411

 

I was peering out through the mini blinds of my darkened office when trouble walked in.

 

Across the trash alley at the Indian restaurant, the busboy and the assistant cook were sneaking a smoke by the dumpster. I was hoping to catch sight of the gorgeous maître d’ who sometimes joined them before the manager shooed them all inside. But it was First Friday, the last of the season which meant all the downtown bars and eateries would be hopping. No rest for the wicked. No smoke break for my tall, dark and handsome with the colonial British accent that drove all of Jen’s paralegals wild.

 

I smelled the cigar before I heard the door open behind me. The ceiling fan must have pulled the smoke through the cracks around the jamb. As usual, the AC was on the fritz, so it was warm but not quite sultry in my office even after dark. Only in here, not the rest of the shared suite. I’d mention it to Jen anyway.

 

“If you’re looking for Jen Harris, you’ve got the wrong office,” I said without looking away from the window. “She’s gone for the night.”

 

“Samantha Song,” I heard behind me. Male, authoritative, from somewhere in the urban Northeast. Not New York or Boston, one of the lesser lights.

 

I let the blinds snap shut. Anyone who knew my name was either a cop or a well-informed potential client. I turned to find out which.

 

In the dim light from the streetlamp seeping through the blinds, I found myself confronted by the palest white guy on the planet. Like a plus-sized Elon Musk in a bright, palm-print tropical shirt, sunburned like he’d been vacationing on a Greek yacht. A lit cigar clamped between his meaty fingers. Cuban-seeded by the dense, rich scent, Dominican or Nicaraguan, but definitely not Havana. A wannabe who wanted people to think he was the real deal.

 

“Sam. That’s the name my mother gave me,” I told my first lie of the night. “Who’s asking?”

 

When he just kept eyeing me, puffing on his cigar, I added, “You looking for something?”

 

He blew smoke across my desk. “Just trying to decide if the name matches the face, sweetheart.”

 

He wasn’t staring at my face. I think his mind was more on drapes and carpet.

 

I already disliked him. The sweetheart comment just tipped the scales further. I wished I hadn’t told Jen that she didn’t need to hang around. This guy had a serious case of bad chi. And probably a terminal case of bad karma to go with it.

 

But which of my clients didn’t. Most were looking for something or someone illicit or exotic. Not strictly illegal, more gray market than black. If that someone was a spouse or SO, ex or otherwise, or a hookup with someone they’d seen but never met, I directed them to Jen’s PI. Or if they were a creeper, which this guy might still turn out to be. I wasn’t that kind of finding service. The 411 on the door downstairs said it all, though most people mistook it for an address rather than a business name, which worked to my advantage. Having Genevieve Harris, Legacy Planning painted above it in classic black and gold on glass lent a touch of class. The vacation property agent and marijuana dispensary to either side of the doorway to the blind staircase leading up to our suite didn’t.

 

“Look,” I said, trying to hurry things along, “I was just closing up shop for the night. A friend and I are meeting for drinks. By now, he’s got to be wondering where I am.” My second lie.

 

“No need to rush, doll. I ditched the wife and fam just to be here,” he said, now taking in the office. His gaze flicked from the ceiling fan to linger on the gunmetal gray four-drawer file cabinet in the corner with an oscillating fan on top sweeping the room then shifted to the matching government-issue desk complete with an ancient rotary phone. “Nice décor, by the way. Lesbian Navy surplus?”

 

Now I distinctly disliked him. A couple of my best friends were lesbians. But if he was a client, I needed the money. The pickup work I did for Jen was strictly hand-to-mouth, mostly finding relatives and investigating claims against estates. Some light IT work securing her wi-fi and computers.

 

“Let’s cut to the chase, buddy,” I said, with an evaluating look meant to obscure my fiscal desperation. “What are you looking for? Beachfront rentals are downstairs to the left, a handful of happy gummies to the right. Viagra you can find online.”

 

He smiled a broad, whitened, orthodontic smile. “I like you, sweetheart.”

 

He settled into one of my client chairs and took a long pull from his cigar before tapping the ashes into my mostly empty coffee cup. An ember hissed as the dregs from my morning wake-up call extinguished it. Then his face went serious. “I need to find a guy.”

 

“If you know my name, you know that’s what I do,” I replied, still eying him as I settled into my desk chair. “You looking for a hookup? Cause I don’t do that.”

 

“With this guy? Hardly.” His expression told me all I need to know about his derision on that score. “But trust me, once you been with me, I’ll set you straight.”

 

Oh, I was really going to enjoy taking this guy’s money. The best part of not advertising my rates was I could charge this guy for the privilege of being an asshole.

 

“Let’s get this out of the way,” I said, leaning in. “My services don’t come cheap. There’s a one-time fee upfront to initiate the process. Privacy altcoin only, non-negotiable, non-refundable.” As I talked, I formulated a number. High enough to compensate for my pain and suffering, but low enough not to scare him off. A tricky internal negotiation.

 

I dropped it on him casually, adding, “With a second equal payment if I get results. No guarantees stated or implied.”

 

He didn’t blink at the number but his face clouded. “What am I paying for if not results?”

 

“Six weeks of my time and attention.” I swept my hand around the office. “I’ve got expenses.”

 

His eyes followed my hand, lingering on the desk before shifting to the computer, clearly dubious. “And if it goes longer than six weeks?”

 

“I don’t know.” I smiled, leaning back in my chair. “None of them ever have.”

 

“But no guarantee you find him.” He also leaned back and took another pull from his cigar. The office began filling up with haze, like the trash alley when the Snoop Doggs of the dispensary downstairs took their toke break.

 

“Some people can’t be found.” I shrugged. “If your guy is living in a cave in the Himalayas or pulled a D. B. Cooper, six weeks or six years won’t matter. Everybody else falls into dangerous repetition. The Chinese ID’d our CIA agents just by their choice of hotels and airline reservations. Though it helped they were camped out inside OPM. Just the tip of the iceberg. All that’s available if you know where to look.”

 

He considered but not long enough, it was just a show.

 

“I can make that happen,” he finally said to the number. “But you’d better find him. Cause, trust me, he’d never make it in a fucking cave. He’s in a program.”

 

Damn. That complicated things. I should have charged him more than double.

 

He extended his hand across the desk to accept the offer. Too quickly.

 

I let it hang there, a deal unsealed.

 

“Why do you want to find this guy?” I probed. This was strictly against my no-questions-asked policy but something about this guy didn’t feel quite right.

 

“Does it matter?” He slowly withdrew his hand, uncertain for a second what to do with it before he retrieved his cigar from his other hand.

 

“Just professional curiosity really.” That much was true.

 

“Doll, the first thing you learn in this business is that curiosity gets kittens like you killed.” He settled further into the guest chair, getting comfortable. “All you need to know is that someone important wants him found. Can you do it or not?”

 

He took another long drag from his cigar and blew it into my face.

 

I glared. “There are things I need first. His name and whatever other personally identifying information you have. Driver’s license, credit card, place of birth, a social. Even where he worked or an old address.”

 

“They’ll have changed all that.” A wave of a hand, another drag from the cigar, another tap of ashes into my coffee cup.

 

“I know,” I said patiently. “But from that, I can reconstruct his old identity.”

 

“I know who he was. I need to know who he is. More importantly, where,” he said through a mouthful of cigar. The smoke in my office was now glowing a bluish-gray in the slatted light through the blinds. I was getting lightheaded.

 

“And I can get that for you,” I acknowledged, trying not to sigh. “But I need a baseline.”

 

“They’ll have erased all that as soon as he went into the program. It’s as if he never existed. Believe me, I’ve looked. Hell, by now they may have reconstructed his face, or slit his dick and made him a woman. These guys are thorough.”

 

That was critical: a government program. High level. While digging into those identities wasn’t technically illegal, it was highly frowned upon by guys in cheap suits with no sense of humor. But in a way, that made it easier. The Feds had patterns.

 

“No one’s that thorough. Trust me.” I tugged the chain on the banker’s lamp, creating a pool of light above my desk. I grabbed a notebook from my desk drawer and pulled out the mechanical pencil from the spiral rings that bound it. “Let’s start with his name.”

 

He gestured with his cigar toward the computer, the only modern item in the room. “Don’t you want to type it in?”

 

I raised an eyebrow. “Do you really want me to store this information in a form that can’t be chemically erased?”

 

He stared at me blankly, piecing together the words but not clearly not understanding the sentence. I was surprised his lips didn’t move.

 

“Paper burns,” I enlightened him. “Once it does, there’s no data recovery.”

 

Now he nodded, somewhat approvingly. “Kenneth Moore,” he said.

 

I wrote it down. “And what do we know about Mr. Moore?”

 

“I know he’s a fucking pervert,” he said around more of his cigar. I wondered what the Feds would make of this conversation. Or Freud.

 

“What do you mean?” I asked evenly, almost clinically, my pencil poised but my eyes still on him.

 

“He likes little girls,” he clarified as if that were unnecessary.

 

Now I leaned back and rested the pencil in the fold of the pages. “How little?”

 

“What’s the fucking difference?” He waved his hand again sending tiny castoff leaves of ash drifting across my desk.

 

“If we’re talking thirteen going on eighteen, I can work with that,” I explained, tapping the back end of my pencil against the page. “If we’re talking under ten, it’s a problem.”

