Note: Four chapters without Reese beating anyone up? Amazing. I regret to inform you that the wait is now over. Please, please, don't cry.
He hasn't kneecapped anyone yet. This must be some sort of record.
I know just enough about ECC to be dangerous.
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Two Years Prior
Elizabeth Ruben had sequestered the little nylon gun case in the far back of the utility closet. Most of the space in the tiny compartment was taken up by a squat electric water heater and above that, an absurdly compact furnace. There was a wide shelf mounted near the ceiling. The shelf had been cut away to accommodate an air duct stretching upward from the furnace and the gun case had been nestled behind the duct, hidden from view by an empty cardboard box for a rechargable back massager.
Inside the gun case was a small black pistol, three empty magazines, and a box of bullets.
Reese called Finch, examining the gun as he spoke.
"It's a .22 caliber pistol," he said. "Doesn't look like it's been fired for awhile, Finch."
There was nothing but static on the line.
"Finch?"
"Yes, Mr. Reese, I heard you." Was it some trick of the earpiece, or did Finch sound—disappointed? Angry?
"Everything all right, Finch?"
"Fine, Mr. Reese. Have one of the detectives run the serial number to see when it was acquired by Miss Ruben—if it is indeed hers to begin with."
Reese took out his cell phone, fired up the camera app, and snapped a picture of the serial number stamped on the gun. Then, he hit speed dial.
A grumpy voice rasped in Reese's earpiece: "Fusco."
"Hello, Lionel," Reese drawled.
"Yeah, what do you want?"
"For starters, Lionel, I want you to be more thorough when you search someone's apartment. We've been over this before. In the future, it would be very helpful if you manage to find the gun that someone hid behind the furnace in the utility closet."
"Wha—the Ruben girl?"
"That's right, Lionel. Next time, I'm not buying you a doughnut. You'll just have to bring an extra candy bar."
Reese could just about hear Fusco squirming in his seat.
"Look, I didn't have time to turn the place upside-down. It took long enough going through her bedroom."
"It might've gone faster if you hadn't spend so much time in her underwear drawer."
Sputtering. "What—! I didn't—"
"I'm sending you a photograph of the gun's serial number. Now what I want is for you to run it through the police database. Think you can handle that, Lionel? Search thoroughly."
"Yeah. Uh, I'll do it right now, hang on—"
Something clicked in the apartment entryway. Something that sounded suspiciously like a lock being turned—or picked.
"I'll have to call you back, Lionel," Reese said. He slipped the gun back into its case, put the case back in the utility closet, and closed the closet door. Drawing his own weapon, Reese whispered, "Finch? Someone else is breaking into Elizabeth's apartment."
"Oh dear. Please do be careful, Mr. Reese."
Reese flattened himself against a wall perpendicular to the entryway, where he wouldn't be immediately seen by anyone coming in through the front door. There was more scrabbling at the lock, another click, and the door opened. Closed. Reese heard footsteps approaching. He thumbed the gun safety off.
A swarthy, bulky man, wearing jeans and a short gray T-shirt, walked right past Reese without realizing that anyone else was in the apartment. His black hair was cropped close to his head; he had the look of someone who spent too much time at the gym and Reese guessed he was about thirty years old. His hands were empty, but that didn't mean he was unarmed. A laptop bag hung from his shoulder.
Reese kept his gun trained on the man's back. The intruder peered around the living room, then spotted the open bedroom door and moved rapidly towards it. Reese followed, silent as the night.
Once in the bedroom, the man headed for Elizabeth's desk like iron fillings drawn to a magnet. He ignored Finch's laptop—which was still busy cloning the hard drive—and went right for the notes scattered on the desk. Unzipping the bag, he grabbed a handful of the notes and stuffed them inside.
"Hi there," Reese said.
The man spun around, dropped the bag. His mustache twitched and his eyes were wide. He frantically dipped his hand into his pocket and withdrew a switchblade, which he brandished in front of him, attempting to look as menacing as possible.
"Oh, buddy, I wouldn't do that if I were you," Reese said, tilting his head.
Apparently the man wasn't in the mood to accept constructive criticism. Instead of taking the easiest (and least painful) way out, he lunged forward and swiped at Reese.
Who was holding a gun.
Amused, Reese avoided the attack and knocked the knife out of the would-be thief's hand. Momentum betrayed the intruder; he went right past Reese, who grabbed the man's wrist and twisted it sharply behind his back, forcing the man face-down to the floor.
"Let go of me, asshole!" the man shouted. Reese twisted the man's arm harder, turning the thief's angry bellowing into gasps of pain. He tapped the barrel of his gun against the back of the man's head.
Finch's frantic, tinny voice buzzed in Reese's ear. "Mr. Reese? What's going on?"
"It's not polite to call people names," Reese said to the man, with the same conversational air one might use when considering what to order at a restaurant. "Especially not someone who's pointing a gun at your head. Let's start over. Hi. My name is John. What's your name?"
