CHAPTER 21

  CINDY THOMAS AND a dozen other avid journalists had stampeded around the Hall of Justice to the back entrance and, once there, had been flatly turned away by security guards. No surprise, really, but Cindy felt personally attached to Mary Elena, who’d been attacked and raped while the Women’s Murder Club had been lunching on caviar.

  Trying again to get into the courtroom, this time through the front door, Cindy maintained her pole position in the lead while Alison Kiel from the American Enquirer questioned her, trying to make friends, hoping to follow her into the Hall. Cindy put on extra speed. By the time she and the rest of the pack reached the Hall’s front entrance and cleared security, court was in session.

  Cindy adjusted her computer bag, hoisting its weight onto her shoulder as she took the elevator up to the second floor. Clearly, she’d wasted time trying to snare a quote from Yuki or Mary Elena, but hell, she’d had to try. She hoped that Louie Mack, one of the two court officers who manned the doors to Courtroom 8G, would hold “her” seat in the last row and would admit her to the court while it was in session.

  Cindy didn’t see Louie outside the courtroom as she headed toward it, and then, as if he could see through six inches of oak—he opened the door.

  “Anybody else would be left standing in the hall,” he said.

  “Thanks, Louie. I was chasing a scoop. How’d you know?”

  He said, “ADA Castellano texted me. Get in here. Quick.”

  Cindy edged into her seat, closest to the door. She plugged her devices into the socket in the baseboard and checked the time, again. It was later than she’d thought. Yuki was winding up her opening statement. Damn it. Cindy loved to watch Yuki work and now she’d missed her setup for the trial.

  “Shit.”

  The woman sitting in the seat to her left gave her a hard look. Cindy ignored her and concentrated on Yuki.

  CHAPTER 22

  YUKI SUBMITTED THREE copies of each of her exhibits to the clerk: the photos of Mary Elena’s injuries, the transcript and a thumb drive of the police interview with Tyler Cates before he lawyered up, with a video of the interview. The clerk logged the exhibits and passed them to the judge for his approval. Defense counsel had already seen them so the clerk delivered the exhibits to the jury, who, to Yuki’s eye, still looked a little shocked from her opening.

  When the exhibits had been viewed and returned to the clerk, Yuki addressed the jurors again.

  “As you saw from the photos, Ms. Hayes suffered a vicious attack. Mr. Cates punched her, strangled her, pulled her legs apart, and forcibly penetrated her. As you will see on the videotape, Mr. Cates claimed that Ms. Hayes ‘asked for it.’

  “It will be up to you to decide if her screams contradict this statement.

  “During the course of this trial, we will introduce noted psychologist Dr. Laurie Birney, a specialist in the field of dissociative identity disorder. We will also introduce you to Dr. Stuart Aronson, Ms. Hayes’s treatment psychiatrist, who will testify about her condition and how it affects her emotions and behavior.”

  Yuki explained, “Alternate personalities, Olivia and Loretta, took over for Ms. Hayes when she was experiencing terrible fear, pain, and stress. This happens when the dominant personality, Mary Elena, is ‘bumped’ into a dark place that people with this disorder often call ‘lost time.’ This lost time is a form of amnesia and a hallmark of DID. Accordingly, Ms. Hayes does not remember what happened to her in the changing room at Xe Sogni, but it cannot be disputed. The beating and the rape did occur, and we will prove this to you with medical reports and forensic evidence showing a 100 percent match to Mr. Cates’s DNA.”

  There was a murmur in the gallery that was shut down of its own accord. What would the ADA say next?

  Yuki was pacing now, looking down at the floor as she collected her thoughts. Keiko’s calming voice was in her head: Okay now, my daughter, you are doing very well.

  Yuki launched the next and last part of her opening. “The defendant did indeed assault and rape Ms. Hayes. And whether or not he knew what Ms. Hayes’s mental disorder was called, he knew that her name and personality changes that took place in his presence were not normal. Still, he violently assaulted her, sexually penetrated her as she screamed for help. Mr. Cates chose to take advantage of the situation, possibly thinking that it was his lucky day.”

