The day after Pete presented him with the silenced pistol, Ty was back at the foreman's office with another request.
"Pete, you seem to know about everyone worth knowing around here, so tell me how I can change my identity for a month or two."
Pete shrugged his shoulders with his hands palms-up. Without hands, Pete probably wouldn't be able to talk.
"That one's beyond me, boss, but why are you asking me anyway? Woody was a cop, and who sees more fake IDs than a cop?"
Ty frowned and tilted his hat back on his head.
"I don't know if I want to expose Stella to anymore of this," he admitted.
Pete rolled his eyes and shook his head.
"The woman is in a position to take a bullet protecting you, and you want to keep her uninvolved? Hell Ty, if you trust anyone, you better trust her. Besides, it seems to me she needs to know what you're up to so she can decide if she wants to keep hanging around."
Ty shook his head ruefully. He was damned glad he had a man like Pete around to kick his ass back in line when he needed it. He pulled his Nextel off its clip and called Stella on the two-way.
Stella was in the barn saddle soaping and repairing tack when Ty called. She figured that she was still a wrangler, and she tried to pull her weight every chance she had. It took her fewer than five minutes to make it to Pete's office. When she was seated, Ty started over.
"Stella, you know I'm going to disappear for a while, and today, Pete reminded me that you needed to know why. What I'm about to tell you goes along with our chat about not doing anything you are uncomfortable with. Regardless of what you decide, your job here is safe, understand?"
"Fire away," she said with a nod.
Ty took a deep breath and let it out then launched into his explanation.
"I mentioned us pretending to be a couple the other night, and I alluded that I needed folks to think I was some where other than where I'll be. See, I'm going to change my appearance and move to the barrio under an alias. While I'm in the barrio, I'm going to poke around the edges of the street gangs and find out who was responsible for killing my grandmother and Lupe. While I'm doing that, you are going to be somewhere acting as if I was there too. We'll make that easier by picking somewhere close by, but secluded, like our ranch up in Wyoming, for instance. I'll sneak back a time or two so we can make a public appearance.
"My concern about asking you to do that is because I will do whatever it takes to find the person who gave the order that caused her death, and then I will personally send that individual to hell. Even though you won't be going to the barrio with me, I figure you covering for me might make you liable as an accessory. So I want to give you one more chance to cut all this loose and go back to your normal life before you get in too deep."
Stella regarded Ty intently for a few long seconds, reading the conviction and iron-willed certainty behind his words. Stella had no big problem with what he wanted to do. She knew what vermin the street gang members were from when she was a cop. If something bad happened to a few of them it wouldn't cause her to lose any sleep. Besides, Tyler McGuinn had enough money to hire an army to extract his revenge, but in true Texas fashion, he was going to do the job himself. The sheer manliness of it made her tingle, while the hurt little boy in him made her want to hold him to her bosom. The guy was killing her and he didn't have a clue.
"No problem, Boss Man, I'm still in," she said with a crooked little grin. "How can I help?"
Ty regurgitated his talk about needing a new identity and Pete added a caveat.
"The identity needs to be pretty good, because the gang-bangers have girlfriends and relatives in about every department of the city and county governments. I know for a fact there is a couple in the Public Defender's office, so running police and credit checks is a snap for them," Pete said.
Stella gave him half a nod and drummed her fingernails on the desk top as she searched her memory. Then she sat up straight and snapped her fingers.
"When I was a cop in Santa Fe, I heard about a kid who supposedly made perfect IDs for under-aged college kids. He used some sort of internet web site to attract business. Let me make a few phone calls and see if any one remembers what came of all that.
Two hours later, Stella tracked Ty down in his big home office. She knocked lightly on the open door.
"Got a second, Boss Man?" she asked.
Ty spun around in his desk chair and gave her a look.
"I've got a second if you call me Ty, Sunshine. If you call me Boss Man when we are out and about, it's going to appear as if I'm paying you to be with me," he quipped.
She laughed and walked into the room and perched her shapely rear end on the corner of his desk.
"Okay Ty, if you insist, but you can call me Sunshine anytime you want, I like that ... a lot," she said sweetly.
Then she changed the subject and handed him a sticky note with a web site address on it.
"My friend in Santa Fe just called me back. The kid I was talking about was the son of some big-shot scientist at the Sandia National Laboratory over in Albuquerque. The feds stepped in and the matter was dropped when the kid promised to stop making the fake driver's licenses. Since he was doing it for free just to get away with it, everyone was satisfied with that. Here's his name, if you Google it, you'll get one web address to a weird site and nothing else."
