Джозеф Файндер - House on Fire

On the plane I found myself thinking about the last time, before the Conrad Kimball dinner, that I saw Maggie Benson.

We’d met for lunch at a Turkish restaurant she liked a lot on the East Side of Manhattan. I hadn’t seen her for a few years, but out of the blue she’d reached out to me, asking to meet. She was even more beautiful than when we were going out. She’d let her hair grow, and she’d put on a little weight, which looked good on her. She seemed happy.

She had a lot of questions about what I did for a living, and it became clear that she was thinking seriously of becoming a private investigator herself. I remembered her saying, “It’s safe, right?”

“Safe how?”

“I mean your personal safety. Like, I don’t need a weapon, do I?”

“Better if you have one,” I said.

“Oh, really?”

“I’ve used mine a couple of times,” I said. “But I think that’s the exception. It’s mostly safe. Boring, sometimes, but safe. Hey, listen. About what happened—”

“Water. Bridge.”

“Seriously, I didn’t get it at first. I think I do now, and...”

She gave me a long look. There was a lot of sadness in her eyes. “Licensing,” she said. “How does that work, state by state?”

She hadn’t wanted to talk about it, what I’d done with General Moore, but I knew it was still there between us.

I thought back to happier times. When she’d slapped a pile of folders down on my desk. And the words kept echoing in my mind:

I just handed you the baton.

Your only job is to run like hell and bring it home.

And I knew I wasn’t going to let Maggie down. I wasn’t going to let her death be for nothing.

I had to make it right.

I arrived in Boston in the late evening. By the morning, I was running on empty. I got to my office and made some coffee and found a profoundly discouraged Dorothy Duval.

She had tried every password cracker program she knew of. Nothing worked. Dr. Scavolini’s encrypted folder remained encrypted. It was a huge folder too — one hundred gigabytes.

Dorothy is very good at what she does. I had no doubt she had done everything she could think of. But without proof of the Tallinn file, I would lose. Conrad Kimball would escape justice. The recording in Anguilla wouldn’t be enough.

This happens. The bad guys win sometimes. You move on.

Then my phone rang, and it was Detective Goldman from Bedford. “Did you have a chance to talk to Cameron?” he said.

“No, not yet.”

“Well, I did. I talked to him about that alleged ‘booty call’ he made in the middle of the night. I told you, he didn’t make any booty call. The kid went to score some fentanyl from a dealer in Newburgh, New York. So it couldn’t have been him.”

Stunned, I said, “You got that out of him?”

“Not easily, but yes.”

“What about the cameras at Fritz Heston’s house? Have you had a chance to check them out?”

“I did. They confirm that his car didn’t leave his house until he got the call from Conrad, in the morning.”

I nodded to myself. “Okay,” I said. “I’ll call you when I know more.”

Half an hour later Gabe sauntered into the office. He dropped the key to my Toyota on my desk. Then he came around behind me to peek at what was on my computer monitor. “Why are you Googling Neil deGrasse Tyson?” he said. “Is he a client? Cool.”

“No. Trying to figure out a password.”

“His?”

“No. A fan of his. But I might be barking up the wrong tree. I have no idea. It’s worth trying.”

“How long is the password?”

“No idea. We don’t know.”

“Letters and numbers?”

“Could be. Or catchphrases.”

“Huh,” he said. He was mimicking me but probably wasn’t aware of it. “Could be anything.”

“Pretty much.”

“The good thing about science is that it’s true whether or not you believe in it.”

“Okay,” I said. Apparently he knew the Tyson quote too.

“I mean, that’s a quote. Something he says. Neil deGrasse Tyson. It’s a meme.”

I squinted at him, tilted my head. “A meme.”

“A meme, you know? A meme. You know what a meme is?”

“Sure.” My understanding was that a meme was basically a saying, maybe a catchphrase, a caption on a photograph passed around the internet. Usually clever and funny, but not always.

“So it’s a meme. Something like that. It’s something he said once. Google it.”

I did, without understanding fully what he was talking about, along with Tyson’s name. A bunch of cartoons of Tyson came up, and some YouTube windows. I read aloud, “‘The good thing about science is that it’s true whether or not you believe in it.’” It looked to be a more popular phrase than I’d thought.

“That’s it. You got it.”

I IM’d Dorothy and asked her to come in. She arrived a few seconds later. “Yes? Oh, hello, Gabe,” she said frostily.

“Hello,” he replied neutrally.

“Gabe here has a passphrase to suggest. For the encrypted folder.”

“Okay.”

Gabe said, “The good thing about science is that it’s true whether or not you believe in it.”

She looked at him. “That’s a passphrase?”

He explained.

Dorothy shrugged, then said, “Can I use your chair?”

I got up and let her sit at my keyboard. Gabe looked over her shoulder. She tapped for a while and then repeated the sentence. She typed it in. Looked back at Gabe with satisfaction on her face. “With spaces,” she said. “Nothing. Doesn’t work.”

“Now try it without any spaces,” Gabe said. “All one word.”

Dorothy nodded. She tapped away at the keyboard. “Nope.”

“Shit,” Gabe said.

Then Dorothy said, “Watch out, guys, we’re dealing with a badass over here.”

“Who, Gabe?” I said, ready to defend him.

“Try it!” said Gabe.

“Try what?” I said.

“‘Watch out, we got a badass over here.’ It’s another Tyson meme,” said Gabe.

Dorothy tapped some more. “Nope. Let me try it without the comma. No spaces.”

She hit a couple of keys. Blinked a few times, inhaled sharply.

“Lord, that did it!” she said. “That did it. That worked. Oh, my Jesus God.”

“It worked?” I said, stupidly.

“Watchoutwegotabadassoverhere,” she said, beaming. “All one word, no comma.”

“Well done, guys,” I said. Dorothy shrugged, and then Gabe did too.

“It’s not just one document,” she said. “It’s a separate drive full of documents. There’s a folder labeled oxydone estonian study, 1999.”

“That’s it,” I said, my heart thudding.

“And a lot of correspondence about it, looks like,” Dorothy said. She tapped at the keyboard some more. “Here’s one from Conrad Kimball. Wait, a bunch from Conrad Kimball. To and from him.” She chuckled, nearly giggled. “It’s all here, Nick.”

Gabe looked at me, and I winked at him, unseen by Dorothy, to let him know I knew the score. That he deserved some credit too, not just Dorothy.

She said, “You want to Dropbox it or something to the client?”

“Can you put it on a thumb drive?” I said. “And I need to see Devlin as soon as possible. I’m going to Katonah tomorrow. And you, Gabe. When I’m done, you and I have to talk.”

I was tense about returning to Kimball Hall. Too many things had to go right. And there were too many variables. For one thing I really had no idea what Conrad Kimball was planning, and that made a difference. Nor what Sukie was going to do.

Early in the morning I picked up a couple of large black coffees from Dunkin’ Donuts and set out for Katonah in my old Toyota.