where she was making a movie. It wasn’t then that we talked about it-about us. She came to the hospital, told me, and said she’d be back. I managed to tell Typhony, my on-again off-again girlfriend at the time.
“They wheeled me to Bud’s funeral with two nurses and two IVs. When I got back to the hospital Suzanne had returned with a whole squad.
“She rented this place in the French countryside, the Loire River Valley, the heart and soul of France, she called it. I was completely depressed. She brought doctors and fed me happy pills.
“Suzanne came and went and physically I got better. I noticed the nurses got cuter.
“I couldn’t go out with Suzanne without news coverage, but we saw each other each night when she came back from location, and gradually we got to know each other.
“Things started tending toward the physical and we both got nervous. I wanted my quiet anonymous life, still thinking I might somehow go back to work, I guess. She didn’t want a boyfriend who couldn’t take her to an opening. I thought maybe I loved her at the time, but I had always told myself never to get involved with a celebrity. I don’t know if it was that or the depression and the guilt that initially kept us apart.
“We took a breather, so to speak, and for a few days I went for long walks around the green lawns, through the rose gardens, into the vineyards, past the fish ponds, and along the Loire River. There didn’t seem to be a solution.
“She called me and said we had to find a way to be together and she was coming to talk about it. They had been in Spain to shoot some scenes. I never talked with her again.”
“The jet crash,” Anna whispered.
“Yeah.”
“First Bud, then Suzanne.” Anna shook her head. “Did you love her?”
“I don’t know. I still don’t know what we could have done. I went back to work.”
“The way you explain it, you see yourself as a victim of your profession, which demands you not take up with a celebrity. Tidy little package. Circumstances may change, but your whole life will always be a set of clever tricks you use to make sure that intimacy never happens. Passion, yes. But not the rest.”
“I take up with a celebrity and the media will soon know when a person’s in trouble. Right now they don’t notice that I’ve shown up because I don’t exist. That’s important.”
The phone rang.
“Answer it,” Anna said.
“I have two big pieces of news,” Paul said. “Hal called. A G-Four landed at Campbell River and took off for Fiji. They even learned that the people getting on the plane in Canada came in on two Beavers from the Alert Bay area.”
“Fiji. I’ll be damned. Which island?”
“The airport at Nadi. After Nadi the G-Four went to Lebanon, but a number of passengers got off in Fiji and took a limo to another part of the airport If they boarded another plane, Hal says it’s only a matter of time until he knows whose plane and where it goes. Apparently it’s hard to keep secrets in Nadi. But if they stayed a few days and then flew out, it could be harder than hell to find them.”
“Lebanon tells me it’s Samir Aziz,” Sam said. “Trouble in paradise-partners at each other’s throats.”
“Right. We’re exploring that. But Big Brain has a new entry in the diagram.” Paul went on at some length to explain the strange correlations in the data.
“And you must have something on Wes King,” Sam said.
“He died of a heart attack a couple months after the break-in. You were in France.”
“Well, we missed it and now all we can do is play catch-up.”
“What?” Anna took his arm as he hung up. “You look sick.”
Sam was still sifting the facts in his mind. “It’ll take a few minutes to explain. You ready?”
Anna checked the oven. “This stuff burns easily because of the honey.” She pulled out the granola, served it, and got them glasses of orange juice.
“Okay,” Sam said, and sat at the table. “Suzanne King had a kind heart. Suzanne allowed her ex-husband, Wes King, to hang around her house. Of all these divorced celebrities who allegedly remain ‘good friends,’ this was that rare couple that actually did remain on good terms.”
“It’s not a bad idea to maintain the friendship.”
“Uh-huh. Well, there wasn’t any spin with them. And Wes stayed at the house mostly when he visited town on business. The study remained his and I guess, according to the maid, the deal was that he could keep using it until Suzanne found a serious boyfriend. Wes had a wall safe-which of course we didn’t know at the time of the stalker case-where he kept the source code to a valuable software program his company had developed. It was called Auditor, and it had made him a fortune. All you need to know is that it was a very sophisticated accounting program that integrated other manufacturing and production functions and was unique at the time. But to set it up and to make it run with other programs you needed the source code. It’s very long and complex and virtually can’t be figured out.”
Sam started nibbling the granola as it cooled and nodded his approval to Anna.
“Somebody wanted it for use in places like China, where its sale was forbidden by federal law. Supposedly because of its potential military applications. The whole thing with the stalking and photos of Suzanne was a diversion to distract attention from the real motive for invading the property. The people who were after the software’s source code found themselves a couple of real live perverts with a record of stalking and assault.”
“But why go to all that trouble?” Anna asked. “If you’ve got the tunnel into the estate, why not sneak in when nobody is home?”
“Because they couldn’t do it with only one entry into the house. You blow up the safe and everybody can guess what you’re doing. The software theft only works if people don’t suspect that it has happened. That’s the big difference between this and a theft of cash or jewelry. Suzanne believed that stalkers were invading her house-she was distracted. I doubt she even knew the contents of the safe. None of us, not me, not the police, and evidently not Wes, were thinking about theft or planning for it. We were all thinking about people on a weird power trip posting nude photos on the Web. That’s how we interpreted all the break-ins, the entire experience.”
“Okay, so what information connected King’s software and my brother’s case?”
“Big Brain. I told you the feeding of Big Brain never really stops. The tech staff was feeding Big Brain even when I was off sailing. What we had thought of as a solved crime-namely Suzanne King’s stalkers-suddenly became an unsolved crime when the news about the safe and the source code became public. The techies fed in the information as the police released it. And the FBI guys that know me and know Big Brain paved the way to feed data for their own purposes. That created a hot spot or high-priority area in the database on anything related to the King case. If there is any genius in Big Brain’s software it is taking these seemingly unrelated facts and finding connections. Sometimes it just seems like trivial information but you’d be amazed at what comes of it.
“In the car used by the stalkers there was a shaving kit, and in that kit was a paper cocktail coaster that had a phone number on it. The number belonged to an executive for Systemtechnik, a German company. We never made anything of that because the stalker was a cousin of the executive’s wife. That explained why he had the number. But before we figured that out we tapped into a computer contact list for Systemtechnik and downloaded the entire contents. And of course we never throw anything away. Big Brain has nearly infinite memory space. One address in those thousands of company contacts was a Cayman Islands address that will become important. Big Brain drew a correlation and the executive with the stalker’s phone number was the same executive who entered the Cayman address in his company’s computer.
“More recently Big Brain highlighted the name of an exporter of gift cheeses in France because it appeared on an invoice retrieved from the garbage of a Grace Technologies employee named Benoit Moreau. The cheese package bore a shipping address-a post office box in the Cayman Islands, the same post office box in the Cayman Islands that had popped up in the Systemtechnik records. That meant a connection to the Suzanne King case.
“To thicken the plot some, a French software company called Belle du Jour had received construction drawings from that same Systemtechnik executive. Belle du Jour also received money and sent billings to Grace, so Big Brain noticed that Belle du Jour had dealings with both Systemtechnik and Grace, and in the case of Grace the ROCs-”
“Wait, what’s a ROC?”
“ROC, record of communication… The ROCs were to one Benoit Moreau.”
Anna looked confused, but she motioned for Sam to continue.
