“But don’t do nothing,” Dillon added, looking directly at Ryan.
Ryan took one more sharp glance at Dillon, shook his head and started out the door, trying not to be offended that Annamaria had chosen to stay with Dillon. He did understand Dillon’s emotional appeal – especially in the short-term.
Feeling the need to clear his head and organize his thoughts, he headed west toward the Charles River to take the scenic route home.
The brilliant shades of red from the morning’s sunrise had been swallowed up by a monotonous gray that blanketed the sky with a single drab tone, neither portending a storm nor showing any sign of clearing. Perfect weather for introspection.
His dysfunctional team had increased in number by fifty percent, but they still didn’t have a viable face for their cause. He could acknowledge that Dillon genuinely loved his father, but Dillon was driven primarily by revenge and was in no way, shape or form a sympathetic figure. His dad was a felon, implicated in terror – and found guilty. No one would care
why
he was caught or how that had affected his son.
Ryan himself had started out a tragic figure, having lost both parents at such a young age, but it was hard to feel too sorry for him ten years down the road, nearing graduation from Harvard at seventeen with no debt and with a stable, happy homelife. To an outside observer, he appeared to be the prototypical Avillage success story – which had really been the only point he was planning to make before Dillon started in on his parents’ death.
Annamaria was beautiful, clearly preyed upon by a greedy corporation, and had a potentially heart-wrenching story, but she was so overexposed as a soulless socialite in the basest forms of media that most of the country probably would have been delighted to hear she wouldn’t be able to procreate.
J’Quarius, even in death, still seemed to be their best hope, Ryan thought. He’d tried reaching out to Hansford and Arlene Washington – and to Leonard Weinstien – after the game, but he’d never heard anything back. Maybe it had been too soon.
Probably time to revisit that,
he thought.
Dillon was right about one thing – Avillage was surrounded by smoke. But Annamaria’s scars were the first time he’d actually seen fire. It was time he personally started doing a little digging.
He quickened his pace to a jog as a light mist began to fall. A band of rapidly-rising black clouds on the horizon announced that the sky had finally committed. A storm was coming, and from the looks of it, he wouldn’t have much time to get home before it hit.
~~~
“What!” Aaron Bradford finally shouted after the third knock on his door. With the clock nearing midnight, he should have had the office to himself.
“Sorry, sir” Corbett Hermanson said, leaning in close to the door. “But I found something you may be interested in.”
“Can’t it wait until tomorrow?” Bradford moaned.
“It’s up to you, sir, but I thought it was worth checking with you tonight.”
Tall and thin with close-cropped fire-red hair and perpetually tired eyes, Corbett wore the same pale blue short-sleeve Oxford shirt, black pants and nondescript black work shoes everyday, no matter the season. He was the first head of IT at Avillage that Bradford had actually approved of – someone as meticulous and paranoid as he was – and as part of his standard security protocol, he routinely monitored a few dozen randomly-chosen files a week for activity, always at different times on different days.
“Fine,” Bradford sighed. “Give me a second.”
Three minutes passed before Bradford gave Corbett the ok to come in.
“Will there be anything else Mr. Bradford?” his twenty-six-year-old assistant asked right on cue as the door opened, sitting conspicuously formally in an armchair several feet from her boss, cradling a completely blank notepad.
“No, Ms. Williams. That will be all. Good night,” Bradford intoned robotically.
“Good night,” the assistant whispered as she hurried out of the room, keeping her head down to avoid making eye contact with the IT manager.
“Now
what
is it, Corbett?” Bradford huffed.
“Well sir, it’s just that I didn’t think that you’d been traveling recently, have you?”
“You’ve seen me here every day this week! What do you think? Get to the point,” Bradford demanded, wishing he’d continued to ignore the knocking at his door.
“I actually didn’t think you had been traveling, which is why I found it odd that a few of your files had been accessed by an IP address in Indianapolis earlier today.”
“What?” Bradford gasped, his attention now undivided. “Which files?”
“Some of the old J files and a some of the BUTY ones off the intranet. My guess is that whoever this is probably
isn’t
in Indiana but is disguising their IP address. And of course I’ll look into it further with your permission. You wouldn’t have shared any of your passwords with anyone by chance, would you have?” Corbett asked.
