peering at oversized computer screens. Her feet were up on a desk. She was talking on her cell phone when Lucas walked in, said something in it, and rang off. “I heard about the Rivera guy,” she said.
ICE was somewhere in her early thirties, slender, medium height with long legs, blond short-cut hair, tight but not spiky, and the finest pale Scandinavian complexion. Lucas had known her since she was seventeen or eighteen, a girl geek at what was then called the Institute of Technology at the University of Minnesota; he’d hired her to do some programming at his newly launched Davenport Simulations, the company that made him rich.
“A complete goddamn disaster,” Lucas said, about Rivera. He pulled an office chair around to face her, and asked, “Where’s Bone? And what’d you get?”
“He said he’d be down when you got here,” she said. She turned back to her desk and tapped a few keys on a keyboard. The computer screen, which had been dark, came up, showing a palm-sized patch of neatly ranked numbers.
“Since you don’t know anything about computers…”
“Though I sold my computer company for eighteen million bucks,” Lucas said.
“Blind luck and perfect timing,” ICE said. “But you never did know shit about computers, so what I’ll say is, see this bunch of green gobbledygook right here?”
“Yeah.”
“What that is, is the beginning of a little programmer’s doily, which, among other things, I think, would allow somebody to call in from the outside and take control of a computer. When he comes in, he’s automatically got root, so he can start moving money around. There are lots of alarms, and when he started messing with money, they should have gone off. So I think they were turned off for this one account.”
“You keep saying ‘I think.’ Is this for sure?”
She shook her head. “I’m pretty sure, but the only way to know for sure is to run the program and see what happens…. And there’s some other stuff in here that looks like it might be parts of a booby trap. That’s why I called it a programmer’s doily-you pull on the wrong string, and the whole doily unravels, and you’ll never figure it out.”
From behind Lucas, Bone said, “The important points are, he had administrator’s privileges, and he had to know enough about the security system to turn off the alarm.”
Lucas swiveled around and, with a question mark in his voice, asked, “Pruess?”
“Not unless he took some serious programming classes somewhere, and then figured out how to get in from a remote terminal. I don’t believe it-there’s nothing on his record that would suggest that he knew anything about programming. He was a sales guy,” Bone said.
“The programming here isn’t particularly hard,” ICE said. “There’s a lot
“To simplify all the techie bullshit,” Lucas said, “you’re telling me that somebody here set up this … doily … and then he could call in from the outside and loot the account.”
“You’re smarter than you look,” ICE said.
“Thank you,” Lucas said. “But what you’ve given us here, I could have figured out myself, eventually, even though I don’t know anything about computers. We need you to give us some details, not this sort of, excuse me, generalized bullshit.”
ICE turned her palms up and said, “We might need a warrant for that. The Bonester is seriously unhappy. He’s dragging his feet.”
Bone said, “Look, we’ll get it done-but I can’t have you setting off some logic bomb that’s going to blow up the bank’s accounts. I’ve got three hundred billion dollars in assets floating around in there. I need to know what’s going to blow if you touch the wrong wire.”
“You’ve got multiple redundancies-” ICE began.
“But there might be multiple bombs,” Bone said. “What’s the point of taking us down, if we go back online in ten minutes? If there’s one bomb, there could be lots of them.”
ICE stuck out a lip and tilted her head: “It’s a thought.”
Lucas asked ICE, “How long would it take you to evaluate the situation? In detail?”
“A day, maybe,” she said. “Depends on how tangled up the knitting gets.”
“Too long, too long,” Lucas said. “They’re killing people every day. You have to move faster.”
Bone said to ICE, “No. No. If you gotta go slow, go slow. And I want my computer security people looking over your shoulder while you’re doing it. I’m not bullshitting you two-”
Lucas interrupted: “Jim. People are being killed-”
Bone said, “Look. Lucas. Ol’ buddy. If she touches off a string of bombs and brings down the bank, Wall Street dumps two thousand points and the economy goes into recession. You’d kill more people than a whole bunch of Mexican gangbangers.”
Lucas grunted, a short laugh, and ICE put on her mildly amused look, but Bone wasn’t laughing. He was snarling: “You think I’m joking? I’m not. This bank crashes, and the first thing everybody thinks is, ‘Terrorists. Gotta get out.’ And they run for the doors. Lucas, I’m not fucking you around here. Miz ICE is wearing a suicide vest, she just doesn’t know it.”
Lucas said, “All right.” To ICE, “Fast as you can, without blowing anything up. These guys, they’re crazy, and they’re going to kill again.”
“Gonna take a lot of high-priced speed,” ICE said.
“I don’t want to hear about it,” Lucas said. “I just want to get it done.”
10
That night, Weather and Letty sat around and talked about the murder of Rivera, and Lucas worried that he’d messed things up.
“I knew something was up with him. I knew he was running around talking to the Latino community, and I might have figured he’d go hunting them on his own…. I just couldn’t imagine that he’d actually find them. I’ve been hung up on the horse shit gang. I wanted to get them, so I let him go. Now he’s dead.”
“You think you can know everything, but you can’t. You think you can anticipate everything, but you can’t,” Weather said. “I didn’t tell you my John Greene story, did I? What happened yesterday?”
“No.” Greene was a friend of theirs, a cardiac surgeon.
“Yesterday morning, he takes a sixty-five-year-old guy into bypass surgery. Vietnam vet, this is down at the VA hospital. They’ve done a huge workup on the guy, everything is perfect, he’s an excellent candidate, hasn’t smoked in thirty years, a little overweight but not terrible, always had high cholesterol but he’s gone on the reversal diet and he’s bringing it down…. But he’s having trouble breathing from all those years of eating pork chops. So it looks like if they do the operation, he’s good for twenty or thirty years. They do the work, the op is fine … but his heart won’t start. Nothing they can do-they try everything. Guy’s dead.”
“Jeez,” Letty said, her face going white.
“Bad day,” Lucas said, “But that doesn’t have-”
“Sure it does,” Weather said. “You can’t know everything. You’re walking through a fog, all the time. Even in situations where you think you know just about everything, like with John, something can go wrong. He’s devastated, because he’s the same kind of guy you are, a control freak. The patient had a nice wife and four kids, couple grandchildren … and he’s dead. But it’s not John’s fault. Same with this Rivera. Shit happens. That’s what everybody was telling John. He
So he thought about it, and didn’t sleep well. Weather had planned a morning at the Minneapolis Institute of Art with Letty and Sam, and Lucas was invited, though he told them not to count on it. He slept through the phone when it rang early the next morning, but Weather, who was used to getting up early, picked it up, and then woke him by pulling on his big toe.
“What?” He was groggy, and pushed himself up.
She was still in her pajamas. “Your phone was buzzing, so I looked at it. It’s Ingrid. She says she needs to
