From Potter's Field (32 page)

But Lucy was out of her chair. She ran to the room where CAIN lived and scanned her fingerprint to get in. Glass doors unlocked with a firm click and I followed her inside. The same writing was flowing across the system monitor, and Lucy snatched a small beige remote control off the desk and pressed a button. She glanced at her Breitling and activated the stopwatch.

'Come on, come on, come on!' she said.

She sat before CAIN, staring into the screen as the message flowed. It was one brief paragraph repeated numerous times. It said:

- - -MESSAGE PQ43 76301 001732 BEGINS- - -TO: - All COPS FROM: - CAIN

IF CAIN KILLED HIS BROTHER, WHAT DO YOU

THINK HE'D DO TO YOU?

IF YOUR PAGER GOES OFF IN THE MORGUE,

IT'S JESUS CALLING.

- - -MESSAGE PQ43 76301 001732 ENDS- - -

I looked at the shelves of modems filling one wall, at lights flashing. Though I was not a computer expert, I saw no correlation between their activity and what was occurring on screen. I looked around some more and noticed a telephone jack below the desk. A cord that was plugged into it disappeared beneath the raised floor, and I found that odd.

Why would a device plugged into a telephone jack be stored beneath a floor? Telephones were on tables and desks. Modems were on shelves. I got down and lifted a panel that covered a third of the floor inside CAIN's room.

'What are you doing?' Lucy exclaimed, unable to take her eyes off the screen.

The modem beneath the floor looked like a small cube puzzle with rapid flashing lights.

'Shit!' Lucy said.

I looked up. She stared at her watch and wrote something down. The activity on the screen had stopped. The lights on the modem quit flashing.

'Did I do something?' I asked in dismay.

'You bastard!' She pounded her fist on the desk, and the keyboard jumped. 'I almost had you. One more time and I would have had your ass!'

I got up. 'I didn't disconnect anything, I hope?' I said.

'No. Dammit! He logged off. I had him,' she said, still staring at her monitor as if the green words might begin to flow again.

'Gault?'

'CAIN's imposter.' She blew out a big breath of air and looked down at the naked guts of the creation she had named after the world's first murderer. 'You found it,' she blandly said. 'That's pretty good.'

'That's how he's been getting in,' I said.

'Yes. It's so obvious no one noticed.'

'You noticed.'

'Not at first.'

'Carrie put it there before she left last fall,' I said.

Lucy nodded. 'Like everybody else, I was looking for something more technologically recondite. But it was brilliant in its simplicity. She hid her own private modem and the dial-in is the number of a diagnostics line almost never used.'

'How long have you known?'

'As soon as the weird messages started, I knew.'

'So you just had to play the game with him,' I said, upset. 'Do you realize how dangerous this game is?' I asked.

She began typing. 'He tried it four times. God, we were close.'

'For a while you thought Carrie was doing this,' I said.

'She set it up, but I don't think she's the one getting in.'

'Why not?'

'Because I've been following this intruder day and night. This is someone unskilled.' For the first time in months, she spoke her former friend's name. 'I know how Carrie's mind works. And Gault's too narcissistic to let anyone be CAIN except him.'

'I got a note, possibly from Carrie, that was signed CAIN,' I said.

'And I'll bet Gault didn't know she mailed it. And I'll also bet that if he found out, he took that little pleasure away from her.'

I thought of the pink note we suspected Gault had spirited away from Carrie at Sheriff Brown's house. When Gault placed it in the pocket of the bloody pajama top, the act certainly served to reassert his dominance. Gault would use Carrie. In a sense, she always waited in the car except when he needed her help to move a body or perform a degrading act.

'What just happened here?' I said.

Lucy did not look at me when she answered, 'I found the virus and have planted my own. Every time he tries to send a message to any terminal connected to CAIN, I have the message replicate itself on his screen - like it's bouncing back in his face instead of going out anywhere. And he gets a prompt that says Please Try Again. So he tries again. The first time this happened to him, the system icon gave him a thumbs-up after two tries, so he thought the message was sent.

'But when he tried the next time, the same thing happened, but I made him try one additional time. The point is to keep him on the line long enough for us to trace the call.'

'Us?'

Lucy picked up the small beige remote control I had seen her grab earlier. 'My panic button,' she said. 'It goes via radio signal straight to HRT.'

'I assume Wesley has known about this hidden modem since you discovered it.'

'Right.'

'Explain something to me,' I said.

'Sure.' She gave me her eyes.

'Even if Gault or Carrie had this secret modem and its secret number, what about your password? How could either of them log on as a superuser? And aren't there UNIX commands you could type that would tell you if another user or device was logged on?'

'Carrie programmed the virus to capture my username and password whenever I changed them. The encrypted forms were reversed and sent to Gault via E-mail. Then he could log on as me, and the virus wouldn't let him log on unless I was logged on, too.'

'So he hides behind you.'

'Like a shadow. He's used my device name. My same username and password. I figured out what was going on when I did a WHO command one day and my username was there twice.'

'If CAIN calls users back to verify their legitimacy, why hasn't Gault's telephone number shown up on ERF's monthly bill?'

'That's part of the virus. It instructs the system on callbacks to bill the call to an AT&T credit card. So the calls never showed up on the Bureau's bills. They show up on the bills of Gault's father.'

'Amazing,' I said.

'Apparently, Gault has his father's phone card number and PIN.'

'Does he know his son has been using it?'

