Hostile Witness: A Kate Ford Mystery Read online

  “Kate?” he said.

  “I’m all right,” Kate said.

  All of a sudden, her mother’s voice boomed over all the other noises, coming from somewhere out in the hall.

  “She had a fit,” her mother said. “She had a screaming, frothing-at-the-mouth fit.”

  Everything in the cubicle went dead quiet.

  “Is it true?” Kate said finally. “Did I have a fit?”

  It hurt to talk. Everything was too sharp. It wasn’t as sharp as it had been, but it was sharp. Kate wanted to go to sleep.

  Kate’s father was still staring at her. “I wasn’t there,” he said finally. “Your mother saw you. You were on the bench. She was looking out the kitchen window and she saw you. She said you weren’t entirely conscious—”

  “I was paying attention to the leaves,” Kate said. She remembered it exactly. “There were these brown, dead leaves, and they had veins in them. I was looking at the leaves. And then I got sort of all tensed up. And everything was purple.”

  “Purple?” the doctor said. “Kate, can you tell me more about the purple?”

  Kate looked at him. He was very small and sort of pinched looking.

  “It was just purple,” Kate said.

  “Was it light purple or dark purple?” the doctor asked.

  “It started out just sort of pale, like lavender chalk,” Kate said. “But later it got to be very purple. And then it was black. All the air went black.”

  “Ah,” Kate’s father said.

  The doctor shot him a look and shook his head. “There’s no ‘ah’ about it. Too much of this still doesn’t fit. We’re going to have to run tests—”

  “I’ve got nothing against running tests,” Kate’s father said.

  “She was frothing at the mouth,” Kate’s mother’s voice streamed in from outside.

  The doctor turned on his heel and marched away. Kate’s mother’s voice stopped suddenly and irrevocably.

  The doctor came back in. “That sort of thing is not helpful,” he said. “I really must stress that, Mr. Ford. If we’re going to understand what happened here—”

  Kate was watching her father closely. He had turned toward the wall, looking at nothing, his shoulders hunched.

  “My wife,” he said, “is going to want to know if this was connected to, somehow, the other thing I told you about, the—”

  “The hyperawareness,” the doctor prompted. “It depends on the nature of the hyperawareness, and even then—” He veered around and looked straight at Kate. “Were you experiencing hyperawareness when this episode started?”

  Kate looked blank.

  “He means were you noticing every detail everywhere and remembering it?” Kate’s father said.

  “Oh,” Kate said. “Not really. Sort of. I wasn’t thinking about anything in particular.”

  “It doesn’t fit the profile,” the doctor said. “Epilepsy doesn’t work like that.”

  “Daddy?” Kate said.

  Kate’s father cleared his throat.

  “Epilepsy or not,” he said, “my wife is going to want to know if the two things are connected. I’d guess we’re all going to want to know that.”

  “I have never heard of a case in which hyperawareness resulted in convulsions,” the doctor said. “I think at the moment, it’s much more important for us to find out what happened here and why, and we can deal with the hyperawareness issues at some later date.”

  “I like . . . the hyper thing,” Kate said. But then she was tired. She put her head back onto the pillow and drifted off, drifted and drifted into a perfectly normal sleep.

  After that, nothing was ever normal again. The one good thing was that months went by before Kate had another “convulsion.” Other parts of the “episode” came back with increasing frequency, though. She got headaches so bad she could barely see. She got nauseated and sometimes vomited. She had less and less control of what the doctor called her “hyperawareness.” At its worst, a slamming door or a dropped textbook could set off the symptoms, and then she had nothing she could do but wait the whole thing out.

  Unlike the first time, though, not only did she not pass out; she didn’t even need much time for recovery. The headaches and the nausea were there. Then the headaches and the nausea were gone.

  And whatever it was that was wrong with her, it wasn’t epilepsy.

  What was wrong with her parents was another matter. Her father told her not to blame herself, but Kate knew there was no one else to blame. Before the convulsion, her mother had been standoffish and a little unhappy; after it, she was always just a breath away from exploding. And the explosions were always about Kate.

  “I always told you something was wrong,” Kate would hear her mother say to her father when they both thought she was asleep in bed. “I told you that right from the beginning. It isn’t normal for someone to be like that.”

  “Like what?” her father would say. “She had an episode of some kind. She fainted—”

  “She didn’t faint. She was frothing at the mouth.”

  “All I can tell you is that nobody but you noticed any froth.”

  “You’re delusional, Franklin. There’s something wrong with her. There’s been something wrong with her from the beginning.”

  Then she stalked off and slammed a door. She always seemed to slam a door.

  Kate wasn’t at all surprised when she came home from school a little more than a year later and found that her mother had gone—packed up her clothes, her wedding china, the Crock-Pot, her jewelry, and the very paintings off the living room wall and gone.

  Three

  Harvey Ballard had been manager and supervisor of this division of Almador for longer than Kate had worked there, and in all that time, she hadn’t been able to figure out what exactly his job was. That had been true on the day Harvey had interviewed her for this job, and it was true now, as she approached his door in the office he used on a floor above her own. Harvey stayed stashed away in his office. Kate stayed stashed away in hers. The two of them communicated by e-mail, as if they were in offices on opposite sides of the country. Kate couldn’t remember the last time Harvey had asked to actually see her.