 

His brow furrowed. “Problem how?”

 

“Bait,” I said.

 

He nodded slowly. “The first one.”

 

Not the brightest client I’d ever had. Between that and the G-man angle, I was positive I hadn’t quoted him enough. I’d need a contingency on this case. A backup. The outlines of one began to formulate.

 

I leaned over the notebook again. “You got a last known address?”

 

“Not that I can give you.”

 

I could interpret that a couple of ways but chose to ignore it for the moment. “How about a social?”

 

“Nope,” he said. “Never worked with the guy.”

 

I didn’t believe him.

 

“A phone number?” I asked, no longer hopeful.

 

“That I’ve got,” he said, suddenly surprisingly cooperative. “Probably a burner. It’s disconnected.”

 

I slid a Post-it pad across the desk and clicked open a ballpoint from a different coffee cup and extended it after. “Write it down.”

 

He shot me a suspicious look.

 

“Dyslexia,” I said smoothly, pointing toward my eyes, a well-practiced excuse. “I want to make sure I get it right.”

 

He nodded again, his lower lip protruding as if that weakness made perfect sense. He inked the phone number diagonally across the pad, pressing down hard enough to leave an indent on the next three pages, large enough to be read across the room. This was a guy who would talk louder and slower to people who didn’t speak English thinking it would help them understand.

 

When he finished, I retrieved the pad. He slid the pen into his shirt pocket.

 

“Where’d you first run into him?” I continued, pretending not to notice. I kept a box of them in a drawer just for kleptos like him.

 

“A coffee shop,” he said, leaning back again with his cigar. “You’d think this guy was from Seattle with the way he went on about coffee. Some black African shit ground in a way he thought was the end of the fucking world. Like Juan Valdez and his little mule weren’t good enough for him. Coffee’s coffee, my friend. If you’re paying more than a buck fifty, you’re getting ripped off.”

 

That was interesting on a couple of levels. It told me as much about my client as the target. I jotted more notes, knowing that if he looked, he could read them.

 

We continued for a couple more minutes but in the end, he didn’t have much other information he was willing to part with. Which was fine. What he’d said might just be enough.

 

When he started looking antsy, I folded the notebook around my pencil and set it on the desk. “I’ll take the case. The clock starts ticking the moment your altcoin hits my wallet. A disposable account is best. You need a walkthrough?”

 

He waved that away. “Not my first rodeo, sweetheart. They’ll come pre-tumbled.”

 

“And rest assured I’ll tumble them some more.” I rattled off a placeholder account located on my favorite tropical island. He wrote it out with the ballpoint on his palm.

 

I stood up and extended a hand. “First payment through the software exchange. Second the same unless things get complicated. Then through hardware at my discretion. Strictly in-person if we go that route.”

 

“Done,” he said, standing as well.

 

This time, we shook on it. I felt like I needed a shower afterward.

 

Before he turned to go, he dropped the remains of his cigar into my coffee cup where it settled with a deep, terminal hiss. “The wife doesn’t like me smoking. Doc says they're bad for my ticker anyway.”

 

I made a mental note of that.

 

After he left my office and I heard the door downstairs close behind him, I locked up and began reconstructing more notes from our conversation while they were fresh. I then retrieved a memory card from the concealed camera triggered by my office door. Reviewing the video on my computer without loading it, I found a couple of good stills. Enough for an image search if it came to that. I loaded everything on an IronKey data stick, encrypted it with a full-length passkey, erased the buffer, and destroyed the card down to the molecular level. Between the smoke from it and the lingering cigar, I was feeling nauseous.

 

Fifteen minutes later, my phone chimed with the confirmation that fresh altcoin had hit my account. I initiated the algorithm to transfer, clean, and close it.

 

Now to find out if Mr. Moore could be found. Part of me hoped he couldn’t.

 

---

 

Halfway through my six-week retainer, I found him. At least, I found signs that he existed and was still above ground. Local no less, which raised a huge red flag on what the client was and wasn’t telling me. But if he’d made my life easier, I was all for it, lies of omission or not. The sooner I could spend his money, the happier I’d be.

 

Thankfully, he hadn’t contacted me again and wasn’t looking over my shoulder. He seemed the type. At least he was that smart.

 

I’d started by checking the Estonian-hosted database cloned from the Office of Personnel Management breach, firewalled, VPNed, proxied, and anonymized. The Russian copy was better but their recent special military action made it less accessible or at least riskier. The original Chinese dataset was the most complete but I didn’t need those guys deciding I was a Uighur.

 

No luck. Turned out Mr. Moore had never been in the employ of Uncle Sam and had never held a clearance. It had been too much to ask anyway, having all his personal identifying information served up as one-stop shopping from a reliable source.

 

So, I had to do it the hard way. I dug into the phone number. It wasn’t active but wasn’t available either. Interesting. With the refresh rate for numbers to meet demand, it was likely in the two- to six-month cooling-off period, a recent addition to recycle purgatory. Which meant there might still be records.

 

I paid a small fee and looked up which carrier the number had been assigned to originally. Numbers were auctioned off in bulk when they came available. The area code was relatively new, inside the insatiable Northeast corridor. Which synced up with the client’s accent. But didn’t narrow it down to where either he or the target lived, more likely where they didn’t. The first rule of burners was the same as affairs: don’t shit where you eat. Even my client seemed that competent.

 

Turned out the number was less than a decade old, originally scooped up by a national carrier that mostly dealt with prepaids. That was both good and bad. Good because a lot of big box stores carried their phones. Big box stores that had been hacked. Bad because those big box stores moved a lot of merch. So a lot of data to filter through.

 

I opted to spit-roast the problem, coming at it from two directions. First, I set up a data miner contracted out to a third-party Estonian outfit I’d used before. It ran in the background on a legion of PCs, most of which thought they were processing cool, new space images from NASA’s latest telescope. Low-level and randomized so it didn’t attract attention. Not exactly malware but not not malware either.

 

Second, I set up a Mongolian horde of online accounts linked to a random name I picked from the old encyclopedia of New York City white pages I kept in my filing cabinet. No address, no other personally identifying information, just a name and the phone number the client had given me. Social media, online shopping, a Gmail account. While my computer remained firewalled, I left all the privacy settings on those accounts at the default level, so basically wide open for tracking. I posted some popular cat memes with some innocuous comments on social media and then tossed a new phone with a few related items that I thought might interest one Ms. Marion Webster into an online shopping cart, but didn’t buy them. I would have used Moore’s name but I didn’t know what tripwires that might tickle. I let Big Data do the rest.

 

Big Data crossed the finish line first. One of the big box stores started peppering Marion’s new Gmail account with ads for phones. They offered a discount on minutes. It should have been in their mission statement: “If we know when your underage daughter is pregnant, we definitely know if you need a burner.” Within minutes of those ads hitting Marion’s inbox, a national carrier was asking if I wanted to reactivate the number. Well, not me, but not Ms. Webster or Mr. Moore, either. Just the number, so probably legit even though it looked like a phishing expedition. But that told me they didn’t have a name associated with the number in their database. Interesting.

 

I used that information to update my Estonian data miner. Within hours, the crawler spat out an account number and a password from a data breach at the carrier which may have been ongoing. Either North Korean military or a false flag out of Taiwan. Which made me wonder who else was on this party line.

 

I tried logging into the account but it had either been closed or the password had been reset as a part of containment. So, I set the data miner to look for a cached copy.

 

Because the breach was recent, that didn’t take long. Within a day I was paging through the account information. A few things stood out.

 

First, the number had originally been funded through prepaid activation cards. A year at a time, bought with cash. The phone must have been a dinosaur. It relied on minutes. I pictured an old, dad-style flip phone. But it hadn’t been upgraded for the 2G to 3G or the 3G to 4G migration, so maybe not quite that archaic.

 

I did a quick side search on the number for associated accounts in both the Apple and Google stores but came up empty. Likely a base model with nothing added. Or someone knew how to hand-load apps to circumvent that trace.

 

When I checked where the prepaid cards had been bought, not a huge data set, I found they were all within fifty miles of the area code, but not within it. The locations, all different, didn’t form a circle though, so didn’t pinpoint where Moore might have been except by absence.

 

The more important thing I found was that the phone had been reactivated not long ago with a new number after the last of the contract minutes had expired. No credit card, just another prepaid, again bought with cash. After that, the online account had been closed. A pretty neat trick as there was no real mechanism to do that through normal interactions. All these companies wanted you back if you canceled so left a back door open by design. No one gave up data willingly.

 

But the reactivation required a new SIM chip which had to be sent somewhere. Which turned out to be a local mailbox store that rented PO-style boxes, one without any federal ID requirements. So anonymous. That the SIM had been delivered locally told me my client was sharing even less than I’d hoped. That was too big of a coincidence to be random, both the client and the target being here.

 

The records from the mailbox place were a dead end. I got the impression that was a feature of their business model. I didn’t get the sense that showing up in person and asking questions would be a great idea either.

 

So, I tried the next obvious solution. I called the number, shadowed behind anonymizing software to block my own. It went straight into a not available, no mailbox message. Blocked, out of service, silenced, or off.

 

Which left pattern repetition as my voted-most-likely angle. That meant legwork.

 

I started checking every coffee shop, bar, and café within perp walk distance of a middle school in the Waterfront, the Edge, Grand Central, and the Central Arts districts. When those came up empty, I branched out farther, Old Northeast, Midtown, even the Warehouse district.

