Jake Needham - Killing Plato

After the obligatory muttered curses, I took a closer look and almost immediately discovered the problem.

The laptop was shut down rather than in standby the way I usually left it. I pushed the power button and immediately heard the reassuring whir of the hard disk spinning up. I almost never shut the thing down and I couldn’t remember doing it when I last used it, but I supposed I must have. God, I sighed to myself as I watched the Windows logo flash up and then disappear again, I must be getting forgetful in my old age.

When the log-on screen came up, I had to stop and think for a moment since I’d just changed my password a few days before, but then I typed in the new password and waited for the desktop to appear. It didn’t. Instead of the usual display of colorful icons against a restful blue background, I found myself contemplating a dialog box with an angry-looking red border around it.

WARNING, it said in big letters across the top. Then below that, in somewhat more restrained type, it announced: THERE HAS BEEN AN ATTEMPT TO ACCESS THIS COMPUTER WITHOUT PASSWORD AUTHORIZATION. FOR FURTHER INFORMATION PLEASE CLICK INFO BELOW.

What the hell?

I clicked the button with INFO on it.

AT 1937h ON 23 APRIL AN UNSUCCESSFUL ATTEMPT WAS MADE TO ACCESS THIS COMPUTER. AFTER THREE INCORRECT PASSWORD ENTRIES, IT WAS SHUT DOWN AND LOCKED. PRESS OK TO CONTINUE.

At least that explained why the laptop was shut down rather than in standby, but the explanation paled into insignificance next to the new question it raised.

Who the hell had been trying to get into my laptop?

I glanced at my watch. It was twenty minutes after nine. 1937h was 7:37 pm in actual people time. At 7:37 pm I had been with Tommy at Plato Karsarkis’ hideaway off Sukhumvit Road.

Had Anita been fiddling with my laptop? That seemed unlikely since she wasn’t in the apartment now. Would she have been here a couple of hours ago, tried to use my laptop, and then left again? Surely that couldn’t be right. Besides, Anita wasn’t very fond of computers and seldom even used her own. She had never touched mine at all as far as I knew. Why would she to start now?

On the other hand, if not Anita, then who? The maid was a sixty-four-year-old woman from a tiny village up on the Laotian border who left promptly at six every evening to go back to her daughter’s house across town. Even if she had still been here at 7:30, she wouldn’t have thought of trying to use a laptop computer anymore than she would have taken a whack at piloting the space shuttle.

I hit OK and the familiar Windows desktop filled my screen just as it always did.

I glanced through the files on my hard drive. Everything looked just as I had left it. Of course, that was the way it ought to look. The laptop had locked up when the password wasn’t entered correctly and no one could have accessed the hard drive anyway. Or could they?

What was going on here? Had someone been poking around in my study while I was out at Karsarkis’ hideaway? As improbable as that seemed, there didn’t appear to be any other explanation unless of course my security software had all of a sudden gone around the bend on its own, which I suppose was possible. The feeling of unease I’d had before, the sense of a disturbance in the air, was becoming distinctly more tangible.

Still, I asked myself, why would anyone have wanted to look at the files on my laptop? There really wasn’t much in them. I had the usual stuff most people did-some personal correspondence, a lot of pointless emails, a list of credit card numbers, some old tax returns, spreadsheets for my brokerage accounts, and a few other bits of personal information. It was hardly the sort of thing that would have held much interest for a cat burglar.

I looked closely at the surface of my desk, but nothing appeared to have been disturbed. Then I got up slowly and walked over to the lateral file cabinet on the opposite wall. I stood there a moment contemplating it warily.

When I pulled open the top drawer I guess I half expected to find a dead body inside. What I actually found, of course, were my files, and they looked pretty much the way they always looked. I ran my hand over the forest of manila tabs that stuck out above the dark green suspension folders. Then I pulled a couple out and glanced at their contents. Nothing struck me as out of the ordinary, so I put them back and closed the drawer again.

I was still standing there wondering if I ought to check out the other drawers and closets around the house-and exactly how far I would get before sheer embarrassment at my own foolishness would cause me to abandon the effort-when the doorbell buzzed.

My state of mind at that moment beinat wn g what it was, the sound of it scared the unholy crap out of me.

So absorbed was I in my outbreak of paranoia, I had forgotten for a moment that Jello was coming around. Opening the door I saw he had dressed for the occasion. He was wearing a lemon-yellow Hawaiian shirt with a chorus line of topless hula dancers strung out across the considerable width of his chest. The shirt hung out over a pair of baggy khakis and the cuffs of the khakis flopped onto a shiny pair of silver Air Jordans with black laces. For Jello, this was dressing.

I led him into the study and he paused next to the straight chair in front of my desk, examining it as if he wasn’t quite sure what it was. I had to admit it looked a little dainty next to him. A lot of people doubted Jello was a Thai since he was so big. Rather than possessing the wiry, whippet-like physique usually associated with Thais, Jello was build more like a sumo wrestler. A big sumo wrestler.

“You got something I won’t break?” he asked, pointing at the chair.

I sat back down behind my desk and waved him into the chair without saying anything. He settled gingerly onto it. Remarkably, it held.

“You get some bad sushi for dinner or something, Professor?” Jello studied my face as he laid the red accordion file he was carrying in his ample lap. “You don’t look too good.”

I tapped my fingers on the desk and avoided Jello’s eyes. How much should I tell him?

The last conversation I had with Jello had ended with ominous warnings from him not to have anything to do with Plato Karsarkis. If I told him I had just been hanging out with Karsarkis while somebody was breaking into my apartment and checking out my laptop, he would have looked at me pretty strangely. I could hardly blame him. Shoot, I was looking at me pretty strangely.

“Well…” I paused, but Jello didn’t say anything to help me out, so I made a snap decision to stick strictly to the mystery of the moment and leave Plato Karsarkis out of it. “It looks like somebody’s been messing with my laptop, but there’s nobody here who could have.”

“Anita?”

“No, she’s out and it happened just a couple of hours ago.”

Jello leaned forward and tossed the file he’d brought me onto the desk, then he folded his arms and looked at me.

“Go on,” he said.

I told him what I knew about what had happened, which wasn’t much, so it didn’t take long.

“Is there anything on the laptop anybody might want?” he asked when I was done.

“Not really. My class preparation stuff, a little personal financial data. Like that.”

“No client files?”

“No…well, nothing important. Certainly nothing anybody would want to break into my apartment for.”

“You think this was a break-in?”

“I don’t know what I think. Maybe the damned software is all fucked up. You asked me why I looked a little strange and I told you. Now lay off. Don’t grill me about it.”

I looked at Jello for ten or fifteen seconds and he looked back, but he never said a word. Then abruptly he stood up and began to wander around the sn="jtudy, apparently aimlessly, examining the framed memorabilia hung on the walls.