Death Benefits (27 page)

31

Walker awoke, not remembering when he had fallen into a dreamless sleep. He had somehow drifted off with Mary Catherine Casey in his arms, and now she had wriggled out, leaving him feeling cold and alone. He opened his eyes and lifted his head to see her sitting cross-legged beside him, still naked, staring down at him with unblinking catlike patience. He rolled toward her, but she remained motionless, so he propped himself on his elbow. “What?” he said. “Was I snoring or something?”

“I was wondering about you,” she said, “so I decided to see if I could read your mind. Don’t worry: I couldn’t.”

“Want to try again?” he asked.

She gauged the angle of his eyes. “Not necessary.”

“Why are you here?”

“Because when I give somebody my word, I do whatever is necessary to keep it.” Her green eyes remained on his with unwavering intensity.

“Who did you give your word to?”

“You,” she said in mild surprise. “I told you yesterday I was going to drop everything I was doing to find out what you needed to know.”

He frowned. “Look, I’m glad to see you—”

“I noticed that,” she said.

He persisted. “But it never occurred to me that you were going to quit your job.”

She gave a deprecatory toss of her head so slight that Walker saw it as a dismissal. “It wasn’t really a job,” she said. “It was just an arrangement.”

“What kind of arrangement?”

She sighed, as though it were all such old history that he should already have known it. “Constantine’s not IBM. He’s like a pirate ship. You sign on as long as the take is good and you feel like staying aboard. You get a cut of the money. If you stop in a port you want to visit, you get off and Constantine sails on.”

He stared into her eyes for a moment, then decided to ask. “How did you get involved in that, anyway?”

“You don’t approve,” she said. “Tough.”

“You’re not going to tell me?”

She shrugged. “I’m a bad girl.”

“Maybe I’m asking why you’re a bad girl.”

She looked at him as though appraising him, then sighed. “I’m acceptable looking, and I’m very smart. People always noticed the one, but they never noticed the other. They also had all kinds of rules for how I was supposed to behave, and the rules didn’t seem to give me any benefit.”

“I’m not sure I understand,” he said.

“I went to college in engineering. The same men who hit on me—complete with assurances of their love and respect—also assumed that the reason I was getting good grades was that I was sleeping with professors. Since I didn’t sleep with professors, the ones who would have liked me to were resentful. The professors who didn’t like the field filling up with women weren’t glad to see me sitting in the front row. The others just treated everybody equally, which was lousy.” She looked at him closely. “You see? No advantage.”

“You seem to have learned a lot about computers.”

“I liked them. When I got a diploma, I went to work for a company in Irvine that sells computer security. I bumped into Constantine.”

“Did he work there too?”

“Hardly. I was always hearing about the enemy: people who spent their time moving in and out of systems they had no business knowing about. Most of them are kids. It’s always been a cheap thrill for teenaged boys killing time, waiting for their skin to clear up so they can get laid. They don’t want anything, so it’s actually no big deal, although nobody admits it. Sometimes companies even hire a few to test the locks and barriers. But everybody talks about the other ones, who aren’t kids. They’re theoretical, mostly: James Bond villains who want to launch a missile, or crash a plane, or shut down regional power grids and all that. Or robbers who are going to divert billions of dollars from banks. I heard stories, and went hunting. One night after a few months, I trapped Constantine Gochay.”

“What do you mean, ‘trapped’ him?”

“What he was doing was pretty harmless. He was reading bank statements in a big system in New York. The bank was one of our customers, so I was in there snooping, and noticed. I traced him backward and found out where he was. I went to see him.”

Walker frowned. “Why? Why would you do that?”

“Huh?” Her brows knitted.

He tried again. “Why didn’t you just call the authorities and get him arrested?”

She smiled. “Selfishness.”

“I don’t understand,” said Walker. “What did you want?”

“Reverse it,” she said. “What would I get by turning him in? He wasn’t in there stealing money. He was snooping, just as I was. He was probably just three boys from the chess team at Antelope Valley High School. But he was in a place that was very, very difficult to get into. I wanted to know what he knew that I didn’t.”

“You just went to that house and rang the doorbell?”