 

In a week, all I came up with were a couple of pale out-of-town stiffs in khaki shorts, kitschy local tees, and aviator sunglasses trolling a new kava bar near the turning basin. They had all the telltales of undercover Feds trying to pass off as a heteronormative couple who looked distinctly uncomfortable with the rainbow pride paraphernalia that adorned the shadowy, rough-cut wood interior. They were too clichéd to be tourists but stood out too much to be locals.

 

As I watched, they first tried to engage the bartender, then a couple of gay guys shooting pool, and finally a trio of a guy and two bikini-topped girls sitting around a table playing some hip new Eurotrash board game. When the stiffs turned their eyes to me, I winked at the woman, pointed, and headed for the lady’s room. From there, I was out the back door before she could recover from the shock.

 

After that close encounter of the officer unfriendly kind, I shifted my search to the wrong side of the lake. Which quickly began to feel like three days in the valley.

 

I didn’t usually make field trips. Since I’d moved to Sunshine City, I’d found most everything I needed was within easy walking, biking, or Uber distance of the office and my apartment. I’d been told that five years earlier, this burg used to roll up the sidewalks at night. I had a hard time picturing that.

 

I still had a car that I almost never drove, an ancient beater with out-of-state plates locked up in a friend’s freestanding garage. In the wilds of the county, I needed more flexibility and a little more flash. So, I loaded up some exploits on my phone and borrowed Jen’s Miata. I dropped the top, threw on my best beach sunglasses, and began trolling coffee houses. The main disad to Jen’s little red coupe was her vanity plate: DDYSGRL. That wouldn’t stand out downtown or at the beaches but would be pretty distinctive in the hinterlands.

 

As an offset, I tried to dress so as not to be kicked off Alaska Airlines. I skipped the leggings and the form-fit crop top that would have blended in downtown and went with jeans and a flowered sleeveless number I thought my mother might wear if she were feeling risqué.

 

This part of the county was more drive-thru than destination. The type of place where reporters from the city paper wouldn’t bother showing up in unless there was a body. The body of somebody important. Not a lot of affluence out here.

 

I caught up with my quarry in an independent coffee shop known simply as The Mill. Right across from an institution that looked like the cross between a paramilitary academy and a boarding school for girls. Think steel and olive uniforms but drifting toward plaid, pleated, Catholic schoolgirl skirts and white Japanese blouses with anime bows.

 

After the near miss with the agents, I’d taken to scanning my phone for contacts to see who was nearby. Not only did Moore’s new number appear but it was active.

 

This was the kind of dangerous repetition I was looking for. Something that bordered on compulsion or addiction. It amazed me that Moore felt safe enough to poach a private girls' school that the daughters of the locally rich and famous attended, even if they were regional D-listers at best.

 

I sized up the joint before I went inside. It was set up in an old, converted wood-framed house that looked like it could have been built back in the county’s frontier ranching days, which were equally hard to imagine. It was trying to be hip and quirky in that last-decade kind of way. But the place was white. White white, both in color and complexion.

 

I had to go inside to catch a glimpse of the phone to know exactly what exploit to run. Each manufacturer and operating system had its own unique vulnerabilities. While technically, I could fulfill my contract right now by texting the client with my location, which is what Jen’s PI would have done, there were some niggling details I wanted to put to bed before I did.

 

I planned to tag the phone with a location tracker that I could exchange for my second payment. I didn’t trust the client. There were too many red flags and interested third parties.

 

But if this guy was what the client said he was, my heart wouldn’t bleed one drop of purple piss for whatever happened to him.

 

If.

 

Still, I hesitated. I hated risking being IDed. I preferred to do my work in the anonymity of the shadows behind a screen where I could control the information space.

 

Yet, all of my tracking modules required proximity or a dedicated connection. I could hack into the coffee shop’s wifi but their sand and shell parking lot wasn’t the kind of place you could just sit around playing on your phone for half an hour without attracting unwanted attention. I mean it backed up to someone’s barn for fuck’s sake.

 

So, I hiked up my big girl panties and headed inside.

 

Of course, this was the kind of establishment that you entered and exited through the gift shop. Which was stocked with a cross between coffee kitsch and conservative internet memes. The kind of place the two stiffs from the kava bar would have nested in and raised a clan.

 

Toto, I don’t think we're in Sunshine City anymore.

 

The order space was through a doorway straight back, the seating area through another to the right. I ventured further in to place an order at a long white counter with a tablet connected to a square commercial card reader that was set up as a register.

 

I went with a large mocha, skipping the canned whipped cream, but adding a fist-sized chocolate muffin that looked like it had more chips than cake by weight or volume.

 

Behind me was a white folding table with cream, sugar, and other coffee garnishes. The flatscreen hanging over it was streaming some wildly popular last-century sitcom with a laugh track and everything. Nearly thirty years on, it still didn’t make much sense. The vaporware of comedy. I got the impression that was a feature, not a bug. I didn’t think the staff was streaming it to be ironic.

 

I sprinkled my mocha with a little extra cocoa and some cinnamon, trying to ignore the scenes that drifted between a coffee shop, a diner, and a palatial Manhattan apartment of a size that would have set back six of us in downtown Sunshine City just to live in the walk-in closet. I stirred my mocha, blowing across it to cool it before popping on a disposable lid, my eyes involuntarily captivated by the inane antics above me like a kid with a cartoon.

 

Satisfied with a sample sip, I turned away and proceeded to the seating area through a narrow connecting hallway lined with a trash can and the door to a one-hole, unintentionally unisex bathroom.

 

An enclosed lanai or old sitting room had been set up with tables in a series of sheltered but not quite private nooks. The front windows looked out onto the exercise yard of the academy across the street. There were six people scattered about, all ignoring the ever-present TVs ringing the area. A trio, two men and a woman, were deeply immersed in a conversation about books or politics or current events with a seriousness that excluded everything in their surroundings. A midlife couple leaned into their intimacy like teenagers, their eyes only for each other. Probably a midday affair. And the lone casual professional, a man neither young nor old, engrossed in his phone by a front window, the primetime seat.

 

None of them gave off the vibe of my target. Until the loner met my eye with a look of prey scanning for predators from his hide before curling a bit tighter into his phone.

 

Gotcha.

 

I found my own niche where I could watch him from the corner of my eye and surveil the windows for activity across the street. I settled in, broke off a corner of my muffin between sips of coffee, and became seemingly absorbed in a game of swipe-left on my phone.

 

What I was really doing was scanning my library of exploits for the best fit to the situation. I noted the target’s phone was iTechnology. Unusual and unexpected for a burner. It was older edition iTech, which provided me a unique opportunity to use a newly uncovered hack, a hardware vulnerability that no simple software patch could ever close. Access relied on proximity and exposure through Bluetooth. It was as elegant as it was devious.

 

Within a minute, I was in.

 

With my newfound admin privilege, I verified the number, confirming it was Moore’s. I quickly installed some stalkerware, a slick little script that allowed me to hijack location services through the Find My Phone feature, which unwisely only required the number to activate. Once loaded, it was undetectable and nearly unstoppable. Even when the phone was off, it queued up intermittent background dumps of GPS data that circumvented any user preferences to disable. The only preventative measure was physically removing the battery from the phone, a task the iCompany had made inconvenient for the casual consumer. Which I couldn’t tell if this guy was.

 

It was almost too easy. That ate at me like the termites slowly undermining Jen’s downtown building. Why in the world would this guy go through so many right steps and still keep his old phone? Why not just set up another burner like the rest of us?

 

That curiosity itched like a feral cat with fleas. I knew I should just finish up my breakfast and eradicate my exploits before texting the client to send my second payment.

 

But I gave into temptation and used my newly established data conduit to clone Moore’s phone to mine. All his contacts, all his photos, all his hidden files. If it was there, I would have it, even if I had to crack it open like an NSA Easter egg.

 

With the limited throughput to avoid detection, this download might take a little while. So, I gave in to the siren song of the television while I absently finished my muffin. Before the cello struck its distinctive final chords for the closing scene, I had everything I needed.

 

Which wasn’t much based on the download size. But I’d already risked too much exposure by sitting here so I quarantined the data without opening any files. It was time to retreat to the comfort and safety of my office before thumbing through contents that might haunt my dreams hereafter. Right after my aborted college career, I’d done a stint in forensic IT. I knew exactly how easy it was to stumble on images you could never unsee no matter how many times you bleached your eyes. Not here.

 

For added security, I encrypted Moore’s data with an algorithm that it would take Big Blue’s Watson a few decades to unwind. Snowden-level access. Then, I retreated to the Miata and made my getaway like Kim leaving Kayne, cautiously but without looking back.

 

When I got to the office, I found Jen waiting by the line of mailboxes just inside the door at the bottom of the stairwell. Like she was meeting a courier.

 

I passed her the keys to her car. “Thanks for the loaner.”

 

She clutched my hand in hers and drew me deeper into the alcove.

 

“Two US Marshals showed up looking for you,” she whispered conspiratorially. “They flashed badges so I couldn’t just kick them out. They wanted to wait in your office, but I set them up in the conference room instead. Eileen’s babysitting. Are you ok, Sam?”

 

I sighed but tried to reassure her. “I think I know this pair. It should be fine, just client stuff, you know?”