Ty nodded and did just that. He followed the link to the web site and sat there staring at the almost empty screen. The site was titled 'GetLost.com' and the only things on it were a banner message declaring, 'Need a Drivers License? Enter you zip code here for the nearest licensing office to you.' Then down near the bottom was a dialog box with the instructions, 'Enter The Secret Word'. Ty thought for a second, shrugged his shoulders and typed in 'p-l-e-a-s-e'. As soon as he hit the enter key, the screen blinked and a message replaced the dialog box.
"Please enjoy the musical interlude while we process your request," it read.
Ty had no way of knowing that the delay was so his IP address could be traced and his identity established. Or that once he was identified, his credit report and banking records could be hacked. Nor could he know that the audio streaming over his Internet connection contained a subtle worm program that ceded control of his computer to the one at the other end of the connection.
A couple of seconds later, AC/DC's Highway to Hell came blaring out of his speakers. Ty chuckled and answered Stella's curious look.
"That's a good omen, because I love AC/DC; I've got every album they ever made on my hard drive."
He wasn't as thrilled with Stella's rejoinder.
"Weren't they from like the fifties? I didn't know you were that old."
Before he could retort, she laughed and slugged him on the arm.
"Just kidding ... Pops," she said with a giggle.
The music stopped about halfway through the song and a chat window opened. The top box was titled 'Waldo' and had a message in it already.
Waldo: "You need a better computer Tyler Lopez McGuinn, this one is a piece of doo-doo. Now why are you bothering me?"
Both Ty and Stella stared at the screen in shock for a second, then Ty typed his answer.
Tyler: "I need a new identity that will pass hard scrutiny. I can pay you well for it."
He had a reply in seconds.
Waldo: "I know you can, I just checked your bank balances and investment accounts, but money isn't everything, and I like that you fund that cancer foundation, my mom died of breast cancer."
Ty sat back in his chair and cut his eyes towards Stella. She looked as shocked as him. He quickly typed his response.
Tyler: "I find it hard to believe you've already looked at my financials. My bank is supposedly very secure."
The window on his screen split in half and sure enough, page after page of his financials scrolled slowly by. Then the text messenger dinged and Ty read the reply.
Waldo: "Wanna bet? Tell your girl friend to sit beside you, all I can see with her leaning over your shoulder is the top of her breasts, and it's distracting me."
Stella gasped, straightened up and took a step back. Ty turned and looked at her in confusion and she pointed to the red dot that indicated that the web cam built into the monitor was active. Ty was starting to get hot under the collar as he typed his next message.
Tyler: "Okay, so you've proven you have skills, I'm impressed. Now are you going to help me or not?"
Tyler's anger turned to something else when Stella sat in his lap with her arm around his neck instead of pulling up a chair. She smiled coyly when he looked at her.
"I'm your girlfriend, Waldo just confirmed it, so where else would I sit?"
Tyler was saved from having to answer that when the instant messenger dinged again.
Waldo: "Make a big contribution in my mother's memory to your cancer fund, and I'll think about it. Her bio is in your e-mail."
Ty was starting to get a feel for this guy, so he ripped off a quick reply.
Tyler: "Why not just transfer what you think is appropriate while you are plundering my records?"
Waldo sent him a frowny face.
Waldo: "I don't steal, Tyler. Don't need to really, I have everything I need or want ... well everything except some big gorgeous babe like yours."
Ty let out a breath and went with his gut. The kid (if that's what he was) on the other end was obviously some master hacker. He could probably get what he wanted as easily as Ty could ... yet he didn't. That spoke to Ty of a person with some sort of values, skewed as they were or whatever.
Tyler: "Okay, Waldo, I'll read your mom's bio and make a donation to both the Cora Leigh and Susan G. Komen Foundations. And I'm sorry for your loss of your mother. When will I have your answer?"
Waldo: "I'll see you when I see you, Tyler and Miss Woodson. By the way, you looked hot in that red dress. Oh, and I'm sorry for your loss too, Tyler."
The screen went blank for a second, then his normal desktop reappeared. Ty looked at the screen for a few seconds, then glanced at Stella, who was still sitting on his knee.
"I think he's gone, so you can hop up now."
