Killer Move - Michael Marshall [26]
“Forwarded it by accident,” I said. Janine had popped out of the office, thankfully.
“You can do that?”
“If you’re dumb,” I said, going into a prepared spiel. “Meant to pass on a property listing, evidently selected that so-called joke by mistake.”
She nodded. “Figures. Doesn’t seem like the kind of thing you’d send to the world on purpose.”
“Well, right.”
“You’re normally far too worried about what people might think of you.”
She turned back to her work, leaving me smarting. If I’d been entertaining suspicions about Karren sending the e-mail from my computer—laughing an evil laugh as she hit SEND—they were dispelled there and then. I had no doubt she was smart and bold, but it would have taken big balls indeed to wrap an unspoken denial in such a blatant diss.
When Karren went to the bathroom twenty minutes later I darted over to Janine’s machine. The e-mail was still sitting there in her in-box, together with about seventeen million others. I forwarded the joke back to my own address, taking care to remove the evidence from her SENT MAIL folder when I was done.
Back at my own machine I established that the original e-mail had been sent at 9:33 that morning—when I’d been standing self-righteously in line at the post office waiting to mail a package back to Amazon, thus tying two small, inexplicable things together in a knot.
A book I had not ordered.
An e-mail I hadn’t sent.
I’d made no sense of either by the time I drifted out to lunch. As I was sitting outside the deli, fingers drumming on the hot metal of the table, I saw Tony Thompson emerge from the reception block. He noticed me and started to head over.
My stomach did a little flip. Tony’s address had been on the distribution list of the e-mail. As he walked down the ramp toward me, I took a slow, deep breath.
“Funny e-mail, Bill,” he said, before I could even get started. “Laughed my head off. You got more like that, send ’em right along. Marie and I are going to have a talk about the matter we discussed, by the way. Probably tonight.”
I shut my mouth, smiled, and didn’t say a thing.
“No way of telling,” the geek said. “Bottom line is it could have been anyone in the world.”
“That’s it? That’s your professional opinion? How much you get paid for this level of insight?”
I was sitting with him outside the ice cream place at the Circle. It was coming up on seven in the evening but still warm, and getting heavier.
He took a lick of his chocolate sugar cone. “A lot less than you, dude. Plus, no commission. Not to mention I spend all day sorting out shit where the root cause exists between the computer and the chair facing it. By which I mean, you know, the user.”
“I got the joke. I’m laughing inside.”
I’d had the idea of calling the company’s tech guy by midafternoon. It had taken him three hours to extricate himself from the IT needs of the main office, and forty minutes to check over my computer. Getting him to do this without yakking on and on about what he was doing was the hardest part, but luckily by then I was the only person left in the office. As soon as he’d pushed himself back from my desk, I’d nonetheless encouraged him to carry on the conversation elsewhere. Sitting with a spindly midtwenties guy in a tatty Pearl Jam T-shirt was not helping to resettle me, especially as his phone kept beeping at irregular intervals: a single, echoing ping, like sonar. He tilted his head to check the screen every single time this happened, but did not pick the phone up or do anything, and this was beginning to get on my nerves.
“You got two issues,” he said, squinting against the slanting remains of the day’s sun. “First is this e-mail. Simplest explanation is someone sat at your machine in the office. This is hardly an exploit of legend.”
“An ‘exploit’?”
“It’s what they call a hacking triumph.”
“Who are ‘they’?”
“Hackers.”
“Assholes with no life, you mean.”
“It’s a point of view. Anyway, an exploit is not what that scenario would constitute. Even newbies and script-kiddies would think it beneath them. You’d be amazed how many people leave their