“Almost doesn’t count.”
A sad smile came to Sally’s lips. “I think to your wife it probably does.”
“Did she believe you?”
Sally shrugged. “I never heard from her again.”
He sat there and looked at her. He opened his mouth, not sure what he would say, but she stopped him with her open palm. “Don’t.”
She was right. He slid away from the counter and headed outside.
Chapter 36
As the stranger entered the garage, he thought, as he did nearly every time he came here, about all the famous companies that purportedly started in just this way. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak started Apple (why not call the company the Steves?) by selling fifty units of Wozniak’s new Apple I computer out of a garage in Cupertino, California. Jeff Bezos began Amazon as an online bookseller out of his garage in Bellevue, Washington. Google, Disney, Mattel, Hewlett-Packard, Harley-Davidson, all began life, if legend is to be believed, out of tiny, indistinct garages.
“Any word on Dan Molino?” the stranger asked.
There were three of them in the garage, all sitting in front of powerful computers with large monitors. Four Wi-Fi routers sat on the shelf next to paint cans Eduardo’s dad had put out here more than a decade ago. Eduardo, who was easily the best of them when it came to the technological aspects of what they did, had set up a system whereby the Wi-Fi not only went out and bounced all over the world, making them as anonymous as the Internet gets, but even if someone somehow tracked it back to them, the routers would automatically trip into action and move them to another host. In truth, the stranger didn’t get it all. But he didn’t have to.
“He paid,” Eduardo said.
Eduardo sported stringy hair that always needed a cut and the kind of unshaven look that made him look more greasy than hip. He was an old-school hacker who enjoyed the chase as much as the moral indignation or cash.
Next to him was Gabrielle, a single mother of two and the oldest of them by far at forty-four. Two decades ago, she’d started out as a phone-sex operator. The idea was to keep the guy on the line for as long as possible, charging his phone $3.99 per minute. More recently, in a similar vein, Gabrielle had posed as various hot housewives on a “no strings attached” hookup site. Her job was to coax a new client (read: dupe) into thinking sex was imminent until his free trial was over and he committed to a full-year subscription on his credit card.
Merton, their most recent colleague, was nineteen, thin, heavily tattooed, with a shaved head and bright blue eyes just south of sane. He wore baggy jeans with chains coming out of the pocket that hinted at either biking or bondage, it was hard to tell which. He cleaned his fingernails with a switchblade and spent his free time volunteering for a televangelist who did his services out of a twelve-thousand-seat arena. Ingrid had brought Merton in from her job at a website for a company called the Five.
Merton turned toward the stranger. “You look disappointed.”
“He’ll get away with it now.”
“With what, taking steroids to play big-time football? Big deal. Probably eighty percent of those kids are on some kind of juice.”
Eduardo agreed. “We stick to our principles, Chris.”
“Yeah,” the stranger said. “I know.”
“Your principles, really.”
The stranger, whose real name was Chris Taylor, nodded. Chris was the founder of this movement, even if this was Eduardo’s garage. Eduardo had been first in with him. The enterprise started as a lark, as an attempt to right wrongs. Soon, Chris realized, their movement could be both a profitable company and a source for doing good. But in order to do that, in order to not let one take over the other, they all had to stick to their founding principles.
“So what’s wrong?” Gabrielle asked him.
“What makes you think something’s wrong?”
“You don’t come here unless there’s a problem.”
That was true enough.
Eduardo sat back. “Were there any issues with Dan Molino or his son?”
“Yes and no.”
“We got the money,” Merton said. “It couldn’t have been that bad.”
“Yeah, but I had to handle it alone.”
“So?”
“So Ingrid was supposed to be there.”
They all looked at one another. Gabrielle broke the silence. “She probably figured that a woman would stand out at a football tryout.”
“Could be,” Chris said. “Have any of you heard from her?”
Eduardo and Gabrielle shook their heads. Merton stood and said, “Wait, when did you talk to her last?”
“In Ohio. When we approached Heidi Dann.”
“And she was supposed to meet you at the football tryouts?”
“That’s what she said. We followed protocol, so we traveled separately and had no communication.”
Eduardo started typing again. “Hold up, Chris, let me check something.”
Chris. It was almost odd to hear someone speak his name. The past few weeks, he’d been anonymous, the stranger, and no one called him by name. Even with Ingrid, the protocol had been clear: No names. Anonymous. There was irony in that, of course. The people he approached had assumed and craved anonymity, not realizing that in truth, it didn’t exist for them.
For Chris—for the stranger—it did.
“According to the schedule,” Eduardo said, staring at the screen, “Ingrid was supposed to drive to Philadelphia and drop off the rental car yesterday. Let me check and see. . . .” He looked up. “Damn.”
“What?”
“She never returned the car.”
The room chilled.
“We need to call her,” Merton said.
“It’s risky,” Eduardo said. “If she’s been compromised, her mobile might be in the wrong hands.”
“We need to break protocol,” Chris said.
“Carefully,” Gabrielle added.
Eduardo nodded. “Let me call her via Viber and knock the connection through two IPs in Bulgaria. It should only take me five minutes.”
It took more like three.
The phone rang. Once, twice, and then on the third ring, the phone picked up. They expected to hear Ingrid’s voice. But they didn’t.
A man’s voice asked, “Who is this calling, please?”
Eduardo quickly disconnected the call. The four of them stood still for a moment, the garage completely silent. Then the stranger—Chris Taylor—said what they were all thinking.