No Good Deed, page 21
part #2 of Lancaster & Daniels Series
Lancaster was standing to Daniels’s right. He wanted to see what was on Gar’s computer, and he stepped between them, using his hand to swivel the PC so the screen was facing him. Gar tried to object, and Lancaster showed him the fake warrant.
“Do you know what this is?” he asked.
The remaining blood in Gar’s face drained away, and he sank back into his chair and shut his eyes. Daniels grabbed his wrist and checked his pulse.
“He’s passed out. You really scared him.”
“Take a look at this.”
Daniels turned her attention to the PC. On its screen was an aerial map of the Tampa area with dozens of pulsating dots of light. The dots were different colors and expanded and collapsed like heartbeats. Suddenly, one of the dots darted across the map like a player in a video game, and left the picture.
“What are we looking at?” Daniels asked.
“I think he’s following people,” he said.
“On their cell phones?”
“That would be my guess.”
The program’s operating system was Microsoft Windows, and there were multiple open folders displayed on the bottom of the screen. He dragged the mouse over the first folder and clicked on it. An aerial map of Saint Petersburg appeared, also with pulsating dots of lights. Examination of the other folders showed maps of several cities in Florida.
Gar’s desk was cluttered with papers, and Lancaster sifted through them, hoping they might shed some light on the images. They turned out to be overdraft statements from Gar’s bank and dunning notices from creditors, and they painted a picture of a man up to his eyeballs in debt. Gar began to stir, and mumbled under his breath.
“He’s coming to. What do you want to do?” Daniels asked.
“I want to grill him. You okay with that?”
“Sure, but no rough stuff.”
“I just want to scare him.”
He went to the door and locked it. Returning, he borrowed Daniels’s handcuffs, and slapped one of the cuffs onto Gar’s wrist, then locked the other to the arm of his chair. Daniels shot him a disapproving look, but said nothing.
A bottled water sat on the desk. He unscrewed it, and poured the contents onto Gar’s head, soaking his neck and shirt. The programmer awoke with a start, and tried to stand. Seeing that he was a prisoner of the chair, he howled. “Let me go!”
“You’re in lots of trouble. Don’t make it worse,” Lancaster said.
Gar rattled the handcuff. “Is this necessary?”
“That’s entirely up to you. Are you going to cooperate?”
He blinked, thinking hard. “Define cooperate.”
“We want you to explain the work that you do.”
“I do lots of different work. Which campaign are you talking about?”
“Tell us how you’re tracking people’s cell phones.”
“I want a lawyer.”
“You sure about that?”
Gar smiled, thinking he had the upper hand. “Damn straight.”
Gar was being cute, believing that a lawyer would bail him out of jail, and that he’d walk away unscathed. His eyes needed to be opened, and Lancaster decided to play his hand. “The company you work for is in trouble. They willingly sold encrypted cell phones to a drug dealer, which is a third-degree felony, and could get you sent to prison. You got any priors?”
“What?”
“Prior arrests.”
Gar swallowed hard. “I got busted for pot once.”
“You’ll do five years. You’ll make a lot of new friends.”
“I didn’t have anything to do with those phones,” the programmer protested.
“Good luck proving that in court. Meanwhile, Special Agent Daniels will tell the judge you’re a flight risk, and ask him to post a high bail, which you won’t be able to meet. You’ll have to plot your defense behind bars, which isn’t easy. Think about it.”
Gar fell back in his chair. “They’ll kill me if they find out I squealed,” he said.
“Who’s going to kill you?” Daniels asked.
“My employer, the bikers,” he said.
“You mean the Outlaws,” Lancaster said.
“That’s right, the Outlaws. They’d cut my heart out if they found out I betrayed them. I’ll take my chances in prison, thank you very much.”
It wasn’t the response Lancaster was expecting. He shot Daniels a glance, needing her help. She took his cue, and placed her hand on Gar’s sleeve.
“If you help us, I’ll get you put into the government’s witness protection program,” she said. “You’ll get a new identity, and a new life. We’ll relocate you to another part of the country where the Outlaws don’t have a presence. You’ll be home free.”
“You’re not screwing with me, are you?”
“I’ll put it in writing, if you want me to.”
“What about my girlfriend?” he asked.
“What about her?”
“Can she come with me?”
“I don’t see why not.”
Gar wasn’t sold. His eyes fell on the stack of unfriendly mail littering his desk. Were those obligations going to follow him as well? Daniels picked up on his vibe.
“I can take care of those as well,” she said.
“You’ve got yourself a deal,” the programmer said.
CHAPTER 33
Once he was uncuffed, Gar’s attitude changed for the better. He grabbed a soda from a small fridge and offered them drinks as well. He wasn’t a bad guy, just a guy who’d gotten himself caught up in a bad situation. If given a second chance, he would probably walk the straight and narrow for the rest of his life.
“How did you come to work for the Outlaws?” Daniels asked.
“It didn’t start out that way,” Gar said. “When I went to work for Phantom, they were a legitimate marketing company who specialized in mobile advertising campaigns. Our motto was, Data won’t change the world without the right people to understand it. We did ten million in sales our first year.”
