“Oh, my God. Okay, this is going to require some explanation.”
“Can you put it on? The Fairmont has pay-per-view.”
Now, it’s my turn to stare at him, confused. “Dax…this might sound obvious, but…you’re blind.”
His deep laugh seems to surprise him, and he sinks against the back of the couch, takes off his glasses, and wipes his eyes. “Trust me, darlin’. I haven’t forgotten. But…a lot of movies—especially older ones without all the fancy special effects—rely on enough dialogue that I can follow them pretty easily.”
“Oh. I didn’t…”
“Don’t you dare apologize.” Carding his fingers through my hair, he angles my head until he can claim my lips. “Though, I remember how much you enjoyed me stopping you.”
“Enough,” I say, my hands on his shoulders to force a little distance between us. “We have work to do, soldier. Tell me what you and Wren found in the notes while I hook my tablet up to the television. I have the movie on iTunes.”
Dax tucks his Bluetooth into his ear, taps the rim of his glasses, and starts slowly flipping through the pages. “This one here,” he says, passing it across the table as I sit back down and start the movie. “Wren says the numbers and abbreviations listed are likely subroutines and lines in the code where Kyle found anomalies.”
“I recognize some of these function names. I wrote a lot of them. Or…at least the beginnings of them. When Noah hired me, he had three developers working for him. Barry, Sundar, and Raja. They’d just started Alfie’s framework. Barely had an idea of where they were going or what they were doing. All Noah knew was that he wanted something that could compete with Siri. He wasn’t thinking about a home unit, or car sensors, or personal security. Just the software.”
On screen, Martin Brice watches as Cosmo’s taken into custody, the scene fading to black, and Dax cocks his head. “So, Redford got away.”
“Yep. And his buddy spent the next twenty years or so in prison. The good stuff happens in about twenty minutes.” Turning over the answering machine, I find four small screws holding the housing in place. “Need my kit. What else is on those pages?”
“A lot of dates. Time stamps. Down to the second. A lot of them are crossed out. But a few of them, he circled. Then, in the corner of this page,” Dax hands me a ragged-edged piece of paper that someone must have crumpled up at some point, “three words stood out to Wren.”
Arch01 Remote Enabled?
My stomach clenches, dinner suddenly not sitting well. “That’s the name of the computer in my office. But we don’t allow remote work. We haven’t since Noah agreed to turn Alfie into…what she is now. I brought in an intellectual property lawyer to advise us on how best to go about keeping Alfie a secret until we were ready to announce, and he came back with a whole twenty pages of recommendations and regulations. Including disabling all remote access to our servers.”
“Most of the rest of these pages…they all look like gibberish to me. Wren says they’re bits and pieces of code, so you might have more luck with them than we did.”
Pouring us more wine, he cocks his head and listens. “Wait. Whistler’s…blind?”
I laugh as I loosen the first of the four screws. “Yep. And he solves the whole damn thing. So stop selling yourself short, soldier.” From my seated position on the floor, I nudge my shoulder into his knee. “Just listen to this next bit of dialogue while I get this housing off.”
On screen, Robert Redford describes an office to the rest of his team, and before the blind Whistler character can make his big reveal, Dax mutters, “Son of a bitch. The guy has an answering service. He wouldn’t need a machine.”
“Bingo. Two points,” I say. “I told you this movie was brilliant. Now, let’s see what secrets this little machine has.”
Setting the case aside, I frown. “It looks like your standard nineties answering machine. Except the tape’s missing. And there are like sixteen more screws.”
One by one, I dump the screws in my leather toolkit until I can pry the second layer of dark gray plastic off the machine’s inner guts. “Jackpot.”
“Uh, still blind here, darlin’. What is it?”
I press the USB stick into his palm. “Hopefully, some answers.”
The movie’s long over. Dax fell asleep an hour ago, stretched out on the couch, snoring almost imperceptibly. His warmth at my back keeps me going, though the lines on the screen are starting to blur. I tuck Dax’s Bluetooth in my ear, pair it with my phone, and call Wren.
“Evianna? What’s up? It’s really late there.”
“Yeah, almost two,” I say quietly as I pad into the unused, second bedroom and shut the door. “Kyle didn’t delete all the copies of Alfie’s code. He kept one. I found it on a thumb drive in the answering machine. It’s eight months old, and the function names and line numbers he wrote down don’t tell me anything. A few of them don’t even exist.”
“What about in the current code?” Wren asks with a yawn. I forget, she keeps Boston time, so it’s late for her too.
“I won’t know that until I get to the office tomorrow. I don’t suppose you made any progress on that little trojan you were working on?” Now I’m yawning, and I press my hand to the thin wood door, silently promising myself—and Dax—that I’ll try to turn my brain off and sleep soon.
“Almost done. I’ll have it for you in an hour. Maybe less. But you’re going to have to install it on the server manually. Can you do that? Without anyone noticing?”
With a sigh, I start to pace the room. “During the day? No. We have a network admin who practically lives in that room right now. But…we’re having a party tomorrow night to celebrate code complete. I can do it then. As long as I’m quick, no one will miss me for five minutes.”
