L.A. Bytes (2 page)

“David is going into anaphylactic shock. This,” he said, holding up the syringe, “will stabilize him.”

“Anaphylactic shock? From what? His allergy shot?”

The doctor slid the syringe into David’s shoulder and depressed the plunger. “This is epinephrine,” he said. “It should stabilize him.”

“What’s going on here?” Chris asked. “What’s wrong?”

David’s breathing grew more regular and his eyes cleared.

He blinked and met Chris’ gaze. Then he turned hard eyes on Abrahms.

8 P.A. Brown

“What the hell happened?”

“Anaphylactic shock—”

“He should go to the hospital, shouldn’t he?” Chris wanted to touch his lover, but he knew David was reticent about physical contact in front of straights.

“I’m fi ne, Chris, really,” David murmured.

Chris whirled on him. “Stop playing the damn martyr, David.

Stop trying to prove how tough you are.” He spun back toward the doctor. “I want him admitted. Now.”

“I concur,” Abrahms said.

Chris had never liked David’s doctor. The man was too analytical, too cool. His bedside manner sucked. To have the man agree with him was unnerving. Just how bad was David?

“Go home, Chris,” David’s voice still sounded weak, but there was no mistaking his annoyance. “Let the professionals do their job.”

That was a sore point with them. Chris had the bad habit of butting his nose into David’s work. Chris didn’t mean to, but sometimes he thought the LAPD was slack in their duties, especially when it came to how they treated the cops in their ranks that were “different.” The LAPD had never quite reconciled itself to the number of gay offi cers that to them must have seemed like they were coming out of the woodwork. Several crippling and image-destroying lawsuits had made them tread lightly, so these days they tiptoed around people like David.

It didn’t help that David was damned good at his job.

Chris was going to suggest again that David be admitted, but David cut him off. “I’m not going into the hospital. I’m fi ne, Chris, really. Dr. Abrahms?”

“I have to agree with Christopher on this, David. There are some tests—”

David shrugged his rolled up shirt sleeves back down over his muscular arms and levered himself out of the chair. “I’ll come back if things don’t feel right, but for now I’m going home.”

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9

Chris knew better than to argue, even if Abrahms didn’t. He scooped David’s jacket off the coat hook and handed it to him.

On the way out the door he looked at David’s still pale face and tried again. “David—”

“Don’t. I’m fi ne, really.”

Chris made a rude noise in his throat, which his husband ignored.

Chris unlocked the kiwi green hybrid Escape he had bought to replace his fi rst Escape wrecked in a car accident. Even with the sunshade covering the front windshield the car was still roaster hot. Chris buckled in and started the AC, knowing it would take a few minutes to cool the car’s interior. In the heat stench from the vomit covering David’s legs grew stronger. After a couple of minutes Chris cranked his window down and tried to breath through his mouth. David followed suit. It didn’t help much.

The radio clock said it was nearly one. David fl ipped his cell phone out. “I better call Martinez, he’ll be wondering what hole I fell into when I don’t come back.”

David’s partner of nearly twelve years had grown comfortable with his gay partner. He had even been best man at their wedding.

He still tended to eye Chris with a slightly jaundiced gaze when he thought no one was looking. The one time Chris had mentioned it, David had dismissed his complaint. “That’s just Martinez,” he had said. “He doesn’t mean anything by it.”

“Right,” Chris had retorted. “And Fred Phelps is kind to his children.”

Chris kept half an eye on David all the way home. A short trip, but an uneasy one. David grew paler and paler. Chris snapped, “I want to take you back.”

“I won’t go.”

“You need to go back.”

“No. No, just home. I’ll be fi ne, Chris. Really.”

David already had his key out when they drove into the cobbled drive of their Silver Lake home. A pair of nesting mourning doves
10 P.A. Brown

fl ew out of the Cyprus tree beside the stone alcove. Sergeant, their rescued Doberman, greeted them enthusiastically at the door, circling David, sniffi ng at his jeans. Chris shut and locked the front door and turned to fi nd David halfway up the marble steps to the second fl oor.

