium on the future of the Net that they’d attended last year. Mary replaced the photo and continued to rummage through the mess. Her fingers touched something cool and round pushed against the back corner. “What’s this thing?”

  In her hand she held a slim green metallic tube.

  “An e-cigarette,” said Tank.

  “A what?”

  “You put some kind of oil inside and an electric spark vaporizes it. It’s the latest thing.”

  “My daughter doesn’t smoke.”

  “She doesn’t like boys either.”

  Mary dropped the e-cigarette into the drawer. She knew she should feel shocked or disappointed, but all she could muster was a vague sense of surprise. At the moment e-cigarettes ranked low on her list of punishable offenses. She closed the drawer and made a search of the floor and closet. “No backpack,” she said. “She has her laptop.”

  Tank stood in the doorway, biting his lip. “We should really go.”

  “Not yet.”

  Mary pushed past him and went downstairs. She took a seat at her work alcove and double-clicked on the search bar. “Don’t,” said Tank. “They see everything.”

  “I don’t care,” said Mary as she logged onto the UT website. “I’ve got to find Jess. I don’t have time to play their games.”

  In a few seconds she’d pulled up a course description and syllabus of Jessie’s summer school class. The professor’s name stood at the top, along with his office address and phone numbers. Below was similar information for his teaching assistant, Linus Jankowski, PhD from MIT, with a concentration in artificial intelligence and game theory.

  The call to his mobile number went to voicemail. “Mr. Jankowski, this is Mary Grant. I understand that my daughter may have visited you earlier this evening. It’s almost one a.m. and she isn’t home yet. If you’ve seen her or have any idea where she might be, please call me at this number. Don’t worry about the time. I’ll be up. Please consider this an emergency.”

  “Mom, where are we going?” asked Grace. “Do I need to get dressed?”

  “Where are we going, Mr. Potter?” Mary asked.

  “Not sure yet. First let’s get to my car.”

  “Just a sec.” Mary pulled up Netflix and selected The Conversation, the movie starring Gene Hackman.

  “What’s that for?” asked Grace, mystified by the old movie.

  “It’s about someone who secretly listens to people.” Mary looked over her shoulder at Tank. “They should like it.”

  “Oh? What happens?”

  “The people start secretly listening to him. It drives him crazy.”

  71

  It was past midnight.

  Alone in his office, Ian stood transfixed as Mary Grant came to magnificent three-dimensional holographic life before him. It was not a likeness in the ordinary sense but a rendering of her everyday life as reflected by her online activity, and as such, a far more penetrating portrait of her entire self. In a way it was a new form of art. Da Vinci had mastered perspective. Monet had given them impressionism. Picasso, cubism. Yet no matter the style, the artist was perpetually seeking a glimpse of the subject’s innermost soul. Now Ian had penetrated those secret confines.

  He turned in a circle, his face bathed in the eerie glow. He had programmed the malware to log on to each site the Grants visited, in order of frequency. As it did, the tower grew ever taller, while screens appeared behind screens—two, three, four deep—until he stood encircled by a stack of translucent images as tall as himself, extending outward to all corners of the room. It wasn’t science. It was art. He would call it “Cyberrealism.” Accurate to within a digital brushstroke.

  Ian sipped from his tea as his eyes ran up and down the screens. He was looking for ways in, seeking his victim’s most vulnerable spot. It was a question not of too few but of too many. Where to start?

  Banking? He had unfettered access to her accounts and could do with her money as he pleased. Credit cards? It would take only a few purchases to push her over the limit. Social media? An unsavory message, a wildly offensive post, could destroy her reputation in an hour. His eyes flitted from one screen to the next, but when they stopped, it was not at a website for a bank, a credit card company, or a social media site but on an icon for a photo app.

  He raised a hand toward the image, only to lower it a moment later, his fingertips tingling as if shocked. Not yet. Pictures were for dessert.

