Prologue
Jonathon Crestwell stared at the woman on the video display. The screen was one of a dozen or so lining the walls of his control room, but at the moment it happened to be the only one with a person on it.
A person.
Nice try at keeping it objective there. Liv Altman was a green-eyed blonde with lush curves rivaled only by her brains.
The man next to Jonathon cackled. “I thought she was your usual tech geek, right? Then I managed to plant the spyware in her computer—which was no easy task, let me tell you—and it’s in there for like an hour before she detects the threat and deletes it. But in the meantime I get this. Turns out she’s got a shower next to her office, so when I go through the feed, this is what I see.”
Ms. Altman was unknowingly stripping for the hidden camera. Her shirt was the first thing to go. Pulling the plain tee over her head, she threw it onto a pile of clothes in her office closet and twisted her long hair into a messy bun on the top of her head, revealing the slender shape of the back of her neck and shoulders. She stretched her arms high above her head, undoubtedly to get the kinks out after sitting at a desk all day, and he saw flat abs and a tapered waist that had been lost underneath clothes designed for comfort, not fashion. Then, in just her bra, she paused, leaning toward the camera, examining something on her computer screen, but giving the eerie impression she was looking right at them.
Jonathon glanced at Rudy Dickinson with disgust and flicked the monitor off.
“Hey!”
“You said you had something to show me. Was there a point to that, other than you getting your sick kicks?”
Rudy licked his lips almost comically and adjusted the crotch of his too-tight plaid pants. “Oh, come on, Crestwell. You got to admit that was cool. Tell me you haven’t done something like that once or twice.”
“No, I haven’t, you pervert, and no, it’s not cool. It’s twisted and illegal, by the way, and I’m not going to watch it.”
“What’s the problem? Chicks show more skin than that on the beach. Besides, her bra was that clunky white cotton,”—he gestured with a chubby hand at the now dark monitor—“not even lace. And we didn’t get to the part where—”
“If that’s what you wanted to show me, get out. Peep show’s over.” Jonathon reached for a beer from the fridge by the console, his throat suddenly way too dry, and took a swig of the brew, barely tasting it. “You said it was urgent. I never should have taken you seriously to begin with.”
And he wouldn’t have, except for the threatening emails someone had been sending him. Cryptic, but full of warnings that he’d better do what was asked of him when the time came. His email address was private. Intensely private. So he wasn’t sure where the threats were coming from. They were untraceable, sent by somebody who knew what they were doing around computers. And disturbingly, the last one had included a picture of his little sister, Julie. So when his old classmate, Dickinson, contacted him and said it was imperative they talk, Jonathon thought it might have something to do with the emails.
“Okay, okay,” Rudy said. “I’ll get down to it. So you know who that chick was, right?”
“Liv Altman? Yeah. She’s head of research at Lincoln Computers.”
In tech circles it was bandied about that Altman was working on a software program that her company had euphemistically labeled “anti-piracy.” A lot of people, Jonathon included, thought the product itself had the potential to be a lot more dangerous than that. It could end up not only making sure that people didn’t illegally download copyrighted material from the Internet, but completely muzzling the Internet while it was at it. Only “authorized content” allowed, approved by the powers that be. No safe haven for dissidents to criticize dictators or innovators to share ideas. No Arab Spring, where anti-government protestors joined together via social media. No last defense against censorship. By developing a technological tool to control the Internet in the name of property rights, Liv Altman could be wiping out all that was good about the web being uncontrolled in the first place. Throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
In other words, Jonathon wasn’t much of a fan.
“So what? What does Liv Altman have to do with me?”
“You’re going to be working with her.”
Jonathon scoffed. “Hardly.”
He hadn’t worked with—or for—anyone but himself since he had graduated from MIT at eighteen.
“Before you make up your mind on that, I got another tape to show you, Crestwell.” Dickinson pulled his phone out of his jacket pocket and swiped a few screens. “You won’t want this one up on the full monitor, so I’ll just preview it for you on my phone.”