The ladder retracted. They were twenty feet above the ground when it jerked and Sachs finally had to release the computer to keep from plunging to the street.
The laptop spun to the sidewalk and cracked open, raining bits of plastic and keys in a dozen different directions.
An hour later Lincoln Rhyme and Juliette Archer were at one of the evidence tables. Mel Cooper was nearby. Evers Whitmore stood in the corner, juggling two calls on two mobiles.
They were awaiting the evidence from the burned-out building; the structure was completely gone. It had collapsed into a pile of smoldering stone and melted plastic, glass and metal. Sachs had ordered a backhoe to excavate and Rhyme hoped something of the incendiary device might remain.
As for the computer, Ron Pulaski had taken it downtown to the NYPD Computer Crimes Unit at One PP in hopes that Sachs’s mad vertical dash hadn’t been in vain; Rodney Szarnek would determine if any data on the laptop was salvageable.
The front door now opened and another figure walked into the parlor. Amelia Sachs’s face was smudged, her hair askew, and she wore two bandages, presumably covering cuts from broken glass—it seemed she’d taken out at least three panes in her dramatic break-in of Williams’s office.
Rhyme was actually surprised she wasn’t more badly hurt. He wasn’t happy she’d ignored him and taken the risk. But they’d fallen into an unspoken agreement years ago. She pushed herself and that was just who she was.
When you move they can’t getcha . . .
An expression of her father’s and it was her motto in life.
Sachs carried a small milk crate, containing evidence from the building—very little, however, as was often the case when a scene is destroyed by flames. His damning clues.
A bout of coughing. Tears ran.
“Sachs, you okay?” Rhyme asked. She’d refused a trip to the emergency room and remained at the scorched site to excavate and to walk the grid, as soon as the fire department gave the all-clear, while Rhyme, Whitmore and Thom had returned to his town house here.
“Little smoke. Nothing.” More coughing. She handed the crate to Cooper, who examined the bags.
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
He stepped to the chromatograph to begin running the analysis. Sachs, wiping her eyes, was looking over at Juliette Archer. Rhyme realized they’d never met. He introduced them.
Archer said, “I’ve heard a lot about you.”
Sachs nodded a greeting, rather than offering a hand, of course. “You’re the intern Lincoln mentioned was going to be helping out.”
Rhyme supposed he’d never mentioned that Archer was in wheelchair. In fact, he believed he’d never told Sachs anything about his student, even the name or sex.
Sachs looked briefly at Rhyme, a cryptic glance, perhaps chiding, perhaps not. And then to Archer: “Nice to meet you.”
Whitmore disconnected from one, then another, call, “Detective Sachs. You sure you’re all right?”
“Nothing, really.”
The lawyer said, “Never thought when I got a call about taking on a personal injury lawsuit, it would turn out like this.”
Rhyme said to Sachs, “So your case and our case, they’re one and the same—often misstated as one in the same, by the way.”
From his perch near the gas chromatograph/mass spectrometer, Mel Cooper said, “I don’t quite follow what’s going on.”
Rhyme explained about Unsub 40’s reading Todd Williams’s blog and deciding to tap him for help in hacking a DataWise controller to turn it into a weapon. “He says, we can guess, he wants to help Williams expose the dangers of these things, down with digital society, capitalism, bullshit like that.” Rhyme nodded to the blog post, still on one of the monitors. “Williams teaches the unsub how to hack the system and the unsub kills him. He’s expendable.”
Archer added, “He’s also a liability. A news story about the escalator accident might mention the controller in the press. Williams would know who was behind it.”
Rhyme nodded and continued, “Amelia is after him in Brooklyn and follows him into the mall, where he’s going to kill his first victim.”
Archer asked, “How do we know it’s his first victim?”
A reasonable question. But Rhyme said, “Williams was killed just a few weeks ago and I don’t recall any suspicious product-related deaths in the news. We may find more, but for now let’s assume the escalator was the first. The question is, was it a one-off? Or does he have more planned?”
“And why?” the lawyer asked. “What’s his motive? Using a controller to kill—it has to be a lot of trouble.”
Rhyme added, “And it’s a lot riskier,” at the same time as Archer said, “And he’s more at risk.” The criminalist grunted a laugh. “Well, we don’t know why and we don’t particularly care. When we catch him, we can ask. When the hell is the computer going to be ready?”
“Ron said it should be within the hour.”
“And where the hell is the rookie?” Rhyme muttered. “That other case? Gutiérrez, I think he mentioned.”
“I think so.”