  A turn of the head and he landed on Mary’s e-mail account. He touched the screen and brought up all new mail. Most messages were from friends expressing condolences. He read a few, moved to older messages, skipping back in time, unsure what he was looking for.

  He continued scanning past messages from family, friends, banks, schools, until his attention came to a halt at the word Hazelden. The mail was addressed to JS Grant and cc’d to Mary. Ian opened it immediately. It was a personal communication from the world-famous hospital informing its former patient, Joseph S. Grant, that he was delinquent on his payments and asking when he would settle the balance due for his stay three years earlier.

  Ian turned, accessed the Grants’ insurance site, and navigated to a history of past payments. Almost all were for the child’s treatments, and they totaled hundreds of thousands of dollars. He scrolled back three years earlier and found a claim for $74,000 for a ninety-day stay in Hazelden’s alcohol and substance abuse rehabilitation unit. The insurance company had paid $60,000, leaving the family with the balance of $14,000.

  Ian turned and found the blue icon he had passed over earlier. He touched it with a fingertip and the screen filled with photographs of the Grant family. Most were of the girls, both alone and together, the younger, blond child irrepressibly sunny, the older, dark-haired child willful, challenging, even spiteful. The photos showed the family at the beach, rafting down a river. Then came the obligatory first-day-of-school pictures. The older girl, Jessie (he knew now), was dressed in baggy dark jeans and a T-shirt advertising a rock band. The younger girl wore a pleated skirt and a pink button-down shirt. At Halloween the older girl wore no costume, while her sister dressed as a strange yellow creature with a single eye. Ian believed it was called a Minion and was a mischievous character from a popular film. Further along he arrived at Thanksgiving. A photo of father and daughters. He tapped the photo and it filled the screen. So here was Joseph Grant. Finally we meet. He was tall, robust, and good-humored. No sign of the impetuous meddler. The man who would sacrifice his life for his career.

  Ian tapped the photo again and returned to the library. Christmas. A photo of the family standing in front of a modest tree. Really, Mr. Grant, thought Ian uncharitably, can’t you do better than that? The four Grants were dressed in their Christmas best: dark suit for the father (poor-fitting and of questionable quality), red cowl-neck sweater and pearls for the mother. The younger girl in a white dress, the older in her jeans and shabby T-shirt.

  Ian continued examining the photos, awed by the sheer number. Was there an occasion that didn’t warrant a few snaps? Grilling burgers at a community barbecue? Making Valentine’s Day cards from construction paper? Getting a good report card? Watching television on the family couch?

  His eye came to rest upon a close-up of Joseph Grant and his daughters. The FBI agent had an arm around each and was hugging them close. Ian looked away, ashamed, as if caught intruding on an intimate scene. After a moment he looked back. It was the father’s gaze directed at his older daughter that
provoked his response and filled him with a familiar emotion.

  Ian ducked his head, peering through the canyon of screens to the far corner of his office. He found the scuffed black briefcase and fought to summon up an image of his own father, Peter Prince. He didn’t care if it was one of such beaming paternal pride. Any image would do. Scowling, laughing, sleeping…anything.

  As always, his memory betrayed him. For a man of prodigious intellect, he was able to dredge up but a single image. It came from the morning of his father’s departure. Ian saw the pinstriped suit, then the shoes, then the dimpled tie, and finally the perfectly combed hair. It took a few seconds longer for his father’s face to come into focus, and when it did, Ian still could not conjure the expression. No matter how hard he tried, he could not make Peter Prince look at him with anything but a neutral regard. Nowhere did he see the kind of pride and unconditional love with which Joseph Grant looked at his daughters.

  It required a herculean effort to return his attention to the photo of Joseph Grant and his daughters. Instead of love, Ian now read hubris in Joseph Grant’s features. In place of pride, selfishness. It was the FBI agent’s fault. He’d been warned. Edward Mason had made it clear that he should cease and desist in his investigations. Grant had known what was coming.