Stella sighed and stretched her arms over her head, seriously straining the buttons on the front of her faded flannel shirt.
"I think I like this seat," she said saucily.
Ty grinned and for the first time, flirted back with her a little.
"And I like you sitting their, but I need the landline so I can make a call. Why don't you go grab us a tall glass of iced tea while I do that, okay?"
Stella smiled and slipped off his knee.
"Sure, Boss Man, coming right up."
As Tyler dialed his accountant's number, he smiled to himself at the idea of making a significant donation to the Komen Foundation. He had been thinking about spreading around some more research money anyway, and Komen was a very worthy cause.
While Ty was reading the supposed bio of Waldo's mother, fifteen year old Cassandra Neely was sitting in her basement room, cackling with glee. This was the first time she'd ever had someone donate money for a worthy cause, as usually, Waldo would pull some sort of prank on the other person, like having their mail redirected or something equally annoying but harmless.
Her seventeen-year-old brother, Jason was going to have a cow when she told him about this one. It would be great when she joined him at MIT next year so they could play Waldo together like the old days. Cass had already graduated from high school, but she had to wait until she was sixteen to follow her brother. He'd be eighteen then, and could act as her guardian.
Based on the protocols she and her brother developed, Cass started shutting down the convoluted path she'd established between her and Tyler McGuinn. The first proxy server she winked out of was in a secure network owned by the Russian Mob in Moscow. Then she dropped the French Consulate in jolly old England. She backed out of two more diversionary servers, each on a different encrypted link before unhooking from the machine that made all their hacking possible, the gigantic Cray Red Storm supercomputer at Sandia National Laboratory, not two miles from her home.
Cassandra and Jason's father was a senior programmer at Sandia. It was Jason who snuck the innocent little subroutine into the middle of lines of code his father was writing. The subroutine allowed Jason and his sister an undetectable backdoor into one of the most powerful computers in the world. The Red Storm came on line last year with Jason's program firmly imbedded. Cass cackled again at the idea of a fifteen-year-old with thirty-eight thousand parallel processors and seventy-eight terabytes of computing power at her disposal through the keyboard of her iMac.
Cassandra left a flag on Google so she'd be alerted if the name she gave Ty made the news, then she went upstairs to fix lunch. Daddy would be home at noon on the dot, and she liked having something nice for him like mama use to make. She worried about her dad a lot, because he was still lost, even though mama had been gone three years now. Her thirty minute chat with Tyler made her feel better about that, though, because Tyler had been a widower for three years too, when he started dating Stella.
Cass thought she'd handled goofing on Tyler pretty well as she chatted with him on one twenty-four inch monitor while reading through pages of info she googled about him on the other. It was time well spent though, if he donated a few bucks so some other young girl might not have to grow up without a mother. Cass had to admit that she liked what she saw of both Tyler and Stella; they seemed like genuinely nice people, even though Tyler was super rich.
Later that afternoon, Cass was on her computer playing World of Warcraft (WoW) when her alert chime sounded. She was more than a little surprised that Tyler had taken action that quickly. But there it was in a news release from the Susan G. Komen folks.
The Susan G. Komen Foundation is please to announce two most generous gifts received today from Texas rancher and oilman Tyler McGuinn. Mister McGuinn donated two and a half million dollars to the foundation, earmarked for research in the name of breast cancer victim Nina Letey, and a second two and a half million for breast cancer awareness in honor of his grandmother, Isabel Lopez McGuinn. The foundation and our clients thank Mister McGuinn for his generous gifts.
Nina Letey was an anagram of her mother, Tina Neely's name.
Cassandra's mind boggled at the size of the donations, because she knew that Tyler didn't have much more than that in available cash. She knew he was sending her a message that the new identity wasn't about money. Her first impulse was to let the money be a lesson to him, but the more she thought about it, the more she wavered.
Finally, right after supper and the evening news with her father, she fired up her computer and logged onto her anonymous e-mail client.
Tyler,
Book a room at the Santa Fe Marriott for the night of Thursday after next. I'll be in touch.
Waldo
As soon as she hit send, Cass grabbed her cell phone and called her brother. She was going to need some serious help, and Jason was the best there was at finding ways to make her crazy ideas work.
