firewalls.”
I almost understood that. “Is that unusual?”
“Possibly it is simply a coincidence. Do you believe in coincidences?”
“Not really,” I said.
“Nor do I.”
I looked at the search engine results. “Securidot,” I read.
“They are in Seattle. I believe your mystery pursuer is associated with them. He or she must have established a back door to the security program the company sells and is using it to create the phantom email accounts.”
“Can you tell exactly who it is within the company?”
“I doubt they would be foolish enough to allow for that possibility. The very fact that there is a back door access into a supposedly impregnable firewall program puts the entire company in danger. Discovery might even land them in prison.”
“Can you keep tracking the emails anyway?” I asked. “And keep a record of all of them. It might come in handy.”
“Of course.”
I sat at the computer with the Securidot web page displayed and started reading, while Tchekhy returned to his work.
According to their website Securidot was started in the mid-1990s by Robert Grindel. His story read like the prototypical dot-com success story. Geeky guy comes up with a neat-o idea, lots of companies pay lots of money for the product of his neat-o idea, geeky guy makes a bundle, and buys a professional sports franchise. All except for the sports franchise part.
Aside from this well-burnished history, the site itself wasn’t very useful, especially since I wasn’t a major corporation looking for a good security program.
“Anything else?” I asked. “This is pretty basic stuff.”
“Try Lexis/Nexis,” he suggested. “You can look up old newspaper articles there. I have an account.”
“A legal account?” I asked.
“Does that matter?”
I followed a bookmark to Tchekhy’s illegal Lexis/Nexis account. (Honestly I don’t think he pays for anything.) Results there proved more interesting. Securidot had just hit the jackpot on a buyout deal with a company called Secure Systems International doing the buying. I wondered if SSI knew Securidot’s program came with a back door.
Information on Grindel himself was a bit more compelling. For starters, the legend on the Securidot website was, as I’d suspected, a very polished version of the truth. He’d actually founded the company with a man named Brian Standish. Brian was the techno-geek and the founder of the technology the company made its millions on. Robert was a different kind of ideas man. He got the backers, founded the company, ran the business, and eventually marginalized Brian entirely. Brian Standish took a buyout six months before Securidot was sold. Reading between the lines, I got the impression Robert knew he was going to sell out and forced out Brian beforehand.
Which was only sort of interesting. Nothing in the articles I found was a smoking gun. Still, I began to think that Robert Grindel was the guy I was looking for. Or rather, the guy who was looking for me. He just seemed like the type. I bounced the idea off Tchekhy.
“It’s possible,” he said. “But I think you should be looking for someone who is more wealthy. Perhaps even a government.”
“Maybe so.” The bounty on my head was roughly one fifth of what Grindel had earned from the sale. Tchekhy had a good point.
“You know,” Tchekhy said, “there is a very easy way to find out more about who is after you. We could simply call him.”
He picked up the phone I’d taken from Stan and tossed it to me. The phone had been the proverbial 300- pound gorilla in the room for the entire day. We both knew it was the fastest way to get quick information but we also knew that using it could be entirely too dangerous. If the person on the other end of the line recognized that neither of us was Stan they might be able to do something we weren’t prepared for. Like activate a tracking device. Or set off an explosive charge in the phone. It sounded paranoid, but at this particular juncture, paranoia was a useful impulse.
Hesitantly, I flipped the phone open.
“Oh, hell,” I said.
“What?”
I held up the phone so he could read the small display screen. It read “NYC.”
“Does this mean a demon is about to arrive at my front door, Efgeniy?” He’d been ignoring the possibility, just as I was avoiding having to admit I’d put him in danger.
“Um, maybe,” I said.
He looked rather cross. “Then you should leave,” he suggested. “Contact me later and perhaps I’ll have finished this trace.”
“Not that easy,” I said. “He might still show up here.”
“I can care for myself,” he argued.
I held up the photos of Gary and Nate. “You haven’t dealt with anything like this.”
“The Lord will protect me,” he declared stubbornly. “I will be fine.”
“Yes, well… just in case He’s busy, maybe I should come up with something else.”
“Then you had better come up with it quickly,” he said.
I’d been working on an idea for the last hour, actually. “Did you say you could post to this MUD thing?”
“Yes. Why?”
“How far is Central Park from here?”
Chapter 14
I reached the pond at the southern edge of Central Park at around ten. By then the darkness was nearly complete, and a decent chill had settled over the whole city. There was a waning moon to see by but it was playing chicken with a bank of clouds, so there were times when I had nothing but the street lamps.
I had with me the bag with all my stuff plus the still-unused satellite phone and a heavy red parka on loan from Tchekhy with Stan’s gun stuffed in one of the pockets. The red parka stood out, as it was supposed to. An hour earlier a digital photo of me wearing it was uploaded onto the MUD along with the message “taken today just outside of Central Park!” Tchekhy posted it under the name of a regular New York contributor to the site, which made more sense than setting up a new account and immediately posting information on the dodgy immortal, something we both agreed would arouse suspicion as to the provenance of that information. The only one who would be wise to it was the guy whose account we used, and since Tchekhy disabled his account right after posting, it would take days for the truth to come out. I only needed one evening.