  Properly enraged, Ian closed the photo app. Sympathy ill-served a man in his position. He straightened his shoulders. With an invisible shudder, he focused his priority on the task at hand: gaining absolute and inviolable control over another human being.

  Ian spun until he found the Grants’ banking website.

  There was no better place to begin.

  72

  Mary rapped her knuckles like a machine gun against Carrie Kramer’s sliding glass door. Beginner’s Morse code for help. A minute passed before a light went on and Carrie peered around a corner, her husband hiding behind her.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked, sliding the door open.

  “I need your help,” said Mary.

  “It’s one in the morning. Why didn’t you call?”

  “Tell you in a sec.” Mary looked over her shoulder. “Come on, guys.” Tank and Grace emerged from the shadows and bustled into the kitchen. “Lock it,” said Mary.

  Carrie closed the door and flicked the lock. “Where’s Jess?”

  —

  Fifteen minutes, two cups of coffee, and a judicious explanation later, Mary sat with Tank in the Kramers’ study, chairs pulled up to the iMac. Grace was in bed, clutching her phone to her chest in case her big sister called.

  Mary slipped in the disk containing the images from the Nutty Brown Cafe’s surveillance cameras. “Think they found McNair by now?”

  “You can count on it.”

  “Will they come to my house?”

  “They’ll come.”

  Mary took stock of her surroundings, telling herself that she and Grace were safe here, not quite believing it. For the tenth time she used Carrie’s phone to call Jessie. For the tenth time the call went to message and she hung up. “Why isn’t she answering?”

  “She doesn’t want to tell you what she’s doing.”

  “Where in the world could she be?”

  “Trying to help her dad. At least that’s what she thinks.”

  “When I get a hand on that young lady, I’m going to…” Mary imagined the dressing-down she was going to give her daughter. No matter how hard she tried, her anger wouldn’t last. “It’s my fault. I should have been here. Who do I think I am? McNair said it himself. He said, ‘Remember, Mary, you’re a mom.’ That’s all I am. I’m not Joe.”

  “And you think Jessie wouldn’t have gone off if you hadn’t left?”

  “Maybe…I don’t know.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  Mary nodded. She’d set Jess on her path the moment she’d asked her about retrieving Joe’s voice message. She didn’t know what she’d expected Jess to do, but deep down, she knew she’d expected her to do something—to come up with some solution from her laptop of tricks. “And you? You all right?”

  “Hanging in there.” Tank smiled weakly, but his eyes were red, fatigued. His once starched shirt was terribly wrinkled, decorated with coffee stains and flecks of blood. She wasn’t in this alone. Tank’s name was on the same list as hers.

  “Let’s take a look at that disk.”

  Mary double-clicked on the first clip. The segment lasted fifteen seconds and showed Joe entering the café, followed by the man the waitress called Boots. Mary hit the Pause bar as Boots, or Supervisory Special Agent FK, stared into the camera.

  “I know you,” she said, pointing a finger at the screen. She studied the man’s face: the sagging cheeks, the wiry comb-over, the sad, pouchy eyes. He had a loud voice, she remembered. He was a storyteller. A laugher. A “good-time Charlie,” the admiral might say, referring to someone who liked to drink other people’s liquor a little too freely.

  “Fred…Frank…Floyd,” suggested Tank with renewed verve. “Felix…”

  —

  “Stop,” said Mary. “Let me think.”

  “Fulton…Phillip…”

  “Phillip starts with a p,” she said sharply, still glued to the image.

  “Sorry. Forget I said that.”

  “Pardon me?”

  “I said, ‘Forget I—’ ”

  “That’s it. His name is Fergus.”

  “Fergus? You’re sure?”

  “I met him once. It was in Sacramento last year. In the fall. Sometime before Joe started going to San Jose. I remember his name because he’s the only Fergus I ever met.”

  “Supervisory Special Agent Fergus…”

  “We can look him up.”

