Chapter 1: Suicide

MY EYES FOGGED OVER and I raised the can of Rockstar to my lips, slugging down the remains. I shook my head to clear it and went back to watching the lines of code scrolling in front of me. I waited. They were closing in. Four years, seven months, and three days of setting traps and ambushes were coming to an end today. Ferreting out the bastards from their dozens of aliases, isolating them from the innocent, and preparing to detonate the collapse of their foundations had consumed me and I no longer felt completely human.

Not since that night.

John Patterson, the great computer gaming magnate and renowned philanthropist, murdered Andi. He was in a mental hospital where he maintained a mantra of ‘It’s just a game,’ refusing to acknowledge any of the serial murders he’d carried out on vulnerable kids. Including Cali’s best friend, Mel.

As shocked and crippled as I’d been when Andi died, I hadn’t been idle. In those first few months, I sat in my office replaying the events that led to the catastrophic warehouse fire, trying to find the place where I’d made an error. It was like trouble-shooting code. After you’ve been through it so many times, you can’t see a simple typo or misplaced comma.

But nothing appeared to me. There was no procedure, function, or subroutine that would bring her back. No way that Cali would ever forgive me for saving her instead of her mother.

The dead have it easy. They don’t live with the memories.

I began rebuilding. Eventually, I was paid handsomely by EFC for identifying the employee who had been robbing the company for twenty years, and the incompetent boss who turned a blind eye. But like my coworkers at Henderson, the rest of my team at EFC blamed me more than Arnie and Darlene—as if the crime would not have been committed if I hadn’t discovered it.

I called it ‘forest logic.’ I spent hours going over the ground I’d covered in the EFC case with Lars—better than the grief counselor Cora, the child psychologist who had an office just upstairs from mine, recommended. Lars and I came up with the term together. ‘If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear, does it make a sound?’ It seems to follow that in today’s corporate world, if a crime is committed but no one saw it, then it wasn’t really committed. Therefore, if I discover a crime was committed, I am to blame for the crime.

It sounds ridiculous when we present it like that, but observation of human behavior and social practices shows that we blame the victim for the crime. If he hadn’t been walking down that dark alley, he wouldn’t have been mugged. If she hadn’t been drunk, she wouldn’t have been raped. If they’d been friendlier to the sociopath in school, he wouldn’t have killed them all. It’s much easier to blame the victim than to do something about the crime and the criminal.

John Patterson was just another mentally ill middle aged white man who had snapped under the stress of all the good work he was doing. I was to blame for placing the straw that broke the camel’s back when I began investigating him for crimes I thought he had committed.

Of course, people like Cora understood and congratulated me on ending the reign of this predator. She was solicitous and recommended the grief counselor. It was in helping one of her clients that I discovered the trail of the predator, Patterson.

Ernest Davenport, the CEO of Evergreen Financial Corporation, had to admit that I’d saved his company a few million future dollars in embezzlement and corporate espionage. Unfortunately, there was no way to recover the millions that had been taken over the past twenty years. Darlene Alexander, as predicted, had suddenly disappeared from Seattle and from the Internet. Belize or Costa Rica, I assumed. Davenport paid me while simultaneously bemoaning the loss of two ‘great employees.’

People are strange.

Jordan Grant got a job offer from the Feds for his role. He was now an investigator for FinCEN, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network. We had a going away party. Lars, Jordan, and me. We tossed back a shot of scotch and wished him good luck at the airport.

I continued to pick up odd jobs. Enhancing computer security here and there. Chasing down a hacker. Clearing a woman’s records when her identity had been ‘stolen.’ Recovering a hard drive that had been soaked in water. Even a trip to Mexico to help bring down a drug kingpin. Life went on.

Cali sent me an invitation to each of her play openings and, as much as it hurt, I attended every one. She’d been scuttled away from her home next door to my apartment building and placed in foster care in Bellevue. She could have returned when she turned eighteen, but by that time she was three months from graduation and decided to finish where she was. She thanked the foster family for letting her stay the added time. I got an invitation to her commencement and it was the first time in all of the times I’d seen her that we talked.

She moved back into the duplex after graduation and we met each Saturday morning at the Analog for coffee all summer. Then she left for UCLA where she’s studying in the School of Theater, Film and Television.

I had no real challenges, so I rebuilt my computer network.

I wasn’t rich, but I didn’t have many expenses. My apartment was one of the few on Capitol Hill that still went for under a thousand a month. My office was a single room in an old house on Fifteenth that the owner told us—his four tenants—would be torn down this winter. I don’t eat much. Don’t drink. Unless you count coffee, Mountain Dew, and Rock Star. I seldom drive my car. I had money to invest in new equipment. I kept one full setup offline. I moved it all into my apartment, which isolated me even more. I manually mirrored the online setup once each week, after scouring and scrubbing my devices to be sure no foreign software or files had been transferred to my system.

It was all part of planning for the future.

And still, Patterson’s ‘non-profit’ empire thrived—beyond threat of legal action.

The people closing in on me now, thinking I was their prey—these people knew and let him get away with it. They were the beneficiaries of his so-called philanthropic endeavors, from which less than a dollar out of every hundred finally worked its way to where it could do some good. The rest lined the pockets of the wealthy, the greedy, and the depraved, making them richer and starving the needy. They were thieves.

And I hate a thief.

Then there were the unwitting collaborators. This empire couldn’t stand on one man’s shoulders. Without the hundreds who paid to play, who helped build the online edifices like the one in which I was currently hiding, who lined the pockets of the wealthy with their own hard-earned cash—without all these, the empire wouldn’t exist. An emperor needs subjects.

There would be collateral damage. But on this battlefield, there were no innocents.

I wiped the sweat out of my eyes and reached for the energy drink again. The can was empty. It was time to act.