“No!” Bradford shot back, insulted at the suggestion. “Now listen. I want you to look into this and find out who’s been snooping around, and I want you to report back directly to me! Do you understand?”
“Yes sir. Of course, sir. I’ll start immediately. In the meantime, I’d strongly suggest that you change all of your passwords.”
“I’ll keep my passwords, thank you,” Bradford said, wondering just who in the hell Corbett thought he was “strongly suggesting” anything to his boss’s boss’s boss. “I’ve got nothing to hide on our intranet – I’ve never trusted it – and I don’t want this low-life hacker to know we’re on to him until we’re ready to nail him. Got it?”
“Yes sir,” Corbett said, backing out of Bradford’s office.
~~~
Ryan stared blankly out the window waiting for his laptop to finish booting up, as the persistent pattering of the steady rainfall on the roof filled his dimly-lit top floor dorm room with a hypnotic white noise that beckoned him back to the night of his parents’ death. He consciously shook it off; now wasn’t the time.
A brief scan of his email’s inbox revealed the typical swath of junk – offshore pharmacies, lurid invitations to meet singles in the Boston area, and plenty of the popular “(no subject)” emails from hacked accounts he hadn’t yet removed from his contact list.
But as he scrolled down the page, selecting messages to mark as spam, something jumped out at him. One of the junk mails with the “(no subject)” subject line had been sent by [email protected], J.R.’s old email account from his time at the Cleveland Clinic.
Ryan still used the same account that had been opened for him at age seven, and J.R. had been his first contact. But he hadn’t heard anything from him in years, and J.R.’s Cleveland Clinic account should’ve been deactivated a decade ago. Was it possible he was back there? Ryan knew he wasn’t in Boston any more. A search for Dr. Ralston on The Cleveland Clinic’s website returned no matches.
Suddenly a light bulb went off in Ryan’s head. He went right back to his email and fired off a message to [email protected], which he inferred from J.R.’s address would’ve been his mother’s old email address. No sooner than the message had been sent did he receive an “undeliverable message” reply in his inbox.
For good measure he then sent another email to [email protected] This time nothing returned. After a quick reload of the page, still nothing. With his heart now racing, he closed his browser and reopened it.
Hovering his cursor over the bookmark to his email, he closed his eyes and hesitantly clicked the left mouse button. After a long, slow, deep breath, he reopened his eyes. Once again there was only one return message – from his mom’s old account.
He immediately grabbed his walkie-talkie and began shouting for Dillon to come in.
While he waited, he searched the Cleveland Clinic website for a Dr. Ryan Tyler, on the off chance someone with the same name now worked there. No match.
“What do you want?” Dillon eventually groaned, bracing for another argument.
“I might have found something,” Ryan started, ignoring Dillon’s sour tone. “I was gonna try emailing Leonard Weinstien again about what he knew about J’Quarius Jones’s biological father when...”
“Wait,” Dillon interrupted. “Who’s Leonard Weinstien?”
“The guy who was holding the poster at the basketball game in Cleveland.”
“What? What poster? You never told me about that.”
“Yes I did. I told you about it a couple of days after the game,” Ryan said confidently.
“You did not!” Dillon insisted.
“Dillon. Really? Come on. You know how these disagreements go.”
“You think you’re
always
right,” Dillon scoffed.
“The conversation took place at around 9:30 PM, two nights after the game, right before you left Cleveland. You couldn’t talk long because your dad...”
“Guardian!” Dillon snapped.
“Fine, your
guardian
was only going to be out of the hotel room for a few minutes. I was wearing a Browns T-shirt that day that my mom made me change because it had a stain on the left sleeve from the last time I’d worn it. I had Apple Jacks for breakfast that morning, a chili dog for lunch, and spaghetti for dinner. The Indians played the Angels that day and won 6-4 with a three-run ninth inning comeback. BP announced disappointing earnings before the market opened that morning and ended up falling 2.4%.”
Dillon was silent on the other end. He hated when Ryan did this.
“Even back then I knew you didn’t know what I was talking about when I brought up the guy with the poster, but you’re so bull-headed, you had to act like you did,” Ryan said.
“Well,” Dillon hedged, knowing full well he was wrong but not about to admit it. “Whatever the case, I don’t recall your ever telling me. Just get on with it, and tell me who he is.”
