“Morton Leringer, owner and CEO of ML Corporation,” said the voice-over, “died in the emergency room of a Moss Beach, California hospital yesterday as a result of a stab wound. The coroner has ruled the manner of death as homicide. Police later searched his nearby home in Half Moon Bay, on the Pacific coast below San Francisco, and discovered a second victim—Nathan Eddington, age forty-eight. Eddington was an employee of StarrCom, a Bay-Area-based security company owned by ML Corporation.”
Emily leaned forward, mouth open. The video showed a body bag being carried out through a huge front door and down porch steps.
“The homicides are being investigated by the San Mateo County Sheriff’s Coastside Patrol Bureau, which serves over sixty percent of the county, including Half Moon Bay. The Moss Beach Substation is the largest law enforcement facility on the coast, staffed with twenty-seven full-time deputy sheriffs, four sergeants, and one lieutenant. So far the substation has not asked for outside help with its investigation. And they are speaking little to the media, saying only that they are following leads.”
The video ended. Emily stared at her monitor, thoughts whirling. StarrCom. A security company.
What kind of security?
Hunched over the keyboard, she searched for the company’s website and jumped to the home page.
“StarrCom Security,” read the header. “Keeping the World Safe.” Emily leaned back in her chair, gaze fixed on her desk. Had Nathan Eddington, through the company’s own security, discovered a terrorist plot to take out power stations?
Whoever was behind this had killed two people already. And they’d tried to kill two more.
Where were Mom and Grand?
“Hey, Emily!”
She jumped. A long, lean face grinned down at her from above her cubicle wall. Dave Raines, her mentor.
“Whoa.” Dave raised his Groucho Marx eyebrows. “Too much coffee already?”
Emily shook her head.
Dave eyed her. “What’s up?”
She hesitated. “Can you keep a secret?”
“Depends on how much you pay me.”
“I need you to look at a video. Just lasts a minute.” She thought she may have seen more pixelation toward the beginning but couldn’t be sure.
“Okay.”
“But on your computer. You’ve got better software.”
“Let’s go.” Dave gestured with his head.
“Thanks. Let me copy it to a flash drive first.”
“All right.” Her mentor disappeared.
Emily copied the file, then snatched up the piece of paper on which she’d written the long sequence of numbers and letters from the video. She hurried into Dave’s office.
“There’s noise at the end,” she told him as he put in the flash drive. “Looks like an encrypted message. I wrote down the sequence.”
“What? Who’s your client, the CIA?”
“Not a client.”
He eyed her.
“But now I’m wondering if there’s something at the beginning. Just a little flash. I can’t enhance it enough to tell.”
“Okay. Let’s see what we got.” Dave pressed the Play arrow.
Emily leaned over his shoulder and watched with him. “There’s no audio.”
As it started, Dave stiffened. He leaned closer, watching closely. At the end he gave her a hard look. “You have any idea what this is?”
She looked away. How much to tell him? “Maybe a power generator?”
“It is a power generator. A very sick one.”
“How do you know?”
“My father worked for a power company.”
“Oh.” Dave’s father had died a year ago. “Didn’t know that.”
“I’ve seen these machines up close. This kind of machine controls an entire power station. But something’s made this generator go out of control.”
Right. Just like she’d seen in that CNN video. “Would that . . . so what would happen?”
“The station goes out. Which means millions of people lose power.”
Emily rubbed her arms. “Could it be fixed quickly?”
Dave stared at the monitor. “This doesn’t look good. Where’d you get this, Emily?”
She opened her mouth, then closed it.
“If this is real, it wouldn’t be like some wire going down. It could cause what my dad called a cascade effect. If a central power station goes dark, it can take another one down nearby. Which takes another one down, and on and on. A whole region could go black.”
Emily sucked in her bottom lip.
Dave turned to look her in the eye. “Where’d you get this?”
“I . . . someone gave it to my mom.”
“Your mom. Why?”
“I don’t know exactly.”