“Was Gutiérrez the killer or killee?”
Sachs said, “Perp. I don’t know why it’s heated up.”
“Well, we’ll make do . . .”
Which brought Sachs’s attention to bear on Rhyme.
“Do you mean that?”
“What?” Not understanding at all what she was getting at.
“ ‘We’ll make do.’ Are you going to help us? It’s criminal now.”
“Of course I will.”
A faint smile on her face.
Rhyme said, “I don’t have any choice. We get the unsub, then Sandy Frommer can sue him for wrongful death.”
Rhyme recalled what Whitmore had said about intervening causes. The controller itself wasn’t the cause of Greg Frommer’s death; it was Unsub 40’s hacking that had killed him. It was like someone’s cutting the brake lines of a car, killing the driver. The car manufacturer wasn’t liable.
A look at the lawyer. “Sandy will be able to sue the unsub, right?”
“Of course. The O. J. Simpson scenario. If we’re lucky this individual—your unsub—has assets.”
“I’m not un-retiring, Sachs. But our paths coincide for a while.”
The smile faded. “Sure.”
Mel Cooper tested the evidence Sachs had found. He asked, “Site of origin?”
“Right.”
Arson produces very distinct patterns as flames start and spread. It’s at the origin site that investigators can expect to find the best evidence about the perp.
He read from the GC/MS monitor. “Traces of wax, low-octane gasoline—not enough to link it to a particular maker—and cotton, plastic, matches.”
“Candle bomb.”
“Right.”
A simple improvised explosive device can be made from a jug of gasoline, using a candle as a fuse.
Cooper confirmed that the trace was so minimal he couldn’t source any of the other ingredients in the unsub’s IED. As Rhyme had suspected.
Sachs got another call, coughed a bit before taking it. “Hello?” Nodding, listening. “Thanks.”
It wasn’t good news, Rhyme could tell.
She finished up the call and turned to the others in the room. “Full canvass of the neighborhood. No one saw him. He must’ve left just after setting the bomb.”
A shrug. Nothing other than Rhyme had expected.
A moment later another call. Rodney Szarnek’s name flashed onto caller ID.
Ah, let’s hope for the best.
“Answer,” Rhyme commanded.
The rock music was back. But only momentarily. Before Rhyme could say, “Shut the damn music off, please,” the officer downed the volume.
“Lincoln.”
“Rodney, you’re on speaker here with . . . a bunch of people. No time for roll call. Was Todd Williams’s computer salvageable?”
A pause, which Rhyme took to be one of surprise. “Well, sure. A fall like that is nothing. You can drop a computer out of an airplane and the data’ll survive. Black boxes, you know.”
“What do you have?”
“Looks like the relationship between this Williams and your unsub is recent. I found some emails between them. I’ll send them to you.”
A moment later a secure email popped up on the screen. They read the first of the attachments accompanying it.
Hello, Todd. I read you’re blog and I feel the same way, what society is coming to is not good and electronics and the digital world are making it a much more dangerous place then it needs to be. Their has to be some way to change the system. Money is the root of it of course as you suggest, I would like to try to help in you’re cause. Can we meet?
P.G.
Archer said, “Ah. We have initials”
“Maybe,” Rhyme said. “Go on, Rodney.”
Szarnek continued, “Your unsub used an anonymous email account. Logged in from an untraceable IP. They set up a meeting for the day of the murder.”
Cooper looked over the email. “Not particularly smart. Look at the mistakes, commas, and the homonyms. Y-O-U apostrophe R-E instead of ‘your.’ And ‘Their’ too.”
Rhyme corrected, “Heteronyms. Same pronunciation, different spelling and meaning. Homonyms have the same pronunciation and same spelling but different meaning.”
Staring at the screen, Archer provided the classic example: “Bark—what a dog does and a covering on a tree. Homonym.” She then added, “But I don’t think he’s stupid. I think he’s pretending to be. Run-on sentences, the heteronyms—they’re obvious. But he uses the clause ‘as you suggest’ correctly. Not ‘like you suggest.’ ”
Rhyme agreed. “And the infinitive after ‘to try.’ It’s non-standard to say ‘try and’; you should say ‘try to.’ And using ‘then’ for ‘than’ would have been flagged by most usage checkers, even on a basic phone. No, you’re right; he’s faking.”
Szarnek broke in with, “Now for the big find. The most troubling find.”
Whitmore asked, “Which is what, Mr. Szarnek?”