“He was a lawyer in Newark from what I could find. He brought a sign to the game with an old picture of a guy that looked a lot like J’Quarius that he claimed was his dad. The sign read ‘Your father loved you,’ and it had Weinstien’s contact info on it. But that’s not why I called you.”
“Well did you contact him?” Dillon asked frantically, starting to hyperventilate.
“Yeah, yeah. A long time ago. I never heard anything back, so I gave up. I’m gonna try again. But there’s something else! I got a spam email from Jared Ralston’s Cleveland Clinic account tonight!” Ryan said excitedly.
There was a long silence.
“And?” Dillon finally said, crashing down from his previous high.
“That means his account is still active! I emailed my mom’s account and it was returned undeliverable, but the message I sent to my dad’s old account never came back! It must be an oversight by the cardiology department.
“If you can hack into those accounts, we might be able to find out how J.R. got his shares without buying them and how he ended up on my board of directors.”
“Hmm.” Dillon paused. A reluctant smile was growing on his face. He was actually impressed. “I can’t imagine it would be very hard. I’ve got a major project due in a couple of days, but I should definitely be able to get the passwords by the weekend. Give me the addresses.”
“One more thing before I give you the addresses,” Ryan said solemnly. “You can do whatever you want with J.R.’s email, but promise me you won’t look through my dad’s emails without my permission. I feel guilty enough looking through them myself.”
“Yeah, sure,” Dillon said, understanding fully. “No problem.”
CHAPTER 11
“I got ‘em!” Dillon’s voice echoed off the walls of Ryan’s previously silent dorm room at two o’clock Friday morning.
Ryan reached a clumsy hand up over his head and groggily patted down his desktop, eventually knocking the walkie-talkie off onto the floor with a jarring crash.
“What?” Ryan mumbled, finally having seized control of his walkie-talkie.
“I got the passwords! Get a pen!”
“I don’t need one,” Ryan yawned.
“Are you sure? Come on, you don’t even sound awake.”
“I’m sure,” Ryan intoned lifelessly. “I’m pumped. Trust me. It’s just late. Or early. Whatever.”
“Okay. Jared Ralston’s password is CCFpassWord14. No spaces. C, C, F and W are caps. And your dad’s is RyanJr0316. The R and J are caps."
“Yep, thanks. Good night.”
“Did you get ‘em? When are you going to go through the accounts?” Dillon pleaded, hopped up on his third energy drink of the night.
“I got ‘em. I’ll look at ‘em in the morning. Good night. Signing off,” Ryan said, turning his walkie-talkie off and closing his eyes, futilely trying to will himself back to sleep.
Five minutes passed. Then ten. Then twenty. He was kidding himself if he thought he was going to be able to get back to sleep. Reluctantly, after half an hour of tossing and turning, he swung his legs off the side of his bed, rubbed his eyes and let out one last yawn, before tugging down on the pull chain of his desk lamp.
Mail.ccf.org was his first guess for the Cleveland Clinic email server, which proved to be correct. Very carefully he typed in the username ryan.tyler followed by the password that Dillon had provided him. And, with surprisingly little effort, he was in.
A bold black number at the top left of the screen indicated his dad’s account had 7,734 unread emails, most of which appeared to be system-wide email blasts. For the next 30 minutes Ryan mundanely rolled his mouse back and forth between “Select All” and “Delete,” eliminating 25 messages with each cycle, quickly scanning each of the subject lines as he went. The only thing that really stuck out at first glance was that recruiters were still contacting his dad with job offers 10 years after his death.
As the received dates of the emails continued to rewind, an uneasy anticipation began to build. These were private communications between adults. The only perspective from which he’d ever known his parents was that of an innocent child. They were still infallible in his mind, and he really didn't want that to change.
A sinking in his chest met a rising from his stomach as he deleted what would probably amount to the final batch of 25 junk messages, received in the first few days after his parents were gone.
As the next page loaded with another set of 25 emails, his eyes were drawn to the bottom of the screen, where for the first time previously-read messages stood out beneath the bold-type unread ones. There was something powerfully sentimental, almost tangible, about the realization that his dad had sat before a computer somewhere ten years earlier and had clicked on these same messages. The most recent one, received just hours before his parents’ death, was from his mom with the subject line, “re: Li’l Ryan’s Bday”.
