System Seven (5 page)

He sat down. “My god.”

Why kill her?
Wrenching guilt set in, a hot brand against his heart. He hadn’t
planned on growing close. The jovial woman would bring the bill over, chatting
sometimes for five, ten minutes or more. About the same age his mother would’ve
been, she was every bit as caring and friendly. He’d cited a bad history with
the phone company when he’d offered to pay her the cost of phone and DSL
service if he could run the wire through the wall. It was a simple tactic to
give him a chance for escape if ever a bust went down.

His escape had led to
her brutal death.

Neither of us deserved to die.
Anger surfaced and fused with guilt to form
steely resolve. Mrs. Shulz’s killers would pay. He would assemble the file,
open it, and put it out there – no matter what it contained.

He stood and paced the
room. Someone had given a false description but why? No matter, a resident or
the manager would offer the correction and soon. He stopped and glanced at the
time, now also his enemy. When they released an accurate sketch, George would
surely see it and recognize him. There would be no convincing him of his
innocence – George played by the rules, believed in them and in the system
itself. If police were searching for “Peter”, then “Peter” needed to see the
police. Peter Brusse was now dead as an identity, as was Drehen Legters.
Another, lesser grief descended for the carefully crafted personas that had
become so familiar, so real.

Lucifer’s moment of
doom stared from the wall.

He would leave, within
minutes, with a note for George and Faiga saying simply that he was not
involved in any way with the killing.
Do
not believe all that you read and are told
. Through the hinterland and back
to home, Elburg, where he could become his fallback, Max Dosch. Priorities
aligned themselves: new transportation and a safe drive to the house.

He loaded his
belongings into the van and with a deep sadness backed out of the barn, closed
its heavy doors, and drove past the farmhouse into the night.

The wifi signal
strength showed sixty percent on the street in Bogenhausen next to the
industrial building where artists rented loft space.

From the back seat of
the stolen Volvo Johan randomized his laptop’s MAC address and joined the
network. He ought to be on the road out of the city but there was something to attend
to first. If they wanted to hunt him down like a criminal for having done
nothing, then he was going to
do
something. The file on Alcazar was some kind of prized truth, which meant it
had value. Normally he’d play it close, control the asset, and bring in others
after forming a monetizing strategy. Now, he might not make it to Elburg. The
UG might delete it outright if it proved too hot. Or maybe Alcazar would fall
to authorities. If so, the file would never see the light of day and
Crosstalk’s last request would never be realized.
Make it count.

He blinked at a pair
of headlights coming down the avenue. A subtle shift of perspective cast its
own light on the moment.

“If it belongs to the
world...”

High karmic
consideration floated, a challenge to self-interest. The car passed and the
interior fell dim again. He thought of the last hack, InterGen, and of the
admin that tried tracing him. He checked the email from Andreas.

Austin Bakken.

He accessed his
control panel for Alcazar and created a sub-account with access to Crosstalk’s
file. Next he created a downloader app for the file and prepared a note
explaining how to use the visitor’s pass into Alcazar.

Both the downloader
app and a note went into an encrypted file. He embedded clues for the file’s key
into a fakie, a file that looked corrupt when viewed.

“If you’re worthy,
then it is meant to be, Mr. Bakken. Figure it out or don’t.”

• • •

Papa Mario and his
wife stood behind the couch their daughter sat on and regarded the uniformed
police and dark-suited detectives in their living room. On the couch a shrunken
Marie, pale and red-eyed from crying, looked as if she might be sick. Her
mother was terrified and looked on in stifled disbelief.

Papa Mario leaned
forward over the back of the couch. On his face was the anger at the
embarrassment she’d caused. “You will give them the right description this
time, won’t you Marie?”

Marie could only nod.

A skinny, balding man
with a half-smile and a sketchpad came in the front door escorted by two more
detectives. He surveyed the room in a glance, ignored the parents, and sat down
next to Marie.

“Hello, my name is
Hans. I understand Arnie was a regular customer at the café? Yes? Good. I’m
sure you’ll give me the best description you can. Let’s begin.”

