Mind Trace (5 page)

Perfect timing.

The sun cast deep reds and oranges across the surface of
the lake. It was breathtaking. It made her regret staying away for so long.

Ironic that when I do finally return, it's under these
circumstances.

After she finished her sad excuse of a dinner, she found
her way upstairs to the Jacuzzi. It would give her a chance to wind down and
make sense out of what happened.

After filling up the tub, Alice quickly undressed in the
chilly air and sank gratefully into the warm water. She felt the built-up
tension start to melt away, if only for a time.

The past few days have been so unreal. It's as if I just
walked out of some science fiction novel, like I'm going to wake up soon and
realize all of this was just some twisted dream.

She glanced down at her hand and saw the fresh burns.

...but I know this is definitely not a dream.

Alice knew she should make some sort of solid plan.  She
could hide at the cabin for a while, but not indefinitely. Someone would find
her, one way or the other. She was not sure if it would be the authorities or
EngineerCorp who found her first. She doubted she would be arrested, given the
nature of her "crimes." EngineerCorp would want to keep the situation
under wraps. They would not want her sharing everything she knew with some law
enforcement agency or the FBI.

What a day.

Any other time she would have been thrilled to meet Eric
Martin, to talk to the man that almost single-handedly changed the world.
Today, however, seeing him made her want to run as fast as she could in the
opposite direction.  Whatever happened, Alice had to convince him that she had
nothing he wanted.

No one would ever suspect that the information was now
neatly stored in her brain, and she wouldn't give anyone a reason to. If anyone
found out her secret, she would never be safe again.

I have to find a way to prove to EngineerCorp that this
was all just one big misunderstanding.

This is going to take a while…

Grateful for the warm cocoon of the bath, Alice sunk
further into the water and began to formulate a plan.

***

Eric sighed deeply.

I should have questioned why she was acting so
strangely.

 He never would have dreamed that girl could be responsible
for the breach, but if he had taken the time to investigate further, perhaps
they could have detained her long enough for him to find the truth.

It's of no consequence. She won't be able to hide
forever, and I could use a challenge. 

There's something simply refreshing about field work. It
can get so boring, being surrounded by people that cower beneath me. Here is a
seemingly insignificant young girl, daring to oppose my authority... I'm going
to enjoy the opportunity to remind her exactly who she's dealing with.  

He picked up a picture frame from a nearby table. Alice
stood with a man and a woman, presumably her parents. The resemblance was
clear, although the picture was obviously several years old.  They stood in
front of a lake, taken sometime during the fall. The trees in the background
were fiery reds and oranges.

A voice broke his reverie. "Sir, we've searched the
house. The girl is nowhere to be found, but we've found some things in her
files that might interest you."

The man handed him a stack of papers.

"Good. Keep searching. I want everything electronic
confiscated, and anything that might give us a clue to where she is."

He turned to look through the papers in his hand,
dismissing the man. 

The top paper was an old newspaper article dated from over
a year ago. It was detailing a fatal car accident on a remote stretch of
highway not far from Asheville. As he scanned over the article, he came across
a picture of the couple that passed away. It was the same man and woman from
the photograph. The last sentence of the article said, "Mary and John
McArthur, survived by their daughter Alice."

 The next paper was a high school diploma, dated five years
ago. That meant Alice was fourteen when she graduated high school. That
document was followed by a bachelor’s and master’s degree, all within the
expanse of four years.

Smart girl. The more I learn about her, the more I am
intrigued. 

There was a healthy stack of awards for various academic
achievements. She graduated at the top of her class in both high school and
college. A community service award described how she had designed a custom
management system for the city to manage its public records electronically. At
the bottom of the pile was the title for a Ducati.

Eric found himself almost impressed, despite his prejudice.
He glanced up as his men were loading the last of the equipment into the SUV.
Grabbing the papers, he exited the cottage and went to join them. There was
nothing left for them to do, and he had far better resources on the
EngineerCorp campus.

When they arrived, they would sort through the evidence and
decide exactly what they were dealing with. In the meantime, he leaned his head
back against the headrest and closed his eyes.

Yes, I am going to enjoy this.

***

Several hours after they returned to the campus, the
engineers presented Eric with a summary of their findings.

There had been quite a few computers and servers found on
the premises. After running diagnostics on all of the hard drives that were
found, none of them contained any data from the EngineerCorp servers.

Additionally, they verified the identity of the computer
that matched the MAC address of the one responsible for the breach. On it, they
found the most complex and advanced series of security scripts, designed to
block any kind of tracking that might occur.  It would take weeks just to sort
out exactly what it was doing, much less understand the logic behind it. The
engineers would get to work immediately on analyzing the code. 

In the inventory, they also found a burnt Ethernet cable.
Analysis on the wire proved that it had recently been burned, probably within
the last twenty-four hours. The engineers also found traces of human DNA,
including burned skin, on the wires, indicating that someone had been in
contact with them at the time they were burned. Further analysis allowed them
to match the sample to DNA from Alice McArthur's medical records.

From there, it became more or less a summary of basic
personal information for Alice. They knew what stores she shopped at, what
places she frequented, her employment history, her credit history, who she socialized
with, and more.  From the most basic facts to the most trivial information, it
was completely analyzed and reported to Eric.

As for clues to her current whereabouts, there was little
information. She had no living relatives to speak of. Either they had all
passed away, or were too far removed to matter. Since her parents had died,
Alice kept mainly to herself. Her cell phone was also a dead end. It had gone "off
grid," but in all likelihood, it was untraceable in the same way as her computer
had been.

