Killer Move

CHAPTER NINE

I had a late lunch of an egg salad sandwich, sitting in the shade outside the grocery store a few doors down from the office. It’s something I do once a week, a little ritual—they make it with a little dill and a touch of Dijon mustard, and it’s very good—but either the bread was a bit stale today or I just wasn’t in the mood.

Karren had received the e-mail, too. So had a couple of private contacts and a few nonwork friends. Only one person on the list had responded, expressing surprise that I’d forwarded something that had nothing to do with realty, as I never normally did that kind of thing.

Well, right. True statement.

I’d stayed at my desk for a while, looking like I was taking care of business. I quickly established that the e- mail was not in my SENT MAIL folder, nor had it been filed. I’m very organized about keeping everything I receive and send. Big or small, even if it’s merely a “Great meeting!” or (god forbid) an “LOL!” everything gets given a sensible home. In realty you never know when you might wish or need to demonstrate exactly what was said, to whom, and when. In reality, too, I guess.

The original e-mail was nowhere to be found. Setting that aside, there was the question of who’d sent it out in my name. Clearly not Janine. That left, of course, Karren. But when Karren had walked into the office five minutes after me, and found the e-mail, I’d seen her frown. She read it again, then looked at me.

“Well, it’s technically comedic,” she said. “Ha and, I guess, ha.”

“Forwarded it by accident,” I said. Janine had popped out of the office, thankfully.

“You can do that?”

“If you’re dumb,” I said, going into a prepared spiel. “Meant to pass on a property listing, evidently selected that so-called joke by mistake.”

She nodded. “Figures. Doesn’t seem like the kind of thing you’d send to the world on purpose.”

“Well, right.”

“You’re normally far too worried about what people might think of you.”

She turned back to her work, leaving me smarting. If I’d been entertaining suspicions about Karren sending the e-mail from my computer—laughing an evil laugh as she hit SEND—they were dispelled there and then. I had no doubt she was smart and bold, but it would have taken big balls indeed to wrap an unspoken denial in such a blatant diss.

When Karren went to the bathroom twenty minutes later I darted over to Janine’s machine. The e-mail was still sitting there in her in-box, together with about seventeen million others. I forwarded the joke back to my own address, taking care to remove the evidence from her SENT MAIL folder when I was done.

Back at my own machine I established that the original e-mail had been sent at 9:33 that morning—when I’d been standing self-righteously in line at the post office waiting to mail a package back to Amazon, thus tying two small, inexplicable things together in a knot.

A book I had not ordered.

An e-mail I hadn’t sent.

I’d made no sense of either by the time I drifted out to lunch. As I was sitting outside the deli, fingers drumming on the hot metal of the table, I saw Tony Thompson emerge from the reception block. He noticed me and started to head over.

My stomach did a little flip. Tony’s address had been on the distribution list of the e-mail. As he walked down the ramp toward me, I took a slow, deep breath.

“Funny e-mail, Bill,” he said, before I could even get started. “Laughed my head off. You got more like that, send ’em right along. Marie and I are going to have a talk about the matter we discussed, by the way. Probably tonight.”

I shut my mouth, smiled, and didn’t say a thing.

“No way of telling,” the geek said. “Bottom line is it could have been anyone in the world.”

“That’s it? That’s your professional opinion? How much you get paid for this level of insight?”

I was sitting with him outside the ice cream place at the Circle. It was coming up on seven in the evening but still warm, and getting heavier.

He took a lick of his chocolate sugar cone. “A lot less than you, dude. Plus, no commission. Not to mention I spend all day sorting out shit where the root cause exists between the computer and the chair facing it. By which I mean, you know, the user.”

“I got the joke. I’m laughing inside.”

I’d had the idea of calling the company’s tech guy by midafternoon. It had taken him three hours to extricate himself from the IT needs of the main office, and forty minutes to check over my computer. Getting him to do this without yakking on and on about what he was doing was the hardest part, but luckily by then I was the only person left in the office. As soon as he’d pushed himself back from my desk, I’d nonetheless encouraged him to carry on the conversation elsewhere. Sitting with a spindly midtwenties guy in a tatty Pearl Jam T-shirt was not helping to resettle me, especially as his phone kept beeping at irregular intervals: a single, echoing ping, like sonar. He tilted his head to check the screen every single time this happened, but did not pick the phone up or do anything, and this was beginning to get on my nerves.

“You got two issues,” he said, squinting against the slanting remains of the day’s sun. “First is this e-mail. Simplest explanation is someone sat at your machine in the office. This is hardly an exploit of legend.”

“An ‘exploit’?”

“It’s what they call a hacking triumph.”

“Who are ‘they’?”

“Hackers.”

“Assholes with no life, you mean.”

“It’s a point of view. Anyway, an exploit is not what that scenario would constitute. Even newbies and script-kiddies would think it beneath them. You’d be amazed how many people leave their computers unattended, though, with their e-mail accounts lying open.” He looked pointedly at me.

“I’m a Realtor,” I said irritably. “I work in a tiny office with two people who are employed by the same company, one of whom has to be reminded how to set the alarm, even though it boils down to pressing four buttons and then another button and has been covered about a zillion times via memo and the spoken word. Concerted campaigns of cyberespionage are not one of my fears. I’m at DefCon Minus Five.”

The guy shrugged again, as if this was the kind of naivete he encountered all the time—though I was confident his occupation consisted largely of crawling under people’s desks to check that cables were plugged in. Meanwhile, he slurped another mouthful of his ice cream cone. Although the girl who’d introduced me to it was not working, I’d ordered the mandarin mascarpone again, and it was the only part of this encounter I was enjoying.

The geek’s phone pinged once more. “Look,” I said. “Why is it making that noise?”

“The social network never sleeps.”

“You want to turn the sound off? It’s really getting on my nerves.”

He pressed a key. “You’re kind of tense, dude.”

“Yeah, I am,” I said, “because, according to you, someone snuck into my office this morning and, in view of at least one of my colleagues, forwarded an e-mail that I’ve never seen. Then trashed all evidence from my computer. And snuck back out. Right?”

“Actually, no,” the guy said. “The e-mail could have been set up anytime in the last weeks or months.”

“You can do that?”

“Yep.”

“Oh.” I didn’t like the sound of this. I’d preferred it when it had simply been impossible for me to have sent the e-mail at the time it claimed to have been sent. That gave me a concrete conundrum—and a specific time frame—to grab hold of and shake. This new idea untied the knot and had the potential to pull the event, and thus the intentions of whoever had done it, back in time.

“Except that probably wasn’t what happened,” the geek said smugly.