Several minutes into
the interview, the artist seemed to be jumping ahead of Marie, fleshing out
details as if he already knew the face. She paled further but kept describing
for some semblance of normalcy: the artist was drawing an exact picture of
Arnie. Worse, he seemed to enjoy her unease.

Her mother looked
away, more frightened at the proceedings than before.

We dance round in a ring and suppose, but the secret sits in
the middle and knows.

-Robert Frost, American Poet, 1875 - 1963

Four large screens
showed activity on the global network. Status windows listed intrusions under
way, recently acquired servers, botnet inventories, and real-time trace
attempts on Underground operations around the planet. A square-jawed South
American tapped arrow keys in time to a Led Zeppelin tune. He set off another
mistrace operation against the tracers.

“Fuck you, NSA. Suck
it.”

A request for review
came in. Soldado scanned an intercept script written by a junior member.

“Gah! Newbcode. That
SSL injection will crater.”

He wrote a few lines
of code and sent it back. Notice of a successful wire transfer scrolled in the
financials window, improving his already decent mood.

A ringing tone and red
flashing bar indicated a priority message coming through Alcazar. “Okay okay,
what’s this... Zero?”

MsgID: 39827091p Sent by: SlotZero

Soldado – xtalk’s last
file extremely hot. phys trace to my pad
½hour of link recvd. Crosstalk toggled
off, poss redblanket. im low moving to safety. offline tfn. Checking zmail.

“What the shit?” He
sat up straight, muted the tunes, and killed his webcam. “Crosstalk
dead?
Nar, very
nar
.”

Crosstalk’s last login
was several days ago. His message base showed him recruiting for a job,
something big.

“No job notes on a
BAP. No bueno.” Big Ass Plans called for review to avoid leading heat into the
UG’s framework, online or off. Crosstalk
always delivered job notes. Whatever he’d bitten into must’ve been so big it
bit back. Nice to know what the hell it was. He suspended Crosstalk’s logon and
put SlotZero’s account on a watch list.

Next, to verify his
story.

• • •

The text message
arrived halfway into his double bacon cheeseburger.

OSR3:HackReturn:IP=207.173.205.24

Austin leapt from his
seat and headed for the door, ignoring the looks from diners and staff. He
bumped open the glass doors and ran for his car. Wayne called from the NOC –
they’d already started the trace.

“Next hop address.
Deanin Industries in Bend, Oregon,” Wayne said. “Shall I call ‘em?”

“Yeah, put me on
hold.” He swung out of the lot, gunning it. If he’d remembered his laptop he
could be finishing lunch while running the trace himself. He slowed coming up
on traffic.

Another engineer
joined the line. “Dan here. He’s dumping a file on Promulgate. Slow, only half
a meg so far. I copied a sample out and it’s encrypted. He hasn’t tried poking
around yet.”

“Okay, watch him...
where’s the trace at?”

“Wayne’s getting the
next hop.”

He put two wheels up
on a curb and drove fifty feet of sidewalk to make a right turn ahead of
traffic.

“–he’s got it.
Checking... okay, it’s residential DSL. Zombie. This is gonna be a dead end, I
think. Yeah. And he’s out now. File’s done and it’s about three megs. He also
left a readme doc.”

“
Don’t open anything
. I’ll be there in like four minutes.”

If Murray found out,
he probably wouldn’t appreciate the trap. It might not matter that he and Rocom
had restricted his access only to the Promulgate server.

Back in the office,
checked on the readme file. It was an ordinary word processing file but with a
complex message.

Below the jumbled
text, an image contained a paragraph of text in what looked like German. Some
of the letters appeared in bold font.

This was the hacker,
his hacker. The references to the two traced locations were clear indications.
A joke? Or an e-bomb? Curious, he copied the files to a memory stick and to the
laptop before scrubbing them from the server. He couldn’t deny the excitement.
Things like this didn’t happen every day. He just hoped it didn’t blow up in
his face.

Wayne walked in with
his hands in pockets. “So what’s the readme say?”

“Don’t know yet. Maybe
clues to a cipher key for the file.”

“What if this is
Omnicron?”

