converter.
Zula looked out a small back window on the alley side of the building and saw a sports car parked there with its lights on, the driver’s door hanging open, the engine still running. The driver was arguing with Peter down in the bay. She assumed that this was because Peter had left the Scion blocking the alley while he unloaded. The convertible was stopped nose to nose with the Scion; its driver, or so Zula speculated, was pissed off that he couldn’t get through. He was in a hurry and drunk. Or maybe on meth, to judge from the intensity of his rage. She couldn’t quite follow the argument that was going on downstairs. Peter was astonished by something, but he was taking the part of the reasonable guy trying to calm the stranger down. The stranger was shouting in bursts, and Zula couldn’t understand him. He had (she realized) some sort of accent, and while her English was pretty much perfect, she did have a few weak spots, and accents were one of them.
She was just about to call 911 when she heard the stranger mention “voice mail.”
“…turned it off…” Peter explained, again in a very calm and reasonable voice.
“…all the way from fucking Vancouver,” the stranger complained, “rain pissing down.”
Zula moved to the window and looked at the stranger’s car again and saw that it had British Columbia license plates.
It was that guy. It was Wallace.
There had been some kind of problem with the transaction. It was a customer service call.
No. Tech support. Wallace was complaining about a “fucking virus or something.”
The tension somehow broke. The adrenaline buzz on which Wallace had blasted down from Vancouver had abated. They had agreed to talk about this calmly. Wallace shut off the convertible’s engine, killed the lights, came into the bay. Peter pulled the door down behind him.
“Whose car is this?” Wallace demanded. Now that the big door was closed, the sound echoed up the steps and Zula was better able to follow the conversation. Her ear was tuning in to the Scottish accent.
“Zula’s,” Peter said.
“The girl? She’s here?”
“I dropped her off at home.” Zula noted the lie with grudging thanks and admiration. “She parks it here when she’s not using it.”
“I have to take a vicious piss.”
“There’s a urinal right over there.”
“Good man.” The freestanding urinal in the middle of his shop was one of Peter’s proudest innovations. Zula heard Wallace’s zipper going down, heard him using it, thought it would be funny to come down the stairs and make her exit at that point. But her car was now blocked in by Wallace’s. “I’ve been assuming that you deliberately fucked me,” Wallace remarked, as he was peeing, “but now I entertain the possibility that it is something other than that.”
“Good. Because it was totally on the up-and-up.”
“Other than being a massive identity theft scheme, you mean to say.”
“Yes.”
“Convincing me of that is easy enough. Already done. But the people I work with are another thing.” Wallace finished and zipped up again. Zula could hear the timbre of his voice change as he turned around.
“I thought you said you worked alone.”
“I was telling the truth the first time,” Wallace said.
“Oh,” Peter said after a noticeable pause.
“I’ve already had three fucking emails from my contact in Toronto wanting to know where the hell are the credit card numbers. As a matter of fact, I’d better send him an update right now. If lying through my teeth can be so called.”
The conversation lapsed for a few moments, and Zula guessed that Wallace was thumb-typing on a phone.
“I guess I don’t understand why you haven’t just sent him the numbers,” Peter said. “So maybe you should just take this from the top, because everything you were shouting when you pulled up a few minutes ago left me totally confused.”
“Almost finished,” Wallace muttered.
“The password to my Wi-Fi is here,” Peter said, and Zula heard him sliding a piece of paper down the counter.
“Never mind, I used something called Tigmaster.”
“You should use mine; it is way more secure than Tigmaster.”
“What is that anyway, an animal trainer?”
“Welder. My tenant. He should put a password on his Wi-Fi, but he can’t be bothered.”
“Right, he’s not security conscious like you and me.”
Peter didn’t answer since that must have sounded to him, as it did to Zula, like a trap.
Zula had thought better of calling 911 when she understood that it was Wallace and not some random enraged crankhead. Now she considered it again. But Wallace was much calmer now. And Peter was the only person here who had actually broken the law. Zula was satisfied just to have broken up with him. Sending him to prison would have been overkill.
“Take it from the top? All right, here we go,” said Wallace, then paused. “Any beers in that fridge?”
“I thought you didn’t drink.”
Silence.
“Be my guest.”
Fridge-opening and beer sound effects as Wallace went on: “As you saw, I transferred the file to my laptop right there in the tavern. Verified its contents. Closed the laptop. Went to my car. Drove back to Vancouver, stopping only once for petrol, never left the car, never let the laptop out of my sight. Parked in the garage at my condo building, went to my flat, hand-carrying the laptop. Set it down on my desk, plugged it in, opened it up, verified that everything was just as I’d left it.”
“When you say ‘plugged it in,’ could you please tell me everything you plugged into it?” Peter had now dropped, improbably, into a polite, clinical mode, like a customer service rep in a Bangalore cubicle farm.
“Power, Ethernet, external monitor, and FireWire.”
“You say Ethernet—you don’t use Wi-Fi at home?”
“Are you fucking kidding me?”
“Just asking. You have some kind of firewall or something between raw Internet and your laptop?”
“Of course, it’s a corporate firewall solution that I pay a fucking mint for every month. Have a lad who maintains it for me. Totally locked down. Never a problem.”
“You mentioned FireWire. What’s on that?” Peter asked.
“My backup drive.”
“So you’re backing up your files locally?”
“You’re not getting this, are you?” Wallace asked. “I told you who I worked for, yes?”
“Yes.”
Peter had not mentioned to Zula that Wallace worked for anyone and so she did not understand what this was about, but the way both men talked about Wallace’s employer had certainly attracted her notice.
“There are a couple of things I would never, ever like to have to explain to him,” Wallace said. “First, that I lost important files because I forgot to back them up. Second, that his files have been accessed by unauthorized persons because I backed them up to a remote server not under my physical control. So what choice do I have?”
“Keeping the hardware under your physical control is the only way to be sure,” Peter said soothingly. “What is the backup drive exactly?”
“A rather pricey off-the-shelf RAID 3 box, which I have placed inside of a safe that is bolted into the concrete wall and floor of the condo. When I am home, I open the safe and pull out the FireWire cable and connect it to my laptop long enough to accomplish the backup, then close it all up again.”
Peter considered it. “Unconventional but pretty logical” was his verdict. “To physically steal the box, someone would have to do huge damage to the safe and probably destroy the RAID.”
“That’s kind of my thinking.”
