True to his training, Tommy Tomelson guarded Hope’s second-story room from the hallway, occupying one half of an old-fashioned love seat located beneath a set of windows that conveniently overlooked the hotel’s semicircular driveway. He’d checked her in under the aliases Stephan and Elizabeth Storey, so as not to identify her as a single woman and to keep the wolves off the scent. The room’s windows, long since sealed shut for the air-conditioning, were behind closed blackout shades. If a killer wanted in there he’d have to go through the glass, and Tomelson would be on top of the intruder before the guy hit the floor.
Soon after she entered her hotel room, Hope’s cell phone rang. She scrambled to answer, praying it was Penny, only to hear the voice of Dr. Miller.
“I can’t talk long,” Hope said. “I need this line free for a call I’m expecting.”
“He’s online,” Miller said. “And I’ve IDed his port.”
“Right now?” She checked her watch.
Miller confirmed.
“He’s early.”
“Maybe not,” Miller said. “More likely I was a little sloppy, a little hasty in my analysis. I was working fairly quickly this morning. By coming online early evening he picks up another five or six hours of processing.”
“But if he’s online right now,” she repeated, “and you’ve identified the port he’s using, are you saying I can communicate with him?”
“He has no firewall in place. No protection. You realize what that means? I know Leo. That’s no accident. If he didn’t want to be found, I wouldn’t have found him.”
“But… then why not contact us directly?”
“Technically speaking? For one, they could have a key-tracker in place that would tell them anything he typed-they’d know what he was working on. Or they might have certain applications blocked. Or they might be watching his screen. It’s hard to say. Why don’t you ask him?”
“Me?” she gasped, thinking immediately of Larson.
“Certainly not me,” Miller said. “You apparently know what this is about. I do not. If you people… if the federal government is interested… the way the world is right now… then that’s enough for me. Do you have an Internet connection? I can give you a URL and a password, and that’s about all there is to it. It’s all handled on this end-on the grid.”
Her heart quickening, Hope glanced around the room, found the hotel directory, and tore it open, the receiver cradled between her shoulder and ear. Flipping through some notebook dividers, she saw that the inn had a business center, but it closed at 5 P.M.
“I’m fifteen minutes late,” she mumbled into the phone. “I could call the manager, plead my case.”
“Any laptop would do.”
She thought of Tomelson, just outside her door. A guy like that would have some way to connect to the Internet. “I’m going to need a minute.”
Then, as she turned toward the door, she noticed the folded advertiser that stood up on its own alongside the withered rose that was trying its best to look fresh. NINTENDO! ON-DEMAND MOVIES! WEB ACCESS FROM YOUR TV!
She practically tore the doors off the armoire. A wireless keyboard sat atop the television, two elaborate joysticks on the shelf to the right, their wires tangled. A duplicate advertiser sat atop the TV.
She switched on the TV. It took too long to warm up. Finally a menu appeared, and, sure enough, INTERNET ACCESS was there on the menu.
“I’m on…” she said less than a minute later. “What’s the URL and password?”
“You understand,” Miller said with great reserve, “that once we do this, a window is going to appear on his screen. We can’t predict how he’ll react.”
“No firewall,” she said, handing him his own earlier argument. “That has to be significant.”
“Of course it is,” he agreed, each building the other’s confidence.
She asked Miller to give her another minute and called Larson using the hotel phone, but the call went straight to voice mail. He either had the phone shut off-doubtful-or he’d moved out of cellular service range. Her maternal fears decided it for her.
“Okay, let’s do it,” she said.
Sounding excited himself, Miller dictated the specifics and she wrote them down. She worked the keyboard and, a moment later, a small window appeared in the center of her browser.
“I’ve got it.”
“Again, there’s no gentle way to do this,” Miller warned. “Once I patch you in, you’re just going to show up on his screen, uninvited. What he does with you at that point is anybody’s guess. Likely he’ll kill that window and log off the grid, and that’s the last we’ll see of him.”
“He’ll talk to me.” She sensed her child’s fate at the end of her fingertips. She felt torn about doing this before contacting Larson. If she succeeded, they both would celebrate. If she failed, he would never forgive her, and she would never forgive herself.
“Are you ready?”
“Ready.”
“If he’s using sniffers-spyware-he already knows I’ve accessed his port. But he hasn’t broken the connection. He may already have both of our IP addresses. Let’s start now and get this done quickly.”
She took one more furtive glance toward the door. “Go ahead,” she said. “Put me on his screen.”