“Well, no,” she said. “I sent him a snappy message that appeared on his screen to tell him when I was coming. I figured that would make these three boys’ little hearts go pitty-pat. Then I drove up there. We talked.”

“What did he say?”

She looked at the pillow critically. “It was better than I expected. He had discovered a few technical things I didn’t know. Everything comes out fast—programs, chips, hardware. Often even the manufacturer doesn’t know all the capabilities or the vulnerabilities or the implications of something that’s on the market until it’s been used for a couple of years. He had all the technology, and all the techniques. But what he had that was most useful wasn’t machinery.”

“What was it?”

“Sneakiness. A lot of the useful stuff—how money moves through banks and credit companies, reservations for planes and hotels, personal customer profiles, personnel files—is in the big proprietary systems that are operated by giant corporations. They’re heavily protected. You can’t get in by brute force. Code breaking is not easy, and failing is dangerous. So what would Gochay do? He knows that these same giant corporations are heartless about layoffs. When two giant banks merge, and ten thousand people are dumped, how closely is the new management looking at each of them? Gochay would cruise the Internet looking for people posting their résumés. Once in a while he would find somebody fired from a big company who knew something—passwords, systems weaknesses—and had just been convinced for all time that his loyalty to the company was a joke. So he’d pay them.”

“And that’s all?”

“Sometimes. Sometimes they didn’t know much, but just getting something like the name of the systems controller was enough. Gochay had programs for that. They would generate every variant of their names, the birth dates of all members of their families, house numbers, phone numbers, and so on, and try them all as passwords in a millisecond. That kind of thing.”

“Did he hire you—make an arrangement with you—because of the company you left?”

She shook her head indulgently. “No. I knew some things that he didn’t, but the company didn’t know them either. And I wasn’t a disgruntled employee. I was doing fine.”

“Then why did you do it?”

“Why did I start a life of crime? You had to be there. At six one evening, I walked out of this absolutely sterile building filled with people just like the ones in engineering school. An hour and a half later, I was in that weird house, talking to this huge, bizarre man with wild black hair and crazy black eyes. He was doing something exciting and dangerous, and he wasn’t interested in me at all.”

“He wasn’t interested in you?”

“He was interested in money.”

“Let me get this straight,” said Walker. “Are these the reasons why you shouldn’t have done it, or why you did it?”

“I was twenty-two. I’d finally gotten out of school, and was going to have the great American adventure of going off to work, independent and free. After two months at it, I could see the future: all of it, from then until I turned sixty-five. It wasn’t that nothing exciting had happened yet, but that it could never happen.”

“So Gochay was an adventure.”

“Part of what an adventure is, is throwing in your cards for a reshuffle. It wasn’t that I wanted to stay with Gochay forever, but that if I was there, anything could happen. As for him, he had much more work than he could do. He didn’t think he could turn his best customers down. So he offered me a deal. I would pick the jobs I wanted to do. I would get seventy-five percent of the pay. He would get twenty-five to cover all of the overhead and his risk. I thought about it for a week, and then gave two weeks’ notice. I dreamed up the name Serena because it seemed to fit. You weren’t surprised that Constantine Gochay would have a girl around named Serena, were you?”

“No,” he said. “I guess not.” He thought for a moment.

“It was fun. Being in a school and then a job with mostly men was a lot of trouble. When I’d walk into a room, I’d feel stares like laser beams moving across various body parts. I guess in my own small way, I’m kind of an exhibitionist—but I like a limited audience. Working with Constantine, I wasn’t a girl, I was a revenue center. I could be anybody at all, and when I wanted to, I was anybody I felt like being.”

“Why did you terminate your agreement with him?”

She looked down at him, and he could see amusement in her eyes. “You want me to say it’s because I’ve changed my ways, my heart is in your hands, and I would crawl across the continent to nuzzle up to you in a cheap hotel, don’t you?”

Walker knitted his brows and made a thoughtful face, as though he were having trouble deciding. “It’s not so cheap.”

“Admit it.”

“Well, yes. I was hoping it was something like that,” he said. “It would be a sound basis for a relationship, certainly.”