He thought back. The
timing would fit. A year ago the security auditing firm Omnicron had worked for
a week straight attempting to get into InterGen – electronically and via social
engineering. This was something they might try, a simulated hack scenario to
test their responses.

“If it’s them, I’m
completely blown away they have Rocom playing along.” It seemed too elaborate
even for InterGen’s auditors.

“If it is them, you
fucked up with the cat and mouse trap routine, dude.”

He sighed. The
possibility existed. “Have Dan close the hole.”

On the laptop, he
checked the readme file again. No mention of an encryption key and without one,
the file wouldn’t open. The image in the document showed German text with
randomly bolded letters.

He wondered if
Omnicron would be so imaginative. He tried using the bolded letters as the key,
repeating each twice as suggested. Every combination failed.
“Two parts, above and below”
. The top
text had to hold half the key but was jumbled.

The Rocom conference
call rang in and lasted the rest of the day, drawing him into the lab to prod
and poke a standby Crest router. By five o’clock he was done with firmware
swaps and checking for sequenced buffer overflow attacks. One thing was certain
– Omnicron wasn’t involved.

His cell vibrated – Kaiya
with an invite for dinner at her place.
Your
fav - sweet n sour pork w/pork fried rice. Chow mein too. You can’t say no
.

He texted back.
Love it. 6:30?

See you then.

On his desk the laptop
awaited a key to open the encrypted file.

He eyed the upper text
again and tried a different sequence of keys. And again. Several tries later,
he gave up with the thought that Kaiya might do better with it.

• • •

xtalk
maybe flatline, slotzero gone low

wtf!!! how? why?

no
clue

u
going to look at xtalks profile?

of
course. to confirm IRL

you have me, you need one more?

ive
got a msg into OB1Kenobi and benny. i’ll ping u when its time

was
he workin on something?

yes
but no idea what. Zero pointed to a file xtalk uploaded. said it was hot but no
job notes

whats the file?

havnt
touchd it yet

xtalk had no notes? weird shit. any fallout on the sys?

nothing yet. ive got daems on high to detect incoming. slows shit down but
gotta do it

yeah does. let me know when you want to crack his file, im around

• • •

A power cord ran
across the dining room floor, up to the table, past a plateful of Chinese food,
and into the back of Austin’s laptop. Kaiya sat close, peering at the screen.
It was looking unlikely they would find the key to the encrypted file.

“I think the
corruption removed formatting,” he said between bites. “The bolding is
obviously the markers for the bottom text and the note says it is, but the top
is all jacked up. If it’s
made
to
look corrupt, then why didn’t they include bolded letters? Or some other clue
about markers? Or maybe the squares are because I don’t have the right font.
But there are hundreds of thousands of fonts.”

She agreed. “Without
the top text, I don’t see how you’ll figure it out.” She went back to her food.
“You know, that intro text is creepy. Something that could threaten your life?
I’m thinking you should just delete it all.”

The last bit sounded
serious. Taking the clue, he pushed the laptop away. “Screw it. I’m ruining
dinner. Time to enjoy this culinary orgasm.”

“Not a bad idea.”

Flickering images from
the television lit the darkened room. Kaiya dozed on the couch, exhausted from
her day preparing for a big client presentation. After dinner he’d helped her
tweak it by adding animations and color that made it pop nicely. They had
started to watch a movie but she passed out early into it.

He sat in a recliner
with the laptop, deep in thought. The upper text either held clues to the key
or once did. The square characters were non-printable character codes usually
seen in damaged files or...

Or
, considering who he was dealing with –

He opened the file
with a hex editor. Laid out in hexadecimal format, the entire message offered
new possibility. To most it was a jumble of random numbers and letters but to
him it was also where a hacker could leave clues.

It didn’t take long to
find a pattern. Hex codes 04 and 00
appeared throughout the message. Both created the squares seen in the text in
normal view. After studying the patterns, he saw the 04 code acted like a
marker since it appeared only in single instances and sometimes after the last
letter in a word, as if tagging the letter prior. It never appeared before the
first letter in a word.

He checked all the 04
positions and noted the tagged characters one by one.

