Evie shook her head. “No. He gave a talk at NSA once, but for the most part he stays out of the public eye.”
Rain looked at her. “Is he still close with Schrader?”
“I don’t know,” Evie said. “But I’ve never heard about any kind of rift. And when people asked him at his presentation, he was complimentary. Maya’s right, by the way. I talked to him at length. He’s definitely on the spectrum.”
“How so?” Rain said.
Evie blew out a breath. “He doesn’t look in people’s eyes, for one thing. His presentation was fine, maybe because it was all about math, and that’s comfortable for him, but he stared at the ceiling the whole time. And when I talked to him afterward, there were tics, some echolalia.”
“Echolalia?”
“Repeated words. And instead of looking at the ceiling, he never took his eyes off my chest. And it wasn’t . . . like, sometimes you’ll catch a man doing that, and okay, he realizes he got busted, he’ll look away. Or sometimes it’ll be an asshole who’ll keep stealing glances because he thinks he has the right. But Grimble . . . he just didn’t seem to know better. Didn’t realize he was being rude, or committing a faux pas, or whatever. On the one hand, we were engaging as peers about some pretty high-level applied math. On the other hand, it was though he was talking to a pair of breasts, not a person.”
Rain nodded, wondering whether what he was thinking was too much of a long shot.
“Look,” Evie said, “I think I see where you’re going. But remember, even if Grimble architected Schrader’s video system, the dead-man switch, all that . . . there’s still the biometrics. And the passcode, which would be Schrader’s.”
“Unless . . . ,” Maya said.
Evie looked at her. “Good point.”
Rain looked from one to the other. “What?”
“Unless he created a back door,” Evie said.
“Would he have?” Rain said.
“I would have,” Maya said. “Any hacker would.”
Evie nodded. “That’s right. Or if not a back door, he might have just kept a spare set of keys.”
Rain wondered whether they had both decided to dumb down the references for his benefit. If they had, it probably wasn’t a bad idea. “Then it sounds like Grimble could be the solution,” he said.
Delilah looked at Maya and Evie. “You found out where Rispel was holding Schrader. Can you find Grimble? And determine the extent to which he might have helped design Schrader’s system?”
Evie said, “There’s almost nothing Guardian Angel can’t find. And I’ve never seen anyone use it like Maya.”
Maya smiled. “Thanks.”
Delilah looked at Rain. “All right. Assume Evie and Maya can find him. And that we’re confident he’s the architect. We can ask for his help. But what if he says no?”
“We’re not going to ask,” Rain said. “Larison is.”
chapter
sixty-two
RISPEL
Rispel sat at her desk, the late afternoon sun slanting through the windows.
Schrader’s house had been yet another disaster in what was turning out to be the most cursed op she’d ever been involved in. Four more contractors killed. And Schrader, dead. Police reports said there were signs he’d received medical attention. Had he given Kanezaki’s people the keys to his system before he died? Shown them how it worked?
Apparently not. Because according to her technical team, someone had just finished remotely querying Guardian Angel. The subject of the queries was one Constantine Grimble. Who, it turned out, was a close associate of Schrader’s, and the apparent brains behind their former partnership.