Page 32 of The Five Year Lie

He rubs his forehead. “I used to think Drew was just a slow programmer. But he had some time-consuming hobbies.” He chuckles. “Our boy was a busy man during his three months at Chime Co.”

“Doing what?”

“Well, it’s weird. When I first looked at everything under Drew’s log-in, it was pretty boring stuff. He did his job. Nothing fishy.Yet.”

Zain’s voice betrays his excitement, though. It’s like listeningto one of Uncle Ray’s stories—you have to sit back and let him tell it.

“Then I realized I should search by terminal ID as well as log-in.”

“Terminal ID?” I ask.

“Yeah—every computer in the office has a unique ID. Most people log in from a home computer, too, so that makes two terminals. So I matched Drew’s log-ins to his terminals. And guess what? Lots of people got logged in on his computer.”

My head swims. “You mean—he sat at his desk and logged in as other people?”

“Yes!” he says, smacking the table. “Asfourother people. What a sneaky fucker he was. And he did this early in the morning or late in the afternoon. Sometimes at lunch. Can you guess why that is?”

I shake my head.

His face lights up. “Because he sat nearme. He must have worried that I’d notice. Or he didn’t want to chance it.”

“Because you are so observant that it’s honestly creepy?”

He snorts.

But I’m not really joking. “Drew was good at reading people. He read me easily enough, didn’t he?”Lonely girl. Daddy issues. Willing to put out for snarky soldiers with blue eyes.

Won’t ask too many questions.

Zain flashes his awkward smile. “Don’t be so hard on yourself. I didn’t ever guess he was a spy, either.”

“Aspy.” My stomach bottoms out. “Forwho?”

“I have no idea. But why else would he steal passwords and poke around the network? You can check my work, by the way. I printed a copy of everything he did. It’s in your bottom desk drawer.”

“Thanks.” But it’s a struggle to square this sneaky Drew withthe one I thought I knew. Either I’m very stupid, or love made me blind. Because I never got that vibe off him. The Drew I knew wasn’t quite so complicated. He liked hanging out with me. He liked to be outdoors. And he really liked taking me to bed.

Nope. I just can’t see it. “So what was he looking at while posing as other people?”

Zain leans his pointy elbows on the table. “At first, he spent hours just figuring out how all the databases fit together. Then he started digging into the way camera IDs work. He seemed particularly interested in how we code police department cameras versus private ones.”

“What does that tell you?”

He shakes his head. “Not much. He opened some of the police department files and looked at the feeds, which is absolutely a violation of company policy. But he seemed to be poking around randomly. He didn’t view the videos for any length of time, either. Just a few seconds. It wasn’t, like, stalkery stuff.”

Yikes.At any given time, Chime Co. stores millions of hours of video. I don’t understand the tech involved, which is probably why I picture it like a vast honeycomb—millions of circular glass lens eyeballs on millions of houses, each one containing the live image of another front porch in another town.

Or, in the case of the police cameras, on another public lamppost. But either way, watching videos for fun is the kind of thing that would get a guy fired. “Is that all he did?”

“No.” He waits for the waitress to plunk a mug of coffee down in front of him before continuing. “After that, he started looking at the PriSys. That means—”

“—Private Request System,” I finish. It’s a way for law enforcement to ask private citizens to share their doorbell camera footage with police. They get a notification in the app, followed by a little message:

Dear homeowner, we are investigating suspicious activity on your block between the hours of two and four a.m. last Monday. If you consent to sharing your camera’s footage during those hours, please tap the CONSENT TO SHARE button.

“Of course I know what that is,” I remind Zain. “It ‘changed the shape of police work’ if you believe theWall Street Journal. My father printed out the article, highlighted that passage and hung it on his office wall.”

Zain chuckles. “I don’t think you’re stupid, Ariel. But you’ve always told people you didn’t really know much about the business. It’s, like, a point of pride. So I’m not going to assume you know the jargon.”