Burning Bright (Peter Ash #2)(71)

“Understatement of the year.” June shook her head. “She told me later that she tried to get custody for years, but my dad had a really good lawyer. I guess it got pretty ugly. She had a whole file cabinet just for the legal paperwork. Anyway, I stayed there in the valley while things got worse. He gave me a bracelet once. I slipped on some rocks and broke it, and it turned out to have some kind of electronic chip inside. No wonder he always knew how to find me when I ran away. When I was fifteen, I couldn’t take it anymore. I got serious and made a plan to find my mom. I didn’t take anything with me that he’d given me, and I finally got away. When my mom called my dad to let him know where I was, he showed up at her house. I locked myself in my room while he stomped around and yelled about how we weren’t safe, none of us were safe. Mom had already called the police. When he heard the sirens, he left.”

Carefully, Peter said, “What do you mean by ‘things got worse’?”

She gave him a look. “If that’s a polite way to ask if he molested me, the answer is no. He just got more paranoid, more overprotective. We were way out in the country, and I needed a security code to get into the house. We had a big shed where he worked, and he stopped letting me inside. Said it was for my own good.”

“Did you see him again after that?”

“He came back to Palo Alto twice more. My mom had helped me get a court order declaring me an emancipated minor, which in California you can do at fourteen. I already had my GED, which made it easier. And we had a restraining order. He started out nice, but got upset pretty fast. My mom always called nine-one-one the minute she saw him, and he always left when he heard the sirens.”

“Did he hit you? Did he break things?”

“He definitely broke stuff, but he never hit me or my mom. Angry, but not necessarily at us. He seemed kind of frantic, actually. After he left the last time, I remember thinking if it wasn’t so scary, it would have been sad.”

“Do you remember what he wanted?”

“He wanted me to come back home, where it was safe. He kept saying it, over and over. Come back home, where it’s safe.”

“That’s it?”

She shrugged. “That’s it. I haven’t seen him since. It must be twelve years now.”

“But why do you call him the Yeti? That’s not his name, is it?”

“His same is Sasha,” she said. “He’s kind of a giant guy, and his friends used to call him Sasquatch. When his business began to fail, his hair turned white overnight. So Mom and I started calling him the Yeti. At the time it was a joke. We didn’t realize there was something really wrong with him.”

Sasha Kolodny, thought Peter. Why is that a familiar name?

Then he remembered.

“He’s still there? In that valley?”

“I have no idea. Like I said, I haven’t seen him in years.”

“So you were pretty close, you and your mom.”

“Yeah.” She didn’t look at him. “Can we stop talking about this?”

“Sure,” he said.





36





June was typing again, reading aloud as she did. “Is Tyg3r aware that an unknown entity tried to purchase Tyg3r from Hazel Cassidy?”


Yes.

“Did Hazel Cassidy attempt to use Tyg3r to discover the identity of that unknown entity?”


Yes.

“Was Hazel Cassidy successful in that attempt?”


No.

“How many attempts did Hazel Cassidy make?”


Thirty-one attempts.

“When was the last attempt?”


February 7, 2:37 p.m.

It was late March now. Peter wasn’t sure of the exact day. It’s what happened when you lived outside, without anything that might be called a job. He thought about how June’s mother had described the algorithm. A stupid cockroach, she’d called it. But getting smarter.

June kept typing. “What did Tyg3r discover at that time?”


See below.

A small window popped up in the lower corner. June clicked on it. It was a string of emails.

June scrolled through.

“These are the emails from Nicolet to my mom. He says he represented a third party. He offered her ten million dollars for exclusive rights to an unfinished private project.” June scrolled down. “She wanted to know what project he was talking about, but either he doesn’t know what it really is, or he’s not saying. He calls it a search algorithm.”

“I guess that might be technically correct, right?”

“Whatever, she wasn’t interested. He kept raising the offer. She stopped returning his emails when he hit forty million dollars.”

“Wait,” said Peter. “Where did Tyg3r get that email? It just pulled that out of some server somewhere? Out of the cloud?”

“Sure,” said June. “It probably already had all her passwords.” She looked at him. “Forty million dollars?”

Peter had spent eight years in the Marines and two more in the mountains, but he also had a degree in economics. “What’s Google’s market cap right now? Four or five hundred billion? That all started with an algorithm, right?”

“Yeah, but Tyg3r was her baby,” said June. “She wanted to make the world a better place. To make powerful groups and individuals more accountable for their actions. What if you used Tyg3r to disclose all campaign contributions? That information alone would change the world.”