“Did I say I wanted one?”

“Don’t you?”

She said carefully, “I left the company—decided to be a bad girl—because I never got to decide before. It felt good. When I met you that night, I thought, ‘Why not? What’s stopping me?’ and decided that whatever had stopped me before, I shouldn’t let it. That turned out to be a good idea, because it felt even better. Yesterday I left Gochay because what you’re doing seemed to be the most interesting thing that was going on.”

“But what you’re interested in isn’t really me?”

She shrugged. “You’re a man. What you do is look at somebody you find attractive, somebody you don’t know at all, and decide you’d like to have sex with her. You aren’t deciding you’re in love with her. You’re not thinking that far ahead, and you don’t feel guilty about it. You did that when you met me. Why can’t I do that with you?”

He said, “I guess I can’t think of a logical reason.”

“Well, if I had stopped being interested in you, I wouldn’t have come,” she said. “What I know so far, I like. I haven’t thought about more than that. I’m enjoying doing as I please.”

She flopped backward on the bed and lay still, staring at the ceiling. He crawled over and looked down at her, but she shut her eyes.

Walker said, “Well, that’s fun. But let’s get back to this nuzzling business. I liked talking about that.” He lowered himself and began to brush her neck with his lips.

She shivered and pushed him away. “That tickles.”

“I’m not sure, but I think that’s part of the point of it. Not much after your crawl across the continent, but—”

“I didn’t say that was true,” she interrupted. “I said it was what you would like to believe.” She sat up and pulled the covers up to her neck. “Actually, I took a plane, and the rest of the nuzzling can wait . . .  for now.” She couldn’t keep the corners of her lips from turning upward a bit, but she said, “I have something to tell you. I’ve been trying to find out who James Scully was, and who his distant cousin was.”

“How are you doing that?”

“I figured that the FBI is doing all of the routine, likely, logical things. So I have to do something else. The lab report I intercepted made me think of genealogy.”

“You mean you’re doing his family tree?”

“It had to be something I could do on a laptop and a phone in an airplane. Genealogy is America’s second-biggest obsession, after their lawns. So there’s plenty of information available. You always start with the Mormons.”

“You do?”

She sighed. “Yes. It’s an article of the Mormon faith to try to find out who their ancestors were, and baptize them retroactively to get them into heaven. They’ve been at it for a long time, and they share. So you start with the Family History Library in Salt Lake City. They also have the International Genealogy Index, the Social Security Death Index, and the Military Index.”

“Those guys didn’t seem religious, foreign, or retired, and if they’d been in the military, wouldn’t their fingerprints have—”

“It’s not for them,” she said. “Their common ancestor is at least a generation back. So I tried the Library of Congress Local History and Genealogy Index.”

“Did any of this get you anywhere?”

“Everywhere, and that’s not where I need to go. It got me quite a few Scullys, and if you add in their cousins, it’s an astronomical number. It hasn’t gotten me a sure way to know which one is yours.”

Walker lay back on the bed and stared at the ceiling. “Another dead end.”

“It isn’t,” she said. “I just need a shortcut. I’ve got thousands of Scullys: maybe a hundred families in New Hampshire, and an unknown number of others on the list whose recent locations aren’t given. By ‘recent’ I mean this century.”

“What’s the shortcut?”

“Coming here. I think your James Scully didn’t move to a rural village in New Hampshire from Chicago or New York.”

“Why not?”

“It doesn’t feel right,” she said. “If you want to be invisible, small towns are poison. If he was some kind of nut—say, an extreme survivalist–racist–mad bomber type—he probably wouldn’t pick Coulter. Those guys move to the south or west, where there’s more real estate that’s really empty and less concern about gun laws. I suspect that he felt safe here because he was born around here. That would mean his relative probably was too.”

“And coming here is the only way to find out?”

“What I want isn’t available any other way. The Health and Welfare Building in Concord has a Bureau of Vital Records. They’ve kept track of every marriage, birth, and death in the state since 1640, and every divorce since 1808. If you give me the right lead, I can find not only James, but any relative who was born here—meaning the other dead guy.”