Sliver Of Truth

“Hey, it’s Jenna,” said a youthful voice when I answered. “How are you, stranger?”

“Hey, there. Thanks for getting back to me,” I said. “Can’t complain. You?”

Jenna was a talker, which is why I’d called her. She was a one-woman corporate rumor mill. She told me how she’d married last year, been promoted, and was pregnant with her first child. I knew we were about the same age, and though I was happy for her, it made me feel somehow behind, like she was clearing the hurdles with grace and skill and I was still hovering around the starting gate. As she chatted on, I spent a moment wondering how this conversation would have gone if I’d married Zack when he’d asked two years ago, if I’d be having this conversation at all. Would I be pregnant? Would I have taken one of the many staff writing positions that had been offered to me over the years? Would I be happy in the ignorance of my past, in marrying a man I knew I’d never love but with whom I was more or less compatible? I didn’t dwell on it too long; not much point in that. We make our choices. We forge ahead. Or we curl up and wallow in regret. Both alternatives have their appeal. At the moment I was forging.

“So what’s up?” she said after the niceties had been exchanged. “You have an idea for me?”

“Not exactly,” I said. “I’m wondering what you know about Myra Lyall. I had some calls from her a few weeks ago. I suppose something to do with Project Rescue. I was thinking about returning her call but I wanted to see if you knew her first.”

She was quiet for a minute. “You didn’t hear?”

“What?” I said with concern and interest, playing dumb.

“God,” she said with a sigh. “She and her husband disappeared a couple of weeks ago. Apparently someone accessed our servers-which, by the way, is supposed to be next to impossible-and wiped her hard drive and all her e-mail communications. People here are pretty spooked. It’s just terrible, Ridley.”

“Wow,” I said, trying to sound suitably shocked. “That’s awful. What are the police saying? Does anyone have any idea what happened?”

“There are all kinds of theories floating around,” she said, her voice dropping to a whisper. “One has to do with her landlord. She and her husband were at war with him. They lived in this rent-controlled apartment they’d been in since the seventies. The new owner had recently bought the building and wanted them out so that he could get the market rate for the apartment. Suddenly they had terrible mice and roach problems, the heat never worked. Apparently, they’d decided to put their rent in escrow until he fixed things; that sent him over the edge. Word is he has ties to the Albanian mob.”

“But that doesn’t explain how the Times server got wiped clean…or why.”

“No. It doesn’t,” she said softly.

“So…what else are people saying? I mean, what was she working on at the time?”

I thought Jenna might clam up. I could hear her breathing. She was a pretty woman with small, serious features and bright green eyes, peaches-and-cream skin. It had been a while since I’d had any face time with her, but I could imagine her frowning, tapping her pen on the desk.

“A lot of people around here think she stumbled onto something. It’s just a rumor.”

“Something to do with Project Rescue?”

“I don’t think so. She put that story to bed over a month ago. And that was more of a human-interest piece than her usual investigative work. She kind of got pushed into it by this new editor-you know, put-some-faces-on-the-crime kind of a thing. Besides, as far as news stories go, there wasn’t any new ground to cover.”

“So…what, then?”

“I dated one of the IT guys for a while ages ago. Grant Webster. He’s kind of ‘into’ his job-a little bit too into it, if you ask me. That’s one of the major reasons we broke up. On top of his job, he has this whole website devoted to the history of hacking, all this conspiracy-theory tech stuff. Anyway, he said it wasn’t the usual kind of hacking. It’s one thing to get in and read e-mail, or to try to steal subscriber credit-card info, or to take over the site for a while. It’s quite another to hack in to the level necessary to erase data from a server. He thinks it might have been someone in-house, someone who was paid to do it…” She let the sentence trail off.

“Or?” I said.

“Or it was one of the federal agencies.”

I let the information sink in. “Like the CIA or the FBI?”

“Right.”

“So the rumor is, she stumbled onto something she wasn’t supposed to know about, possibly involving one of the federal agencies, so someone made her disappear and erased all her e-mail correspondence?”

She didn’t pick up the skepticism in my voice.

“And her hard drive, containing anything she might have been working on now plus everything she’d ever worked on in the past, though of course most of that has been published. And her voice mail,” added Jenna. “Which, according to Grant, is a lot easier than erasing e-mail.”

“That’s quite a theory,” I said.