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I gave her some time to gather her thoughts. She pulled a tissue from her designer purse and blew her nose. She sniffled for a little while until she was ready to talk. Then she leaned in across the table and said in a very clear and determined voice, “Is there anything I can do to help you catch whoever killed Tommy?”
“I’m not the detective on the homicide. I’m just looking for Natalie. But I can think of something that will help both me and the homicide detective.”
“What’s that?”
“Tell me about Estonia.”
CHAPTER 41
I PULLED OUT a small notebook and settled in to hear Jennifer Chang’s story. Like most people about to talk to the police, she paused for a moment. She looked around the room as if she was conducting countersurveillance.
She said, “If Natalie’s in Estonia, she’s with a hacker named Henry.”
“Henry.”
“His real name is Endrik. Endrik Laar. Henry’s just the Anglicized version of his name he prefers. I’m pretty sure he’s from Estonia originally. He’s there now, at any rate.”
“Who is he? What’s he look like?”
Jennifer thought about it for a moment. These computer people didn’t just spout off. They considered questions and the best way to answer. Finally she said, “I guess Henry is about thirty. He’s a little on the short side. Not even five eight. He used to be as skinny as a rail, but now he’s muscular. I mean absolutely ripped. Part of it is because he trains with some former Olympian from Germany. Part of it is steroids. I think that’s what changed his personality. He used to be the typical funny, nice, young computer guy. But he’s changed.”
“How so?”
“It started with his moods. As he brought in more and more money, it was like he realized how much power he had. Then he hired people specifically as enforcers. They were the ones who kept all the programmers from talking to the police. I think it’s worked pretty well. To my knowledge, he’s never been arrested.”
“Why would Natalie be with Henry? Are they an item?”
“That’s a complicated question. Henry had relationships with all three of the female programmers during the time I worked with him, here in New York. A girl from Latvia named Svetlana. Natalie. And me.” She stared at me to see if I was shocked or would offer any judgment.
I said, “I remember what it’s like to be young. I don’t care about any consensual relationship. But I am trying to get a handle on if Natalie was forcibly taken or ran away to be with her boyfriend.”
Jennifer said, “It’s hard to say. Natalie was into Henry for a while. When we first started working with him, we thought we were doing something special. Exposing secrets. Forcing businesses to admit when they were cheating people. But pretty quickly Henry figured out the real money was in essentially blackmailing retailers. He’d knock out their website for an hour, then tell them to pay some outrageous sum or he’d knock out the website for three days.”
“But he couldn’t knock it out permanently.”
Jennifer gave me a flat stare. “Amazon does more than six hundred million dollars in sales a day. Do you think if some hacker who proved he could knock them offline asked for five million dollars to leave them alone they wouldn’t go for it? Henry does it all the time. And by setting up his bank accounts in money havens like Belize, Switzerland, and the Cayman Islands, it makes it impossible to find him.”
I put down the pad and crossed my legs. “What is Natalie like?”
“Nice girl. Very close with her mother. When you told me her mom hadn’t heard from her I knew something was wrong.”
“Is she a hacker, too? Does she enjoy cracking systems?”
“We all enjoy breaking security systems. She is more into creating the algorithms than actually cracking the systems. She never seemed to care about money, either.”
“Do you think she’s in trouble?”
Jennifer didn’t have to think about this one. She looked me right in the eye and said, “Yes.”
CHAPTER 42
ALICE AND JANOS stepped through the door of Brew. They didn’t try to hide or be subtle. No one knew them. Their rough plan involved waiting until Jennifer and the cop left and then somehow luring them to a secluded area. Eliminate both of them. Then flee.
What the plan lacked in details it made up for in boldness.
Alice said to Janos, “You shoot the cop. Don’t hesitate once we get them outside. He doesn’t look like someone you want to screw with. I’ll deal with Jennifer.”
Now, as she stood by the front door of the coffeehouse, she took a moment to appreciate Jennifer completely. It wasn’t just that she was pretty and stylish. This girl was dead-on smart. Alice would see what all those brains did for her with a wire around her throat.