Chris took the stairs two at a time. He found David stripping his fi lthy pants off and tossing them in the laundry basket. After a very quick shower he slid into their king-sized bed and drew the duvet up to his chin. The dog stood beside the bed, whining. He knew there was something wrong. David patted the bed and the dog leaped onto it, settling down at his feet.

“Listen, hon, you don’t need to prove how tough you are,”

Chris said, stroking the dog’s knobby head. “A trip to the hospital isn’t giving in.”

“Give me a break. I just need to rest.”

Chris stood in the doorway for another minute, then gave up.

He took the laundry hamper downstairs and shoved the jeans in the washer. In the kitchen he rinsed out the few dishes in the sink and loaded them in the dishwasher. Preparing a pot of Indonesian coffee, he sat alone at the kitchen table. Idly, he toyed with an orange from the fruit bowl without seeing anything.

Growing restless with so many unanswered questions, he knew he needed to get back into Ste. Anne’s network to see what had gone on there. David had taught him long ago that coincidences were rare. Chris knew from his preliminary work that the clinic where Abrahms worked was linked into Ste. Anne’s network. He would start there. But fi rst he had to sign Terry’s contract. Only then would he get the access he needed.

He pulled his Blackberry out and punched in Terry’s number.

After the initial greetings Chris didn’t waste time. “I want to come in and fi nalize the contract.”

“Good. When?”

“How about now.”

Chris met Terry inside his offi ce. Signing the contract took only a minute. After Chris slid his Mont Blanc pen back into his L.A. BYTES
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suit pocket, he stood and shook Terry’s hand. “The only other thing I’ll need is physical and remote access to all your systems.”

“I can do that.”

“The sooner the better. I’ll write you up a nightly report so you can see the direction I’m taking. Does that work for you?”

Chris waited in Terry’s offi ce while Terry collected an electronic badge that gave him access to any place in the hospital.

Terry provided the necessary passwords; Chris committed them to memory.

While Terry showed Chris his system, his pager went off. Terry glanced at it. “I gotta go. You’ll be okay here on your own?”

Chris nodded. After Terry left he sat down at a workstation and logged in to the main hospital system. He quickly navigated his way through fi les and directories, probing for signs of intrusion.

Streams of information fl ashed across the monitor from the intrusion detection programs he was running.

Chris glanced through some captured data logs. On the surface he saw nothing unorthodox. But he’d expected that. He’d seen how good this guy was. A quick scan of the outer fi rewall revealed the software gateway that protected the inner network was being hit by a lot of traffi c, but that was standard—the Internet swarmed with packets designed to do nothing but probe for open ports. Nothing seemed to be getting past the perimeter.

Terry had hardened his network well.

Before he went any further he stopped and took a deep breath. What he was going to do next wasn’t entirely ethical; it was outside the bounds of his contract but he had to know.

What had happened to David? As much as he didn’t like Dr.

Abrahms, he knew the man was too good to make so simple a mistake as dosing David with the wrong medication. Chris knew David was allergic to the whole range of penicillin drugs. Had the hospital somehow delivered that instead of the anti-allergen he should have received?

12 P.A. Brown

He sent his probes into the heart of Ste. Anne’s. It took him a while to fi nd Dr. Abrahms’ fi les and even longer to locate David’s but eventually he was inside. He was able to look up past treatments David had received and compared them to the last one. The difference was immediately obvious. Whoever had hacked the system had made no effort to hide what he had done.

Obviously no one at the pharmacy had checked the script. Why would they? They took what was delivered. He also saw the alert, warning the pharmacy of the allergy, had been removed, so there was nothing to warn anyone of the mistake they were about to make.

He didn’t have to search much to fi nd out what had replaced the drug David had received: Amoxicillin rather than the anti-allergen. No wonder David had such a violent reaction. But...

it didn’t make any sense. Why David? Sure he was a cop and a gay man. Both attracted the wrong kind of attention. Could the hacker have had a run in with cops? With David in particular? If he had this power he could have hit the entire hospital pharmacy records.

Chris scrambled to his feet. He had to warn Terry. If medications were compromised time was vital. He snatched up his Blackberry and punched in the network manager’s cell.

