You Think You Know Me Pretty Well aka Mercy (50 page)

In a moment of intense longing, Alex tried to sit up, managing to raise his torso a few inches from the mattress. But his strength deserted him and he slumped back to the mattress, a smile of resignation breaking out across his face.

“How did they find me?”

Alex realized that he was looking up at the ceiling when he said this. He could have looked at the governor, but somehow he felt uncomfortable doing so. In any case what he really wanted to do was close his eyes altogether. He was still tired and all he really wanted to do was sleep the sleep of the innocent.

“The patrol helo saw the car leave the cliff and radioed in for some emergency relief from the coastguard.”

Even through the haze of confusion and the intense desire for sleep, Alex noted that Dusenbury had used the military term “helo” rather than the civilian term “chopper.” He resolved to ask him about this … some time.

“I think maybe it’s time for me to go,” said the governor. “There are a couple of people here to see you.”

For a moment, Alex thought Dusenbury meant the police. But he was pleasantly surprised when David entered the room with Debbie in tow.

Debbie!

She had come all the way out here from New York to be with him. He looked at her and gave her a welcoming smile. She returned it, but even through her gentle smile, Alex could see the hard person beneath it.

In some ways she and Nat were kindred spirits: both conceived during wild unprotected sex by alcohol-fueled students, both very determined people who could set their sights on an objective and then go for it with an almost ruthless tenacity. Not that Debbie would send an innocent man to his death.

It was ironic that while Debbie had gone to work in New York to put some distance between herself and Alex, Nat had actively sought Alex out as an employer.  Alex had asked Nat, in the car, about why he had pushed so hard to work for him, but the answer to that question had been denied when the car went over the edge.

He thought about it now and remembered how familiar Esther Olsen had looked only 24 hours ago, when he first saw her in the governor’s office.  He remembered his reckless student days of frat parties and drunken one-night stands.  He remembered looking at the picture of Dorothy Olsen and thinking about her resemblance to Debbie – not the eyes, for Debbie got her eyes from Melody – but some of the other features that Debbie got from her father.  And he remembered how Esther had told him that Dusenbury had fathered both Jonathan and Jimmy but not Dorothy.  He remembered also that Edgar Olsen had hated Dorothy because he knew that she was not his daughter.

A chill went up Alex’s spine as he realized the answer that Nat had been about to give him, before he was snatched away forever.

Dorothy’s Poem

(with apologies to Sylvia Plath)

I cannot be, can never be

What I thought you wanted me

To be, to be, or so it seemed

When I didn’t understand

What a fool I was, tee hee

Daddy, I know I am guilty

Though someone killed you first

I killed you as surely as if

I had pulled the trigger myself

Bang Bang! All over

And now I have to cross the Atlantic

Because I have to flee

Across the ocean, safe and sound

To where they’ll never find me

You see

I never knew much about

The little boy you had before me

The son who died

The one you loved so much

That you couldn’t let him go

I knew his name was Jimmy

And he died when he was three

In a car accident, with you at the wheel

No wonder you felt guilty

You never spoke about him

I tried to ask you when I was older

Tiptoeing delicately round the subject

But you gave me a look that warned me off

And I knew so well already

The anger you were capable of

But it was that poor dead toddler

Who cast a pall over me

A lightning rod for your anger

I started trying to be a he

I thought you wanted a he

Just act like a boy, that’s what Mom suggested

And that would make you happy

It would give you back the thing you had lost

The son you always wanted back

We thought that you wanted a he

But all these efforts to win your love

They only backfired on me

They brought out your suppressed guilt

And your latent misery

Killer, Killer, that’s what you are!

Not by malice but by reckless disregard

Then covering it up like a bully

With a wall of anger against others

As if they were to blame

So you could feel less guilty

You dragged me before the mirror

And ripped the clothes off of me

Forcing me to face the fact

That I am not, that I am not

The thing that you want me to be

You crushed the hope out of me

Not in cold blood, but angrily

And only when you died

Did I resolve the mystery

Of your vicious assault on my dignity

Because I was too young to understand

You were only trying to set me free

You didn’t really want to change me

You wanted an alternative reality

You wanted to turn back the clock

And resurrect a child of three

But I saw things differently

My needs were shaped more selfishly

I had to escape my cell, I had to escape my shell

And find my own path to liberty

Now I must kill the little girl I used to be

But that won’t be the end of me

Like some shapeshifting creature

Like Fantomas, like the Phoenix

I’ll be reborn in the flames

I cannot slay my inner demons

For they are stronger than me

So instead, I will bury them deeply

Lay them to rest subconsciously

Daddy, Daddy, only then will I be free

Afterword

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Finally don’t forget to check out the other Alex Sedaka thrillers.

