L.A. Bytes (34 page)

He was glad for the hours of gym work he had put in over the years. It gave him the physical strength to push his way through the milling crowd back toward Fremont. When pushing didn’t work he cajoled and cursed, but always he moved west.

As he passed Figueroa the crowds grew sparse. Everyone was moving east, drawn by the crowds and the specter of an entertaining sideshow. Most of the traffi c that couldn’t get down Temple turned north onto Figueroa or tried to get on the 101.

Chris started to run.

298 P.A. Brown

A black and white careened around the corner of Fremont and slammed on its brakes as it hit a stream of barely moving traffi c. Ridley was riding shotgun and he leaped out, hands on his utility belt, as he surveyed the pandemonium in open-mouthed astonishment.

The look changed, his dark face hardened when he caught sight of Chris.

“What the hell are you doing here?”

Chris skidded to a stop a couple of yards from the young cop.

Holding a stitch in his side, he took several deep breaths before answering.

“It’s a computer attack on the city’s infrastructure,” Chris gasped. “The phones are down, 911’s inaccessible. Can you radio out?”

“What do you mean, an attack?” Ridley looked up in alarm at the nearest tall structures.

“Not that kind of attack,” Chris said. “He’s using computers.”

“He?” Ridley snapped around, his brown eyes drilling into Chris. He stepped closer, his right hand closing over his baton.

“You know who’s doing this?”

“My husband was investigating it. Like I told you earlier, if you want to know more, talk to Detective Martinez.”

An LAPD helicopter roared by overhead, the thunder of its passing drowning out Chris’s words. He repeated the last invective.

“Martinez again? Who is this Martinez and what’s he to you?”

“He’s my husband’s partner.”

Ridley stared into Chris’s eyes, then slowly he dropped his gaze and raked Chris up and down. Finally he raised his head.

“Your husband’s a cop?”

“Detective from the Northeast.” Chris jutted out his chin.

“Detective David Eric Laine.”

L.A. BYTES
299

“Laine?”

Chris could tell by the look on Ridley’s face that he had heard the name somewhere. As usual, David’s infamy preceded him.

Suddenly a wave of dizziness washed over Chris. He lurched forward and Ridley’s hard grip on his arm was the only thing that kept him from tipping over.

Chris thought he heard the clunk of a car door and a second set of hands guided him forward. Hands maneuvered him until he was in the back of the black and white. Shit, they were arresting him.

“What’s wrong with him?” a strangely musical voice asked.

“Crazy if you ask me,” Ridley muttered. His grip on Chris’s shoulder tightened. “Said it’s some kind of computer attack. And get this: his partner’s a cop. Name of Laine.”

“Laine?” the musical voice said. “Never heard of her.”

“Him,” Ridley corrected acidly. “Northeast. Partnered with some dick called Martinez. Don’t tell me, you never heard of him either.”

Chris heard a click and a musical voice said, “Code thirty, Delta Charlie Three, this is One Adam Sixteen, ten-twenty 101

on-ramp at Temple following up on a one eighty-seven report.

There appears to be a serious traffi c tie-up around Temple between Hope and Grand. Please advise, Delta Charlie Three.

Out.”

Chris strained to listen for a response. Another wave of dizziness rolled over him and he lowered his head between his knees to keep from passing out. Through the roaring in his ears he heard the harsh crackle of a broken voice come back over the two-way.

All he caught was “Civic Center traffi c grid” and “widespread telecommunications breakdown...” Then he heard Lewis mutter,

“Shit.”

“What?” Ridley snapped.

300 P.A. Brown

“All hell’s breaking loose out there. Dispatch is being inundated with 911 calls. A dozen 211s, armed assaults, drive-bys, fi res, explosions... Jesus. What the hell is going on?”

“Where?” Ridley asked. “Central?”

“Everywhere. Central, Hollenbeck, Hollywood, Northeast...

the boards are lit up everywhere. Traffi c lights are out all the way over to Alameda and down to 5th. Total traffi c tie-up. Even with the birds up no one can count how many accidents there are.”

Lewis’s voice was tinged with growing unease. “Fire, ambulance, they’re all tied up...”

