Page 121 of The Picasso Heist
“What the hell?”
“You mind if my sister and I say a few words?” asks Malcolm.
CHAPTER103
THOSE WHO HAVEthe podium have the power.
For the first time in a long while, Elise Joyce has no clue what to do next. She stammers, she nearly trips over her own feet, and ultimately she storms out of the press conference without completing another sentence, which is fitting because waiting for her backstage are Agents Sigma and Tau, who will promptly inform her of her right to remain silent.
“While we have you all here,” begins Skip as I join him at the podium.
Every face looking back at us has the same expression: Shock. Disbelief. The immediate desire to figure out what the hell is happening. How is Malcolm Greer back from the grave? Of course the answer is plain to see. He was never dead.
Skip and I take turns laying out the case against Joyce, quickly highlighting the past few weeks before getting to the smoking gun—the evidence she suppressed during our father’s trial. And just to makesure every reporter digests every last detail, Skip gives the address of a website he created just for the occasion. He didn’t get overly snarky with the name; it’s very straightforward: joycebrokethelaw.com.
No one waits for us to open the floor for questions. The room erupts before Skip can finish sayingdot-com,everyone yelling over one another. We answer what we want to and deflect what we don’t. Ultimately, it’s an FBI sting operation, we explain, and they’ll be announcing their own press conference later today. No one needs to know—not now and hopefully not ever—that Skip and I are the ones who first approached the Bureau. Of course, that won’t stop a few reporters with pit-bull blood from chasing down their suspicions, and they can have at it.
The one thing they’ll never know is how we hacked into Elise Joyce’s private email server that she used to skirt her transparency requirements at the US attorney’s office. How did we even know she had one?
Years back, when the FBI raided our home, they took my father’s laptop, which contained screenshots of text exchanges with Bergamo, demonstrating my father wasn’t originally involved in the forgery scam. He wasn’t comfortable having the texts just sitting on his phone so he made the pdf copies and erased the entire thread. During discovery, my father’s attorney requested these copies but was told by Joyce they weren’t on the hard drive. A digital forensics expert even backed up her claim.
So, once again, how did we know Joyce was using a private email server for official business?
For a long time we didn’t, but it always bugged me that those screenshots went “missing.” Joyce had to be behind it; the question was how. Then, during my senior year at Columbia, I met Vikram. He was a computer science major. He also had the second-highest GPA in our graduating class. Second behind me—until I messed up on my art history final.
I asked Vikram how someone in Joyce’s position, knowing that my father’s hard drive would be examined by a digital forensics expert, could delete files from the drive without leaving a footprint.
“The short answer is that she almost certainly couldn’t,” said Vikram.
“What’s the long answer?” I asked. “The one that explains why you saidalmost.”
Vikram explained the concept of mirroring, an AI program that could mimic the activity on a server in real time. “Or with half a millisecond of lag time, if you want to be precise about it,” he said.
Mirroring basically allowed someone to create two realities, one public and the other private, and then alter a digital footprint in a way that 99 percent of forensics experts wouldn’t be able to detect.
“Vikram, please tell me you’re in the one percent,” I said.
He was.
And so was whomever Joyce had used to install the mirroring program on the criminal division’s server at the US attorney’s office. Or at least, that’s what Vikram believed—right after he was able to trace a backdoor portal to a private email account registered to a fictitious name but having the same IP address as… wait for it… the modem in Elise Joyce’s Upper East Side apartment.
“Thanks, but no, thanks,” said Vikram after I offered to pay him for his help. No matter how much I insisted, he refused to accept any money from me. Ironically, that was the thrust of his valedictorian speech at graduation:
Doing right in this world should be reward enough.
CHAPTER104
“HI, DADDY.”
I can’t remember the last time I said those words without being surrounded by cinder block. That’s how long it’s been. But today there’re no walls around us and nothing but blue sky above. My father’s a free man.
He hugs me. He hugs my brother. “Hi, Dad,” says Skip.
My father hugs Amir, who insisted on driving us immediately after the press conference. Normally I’d feel a little self-conscious about showing up at a state penitentiary in a white Rolls-Royce Phantom. I even said as much to Amir, which was when he reminded me of his early days in Pakistan after escaping Iran in 1979.
“My wife and I slept in an old sewage drainpipe for a month before upgrading to the concrete floor of a storage room,” he said. “I wasn’t ashamed of what I didn’t have then, and I’m not ashamed of what I do have now.”
What Amir has now, after coming to America and initially findingwork as an assistant mechanic, is over two dozen luxury-car dealerships in the tristate area. One of my father’s first clients, he was also a victim of the scam. Right before sentencing, though, my father transferred every penny of every remaining asset he had to Amir in an effort to make good on his debt. It was my father’s way of sayingI’m sorry.
