The Broken Window

the theft was what Lincoln Rhyme had heard their computer guru comment on: the empty space on a computer hard drive. Sterling had claimed the computers didn’t keep track of employees’ downloading dossiers. But when Szarnek had explained about information floating around in theether of SSD’s computers, Rhyme had asked if that might include information about who had downloaded files.
    Szarnek thought it was a real possibility. He said that getting into innerCircle would be impossible—he’d tried that—but there would be a much smaller server that handled administrative operations, like time sheets and downloads. If Pulaski could get into the system, Szarnek might be able to have him extract data from the empty space. The techie could then reassemble it and see if any employees had downloaded the dossiers of the victims and the fall guys.
    “Okay,” Szarnek now said, coming on the phone. “You’re in the system?”
    “I’m reading a CD they gave me.”
    “Heh. That means they’ve only given you passive access. We’ll have to do better.” The tech gave him some commands to type, incomprehensible.
    “It’s telling me I don’t have permission to do this.”
    “I’ll try to get you root.” Szarnek gave the young cop a series of even more confusing commands. Pulaski flubbed them several times and his face grew hot. He was furious with himself for transposing letters or typing a backward slash instead of a forward.
    Head injury . . .
    “Can’t I just use the mouse, look for what I’m supposed to find?”
    Szarnek explained that the operating system was Unix, not the friendlier ones made by Windows or Apple. It required lengthy typed commands, which had to be keyboarded exactly.
    “Oh.”
    But finally the machine responded by giving him access. Pulaski felt a huge burst of pride.
    “Plug the drive in now,” Szarnek said.
    From his pocket the young officer took a portable 80-gigabyte hard drive and slipped the plug into the USB port on the computer. Following Szarnek’s instructions, he loaded a program that would turn the empty space on the server into separate files, compress them and store them on the portable drive.
    Depending on the size of the unused space, this could take minutes or hours.
    A small window popped up and the program told Pulaski only that it was “working.”
    Pulaski sat back, scrolling through the customer information from the CD, which was still on the screen. In fact, the information on customers was mostly gibberish to him. The name of the SSD client was obvious, along with the address and phone number and names of those authorized to access the system, but much of the information was in .rar or .zip files, apparently compressed mailing lists. He scrolled to the end—page 1,120.
    Brother . . . it would take a long, long time to pick through them and find if any customers had compiled information on the victims and—
    Pulaski’s thoughts were interrupted by voices in the hall, coming closer to the conference room.
    Oh, no, not now. He carefully picked up the small, humming hard drive and slipped it into his slacks pocket. It gave a clicking sound. Faint, but Pulaski was sure it could be heard across the room. The USB cable was clearly visible.
    The voices were closer now.
    One was Sean Cassel’s.
    Closer yet . . . Please. Go away!
    On the screen in a small square window: Working . . .
    Hell, Pulaski thought to himself and scooted the chair forward. The plug and the window would be clearly visible to anybody who stepped only a few feet into the room.
    Suddenly a head appeared in the doorway. “Hey, Sergeant Friday,” Cassel said. “How’s it going?”
    The officer cringed. The man would see the drive. He had to. “Good, thanks.” He moved his leg in front of the USB port to obscure the wire and plug. The gesture felt way obvious.
    “How d’you like that Excel?”
    “Good. I like it a lot.”
    “Excellento. It’s the best. And you can export the files. You do much PowerPoint?”
    “Not too much of that, no.”
    “Well, you might some day, Sarge—when you’re police chief. And Excel is great for your home finances. Keep on top of all those investments of yours. Oh, and it comes with some games. You’d like ’em.”
    Pulaski smiled, while his heart pounded as loudly as the hard drive whirred.
    With a wink, Cassel disappeared.
    If Excel comes with games, I’ll eat the disk, you arrogant son of a bitch.
    Pulaski wiped his palms on his dress