You’re lust for things, for objects, for trinkets will be the death of you all! You’ve abandoned true values and in doing that lost your precious ‘control’, that happens when you don’t use your data wisely. You have rejected the love of families and friends for the addiction of belongings. You must own more and more and more until, soon, your possessions will possess YOU and, with a cold, steel kiss, send you to hell.
—The People’s Guardian
Rhyme mentioned that the unsub’s email to Todd Williams was signed P. G.
“Legit?” Cooper asked.
Curiously many people took credit for crimes that they had nothing to do with.
“No, I’m sure it’s from him,” Rhyme said.
“How do you—?” Archer started. Then: “Sure, the word ‘control.’ It’s in quotation marks. And the reference to ‘wise’ and ‘data.’ ”
“Exactly. Hacking the DataWise isn’t public information; only our unsub would know about it. And some of the same intentional grammatical mistakes, the Y-O-U-R-E. And the incorrect use of ‘that’ for ‘which.’ ”
Sachs said, “Let’s find out if he’s done this before . . .” She went online and began a search. A few minutes later, “Nothing in NCIC.” The National Crime Information Center compiles warrants and profile information on tens of thousands of suspects throughout the United States and some foreign nations. Sachs added that the popular press had reported no activist groups mounting attacks that were in anyway similar to what Unsub 40 had done. Nor were there any references to “the People’s Guardian.”
Juliette Archer, Rhyme realized, had wheeled away from the others and was looking over a computer screen. She called, “I’ve got it.”
“What?” Rhyme asked bluntly, irritated that there were no new leads in a case in which the unsub was possibly targeting more victims right at the moment.
“The controller company. CIR Micro?” She returned to the others and nodded at the screen she’d just called up. “That’s the CEO’s direct line, Vinay Chaudhary.”
“How’d you get that?” Sachs asked, seemingly irritated that the NYPD assistance she’d requested hadn’t been as fast as an amateur.
“Just a little detective work,” Archer answered.
“Let’s talk to him,” Rhyme said.
Sachs typed the number into her phone and apparently got Chaudhary’s assistant, from what Rhyme could deduce. After an explanation, Sachs’s body language, registering surprise, suggested she was on with the CEO himself. It appeared he wasn’t resistant to talking with them, though—she explained after disconnecting—he wasn’t free just now. He could speak to them in about forty-five minutes.
Presumably, after he had his lawyers assembled around him, circling the wagons when hostiles appeared on the bluffs over their heads.
CHAPTER 22
Whatta we got, Sarge?” The question slipped smoothly through the officer’s headset.
The DSS tactical surveillance van, plumbing today, was parked directly across from the bar and NYPD Sergeant Joe Reilly had good eyes on the inside of the dive. He replied, “Both of ’em, sitting, hanging. Drinkin’ beers. No cares in the world.” A paunchy, gray-haired officer in Narcotics, Reilly had been a supervisor with the Drug Street Sweep program since it had started years ago; back then radios crackled like wadded-up waxed paper. Amazing they could coordinate the busts at all. Now it was all high-def digital, as if the tactical team officer he was speaking with was only feet away, not in a restaurant up the street in this scruffy Brooklyn ’hood.
Reilly wasn’t alone in the van. Beside him, operating the camera controls, was a prim and proper stocky young African American officer, a whiz with the electronic eyes and ears, though she wore too much perfume for the sergeant’s taste.
“Any weapons?” the voice in his ear asked. The undercover tac team was a half block away from Richie’s bar in Bedford-Stuyvesant and they damn well better’ve ordered the calzone Reilly had told them to get for him. And no spinach. Ham and Swiss. Period. Soda. Diet.
Reilly peered at the screen image of the two beer drinkers under surveillance. The woman officer shook her head. Reilly said, “Negative presenting.”
Which didn’t mean the two men they were watching weren’t armed to the teeth.
“Just the two of them?”
Woulda said three, it’d been three. Four, four.
“Yeah.” Reilly stretched. Hoped this wasn’t a damn waste of time. There’d been good intel that a senior asshole from one of the Dominican Republic crews was meeting a local punk in Richie’s. Maybe transferring something big. But the DR guy was late and the punk—skinny, twitchy—was just hanging with some unknown, a white male, youngish, acting kind of twitchy himself.
The tac officer on the radio took a sip of something, slurping, and said, “How late is Big Boy?”
The Dominican was not only high up in the crews but tipped the scales at three hundred plus.
“Half an hour.” Reilly looked at his watch. “Forty minutes.”
“He ain’t gonna show,” the tac cop muttered. He was now chewing.
