12 - Seattle, Again

Another murder, another bag of money, a change of plans. The Aether and the Lie: A billion-dollar data heist, a jilted artist, a double murder, and a drifting math genius.

Visit MontanaVoice.com for more information and to listen to additional episodes.

Transcript

From the novel, "The Aether and the Lie," by Steve S. Saroff

Seattle, Again
 

            Two weeks went by. The fresh snow had been trodden into dirty ice, but I had not noticed much else. I went to my office in Missoula each day, closed the door, read old math books, and answered occasional messages. There had been no other news regarding Kaori and no other contact from the thin detective. 

            And nothing from Tsai. I was hoping that Tsai had decided that the backdoor code had run long enough on the SLAM network to have been worth his briefcase of cash. I thought that maybe I wouldn't hear from him again. 

             Then, on a Thursday morning, Suzzy knocked on my office door and said, "You hear about what is happening at SLAM?"

            I said "no." 

            She said, "Dave Cheat was in a car wreck. It's awful. He's dead." 

            Suzzy paused and then continued, "Fritter called. You are supposed to call him now."

            Dave Cheat is dead. Dead!?

            I remembered him juggling. I was leaning on the railing, looking out over the water with him. He was telling me about a bad knee. Had I gotten him killed for money buried in the mountains?

            Suzzy was looking at me, waiting for me to say anything. 

            "What!?" I asked.

            Suzzy said that it happened yesterday evening. She said, "It's sad when someone you know dies." 

            I picked up the phone and called Tsai. Called him directly. Not caring about his fear of phones. I wanted to ask him, "Did you have Dave Cheat killed so I wouldn't 'have a problem.'" There was no answer.

            I started to dial the corporate number for BTG, but then I stopped. I thought that even if Tsai had killed Dave Cheat, what would confronting him accomplish? 

            Instead, I called Seattle and asked for the Fritter's office, SLAM's CEO. Fritter answered and said, "Bad about Cheat." 

            I asked him about the wreck, and Fritter told me that no one knew yet what happened. He said Dave was driving in afternoon traffic. "Not much to explain. He veered off of I-5. Maybe overcorrected. Flipped. Caught fire. Bad," he repeated. Then he said, "Need your help now, Enzi."

            "That new car of his, that Tesla," I said, "thought it couldn't crash."

            "Software," Fritter said, "you know about software. Always bugs."

            Then Fritter said that he needed me to come to Seattle immediately "to help transition the coders who worked for Cheat." He said, "They're a smart group, shouldn't take more than a few days on sight."

            I asked Fritter why he wanted me, and he said, "Dave was saying great things about you. He used to complain about your Montana group's inclusion into the company. Turn-a-rounds are impressive. Hold on…." Then I heard Fritter talking with someone else who was in his office, and then Fritter got back on the phone said to me, "Straight talk, Enzi. Lot depending on our work with British Telglomerate. Must make sure that continues smoothly. Need you to jump. Be a Rockstar. You need to be here now."

            Again, I was quiet. Like the questions from the thin detective that I wouldn't answer. Because the only safe answers are no answer. "You have the right to remain silent." For a reason. Because if I spoke, I would yell. I would shout, "Your employee number nine died yesterday, and all you need now is the BTG deal to continue smoothly?" I held onto my right. I was silent. 

            Fritter asked, "Enzi? You there?"

            I took a deep breath and then told Fritter that I would catch the afternoon flight and be at SLAM early the next morning. I went home, packed a few clothes, and then flew to Seattle. The five-minute flight took an hour. 

            When we landed, it was raining outside and crowded in the airport. As I was walking through the concourse, a man came up and started walking close to me. Our shoulders brushed together. I looked at him. He was short and solid. His hair was dark, about an eighth of an inch long, like his head had a five o'clock shadow. The back of his neck was tattooed with words that I couldn't understand, the letters jagged and of different sizes. He was wearing a worn leather jacket. He smelled strongly of stale cigarettes. Each time we were jostled together by the crowd, I thought, I tried to move further away from him, but he pushed against me until I was nearly walking against the wall. Finally, when we were near the men's restroom entry, he stepped in front of me, directly blocking me, and made me abruptly stop. Then he said, "Sorry about this, Mate." 

            He had a British accent. Before I could answer him, he had grabbed hold of my shirt, pulled me off balance, and tripped me over his leg so that I fell hard. I was lying on the floor at the entrance to the restroom, with people walking past me. The short man who had done this to me was walking away, mixing with the crowd in the concourse. As I lay on the floor, I remembered that his hands that grabbed my shirt had identical tattoos on each knuckle. A purple X on each hand's knuckle. X's on the left. X's on the right. 