  Ed Schneider objected to Yuki’s putting her thoughts into his client’s mouth and Judge St. John sustained his objection, ordering Yuki’s last comment stricken from the record. Yuki felt it was a price worth paying.

  She thanked the court and said, “We’ve concluded our opening statement.”

  Yuki returned to the counsel table, nearest to the jury box. She took her seat on the aisle and leaned across Gaines and whispered to Mary Elena, “Okay?”

  Mary Elena said softly, “We’re fine.”

  Gaines gave Yuki a hearty thumbs-up and then Judge St. John addressed the defense.

  “Mr. Schneider, please proceed with your opening statement.”

  CHAPTER 23

  YUKI HAD NEVER met Ed Schneider, but he was well-known in California as a cutthroat criminal defense attorney with an impressive batting average. Now, Tyler Cates’s attorney rose to his feet. He buttoned his jacket and staked out a position behind the podium in the center of the well. Facing the jury box, he began to dismantle Yuki’s platform, one board at a time.

  “Your Honor, good people of the jury. I don’t intend to take an hour to give the defense opening statement. The witnesses will fill you in on the events that took place in Xe Sogni because they were there.

  “For now, let me say this.

  “The defendant did not know that the plaintiff had a theoretical mental illness that blocks out real words and actions happening in actual present time. Why is knowledge of this theoretical mental illness critical to the prosecution’s case?

  “It’s critical because my client has sworn that he did not know that there was anything wrong with Ms. Hayes. If he had known, it would have meant that Ms. Hayes could not give consent to having sex with him. That is the prosecution’s case because sex without consent with a disabled person is a crime.

  “There was no witness to the commission of the sex act, let alone that the defendant believed Ms. Hayes was mentally disabled. Ms. Hayes told my client that she wanted to have sex.

  “Furthermore, when I say that Ms. Hayes’s disorder is ‘theoretical,’ I mean there is no scientific proof that DID even exists. It’s simply theory. Guesswork and make-work for untold numbers of psychiatrists, psychologists, psychiatric researchers, and social workers. However well-meaning, the expertise of these people lies in detecting and analyzing symptoms, then labeling them as mental disorders. They are not scientists, and I repeat, scientific evidence of DID does not exist.

  “For example, a theory of another psychological disorder: It’s been posited by psychiatrists for decades that depression is caused by a shortage of serotonin, a feel-good neurochemical produced in the brain. Until lately, the theory has been that early trauma causes the human brain to create additional receptors for this neurochemical. The effect of many additional receptors, according to this theory, is that the serotonin is sucked up into those receptors so quickly that it does not sufficiently bathe the brain cells with feel-good serotonin, and so the individual becomes depressed.

  “Ever hear of a book called Listening to Prozac? This book posits that if a patient responds to selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, like Prozac, they are therefore suffering from a shortage of serotonin, ergo, their depression is a psychiatric disorder and can be treated by serotonin.

  “Manufacturers of a huge class of these selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors sold them by the boatload. Not long ago, it was proven that this theory—sold as ‘science’—is faulty. SSRIs cured nothing. But Big Pharma pushed the theory disguised as proof and made billions.

  “Back to the case at hand. Actually, there is no medication for DID. Psychoanalysis is recommended. Meditation. Learning what trauma triggers the presence of so-called alters. Tranquilizers. In other words, there’s no standard of proof that DID exists. I could go down the list of psychological disorders where the proof is in the interpretation of symptoms, not in physical structures or provable disorders.

  “Tyler Cates has common sense and a tenth-grade education. He washes vegetables and dishes for a living. He did not know if Mary Elena Hayes had dissociative identity disorder or a vivid imagination or just wanted to get roughed up by an attractive stranger. He didn’t know, I don’t know, and whatever Ms. Hayes says, I honestly say to her, ‘You have a big and active imagination. You put yourself in a situation you couldn’t control. You shouldn’t do that again.’

