Chapter One – Gary
"Wish they could all be so easy," thought Kyle Mason as he exited the lobby of QWERTY Solutions and headed to his car in the parking lot.
The preliminary security audit that Brandt Consulting performed prior to presenting their services to a corporate customer would typically turn up one or two minor chinks in a company's data security procedures, but they'd hit the Mother Lode with QWERTY.
First, a wireless 'sniffer' identified that the Chief Financial Officer for the company had an unsecured wireless access point broadcasting within his home, probably setup by his son without his father's knowledge, but the end result was that they were providing Wi-Fi service just as free as Starbucks or McDonalds, with the added benefit of granting complete access to their home network to anyone who chose to take advantage of it. Any work performed at home by the CFO was subject to hacking.
Secondly, Kyle was able to quickly guess the passwords for the laptops belonging to the Vice President of Human Resources and the Director of Facilities by assuming they were the same as the passwords on their desktop systems, both of which were determined by reading the Post-it notes affixed somewhere on their own desks.
Most organizations realized that if a preliminary security audit focused solely upon officers of the company identified such basic deficiencies, then their real exposure ran much deeper. Such was the case with QWERTY Solutions, and Kyle left his presentation with marching orders for Brandt Consulting to prepare a proposal for a more comprehensive audit and revised data security protocols for the entire company.
Once Kyle had gotten settled behind the wheel of his rental car, he turned his cell phone back on and paired it with his Bluetooth headset. Retrieving his voicemail messages he heard the voice of his old friend Cliff Saunders, "Kyle, this is Cliff. We need to talk man, so give me a call as soon as you get this message. You have the number."
Cliff and Kyle had been friends since grade school, and still socialized several times a year as their schedules allowed. Cliff had married Linda Flynn and bought a house near Corona, which put him at least an hour's drive from Kyle in Costa Mesa, but the distance wasn't as much a barrier to them hooking up as their careers were. Cliff had trained as an emergency room physician and worked horrendous hours trying to get his residency established.
Since leaving the Air Force, Kyle had merged his own company with Brandt Consulting and accepted a position as the Vice President of their corporate business development team. The merger had made Kyle even wealthier than he was before, and while he had the financial security of less than one percent of the American population, he still lived modestly and led a low-profile life.
Although his role for Brandt Consulting had Kyle on the road ninety percent of the time, he didn't mind. At only 28 years of age, without a wife or family other than his widowed mother who still lived on her own in the house where he had grown up, Kyle found his only challenge from the travel being his exercise routine.
Standing at six feet two inches, with a slender 190 pound athletic build, Kyle still loved to play tennis, but seldom had the opportunity to meet up with his friends to get in a match. Most had stopped even calling him to see if he was available because he had begged off too many times.
He also had few opportunities to work with a partner on his martial arts techniques because his hybrid styles were not taught at any dojo in America. Since shortly after joining the Air Force, Kyle had transitioned his earlier martial arts training into the system known as "MCMAP" or the Marine Corp Martial Arts Program. He was a fifth degree Black Belt (instructor qualified) and had hoped to have reached the sixth degree and achieved instructor trainer qualification by this time, but his good friend and senior instructor Sean 'Recon' Wallace had left on a world-wide pilgrimage after he was betrayed by his fiancée a week before their wedding. There were few others in the civilian space that Kyle could work with, so he focused on his job and did his best to keep in shape on stationary bikes in hotel fitness rooms.
Focusing back onto his phone, Kyle saw that his other messages were routine scheduling reminders that he would use to update his calendar later. He called Cliff back as he drove out of the parking lot towards the airport.
"Hey Cliff, this is Kyle. I just got your message. What's up?"
Cliff took an audible breath and broke the news to his friend, "Sorry to be the one to tell you this Kyle, but Gary Conté died early this morning."
"What happened?" Kyle asked. "I just spoke with Gary on Sunday. We were discussing a fishing trip to Utah."
"He got rear-ended by a drunk driver last night on State College Boulevard," replied Cliff.