 

Jen looked dubious. “They look pretty serious and asked some really leading questions. Just say the word and I’m on retainer.”

 

“I don’t think that will be necessary,” I reassured her, “but I appreciate the backup. I’ll let you know if it changes.”

 

She squeezed my hand and nodded before releasing it. She then escorted me upstairs to the conference room.

 

Inside, the pair from the kava bar waited along with Eileen, one of Jen’s paralegals, who was focused on her laptop. The Feds were more recognizable in their dull, off-color, off-the-rack grey suits that served as uniforms. I felt distinctly overdressed. Or underdressed. Or something.

 

The conference room was small with barely enough room for the five of us. Jen dismissed Eileen with a “Thanks” and a nod. She folded up her laptop and squeezed out past us as we skirted around the table.

 

“Before I release my client to you,” Jen said in her professional voice, “I want to confirm she is not a suspect.”

 

“No, Ms. Harris,” the male agent intoned. “Ms. Song is not a suspect.”

 

“Not at this time,” his female counterpart continued without a pause. “She just might have information her government would be grateful to receive.”

 

“Very grateful,” the male agent finished up as if he’d never been interrupted.

 

Jen leveled an evaluating look at each of them, then turned to me and said, “You don’t have to talk to them, Sam.”

 

“It’s ok, Jen,” I replied soothingly. “I’m always happy to help out our government’s finest.”

 

She searched my eyes as if to make sure I was certain. Turning back to the Feds, she said, “One word from my client and I’m back in the room. Then this whole fishing expedition gets shut down. So, I suggest you two play nice.”

 

One word, she mouthed to me as she turned away from the agents and headed for the door, closing it behind her.

 

“Before we start,” I said, “I need to see some IDs.”

 

They both reached into their jacket pockets and flipped them open for inspection, synchronized like Olympic swimmers.

 

“I’m Deputy Marshal Johnson,” the male agent said, “And this is my…”

 

“…partner,” the female agent stepped in without a noticeable pause, “Special Deputy Marshal Johnson.”

 

I examined each of their badges. US Marshal Service. DOJ. Woody and Meade respectively. Was anyone using their real names? But they looked legit with all the right tin stars, embossing, holograms, and mug shots, down to the archaic typewriter font the Feds just couldn’t get away from.

 

“Ok,” I said, settling in a chair after I slid their IDs back across the table. “What can I do for you?”

 

“You’re a hard woman to track down…” Woody started.

 

“…Daddy’s Girl,” Meade finished.

 

I just stared back at them without volunteering any further information. Not my first brush with the law. But my first with the tin men.

 

Woody seemed to take the hint. He reached into his opposite jacket pocket and drew out a small deck of snapshots. Dealing the first off the top, he laid it on the table like a card in Texas hold-em. “We believe you have been contacted by this man.”

 

“He sometimes goes by the name Herman Kardon,” Meade clarified, checking out her nails. I filed that name away but otherwise didn’t react to my client’s picture. Other than to note he looked slightly younger and had been captured candidly as if under surveillance. That spelled trouble.

 

“Here’s a more recent picture,” Woody said, snapping down Kardon’s photo in the tropical attire he’d worn the night we’d met, cigar and all.

 

“He may have asked you to find this man,” Woody continued as he snapped a third photo onto the table. The target this time, the same guy from the coffee shop. Only Moore’s picture was a portrait, Olan Mills by the watermark. Were they even still a going concern?

 

I turned back to Meade to see if she had anything to add. She didn’t, just kept examining her short, nude, clear-coat nails.

 

“This stiff have a name,” I finally asked.

 

“Not that you need to know,” Meade said without looking up.

 

I leaned back from the table and said, “Can’t say I know either of them.” Which technically was true.

 

"Maybe look again," Woody said, tapping the photos.

 

So, I picked up each in turn to study them, hoping they might reveal more clues about my client, the target, or their connection. They didn’t.

 

“Nope. Sorry. Can’t help you.” I said, laying them down and sliding them back. “Why are you looking for these clowns anyway? Somebody forget to file an extension with the IRS? Cut the line at TSA?”

 

“We’re not looking for Mr. Kardon,” Woody said.

 

“Who said we were looking,” Meade asked.

 

“We know exactly where to find him,” Woody continued.

 

“How, where, and when,” Meade added.

 

“It’s his colleague we’re interested in…”

 

“His coworker, you might say…”

 

Woody tapped Moore’s photo again as if to reinforce his partner.

 

“All very fascinating,” I said. “But I don’t see where the US Marshals fit in. You lose track of this unnamed hero? Maybe a friend of J. Edgar? He saddle up and slip off your reservation?”

 

I just threw all that out there because something didn’t add up. If Moore was going to star in an upcoming episode of America’s Most Wanted, I should be talking to the FBI, the real G. Gordons, not a pair of knockoff kicks.

 

Woody glared a narrow glare at me. “We don’t lose track of anyone.” He shook his head. “We’d just like to have a conversation…”

 

“Catch up with an old friend you might say…” Meade added.

 

“Which is where your special skill set comes in,” Woody concluded.

 

“Oh, so you want to hire me,” I said, leaning back. “Sorry, I don’t work for the Feds. Your last boss didn’t like to pay his bills. I’m not sure the recent regime change will hold through the accounts payable cycle. And this looks like an arduous acquisition contract. Unless maybe there’s a finder’s fee up front?”

 

Woody shook his head again. “Not the way we work, Song…”

 

“This is more of a civic duty situation,” Meade continued.

 

“Then I’m truly sorry I can’t help you,” I told her. “My date book’s full up right now. And I gave to the United Way in Jen’s charity drive.”

 

“And if we said we thought it would be in your best interest to open up an appointment…” Meade began.

 

“You know, if you suddenly remembered something in a fit of moral conscience?” Woody finished.

 

“I’d say drop a card and I’ll be in touch,” I replied.

 

Woody swept up the photos from the table while Meade extracted a business card from her jacket and offered it between her fingers. When I reached for it, she curled her fingers back to keep it just out of reach.

 

Once Woody settled the photos back in a pocket, he asked, “Are you a Lightning fan, Song?”

 

“No more than anybody I guess,” I responded, sitting back with a sigh, not reaching further. “A little late to catch a game, don’t you think?”

 

“Mr. Kardon is not a nice player…” Woody continued.

 

“A bad dude, an enforcer on the ice…” Meade explained.

 

“And let’s just say there’s a penalty box for people we catch playing on his team,” Woody returned.

 

“Consider it a warning,” Meade finished. With that she flicked the card in my direction. It skated across the table and fluttered to the floor. When I didn’t move to pick it up, the two Marshals stood and headed for the door.

 

“Just remember, the refs are keeping an eye on you, Song…” Woody said from the doorway.

 

“Like a replay camera that never sleeps,” Meade finished.

 

I watched them go without responding. If that last statement was meant to intimidate me, it did. But it also left me wondering just what I’d gotten into.

 

When I heard Jen intercept them in the hall to escort them out, I retrieved their calling card.

 

---

 

Back in my office, I began digging into what I’d found.

 

I started with IDing the client. While I knew most of my clients were sketchy, none so far had come with federal entanglements. Mr. and Mrs. Johnson’s visit had my full and undivided attention. I needed to know who this guy was to know whether to cancel the contract, eat the loss as a tax write-off, and walk away. Or run. But I needed to know how far I might be chased.

 

I started with Herman Kardon. The Marshals had dropped that name because they wanted me to find something. But what?

 

That opened up like the kimono of a geisha left unchaperoned with my client.

 

His name was all over the social pages, a kind of D-List celebrity seemingly known for having a lot of money and living large with it. Though no one seemed to know where that money came from, or really care. Kind of a low-rent Trump or Kennedy crossed with a wannabe Hilton or Kardashian. And just like those modern aristocrats, his information space was curated and well-managed, down to the press releases disguised as articles running deep on page six.

 

It only took some casual skimming to piece together that Kardon was on his second marriage. His latest arm candy had her own high-profile media influencer presence and went by the name Hampton Baye. Sounded like a stripper name. And she fit the part down to the flashy fake Brazilian body mods and the bottled bimbo hair. I could easily have mistaken her for Kardon’s daughter.

 

But I soon knew better. Kardon actually had a daughter, not much off my age. Her wedding had made the local society page back when those were still a thing, about a decade and a half ago. No picture of the groom or the mother of the bride, just a mildly attractive young woman arrayed in twenty square yards of dress. And nothing further until a one-inch column announcing the birth of a daughter not long after the wedding. Then an utter media blackout as if everything else had been erased. A neat trick in the internet age.

 

Cross-referencing a few databases with a credit agency, I came up with Herman Kardon being an alias for one B. “Bang-Bang” Olufsen, a midlevel tristate mobster from an unexpected old country. Here the picture got murkier.

 

Bang-Bang had been a busy boy earlier in life, starting out as a bagman for a local Scandinavian lottery scam that had been popular in the early wired age. He’d graduated from muscle to an enforcer, earning his nickname in a series of drive-bys in an uncharacteristic Volvo that he later traded in for a Saab story, abandoned when it broke down during a getaway and was tied back to him. No charges. So connected.

 

Rumor had it Olufsen had then transformed into a full button man but by then he’d fallen off the radar. Kardon had his cotillion about ten years later, paid for with freshly laundered money by the smell of it.

