Josh needed a way to get Helen’s boss to show himself. He racked his brain, coming up with a hundred variations. All led to dead ends. He had to assume he couldn’t just track her boss’ IP address, though he’d try just to be sure. If Josh got his phone number, it would probably be untraceable – he could be replacing the SIM card or using a stolen account. He’d still check to be thorough, but Josh didn’t believe it would work. What did he know about him? Josh knew he didn’t care about killing innocent people and would hire someone like Helen to do it. Josh didn’t know what he wanted with the Ventrica. Rigas’ story about Bernard Mills and the software company was all the convincing Josh needed that he was just one of the people whose life had been ruined by this scam, so he also knew her boss was motivated by money. Josh couldn’t get to him by threatening to expose him, but maybe the Ventrica design was important enough to get him to incriminate himself. There were also the accounts. Josh had logged in while Rigas was out and found $17.5M in the second account. He was pretty sure the 2.5M from the first account was Crawford’s and the bigger account was Helen’s. Maybe that money, plus the Ventrica, could be enough bait. Josh wasn’t sure how good a blackmailer he could be, but he was going to find out.
Showing great timing again, Rigas pounded on the door just as Josh was getting the last couple minutes of hot water out of the shower and thinking about the details of the plan. Still wet but properly covered this time, he let her in.
“Nice hair,” was her greeting this time. “Hello” wasn’t part of her vocabulary.
“I’ve got an idea.”
“Well, quit dripping and start talking. Let’s get some food, too.”
She brushed by and headed to the kitchen, again. They seemed to have established a pattern. She rummaged around and pulled some things out of the fridge. It was mid afternoon, so a late lunch or early dinner was fine. They heated things in the microwave and sat at the kitchen table. Josh noticed Rigas had combed out her hair. She wasn’t one for makeup, but he saw a hint of gloss on her lips. It looked nice.
Josh told her what he was thinking. About the plan, not about how nicely her lips were glistening. A little tomato sauce from a meatball sandwich she’d made sat on the corner of her mouth. He offered her a napkin but she brushed him off. She thought about the idea he’d come up with, then licked the sauce off with her tongue. Josh felt a little tingle again.
“You wanna piss him off enough so he’ll tip his hand? That’s your plan? Brilliant. What’s your back-up plan – we hire Inspector Clouseau to track him down?”
“If I can get him to get in touch, I can track him down. I just need to get him into a dialog, so we have to go back and forth. Email and cell phone. If I can get him to contact me enough times, I might be able to find out where he is.”
Rigas looked a little irritated now. “I thought you said you couldn’t track him that way.”
“Not exactly the same way. One call or email isn’t enough – not if he’s taking precautions. But if I know he’s going to use the phone or email, then I can set up a series of hunts to narrow him down. The first will tell me which region of the country, the second which city, and a couple more will let me identify the wireless connection or cell region he’s using. He’d only be untraceable if he switches Internet providers or cell phones every time he’s in contact. He’d have to have a new phone every other call, and I don’t think that’s likely.” Josh said this with more confidence than he was feeling, but knew it could be done technically. What he didn’t say was that if Helen’s boss were moving around in one city or traveling to multiple cities, Josh couldn’t do it. He needed to have contact with him four or five times over a short period of time, a few hours, to be able to find him.
She thought about it for a minute. “Okay, if he responds then it ties him to the Ventrica. We’ll include some stuff about the Mills murders too. If he thinks he can’t be tracked, he might not deny his involvement. That’ll be incriminating enough to pin him to it. Then we can put the rest of the pieces together. And there’s something else.” She told Josh about the Lockheed missile test and the involvement of the software company where Bernard Mills had worked. Then she looked at him expectantly, like Josh was going to put it together. No way this was all a coincidence, and he realized what it meant; it made sense and it scared him.
“Mills must have been working on the software for the missile intercept system, I’ll bet. Helen got to him. But why?” Josh was asking himself, not Rigas. To her, this was information to help tie Helen’s boss to criminal activities. To Josh, this was a step in understanding why Helen’s boss was doing this, which could lead to finding him before he found Allison and Josh. There was also a certain amount of curiosity about the person who was doing all this, though that curiosity was lagging far behind the part of Josh that feared the reach of someone who could affect a missile test by the U.S. government.
“Why was your friend so upset about the news report?”
“Not my friend…but he was pissed because he’d been playing the market and Lockheed’s stock dropped or something.”
It made Josh’s head hurt to think about it, but he knew the answer. Helen had gotten this poor guy Mills to do something to the software, maybe sabotage it, so the test would be a failure. Lockheed stock would drop – a lot. Her boss must be playing the market, shorting Lockheed. It would be worth millions if you knew ahead of time the stock was going to take a hit. It was brilliant, but sick. He explained it to Rigas.
“Damn! I like that. We should be able to track him, find out who bought a lot of Lockheed stock just before the missile screw-up.” She thought about it some more. “And we can use it in this social hack bullshit you’re gonna do. Spook him a little. Let’s go.”
Josh started to get excited. Rigas may be tough, but he trusted her opinion. If she thought this would work, then his confidence grew. They headed back into the office, Rigas carrying the rest of her sandwich.
Josh had already thought about the first email message he would send. It had to be a smart, careful inducement to get this guy into a conversation. The series of messages Josh had planned were going to make a very dangerous person very angry and he needed to keep Helen’s boss interacting with him.
Josh began to compose the email, Rigas leaning in over his shoulder and giving pointed advice. Focused on the message, he was distracted by the scent of strawberries. He realized with a start it was Rigas’ hair. He took a quick glance at her but shook it off before she could notice. Only she had noticed and it made her smile to herself.
Josh only had one example of Helen’s messages to her boss, from the keylogger he had put on her computer. Her email account didn’t keep copies of old emails sent. But between that one example and the two she had sent him, Josh got the sense criminals weren’t chatty in their emails. It took ten minutes but when he hit the Send button, he was fairly confident they would get his attention posing as Helen.