“What time?”
“One. We’ll get lunch first. There’s a charming diner just across the street where Loretta says you can get soy smoothies.”
“You don’t even like soy,” I said. I had doubts she knew what it was, but I decided to keep that to myself.
“Michael, I’m making the effort,” she said.
“If I’m busy,” I said, “I’ll call you.”
“What could you possibly be doing?”
Just as I was about to explain to my mother the entirety of the possibilities, I was saved by the ringing of my cell phone. It was Sam.
“Mikey,” he said, “there’s been a slight change of plans.” His voice sounded a touch on the anxious side. If there’s one thing to know about Sam Axe, he doesn’t get overly anxious.
“We didn’t have any plans, Sam.”
“Right. That’s the change.”
“Where are you?”
“Incognito.”
“A little more specific, Sam?”
“About a hundred meters from your mother’s house, watching the person watching you.”
I walked across the living room, out the front door and onto the porch. On the trunk of my car was Loretta’s package, which was wrapped with so much tape that I could actually see my reflection in it. I looked down both sides of the street. Nothing. “I don’t see you,” I said.
“That’s because I’m a highly trained operative, Mike,” he said. “Do you see the Lexus parked on the other side of the stop sign to your southeast?”
I turned and casually gazed down the street behind me, gave a hearty belly laugh and patted the top of my head like a trained monkey, all while staring at a car in the wrong neighborhood. The last time someone pulled down this street in a silver Lexus IS and parked under a shady tree for the afternoon… well, they were probably looking for me, too. This is a Dodge and Honda street, and Honda had to muscle its way in.
Inside the car was a man trying to look inconspicuous, which is difficult when the burned spy you’re watching is looking right at you and could, if he wanted, pull you from the car by your eyebrows.
“Who is he?” I asked, still in full laugh. Just having a nice day on the front lawn. Inhaling the humidity. Enjoying the clouds in the sky. Having a pleasant conversation with my buddy the ex- Navy SEAL about the meathead in a Lexus and relishing the start of hurricane season.
“I’m not sure,” Sam said. “I’ve got a buddy running the plates now. But he isn’t one of ours. Not a Fed boy.”
“No,” I said, “the Lexus gives that away. When did you pick him up?”
“I didn’t,” he said. “I came here to give you the news on what I’d found out about Gennaro’s problem and saw him. You want me to bring the wrath of Neighborhood Watch Commander Chuck Finley upon him?”
I looked around again to see if I could locate Sam. He was really hiding quite well, though his tendency to wear floral prints was probably helping the situation here in the land of palm trees and birds of paradise.
“Give me a minute to get back inside,” I said.
“Got it,” Sam said.
Just as I started to walk back toward the house, Loretta came sprinting-well, comparatively speaking-from across the street, her pelican shirt buttoned haphazardly, her hair in a set of rollers, a single word bursting from her in a fracture of frenzied repetition: “PERVERT! PERVERT! PERVERT!”
“Sam?”
“CALL NINE-ONE-ONE. CALL NINE-ONE-ONE. CALL NINE-ONE-ONE…”
“I’m Oscar Mike,” Sam said, slipping into the military parlance for, essentially, “on the move,” which was fine since the Lexus was officially Oscar Mike, too.
“Great,” I said. “Tell me she didn’t see your face.”
“Impossible,” he said. He didn’t sound terribly convincing, which might have been because he was sprinting away from his previous location, which I suspect was somewhere near Loretta’s bathroom, judging by the way she was screaming, the status of her hair and her difficultly in putting her clothing back on correctly.
“Let me diffuse this before my mother calls in an airstrike,” I said.
“PERVERT! IN MY BACKYARD! PERVERT! CALL NINE-ONE-ONE!”
“I’ll meet you back at the loft,” he said. “We’ve got a few, uh, problems I need to fill you in on.”
“Of course you do,” I said.
“Oh, and Mikey? Maybe stay away from anyone who looks like they might be, you know, gang affiliated between now and when we meet up.”
“PERVERT! DO YOU HEAR ME? PERVERT!”
Loretta was only a few feet away from me and gaining as quickly as a snail might gain on a cheetah. “Tell me you didn’t tweak Bonaventura,” I said.
“Ah, Mikey, it was just one of those things that happens unexpectedly in the course of gathering information,” Sam said.
“Like peeping on someone’s grandmother, Sam?”
“I didn’t see a thing,” Sam said, “and I’ll take that to the grave.”
“ARE YOU CALLING NINE-ONE-ONE?”
“You might have to,” I said.
“I’ll fill you in,” he said, “but right now I’ve gotta jump over a fence guarded by a pair of vicious-looking poodles.” Working with Sam was like working with a meat grinder: The end result tended to be palatable, but getting there occasionally involved a bit more blood and guts than you might expect. “And hey, Mikey? I need you to remind me never to get dentures, okay?”
6
There’s no such thing as an entirely safe Web site. There are levels of security, firewalls and booby traps and encrypted trapdoors that will send a rank amateur back to his single bed in his mother’s basement, but for anyone with a dedicated desire to break into a site, nothing is impossible. You don’t need to be a spy, or even of voting age, to figure out how to dismantle what one would presume to be the most secure sites.
NASA?
The Pentagon?
Both were hacked by the same fifteen-year-old boy, Jonathan James. A few years later, NASA, the Navy, the Energy Department and Jet Propulsion Laboratory were all hacked by the same twenty-year-old Romanian, Victor Faur. At the same time, NASA was being hacked by an unemployed British man named Gary McKinnon, who was looking for evidence of extraterrestrial life… and was doing it from his girlfriend’s aunt’s bedroom, which isn’t exactly like working out of Quantico.
Hacking into the highest levels of American government doesn’t require an MIT education, not if your girlfriend’s aunt has a broadband connection, and not if you know even a little bit about moving around encryption devices and have a good understanding of how to rewrite programs to work for you, not against you.
Sam doesn’t have an MIT education, either. He doesn’t mainline Red Bull. He’s not prone to wearing jaunty capes while discussing his favorite manga characters with his buddies in his parents’ basement. He’s done some “special projects” for the government, so he knows his way around a computer, but doesn’t have the skills to hack his own bank to move a few zeros around, much less search for the existence of space aliens on NASA’s Web site. So while I’d been busy cleaning my mother’s house that morning, Sam was trying to work a few contacts who could take a look at the Web site streaming the video of Gennaro’s wife and daughter. He probably didn’t plan on eventually scaring a half-naked grandmother out of her house a few hours later, but then not all days go exactly how you plan them.
Which is how he ended up having a breakfast date at the Roasters ’n’ Toasters deli on South Dixie Highway