Up in bean town, on the Cambridge side of the Chares River, Jason Neely shook his head at his sister's antics. Cass was scary-smart, but she was a wild child. She caused ninety percent of the trouble he'd ever been in, but he wouldn't trade her for a ride on the space shuttle. Cassandra came up with ideas, and Jason methodically organized her vision and pushed them to completion. Cass was the one who thought up putting the back door into the Red Storm at their father's lab. She even figured out how to do it, but Jason had written and perfected the four lines of computer code that made it happen. He knew she'd be up to something the minute she arrived next year, and he seriously hoped that MIT was ready for her.
Jason was five foot eight with a medium build that he worked hard to keep buff. He was a handsome young man who looked and acted like a bright and polite seventeen-year-old that any mother would be proud of. It was a look he capitalized on to help keep him out of trouble. He used to hate how young he looked, until Cass convinced him it was actually an advantage. Heck, she ought to know, because she was only five feet even and weighed ninety-five pounds. She was also Cindy Brady cute. When she wanted to, she could look as if she were twelve.
Jason thought about what Cass wanted them to do, and saw no harm and a good challenge in it. This was a much bigger deal than cloning a New Mexico driver's license. Jason took out his doodle pad and started listing ideas as they came to him. After thirty minutes of cogitating, Jason read the list to his Macbook Pro and sent them in an encrypted e-mail to Cassandra.
Back in Albuquerque, Cass opened the e-mail and arched her eyebrows at the thoroughness of the list of tasks, and the rational order in which Jason had sorted them. She sometimes envied her brother's well ordered mind. About half of the list was simply researching public records, but some of the items would require some serious hacking. Cass grinned impishly and activated the link to Sandia Lab's Cray supercomputer. She was a girl who loved a challenge too.
It took her fifteen minutes to set the parameters of her query string, because she needed to filter what she thought would be over a hundred thousand births down to one death. She needed to find a Hispanic or mixed-race man with a Spanish surname born within a year or two of McGuinn, and who died in obscurity as an adult. He would have to be between five-eleven and six-four, and not have any felony convictions or distinctive physical characteristics. She sent the Cray searching, and then she rejoined her quest on WoW.
Nights were usually quiet at Sandia Labs, so there was plenty of computing capacity available on the thirty-five hundred square foot Red Storm array. The supercomputer used a fraction of that idle capacity to root through data bases in every state in the union and the District of Columbia. It found eighty-seven thousand male live births for the years 1975 through 1979. Of those births, a surprising high number of thirty-one thousand were already deceased. Many died as infants, some died in some far off war, a number of them were killed in crimes of violence, and automobile wrecks killed quite a few.
The winnowing out of the nonqualified only took minutes, mainly because of the height restrictions, Cass built into the query. So it was that Cassandra Neely had six names of potential new identities by ten that night. She ruled out one candidate right away, because he was from El Paso. The other five she started researching, starting with the circumstances of their deaths. Another name was eliminated because the man died in a fiery airplane crash that stayed in front of the public eye for weeks. And so it went for the next two hours, until she was down to two.
Cass studied the photographs of the two men, with each one displayed on a different monitor next to a picture of Ty. Neither one of them looked much like Ty, 'not handsome enough' she thought. It wasn't as if it mattered anyway. Both fit the general profile, but the clear winner was the poor guy who did not leave a wife and children behind. His name was Ricardo Salazar, but according to his obit and the staff and residents of the nursing home where he worked, most people knew him as Richie.
Salazar was born and raised in Mesa, Arizona and married his childhood sweetheart. When his pregnant wife was killed in a car wreck, Salazar started moving around the southwest. He had been granted drivers licenses in Arizona, California and Nevada. He died and was buried in Las Vegas.
Cass took what she had assembled on Salazar and sent it to her brother via encrypted e-mail. She would leave the delicate work of hacking into the Social Security Administration and the IRS to Jason. Jason would fill in the five years Salazar had been dead to the databases at both agencies. It was tedious work fabricating the electronic data at the federal agencies, but by the time he was through, as far as the government of the United States was concerned, Salazar was still a marginally productive member of society.
Jason also caused the Department of Vital Statistics in Phoenix, Arizona to send a certified copy of Ricardo Salazar's birth certificate to a mailbox at the UPS Store in Albuquerque. The social security administration also sent a replacement SSAN card to him there. The UPS store mailbox was where Jason and Cass had everything sent they didn't want their father to know about.
