The Apocalypse Contract

CHAPTER 21 - PETER

Peter sat at Samantha's kitchen table, his attention completely consumed by Sydney's laptop. Samantha walked into the Kitchen. "She's in the crawlspace and won't come out."

"I don't think Sydney is in your crawlspace," Peter replied without looking up.

"Not Sydney. Roxy, my cat."

"Oh. Is that bad? I thought cat's loved small spaces like that."

"It is disgustingly filthy, and I don't know what sort of things the previous owner left in there. It could have traps and poison and... snakes."

"I'm sure the traps and poison will have killed all the snakes."

"You're not helping."

Peter looked around the kitchen, his eyes landing on an electric can opener. "Do you feed Roxy canned food?"

"Sometimes. Why? Oh wait, I know what you mean." She walked over and ran the can opener. Ten seconds later a bundle of black and white fur careened into the kitchen. "Look at you. You're a mess," Samantha admonished the cat as she scooped it up.

"That's it! I got it." Roger stared at the laptop's screen, hardly believing his luck.

"You cracked her email?" Samantha tried to look over Peter's shoulder while holding a squirming cat.

"Yes. Well, some of it. She has more than one account. This one came with her DSL Internet account, I think. Her email software is configured to log in to it automatically. If we can find where it stores the username and password, we can try the same ones on her cloudmail account."

"Let me take a swing at that. I know my way around Linux a little better than you."

Peter got up and gestured for her to take his place. Samantha handed him the cat as she sat down. "Don't let her run off. I haven't closed the door to the crawl space yet."

"I can do that. I'll just distract her with food first. Where do you keep it?"

"Shelf right above the can opener." Samantha replied, waving her hand in the general direction. She was already deeply engrossed in the laptop.

Roxy began climbing Peter's leg as he opened the can of pureed chicken cat food, only stopping when he deposited a wet cylinder of food into her dish. While the cat was occupied, he located the hatch to the crawlspace and closed it.

"I feel as hungry as Roxy looks right now," he commented as he returned to the kitchen. "Should I order us a pizza?"

Samantha made an indistinct noise that Peter took as an affirmation.

Peter took out his phone and began an Internet search for local pizza places. "What do you want on it?" he asked.

"Fridge door," Samantha replied, waving her hand in that direction.

He looked, and found a menu for Mama Rotoni's Italian Bistro taped to the refrigerator. The Ultimate Garlic Feast Pizza was underlined and circled. "Ah, got it." He called and placed an order, almost yelling into the phone to be heard over a cacophony of restaurant kitchen noises. Peter wasn't sure, but he thought he could even hear someone swearing in Italian.

"It'll be here in forty-five minutes," he reported to Samantha after hanging up.

"Thanks. You'll like it. Mama's is authentic as they come."

"I got that impression."

Samantha submerged herself back into Sydney's laptop, so Peter pulled out his laptop and dove into the Internet to kill time. He tried a variety of searches, including 'missing person in the Boston area' and even 'recent alien abductions'. It returned plenty of hits, but nothing useful. Time flew past until he was interrupted by the doorbell ringing.

"That'll be the pizza," he said as he ran to the door and opened it to a teenage kid carrying a steaming pizza box. While counting out money to the delivery person, Samantha bolted out of the kitchen.

"I did it!" she shouted. "I cracked her email. And get this... she was interviewing for a consulting job a week before she disappeared."

Peter turned to her, the delivery person forgotten. "You think it's connected?"

"I don't know. Maybe. It's a clue we can follow up on at least."

"Do you want your pizza or not?" the teenager asked.

"Huh? Absolutely, yes." Pete handed over a handful of cash, telling the teenager to keep the change.

"Thanks. Are you, like, detectives or something?"

Samantha laughed. "Yeah, sure, something like that. I'm Agent Scully and he's Agent Mulder."

The teenager looked impressed. "Cool. Well, enjoy your pizza."

As the delivery truck pulled away, Samantha turned to Peter and asked, "Doesn't anyone watch the classics anymore?"

* * *

Back in the kitchen, pizza slices in hand, they returned to examining Sydney's laptop.

Samantha pointed at the screen. "Look, a couple weeks before she disappeared, Sydney was trading emails with some company called Negocio LLC."

"That's got to be a joke," Peter insisted.

"What?"

"Negocio is just Spanish for business."

"Well, they set up a phone interview about a month ago. Then Sydney sent a follow up email a few days later but got no reply." Samantha opened up a web browser. "I'm getting nothing when I try their website. Connection failed."

"What about email?"

Samantha hammered at the keyboard. "It bounced. I sent an email to the same address Sydney was sending to, and it failed. Not just 'no such user'... it couldn't even connect to the server."

"That seems damn suspicious."

"It could just be a network outage," she suggested, "but a whois command says their domain was registered only a few months ago. Adding it all up, it does sound pretty sketchy."

"So it's a silicon valley start-up," Peter countered. "It wouldn't be the first to start and go bust in less than a year."

"Maybe. We should probably give this to the police, though. They can dig deeper than we can."

Pete thought about it. "Sure, we could do that... or I can ask a couple of friends to look into it."

"Some of your hacker buddies?"

"They deserve that label more than I do. I used to game with them a while back. They definitely know their way around the dark side of the net."

"Let's do it. Send your nerd-bro friends the info and see what they can do with it."

"It's a brother and sister team, actually."

"Whatever, I'd rather not know the details. Let me maintain my plausible deniability."

He fought to keep a straight face as he answered. "Whatever you say... Agent Scully."