Laura Caldwell - Red Hot Lies

“Michael is at work?” I asked. Please, please let him be at work, because I have to hack into that thing and make a duplicate copy of his hard drive.

The bank told Mayburn that they had paid for a laptop, which Michael used at home. Mayburn then explained that the hard drive on such a computer carried information about every keystroke ever made. The only way to truly destroy that electronic information was to physically kill the computer. “You could burn it or smash it,” Mayburn said, “or maybe throw it in a river, but beyond that, you can’t get rid of the information that was once there.”

“Don’t people clean out stuff on their computers all the time?” I said.

“They try. If they’re serious about it, they do something called scrubbing. But even with that, the files are no longer active, but the information can be found. So I just need you to get on DeSanto’s computer and download everything off it.”

I took one more look at the computer as Lucy led me toward the kitchen. God, I hoped I could I get in there and remember everything Mayburn had taught me. My palms felt slick with sweat at the thought.

The kitchen was huge, with taupe-colored granite and golden pine floors.

“I hope you didn’t eat lunch,” Lucy said. “I made some cucumber sandwiches.”

“Sounds great.”

Lucy told Eve to find Noah in the basement playroom, and after Eve scampered from the kitchen, it was just Lucy and me. For the next twenty minutes, we ate and talked, and I fell into my role as Isabel Bristol, average mom. I gave the story about how I’d become Kaitlyn’s stepmother. Lucy told me about how she met her husband at an opening of a local restaurant. She was in town as part of her job at a New York PR firm, and they’d handled the opening.

“I’d never been to Chicago,” Lucy said, “but I fell in love with it, just like I fell in love with Michael.”

“Was it a hard adjustment?” I asked. “To move here?”

She bent her head to the side, a thin sheet of her gold-spun hair falling on a shoulder. “Yes, I suppose. I mean, it’s so different here than New York, but in a good way. The hardest thing was realizing that we were here for good, while most of my family live in Connecticut now. I missed my sisters a lot. Still do. But this is my family now.” She gestured around her vast kitchen. “You know how it is.”

“Sure.”

Lucy was so easy to be with. She had a tinkling laugh that made you smile, and she had such an uncomplicated and sweet air about her.

But as we finished our sandwiches any ease I’d experienced evaporated, and I started dodging glances at my watch. Assuming I could get into DeSanto’s hard drive, which I had no real confidence about, the duplicate would take at least an hour, possibly two, to complete. I had to get in that office and on that computer now.

When Lucy stood to clear our plates, I grabbed my bag. It was heavy with the equipment Mayburn had loaded into it.

“Can I use your bathroom?” I pointed in the direction of a powder room that was just outside Michael’s office door.

“Sure, and I’ll go check on the kids.”

“Thanks.” I hoped desperately that Kaitlyn hadn’t defaced a painting or taken apart a stereo.

I stepped into the bathroom and closed the door behind me. Nervous, I looked at myself in the mirror, struck by how little I’d changed over the last week. My hair was still red and curly and fell past my shoulders. My eyes were still large and green. I didn’t look older, although I felt ancient. I didn’t look jaded, although the loss of innocence was palpable.

My heart rate started to ratchet up as I looked at myself. How in the world had I gotten here? Last week, I would never, ever have agreed to hack into someone’s computer, particularly someone who, as Mayburn had explained, might have some significant mob affiliations, but here I was about to do it.

Ignoring the hard thump, thump in the veins in my neck, I pulled latex gloves from my bag and tugged them on. I turned off the powder-room light and opened the door as quietly as possible. I stuck my head out. I couldn’t hear anything, which, hopefully, meant Lucy was still downstairs with the kids. My bag over my shoulder, I began stepping on my tiptoes in the direction of Michael’s office. I gave myself five minutes until Lucy might come looking for me. Five minutes to dismantle a computer and start downloading the hard drive.

The computer was off, just as Mayburn had said it would be.

“How am I going to turn on the computer?” I had asked him. “Won’t he have a password?”

“Oh, absolutely. And it’s probably encrypted with a fingerprint swipe to get on. That’s why you’ll leave it off.”

I unplugged the laptop and turned the thing over. It was a heavy one. The back had a number of panels screwed into place. I heard Mayburn’s words, Don’t try to decipher the panels, just unscrew them all.

I took out the set of screwdrivers he’d given me. My hands began to shake as I tried to match drivers to the different screws on the laptop. Finally, I found the right ones and unscrewed the four panels on the back. I got a shot of excitement, thinking I’d gotten to the hard drive, but all I found underneath was a sheet of metal, affixed with more screws.

Dammit. I shuffled through the screwdrivers again, finally unscrewing and lifting off the metal sheet. And that’s when I recognized the hard drive-it was square and made of aluminum. Four more screws held it in place. I unscrewed those, but now I had to detach the flexible cables that held the hard drive to the computer, pulling them apart from the motherboard. But the space that held the hard drive was cramped and my fingers felt as big as sausages. The thing wasn’t coming out.

“Okay,” I said under my breath. “You can do this.” I looked quickly over my shoulder. I heard nothing from the hallway or the kitchen. I looked at my watch. I’d been in there at least five minutes already. Should I return to the kitchen and try to get back to the office later? What if I didn’t have a chance?

“Go, Iz,” I said to myself, again under my breath.

I forced my fingers deeper into the bowels of the computer, gently twisting the hard drive from its place and, finally-Yes!-I extract the thing. It was surprisingly heavy-at least a pound in weight.

I rustled in my bag until I found the Logicube, a handheld hard-drive duplicator. It was blue with black sides and about the size of a large cordless telephone-roughly seven inches tall and four inches wide. An LCD screen covered the top of the device. At the bottom was a keypad.

I plugged the Logicube into the hard drive.

Don’t turn it on yet! I remembered Mayburn saying. If you turn that thing on before you attach the Write Blocker, we’re screwed.

You mean I’m screwed, I retorted in my head. I was the one sneaking around this house and breaking in to this computer. I was the one who’d littered the desk with a constellation of little screws. The pulse in my neck began tapping louder against my flesh. It felt like a drum in my throat.

Suddenly, I heard Lucy in the kitchen, singing a kids’ song softly to herself. I drew in a sharp breath, swiveling my head and looking over my shoulder again. Go, go, go! In minutes, she’d be down the hall to ask if I was all right.

“You can do this,” I whispered to myself.

I pawed through my bag until I found a box that looked like a black cigarette case.

The Write Blocker, I heard Mayburn say. It prohibits any change in the appearance of DeSanto’s data, so he’ll never detect you were on the computer.

I attached the Write Blocker to the Logicube and then, lastly, pulled from my bag a silver box, similar in size to the Write Blocker. An external hard drive.