  “Where?”

  “The FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin. It’s a monthly online review. It lists promotions, convictions, any big cases they make. If he’s done anything important in the past ten years, he’ll be in there.”

  Mary logged onto the FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin’s website and typed “Supervisory Special Agent Fergus” into the search bar.

  “I hope your memory is more accurate than mine,” said Tank.

  “I didn’t have the concussions.”

  Two links appeared. The first read: “Supervisory Special Agent Fergus Keefe assumes post of Assistant Special Agent in Charge, San Jose regional office.” And the second: “Deputy Assistant Director Dylan Walsh and Special Agent Fergus Keefe stand up Bureau’s new Cyber Investigations Division.”

  “Fergus Keefe,” said Tank. “Nailed him.”

  Mary felt a jolt of excitement. She double-clicked on the first link, bringing up a short article—hardly more than a press release—stating that Keefe had taken over as assistant SAC of the San Jose office in July of last year after working with Dylan Walsh at the Cyber Investigations Division since 2007. His past assignments included stints in Baltimore and New York. Keefe had graduated from the FBI Academy in Quantico in 2002.

  Mary double-clicked on the second article, which discussed the founding or “standing up” of the Cyber Investigations Division. “Sid. That’s what it means.”

  “I thought his name was Fergus.”

  “No, CID—it means Cyber Investigations Division. It’s not someone’s name. Joe said they were the good guys. I thought he was referring to an agent he worked with, but it’s really the team Joe was part of.”

  “If Fergus Keefe was still attached to that division, it explains why he was stationed in San Jose.”

  “And why Joe was always traveling down to Silicon Valley. The question is, what brought Joe and Keefe all the way out here?”

  “Semaphore?”

  Mary typed “Keefe” and “FBI” into the Google search bar and hit Return. A dozen hits appeared. The first was from the New York Times and was titled “FBI Terminates Investigation into Claims of Extortion in Merriweather Systems Takeover.”

  Dated the past December 10, the article began:

  The FBI has terminated an investigation into charges of exto
rtion levied against ONE Technologies and its founder and CEO, Ian Prince, in relation to its recent purchase of Merriweather Systems, a San Jose–based manufacturer of supercomputers and Internet hardware, according to The Smoking Gun, an online investigative site. No charges will be filed.

  In November, a lawyer representing William Merriweather, son of Merriweather Systems founder and CEO John Merriweather, informed the FBI that his client had been threatened by unknown parties if he failed to vote his shares in favor of the company’s sale to the Austin, Texas–based tech giant. William Merriweather holds 6 percent of Merriweather Systems’ stock.

  Fergus Keefe, a special agent with the FBI’s San Jose office, visited Merriweather Systems’ offices in Sunnyvale, California, as well as other locations. The investigation was led by the FBI office in San Jose, according to a non-public document obtained by The Smoking Gun. A spokesman for the FBI said that, following policy, he could neither confirm nor deny the existence of an investigation.

  Ian Prince, chairman and founder of ONE Technologies, did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment. A ONE Technologies spokeswoman referred all questions to the FBI.

  “John Merriweather’s dead,” said Tank.

  “The father? To tell you the truth, I’ve never heard of him.”

  “His death was a big story. He disappeared after leaving his winter home in northern California to fly to San Jose. They didn’t find him for weeks.”

  “What happened?”

  “Plane crash. He flew straight into the side of a mountain in bad weather.”

  “Do you think Joe might have been working with Fergus Keefe on the extortion investigation?”

  “Could be. ONE’s headquarters is here in Austin. They have offices in Silicon Valley, but so does everybody.”

  Mary remembered McNair’s words. “Does ONE control the pipe in Cedar Valley?”

  “Type in ‘DSL’ and ‘Cedar Valley.’ ”

  Mary typed in the keywords and hit Return. Three companies offered DSL service in Cedar Valley: AT&T, Gessler Cable Systems, and ONE Technologies.