  Still, Kate thought, as she marched up to the door and knocked as loudly as she could without hurting her hand, that didn’t mean anything was wrong. She was almost certainly not getting fired. Her productivity was too high, and there were at least three government agencies who requested her by name whenever they had a computer security problem—which they almost always did, because for some reason, government agencies were completely hopeless at computer security, no matter what they did.

  Harvey’s voice boomed, “Yes? Who is it?”

  Kate sighed. Not “Come in” or something else more pleasant. Harvey acted as if he thought managers were required to be rude just to maintain their authority.

  “Kate Ford,” Kate said. “Molly said—”

  “Come in, come in,” Harvey said, making shuffling noises just beyond the door.

  Kate opened the door just fast enough to see him push a pile of papers under another pile of papers, as if he were trying to hide them.

  “Molly said you wanted to see me,” she said. There was a single visitor’s chair. She sat down in it.

  Harvey was a pudgy, harried, balding man just past middle age, the kind of person who sweats so much, the stains showed through the armpits of his jacket by the middle of the day.

  The monitor on Harvey’s computer was turned just far enough so that Kate could see what was on it. It was open to an article on CNN.com complete with a blaring headline about the trial and large photographs of Kevin Ozgo, Chan Hamilton, and, of course, Rafael Turner.

  “I have asked you up here on a work-related matter,” he said. He was trying to sound stern. He ended up sounding choked.

  Kate nodded toward the screen. “Our boss’s daughter gets herself involved in the most spectacular criminal case of the year and you don’t think the entire building is cu
rious? If there’s any connection at all between that case and our ‘beloved’ leader Richard Hamilton—”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Harvey snapped.

  “If there is some connection to the company,” Kate pointed out, “we could all be looking for jobs in the near future.”

  “There is no connection to the company,” Harvey said, “and implying that there is isn’t improving your position here.”

  Kate stretched out her legs. “You said you had an assignment for me?”

  Harvey looked like he was wrenching himself back from the abyss of God only knows.

  “Well,” he said.

  “They asked for me particularly,” Kate prompted.

  Harvey started to shuffle the stack of papers Kate had seen him moving around when she came into the office. Then he seemed to realize what he was doing and almost jumped back in his seat.

  Harvey found the papers he was looking for, pulled them out, picked up the messy stack, and hit them against the desk to square them.

  “Yes,” he said. “Well, the name of the company is Robotix—”

  “Robotix?” Kate said. “I don’t remember seeing that name before.”

  “You haven’t,” Harvey said. “As far as I know, no one at Almador has done work for Robotix before, and we in this division certainly haven’t. They’re a relatively new company. Relatively new on the level that would require our services, I should say. They’ve recently become a serious player, and of course, that comes with major security problems. Specifically, they now have problems in one of their divisions. Four times in the last year, they’ve had their ideas suddenly appear in their competitors’ product lines.”

  “But that sounds like industrial espionage,” Kate said. “Not computer security. Especially if it’s all coming from the same division of the company.”

  “I agree,” Harvey said. “And I made the same point when I talked to Mr. Rose, head of the vacuum cleaner division.”

  “Vacuum cleaners?”

  Harvey sighed. “Robotic vacuum cleaners,” he said impatiently. “Everything Robotix makes is robotic. That’s why it’s called Robotix. Are you clear on that now?”

  “Certainly,” Kate said.

  “Then let’s get on with it. Somebody is leaking Robotix’s vacuum designs to its competitors. It’s almost certainly industrial espionage, but for a number of reasons, Mr. Rose does not believe that the problem is somebody inside the company getting ideas out. Why he doesn’t think so is thoroughly covered in the material I am sending you. Robotix is convinced that they’ve been hacked. They seem to think that you’re the best person to uncover that hack and get rid of it. That’s what you are going to do.”

  “And they asked for me by name?”

  “I already said that.”

  “Did they give us a time frame?”

  “Yesterday was my general understanding,” Harvey said. “And you can’t blame them. This sort of thing can kill a company’s profitability. Do you have something else you’re working on?”

  “I just finished the Markwell-Halliday job.”

  “Good. I thought you were off schedule. If you could take these,” Harvey handed over the paperwork, “and get onto this right away, both Robotix and I would appreciate it.”

  Kate looked down at the thick stack of paper she held in her hand. “Robotix makes robots,” she said.

  “Yes, Robotix makes robots, Miss Ford.”

  “Are they run by computers or—?”

  “I think that’s the kind of information you’ll find in the paperwork. And I’ve sent you the complete file of e-mails I’ve had with the company, plus some documentation.”

  “I’ll get right on it,” Kate said.

  Harvey Ballard looked almost infinitely relieved, except that he was sweating again.

  “Fine,” he said. “Fine. You just get right on it.”

  ***

  Five minutes later, Kate was back in her office, the door closed, the lights low. She had her rock in her hands and was rubbing it rhythmically.