 

The thing was Olufsen had never legally changed his name, at least that I could find. Not that I’m sure that was his birth name anyway. I could find no official record that it was. Olufsen and Kardon were like the separately maintained identities of a serial bigamist you read about on BuzzFeed.

 

Which meant nothing that happened to Olufsen splashed back on Kardon. Or if it did, it could be sanitized and contained. In theory. I didn’t understand the practical advantage of the arrangement until I started poking through federal records. I didn’t expect the Johnson twins had dropped the name without expecting me to find their connection to him.

 

That popped up when I hit the middle district federal court, once I started poking around in Moore’s area code. Sometimes it’s the absence of information that tells me something. And sometimes it’s a government bureaucrat screwing up.

 

In this case, the latter. I ran across evidence of a sealed indictment against Mr. Olufsen. Not the indictment itself or any of the supporting documents. Just that some overworked court clerk had forgotten to scrub the docket of a postponement to a petition to place a grand jury preceding under seal. The lawyers representing the defendant, one B. Olufsen, cited an emergency medical procedure for the delay. The hearing was perfunctory, barely fifteen minutes. Which meant the prosecutor had agreed. From there all records disappeared. So, the seal had gone through.

 

There were only a handful of circumstances where the Feds didn’t fight a seal. Juvenile cases. Cases to protect the anonymity of a jury. Cases involving nuclear secrets, especially that entangled a former President. And RICO cases where the witnesses might need protection.

 

Bingo.

 

That joy of discovery quickly sank into a queasiness as I tried to digest the information like a lead dumpling. Another piece fell in place. Kardon was likely using me to do his dirty work, so he could make the indictment, and Mr. Moore, disappear.

 

Which meant I could be staring down a federal witness tampering charge from Johnson and Johnson at a minimum already even if I dropped the client’s case like the ticking bomb I knew it was. Rock and a hard place.

 

I needed a risk premium to ensure my future. Bigger than my original fee. Bigger than my second payment, which I now absolutely had to get if nothing else to disappear until the dust settled.

 

I needed insurance.

 

I started by digging into Kardon’s health records for the emergency procedure that had delayed his court date. Even with him being self-insured, that task should have been trivial. It came up empty. No reference to so much as a routine checkup, never mind any existential intervention. Federal courts were used to dealing with low-life serial liars, so it seemed unlikely they wouldn’t have demanded proof, especially after the previous Administration.

 

And that’s when it dawned on me that I was chasing after the wrong person in the wrong state. So, I changed my parameters to Olufsen in and around Sunshine City. The first hit popped up nearly instantaneously at a premier cardiology center just across the bay. It seemed Mr. Olufsen couldn’t outrun Mr. Kardon’s lifestyle choices. One too many knockoff Cuban cigars had caused Bang-Bang’s heart to start misfiring.

 

At the time of the hearing, Mr. B. Olufsen was having a state-of-the-art pacemaker installed. Full sedation, not a local or outpatient. Turns out my client was a wimp.

 

I filed all that for future reference. Because I had bigger problems if what I was beginning to suspect was right.

 

Next, I set up a full isolation suite on my desktop before I plugged in my phone to attack Moore’s cloned data. I mean CDC-level Ebola security. Everything partitioned, firewalled, and keyed for erasure at the slightest glitch, and definitely when the extraction was done.

 

I grabbed an older iTech burner from my stockpile in the filing cabinet. I’d picked up a half dozen on my last trip to the islands to rearrange the deckchairs of my crypto accounts. Fire sale prices, though somehow with all the right holographic stickers, complete with a virgin, yet-to-be-activated SIM. So likely a customs bribe or a box that fell off a boat. Either way, it was configured perfectly as a clean, pristine smartphone sans carrier. I overlaid the clone data onto it which didn’t take long. Then I expunged all the records of the activity down to deleting apps, purging logs, and performing a ten times memory overwrite of the dataspaces on my computer and on my phone. I would exchange it later for a backup, sometime before I dumped both contaminated phones in the bay.

 

Once that finished, I had a fully working replica of Moore’s phone without the ability to connect. Much easier to navigate than sorting through iData formats.

 

The first thing I examined was his contacts. Only one, just a number with no associated name. No picture either, just a unicorn for an icon. Not creepy. But it was also the only number that was white-listed, meaning the only incoming call or text that would go through. Checking his recent and missed calls, none had. No text chains, either, not even spam. Meaning his phone was seriously off the grid.

 

I checked for emails in case this guy was a dinosaur but found no accounts had been set up in the mail tool. No appointments in the calendar, no music, no books, no PDFs. No browser history, and no downloaded data files. Nothing but a slew of pictures.

 

So why in the hell did Moore reactivate this phone? Why not start clean?

 

Now the part I was dreading but had put off long enough. With a trembling finger, I tapped the photos folder and began cautiously swiping through them.

 

What I found was picture after picture, all girls of varying ages. Nothing illicit. Nothing enticing or provocative. Nothing even suspicious or damaging. In fact, they were the same girl, snapshot after snapshot going back through time, age thirteen to unreasonably young. I would have said it indicated some sick stalker obsession.

 

Except they all looked amazingly like my target. So amazingly, they could only be closely related. Like sharing half their DNA. But not so amazingly on closer inspection that I couldn’t see she was also her mother’s daughter, with just enough of her grandfather thrown in.

 

No wonder Moore hadn’t wanted to ditch his phone. He didn’t want to lose the pictures, perhaps the only ones he had now of his daughter. Who a quick search revealed had been recently enrolled in the academy he’d staked out. Dangled like bait.

 

And that’s when the final piece to the puzzle fell into place and shattered the glass floor beneath my feet.

 

---

 

It took a couple more weeks to set up the meet with the client. Not because of Kardon, because I needed time to prepare.

 

The first thing I did was order a kit for a clever anti-tracking device I’d recently spotted in my favorite dark web forum. The original concept was born out of a retired Homeland Security agent who had been asked by a former colleague how to avoid being tailed to a meeting with a confidential informant. Aside from giving him the standard counter-surveillance techniques that the colleague already knew, the retired DHS guy had crafted a cellphone tracker from off-the-shelf makerware electronics.

 

Basically, the setup exploited a feature of modern cell phones. Like poor college students or your low-rent uncle, they were constantly on the prowl for wifi networks. Specifically, wifi networks they may have already used. The version I picked up also scanned for Bluetooth connections, and tire pressure monitoring gauges that could identify specific vehicles hanging around an area even if their occupants’ phones were off. Any source that pinged more than once in twenty minutes would send up a flare with enough metadata to get a pretty good idea of who might be loitering nearby, even out of sight. All in a waterproof case with a hardwired display and a charging system, some assembly required.

 

It was a cool new toy, for the low, low price of three hundred in altcoin. There was a rich irony in using part of Kardon’s payment to craft an op against him.

 

But he would do the same to me. And likely was. Though he was unwisely paying me for the privilege of modeling for his frame.

 

While I was waiting on my special delivery, I conducted more research. First, I hacked deeper into Kardon’s healthcare records and came up with the specifications for his internal hardware. He hadn’t skimped, a state-of-the-art pacemaker with a full data connectivity suite to keep the rig’s maintenance minimally invasive. Perfect for my needs.

 

I also set up a consult with Jen’s PI to brainstorm an out-of-the-way spot for the meet, all shrouded in plausible deniability for both of us. He had several interesting ideas without going into precise locations. Turns out that Sunshine City had numerous dark alleys and abandoned locales that had not yet been redeveloped. The good and the bad of that was they all likely would be soon. Which meant my research wouldn’t last long, but neither would any incriminating evidence that inadvertently got left behind.

 

I didn’t know if I would be able to control the meeting point. If I could, I would. But I had to get moving.

 

While I was assembling my new cell phone tracker, I also hacked a key-fob remote for an ultrasonic anti-barking system Jen had given me as a gag gift after I’d complained about my neighbor’s rat dog waking me up at 2 a.m. A few simple mods with a little reprogramming and it became a one-direction Bluetooth initiator of a custom app I’d developed. A kind of emergency dead man’s switch I could easily conceal if my phone was inaccessible. Fortunately, the soldering I had to do wasn’t too extensive and the designer docs were very clear.

 

Even though I’d done most of the work at night over the weekend with the back window open and the fan pointing out, that next Monday morning Eileen complained that the office smelled like a dying computer. Jen reassured her after sparing a quick questioning glance at me. I replied with my best Mona Lisa smile.

 

Armed and armored with my new gadgetry, I laid out the bait for my trap.

 

There were a lot of pieces that needed to move in a strict order, like one of those cube puzzles my grandmother had when I was a kid. She would scramble it and hand it to me to keep me quiet and entertained, preferably out of earshot of the adults. I always hated it and learned how to take it apart out of sight to make the color faces match without having to solve it. She thought I was a genius. Especially after I left one corner piece out of position and rescrambled it so no one else could make it work.

 

I set up the op like an elaborate con. Events had to unfold quickly within a narrow time window so all any given player could do was react. And with an unknown information space, I had to ensure one party didn’t inadvertently tip my hand to another.

 

After reviewing the criteria and reconnoitering the available options from my PI consult, I settled on a location for the meet, an old printing plant for the Sunshine City Times. After being renamed and rebranded for the Bay area, they had subcontracted its operation to greener pastures in the center of the state. A decrepit production site on a defunct railroad siding that had yet to attract much attention from the real estate crowd, who were probably worried about exactly what they might find buried beneath the surface. But with the current boom, they wouldn’t be for long.

