tube will suit me fine,” he had concluded. “Besides, the exercise will do me good.”
Sarah had kissed him on the bald spot on his head and had given his shoulders a squeeze. Now, she’d be rubbing his back with her infamous Chapman’s Liniment for a week.
“Bloody stuff is made for horses,” he would protest.
“That’s what you get for acting like an ass,” she’d be certain to counter.
Ludlow smiled.
He had reached the street and, revived by the cool air, he headed toward Upper Harley Street and the pleasures of home.
The walk was surprisingly invigorating and his apartment house greeted him like an old friend. Perhaps if his back hadn’t been hurting him so badly, he might have realized something was wrong. Perhaps he might have become alarmed at seeing the apartment windows dark when he knew Sarah would be wide awake and anxious to hear the details of his trip. In any case, he still would have walked unknowingly into their apartment and into the stark terror that awaited him.
Two strong arms seized his and pulled him into the room, even as he struggled to free the key from the lock. They encircled him, and with one great wrench against his chest, left him breathless and in agony from ribs that splintered and gave way. Ludlow slumped to the floor. The room, suddenly flooded with light, seemed oddly filled with white. Two huge figures towered above him, each in clothes devoid of color and faces devoid of expression.
Only Sarah brought color to the moment, her face, hands, legs, and nightgown, all covered with the sickening brown-red of fresh blood. One eye was swollen shut, and a red trickle ran from her ear, but she was alive.
“Please, take what you want. Take it all,” Ludlow pleaded. “Just leave us alone. We’re old. Take whatever you want and go.”
“You know what we want,” the first intruder said softly.
Sarah’s sob broke the silence that followed.
While one tormentor held Ludlow’s head in place so that he would bear witness to the scene that was to follow, the other walked toward his beloved Sarah. The intruder hesitated for a moment, smiled at Ludlow, then kicked the prone woman full force in the side of the head.
Ludlow heard the crack of her neck as it snapped the life out of her. For a moment, the room was silent, save for a tiny exhale of her last breath.
“No!” Ludlow shrieked. He was on his feet, and his hands found the face of the executioner. Ludlow held him by his hair as one eye yielded its soft viscosity to his death grip. Ludlow’s screams of rage drowned out his victim’s cries of pain.
The old man heard nothing, saw nothing, knew nothing. His body did what it had to do and continued grasping and flailing, even as the second intruder pulled him from the first and beat and kicked him until his body could no longer bring muscle and nerve together to move.
“Now give it to us,” the murderer demanded.
“I don’t know what you want,” Ludlow mouthed. His chest spasmed with unreleased sobs. “I don’t know what you want,” he whispered again.
“The diary, you old piece of shit! Just give us the diary and we’ll let you die in peace.”
“The diary?” Ludlow whispered, confused.
Another kick to his back. “Like you didn’t know,” his torturer snickered.
Ludlow struggled to clear his thoughts.
That’s what this was all about? The diary! No, it couldn’t be. It was all too fantastic to imagine.
He had warned DeVris that powerful people had powerful reasons to get control of the diary. DeVris had laughed at him. Sabbie had indulged him his secrecy and had gone along with his emergency preparations, though she had thought him over the top about it. Sarah, too. But none of them had ever considered him anything but paranoid about the whole matter. Even he doubted his own concerns. And, now, son of a bloody bitch, he had been right all along.
Ludlow smiled; a tiny raising of the corners of his mouth, an insignificant movement that echoed a greater victory than any round of cannon fire.
He had what these murderers so desperately wanted, but they had left him with no reason to give it to them. They had taken everything; his Sarah, his desire to live, and his body’s ability to continue to endure their abuse. He was dying and he knew it. Yet this, the only thing they really wanted, they would not get.
SEVEN
Day Four, early morning
CyberNet Forensics, Inc., New York City
CyberNet Forensics was one of the top-rated, though not one of the highest-grossing, Internet Investigative Services in the country. While the identities of clients were usually kept pretty hush-hush, all of the company’s top cybersleuths, including Gil, knew that their clients were some of the most powerful individuals and agencies in the world.
CyberNet’s website claimed their computer programs had helped spot, prosecute, and put an end to more identity theft, online child pornography, money laundering, fraud, and potential terrorist schemes than all the other Internet forensics companies combined. Oddly, though, according to the company’s annual financial reports, CyberNet continued to remain in the red.
At least once a month, George, as division supervisor, addressed the company’s team of cybersleuths or, as he preferred to call them, his Internet Forensic Specialists. It was always the same old pep talk about how their programs were helping to keep cyberspace safe for the innocent. Most of them no longer listened to the plethora of words and lack of action. George could never explain why, as the accounts grew, budgets shrank. Morale dropped accordingly.
When Gil first came to the company, fresh out of graduate school, it had been a different place entirely; full of excitement and hope. These were the crème de la crème; young men and women, not necessarily tops in their classes but independent in their thinking and dogged in their persistence.
Every one of them was a loner, content to work in some tiny windowless office for days on end, hacking into “unbreakable” data bases and Internet sites, in order to track down a target, find proof of the cyber crime, and present enough solid evidence to back up an arrest and conviction.
“You get paid to break into top secret files?” Lucy asked incredulously on their first date. “Can’t you be arrested or something?”
No, he couldn’t be arrested. He was registered with the National Securities Administration, the only organization that hired more forensic investigators than CyberNet. And, no, he wasn’t being paid the big bucks, such as they were, to break into systems; he was paid to figure out how identity thieves had made their way into the systems and to make sure that no one else could ever do the same.
The truth, however, was that like every other cybersleuth, it was “nailing the target” that Gil loved. Once he had proof positive of a crime and the identity of the perpetrator, the task of making the system secure for the future didn’t run anywhere near a close second. It was the very love of the hunt and his dislike for the cleanup that ended up being Gil’s salvation.
While looking for a shortcut in order to patch up the FBI’s payroll system, he’d written a set of computer instructions designed to sniff out the gaps in the original program. He called his subprograms Dobermans because, once set in motion, they hunted down their prey and pounced on it, holding it at bay until he gave them the okay to obliterate it. A single tap on the return key and the security breach in the system was literally gobbled up.
At the time, George had been beside himself with joy. He predicted that, with Gil’s Dobermans in action, the world would be beating a path to CyberNet’s door. Which it had, though the money never seemed to find its way beyond George’s office on the top floor. Gil looked around at his own small, windowless office.
Well, so much for the Trickle-Down Theory of Economics.
Gil swiveled