Killer Move

I’d had the idea of calling the company’s tech guy by midafternoon. It had taken him three hours to extricate himself from the IT needs of the main office, and forty minutes to check over my computer. Getting him to do this without yakking on and on about what he was doing was the hardest part, but luckily by then I was the only person left in the office. As soon as he’d pushed himself back from my desk, I’d nonetheless encouraged him to carry on the conversation elsewhere. Sitting with a spindly midtwenties guy in a tatty Pearl Jam T-shirt was not helping to resettle me, especially as his phone kept beeping at irregular intervals: a single, echoing ping, like sonar. He tilted his head to check the screen every single time this happened, but did not pick the phone up or do anything, and this was beginning to get on my nerves.

“You got two issues,” he said, squinting against the slanting remains of the day’s sun. “First is this e-mail. Simplest explanation is someone sat at your machine in the office. This is hardly an exploit of legend.”

“An ‘exploit’?”

“It’s what they call a hacking triumph.”

“Who are ‘they’?”

“Hackers.”

“Assholes with no life, you mean.”

“It’s a point of view. Anyway, an exploit is not what that scenario would constitute. Even newbies and script-kiddies would think it beneath them. You’d be amazed how many people leave their computers unattended, though, with their e-mail accounts lying open.” He looked pointedly at me.

“I’m a Realtor,” I said irritably. “I work in a tiny office with two people who are employed by the same company, one of whom has to be reminded how to set the alarm, even though it boils down to pressing four buttons and then another button and has been covered about a zillion times via memo and the spoken word. Concerted campaigns of cyberespionage are not one of my fears. I’m at DefCon Minus Five.”

The guy shrugged again, as if this was the kind of naïveté he encountered all the time—though I was confident his occupation consisted largely of crawling under people’s desks to check that cables were plugged in. Meanwhile, he slurped another mouthful of his ice cream cone. Although the girl who’d introduced me to it was not working, I’d ordered the mandarin mascarpone again, and it was the only part of this encounter I was enjoying.

The geek’s phone pinged once more. “Look,” I said. “Why is it making that noise?”

“The social network never sleeps.”

“You want to turn the sound off? It’s really getting on my nerves.”

He pressed a key. “You’re kind of tense, dude.”

“Yeah, I am,” I said, “because, according to you, someone snuck into my office this morning and, in view of at least one of my colleagues, forwarded an e-mail that I’ve never seen. Then trashed all evidence from my computer. And snuck back out. Right?”

“Actually, no,” the guy said. “The e-mail could have been set up anytime in the last weeks or months.”

“You can do that?”

“Yep.”

“Oh.” I didn’t like the sound of this. I’d preferred it when it had simply been impossible for me to have sent the e-mail at the time it claimed to have been sent. That gave me a concrete conundrum—and a specific time frame—to grab hold of and shake. This new idea untied the knot and had the potential to pull the event, and thus the intentions of whoever had done it, back in time.

“Except that probably wasn’t what happened,” the geek said smugly.

I stared steadily at him. I very much wanted a cigarette. He coughed and sat up straight.

“Okay,” he said. “Someone with skills could have dropped below GUI level and triggered it from underlying OS. I couldn’t find any sign of that, though, which brings me to Issue Two. You’ll recall I said there were two issues, right?”

“You did. How are you still alive, by the way?”

“This Amazon delivery you mentioned. Could be the two are unrelated, but . . . Occam’s razor, right?”

“What are you talking about now?”

“Medieval logician guy. He said if you’ve got two competing explanations for an event or situation, always choose the simplest, at least as your starting point. Point is, you have this weird e-mail, plus this morning you receive a book you say you never ordered.”

“I didn’t,” I said tersely.

“Your login for the Amazon account is your e-mail address, I assume? Like half the frickin’ world?”

“Yes,” I admitted.

“But there’s a password, too, right?”

I opened my mouth, then closed it again.

He nodded. “Right. Anyone can find your e-mail address. You probably bandy it about more than your actual name. But your password? That’s not for sharing. So this is where it starts to look concerted. Where do you keep a record of this password?”

“Nowhere. I just remember it.”

“Tell me it’s not something like your name or your wife’s name or date of birth.”

“It’s not. There’s no way anyone could guess it.”