  “Mr. Cates couldn’t take advantage of this so-called mentally disabled person who could not or did not give consent, because only the two of them were present in that changing room. There is no way to establish if Ms. Hayes has such a mental condition or if it just makes for good fiction or a rationale after the fact. At any rate, Tyler Cates didn’t know a thing about it. Mary Elena Hayes, by any name, came on to him. He complied with her wishes.”

  Ed Schneider strode heavily back to the defense table, roughly pulled out his chair, and when it snagged on the table leg, he wrangled it into submission and sat down.

  Schneider didn’t intimidate Yuki and she’d remained unfazed while he spoke. Now it was time for Yuki to call her first witness.

  CHAPTER 24

  JOE WRENCHED THE steering wheel, sending his old Mercedes into a hard right turn around the curve on California Street. Bao fell against her seat belt, then was thrown back in her seat as Joe, staying close to Cyber Security Incorporated’s Tesla, climbed the forty-five-degree incline of Jones Street. Bao hung on to the armrest, and as Joe took the hilly roads, she told him what she knew about Thordarson and Wooten.

  “Sveinn Thordarson graduated MIT with honors in math—Jeez, Joe.”

  “Sorry, Bao. Keep talking.”

  “Where do you keep the barf bags?”

  “Seriously?”

  “Nooooo. As I was saying, Thordarson was then recruited by the Secret Service. Wooten graduated Harvard in the top 1 percent; majored in science and technology. He was snapped up by Intel and was on a management track. By then Thordarson had started his new business and offered Wooten a partnership in his cyber threat defense start-up.”

  Joe said, “That fits. I see Thordarson as a risk taker. Wooten’s precise. I’d guess an intellectual.”

  “Here,” said Bao, reading from her phone. “One of their clients says, ‘Wooten can see threats in five dimensions, in or out of the sandbox.’”

  “That fits.”

  “Good guess,” Bao teased, bracing against the next curve with her hand on the dashboard.

  Joe knew that in tech jargon, a sandbox was an isolated testing environment for trying out code changes and other experimental work. Like tracking cyber threats.

  The Tesla pulled up to a ten-story office building on a mixed-use block in the Rincon Hill district. Joe parked behind the CS Inc. company car, and he and Bao joined Sveinn Thordarson and Pete Wooten at the building’s entrance.

  Inside, the lobby was fronted with a manned security desk, lined with white stone, and punctuated by a half dozen elevators. One of them was marked with a nameplate inscribed CYBER SECURITY INCORPORATED and had a biometric palm print reader below it. Thordarson cleared his guests through security, and Wooten put the flat of his hand on the palm reader. There was a buzz, a thunk, and the lift doors opened. The four got in and the car sped them directly to the top floor. The doors opened again, this time into a long white room taking up most of the tenth floor.

  Joe was temporarily stunned by the pure white light evenly illuminating six long tables, running lengthwise, from back to front of the room, the SOC, or security operations center. Each of the tables held multiscreen computers from end to end. Behind them sat dozens of technology operators wearing headsets, their chairs pulled up to the tables, their eyes fixed on the screens. There was a soundtrack, the clacking of keyboards and chatter of speech to fellow operators nearby.

  Joe and Bao followed Thordarson and Wooten to the office at the rear of the room. Wooten closed the door behind them and Thordarson offered chairs and cold drinks. After all were seated, Joe asked how their process worked.

  Thordarson squared the empty space in front of him with his hands. Then he said, “St. Vartan’s wants us to work with the Feds and that’s what I always recommend. We can track the evildoers but have no authority to arrest them.”

  Thordarson gave Joe and Bao his full intense attention. He said, “So, our charge is to eject Apocalypto’s payload, reset what’s been damaged or altered in St. Vartan’s network, and set up the next level of protection. In this case, shutter all of the faulty protocols that Apocalypto has put into place in the last weeks or months, malware that is set to drop the instant the two-day extension period expires if the ransom doesn’t drop into their bank. Once we’ve restored their systems, put blocks in place, St. Vartan’s is going to be impermeable, and Apocalypto knows it.”

  “Smart of the hospital to have you at the ready,” Bao said.

