[Steven Lyle Jordan]

7: Ambush

I came in the door, and immediately heard my brother shout, “Danger, Will Robinson!” I spun around in time to catch the beer he’d hurled at me, barely having time to muse about how my thoughts were now leaking across chapter boundaries. As he came out of the kitchen, he said, “So, how did your little con job go?”

“I think it went well,” I said, twisting off the beer top and reaching out to clunk the bottle against Pete’s in a toast. “I’ll keep an eye on the webs over the course of the next day or two, and see if we catch a thief.”

“Hmm… you know,” Pete said, “neither of us is supposed to be old enough to remember Will Robinson… or Alexander Mundy.”

“Better that,” I said, “than confess to watching Captain Planet. I’ll keep sixties television, thanks.” I tossed Pete’s car keys in the air, and he snagged the keyring on a pinkie. I took note. “You training to make a killing at a carnival?”

“Just keeping my reflexes in shape,” Pete grinned. “You never know when a little dexterity may come in handy.”

“That’s what she said,” I commented lightly as I headed for the dining room to unload my pants. (Excuse me: To unload the electronics gear from my pants pockets. You have such smutty minds.)

A few hours later, we were still hanging on the balcony, just chatting idly and checking out the babes at the pool, and beyond on the beach. Well, we weren’t really so close to the beach that we could check out the girls there without a pair of binoculars. And there were enough pretty girls down at the pool that we didn’t really feel the need to lift Pete’s binoculars from the table. So mostly we just checked out the pool.

“I could get used to this,” I said abruptly, and took a deep chug off of my beer.

“Glad to hear it,” Pete said. “I really do think staying in San Diego will be good for you. There’s no reason you have to go back to Baltimore.”

“Baltimore isn’t so bad,” I said defensively. Well, slightly defensively. Actually, I just said it to be saying it.

“Ahh, you’re just saying that,” Pete said. “The whole east coast has a way of turning people conservative… complacent… and…”

“Convivial?”

“No, that’s not it…”

“Communistic?”

“You wish…”

“Covalent?”

“Cut that out!” Pete snapped. He raised his finger at me, and said, “Sar—” he held the word after the “r”, and used his finger to stab out the rest of it… “—castic! That’s what you are!”

“Well, at least I’m not alliteratively-challenged,” I gloated. Pete was about to try to retort, when a preprogrammed ding went off on my Toughbook. “Hold that thought… if you can,” I said, as I hopped out of my chair and went to the laptop in my Borgspace. Sure enough, I had a message that my Trojan Horse was moving around. I’d designed it to poke around the computer of any entity that downloaded it, or even ordered it moved from one place to another, so I could verify the identity of the user. Assuming the perpetrator was at another location, I could then locate them, and the police would have a place to serve a search warrant. If it was an inside job, there was every possibility that the perp wasn’t dumb enough to use their own PC… but I had a way to deal with that, if need be…

Hold on. As I watched the screen, I realized there was something I’d missed. And I was about to be screwed by it. “Aw, damn!”

“What?” Pete looked up from his chair. “What’s wrong?”

“I F’ed up! I need your car!” I snapped the Toughbook closed and threw it into my gear bag, then bolted out of the dining room.

“Key!” Pete shouted, and threw the keys at me. I snagged them back-handed, as I reached the door and threw it open. And immediately ran into Gail.

“Oof! Hi, lover—” Gail got out, but not before I was grabbing her shoulder with my hand and turning her one-eighty in the foyer. I yelled back, “Key!” and threw it back at Pete, then pushed Gail out the door and followed close behind her.

“What’s the matter!” Gail demanded as I rushed her out.

“We have to get to Coyote Chow! You’re driving!”

“Whu—”

“Go!”

We went… downstairs, faster than the elevator could’ve gotten us down, and sprinted for Gail’s Eclipse. I was pretty damned sure it would move faster than Pete’s Fit, and when Gail threw it into gear and yanked the wheel to the left, I knew I was in speedy hands. We vaulted the hump at the parking lot entrance and laid a patch on the road as we bolted southward.

“All right,” Gail finally said, still a bit breathless from our dash from upstairs. “Tell me what’s happening!”

“I got a signal from my Trojan Horse,” I explained, opening up the Toughbook on my lap. “The file is being accessed… and it’s being done by someone at Coyote Chow, right now!”

“It is an inside job!” Gail breathed, and her eyes narrowed.

“Well… it might not be,” I told her. “The data I received told me something Lou neglected to mention when I spoke to her. The office has a wi-fi connection.”

“What?”

I nodded sickly, knowing how big a bone this might throw into my plans. “It looks like it’s a small server attached to a common printer in the office. It lets anyone print to the printer at the office, including someone who might come in with a personal computer, without having to run a bunch of wires around for everyone. The problem is,” I continued, “the same connection allows anyone who knows the right passwords to access the main server, and any computers connected to it and running, from anywhere within range of the wifi signal.”

“Don’t wifi signals broadcast out to, like, fifty feet or more?” Gail asked.

“Yup.”

Gail’s eyes went wide. “But that means—”

“It means the perp could be sitting in the office, or outside in the parking lot,” I stated. “And if we don’t get there before they’re done, we may never know who it was!”

“We can’t possibly get there in time!” Gail said, just as she was swinging us onto the highway and flooring the Eclipse.

“Hopefully,” I said, “I can slow them up…” Lou had given me enough information about their office’s servers to allow me to log in and mess around. I was trying to do that now. Basically, I just started a few routines that would slow the operations of any computer connected to the server to a crawl, and even force up some error messages. Hopefully the perp would roll their eyes a bit at the delay, and maybe even restart their connection in hopes of clearing it, but not cut and run before they were done. Gail, guessing at what I was doing, shut up and let me work, and we passed the next few minutes in silence. It was thankfully after rush hour, and already starting to get dark, so hopefully Gail’s white streak would manage to avoid any police engagements.

At about the time I guessed we’d be running out of time, Gail swung us off of the highway, and we ploughed down the industrial park roads to get to Coyote Chow. As we came around the corner that finally put the building in sight, we could see a car bouncing out of the parking lot and into the street ahead.

“We caught ‘em!” Gail cried.

“Don’t lose ‘em!” I cried back.