He answered on the third ring. In the background Chris could hear children yelling. The sound suddenly died; Terry must have moved to another room.

“What’s up?”

“You may have a bigger problem than we thought.” Chris told him about David’s compromised medication. There was nothing but silence at the other end.

“You think other records might have been altered?”

“I can’t rule it out.”

Terry swore.

“I’ll be right there,” Terry said.

Monday, 4:45 pm Ste. Anne’s Medical Center, Rowena Avenue, Silver
Lake, Los Angeles

“I heard about your troubles a few years ago,” Terry said.

He had run out to Krispy Kreme and picked up half a dozen donuts along with two coffees. “What did the paper call him?

The Carpet Killer? It must have been rough.”

Chris fi gured just about everybody had heard about that terrible time with the Carpet Killer. The press had gone on a feeding frenzy with Chris and the newly outed David at center stage for way too long. The whole mess had nearly derailed David’s career. The police brass had not taken kindly to one of their homicide detectives forming a relationship with a man who had been a murder suspect at one time. Their wedding in Canada eighteen months ago had only solidifi ed his news value.

Oddly enough, it had all provided a much-needed boost to Chris’s new business. When he’d quit DataTEK, and gone solo, he’d worried about building his new client base. All the publicity had actually brought in new business. He fi gured it was a Hollywood thing—any publicity was good as long as they spelled your name right.

“It had its moments,” Chris said. “Look, I know you’ve got a good system here. But this is a lot more malicious than I originally thought,” Chris said. “We need to take a look at all the patient records to see if they show signs of tampering.”

Terry was pale but stoic. They discussed what they were looking for and soon the two of them were seated in front of glowing monitors scanning through directories, looking for what didn’t belong.

“Watch for odd timestamps,” Chris said. “We’ll have to look at everything that was altered within the last forty-eight hours,
14 P.A. Brown

compare any suspicious ones against your backups.” David’s fi le had been changed roughly sixteen hours ago. “You realize we’re going to have to let management know what’s going on? You have to comply with the data breach laws. Those with legitimate access to those fi les are going to have to go through them, too.”

Pain crossed Terry’s face. Disclosure was mandated by law.

“This is bullshit. How the hell did he get in?”

Chris hated what he had to say next. “On foot.”

“You mean he just walked in and hacked my system?”

“Not quite that simple, but here, look...”

Chris had been pleased to fi nd Terry had employed a passive protocol analyzer, which operated at the lowest levels of network operation, and was extremely diffi cult to evade. There was no obvious way to transmit packets on a monitored network without it being detected. It still took a trained eye to spot the bad packets from the good ones. At fi rst glance the activity logs seemed innocuous. Terry scrubbed stiff fi ngers through his short hair.

“I don’t see anything.”

Chris was looking for tunneling activity or some other TCP/

IP exploit, since it was the one type of traffi c that couldn’t be blocked without blocking Internet access. Once inside, any savvy cracker could access the rest of the network. Chris often used something similar to run penetration tests of networks he was charged with protecting.

“It’s probably some damn script kiddy,” Terry muttered. “You know as well as I do that most of these guys are kids, barely out of diapers. Makes you feel old. Doesn’t it?”

“I try not to think about it.” Truth was, Chris did feel old sometimes, trying to keep up with teenagers with no morals, and minds like quicksilver. It was all fair game to them, and it never did any good telling them it was wrong to hack a stranger’s computer. They made heroes out of the ones who got caught.

Famous crackers and phreaks like Riddle and Mitnick were vilifi ed by the mainstream media, but lived on as cyber-legends, L.A. BYTES
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in chat rooms and newsgroups, all over the world. Role models to a disenfranchised generation.

“How did it happen? I can’t believe you’re saying he just strolled in off the street.”

“Not quite that simple, but yeah, he did it from inside.” He tried to soften his words. “Face it, would anyone notice a stranger wearing scrubs? Carrying a stethoscope?”

“It is a big hospital,” Terry admitted. “Lots of staff turnover, what with interns and teaching staff coming and going. Not to mention patients and visitors. I don’t want to think about the uproar if we start refusing them entry.”