“For hours before the murder—while Todd and your unsub were meeting, I assume—Todd was online. He did two things. First, he bought a database. He used a Bitcoin account and bought it from a commercial data miner. He spoofed he was an ad agency—used a real one with an account he’d hacked—and he claimed he needed the information for market research. It was a laundry list of the products that DataWise Five Thousand controllers are found in.”
“How many?”
“A lot. About eight hundred different products, nearly three million units shipped to the Northeast of the U.S., including the New York metro area. Some couldn’t do any real harm if a third party took control: computers, printers, lights. Others could be deadly: cars, trains, elevators, defibs, heart monitors, pacemakers, microwaves, ovens, power tools, furnaces, cranes—the big ones used in construction work and on docks. I’d guess sixty percent of them could be dangerous. Then, the second thing he bought, a database of purchasers of those products. Some are other equipment manufacturers. Like Midwest Conveyance. Others are individual consumers, who bought smart appliances. Names and addresses. Again, New York and Northeast mostly.”
Archer asked, “That’s available? That information?”
Another pause. Perhaps this was one of astonishment. “Data mining, Ms. . . .”
“Archer.”
“You have no idea what aggregators know about you. The data collection is why when you buy, in this case, a smart stove you start getting direct-mail ads for other products that might be cloud-oriented. By buying the stove you’ve declared yourself to be in a certain demographic.”
“So he simply browses through the list and finds a dangerous product with a DataWise inside, like the escalator. He hacks in and waits so that—if he’s a decent monster—it’s not a child or pregnant woman riding to the second floor, and pushes the button.”
Sachs asked, “How did he hack it? It can’t have been that easy.”
No pause this time. Just a laugh. “Well. Okay. About the Internet of Things—a phrase I completely detest, but there it is. Can I give you a brief lesson?”
“I like the brief part, Rodney.”
“Smart products from household lights all the way up to the ones I just mentioned are quote ‘embedded’ with wireless connectivity circuits.”
Rhyme recalled this from Williams’s blog.
“Now, embedded devices use special protocols—rules, let’s call them—which govern how computer devices talk to the cloud and to each other in the networks. ZigBee and Z-Wave are the most popular protocols. The DataWise controller and some other companies use Wi-Swift. The protocols provide for encryption keys to make sure only legitimate users and devices are recognized but there’s a moment of vulnerability when the stove or webcam and the network try to shake hands, and hackers can sniff that out and get the network key.
“To make matters worse the manufacturers are, well, don’t be shocked—greedy! New software takes time to write, and that flies in the face of the time-to-market issue high-tech companies face. The longer it takes to start selling a product the greater the risk that somebody’ll beat you to it. So what’s happened is these smart controller companies use existing software for their embedded products—and I mean old, ancient software. Dinosaur-ware. Early Windows and Apple operating systems and some open source code, stripped of gingerbread like the Solitaire game and PaintShop. The software is more vulnerable to security exploits than if the company wrote new code that was specific to the products the smart controller’s installed in.”
“Exploit?” From Whitmore.
“Hacking. Finding a weakness and, well, exploiting it. You know the refrigerator hack? This was epic. A product line of smart fridges was running some old software written for PCs. Hackers got inside and turned the controller into a spambot. Refrigerators around the world were writing and sending penis-enhancement emails and vitamin offers to millions of addresses. The homeowners never knew.”
“The companies that make these smart controllers? Can’t they protect against hackers?” Archer asked.
“Well, they try to. They’re always sending out updates with security patches. Ever logged onto your PC and you have to wait because Windows is installing updates? That’s probably a security patch. Sometimes you have to install them yourself. Sometimes—like with Google—they’re downloaded and installed automatically. The patch’ll usually do the trick . . . until some hacker comes up with a new exploit, of course.”
Rhyme asked, “Can he be traced when he’s online and controlling the product?”
“Possibly. You’ll have to talk to the controller maker about that.”
“We’ll do that, Rodney. Thanks.”
They disconnected.
Sachs said, “I’ll have somebody at One PP get us the number of a contact at the controller company.” She stepped away to make a call. She completed it and said, “They’ll get back to us ASAP.”
Then simultaneously three phones in the parlor sounded. Sachs’s, Whitmore’s and Cooper’s.
“Well,” Sachs said, reading. “Looks like we have our motive.” Her face glowed from the phone screen as she read.
“What?” Rhyme asked.
Whitmore said, “My paralegal has sent me a text. A posting on several newspapers’ online editions in the op-ed sections, claiming credit for the escalator death.”
“It’s up here,” Cooper said. They all turned toward the display.