With a lump developing in his throat, he clicked on the message. His mom had written: “That’s something dads should talk to their sons about ;)”
Hmm.
Didn’t make sense without context.
Below the end of the message he found the option to “show quoted text,” which he clicked on to reveal the entire exchange in reverse chronological order. She had been responding to his dad’s message: “I’m sure he’ll get it. I like the idea, but you better be prepared to have a discussion about the birds and bees. You know how his mind works. He’ll want to know how that baby got in there.”
Ryan’s palms grew sweaty as he began to infer what was coming next. Not entirely sure he wanted to continue, but certain he couldn’t stop, he scrolled to the end.
The thread had started with his mother’s message, “I’m already showing big-time. Sweaters only get so baggy, and it’s going to be warming up soon. I think tonight would be the perfect time to tell Ryan. I wrapped up a T-shirt for him in one of his presents that says ‘Big Brother’ on it. A birthday surprise! You think he’ll get it?”
Having trouble taking in a deep breath, he rose to a stand and slowly backed away from his computer. It wasn’t his nature to ask fate “Why?” or to dwell on whether or not something was “fair.” But this was utterly overwhelming – a knife wound on top of an old scar that had never sufficiently healed.
~~~
Corbett Hermanson peered around the edge of Bradford’s half-open door and knocked gently on the frame. Bradford was sitting at his desk, leafing through a thick binder.
He had to have heard the knock
, Corbett thought, peeking in, but his attention to the material in the binder remained unbroken.
Now regretting his timid first knock, Corbett anxiously debated whether he should knock again, which could be perceived as rude, or try something else to get Bradford’s attention. Ultimately he decided to clear his throat loudly, while standing more prominently in the doorway.
Still, Bradford kept his nose buried in the files in front of him.
Finally, Corbett knocked more confidently on the door itself.
“What!” Bradford demanded. “If you’ve got something to say, just say it!”
“Sorry, sir. Wasn’t sure you heard me,” Corbett said, with a nervous chuckle.
“Do you think I’m deaf and blind?” Bradford sneered. “Just get on with it already.”
“Well sir, I’m sure you recall our conversation a few days back about the potential unauthorized user in our system? It turns out...”
“Close the door!” Bradford whispered emphatically, waving his arms wildly for Corbett to stop talking and come all the way into his office.
“Sorry, sir,” Corbett said, his cheeks glowing an orange-red hue to match his hair. After self-consciously closing the door behind him, he picked up where he’d left off. “It turns out, he’s quite good at keeping himself hidden. I was right about his not being in Indiana, but behind that location, his IP address bounces around all over the world from India to Singapore to Brazil to several U.S. cities – all places I believe you’ve traveled. Had you originally planned to be in Indiana last week?”
“No,” Bradford said dismissively, before pausing for a moment. “But my secretary had put it on my calendar. He must be basing his locations on where he thinks I’ll be!”
“Tracking down his true location, unfortunately, may prove to be beyond my expertise. If we got the authorities involved...”
“We’re not getting authorities involved. This is what we pay
you
for,” Bradford barked.
“Well I do have another idea,” Corbett said, taking a step closer to Bradford’s desk and lowering his voice. “We could set a trap.”
Now he was speaking Bradford’s language.
“I’ve set up a half dozen dummy accounts on our corporate email server,” Corbett said, handing Bradford a slip of paper with several handwritten lines. “Some time today I would ask you to send an email to those accounts referencing an urgent confidential issue with former ticker symbol J. Along with the message, I’d like you to attach the file that I’ve listed below the email addresses on that piece of paper.
“He’s been coming and going as he pleases anywhere he wants in our system for the past three to four years as far as I can tell, so I’m counting on the assumption he’s let his guard down a little by now.
“I’ve attached a tiny tracer virus to that file I’ve written down for you,” Corbett said, motioning to the scrap of paper in Bradford’s right hand. “I’m pretty sure his computer will detect and destroy it fairly quickly. But if I’m online at the time he downloads it, I should have just enough time to pinpoint his location.”
“I like it,” Bradford beamed, nodding his head approvingly. “I’ll get the email out today.”
