Deadline (35 page)

Murphy turned to the camera. “So no clear answer there from Liberal Leader Evan Pinsent on whether a Liberal government would reopen the constitution for a Meech II type deal, Lorne.”

The piece ended, and Peggy came over to sit down with a coffee, so Jack killed the volume..

“Don’t you get enough of that?” she said.

“Aunt Peg, it’s like crack,” he said. “Once you’re hooked, they got ya.”

“My dear,” she said. “Don’t be joking about crack. There’s enough of it in this town.”

“Yeah?” said Jack. “We got it in Ottawa, but I wouldn’t think you’d find it way up here.”

“My dear, they call it Fort Crack, sure!” she said. “It’s rotten with it. These young fellas up here, away from their families, nothing to do, money burning a hole in their pockets, some of them get lost. Lost, me son. They fall in with these girls, these women comes up here looking to party all the time, find some stunned bayman to pay for it. It’s shockin’.”

“That sounds like the story I’m working on,” said Jack. “This girl, Rena Redcloud. She was from Fort MacKay, seems like a good family, got mixed up with coke, turning tricks, ended up getting murdered by a john. Sad story.”

Peggy arched an eyebrow at him. “Is she anything to that fellow Mike, that Vern works with?”

“I think that’s her brother,” he said. “I want to ask Vern if I can talk to him.”

“Sure, I’ll call him.” She got out her cell phone and called her husband. “Vern, I’m here with Jack,” she said. “Yes. He just had a two-piece with dressing and gravy. Yes. We’ll fatten him up, eh. Now, he tells me that he wants to talk to that fellow you work with, Mike. Yes. Says it’s her brother. All right. Talk to you soon.”

“He’s going to check,” she said to Jack. “See when Mike’s working. They goes all night up there.

Ashton and Flanagan ventured down to the office of Sgt. David Gaston, the computer forensics guy, to sweet talk him into cracking the password right away, not in a week, which is what he’d promised on the phone.

He was sitting in front of a wide-screen monitor, in a windowless room crowded with computers and parts of computers. Steel shelving units, loaded with hard drives and circuit boards, lined the walls. Many of them had evidence tags hanging from them. More partly dissembled computers – old and new – sat on several big wooden tables, a warren of cables, connectors and power bars strewn among them.

“I don’t like to bug you, Dave,” said Flanagan. “But Zwicker is on us. It’s bad. He swore at us. In two meetings. You ever hear him swear? Told us to get the fuck out of his office. Somebody is shitting on his head, and he doesn’t know what else to do, except to sit down and have a big, stinky dump on our heads. On poor Mallorie’s head. Forget about my old head. Think of Mallorie. Do you want to see this nice head all covered in Zwicker’s shit? Because that’s what you’re saying here. You are saying you don’t give a fuck if Zwicker shits on Mallorie’s head. And I didn’t think you were that kind of guy. Don’t be that guy. Hook a brother up.”

Gaston swivelled on his old computer chair and glared at Flanagan, then turned to look at Ashton, who was trying not to grin. “Is that true, Mallorie?” he asked. “Is Zwicker gonna dump shit on your head?” He lowered his glasses and looked at her.

“I can’t have that,” he said. “I am very busy here. I would normally tell you both to go fuck yourselves, which is what I tell everyfuckingbody else, and get in line, but Flanagan here says Zwicker’s gonna shit on your head. Is that right?”

Mallorie couldn’t help but laugh. “That’s right. If you don’t help us, Zwicker’s going to shit on my head.”

Gaston pushed his glasses back up his nose and held his hand out for the hard drive in Flanagan’s hand.

“What is it?” he said.

“Security Master,” said Flanagan. “It was used to run one small web cam.” He held up the little lens. “Looks like a program for stores or whatever. It can run lots of cameras, but only one camera was hooked up to this one. It was in the boudoir of the guy they pulled out of the canal. It’s password-protected.”

“Fuck,” said Gaston, as he took the zip drive and plugged it in to his main computer. “Security Master. Fuck.”

He opened a web browser, went to a hacker web site and typed in “Security Master.” A screen came up with a brief description of the device, in hacker shorthand. It looked like gibberish to Ashton and Flanagan.

“Unix-based,” said Gaston. “Okay. Sebastian.ru. Okay.” He typed a bit.

“About five years ago, some Russian kid built a password cracker that really strips the panties off this generation of Unix encryption,” he said. “Better than lemon gin. Let me try it.”

He booted up Sebastian.ru and steered it to the folder on the zip drive. He tweaked the settings and pressed enter. Security Master started up. He clicked on the top folder, and hit enter. The hacking program started trying combinations of letters and numbers, faster than the screen could redraw, so the program looked jammed.

“There are twenty-six characters in the alphabet,” said Gaston. “With upper case and lower case, plus ten digits and punctuation marks, you have ninety-six characters. You’ve got 782 billion possible combinations of characters in a six-character password. If we don’t know, as we don’t, whether it’s a six-, seven- or eight-letter password, there are trillions of possible combinations. Sounds tough, eh?

“Luckily for us, a lot of people use passwords that have some meaning to them, all lower case. This Russian kid built an algorithm that orders the possible combinations from most likely to least likely, using names and words from the dictionary. The program just types the shit out of the damn thing, trying combination after combination in the password window. Sooner or later it will match. Or it should do.”

He glanced up at Flanagan. He and Ashton were staring at the unchanging screen.

“Boudoir, eh?” said Gaston. “Is there a girlfriend?”

“Sophie Fortin,” said Flanagan. “Very impressive young woman.”

The computer chirped and suddenly a folder popped open. Gaston clicked on sebastian.ru. The password was Sneak.

“Wow,” said Ashton.