“Out of this office?” Daniels asked.
“I wish. The company started in Miami, then branched out, and opened satellite offices in Orlando and Tampa, which is when I joined. We used to have thirty employees, with four working here.”
“Did you sell encrypted cell phones?” Daniels asked.
“No, I did not,” he said emphatically. “That was a side business out of Miami that I wasn’t involved with.”
“What exactly did you do in this office?”
“We did three things for our clients: mobile advertising campaigns, location measurement—which is analyzing GPS location data of a client’s customers through their smartphones—and business intelligence, which is a fancy name for statistical analysis.”
“Sounds like a good business model,” Daniels said. “What happened?”
“Google happened,” he said. “They offered the same services for less money, and wiped us off the map. The company shrank down to six employees, with just me and Wendy in Tampa. One day the owner called me, and said he was having cash flow problems. He asked me to start paying the office bills on my credit cards.”
“Did you?”
“Yeah. He promised to pay me back once things got worked out.”
Something dropped in the pit of Lancaster’s stomach, and he pointed at the letters on the desk. “Is that where those came from?”
“Afraid so,” Gar said.
“Why did you go along with this?” Daniels asked him.
“Maybe this sounds naive, but I believed him when he said he’d get things worked out. This is the best job I’ve ever had, and I didn’t want it to end.”
“When did the Outlaws enter the picture?” Daniels asked.
“Three months ago. The owner said he had a new backer, and he’d be coming by with a check. That was music to my ears, because I was about to get thrown out of my apartment. That afternoon, a biker appeared in the lobby. The guard refused to let him in, and called me. I called the owner, and was told this was our new partner.”
“So you let him upstairs,” Daniels said.
“I didn’t have much choice,” Gar said.
“Describe him,” Lancaster said.
“He was a mean hombre, and wore all black,” Gar said. “He said his name was Dexter. I never got his last name.”
“What happened then?” Daniels asked.
“Dexter gave me a money order for five grand, which he called an installment,” Gar said. “He had a job for me, and said that he’d give me five grand every two weeks until it was done. I was fifty grand in debt, so I couldn’t say no.”
“So you had reservations about working for him,” Lancaster said.
“You bet. He made my skin crawl.”
“What was the job?” Daniels asked.
Gar took a swallow of his soda and wiped his mouth on his sleeve. A guilty look spread across his face, and he spent a moment gathering his thoughts.
“He wanted me to track people,” the programmer confessed.
“On their cell phones?” Lancaster said.
“That’s right. You know about this?”
“We don’t know how it works. Explain it to us,” Daniels said.
“In mobile advertising, there’s a metric called location measurement, which lets retailers track cross-channel advertising campaigns to see if the ads are influencing foot traffic in stores. All the major brands do this.”
“What’s a cross-channel campaign?” Daniels asked.
“It’s a campaign that runs on three channels,” he said. “Personal computer is the first channel. The second channel is tablets, like iPads. The third channel is mobile phones. That’s cross-channel.”
“Got it. How does location measurement work?”
“Okay. Let’s say you’re Nike, and you want to promote a new line of sneakers. Your goal is to drive customers into your stores, which are located inside shopping malls. So you run a cross-channel video campaign that is targeted against consumers who meet your profile and live in zip codes that are located within a ten-mile radius of your stores.”
“You can do that?” Daniels asked.
“Piece of cake. Nikes sends us a video, and we wrap it with a tag. When a viewer watches the video, the tag recognizes the viewer’s IP address, and stores it. We then use a software program to find the mobile phone tied to your IP address.”
“Let me be sure I’ve got this straight,” Daniels said. “If I watch a Nike video on my laptop, your company can determine where my mobile phone is?”
“That’s right. The software program is called a device graph, and it lets us determine the mobile phones tied to the IP address the campaign is delivered to. We then partner with hundreds of apps that track your location, which lets us know where your mobile phone is. It’s fairly easy to find you, once we’ve served you an ad.”
“That can’t be legal.”
“It’s perfectly legal. Have you downloaded an app recently? Before it becomes functional, you’re asked to accept the terms of use. No one reads what those terms are. If they did, they’d see that they’re permitting the app’s designer to track their location, and sell that information. The industry has a name for this. We call it terms of abuse.”
“How long does it take your technology to do this?”
“Nanoseconds.”
He shook his head. Corporations were monitoring his movements every day, and he hadn’t known it. He glanced at Daniels, hoping she’d take over.
“Okay, so Dexter paid you a visit, and said he had a job for you,” she said. “What exactly did he want you to do?”
“Dexter wanted me to track a specific person using location measurement,” Gar said. “The idea was that we’d bombard this person with a tagged video ad, and start monitoring her location when she went shopping.”
“Can you track specific people?”
“I didn’t think we could,” Gar admitted. “But Dexter said that the Miami and Orlando offices had done it, so I was wrong.”
“Your other offices tracked people for Dexter,” Daniels said.
“Yeah. Tracking is supposed to be anonymous, meaning we don’t know the identities of the people we’re tracking. But it isn’t hard to attach a name to an IP address, and track a specific person.”
“And you did this for him.”
“Yes, regrettably.”