            People stepped around me. No one offered help or kind words. The floor was wet and soapy. When I stood up, I saw that I had been thrown down next to a warning sign that read, "Caution," and which had a drawing of someone falling. 

            I looked for my travel bag, thinking that I had just been robbed, thinking that it had been the motive for the attack, but it was there on the floor. I picked it up, and then it was like nothing had happened. Except my shoulder was sore from falling. And the front of my shirt was ripped open with most of the buttons torn off. I went into the restroom to put on another shirt from my travel bag. 

            The restroom was crowded. I stood at a sink next to a man who was washing his hands and talking loudly. He was wearing a blue-tooth earpiece. He said, "We have been over this a hundred times. There's nothing more to talk about," but then he said, "Hold on, I have another call coming in, don't go away." 

            The rows of sinks and mirrors. The faucets that went on and off without being touched. Toilets that flushed and refilled automatically. Disordered lines of men. The endless loop of the airport security warnings playing from speakers in the ceiling. It was something worse than chaos. It was tiled loneliness.

            I left my torn shirt in the restroom trash bin, went back to the concourse, stopping first to look left and right, then stepped back in with the crowd.

            I got a ride downtown and checked into a motel near SLAM. I left my bag in my room and then went across the street to a restaurant and had dinner. 

            When I came out of a restaurant, it was still raining. 

Someone said, "Hey Mate." I looked, and leaning against the wall was the short man with the shaved head with the X's on his knuckles. I stepped back. I said, "Come near me, and I start yelling."

            "No, you won't," he said, "sorry about that bit near the loo. Mutual friend told me to get your attention first and talk later."

            "Tsai, are you here because of Tsai?"

            "Names don't work, Mate. Let's walk." And he went past me, down the sidewalk, towards where the waterfront turns from tourist to grit. He didn't look around, but he knew that I was following him.

            "You owe me a new shirt," I said.

            He stopped walking. He had a child's school bag, a small daypack, slung over one shoulder that looked like it had books in it. He said, "Mutual friend said to deliver this," then he took the bag off his shoulder, and from just an arm's reach away, threw the bag hard at me. It hit my chest and fell onto the sidewalk. 

            "Pick it up, Mate, take a look," he said. 

            I did. It was heavy and lumpy. I unzipped the top of the bag and looked inside. It was filled with bundles of hundred-dollar bills, each with a paper band that read, "$10,000."

            "There's your shirt, Mate," he said. "It should have been your bloody teeth too. Still could be." 

            I zipped the bag closed and held it loosely. Then I held it out to him, but he said, "Won't take it, Mate. Not worth it. And our mutual friend had this message for you. 'Do your job.' So toss that in the water if you don't want it." 

            Then XX walked into the traffic, forcing cars to swerve and brake. When he got to the other sidewalk, he was gone. 

            Back in my room, there was an envelope slid under the door with my name on it. I opened it. It was a sheet of thermal paper from a fax. The hotel must have kept one around to go with the taxi stands. The fax had one typed line, "Payphone. End of the lobby. Midnight."

            Before midnight I took the elevator downstairs. Connecting with the hotel's lobby, was a hallway and at its end were a few payphone kiosks and chairs. I was the only person there. I sat down at the last phone and waited, and then the phone rang.

            I picked it up and said, "A fax? More cash? A phone? Really?" And then I asked, "The Brit, was that necessary?"

            Tsai didn't answer me directly. Instead, he said, "You count what he gave you?"

            I told Tsai, "I Don't want more money. I didn't ask for it. Not going to do anything for it." 

            Tsai said, "You are not done."

            I said, "I'll leave this cash in some locker. I don't want it. And I'll give you back the rest too. But you'll have to wait until spring for that, after the ground thaws."

            Tsai said, "So, you buried it. Good. Safest way."

            I asked, "Did you hear anything I just said? I am done. I don't even want to know what is going on. I am done. You can have all the money back."

            Tsai said, "Too late. You proved you could make this work. Now it isn't about the money we gave you. Now it is about what we are losing every day. I have partners. They are your partners now too. And you are making them angry." 

            I wanted to be the one to hang up first, but I keep listening as Tsai said, "Turn the money back on, Enzi." Then he hung up on me. 

            Back in the hotel room, I dumped the small daypack's contents on the bed. There were fifty bundles. Another half a million dollars. 

            I wondered how Tsai had paid Mr. XX, the Brit, to kill Dave Cheat. I doubted Tsai had paid him using bundles of old hundred-dollar bills. I bet that Mr. XX was the proper sort who preferred Krugerrands and Canadian Maple Leafs. Or maybe Mr. XX took his pay the easy way in crypto wallets on thumb drives. Tsai probably only used dangerous cash with me as an angry joke, like he was saying with it, "You people who push buttons, go and figure out what to do with paper." You people. You coders who think you are in control.