Horror seeped through Chris’s numbness. He looked up and met Ridley’s gaze. “You’re being swatted.”

“What?”

“He’s swatting you. Triggering an attack on all 911 lines, overloading them. Tying up your emergency services while he does whatever he has planned.”

“He was right,” Ridley whispered. “The fucking hump was right.”

Two fi sts wrapped around the thin material of Chris’s T-shirt and hauled him out of the back of the cruiser, shoving him against the open door. His head spun and shards of light shot through his vision. Ridley’s sour breath was hot on his face.

“You better start telling us what’s going on before I bust your ass.”

Chris didn’t try to resist. He told them what he knew about Adnan. After a while they let him sit back down in the rear of the squad car. He sagged in the seat and tipped his head back against the rigid seat rest. His voice grew hoarse with the recitation.

“Let me get this straight,” Ridley said. “You think this guy is driving around down here with a van full of explosives and a hostage cop?”

“Yes.” What could he say, they either believed him or not.

“Except he’s probably not driving anymore. He would have parked before he launched his attack.”

L.A. BYTES
301

“I’ve got a call in to this Detective Martinez. You better hope he corroborates your story.”

It was obvious Ridley’s heart wasn’t in the threat. Chris glanced at him. His face was gray. His partner was on his two-way. When he got off he looked almost as sick as Ridley.

“We’re supposed to take up position at the nearest intersection and start working crowd control,” Lewis said. “They’re sending more units down as they become available. If they become available,” he said darkly.

“What about this scrote?” Ridley asked.

“Detective Martinez wants us to bring him along. He’ll meet up with us at the secure site. Homeland Security has set up a command post and they want him there.”

The only street not clogged with traffi c yet was Figueroa.

They turned on their lights and sirens and edged down the street and turned left onto 6th Street. The traffi c lights were still active there.

“Now you can tell me one thing,” Chris said.

“And what would that be?” Ridley asked.

“The van those Caltran’s guys saw. Did they see inside it?”

“One guy did.” Ridley shrugged. “Why?”

Eagerly Chris leaned forward. “How many people did he see?”

“How many—two, he said he saw two males.”

“Oh God.” Chris sagged back against the seat and closed his eyes. “David.”

“You think that was the missing cop?”

“It was him. It had to be. What did the van look like?

Please—”

At fi rst he thought Ridley was going to refuse to tell him any more, then he shrugged again. “Blue, with some kind of fl ower design on the side panels. We’ve got a BOLO out on it.”

302 P.A. Brown

Lewis pulled the black and white to a stop south of 6th on Grand. The twelve story limestone and terra cotta Art Deco offi ce building stood out among the sleeker towers around it.

Ridley and Lewis led him through the ballroom-sized lobby with its 40-foot high pressed tin ceiling and gaudy crystal chandeliers. Their shoes echoed on the marble fl oor. A suit met them at the front desk where Chris was signed in and handed a temporary pass.

The two beat cops conferred with the suit; Chris fi gured him for a federal agent. Martinez was noticeable by his absence.

Ridley gestured him over toward the elevators, dark oak paneled and from another era altogether. He approached reluctantly. The fed stood ramrod straight, a grim look of disapproval on his pale, narrow face. Washed out blue eyes slid over Chris and clearly found him wanting.

“We’ve been instructed to leave you with Special Agent Booker,” Ridley said. “Detective Martinez should be along shortly.”

Ridley and Lewis hurried out, as though afraid they would be called back if they lingered. Chris watched them go with longing. Ridley was a jerk, but at least he was a jerk Chris could understand.

He breathed an audible sigh of relief when Martinez lumbered into the lobby fi ve minutes later.

Martinez nodded at Chris then turned his attention to the other man. He fl ashed his ID. “You Booker?”

“Right.” Booker showed his blue government ID. “We’ve got a command post set up on the fi fth fl oor.” He looked at Chris again. “This the braniac who’s going to fi x everything?”

Chris passed over his own ID, which Booker studied closely.

“Let’s get upstairs,” Martinez said. “I hope your crew has things in place.”

Wednesday, 2:05 pm, Grand Avenue, Los Angeles
They rode the elevator in silence, which suited Chris just fi ne.

All he wanted to do was concentrate on fi nding David.