The gangbanger’s absence probably wasn’t cold feet, Reilly guessed. Drug suppliers at the Dominican’s level are just very, very busy.
“You sure the unknown with him isn’t with the DR crew?”
Reilly laughed. “Not unless times’re so hard they’re hiring choirboys. White ones. And times ain’t that hard.”
“Any idea who?”
“Nup. Descrip is blond, six feet, fucking piss-me-off skinny.” Reilly scanned the guy’s face close up. “You know, he’s looking funny.”
“What’sat mean?” the take-down guy said, between bites.
Fuck that. I want my calzone.
“Nervous.”
“He made you, Sarge?”
“I’m sitting in a fucking plumbing van on a street in Brooklyn that’s filled with plumbing supply stores. The camera lens is about the size of your cat’s dick.”
“I don’t have a cat.”
“No, he didn’t make me. Just, he doesn’t want to be with our boy.”
“Who would?”
Good point. Alphonse Gravita—aka Alpho, but more popularly Alpo, woof woof—was a shining piece of non-work. The germ of a dealer had been lucky enough to miss getting busted but he had his eye on moving up, expanding his street business from the mini mart he hung out in in Ocean Hill to Bed-Stuy and Brownsville.
“Hold on.” Reilly sat up straighter.
“The DR guy there?”
“Negative. But Alpo and his buddy . . . wait, something’s happening.”
“What?” The chewing had stopped.
“Looks like a transaction . . . Pull out.” The latter spoken to the perfumed cop sitting beside him.
Bad choice of words, he decided. Or good. But she missed the innuendo.
The officer zoomed out to get a broader shot, to catch everything that Alpo and the blond man were doing. Alpo was looking around and fishing in his pocket. The blond kid was too. Then palm met palm.
“Okay, got an exchange.”
“What was it?”
“Shit. Fair number of bills. But couldn’t see the product. Could you see?”
“No, sir,” the surveillance woman answered. Gardenia came to mind, the perfume, though Reilly had no clue what gardenias smelled—or looked—like.
The tactical cop radioed, “Your call, Sarge.”
Reilly debated. They’d just seen an illegal drug transaction. They could come home with two heads. But it might make sense to collar White Boy alone, outside, and keep Alpo in play. They’d have at least one collar to their credit if they couldn’t go back to the 73 with the DR scumbag in metal. The kid might also have intel about the Dominican. They could squeeze the nervous little punk until he gave up plenty.
Or just let this one pass—obviously the deal wasn’t that big. The blond kid could walk away and they’d hope Big Boy showed up.
Tactical: “They’re still there, just sitting there?”
“Right.”
“We move in?”
“No, don’t want to lose the Alpo connection to our DR friends. Maybe take the other guy if he leaves. Until then wait.”
“The DR guy’s fifty minutes late.”
Reilly made a decision.
“Okay, I’ll tell you what we’re gonna do. But answer the question: You order me that calzone?”
Lincoln Rhyme was saying, “We know he’s going to hit somebody again. I want a memo out to every precinct and FDNY station. Any accident involving a product, seeming accident, I want to hear about it. Stat. Immediately. ASAP. Whatever cliché you want to use.”
Mel Cooper said he’d take care of that and drew his phone the way he would the small revolver he wore almost quaintly on his hip.
Sachs received a text and glanced at her phone. “The smart controller company. They want to talk.”
“Or,” Archer said, “tell us in person how uncooperative they intend to be.”
When it came to investigative work, she was quite the fast learner, Rhyme reflected and called for Thom to set up a Skype call.
Soon the distinctive heartbeat of the app’s ringtone pulsed through the room and a moment later the screen came to life.
It wasn’t much of a wagon circling. Only two people from CIR Micro were on the screen and one of them, he easily deduced, was Vinay Parth Chaudhary himself, looking both South Asian and authoritarian. He wore a collarless shirt and stylish metal-framed glasses.
The other was a sallow-faced, solid man in his fifties. The lawyer, presumably. He was in a suit, no tie.
They sat in an antiseptic office: a bare table, on which were two monitors, bookending the pair. On the wall behind them was a slash of maroon and blue paint. Rhyme at first thought it was a painting but saw that, no, it was directly on the wall. Maybe a stylized rendering of the company’s logo.
“I’m Amelia Sachs, detective with the NYPD. We spoke earlier. This is Lincoln Rhyme, a forensic consultant who’s assisting on our case.” It was just the two of them. As earlier, Rhyme had decided that the company might be less cooperative with more people present, even if the outfit wasn’t any longer a target of litigation.