 

Which is how I found myself sitting in a car wedged into an alley on the wrong side of the abandoned tracks across from an equally abandoned industrial building that looked like something straight out of Ukraine. Soviet block construction, post-occupation, pre-shelling. One of my anonymous Estonian contacts of suspect origins thought it would make an ideal location to fortify against a multi-month siege, especially if it had access to interconnecting sewers.

 

I was dubious. All we had in Sunshine City were storm drains. And with the feeder bands from a major late-season hurricane slashing across my windshield, I didn’t think those were currently accessible.

 

Sunshine City. Yeah, right.

 

But the incoming storm provided the perfect cover. The local cops would be preoccupied with evacuations and monitoring so were unlikely to be running routine patrols. And most of the populace would be too distracted with preparations or hurricane parties to care.

 

Before I’d left the office for my digital stakeout, I’d texted Moore, spoofing it to come from his daughter’s phone to make sure he’d get the message. It simply said, “This phone is compromised.” I considered signing it with the initials BO/HK in case he didn’t take it seriously but opted for subtly thinking he was at least that smart. When I saw confirmation he’d viewed the message, I bricked his phone and activated my clone in its place through a SIM swap in the carrier’s database. All with just enough lead time so he couldn’t immediately tip off unwanted eyes and ears if he panicked.

 

I’d then contacted Kardon through our prearranged channels to tell him I’d found his target. Not only Moore and his up-to-now concealed new burner, but a scheduled meet with an identity specialist at a time and location I was willing to disclose, along with Moore’s number, as soon as Kardon’s second altcoin hit my account. No complications. No need for a face-to-face.

 

His payment had dropped within five minutes. I was impressed. I’d then duly forwarded the promised information after I kicked off the process of tumbling his coins.

 

The last contact I had to make would have to wait. I pictured Woody and Meade hanging around a government-rate hotel in a strange town, hunkering down against the storm by catching up on something wicked on HBO after raiding the vending machines and the lobby convenience shop with their per diem. Like kids at a sleepover. Big, bored, heavily armed kids. It wouldn’t pay to give them an interesting distraction too soon.

 

But when I did, it would be routed through my office. I’d left my cell sitting on the desk, waiting for a call and a code to kick off a Bluetooth connection to my computer which was now wired into the landline in the wall, An exploit and an alibi.

 

I’d been watching the meet location for fifteen minutes, parked between two other Rust Belt buildings across the street. I needed another five to confirm no phones or cars were lurking, watching for watchers.

 

On the seat beside me, Moore’s clone was off for the moment. Off off. Not only powered down but in an electromagnetically sealed envelope to make sure no sneaky signals filtered through. I was confident my own phone would go into black hole silence mode when I killed power but I hadn’t had the time to sniff around the clone. iTech was notorious for being shifty and dishonest. Moreso with each update. An ounce of prevention was worth a pound of surprise.

 

The only sign of activity I’d spotted so far wasn’t signal related. A scraggly surfer dude on an electric bike, soaking wet, likely a drug dealer running the over/under on whether I was looking to score some party favors for the storm or just trying to crowbar in on his delivery route.

 

I guided him to a third option by flashing my headlights at him. It took a second flash for the echo to percolate into his brain. He cleared out, uncertain if I was a cop or a bigger fish looking for some privacy. But he unpouched his own phone and scrolled through his messages before he scootered away. I tagged his number for later, just in case.

 

Since then, all had been quiet on the northern front.

 

Then I got two pings. First from the tire pressure gauge on a new model Buick. Then from Kardon’s phone. He hadn’t even cruised the block.

 

Showtime.

 

While I waited another few minutes to make sure he wasn’t bringing backup, I ran through my mental checklist to make sure I had everything. IronKey loaded with an encrypted payload, check; Post-it Note from my first meeting with Kardon, check; nitrile gloves, the same brand SCPD used, check. Moore’s clone still in power down, check. Anti-bark remote, palmed in my hand, slip ring looped around my middle finger, check.

 

I set up the phone detector to keep sniffing and forward any contact warnings to the clone, priority interrupt. A minor security hole, but if a party crasher showed up, I needed to know ASAP.

 

If I’d had my own phone, I would have spent the time tunneling through the satellite entertainment system in Kardon’s dashboard to prevent his car from starting. I missed having all the fun tools, but I’d loaded up the bare minimum I needed for the night onto the clone. The downside of traveling light.

 

When no second contact appeared, I unbagged and turned on the clone, which immediately reached out to ping three nearby cell towers, initiating a set of digital fingerprints I couldn’t take back, not easily if at all. That set in motion a chain of events I had to see through. A Rubicon crossed with all the bridges burned behind me.

 

The nice thing about old ink and newsprint papers is that without multi-billionaire angel investors, they are generally losing propositions. Security for a decommissioned facility they’d already cleaned out wasn’t high on their list of expenses. Just the minimum chain link with the requisite No Trespassing signs was about it. I think the holding company wouldn’t be too unhappy if it burned to the ground. Might save someone the cost of demolition with a little left over for a tiny executive bonus from the insurance payout.

 

The local degenerates had made a game of breaching the fence and the doors on a semi-regular basis. Last New Year’s Eve they’d set up a speakeasy disco with the production area as the dance floor, the DJ perched behind the window of the overlooking foreman’s office running the rave. On the Fourth of July, they’d sponsored an indoor bottle rocket war. That earned the plant a second layer of fencing and increased SCPD patrols plus a scant set of off-the-shelf cameras with so many blind spots they needed a red-tipped cane and a service animal.

 

After I ensured my custom app was up and running on the clone, I pocketed it and wended my way across the street when the rain lightened some. I’d picked up a pixilated, thundercloud grey rain poncho that I’d ditch with the other artifacts that might leave evidentiary fingerprints when the night was over, digital or otherwise. Until then, it would serve to disguise my size and shape if I got caught on camera, as it was specifically designed to do.

 

The tricky part was not getting the poncho snagged on the raw edges of either chain link fence that had been bolt-cuttered open. Or again after I followed the rail spur to a massive rolldown door that had been crowbarred and propped up with cinderblocks. All of which allowed more than a little water and mud to seep into my clothes. I’d likely have to ditch those, too.

 

Using the clone as a flashlight, I found myself in an unfinished, industrial subway station. Like an old spur in the bowels of Manhattan uncovered by an archeological dig. The dropped-down railbed was still graveled between semi-solid crossties though the steel tracks, spikes, and brackets had long ago been salvaged and recycled. The platform was unfinished concrete, wide enough to stack pallets of fresh daily papers against one long wall and still maneuver a forklift into the MIA boxcars after rolls of newsprint and barrels of ink had been unloaded.

 

I climbed up and hung the poncho on an eyewash station that looked like a water fountain by the entry into the plant proper. Which meant I had to go out the same way I’d come in. Until then, I needed my hands free.

 

A large, open doorway near the center of the platform led to a central storage area sprinkled with dead, rough-cut pallets. From there the facility became a set of large, interconnected rooms whose original purposes I could only guess at now that the bulk of the printing, spooling, and bundling machinery had been removed, along with all the conveyors that had modernized the process. All that remained were outlines in the concrete marked by sheared or removed footer bolts interspersed with massive support columns, and large, mysterious holes through the interior cinderblock, some at ground level but only a yard high, others a yard or two off the floor. A few in the ceiling.

 

The unfinished floor was strewn with plastic bottles, snack bags, burnt-out bottle rockets and cigarette butts, tobacco and otherwise. I was surprised there wasn’t more broken glass but judging from the out-of-date indie band flyers littering the area, beer did not appear to be a central vice in the facility’s repurposed social function.

 

To think that one day all this would be repurposed into condos, with maybe a yoga studio where I was standing. I bet those aspiring real housewives of Sunshine City would love to learn the backstory of the building while they were studying the floor in their down dogs. Almost as good as the gated community where the other soccer moms might live, erected on the site where a drive-in porn theater had once stood.

 

I felt pretty exposed in all this open space. I could only imagine the claustrophobic shadows if the machinery was still in place. I didn’t know where Kardon might be lurking but I suspected it wouldn’t be in this maze. He struck me as the kind of guy who would keep his back covered.

 

So, I started up the first stairwell I found hoping maybe to locate the foreman’s overlook I’d read about.

 

The second floor was equally as disorienting. Closed rooms and semi-enclosed areas were comingled with cutouts to the ground floor, some with additional walkways that led back down.

 

I’d truly underestimated the scale of the facility when I’d chosen it. I had no idea where Moore and his fictional contact would have set up a meet in this sprawling monstrosity. I felt like Kardon and I could roam around for hours without encountering each other. But I bet he would have a good idea and would already have staked it out. Even with the clone’s flashlight app, I was running blind. Which was how he got the drop on me.

 

I had just exited an incongruously normal-looking office area that led to another open-plan space that I’d forlornly hoped might finally connect to the overlook when I heard a voice behind me.

 

“Surprise, surprise, my little mockingbird was really singing someone else’s song. Or has my sweet turtledove turned canary?”

 

Kardon. I must have walked right past him.

