Mission Canyon by Meg Gardiner Read Free Book Online Page B

sandstone on the mountains glowed gold under the sun, and thunderheads burled into the sky. The inland valleys were getting lightning.
    Jesse lived on the beach, down a drive that curved between Monterey pines. The house was pale wood and glass, with a cathedral ceiling and a wall of windows facing the surf. When I drove up, Adam Sandoval’s Toyota pickup sat in the driveway. I found Jesse and Adam sitting outside on the edge of the deck, wearing surfer swim trunks, warming their feet in the sand. Breakers frothed up the beach.
    From the back, from a distance, Adam and Jesse looked similar. Swimmers’ shoulders, rangy limbs, California skin tones. Only closer could I notice the differences— Jesse’s scars, and the stillness in his legs. The injury had taken almost all the movement and sensation on his right side, and about half on the left. He could walk, barely, with braces and crutches. He got to the water by scooting backward on his butt.
    I crouched down behind him, slipping my arms around his neck. His skin was hot from the sun. He tilted his head back and I kissed him.
    He said, ‘‘Adam’s been showing me his new dive gear.’’
    He nodded toward a mask, fins, and a spear gun. Adam was accomplished at spearfishing, did it free diving. He cooked the catch pretty well too.
    Jesse smiled. ‘‘The diving off Kauai is spectacular. There’s still time for you to get your scuba certification before we go.’’
    I kissed him again. ‘‘Good try.’’
    ‘‘Honestly, you’d love it.’’
    ‘‘No, you love it. Bottom line, I’m not spending my honeymoon in flippers.’’
    ‘‘But flippers are my favorite turn-on.’’
    Adam stood up. ‘‘You kids.’’
    Jesse said, ‘‘Adam agrees that my porn outbreak at the office was probably caused by a computer worm.’’
    ‘‘Charming experience, isn’t it?’’ Adam said.
    I said, ‘‘Explain to me exactly what a worm is.’’
    ‘‘It’s malicious computer code, similar to a virus. It replicates itself and spreads without your control. It might delete files, or send documents on your hard drive to random addresses it generates.’’
    ‘‘So Jesse’s computer may simply have had an unlucky address?’’
    He found his crucifix and slipped it around his neck. ‘‘Could be.’’
    ‘‘Then let’s hope that’s the end of it.’’
    ‘‘Yeah,’’ Jesse said. ‘‘Except our IT guy couldn’t find any evidence of a worm on my machine.’’
    The breakers crashed and ran toward us, hissing over the sand.
    Adam picked up an envelope of snapshots. ‘‘Look what I found. Photos Isaac took. I hadn’t seen them before.’’
    I leafed through them—casual shots of Isaac at the beach, and with girls in bikinis, and at the computer start-up where he worked. They looked prosaic, full of sunny normality. Right before the light snapped off.
    ‘‘They’re great,’’ I said, handing them back.
    With care, he returned them to the envelope. ‘‘I finally started going through his things. Boxes his colleagues packed up from work. Until now, I just couldn’t. . . .’’
    Pain pinched his face.
    Jesse pulled the wheelchair close. Hands on the edges of the seat, he hoisted himself up.
    ‘‘Tell her the rest,’’ he said.
    Adam rubbed his fingers across his forehead. ‘‘I found something perplexing. Notes Isaac made about a problem at work.’’
    Isaac had worked at Firedog, Inc., an Internet firewall company. He was a programmer, an athlete-geek like Adam, and when he died, Firedog lost its scrappy spirit. Eventually, the market imploded, they sold their technology to investors, and closed up shop. One of those investors, I recalled, was Mako Technologies.
    ‘‘Going through Isaac’s things, I found a scratch pad with Mako’s phone number and notes about a hassle of some kind. It sounds like Mako was on his back about some missing paperwork.’’
    In the back of my mind I heard Harley Dawson. This incestuous town . Everybody knowing