Spyware

Spurlock looked at him as if he was a nut. “Look man, I’m really in a hurry here. If you don’t want to help me out, then please take back your money and let me find some other way to solve my problem.”

The cop set his jaw. “I don’t buy it. I don’t buy any of it. I don’t recognize you and I know this neighborhood.”

Spurlock laughed in disbelief. “Look man, I’m new here, that’s all. I’m staying with my mom and looking for work, that’s all.”

“Let’s see the address on your ID, then.”

“I told you, man: I’m new here.”

“I’m off-duty, so I’m going to make a citizen’s arrest here until I can get back up.”

Spurlock argued and reasoned until his throat hurt, but the cop bought none of it. He got the cell phone from his wife’s and called in a car to come pick them up. While they waited Spurlock thought about bashing the guy, but he was pretty tough-looking and he decided that he’d rather take his chances with the system. For exactly this kind of emergency, he had no ID on him, and he had already buried the gun.

With luck, he’d just get released on the street within hours as a transient with a court date for panhandling. Davis was a liberal town. He’d have to trust to his luck.

… 21 Hours and Counting…

“We needed a break, this was a good idea,” sighed Johansen.

Vasquez glanced up at him without moving her head, then returned her attention to the report in her hands. Despite her bad mood, she allowed herself a private smile. Johansen was always complimenting his own ideas. It had been his idea to go to Black Angus for a prime rib dinner and she had consented after token complaints. Underneath it all, of course, she had to admit to herself that he was right. They both needed a break. In police work, you could drive yourself for days and weeks to exhaustion, and it was often counterproductive. Always, she had to remind herself of her instructors’ words in Quantico: “Better to sleep for eight hours and solve the case in one, than to stay up all night and be unable to think at all.”

Around them, the activity in the restaurant was subdued. It was after nine now, and most of the dinner crowd had already left. They sat together in a darkened private booth that would have been romantic if she hadn’t been in such a sour mood. They had lost track of three suspects now-Vance, Ingles and Nog-and still the internet was burning. Johansen ordered two margaritas without asking her if she wanted one. When the drinks arrived, she stared at hers for a moment, then took a gulp. The frozen slush pained her sinuses at first. Then it tasted good.

“This report is grim,” she told him. He watched her expectantly. His margarita was half-gone, but she knew from experience that alcohol had little effect on his bulky body.

She spoke in a hushed tone. “The internet has sustained significant damage. Approximately forty percent of the known servers have suffered some form of attack and it is estimated that most of the rest have a latent form of the virus hiding on disk, waiting to strike.”

Johansen nodded and leaned back a bit in his chair. “It’s like we’re fighting a thousand viruses at once, rather than just the latest one of the month,” he said. His hand slid down to his waist, and-although she couldn’t be sure-probably popped open the top button of his pants. Immediately after this move, he faked a cough and touched his hand to his mouth. There were a lot of large dishes stacked on his side of the table, and he had cleaned them all. Vasquez smiled down at her report.

“Let’s go over tomorrow’s checklist,” she said.

“Again?”

“Again,” she replied firmly.

Nodding, he produced a notepad. Even from across the table, she could see his neat, dark strokes of pen and pencil. The man really knew how to take good notes, and that had always impressed her. Vaguely, she wondered if that made her an obsessive-compulsive. She supposed that it did, but argued with herself that such a trait was often an advantage for a cop.

“Nog has been pinpointed at Brenda’s residence shortly before the police arrived. Witnesses noted his distinctive appearance and his Lincoln Towncar-” Johansen looked up from his notes with a grin, “- a fat guy in a huge white whale of a car must’ve impressed the kids.”

She nodded and smiled vaguely, hinting with the incline of her head that he should keep going. He caught the look and must have realized that she was doing some real thinking, because he snapped back to the notebook and dropped the levity from his voice.

“The presence of the police-band emissions detector-” here he lifted a small black box from his pocket and placed it on the table, “- seems to support the idea that Nog had recently been present,” Johansen paused for a moment to finger the box. “This is a nice piece of homebrew work, the electronics techs told me. It seemed like they were impressed, almost like they wanted to hire this Nog guy when we caught up with him.”

Vasquez nodded. “He’s clearly a genius.”

“It almost lends credibility to Vance’s claims.”