A telephone rang. She picked it up.

FROM POTTER'S FIELD

317

'Yes, sir,' she said. 'I know. We were close. Certainly, I will bring you the printouts immediately.' She hung up.

'I don't think anyone's told him,' Lucy said.

'No one here has told Peyton Gault.'

'Right. That was Mr. Wesley.'

'I must talk to him,' I said. 'Do you trust me to take him the printouts?'

Lucy was staring at the monitor again. The screen saver had come back on, and brilliant triangles were slowly slipping through and around each other like geometry making love.

'You can take it to him,' she said, and she typed Prodigy. 'Before you go ... Wow, you've got new mail waiting.'

'How much?' I moved closer to her.

'Oops. Just one so far.' She opened it.

It read: What is gold foil?

Lucy said, 'We're probably going to get a lot of that.'

Sally was working the front desk again when I walked into the Academy lobby, and she let me through without the bother of registration and a visitors' pass. I walked with purpose down the long tan corridor, around the post office and through the gun cleaning room. I will always love the smell of Hoppes Number 9.

A lone man in fatigues was blasting compressed air into the barrel of a rifle. Rows of long black countertops were bare and perfectly clean, and I thought of years of classes, of the men and women I had seen, and of the times I had stood at a counter cleaning my own handgun. I had watched new agents come and go. I had watched them run, fight, shoot and sweat. I had taught them and cared.

I pressed the elevator button, boarded and went down to the lower level. Several profilers were in their offices, and they nodded at me as I walked by. Wesley's secretary was on vacation, and I passed her desk and knocked on the shut door. I heard Wesley's voice. A chair moved and he walked to the door and pulled it open.

'Hello,' he said, surprised.

'These are the printouts you wanted from Lucy.' I handed them over.

'Thank you. Please come in.' He slipped on reading glasses, reviewing the message Gault had sent.

His jacket was off, a white shirt wrinkled around woven leather suspenders. Wesley had been perspiring and he needed to shave.

'Have you lost more weight?' I asked.

'I never weigh myself.' He glanced at me over the top of his glasses as he seated himself behind his desk.

'You don't look healthy.'

'He's decompensating more,' he said. 'You can see that from this message. He's getting more reckless, more brazen. I would predict that by the end of the weekend, we will nail his location.'

'Then what?' I was not convinced.

'We deploy HRT.'

'I see,' I said dryly. 'They will rappel from helicopters and blow up the building.'

Wesley glanced at me again. He placed the paperwork on the desk. 'You're angry,' he said.

'No, Benton. I'm angry with you, versus being angry in general.'

'Why?'

'I asked you not to involve Lucy.'

'We have no choice,' he said.

'There are always choices. I don't care what anybody says.'

'In terms of locating Gault, she's really our only hope right now.' He paused, looking directly at me. 'She has a mind of her own.'

'Yes, she does. That's my point. Lucy doesn't have an off button. She doesn't always understand limits.'

'We won't let her do anything that might place her at risk,' he said.

'She's already been placed at risk.'

'You've got to let her grow up, Kay.'

I stared at him.

'She's going to graduate from the university this spring. She's a grown woman.'

'I don't want her coming back here,' I said.

He smiled a little, but his eyes were exhausted and sad. 'I hope she'll be back here. We need agents like her and Janet. We need all we can get.'

'She keeps many secrets from me. It seems the two of you conspire against me and I'm left in the dark. It's bad enough that . . .' I caught myself.

Wesley looked into my eyes. 'Kay, this has nothing to do with my relationship with you.'

'I would certainly hope not.'

'You want to know everything Lucy is doing,' he said.

'Of course.'

'Do you tell her everything you're doing when you're working a case?'

'Absolutely not.'

'I see.'

'Why did you hang up on me?'

'You got me at a bad time,' he answered.

'You've never hung up on me before, no matter how bad the time.'

He took his glasses off and carefully folded them. He reached for his coffee mug, looked inside and saw it was empty. He held it in both hands.

'I had someone in my office, and I didn't want this individual to know you were on the line,' he said.

'Who was it?' I said.

'Someone from the Pentagon. I won't tell you his name.'

'The Pentagon?' I said, mystified.

He was quiet.

'Why would you be concerned that someone from the Pentagon might know I was calling you?' I then asked.

'It seems you've created a problem,' Wesley simply said, setting the coffee mug down. 'I wish you hadn't started poking around Ft. Lee.'

I was astonished,

'Your friend Dr. Gruber may be fired. I would advise you to refrain from contacting him further.'

'This is about Luther Gault?' I asked.

'Yes, General Gault.'

They can't do anything to Dr. Gruber,' I protested.

'I'm afraid they can,' Wesley said. 'Dr. Gruber conducted an unauthorized search in a military database. He got you classified information.'

'Classified?' I said. 'That's absurd. It's one page of routine information that you can pay twenty dollars to see while you're visiting the Quartermaster Museum. It's not like I asked for a damn Pentagon file.'

'You can't pay the twenty dollars unless you are the individual or have power of attorney to access that individual's file.'

'Benton, we're talking about a serial killer. Has everybody lost their minds? Who the hell cares about a generic computer file?'

The army does.'

'Are we dealing with national security?'

Wesley did not answer me.

When he offered nothing more, I said, 'Fine. You guys can have your little secret. I'm sick and tired of your little secrets. My only agenda is to prevent more deaths. I'm no longer certain what your agenda is.' My stare was unforgiving and hurt.