  “Thanks, Director. It’s still impossible to stop attacks before they happen, but our warning system did its job and we’ve been actively working since LaBreche called me three hours ago. Right now we’re collecting indicators of compromise. When we’re done, God willing, we’ll have an impermeable hospital and we’ll turn over the attackers’ names or pseudonyms, IP addresses, a report on the malware, and other types of indicators to you guys.”

  “Stupendous,” Bao said with a smile. “Now, I think I’ll take a diet-something with caffeine. Jet lag.”

  CHAPTER 25

  PETE WOOTEN OPENED the fridge under the table, took out a Diet Coke, held it up.

  “Ice?”

  “A nice cold can is fine,” said Bao.

  Wooten handed off Diet Cokes to Bao and Joe, grabbed a Red Bull for himself and one for Thordarson, then clinked cans with all three.

  “To Fidelity, Bravery, Integrity,” Wooten said, quoting the FBI motto. Bao grinned and Wooten returned a grin, then sat back down in his chair.

  Thordarson said to the FBI visitors, “We brought you here to see our process in action. Pete and I developed a real-time attack map for locating cyberattacks.”

  “Real time how?” Bao asked.

  “As you know, the current best practice is to have one person, say FBI or NSA, watching the attackers’ end and the internal security folks watching the target—in this case the hospital. Our dream tracker watches both sides at the same time.”

  “Oh, wow,” Bao said. “You’re going to give us a demo?”

  “Exactly. This is its actual maiden launch. We’d be interested in your read on CS Inc.’s just-minted attack catcher.

  “Created right here.”

  He pointed a remote-control device at the eighty-inch screen on the wall to his right. A diagram appeared on the screen. Joe peered at it. Couldn’t quite make out what he was looking at.

  Thordarson said, “Can everyone see okay? I’ll sharpen the contrast.”

  Wooten cut the overhead lights, and after Thordarson brightened the picture, Joe walked over to the screen and Bao rolled her chair closer. Now, the 3D diagram was clearer.

  “Beautiful,” said Joe.

  “This program is part sandbox, part dream catcher. It’s a perfectly in-scale diagram of the globe. Right now, we’re viewing the northern hemisphere. Those pinpoint clusters of light represent individual devices signaling at 1,000 Hz or higher. Here’s a sparse concentration of pinpoints in the Arctic,” Wooten said. “Those are biologists’ devices likely studying and recording life-forms deep under the ice. And here, this is a military base in Croatia. These blips are coming from search engines powerful enough to hop over continents without being boosted by an outside network. And of course, they use the submarine fiber-optic cable backbone.”

  Wooten toggled a switch on the remote and the map rotated.

  “We’re seeking a signal of an IP address launched from a known location in Amsterdam or Bruges or Eastern Europe and coming toward a known location in Northern California, USA.”

  Sveinn said, “Pete, roll back the tracking record to two weeks ago.”

  Pete Wooten made some adjustments to the projector, winding back the time stream. The symbols on the diagram rapidly reassembled.

  “Here we are,” said Wooten. “Two weeks ago.”

  He jabbed a button on his remote, which brought the rotation and all other movement to a halt.

  Wooten said, “Now, retroactively, we’ve identified devices that have been pinging the IP addresses of companies, individuals, targets of all kinds in Bruges, Amsterdam, Glasgow, and finally setting course for the City by the Bay. We developed an AI program that alerts us to a pair of hits that include Eastern Europe and Northern California. That’s when our SOC team”—he pointed to the room outside the office—“runs the IP addresses through our programs to get IDs on the signal. That signal carries the payload and starts the destruction when directed. So far, we don’t have those hits.”

  Wooten pressed a button and the program sped up to present time. Joe found it mesmerizing to watch computer signals break apart and reform. He was impressed by the display, but unless it produced a suspected attacker, it was all lipstick and no pig. As he watched the light array cross the East Coast of the US, the machine beeped.

  “There—and none too soon, I should add,” Wooten said, pointing to one glowing dot in a cluster. “That dot represents a device bearing a known twelve-digit IP address. It launched from Amsterdam and is searching now from a point in San Francisco.”