"Oww! Goddamnit. The man hadn't yet realized that struggling did little more than encourage Reese to force his arm into an even more unnatural and painful position. Reese ground the thief's face into the carpet.
"Nice to meet you, Goddamnit. See? We're on better terms already. What are you doing in this apartment? Who sent you after the notes?"
"I don't know! Fuck, man, I don't know! They set it up by email, OK? Anonymous, didn't know who, didn't ask."
"How much were you paid? What were you instructed to do?"
"Just—shitshitshit, owww, shit!-it just said to take the notes! Said to take the notes and get rid of them. That's all it said, I swear! I'm getting paid thirty thousand bucks in coins. Ten down, twenty later."
"When?"
"T-t-tomorrow morning."
"Thanks, Goddamnit," Reese said. Then he clubbed the man on the back of the head. He collapsed, unconscious.
He tapped his earpiece. "Finch," he said, "the guy was after Elizabeth's notes. Given his schedule, I think that whatever is going to happen is going to happen today. Elizabeth may be in danger."
"What do you suggest, Mr. Reese?"
"Stick close to her, Finch. I'll wrap things up here and meet you later."
He signed off and got to work. The first order of business was to restrain the thief. Fortunately, Elizabeth kept a roll of duct tape beneath the kitchen sink; it was quite effective at binding the unconscious man. Next, Reese put the notes back on the desk, getting them as close to their original position as possible; he accomplished this by referring to the pictures he had taken earlier. Reese scooped up the knife, checked the man's pockets to ensure he had nothing he could use to free himself. He found a cell phone and took it.
The second hard drive finished cloning several minutes later. Reese put the hard drive back in Elizabeth's laptop, packed away the equipment he had brought, ensured that everything was as it had been (except for, of course, the unconscious man bound on the floor), grabbed his duffel bag, and headed for the entryway. He made sure to leave the front door open a crack as he stepped outside.
Reese walked down the front path and dialed his cell phone.
"Hello, Detective Carter," he said. "I have a present all wrapped up for you..."
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Finch kept a wary eye on Elizabeth Ruben throughout the day. At noon, she ate lunch—at her desk. Afterwards, she took a break and went for a walk—around the perimeter of the office. Then she returned to her computer and started typing again.
Dedicated, indeed. Or, perhaps obsessed with her programming project. Finch could most definitely relate.
The subjugation of the Landis intranet was proceeding nicely. Finch had compromised an administrator account and then added a set of rules to the external firewall, allowing him to later access the Landis systems via the Internet. He had installed several remote backdoor rootkits into key servers and he almost, almost had the stubborn source code repository server under his control. He had even finished the HTML coding he had been assigned, albeit with much grumbling and muttering about how anyone who found this sort of work to be fun must have been from Mars.
He had also gained access to three of Miss Ruben's home computers—via vulnerabilities in various daemons and services running on each one—and would soon have access to four more. The young woman may have employed excellent wireless encryption, but she didn't keep up with security patches very well. The computers in her apartment were busy compressing their own files and sending them through the backdoor to Finch's computers at HQ for later analysis. Unsurprisingly, Miss Ruben's home Internet connection was proving to be a bottleneck, but he was confident that he would have the contents of at least half the computers downloaded by this evening...
Assuming it wasn't too late by then.
Finch hoped that Reese's interruption of the break-in at Elizabeth Ruben's apartment would preclude any sort of excitement today. He wasn't confident that he would be able to do to protect Elizabeth Ruben from harm (or prevent her from causing harm) here at the Landis offices. Finch didn't have any sort of weapon. His sole self-defense technique, emphasis on the self, was to poke someone in the eye. And while it had a 100% real-world success rate—he had tried it once, and it had worked, giving a ratio of 1 out of 1—he wasn't confident it would ward off a determined attacker. He could only hope that no one would come after Elizabeth in such a public location.
He tried not to think about it too much. Instead, he focused his attention on the mysterious notes that had been found on Miss Ruben's desk. They appeared to be incomplete, but the information present was leading Finch to believe that they were portions of a cryptography algorithm. He did his best to fill in the unknown parts of the algorithm—which, he had to admit, was delightfully puzzling—in between conquering servers and watching Elizabeth Ruben type.
At 12:52PM, a young man named Bobby Tam stopped at Miss Ruben's desk. Finch had met him briefly earlier in the morning; he seemed friendly enough, if a little shy and socially awkward. A hectic nest of black hair; scuffed black leather shoes; a shirt with an uneven, wrinkled collar; black slacks, faded in places—his appearance was rather shabby, but Finch had seen several of Mr. Tam's Linux shell scripts in his exploration of the Landis network, and he recognized the potential behind that succinct, efficient code.
Tam stayed only for a minute or so, and when he left, Elizabeth was smiling.