“I’m Vinay Chaudhary, president and CEO. This is Stanley Frost, our chief general counsel.” His voice was pleasant, calm. Hardly any inflection. He didn’t appear threatened. But Rhyme supposed that men who are worth forty billion dollars rarely are.
“This is about a crime involving our products?” Frost asked.
“That’s right. Your DataWise Five Thousand smart controller. An individual here in New York City intentionally sent a signal to one of those devices that was installed in a Midwest Conveyance escalator. It activated the access panel at the top of an up escalator. It opened. A man fell in and was killed.”
Chaudhary: “I heard about the accident, of course. But I didn’t know it was intentional. How terrible. I do have to say, we told Midwest to use the DataWise solely for uploading diagnostic and maintenance data and for emergency shutoff. Not to allow access.”
“We have correspondence to show that,” Frost the lawyer said.
The CEO continued, “And the Midwest Conveyance controllers were installed several years ago. We’ve sent the company forty, forty-five security patches since then. They would’ve kept the hacker out. If they didn’t install them promptly then there’s nothing we can do.”
Rhyme said, “This isn’t about your liability. It’s the hacker we’re after, not you.”
“Your name again, please?” Chaudhary asked.
“Lincoln Rhyme.”
“I believe I’ve heard of you. The newspapers, or a TV show.”
“Possibly. Now, this suspect learned how to get inside from somebody who’d blogged about it.”
Chaudhary was nodding. “You’re probably thinking of the Social Engineering Second-ly blog.”
“Yes, we are.”
“Well, the blogger used an early model and he intentionally didn’t download and install the security patches. If he had, he never would have gotten the DataWise to malfunction. But he didn’t say that in his blog, of course. It’s much more sensational to suggest that any thirteen-year-old can run an exploit. Gets you a lot more hits on your blog when you raise the battle flag of privacy breaches and malfunctions. The DataWise has far fewer vulnerabilities than ninety percent of the systems out there.”
Frost added, “We have a white-hat firm we work with—ethical hackers. You know the term?”
“We can figure it out,” Sachs said.
“Which spends all day looking for ways to hack into the DataWise servers our clients use. Any hint of an exploit, we send out a patch. If that blogger had done that he never would have gotten inside. What does he have to say about it?”
Sachs said, “I’m afraid our suspect killed him after he learned how to hack into the system.”
“No!” Chaudhary actually gasped.
“It’s true.”
“Well, I’m certainly very sorry about it. Terrible.”
Rhyme continued, “The subject we’re after has a list of products that use your controller and people and companies who bought those products. A very long list.”
“It’s been a good few years.”
The lawyer turned to the CEO, saying nothing, but perhaps sending a signal to avoid hinting at the company’s net worth, even though this wasn’t about the company’s potential liability. Lawyering 101.
Chaudhary said, an aside, “It’s okay. I want to help.”
Rhyme pressed on. “And we have reason to believe that he’s going to do this again. Kill someone else.”
The man frowned. “On purpose? Why on earth?”
Sachs said, “Domestic terrorist, you could say. He has a grudge against consumerism. Maybe capitalism in general. He’s sent some email rants to various news organizations. You can find stories about them, I’m sure. He calls himself the People’s Guardian.”
Chaudhary said, “But . . . is he psychotic?”
“We don’t know what he is,” Rhyme said impatiently. “Now, why we’re calling. I’d like to know a few things. First, is it possible to trace where he’s physically located when he takes over control of a product? And it seems he’ll be nearby, so he can see the incident and decide exactly when to activate the controller. Or, another question, is it possible to trace his identity?”
Chaudhary answered: “Technically, tracing, yes. But again that’s the province of each manufacturer—the webcam maker, the stove maker, the car companies. We couldn’t do it from our facilities. We simply make the controller hardware and write the script—the software in the controllers. He’d be hacking into the system through our customers’ cloud servers.”
“That’s what the NYPD technical department says,” Rhyme confirmed.
“Then, if you knew in advance which appliance or device—I mean, the actual unit itself—he was targeting, the manufacturing company could trace his location. But then how you’d find the stove or water heater he was targeting I don’t know. And even if you could he’d be using proxies to log into the cloud. You’d have to identify those. Finally, you’d have only seconds to find out before he logged out and powered down after the hack. As for identity, he’s too smart not to use burner phones, unregistered pads or computers and anonymous proxies or virtual private networks. That’s Hacking One Oh One.”
This was more discouraging than he’d hoped. Rhyme then said, “All right. One other thing: Is there some security measure you can take to stop him getting access?”