  She went to her computer and checked her e-mail. There was an e-mail there from Harvey Ballard with attachments out the wazoo. She opened them up and started to download them.

  And then she started counting the ways that this whole situation was odd.

  First, there was the fact that the documents were here, right in her work e-mail inbox, just as if they were menus from the cafeteria or cheery motivational notes from human resources.

  But the first rule of computer security was that you never used the same machine for confidential or classified material as you used for the general stuff. Hell, you didn’t even use a computer on the same connected system or in the same room. Almador had a total of five secure rooms with computers that were entirely disconnected from the general network, two of which were for government work alone. It wasn’t entirely impossible to transfer information from a secure computer to a nonsecure one, but it was difficult, and the secure rooms all had video cameras running twenty-four-seven. They also had no access to printers and no access to e-mail except (on the government ones) to the special system used only by the US Armed Forces and Intelligence Community.

  But here she was with an assignment relating to what the client believed was a hack of his company’s computer system with all the relevant documents in an e-mail file her thirteen-year-old son could access in half a minute flat.

  The first thing she’d have to do on this job was find out whether Robotix was really this lax about its in-house digital systems and, if it was, try to get them to change over to something that had a chance in hell of being secure.

  She’d run into that problem with other companies, and she hadn’t always been successful in making the client see reason. Clients—at least commercial clients—often wanted speed and convenience so much that they refused to believe they couldn’t have that and security, too, but that wasn’t so.

  Harvey should have sent her these documents in a way that could only be opened on a secure computer. But Harvey Ballard had not done that or anything like that. He hadn’t even lectured her on maintaining the security of Robotix’s confidential documents. He’d just jammed the whole mess into a ZIP file and sent it off to her, unprotected.

  And that wasn’t all he’d done.

  Kate looked at her monitor and wondered if she should have downloaded these files, if maybe she should delete them immediately and forward the original e-mail to—where could she forward it to? There was no connection between this computer and the ones in the secure rooms. That was the point of the secure rooms. If she needed to use this material in a secure location, how was she going to get it there? She would have to send it back to Harvey, because one of the other things the secure computers couldn’t do was connect to a flash drive.

  A couple of years ago, one of Almador’s biggest competitors had carelessly taken on a new client who turned out to be a front for ISIS operations in Western Europe. They ended up facilitating a hostage situation in Belgium and a bombing attack on the Eiffel Tower. The bombing had been unsuccessful, but all the hostages had been killed. And Almador had one less serious competitor.

  Kate had no idea how sending files about vacuum cleaners insecurely could lead to hostage situations anywhere, but she wasn’t about to let the whole thing go without checking it out.

  And that was before she even started considering the really odd thing.

  She picked up the papers Harvey Ballard had given her and rifled through them. The stack consisted of page after page of bold-faced type in deep, thick paragraphs that stretched relentlessly from one page to the other. She caught sight of a heading in all caps—“DIVISION PERSONNEL BY FUNCTION”—and then another: “DIVISION PERSONNEL BY LOCATION.” She’d be willing to bet anything that the same information was in the files she was downloading.

  She rifled through the papers again, more and more dissatisfied. Then she got up and went out her door and into the front room where the assistants were.

 
All the desks were filled now. All the assistants were sitting at their computer terminals, typing away.

  She made a little coughing sound, and heads went up across the room.

  “I just want to ask you guys something,” she said. “Can any of you remember the last time that you or anybody else at Almador got information relating to an assignment on actual paper?”

  It was Molly who spoke up. “Actual paper? We get letters, if that’s what you mean, you know, for accounting and that kind of thing; sometimes people want the paper trail—”

  “Not like that,” Kate said. “I mean actual information relating to the assignment. Particulars about the client and the client’s company. Things like that.”

  The young woman to the left of Molly—Rachel, the chubby one who always wore bright-red dresses—shook her head. She was wearing a tiny Star Trek pin just at the base of her throat. It was too small for most people to notice. It was the first thing Kate’s mind connected with. “We’re not supposed to put anything like that on actual paper,” the young woman said. “Mr. Ballard says it’s too easy to get paper in and out of here, and there could be a security breach.”

  “That’s right,” a third woman said. “And that’s even more important if we’re doing work for the government, because if that information got out, it could get people killed.”

  “Also, you don’t want to get fired,” Rachel said. “You’d be out on your ear in a minute if you put any of that information down on actual paper.”

  “I thought so,” Kate said. “Thanks very much.”

  She turned away and went back to her office.

  There were people, mostly older people, who believed that the old days of paper files had been much safer and less prone to breach than the new digital systems, but Kate knew they were wrong. You could put layers of protection on digital systems that you could never manage with ordinary paper. And paper, once accessed, was easy to conceal in clothes or shopping bags or any of a thousand other things. The old Cambridge spy ring that had devastated British military intelligence in the sixties had managed to get entire volumes of paper files out of their supposedly secure locations, and back again, without anybody knowing. It made no sense, with encryption and everything else that was available, to put the whole thing on paper and leave it lying around for anybody to get hold of.