"Wow," said Kyle. "The guy must have been flying to have injured Gary bad enough for him not to have survived."
"Gary wasn't in is truck," said Cliff. "He was on his bike." Gary had owned a Harley-Davidson Softail for the past two years and had been trying to convince Kyle to buy a similar motorcycle so that they could ride together.
"Geez," moaned Kyle. "Poor Gary."
"If it's any consolation, I have reviewed his medical file and I doubt that Gary ever felt a thing," remarked Cliff. "The force of the impact practically severed his brainstem and the efforts of the EMT's were the only things that presented the emergency room with any vital signs at all when he arrived."
"How are his parents?" asked Kyle.
"I spoke to his dad about an hour ago," said Cliff. "They're holding up as well as can be expected. Gary was always the planner, so his affairs are going to be relatively easy for his parents and the partners in his accounting firm to deal with. They're looking at having the service early next week and wanted to know if you and I could serve as pallbearers."
Gary had always been the strategist in the group. He and Kyle had met in high school when they got paired as doubles partners on the tennis team. Kyle was the more nimble and athletic of the two, but Gary made his presence known by out-thinking their opponents, identifying their weak spots, and then instructing Kyle on how they were going to exploit them. Together, Kyle and Gary won honors as the best doubles pair in the district.
"I'll get my calendar cleared for all of next week until we have a firm date for the service," said Kyle. "Is there anything else I can do for his family?"
Cliff hesitated as he considered Kyle's question, "I think we should leave them alone for a day or two. Maybe you and I can stop by this weekend and offer any assistance they need once they've had a chance to consider everything."
"Sounds fair," said Kyle. "I am heading to the San Jose airport right now, and barring any Friday afternoon delays, I should be arriving into John Wayne by 7 p.m. If anything comes up that you think I can help with, please leave me a voicemail."
"You've got it," replied Cliff. "I'm going to see if I can get someone to cover my shift on Sunday afternoon and once I have that confirmed, I'll call and we can figure out when to visit Gary's family."
"Okay," said Kyle. "Thanks for letting me know Cliff. I know it's never pleasant to deliver a message like that."
"Bye."
"Bye."
***
The checkout line at the grocery store was going intolerably slow. She chastised herself for not stopping at a store with self-checkout lanes because even the express "15 items or less" lanes at this store never failed to have multiple customers who couldn't master the technology of a debit card to complete their transactions without help.
"Might as well use the time in a productive manner," she thought as she pulled her personal cell phone out of her purse to check her e-mail. She didn't receive a lot of personal e-mails, and true to form, most of what she saw now were reminders from her bank's bill pay notification service and messages from the few blogs she subscribed to. There was one e-mail subject line that caught her eye however, and it was announcing that one of her Google search alerts had been tripped. She wouldn't know exactly which alert until she opened the e-mail, and she decided that it would wait until she got home to check.
As she replaced her phone and continued to wait her turn in line, she checked off her search alerts in her head. She had been careful to select search strings, which if entered by anyone in their Goggle search, would notify her so that she could duplicate the same search and see if anything was posted related to the subject of her focus.
Although it wasn't likely that the Secret Service monitored search engines to see who might be interested enough in her subject to have established a search alert for him, the fact that his uncle was who he was, and she worked for who she did, made her overly cautious.
Establishing search criteria that filtered searches on his friends, his company, or his favorite activities had allowed her to monitor him for years without her actually ever having to use his name.
"The subject of her focus", she thought with a grin. What would Kyle Mason think if he knew she was tracking him? It would probably surprise the hell out of him. She knew he never suspected the torment that he had put her through for all those years, and she had diligently avoided any contact with him until she was prepared to bring an end to the suffering on her terms.
Her turn to check out finally arrived and she completed her purchase transaction before her items could be placed into bags. The store personnel on this lane were not accustom to having a customer efficiently pay for their groceries, so they had developed a sloth-like routine in their own actions to compensate. Retrieving the bag as soon as the last item was in it, she strolled out of the store to her car and was pulling into her Vienna, Virginia apartment parking space five minutes later.