Extract from
No Way
Out

Copyright © 2010 David Kessler

It was only a set of fingers flying across a keyboard, yet they could work so much malice.

She watched in awe as her words appeared before her, the letters on the screen keeping pace with her fingers. What was so amazing was how little she had to change to wreak so much damage. All she had to do to alter the behaviour of an entire computer program was make minor alterations to just two of the lines of the program and then switch two of the other lines around. Hackers and “midnight programmers” would laugh at the absurd simplicity of it. Some of them might even have been mildly amused by the sheer audacity of it. But few of them would have condoned her objectives. Most hackers tended to be free-wheeling libertarians, not embittered racists. And she wasn’t even trained as a computer programmer, apart from one short online course she had taken recently.

But the irony went deeper than that.

Everyone knew the old cliché that you can radically change the interpretation of a contract by an ambiguous pronoun or the meaning of a statute by a harmless-looking punctuation mark. In England a diplomat and humanitarian called Roger Casement was said to have been “hanged by a comma” after he was found guilty of treason under a medieval statute.
But who would have believed that the same was true of a computer program?
And the biggest irony of all was that she couldn’t tell anyone – like the criminal who commits the perfect crime and wants to brag about it to others, but can’t, because if he tells other people, then the crime would no longer be perfect!

But so what?

She wasn’t doing it for fame or glory. She was doing it for justice – plain, old-fashioned justice.

As she continued her work, she glanced up and looked out through the window. In the distance she could see the flickering lights of the nocturnal city. It reminded her that there was a world out there beyond her private world of vengeance. But she forced herself to ignore the distraction. Her fingers continued to dance across the keyboard in the small pool of halogen light that fell upon the desk. The rest of the room was in darkness.

After a few more seconds of work, she paused, satisfied with the results of her labors. Then, with a couple of clicks on the left button of the mouse, she selected a menu item called “build.” This action inaugurated a two-stage process known to computer programmers as “compiling” and “linking.” It was this process that actually created the finished computer program. By the time forty eight seconds had elapsed, she had created a
new
version of the program.

And what a new version!

She thought about it now, almost wistfully. Getting the original source code had been rather tricky. She’d had to use some of her old contacts to break down the bureaucratic barriers. But many States had public records or freedom of information laws. She wished that she could infiltrate the altered program
everywhere
. That would be something of a coup! But she had to be realistic.

When she first started out, she had no idea that she would even be able to do it. It was more idle curiosity than a firm agenda that had prompted her to explore the possibility. But when she studied the documentation and asked a few questions of a professor to understand how the software worked, it suddenly dawned on her just how easy it would be.

Of course, slipping it in
undetected
would be the hardest part. There were various ways she could do it. One way was to hack into the server computers and upload the new program. But that was risky. The fact that an organization maintained a server that was accessible from outside did not necessarily mean that it was vulnerable. Interactive websites were usually protected by strong firewalls.

There was, however, another way to infiltrate the new version of the software that didn’t involve direct use of the internet at all – social engineering. The trick was to
get the systems administrators to install it themselves
. The key to this method was to make it seem as if it were a modification of a current program that they were already using. By packaging the program complete with forged letterhead, printing on the DVD surface and multicolor process-printed documentation, and then sending it out by special courier, she could trick their Systems Administrators into installing the new version under the erroneous assumption that they were getting an upgrade from the software company.

It would be the ultimate software hack followed by the ultimate in social engineering.

But what
was
the new program? It was
not
one of those so-called “Trojan horses.” Neither was it a virus that could replicate itself. Nor yet was it a trap-door that would enable her to get into the system later. Indeed, once inserted into the system it would simply do its work.