            For enough money, cash, gold, or crypto, machines can be corrupted. Moving mass can be made to look like a momentous accident. The words of physics. "Momentum," that word which means a product of mass multiplied by velocity. "Direction," that word which is the vector of going. Then a rapid turn of a wheel or a fast hack of a microprocessor in an aether connected car. Then the final word would be "kinetic," as the direction brings the momentum to an abrupt halt, with all its mass times velocity squared. 

            I put the money back into the daypack and put it up on the closet shelf. 

            Early the next morning, I called the front desk. I explained that I was working in my room for the day and that I wanted to be left alone. They told me to hang the "Do Not Disturb" sign outside my door but that they would also let housekeeping know not to clean my room. Then I left the hotel by a side door and walked the few blocks to SLAM. 

            I went straight to Fritter's office. He always looked like an indifferent Southern California surfer working on his tan while scanning the water for anyone who might dare to encroach on the next wave. But, his look said, "All the waves are mine." 

            Fritter and I shook hands, and we stayed standing, and he said again how unexpected, and sudden Dave Cheat's death had been. Then he said, "Glad you are here now, Dude. Dave had taken a liking to you. That will go a long way with working with his peeps. Need to make sure the British work is cool." 

            Fritter didn't say anything about any sort of memorial for Dave or say anything else about the accident. 

            I went downstairs with Fritter to where the coders had their cubicles. Cups of coffee and large monitors. Printouts of code and thick software manuals. Whiteboards with database schemas and flowcharts. Office ketch and fluorescent lights. The only windows were many cubicles away. It was the standard sort of location where companies put their coders. Like a parking garage, but with carpet and without cars.

            I said hello to the coders whom I had talked with during the meeting two weeks back. Then I listened to their sincere sadness about Dave's death. He had been liked.       

            Fritter interrupted the talking about Dave and told the coders that I had taken over Dave's responsibilities until a new project manager would be hired. The coders nodded and didn't say anything. Fritter then said that I should be given time with anyone I needed to talk with. Next, Fritter, the company CEO, told the coders that I had been given full access to get into all the files and all the networks. He said, with emphasis, "A lot riding on this British deal." Then he said, "You guys rock," and headed back to his office.

            As soon as Fritter was gone, the coders looked confused and told me that there were no problems, everything was working, and that the deadlines were not any worry. They said that the only active new work had been adding the Montana interface code, and that had been completed. One of the coders said, "I'm not sure what Fritter's worried about. All the other work for BGT was completed a month ago," and added, "Fritter never has a clue." 

            I told them then there won't be much to do but that I still needed to spend some time looking through everything because of Fritter's request.

The coders nodded, and then they shared more anecdotes about Dave. They talked about how much he liked juggling and how he had told them he had juggled with me that day by the pier. They also told me about his favorite bar, a place where there were one hundred and fifty different types of micro-brew on tap, and that Dave had been working on drinking a pint of each. "Place gives you a tee-shirt after you have drunk a pint of all hundred and fifty, but Dave also paid the bartender five dollars for each empty mug after each new beer. Said he wanted to keep track to make sure he would get the free tee eventually." The coder laughed and went on, "that shirt, if he had managed to drink his way into it, would have cost him seven-hundred-and-fifty dollars! Dave loved things like that. Tee-shirts and memorabilia," and the coder pointed into a cubicle and said, "This is Dave's."

            I looked over the cubicle divider, and there were a set of juggling clubs, a shelf lined with beer mugs, and the five book-weights I had bought from Uwajimaya's. I had forgotten about them and realized that Dave must have taken them when he left the pier.

            I went into Dave's cubicle and sat down. I turned on his computer. The six connected monitors lit up with SLAM's green logo. I used my company ID card, along with my thumbprint, to log into the SLAM network. A message box appeared stating that Fritter had upgraded my security clearance. 

            The coders had gone back to their cubicles, and I was left alone. I logged into the version control system and found the exact date and time where Dave had found, and removed, my backdoor. I read the notes that he had added. He had written that a memory overrun was removed. He also noted that the over-run did not appear to cause any problems other than causing a minor network slow-down when it occurred. 

            I looked at Dave's default version control settings and saw that they were set for maximum change tracking, logging dates, and times for every computer file he had opened. I scanned the list of file names, and I saw that even though he found where I had de-referenced a pointer to a function -- the 'memory over-run which he had thought was a minor bug --- Dave had not opened the actual backdoor file, which was hidden in the graphic files for the interface. 

