through the lobby, and watchful, but there is no reappearance of Kathy Rink’s men. The sky is painted pearl gray as he crosses the visitors’ parking lot, and already the day’s heat is building beneath it. There’s a rumble of thunder off to the east as he climbs into Mike’s SUV and drives away.
The workhouse is at the end of a quiet lane, on a canal that feeds into North Sound. It’s a stucco box in faded blue, with a tiled roof and plaster embellishments around the windows. From the street, Carr can see into the sandy backyard. There’s a metal dock there and the fishing boat is tied up alongside it. Dennis opens the door. A week on Grand Cayman and he’s paler and thinner than ever-a red-eyed, unshaved reed. He puts a finger to his lips.
“Bobby’s still crashed,” he says softly. Carr follows him in.
The main room is white and raftered, and the big front window has a view of unkempt hedges, milky sky, and planes angling toward the airport. The furnishings are a hodgepodge of hotel castoffs: fraying slipper chairs, sagging leather and chrome armchairs, water-stained end tables, and the ashtrays of a dozen defunct lounges. Dennis has three laptops open side by side on a chipped glass dining table, behind a stack of highspeed modems, coils of cable, and a platoon of empty soda cans.
“You want coffee?” he asks Carr. Carr nods and Dennis disappears into the kitchen, reappearing with a steaming mug.
Carr takes a drink. It’s bad. “When’s the last time you slept?” he asks.
Dennis’s smile is skewed and slightly goofy. “A while ago.”
“Hope you were doing more than just surfing porn sites.”
A blush spreads up Dennis’s neck. “Not just porn.”
Carr puts his coffee aside. “So what’s new in the virtual world of Isla Privada Holdings?”
“That’s a nontrivial question,” Dennis says, rubbing his chin and taking a seat before one of the laptops. Carr girds himself: Dennis gets pedantic when he’s tired, and he’s tired now. “Security on their VPN wasn’t totally stupid to begin with. I mean, aside from the happy gap we want to exploit, the multifactor authorization is pretty cute. And the rest of the stuff-it may be textbook, predictable, maybe even lazy, but it’s not totally stupid. It’s good enough, for instance, that if you look at it too hard-look actively, I mean, poke around too much-they’re going to know you’re there. And they’re going to poke back.” He looks up at Carr, his eyes shadowed but earnest. “We don’t want that.”
“We don’t,” Carr affirms.
Dennis opens four packs of sugar over his coffee mug, stirs with a pencil, sips at it, and smiles. “So, a nontrivial question-how do you look inside the box without taking the lid off? Not so easy, unless…” Dennis taps a forefinger lightly on his temple.
“Unless you’re you-I get it. So what’s changed?”
Dennis drinks more coffee. His fingers beat a droning drumroll on the tabletop. “A few things. They’ve upgraded their routers; they’ve implemented better filtering on inbound and outbound packets; and they’re scanning their servers better. Still textbook, but at least a more recent edition. In fact, if I was going to mount a denial-of- service attack on them, I might actually have to spend more than ten minutes planning it.”
“I didn’t think we cared about that stuff.”
“We don’t.”
Carr counts to ten and struggles to keep the impatience out of his voice. “What’s changed that we care about, Dennis?”
“For the moment, nothing-at least from what I see. The network access protocols and authorization layers are the same. The out-of-band component, to the user’s cell phone, is still in place. Last night, I walked through video of Chun as she was logging in yesterday, and I synchronized it with the sniffer logs. Everything looks the same.”
“And our gap?”
“From what I see, it’s still there. Once you pass through the authorization layers-the password generator, the thumbprint scan, the call back to the cell phone with a second password-and you get onto the network, access to Isla Privada’s processing system is by password alone. And there’s still no cross-check between the network access and processing system. So if I’ve got Curtis Prager’s processing system password, then that system thinks I’m Curtis Prager, and it lets me do everything Curtis Prager can do, even if I’ve gotten onto their network using Amy Chun’s ID.”
Carr sighs. Something loosens in his chest, but it tightens again when he looks at Dennis. “There are a lot of qualifiers in what you said, Dennis-‘for the moment,’ and ‘from what I see.’ They’re not particularly reassuring.”
Dennis’s fingers drum faster on the table. “They shouldn’t be. I can’t see too far into their network without hitting trip wires, but I’ve seen enough to know that their environment is changing. They haven’t fixed the hole that we want to climb through yet, but I’d say it’s just a matter of time.”
Carr sighs again, but there’s no relief in it. “How much time?”
Dennis shrugs. “Ask Kathy Rink.”
Tina’s hotel room overlooks a garden, with lavish beds of jacaranda, frangipani, and hibiscus massed around a weathered stone fountain. The garden is empty and the flowers are limp and restless in the humid breeze. Carr turns from the window.
“You should be smiling,” Tina says from the sofa. “It’s all good.”
“You call it good; I call it fucked up, though maybe not completely fucked up. Maybe not. There’s a difference.”
“Semantics.”
“Call it that when it’s your ass hanging out.”
Tina chuckles and unfolds herself from the sofa. She wears a simple gray skirt and a short black T-shirt, and her white-blond hair is pulled into a short ponytail. She pads barefoot across the room to refill a glass of ice water from a pitcher.
“Come on, Carr-the system stuff hasn’t changed, security’s tighter but still manageable, and your prints came back to Kathy Rink with Greg Frye’s record attached-and only his record: that’s good news.” Carr looks at her and raises an eyebrow. “What?” Tina says.
“I’m just wondering how you managed it-the fingerprints, I mean.”
“ I didn’t.”
“Boyce, then.”
“I don’t ask, and he doesn’t tell.” She smiles at Carr but he doesn’t return it.
“This is more than just ordering off-menu-more than calling in a favor here and there. This is pulling some serious weight, and I have a hard time believing you don’t know shit about it.”
Tina returns to the sofa, folds her white legs beneath her, and smooths her skirt. “I know about gift horses, and where not to look.”
“I’m serious, Tina.”
“So am I. I’m not talking about this anymore, and if you’ve got half a brain you won’t either.” Her eyes are flat and icy and unwavering, and finally Carr turns back to the view of the garden. “How’s Bessemer holding up?” Tina asks.
“He’s pickling himself in gin.”
“He going to keep his shit together for Prager?”
“Mike was worried about the same thing. He will.”
“And Mike, and the rest of your crew-how’re they doing?”
Carr takes a deep breath and turns around. Tina’s eyes have lost some of their chill, and that makes it easier. “I found out what happened to Bertolli’s money,” he says, and he tells her about Bobby’s confession, and about the afternoon he spent in Miami, walking up and down Brickell Avenue. Tina is perfectly still; her face is without expression while Carr speaks and in the squirming silence that follows. Finally, she clasps her white hands together and puts them in her lap. Her voice is soft.
“Well, they’re busy beavers, aren’t they? Maybe you’re not giving them enough to do. Too much time on their hands.”
“I’m sure that was the issue.”
Tina frowns. “There’s plenty here for me to be pissed at-like the fact that I’m only just now hearing about this-but I’m doing my best to rise above it, and so should you.” Carr nods and Tina continues. “Assuming Bobby’s