OOWIVULDENFFRIIALEUVETAYE
ETFTFAMETYMM YBTHADHPWAVBE

“Okay...” He typed the string followed by the bolded
characters from the lower text, twice for each instance they appeared.

Nope.

He flipped the order,
lower text then upper text.

Still nothing.

“Damn,” he whispered,
staring digital daggers. A complete waste of time.

Right before closing
the files, he saw it. In the graphic, the last period in the paragraph was
smaller than the one on the line just above it. Just a pixel or two difference.
He zoomed in.

Good God
. Subtle. So damned subtle.

He scanned the whole
paragraph and counted ten periods, nine of them bolded. He tried again with the
periods included. Like a magical unveiling, the file’s contents were revealed.

“Alrighty then...”

The screen’s light
ghosted his face. Two files... an application installer and another readme
doc. He checked the readme.

Austin – Install client
on notebook. Go mobile to download the file. Be careful they may be on to you
right away. I don’t know who they are or what’s in it. See msg below. Just get
it and send it out. To who is up to you. Good luck, program. Username:
$in$in Password:
45forgottenNightz%+

Below it, a message:

THEY ARE TRACKING ME
RIGHT NOW THEY HAVE ME I AM DEAD TONIGHT. THEY ARE ON THE GROUND AND IN PEOPLES
MINDS, DON’T LET THEM FIND WHO YOU ARE!! GET THIS AND RUN NOW ZERO RIGHT NOW GO
LOW FAST BUT FIND A WAY TO LET IT OUT. LET THEM HAVE IT!! MAKE IT COUNT!!!! I
WAS DARREN BLYTHE ENGLAND, HCS. REMEMBER STATEN-GENERAAL.

“
What
the–?
”After the second reading, he realized he was holding his breath. He
read it once more before closing out the files.

The whole thing was
seductive, designed to attract, lure. Something so important it could threaten
his life... o
n the ground and in people’s
minds.
It turned uncomfortable, familiar wheels of thought. Only Kaiya
wouldn’t like it. Not a bit. He powered off the laptop and set it aside.

Probably a trap. A
hoax. It wasn’t real, yet... still it drew him in. The fact that someone had
taken the time to set up something so elaborate begged for discovery, just to
see where it went.
Why bother?
He
could hear Kaiya’s question. And his dad’s criticism.

“Shit.”

Fatigued from
speculation and the long day, he de-stressed with television for another hour.
Creating distance from the hacker’s file felt wise. It could wait. Eventually
the moving images lulled and became more and more disconnected until sleep
crept up. He eased the recliner back and stretched out with his eyes closed.

He woke standing in
the apartment. An open window revealed a deep-blue night sky speckled with
stars.
Who had opened...?

No. It was a
fixed-frame window, it couldn’t open.

And he couldn’t sleep
standing up.
I’m dreaming. I’m lucid.

Recognition and the
resulting flush of excitement almost woke him. It wavered, then stabilized. The
open window invited him so he floated out and rose as if on a warm current of
air. He looked down from high in the night sky. Tiny headlights on the downtown
avenues and freeways coursed like electric blood in the city’s veins. All
around teemed an ocean of consciousness.

Just to explore
that
... how cool it would be. But there
was something else worth exploring, worth finding – the hacker. With liquid
awareness he cast out across the curve of the planet, open to the thought of
the hacker. Somewhere out there he lived and maybe dreamed, too. Potential
simmered. He focused, extending feelers for the target mind, for the one who
had sent the file. Slowly a sense emerged, a sense of a strange.... place
.
A place of energy that was solid,
real, and unique. Curiosity blossomed out behind him in a purple energy trail
as he flew eastward in search of it. Higher and higher he soared until the
lights of cities sparkled impossibly clear in the distance, hundreds of miles
away. Caution resonated deeply, an intention from his logical mind to be
careful in the unknown. In that brief reflection a peal of skepticism also sounded
and threatened to end the dream, but he held on and continued. The sense of the
strange place became stronger spanning eastward over the country. He marveled
at the cities lit by the Eastern Interconnect like an electric cobweb. He
passed over the coast. Beneath him the dark Atlantic hummed with its own
universe of life.