“You knew it was wrong.”
“I did. But I also knew that if I didn’t go along, I’d be living out of my car. So I agreed to do what Dexter wanted.”
Something wasn’t adding up, and Lancaster jumped in. “Dexter’s full name is Dexter Hudson, and he spent the last fifteen years in prison. How did he suddenly get tech savvy, and know about location measurement?”
“That bothered me too,” Gar said. “How does a guy who rides in a biker gang know about mobile device tracking? The second time Dexter visited my office, I asked him. He said that one of his biker buddies was on the FBI’s Most Wanted list, and got run down and arrested. His buddy’s lawyer made the prosecutor reveal how his client was found. There’s some legal name for this.”
“Discovery,” Daniels said.
“That’s it, discovery. So the FBI had to reveal how they found Dexter’s buddy. It turned out that they used location measurement.”
Lancaster shook his head in disbelief. If a criminal defense attorney had asked him how he’d tracked down a client, he would have invented an answer and not tipped his hand, knowing that criminal attorneys were sometimes in cahoots with their clients. But the FBI did things by the book, and had given the Outlaws a valuable tool.
“So you tracked specific people for Dexter, and sent their whereabouts to him,” Lancaster said.
“Not exactly,” Gar said. “The Miami office created video ads, which they emailed to me. I wrapped the ads in tags, and bombarded the people Dexter wanted to find. Then I let Dexter do the tracking. I wanted no part of that.”
“How did Dexter track them?”
“He used an app on his mobile phone that I gave him,” Gar said. “I told him that wasn’t the app’s purpose, but he didn’t care. I told him that it was wrong, but he didn’t care.”
Daniels started to ask a question, but was drowned out by a roar of motorcycles coming from outside. Gar said, “That doesn’t sound good.” They rose from their chairs and went to the window. Down in the parking lot, four leather-clad bikers had parked by the entrance. They were banged up, leading Lancaster to believe they’d been part of the gang at Echo’s complex the night before. Dexter Hudson was not among them, which was a shame, because he was looking forward to confronting him.
“What’s this about?” Lancaster asked.
“Must be payback time,” Gar said.
“You did something to the Outlaws that warranted payback?”
“The last time Dexter was here, he threatened to beat me up if I talked to anyone about this,” Gar said. “It bothered me, so I decided to file a police report. Since I didn’t know Dexter’s last name, I filed the report against his company, which is called One Percent Solutions. Those guys must be his partners.”
“We need to get out of here,” Daniels said. “You’re not coming back, so grab whatever belongings you want to keep.”
Gar scooped his laptop off the desk. From a desk drawer he grabbed several personal belongings and shoved them in his pockets.
“Ready when you are,” the programmer said.
They took the stairwell to the floor directly below, went into the hallway, and stood by the elevators. The LED display showed that one of the cars was coming up.
Lancaster drew his SIG and aimed at the door, in case the bikers decided to stop at this floor for some reason. Daniels drew her sidearm as well.
“Jesus Christ,” Gar said. “Are you going to shoot them?”
Lancaster nearly said, Yes, I’m going to put a bullet into each one of their hearts as payback for the pain and suffering they’ve caused, but bit his lip instead.
“Let’s hope it doesn’t come down to that,” Daniels said.
The elevator didn’t stop, but instead went to the next floor. After a few moments, Daniels pressed the down button, and the car descended to their level. It was empty, and they put their weapons away. Reaching the lobby, they got out.
“We need to blow out of here,” Daniels said. “Once your friends see that you’re gone, they’ll come downstairs. We don’t want to be here when that happens.”
“One second,” Gar said. “I want to ask the guard why he let those guys come up. He’s supposed to call with every visitor.”
The guard was not at his post. A quick search revealed him inside a storage room with a bump on his forehead. The guard was awake, and in the act of dialing 911.
“Those goons attacked me,” the guard said.
“Sorry to hear that,” Daniels said. “We need to get this gentleman to a safe place. Lock this door behind you when we leave, and don’t come out until the police arrive.”
“I’ll do that,” the guard said.
The door clicked behind them. Crossing the lobby, Lancaster glanced at the elevators, and saw that a car was descending and would soon be in the lobby. Drawing his SIG, he backed out of the building with Daniels and Gar by his side. He didn’t want the bikers running them down, and he went to where their motorcycles were parked and gave the one on the end a good kick, toppling it over, and taking the others down with it.
“Aren’t we clever,” Daniels said.
CHAPTER 34
They drove to Gar’s apartment so he could pack a suitcase and then drove to the Marriott on State Road 54, where Daniels arranged for Gar to be put into a room on the same floor that her team was staying on. The hotel was nearly sold out, and the manager had to shuffle some reservations to see if he could accommodate her.
Gar was looking pale as the reality of his situation sank in, and Lancaster asked if he wanted a drink. His offer was received with an enthusiastic yes, and Lancaster told Daniels that he was going to take Gar across the street and buy him a beer.
“Make sure nothing happens to him,” she said.
“Not on my watch,” he said.
There were several options to get a drink, and he picked Glory Days because of its dark interior. It was quiet, and he chose a booth near the bar.