 

I turned to find myself confronted by the barrel of a Dirty Harry hand cannon, Kardon’s RBF peering down the sights. Suddenly the lyrics of one of the horrible old southern-fried ballads Jen would blast through the office on deadline ran through my head. Give me three steps, mister, and you’ll never see me no more.

 

That wasn’t possible. I’d known in my heart Kardon would come strapped. His kind always did. My kind was supposed to be more evolved, more enlightened. We used a keyboard, not a gun.

 

But staring into a spiral hole as big as around as a Texas cracking tower made an impression I couldn’t keep off my face. My only instinct for an instant was to do anything the nice man asked while trying not to let my courage trickle down my leg. I resisted the impulse to raise my hands in surrender. Because I suddenly remembered I was armed, too.

 

“Drop the phone and step back, sweetheart” Kardon said, his voice no longer warm and sociable. “I want to take you in one last time before we get down to it.”

 

I kegeled up my courage, bent over, and set the clone face down on the floor then took a mother-may-I giant step back, just like he’d said. Anything to put me a little farther from the hot death clutched in his hand. I kept my left hand curled near my side waiting for the right moment to unleash my attack. I’d only tested that the remote would set off the custom app on the clone. I had no way to know what would happen after. But I didn’t want to be too close and in the line of fire if his trigger finger twitched.

 

“I was hoping you’d be Moore,” Kardon said as he bent down to retrieve the clone. “My wayward son-in-law and I have some unfinished business. But this saves me the trouble of tracking you down later. I guess I’ll just have to amuse myself by playing with my little doll now instead. At least until you tell me where he is.”

 

He’d picked up the clone with his left hand without breaking eye contact, his Sunshine City persuader never wavering in his right. I bided my time, my finger caressing the button on the remote in my palm like my tongue worrying an aching tooth.

 

Kardon started swiping through something on the phone with a practiced thumb, clearly looking for information he expected to find. The screen was tilted away from me so I couldn’t see what. So far, he was only glancing at the phone. If he ran across my custom app and dismissed it, I’d be in real trouble. By now the Bluetooth should have connected if it was going to.

 

Suddenly, his attention became fixed on the screen. His expression hardened. He’d found something he didn’t like. Now was my chance but I hesitated. I’d never killed anyone before.

 

And before I could, he looked up at me with an expression of pure malevolence, pinning me with his eyes like a collector with a butterfly, cold, calculating. Remorseless.

 

“Where did you get my granddaughter’s number?” He glanced at the screen again, his brow furrowing as he worked through the third-grade math. “This isn’t your phone at all, is it? It’s his. What fucking game are you two running? If you know what’s best for you, sweetheart, you’ll tell me where he is right now or this will get very unpleasant. Start talking and I promise it will be over quick.”

 

Kardon’s attention was now fully focused on me. There was murder in his eyes or worse. I’d missed my opportunity.

 

“Ok, ok,” I said with a hitch of fear that came naturally to my voice, mocking surrender by moving my hands away from my sides without showing my palms. “I’ll tell you. But I need you to see something else on the phone first.”

 

“If you think I’m handing this back to you, you’re out of your pretty little mind,” he said, the gun unwavering.

 

I shook my head. “Just swipe your thumb to bring up the running apps. It should be the only other one if you brought up contacts. Tap it to open it.”

 

He eyed me critically. “If this is a trick, songbird, you’ll pay. Long and hard, I promise. Before anyone can hear you scream.”

 

“No trick,” I reassured him. “Just something that will answer your question.”

 

Slowly, carefully, he followed my instructions. When nothing seemed to happen, he flashed first through surprise then relief then confusion then annoyance before finally settling on rage. The five stages of ignorance. As he stared down at the screen, his brow furrowed deeper. I could see him trying to make sense of the monitoring app. I envisioned the status of his hardware scrolling up the screen.

 

“What the fuck am I supposed to be looking at,” he barked, his eyes glued to the screen. The barrel of his gun drifted ever so slightly away from the center of my chest. My last opportunity.

 

“This!” I said, dodging and ducking right, away from the wavering barrel, as I repeatedly mashed the button in the palm of my hand like I was waiting for an elevator, then held it down like a panic switch even though I knew no help coming.

 

The results unfolded like an origami swan, slowly, gracefully, once you understood the trick for flapping its wings by pulling its tail.

 

First, the gun swung back toward me, barking once when it arrived where I had been. That would save me some trouble later as long as it didn’t speak again. At the same time, Kardon’s left hand curled toward his chest, his face contorting as if he’d been the one shot. The clone clattered to the floor, quickly followed by the gun as his right hand moved to clutch his left. Then he dropped to one knee like a mound of uncured pork, an anguished cry arising from his throat before he collapsed to the floor.

 

That worked better than I’d thought.

 

I straightened from my crouching dodge. When I was certain he wasn’t going to lunge, I stepped forward, kicked the gun out of reach, retrieved the clone, and stepped back in one fluid motion. Like the old men practicing tai chi in the park outside Jen’s office each morning.

 

Kardon made a feeble attempt to grab my ankle, too slow and too late. I hit the button in my hand again for good measure. He curled himself around the agony in his chest like an infant, mewling.

 

I brought up the phone. The clone’s screen was cracked from the impact of the fall but otherwise still functional. But it wasn’t the monitoring app he’d brought up with his thumb. It was the cell phone tracker. It must have spawned when the notification of a repeat signal had come in. It seemed my hipster drug dealer had let his curiosity get the better of him. I wondered if he’d heard the shot. I’d know soon enough if Sunshine City’s boys in blue started streaming in.

 

I quickly brought up the pacemaker app I’d crafted. The one Kardon hadn’t seen. Which might be both lucky and convenient later. The algorithm was freaking out, screaming an alarm for cascading atrial fibrillation but not knowing what to do because I’d lobotomized its response package. Ok, not so much lobotomized as slid an ice pick in beside its eye to disable it. All I’d done up to now was shock his heart out of rhythm. He had no idea how.

 

I stared down at Kardon who stared back up at me with derision. Playing the tough guy to the end. A hard sell from a fetal position on the floor.

 

I thumbed through the custom commands I’d crafted to manipulate his internal hardware before settling on the one I knew I had to use. Again, I hesitated. I needed Kardon to understand exactly what I was about to do.

 

He beat me to it with a threat, the go-to hammer in his toolbox. “You’d better leave me dead, sweetheart,” he rasped between gritted teeth. “Because if me or mine ever catch up with you, they’ll have to reassemble your body from a dozen different zip codes. But I promise I’ll do your face last, doll, so I have something pleasant to look at while I work.”

 

I smiled down at him. He’d just made the next step so easy.

 

“I want you to take a second to listen to your heart,” I instructed him while channeling Jen’s cold, collected, professional voice. “You hear that bang, bang, bang of a runaway heartbeat?”

 

I paused a moment to make sure he did, my finger poised above the cracked screen of the phone. I could hear my own heart pounding in my ears.

 

“I want you to remember that sound. I did that to you, and can again,” I continued before pausing one last time for dramatic effect. “And I’m the one who can make it stop.”

 

And with the caress of a digital button, I did. All of it. Entirely.

 

I eyed his face as it slowly dawned on him that the silence that had suddenly replaced his galloping heartbeat could be eternal. I just watched it register as consciousness slipped from behind his eyes. His lips gulped uselessly like a mullet on a hook landed on the seawall of the turning basin. Until they finally went still.

 

Now I was really on the clock.

 

I pulled on the blue nitrile gloves I’d brought. I retrieved the IronKey which was loaded with the special irony of the kind of files Kardon had tried to use to bury his son-in-law with me. I’d told my Estonian contacts to be creative. I hadn’t even opened the payload when it arrived, I’d just transferred it to the data stick along with a WikiHow of clandestine distribution instructions and encrypted everything with a minimum-length passkey.

 

I wiped it down and slipped it into Kardon’s pocket beside his Buick’s key fob. Then I fished out his wallet from the opposite one, tucked his handwritten sticky note behind the Benjamins inside, and replaced it. I slid the gun closer to his body with my shoe. That it had been fired was enough probable cause to justify a search once the police got here.

 

I looked around to make sure there wasn’t anything uncurated I was about to leave behind. Finding nothing with a double-check of the area with the phone’s flashlight, I removed a glove and brought up one final button on the app, hoping I’d read the specs that I’d downloaded right.

 

Here went nothing.

 

With the tap of the virtual button, I removed the icepick from the pacemaker, which reloaded the previous firmware and deleted the logs, quickly followed by erasing the app from the clone.

 

On the floor, Kardon’s body twitched with a tiny gasp as the newly uninhibited life-saving algorithm sprang back into action. His chest rose and fell shallowly but regularly which saved me from giving him a kiss of life. His cheeks pinked up from purplish to a rosy hue.

 

Everything had worked. The manufacturer would be pleased but left to wonder exactly what had gone wrong when they dissected the nonexistent logs. Possibly resulting in a recall or at least some deeply buried regulatory data.

 

Kardon had been out just under three minutes, so unlikely he’d sustained any brain damage. At least no more than he’d started with. From my research, it would be a while before he woke up on his own without medical intervention. I just hoped he remembered enough of our encounter to understand I could reach out and touch him again any time I wanted. I suspected he’d connect the full circle of the same threat he’d given me.

 

So, I left him there, alive and breathing, crumpled on the floor, his gun beside him as if it had fallen when he did. I headed for the closest stairwell.