At 2:21PM, Tara Dodson tapped Elizabeth Ruben on the shoulder. Finch couldn't help but notice that the two women was very nearly opposite in appearance. Elizabeth wore her blue dress and flat sandals, with shoulder-length hair and very little jewelry to speak of; Tara wore a tailored gray suit, unstably high heels, and far too many bracelets and earrings. Her ginger hair was cropped quite short. Unlike with Miss Ruben's other coworkers, Finch had a vague notion of the subject of their conversation; the lanky older woman had quite a boisterous voice, and it carried.
"I didn't see your code commit in mainline today, Lizzy," Tara said.
Miss Ruben, who looked quite irritated at the sudden interruption—or perhaps at the nickname—said something in return.
"What do you mean, it's not done?" said Tara.
Another response, this one more snappish.
"Testing is for the QA monkies. The firmware ships in six weeks. We're waiting on your code, Elizabeth. Just commit what you have."
Elizabeth crossed her arms and leaned back in her chair. Raised her eyebrows. Her curly hair bounced as she shook her head.
"Fine. Do it your way." Tara jabbed a finger at Elizabeth. "But if the firmware ships late, I don't care who roots for you this time—I'll make sure you're out. Got it?"
In response, Elizabeth turned back to her computer. Tara caught sight of Finch's stare and said, "What are you looking at, bozo? Get back to work!"
"Yes, ma'am." Gulping, Finch buried his head in his monitor.
At 3:37PM, Reese reminded Finch that he was one-sixteenth ninja by blood.
"Hello, Harold."
Finch jerked in his chair, readjusted his glasses, and glared at Reese, who was casually leaning on the desk. Finch hadn't noticed his approach.
"How did you get in here, Mr. Reese?"
"Charming smile. A little research, some social engineering. The receptionist? He's a bit, uh, dense."
"So I noticed," Finch said dryly.
Reese reached into his pocket, withdrew a cell phone, and set it on the desk in front of Finch. "I took it off our thief," said Reese. "There's a few emails on it, but they're encrypted."
"I'll trace them as soon as I get back to the library," Finch said, examining the phone and then pocketing it. "Did you hear back from Detective Fusco yet?"
"He's better at searching a weapons database than he is at searching an apartment. The gun belongs to Shannon Ruben. Elizabeth's mother."
"So either she stole it, or her mother gave it to her."
"Fusco says it hasn't been used in a crime."
Finch glanced up at Elizabeth, who was still at her desk, programming away. She had been sitting for hours straight. "Perhaps her mother gave it to her for self-defense, anticipating a break-in such as the one that occurred today."
"Maybe. But putting it behind an air duct on a shelf that high up? She'd have to get a stepladder to reach it. That's not the mindset of someone who would need to get to it in a hurry." Reese paused, quirked a grin, and added, "Fusco would need a ladder, too."
"So either Miss Ruben isn't intending to use the gun, or she's hiding it."
"Hard to tell which. Have you figured out the notes from her desk yet?"
Finch held up the yellow legal pad that contained all of his calculations and pseudocode.
"As far as I've been able to reconstruct, it's a rather unique take on an eliptic-curve cryptography scheme."
"Is that a yes or a no, Harold?"
"I've figured out enough to know that, if properly translated into an algorithm, it would be far more efficient than traditional public-key algorithms. An eliptic-curve solution will run much faster than an RSA algorithm on the same hardware, and for a company like Landis—which writes software for devices with limited CPU power—this could really put them ahead of the competition."
"Still waiting for a yes or a no, Harold."
Finch fixed Reese with an undefinable look.
"If I had to guess, Mr. Reese, I would say that our Miss Ruben is on the verge of a breakthrough in cryptography routines—and someone else wants her algorithm very badly."
Reese scratched his chin, considering the possibilities. "They want it badly enough to kill her, steal her notes, and publish them under their own name?"
"A likely scenario, Mr. Reese. The algorithm would be quite valuable."
"So who are we dealing with here, Finch?" Reese eyed the occupants of the office. "Who would want this algorithm? There's at least a hundred people in this office."
"And nearly any of them could be the perpetrator. Many of the people here specialize in network security or encryption."
"Assuming we don't have it backwards. She could be the perpetrator, Finch. Maybe she's fed up with her coworkers. Or maybe she's about to murder her boss because he doesn't pay her enough for her talent."
Again with the look.
"Mr. Reese, if you truly want a raise, all you have to do is ask. Although, your alternative scenario is plausible. One of Miss Ruben's coworkers, Tara Dodson, is quite the acerbic individual."
"That's a polite way to put it," said Reese.
"Unfortunately, there's not much more we can do until I can return to the library and analyze all the information I've pulled from the Landis servers and Miss Ruben's home computers. We'll simply have to protect her as best as we can until then."
Reese stiffened.
"Protecting her might be difficult, Finch."
"What? Why?"
"Because she just slipped away."
Finch looked up to see that Elizabeth Ruben's desk was no longer occupied. Frantic, he peered around the room and caught sight of her just as she stepped into a lift, head down, fingers tapping out a message on her cell phone.
"Stay here," said Reese. He ran for the lifts.
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