On the fi fth fl oor Booker led them to a locked offi ce. He opened the door with a passkey. Half a dozen men who looked like Booker clones glanced up at their entrance.

Chris stared at the bank of computers set up on two steel tables laid end to end. Cables ran everywhere. The screens were full of images. Several were maps of the Civic Center, including what looked like blueprints of the city’s pipes and sewer conduits.

Chris sat down at the nearest machine and began running a string of commands on it. He was impressed. On such short notice they’d come up with some pretty decent equipment. Linux, no less. That would help.

“Can you get me into the telecommunications grid?” he asked the nearest agent who looked like he knew his way around a computer.

The fuzzy cheeked kid nodded. “What level?”

“Just get me root access. I’ll fi nd what I need.” Being logged in as root gave him absolute power over every aspect of the system. Only root could launch commands that could access the system kernel. Adnan would have had to gain the same access to run his programs.

A couple of phone calls and Chris was logged in as a super-user on the grid that controlled the local cell towers.

He ran through another series of commands, scanning fi les as they came up then grepped through to the next level. He glanced at the young agent. He had a lopsided name tag that said “Troy Schneider.”

304 P.A. Brown

“Keep your eyes open, Troy. Let me know if you see anything odd.”

“Yes, sir,” Troy said.

“I’m guessing our cracker replaced a common program with something that would do what he wanted. It’ll look like it’s supposed to be there, but the time stamp or a bogus signature will give it away. If he tried to tamper with it, I’ll fi nd some sign of his activity.” Chris stroked the keyboard, calling up yet more lists of fi les. “Once I fi gure out which one he’s using I can see what it’s actually doing.”

He almost missed it. The altered program had been a simple key logger, designed to watch who logged in. Now it was doing something entirely different.

The program Adnan had launched was subtle. It isolated the signals generated by cell towers and triggered multi-phasic swings; changing the microwave frequency just enough to shut the cell towers down.

He deconstructed the code as rapidly as he could. Some of it was confusing, he didn’t know if it was bad code or if it was his own exhaustion that befuddled him.

“Just stop it,” Troy said. “Run the kill command.”

Bentzen, the bomb squad detective, entered the room and offered Chris the barest of nods. “We traced the explosives used in the hospital attack back to a known terrorist group,”

Bentzen said. “Linked to Algerian and Madrassa terrorists. A cell was broken up in Florida a couple of years ago, one prominent member was never found, a French ex-pat called Jean-Gabriel Clavet.”

Chris straightened, hands still poised over the keyboard. “The guy who kidnapped David.”

“That’s what we believe.” Bentzen looked uneasy. “His M.O

is using an electronic device like a cell phone to trigger his explosives. We think that’s what he did at the hospital.”

L.A. BYTES
305

Chris felt the blood drain from his face. He turned to stare at the computer screen, which displayed Adnan’s program. “If Adnan is monitoring, he’ll know instantly that I’ve stopped it,”

he said.

“Hell,” Booker said. “He counted on us fi guring this out and that our fi rst instinct would be to undo the damage. If he’s sticking to his M.O, Jean-Gabriel wants to trigger the attack from a line of sight location. Near enough to let him watch. He apparently has quite a fondness for observing his own handiwork.”

Chris was vaguely aware of the others huddled in groups, hashing out all the events of the last few days. Martinez reminded them pointedly that it hadn’t originated with the bombing at Ste.

Anne’s but had started much earlier, with the hospital hacking job and the death of Adnan’s mother.

“The guy was stalking David before he ended up in the hospital,” Martinez said.

Chris looked up. He blinked the sleep out of his eyes. “What do you mean?”

“We found some photographs...” Martinez suddenly couldn’t meet Chris’s eyes. “David never told you?”

“No, he missed that little revelation,” Chris said icily. “So Adnan was stalking me. Ever since I was hired by Ste. Anne’s to fi nd out who hacked their systems. He went after David because of me.”

“You can’t take responsibility for the actions of a psychopath,”

Booker said. “And don’t doubt for a minute this guy is one. He might be pretending this is about revenge, but the truth is he’s just a cold little prick.”

Before any of them could respond, Booker’s cell rang. He snatched it up.