The full minute of silence that followed my questions was heavy, almost sad.Doug had lowered his head, then shook it once.
“You need to speak, Doug.Your answer has to be clear,” Ben cautioned.
He shook his head again.“No, I don’t need you to call anyone, and I don’t want to talk with a lawyer.It is what it is.”
The text tone on my phone sounded deafening in the silence after his statement.Emma.I picked up the phone.
Emma: It was a diversion.
The pattern matches.E.
Me: Can’t come up now.
Big break.More later.A.
I put the phone back on the table, screen down.“Sorry for the interruption.Doug, we have all the time you need.”
He finished the water.I didn’t realize Ben had another bottle until he put the second bottle on the table.
“Do you want to record this?”Oooookaaaaay.A glance at Ben and a quick nod.
I picked up my phone again.“Yes, I think that’s a good idea.”I set up the voice memo app.“Do I have everyone’s permission to record this meeting?”
“Yes.”
“Yes.”
Time to get the legalese out of the way.I gave the date, time, location, confirmed that Doug waived having an attorney present.Each of us repeated that permission had been granted to record.
“Start at the beginning, Doug.Whenever you’re ready,” I prompted.
And for the next hour, he told a story that was almost unbelievable.The confluence of circumstances had to be one in more than a million.
He was a member of an online gaming group; five lived in the local area, and they met occasionally at a bar south of Seattle.This had been going on for nearly three and a half years.The other four were Hugo Wayne, Baylor Moore, Greg Webster, and Lee Milligan.I knew that in the tech community, like other professions, especially in a local area, eventually, if you lived and worked in the same area long enough, everyone knew or knew of everyone else.
After we fired Baylor, he was hired at one of the big box electronics stores, hated the job, but couldn’t get hired at the big tech firms.No surprise.
Hugo was a different story.Doug said he couldn’t get a job, and his unemployment had run out.He’d lost his apartment and had moved in with Baylor.He definitely had a log on his shoulder toward FI because he thought we’d blackballed him.Doug’s observation was spot on: Hugo insisted that everything that had ever happened to him was everyone else’s fault, and why couldn’t people see that he was an expert.
Greg Webster and Lee Milligan worked for Tri-O-Tech—the connection and the grudge.Doug explained that when I mentioned Emma, everything came together, and he knew it was only a matter of time.Greg made sure they all knew that Emma was the daughter of the guy that owned some big tech firm, Palmer Logistics or Technology or something, and she’d either slept her way up or daddy had somehow smoothed the way.Now Greg and Emma were up for the same promotion.Greg went ballistic when Emma was assigned to the project.
“I knew Tri-O-Tech was handling the expansion and streamlining, but I didn’t make the connection until you asked if I knew her.”
The plan was Hugo’s idea.The malware was ransomware hidden in ghostware.Hugo stored it in plain sight.He would send Doug the trigger from a burner phone to a dummy FI email after Hugo duplicated the R&D project file that contained designs, drawings, and data on new products.He intended to sell it—Doug had no idea who the buyer was—had the buyer all lined up.Supposedly by the time the ransom money had been wired to an offshore account, Hugo, Baylor, Doug, and Lee would be out of the country, destination somewhere that had no extradition treaty with the US.
Greg intended to try and sabotage any work that Emma was doing on the expansion, tank the project, then somehow convince Tri-O-Tech management to let him come to the rescue.Greg wanted nothing to do with the ransomware attack.His only involvement was to ruin Emma.
“I know this all sounds like a B grade movie.All it’s missing is the jilted lover.Turns out Lee wanted to get with Emma, said the idea was if he got with Emma, maybe she could put in a good word with her dad, but she ignored him.He said she acted like she was too good for everyone.Barely spoke to anyone.
“Anyway, I tried to tell them the plan wouldn’t work because of how tight security is.Hugo said between him, Baylor and me, we’d figure something out.That was right before he got caught by the intrusion alarms.I was going to tell you; I swear, and then Craig told me you wanted to see me.I was sure it was because you found out.”
Ben spoke for both of us.Doug seemed like he had his life together.“Why did you get involved in this?You’re the last person I would’ve thought would have anything to do with something like this.”
Doug scoffed on a bitter laugh.“The person you see today isn’t the person I was as a kid.When I was fourteen, I stole a car.It belonged to a guy who lived at the other end of our street.Ever seen that movie about the old guy who restored an old car?He hated anyone that came around his place.They must’ve used old man Griffith as the inspiration.It was a black Vette.I got caught, charged with grand theft.If it hadn’t been for old man Griffith, they probably would’ve put me in juvie until I was eighteen.The DA wanted at least three years.Mr.G tried to get them to drop the charges, but that wasn’t happening, so Mr.G talked the DA into one year and got the record sealed.Hugo found it.Said if I didn’t help get them in, he’d send the record to HR.
“I fucked up again and here we are.”
Chapter Forty