            I changed Dave's version control settings to stop logging file activity. Then I changed his system clock so that everything I was doing would appear to have been done the day before his car wreck. Finally, I created a temporary project and added a new de-referenced function pointer, hiding it one layer deeper than my earlier code had been. This deeper method of calling the backdoor would mean that that hijacking of SLAM's network would only degrade its performance by a fraction of a fraction of an already tiny amount. If I had done that the first time, Dave would never have noticed. 

            I looked at my new code changes. Then, I looked at the time. It had taken just twenty-one minutes to re-instate the backdoor, the hack that Tsai – and his 'partners' – needed to continue to steal the financial data from the stream between New York and London. 

            Twenty-one minutes and one innocent person's death. 

            But it was not turned on yet. Before the new code could work, it would have to be installed everywhere on the SLAM network by being checked into the main code body. And that was then one mouse-click away. 

            My hand lingered on the mouse.

            I looked around. No one was standing nearby. I looked around Dave's cubical again. I looked at the photos on Dave's shelves. I stood up and picked up the closest photo. It was a younger Dave. He was wearing a backpack and was smiling. Behind him are mountains. In the photo, he was not alone; he held hands with a woman wearing a pack. I turned the frame over and took the photo out of its holder. The words "Leslie and me by Mount Olympus " were written on the back of the photo," and the date, about ten years earlier. I put the photo back in its frame and looked at another. Family photos, children, a Christmas morning by a tree, presents, and torn paper. I didn't take any more photos out from their frames. I looked at the books on his shelves. Mostly software books of dead computer languages. Pascal. Perl. Awk. But there were poetry books too. Charles Bukowski. Linda Pastan. And some fiction. Michael Fitzgerald. Chandler. And then there was a paper-back, yellow, and blue, called "The Periodic Table," by Primo Levi, which I took off the shelf and thumbed through. It was a book by the same author whom two other people I had recently met had also been reading: the Somalian cab driver and Pascal. The author whom the cab driver had told me had written, "You survive by telling stories." An author whom, three weeks before, I had never heard of. 

            I sat back in front of Dave's computer with its six monitors. I put my hand on the mouse and moved the cursor over the "Check-in" icon. One-click, and the backdoor would be active again. I could then go back to Montana and read old math books. There would be no XX coming for me again. The counter would remain between Tsai and me. 

            I hesitated and looked again at Dave's photos and books. And the shelf of beer mugs that had only made it about halfway to its hundred-fifty mug goal. Even if the military had trained him, Dave had not been a 'cloak and dagger' person, and he should not have died because of anyone else's greed.

            I took one deep breath, and then, without checking it in, I deleted my temporary project. Then I reset the computer's time and date back to where it should have been, and I logged out of SLAM's network.

In one of the cubicles, several coders were talking together and laughing. I explained to them that I had finished reading Dave's project schedule and looked at the current delivery status. I said, "You were right. Everything is solid and already done. You don't need any interference from me." They all smiled and then went back to the stories they were sharing. And as I walked away, I said quietly, not sure if anyone could have heard, "I've added enough chaos already." 

            I left SLAM without talking to anyone else and without doing what Tsai had told me to do. 

            No one had been in my motel room. The daypack was still in the closet. I took it, and my travel bag, and then I caught a car up to Capitol Hill, near where many students lived. In a corner grocery store, I looked on the bulletin board, the type with thumbtacked cards. There were a few cars for sale. I called from the burner and found someone about twenty years old who was selling their first car, an old Subaru. I offered him the amount of money that he was asking for, and he seemed surprised. I told him I would pay cash if he could get me the car right away, and he drove over.

            The plates and tags were good, and I told him I needed to leave them on until I got down to the motor vehicle department. He started to say he needed to check to see if that was the right way to sell a car, but when I told him it was all legit for cash purchases under five thousand, the kid said sure. I paid him, and he signed the title, and I told him that I would have to wait to fill out the blank parts with my name until I got the new tags, confidently telling him that is the way it was done. He was counting the hundred-dollar bills which I had just given him and said, "Sounds good." Then I had a car without my name connected to it. Another sort of burner.

            I had been in Seattle for less than 24 hours. I wanted to get back to Montana before XX found out that I had gone and before Tsai realized that I was not working on turning on the backdoor again.

            I stayed on the I-90 and drove straight through, only stopping for gas and fast food. I went the speed limit and was in Missoula nine hours after leaving Seattle. 

            Back in Missoula. Nighttime. The hint of smoke in the winter air, people burning lodge pole and spruce in their woodstoves. People comfortable and safe. I parked the car two blocks from my house and left the daypack of money, covered with a blanket, in its back.

(c) 2021 Steve S. Saroff
from the novel, The Aether and the Lie.