“Is that it?” said Flanagan.

“Yup,” said Gaston. “Let’s see what we have here.”

In the open folder there was a single video file, with no name, just a date and time stamp: 2011/07/18.

He double clicked on it and suddenly there was a video of the empty bedroom. It was surprisingly clear.

“That’s their room,” said Flanagan.

Gaston clicked ahead on the space bar, toward the end of the file. The lights were out and Sophie and Ed were asleep under the covers. He clicked back and the lights were back on, and Ed was on top of Sophie. They were both naked and her legs were wrapped around his waist. She was groaning rhythmically and Ed was grinding his pelvis into her. Sophie’s fingers gripped his back.

“That is our victim and his girlfriend,” said Flanagan.

The three of them watched Sophie and Ed have sex for a moment.

Ashton cleared her throat.

“Well,” said Gaston, “I guess that worked. “

He sat there watching for another moment. Sophie lowered her hands to Ed’s ass.

“Well,” said Gaston. “I guess I’d better shut this down.”

He stared for a second longer and then clicked stop.

“There you go,” he said, and handed them the hard drive even as he turned back to his computer. “Have fun.”

After dinner, Vern and Jack put on white hard hats, got into the truck and headed north to call on Mike Redcloud. They drove for forty minutes on a four-lane highway that abruptly turned to dirt when they turned off to the Syncrude site. Vern had told his boss that his nephew was thinking about working there and wanted to see the site, and arranged a visitor pass for him, which got them through the security gates.

Vern drove him around a bit, showing him the massive settling ponds, lakes of poison filled with a mixture of oil by-products and water, dotted with noisemakers and scarecrows to keep away the birds. There was a surprising beauty to the scene. The sun was setting over the softwood forest, and the reflection of the vermillion sky shimmered on the surface of the toxic ponds.

They drove past the massive upgrader, where acres of high-tech equipment refined the oily sludge to light crude. Plumes of smoke and steam poured out of smokestacks into the vast northern sky. Jack stared at the massive hills of yellow sulphur next to the refining equipment. The air was dusty, and smelled odd and unpleasant.

A broad dirt road through the woods took them out to the mine site, where Vern stopped the truck on a lookout. They got out and walked through the snow to the edge of a four-kilometre wide hole in the ground, an artificial canyon that was so big it was hard to take it all in.

“Holy fuck,” said Jack.

“She’s something, eh, b’y,” said Vern.

In the darkening sky, it looked like a blot of nothingness spreading out from their feet, a hole 100 metres deep that stretched out a good way to the horizon. In the distance, Jack could make out buildings, earth-moving equipment and dump trucks working under massive halogen lights.

“They started at this end in ’82,” said Vern. “And the hole’s been getting bigger ever since. I’d like to have a nickel for every tonne of dirt they’ve hauled out of here.”

They got back in the truck and drove around the hole, and then down into it and across it, to a trailer sitting in the sticky, black mud.

From here, Jack could see how the mine worked. Five-storey cranes rhythmically gouged enormous scoops of black sand from the wall of the canyon, and dropped them in the back of dump trucks the size of houses.

Under the glare of the halogen lights, the colours were intense and strange – the yellow trucks gleaming, the dirty snow banks spectral, the sand underfoot so black and dull with oil that it reflected nothing, like a night sky without stars.

“They say there’s more oil in Alberta than in Saudi Arabia,” said Vern. “But it’s just a bit harder to get at, eh.”

Jack bent and picked up a handful of the stuff, and rubbed it. It stained his hand black.

“Jeez b’y, you’ll have to scrub a bit to get that out,” said Vern. “Let’s go in where it’s warm.”

The white industrial trailer was for the crew, with bathrooms and a lunch room with a coffee machine, snack machines, a sink, a microwave, plastic chairs and a couple of tables. It was lit by florescent lights. One of them flickered and buzzed.

Two men in blue overalls were sitting over coffees.

“How’s she going, b’ys?” said Vern. “You haven’t seen Mike, have you?”

“Who, the chief?” said one of the men.

Vern stared at him.

“Mike Redcloud,” he said. “What do you mean, the chief?”

The guy grinned and looked away.

“He should be on break in ten minutes,” said the other guy. “We’re the relief.” He looked at his companion. “The comic relief.”

Vern stared at the two of them for a moment longer, then turned away, shaking his head.

“You want a coffee, b’y?” he asked Jack.

They sat at the other end of the lunch room from the relief crew.

Mike arrived soon after, walking in with a short blonde woman. Both of them took off their hard hats as they came in.

“Mike!” said Vern. “How’s she going?

Mike came over and introduced the woman he was with as Bonny

“Well hello, Bonny,” said Vern, smiling and shaking her hand. “This is my nephew, Jack, wants to talk to Mike about something. What do you have for supper? Have enough to share?”

She laughed and he steered her over to the other end of the trailer. The relief crew headed out.

Jack and Mike shook hands.

“I’m glad you could take a few minutes to talk to me,” said Jack. “It’s about your sister.”

Mike smiled and laughed nervously. He was tall and athletic-looking, with mahogany skin, a wispy moustache and liquid brown eyes that somehow seemed both happy and sad.

“Sure,” he said. “Vern told me. Let me get my dinner going.”

He went to the fridge and took out a plastic tub and popped it in the microwave and sat down to wait while it heated his dinner.

“So, why are you interested in Rena’s story?” he said.

Jack gave him his card.

“I’m a political reporter in Ottawa,” he said. “And a source, someone I have promised not to identify, has reason to believe that there’s something odd about her death, or the investigation, something with a link to some powerful people in Ottawa. We don’t know what exactly is strange about the death or the investigation, but the source is a very serious person, and we have reason to believe it’s worth looking into.”