 

When I hit the platform by the rail spur, I used the clone to call my cell. Once it picked up, I entered the code that would drop a dime to the number on the card Woody and Meade had left with me, rerouted through my computer to my landline.

 

“Yeah,” was the answer on the other end after a couple of rings. Meade. No official introduction, no government boilerplate. No warning the call might be recorded. I could hear the crinkle of cellophane and a TV in the background.

 

“Marshal Johnson, I have some information.” I half expected her to ask who this was. That she didn’t said she didn’t need to, that she had tagged my office number in her caller ID. Which hopefully meant my rerouting routine was working.

 

“Spill,” was the only terse response I received.

 

So, I did, quickly and efficiently without making it seem rehearsed. As casually and conversationally as I could, I told her the tale about Moore’s number and his meet at the printing plant, the where and when, the same one I’d told Kardon earlier. Or similar enough.

 

As I did, I heard her fingers snapping. The TV noise ceased. I heard another voice talking low after a rustling. Woody on another line.

 

When I finished, she only said, “We’ll be in touch. Don’t leave town.”

 

Like I had anywhere to go or any way to get there in a Cat-4 cyclone. Then she hung up. No thank you, no goodbye. Just dead air.

 

I took that as my cue to hurry. I grabbed up the pixilated raincoat, slipped it over my head, and bolted for my car. The rain had slackened some. Must be between squalls. As I paused to unlock the door, I heard sirens in the distance.

 

Inside the car, I put on the nitrile gloves again. First, I popped the battery compartment on the clone with a special tool so it would be accessible. Next, I extracted the SIM card from the access port. After carefully wiping it down, I snapped it in half and dropped it out the window. I pressed the right combination of buttons to initiate a factory reset on the clone. I then stuck it back in the translucent, EM-shielded bag, the case still opened so the battery was exposed.

 

The sirens drew closer. Time to get the hell out of Dodge.

 

I backed out of the alley and fled the scene on backroads that led away from the sound of cruisers streaming from the central police fortress downtown. I occasionally glanced at the phone on the seat beside me. Once the happy little symbols indicated it had completed its reset, I removed the battery through the bag. An awkward bit of driving but thankfully there was no one else on the road.

 

As I sped along a stretch of bayside through Old Northeast, waves were just lapping over the seawall. Slowing, I rolled down the window and tossed the battery into the bay first, followed by the phone body half a mile later. Before I did, I helped it on its way to being damaged beyond easy repair.

 

Then I drove back to the office to ride out the heart of the storm.

 

---

 

It took three days before the Marshals arrived. No call, no appointment, they just showed up. My only warning was Jen’s protests from the moment they hit the building. I’d expected them earlier but wrote it off to Federal bureaucracy.

 

By then, Sunshine City was in cleanup mode. The storm had diverted at the last minute, like it always did, ravaging points south.

 

I was reading the Times when Woody and Meade darkened my door, reading it the old-fashioned and completely untraceable way. Buried in the back, overwashed by all the near-miss storm drama, was a postage-stamp article that said Herman Kardon, aka B. “Bang-Bang” Olufsen, had been indicted in Federal court across the bay for possession of child porn with the intent to distribute, though other charges might be forthcoming. No further details were available, just a thumbnail sketch of background and not much of that.

 

I folded up the paper and set it on my desk with a nod to Jen to tell her it was all ok. After a long look and another reassuring nod from me while Woody and Meade parked themselves in my client chairs, Jen retreated to her office where I knew she’d be listening for any fireworks.

 

If everything went the way I planned, there wouldn’t be any. Their initial multi-day delay had given me plenty of time to tie up my own loose end in pretty bows. I’d ditched all the incriminating evidence from my nighttime raid into various piles of curbside cleanup. My original phone was now swimming somewhere beside Moore’s clone in the bay, a fresh but free and clear clone with the data key to my alibi in my pocket if I needed it.

 

“Why don’t you make yourselves at home,” I said as Woody crossed one foot over a knee and Meade began examining a glass paperweight she picked up from my desk.

 

When neither Marshal said anything, I tapped my copy of the Times. “I guess my tip panned out. You here with a reward?”

 

Meade set the tchotchke back down with a thunk. Woody eyed me over steepled fingers, leaning back in his chair.

 

“We have some questions about that, Song,” he finally intoned.

 

Meade now picked up my stapler like it was a novel artifact unearthed in an excavation. I spared her a quick glare.

 

“Anything for our government’s finest,” I said, leaning back in my chair.

 

“How exactly did you come by the information you relayed to us three nights ago,” Woody asked.

 

“A little birdie told me,” I replied.

 

Meade looked up from her inquest of my stapler. “This is a courtesy call, Song. We can do this here or at the Federal building downtown.” Her voice was flat, dead. Like her personality.

 

“I got a call,” I explained after a moment of seemingly gauging their resolve. “An anonymous tipster. When I heard what he had to say, I felt pangs of patriotic nausea. So naturally, I thought of you. A weak moment, I admit.”

 

Meade set down the stapler, out of place. Woody just stared at me, cocking his head like he was considering a cockroach scurrying up a wall, a shoe poised in his hand.

 

When I just stared back, he finally asked, “And where did you make that call, the one to us?”

 

I pointed to the black Bakelite, rotary-dial phone squatting on my desk. Meade found the cord and traced it to the base. No modular connection, it just disappeared inside. She then followed it under my desk, where I knew she’d see it running into a hole in the wall. I’d rewired the whole setup while I’d killed time waiting for them after the storm. Reusing all the old-school, archaic wiring. They’d have to tear it apart to notice.

 

“Hardwired,” she announced. Woody grunted noncommittally.

 

“It’s an old building,” I said by way of explanation. “Might be on the historic register one day.”

 

“You sure it was that phone and not your cell,” Woody quizzed, still eyeing me with disdain.

 

I knew the trap he was setting and already had the answer.

 

“Positive,” I replied. “Because I was on that line with the informant who’d blocked his number.”

 

“You know we can verify that,” Meade cut in from back in her chair.

 

“I assumed you were competent and already had,” I said. “Besides good luck getting a warrant past Jen if you haven’t. I was working for her that night. Technically, this is her office.” I swept my hand around the space.

 

“Lucky for you,” Woody drawled, tapping the bridge of his nose with his fingers, “your story checks out with the other witness and the cell towers.”

 

“Because our perp spun an interesting story about that night,” Meade said.

 

“Without a shred of evidence to back it up,” Woody took over like a long-married husband completing his wife’s thoughts.

 

“But something still doesn’t sit quite right,” Meade continued the tennis match.

 

“Maybe that truck stop sushi you splurged on for lunch,” I responded. When both of them just stared at me, I raised an eyebrow and added, “Or maybe you think I was in two places at once.”

 

“Or maybe,” Woody took up the thread again, still watching me intently, “we don’t need you to make our case. Kardon was caught red-handed. Smart enough to store his pervy stash on an encrypted data stick. But dumb enough to write down his password on a note in his wallet. He even had a step-by-step for how to slip it onto someone else’s phone undetected. Maybe yours.”

 

“Can’t say it surprises me,” I said, looking back at him unflinchingly. “He never struck me as the sharpest knife in the drawer.”

 

“Sharp enough to avoid us in a decade-long RICO colonoscopy,” Meade observed.

 

I shrugged, switching my gaze back to her, wondering if I’d get neck strain. “Not a ringing endorsement.”

 

Woody kicked his foot off his knee and sprang to his feet. He slapped both hands on the metal desktop and glared across it like a Doberman. I gave him a bemused look back, like, it’s so cute when they try to be intimidating.

 

Meade rose and laid a hand on his arm in the leash I knew would be coming. “We got what we came for, Woody.”

 

“Speaking of,” I couldn’t help baiting them, just to see if anything shook loose, “Did you ever find your lost dog, the one from those family snapshots?”

 

Meade tightened her grip.

 

“No?” I shrugged again, leaning back. “Maybe he’s living on a nice farm out in the country somewhere.”

 

Woody stiffened. Without releasing his arm, Meade turned on me. “Watch yourself, Song. And keep available, in case we have more questions.”

 

Woody pointed a finger at me across the desk. “Because we’ll be watching you.”

 

I leaned back a little further. “As long as you have your cane and seeing-eye dog.”

 

Meade steered Woody toward the door before he could reply. “Let’s go,” she said.

 

Reluctantly, he did. Like a good little doggie.

 

I closed the door behind them and let out a small sigh. I guess I’d never know what happened to Moore. When I’d bricked his phone, I’d killed the tracker. I’d never even bothered to look at where he was or where he’d been. I’d burned all that data with the rest of it. Plausible deniability.

 

And I had no intention of poking around that Federal yellowjacket nest to find out. He seemed like a decent guy, a family man caught up in the wrong family business. I hoped he made it out and got back with his daughter now that the Feds no longer needed him.

 

But it might be time for my own relocation. I knew I shouldn’t stay in Sunshine City. Too high profile now, too many enemies. Luckily Kardon’s payment and my offshore retirement account would set me up somewhere nice to start again.

 

Maybe I’d head out to Seattle. That city had the kind of people who would appreciate my talents. I heard the coffee wasn’t bad. And I really didn’t mind the rain.

 

I just needed to talk to my favorite Estonians about a new ID.

 

 

 

© 2023 Edward P. Morgan III