The Garden of Betrayal - Lee Vance [76]
“So, what was the box?”
“That’s what I wanted to know. Little pieces of network kit like that always have a part number or a description on the case somewhere, but this didn’t have anything stamped or printed on it, which also seemed strange. I took it back to my room and used a screwdriver to pry the faceplate off. The box had a microprocessor and some flash memory wedged inside, and the processor had a serial number. I searched the serial number on the Web and ended up in a bunch of hard-core hacker forums. The processor is a repeater, a chip that’s designed to capture Internet traffic and forward it to some third location.”
“What third location?”
“Any third location. In our case, to a server somewhere in the Cayman Islands.”
“Wait a second,” I said incredulously, her import penetrating. “Are you telling me we were bugged?”
“Exactly. Everything any of us have done on our home network the last couple of days—all our mail, all our chat, and all the Web sites we’ve visited—has been copied to this other server.”
Much as I wanted to know who’d bugged us, and why, I had a more important question to ask first.
“Let me get this straight. This box you found was physically inside our apartment, right? Which means that whoever put it there had to be inside our apartment.”
She nodded, her scared expression returning.
I was scared also, and confused, but more than either, I was furious. Someone had broken into my home. What would have happened if they’d bumped into Kate or Claire?
“I’m calling Reggie,” I said, starting to stand up.
“Wait,” she said, grabbing my wrist. “There’s more.”
“How can there possibly be more?”
“Sit,” she urged. “Come on. I asked you to listen until I was done.”
I settled next to her again apprehensively.
“I’m listening.”
She let go of my wrist and sighed.
“After I figured out what the repeater was, I got really mad at you.”
“At me? Why?”
“Because I read in the hacker forums that these things are mainly sold to employers snooping on employees, and to parents checking up on their kids.”
It took me a beat to catch her drift.
“You thought that I was spying on you? Why would I do that?”
“I could tell you picked up on something between me and Phil when you met him the other day,” she said, cheeks turning pink, “and that you were a little freaked out. I thought maybe you wanted to know what was going on between us, and didn’t feel comfortable asking.”
“You’re right that I noticed,” I admitted, reminded of how adept she was at reading me. “And that I’d been meaning to ask you about it. But I’d never spy on you. I trust you.”
“I know,” she said, nudging my knee with hers. “And I’m sorry for jumping to the wrong conclusion. But this was a pretty slick installation. Mom couldn’t have done it—she doesn’t have the tech skills. You have a bunch of smart network guys at work, though. I figured maybe one of them helped you.”
I made an effort to set my anger aside and think about what had happened objectively. Frick and Frack certainly had the tech skills, but they operated only at Walter’s behest. Was it possible that Walter was spying on me? Why?
“Do you have any idea when the bug was planted?” I asked, hoping the time line might shed some light on the situation.
“Some,” she said. “But let me finish. I was really pissed at you all yesterday afternoon, and then after the concert, I decided to teach you a lesson. I hunted around on the Internet and found a program that let my computer emulate our modem.”
“Remember who you’re talking to here, please,” I said, wary of her slipping into jargon. “Keep it simple.”
“Sorry.” She hesitated a moment, lips pursed. “What I wanted to do was hook the repeater up to my computer but trick it into thinking it was still attached to the modem. The repeater has a limited amount of memory. When it runs low, it has to send the information it’s captured somewhere else. That’s why our network was acting so strange when I was downloading the big video files—because the repeater kept interrupting to dump data to the remote server. By hooking the