There was a lot about his children Doctor (PhD, Physics) George Neely didn't know. Oh, he knew how intelligent and mature they were, because they practically raised themselves after Tina died. George loved his kids, but he couldn't take care of himself, let alone them too. Thankfully, both Jason and Cassandra had inherited there mother's (another physicist) practicality, as well as both parents' brains. Cassandra was working hard to find her father a new life partner, because she didn't like the idea of leaving him on his own when she left for MIT one little bit.
The e-mail from Waldo was good news to Ty, because Waldo had most ably demonstrated an ability to manipulate the system. He figured that anyone who could have his credit report and access his bank records in fewer than fifteen minutes wouldn't have much trouble fabricating an ID.
He talked the situation over with Stella and Pete, and decided that the trip to Santa Fe would be the jumping-off point for his supposed extended vacation. Ty figured he'd need at least a month for cementing his disguise, and becoming familiar with his new identity. When he was ready, he'd return alone to El Paso and find a job and a place to live in the barrio.
On the appointed Thursday, Ty and Stella drove a rented Ford Expedition two hundred and fifty miles up Interstate 25 to Santa Fe. They passed the trip talking about everything under the sun. Ty found Stella to be exceptionally good company. She had that same wickedly playful sense of humor that Cora Leigh had, yet she was a different enough person not to constantly remind him of his deceased wife. Stella also drew conversation out of him much easier than anyone in the last three years.
The couple arrived in Santa Fe at two in the afternoon. They checked into the Marriott and Ty picked up a document-sized UPS mailer that was waiting for him at the desk. Stella had made the travel arrangements for them, so Ty was much surprised that she had reserved them a mini suite with a king-sized bed. He looked at the bed then looked over at her.
"New lovers don't ask for separate beds," she said, the very voice of reason.
Ty nodded, conceding the point.
"Well, the couch doesn't look too uncomfortable, and I've slept in worse places," he replied.
"Nonsense!" she retorted. "I trust you and besides, I'm pretty sure that nothing would happen I didn't want to happen, anyway."
Ty knew better than to argue with her on that point. Pete Colon told him that 'Woody' had laid out two cowboys who had tried to get amorous with her when she was a new hire. Pete said she put one of the drovers in a judo hold that left him with his neck out of joint until he could visit a chiropractor.
Ty looked her up and down as she stood there hip shot. For the trip, she wore a new pair of slightly tight jeans and a snug, feminine blue blouse. Her short shag haircut framed her face nicely, and she even wore a touch of make up. She was a very attractive woman and Ty was a normal man who'd been celibate for more than a month, he hoped she was right about being able to trust him.
Ty and Stella's arrival at the Marriott did not go unnoticed, as a slip of a girl in jeans, t-shirt and baseball cap, peeked over the top of a Cosmo she was pretending to read, watched them check in. The girl was Cassandra Neely. Cass was at the Marriott because her father was attending a two-day symposium on fluid dynamics. She had Ty travel to Santa Fe to pick up his documents at the same time, as a way to keep any communication between them untraceable. She could have used another method, but she was also curious about Tyler and his girlfriend, and she wanted to see them in person.
Cass thought they made a cute couple. She smiled when Stella said something to Tyler that made him laugh. For a person from a family of small people, she was fascinated about how big they both were. Neither one of them was movie star material, but he had rugged good looks and she had a sparkling personality to go with her lush shapeliness and attractive features. They both flashed Cass a smile as they walked by heading towards the elevators.
Cassandra Neely was a strange mixture of adult, teenager and young girl. Her astonishing intellect put her way ahead of her contemporaries, but behind them in some ways too. For one thing, Cass had never attended high school, except to graduate. She also didn't hang out with people her own age, because she found the typical teenager vapid and self-absorbed. Consequently, all of Cass's social interaction was with her father's contemporaries (all of whom treated her as an adult), or through chats at World of Warcraft. Since she had promised both her father and Jason that she would limit her time on WoW, she mostly talked to other extraordinarily intelligent people. And of course, not having her mother's guidance also didn't help one iota.
All of that accounted for her seemingly Mercurial nature and sometimes impulsive behavior. It might have also had something to do with what she did ten minutes after Ty and Stella boarded the elevator to their fifth floor mini-suite.
Ty was the one who answered the soft knock on the door. He swung it open and looked down at the waifish girl with the ponytail sticking out the back of a Diamondbacks baseball cap.
Her eyes darted up and down the hall. Satisfied the coast was clear, she leaned towards him.
"I'm Cassandra," she whispered conspiratorially. "Waldo sent me."