The lead engineer also mentioned that based on the volume
of data supposedly downloaded from their servers, the target device had to have
an impressive storage capacity, one beyond any normal computer. A server could
have held the information, but no common computer or laptop would have that
kind of storage capabilities. There had been no indication that she ever owned
any type of device like that. The servers that Alice did possess had all been
accounted for.

The most likely scenario, if she had actually downloaded
any
of the information, was that she was only storing a fraction of the database on
something small enough to take with her. Although this directly contradicted
the report from the EngineerCorp mainframe, which showed that
all
of the
data had been dumped, the engineer conjectured that the data must have filled
the target device and the rest of it had been lost during the transfer.

Eric leaned back in his chair, pensive.

If she only downloaded a fraction of the server, then
the situation may not be as bad as it seems. What would she want with a partial
download? What information was she after?

All that remained now was to find this device, if it
existed, ascertain if any of the data had been further compromised, and get rid
of any remaining loose ends.

In any case, young Alice will definitely be a guest of
EngineerCorp very soon…

***

Alice had been sitting on the sofa, staring at the
fireplace for quite some time. The inside was charred from the many fires burned
within its walls. Her memories were the only thing keeping it lit now. Sighing,
her thoughts returned to the present.

I can't risk everything on the hope that I will convince
EngineerCorp that I'm not a threat. I need a backup plan, just in case they don't
believe me.

She needed to find someone that could be enlisted to
protect her, or could at least pose enough of a threat to EngineerCorp to keep
her safe… Only, no one posed any kind of threat to them, especially since the
incident with Cyberconn.

Cyberconn?

Suddenly, unbidden images flashed through her mind. She saw
a confidential report detailing how EngineerCorp infiltrated the Cyberconn
network, and began siphoning information about all of their projects back to their
servers. There were blackmail letters to key people, preventing them from ever
revealing the truth and the story that was leaked to the press with the false information. 
Cyberconn had been set up, and subsequently ruined by the plot.

Cyberconn sent that email. If I find the person responsible,
I can offer him this information in exchange for helping me. That has to be
what he was hoping to find in the first place!

He could never know the nature of how she came across the
information, but it would hardly matter to him. All that would matter is that
someone could produce proof that Cyberconn was not responsible for the incident
that ruined them. With her ability to hack into the EngineerCorp mainframe, she
was more than qualified to do so.

A new, more disturbing thought occurred to her.

If EngineerCorp is capable of this level of trickery,
then what else are they capable of? All these years, they've produced one
ingenious product after another. What if none of them were original?

Eric Martin is a brilliant man, beyond doubt, but the
way his company has single-handedly dominated the market is suspiciously
convenient.

If their renown was due, in any part, to a history of
theft and sabotage, then they deserve to be exposed for what they really are.

She pulled out her laptop, set up her phone as a modem, and
began to work.

***

Garrett Wiggins was staring absently through the window in
his office. The trees were softly swaying in the wind, making everything seem
calm and serene. His reality was anything but that.

Garrett was not the issue; he was merely a victim of
circumstance. His appearance would never indicate his inner turmoil. In his
late twenties, and taller than average, he had warm, honey-colored eyes that
always seemed to be laughing, even if they were clouded with worry.  

Garrett was considered attractive by most women, with his
broad shoulders and slightly tousled, curly, dark hair. The small set of
business cards on the corner of his desk read, "Garrett Wiggins, President
of Cyberconn."

Cyberconn had at one time been situated in an industrial
part of New York City, a testimony to their success. However, at present, they
were located in a washed-up commercial section of a small town in New
Hampshire.

Garrett had been there when Cyberconn emerged as the leader
in the industry, offering technology that their competition only dreamed of. It
pained him to see how far they had fallen, now reduced to a second-rate tech
company, years behind the rest of the market.

The moment we engineer something, EngineerCorp flies to
market with something bigger, better, and more successful. Nobody even knows
who we are anymore. We're not even a blip on the edge of their radar.

Cyberconn was reduced to barely getting by. Any dream of
expansion or improvement was only that. A dream. Garrett sighed in frustration.
This month had been particularly exasperating, trying to keep numbers up in
sales. They had definitely had better months. 

Out of desperation, he compiled a list of the best and
brightest hackers, appealing to them to hack the EngineerCorp mainframe.

Of course, they had no idea it was "hacking."

He still had contacts in certain places, and while they
might not be able to infiltrate EngineerCorp, they could put him in contact
with other, more likely, candidates. Garrett did not believe any of them would
be remotely successful, but he dared to hope that one, just one of them, might
be able to breach the network.

The whole thing was beneath him...stooping to subterfuge,
irrationally hoping that they could somehow find what he was looking for. If he
could only prove that they had been set-up, that the whole "scandal"
was just an attempt to sabotage their success, they might finally stand a
chance again.  It would be an added bonus if EngineerCorp suffered for being
the conniving, conspiring monstrosity that it was.

Snap out of it, Garrett. There's not much point in
living in the past.

His eyes had come back into focus on a budding tree limb
outside his window as he heard a soft ding from his computer, signaling a new
email.

Garrett rolled his chair back to see what it was. His
eyebrows furrowed as he saw that the sender was unknown and the subject line
was blank. It was not flagged as spam by any of his highly efficient scanners,
so he decided to read it.