“Make it juicy, but not so much that it’s suspicious,” Corbett added, smiling along with his boss.
Bradford’s expression quickly soured at the suggestion. “I don’t need your ‘expert’ tips, Corbett. Trust me, I know how to play this game better than you. Now, get back to work.”
~~~
As the sun slowly inched above the Cambridge horizon, casting long streaks of blinding light westward down the Charles River, Ryan found himself on the south end of campus, gazing up at the Eliot House clock tower, its hands transposed on top of one another, pointing straight down to six-thirty.
Having spent the wee hours of the morning wandering aimlessly around the mostly empty campus, oblivious to the world around him, he was suddenly reminded that his last final of the semester was coming up in an hour and a half. And maybe that wasn’t such a bad thing. At least he’d be able to focus on something else for an hour or so.
But as it turned out, he wouldn’t find the distraction he was looking for in the classroom. A mere twenty minutes after taking his seat, he returned the pen he’d borrowed from the professor along with his completed answer sheet from a test that unfortunately hadn’t been challenging enough to give his tormented mind any reprieve. He exited the lecture hall with the same hollow feeling that he’d come in with. If anything, it had only intensified.
The previously peaceful campus was now bustling with sleep-deprived, stressed-out students hurrying off to take final exams or squeeze in one last cram session. Desperate to be alone, he reluctantly headed back to his dorm.
A wave of nausea hit him as he unlocked his door, knowing his computer would be staring him in the face right when he walked in.
Mercifully, the email account had timed out, so he didn’t have to relive the experience in its entirety. He nudged the laptop closed and collapsed onto his bed, mentally and physically exhausted from traipsing around campus all morning, and he was dead asleep before he even hit the mattress.
Instantaneously he was transported back to the double doors of his day care center. It had been a long time. As was always the case, he was standing next to his teacher, waiting for his parents to arrive, but this time there was no rain.
A flood of sunshine from the cloudless sky amplified the reds, blues and yellows of the slides and swings in the fenced-in playground off to the side of the front parking lot. Across the street, he could see the bright green soccer field and baseball diamond where he and his friends would spend their afternoons when the weather allowed.
To his left, the narrow two-lane drive in front of the facility stretched past a row of one and two-story concrete office buildings and on toward the entrance of the office park where the road opened up into a busier four-lane highway.
Off to his right, repeated glimmers of reflected sunlight were bouncing off the back of a furiously swaying stop sign from the corner opposite the day care center straight into his eyes. The sign was in continuous chaotic motion, as though the thin pole that supported it may snap at any second. But curiously there wasn’t so much as a ripple in the grass around it. And the leaves in the tree next to it were perfectly still.
Then out of nowhere the sky suddenly blackened, and a driving rain began to fall, as his gaze was involuntarily pulled back to his left, where he saw headlights approaching. Emotionally incapable of watching what he knew was coming next, he tried to look away, but he couldn’t. He knew he had to be dreaming, but he couldn’t manage to snap himself out of it.
Just then, a soft but completely out-of-place chime broke his concentration, disintegrating the dream world, as it dawned on him that it was his phone alerting him to a new email.
“Stop sign,” he whispered to himself as he opened his eyes.
Looking over at the clock, he was amazed to find that he’d been asleep for over an hour; it had felt like less than a minute.
There was a four-way stop in front of the day care center. And the day care center was off the main road in an office park that had no through streets.
His whole life, he’d been trying to suppress the specifics of that day, not dissect them.
Whoever had hit his parents head on would’ve had to have floored it from the end of a cul de sac, run through a stop sign, and swerved (or stayed) in the wrong lane. If that driver hadn’t also died in the crash, which was likely, he would have had to have been charged with a crime. Either way, there had to be police records documenting what happened.
Would he have any right to them as his parents’ only survivor? And if he did, would he be able to access them as a minor?
As he pondered these questions, he grabbed his phone to see who had sent him the well-timed email. His inbox contained only one new message: a reply from Leonard Weinstien.
“Thank you for contacting me,” the email read. “I’m sorry I won’t be able to tell you much via email. Previous experience has left me distrusting of computers. I would, however, be more than happy to meet with you face-to-face. I’m retired with no one depending on me and (sadly) not much to do. So I’d be quite flexible as to where we could meet. – Leonard.”