Runaway Heart

SEVEN

The phone rang, pulling Roland up with a start. Where was he? His one-bedroom apartment in D.C.? His cot at the Institute for Planetary Justice? Then he landed back in time and place. He was in San Fran, asleep in the rectal monstrosity. It was the middle of the night and he was ready to do battle with the Gen-A-Tec cyber-shit who kavorked him that afternoon. He fumbled the phone off the hook. "Your wakeup call," the operator said.

"Bitchin'." Roland hung up, got out of bed, and went into the bathroom where he splashed cold water on his face, then returned to his computer and turned it on. He looked down at his weapon of choice while it booted up. With this little twenty-four-ounce spaceship he could fly anywhere in the universe, visit secure sites, soar above it all-a bird of prey searching for rabbits in the system.

Once his laptop was up he grabbed a Coke out of the minibar and went to work. He logged into the Gen-A-Tec mainframe using the stolen security codes that his line-sniffer had lifted from Jack Sasson's log-on. In seconds he was accepted and welcomed into the real Gen-A-Tec computer system.

"Eat my shorts," Roland said to his screen as he got in.

The rest was cake.

He found the real reshcorn file and downloaded it, scanning as it copied to the zip disk. Everything Herman wanted was in there: the almost total lack of testing Gen-A-Tec had done; the callous disregard for collateral damage that the genetically enhanced corn might wreak with its self-generated pesticides. He pulled up the EPA and FDA reports. Those agencies had really done a piss-poor job of vetting this Frankenfood. The whole program had been fast-tracked by the Department of Agriculture, probably because of Gen-A-Tec's strong-arm lobbying tactics.

Roland downloaded the file on human testing, which consisted of not one single test, but just a bunch of scientific opinion. Then he went on a search to find out what the fuck DARPA had to do with this private-sector lab. He started back in e-mail and screened the executive boxes. Several e-mails cropped up with DARPA in them. He read them all and finally saw the same fragment of the message he had seen in the shadow system:

We should put in a request for additional funding before darpa closes its budget in the fall.

Below the message were listed the Gen-A-Tec projects that DARPA was interested in. There were two.

One was [dna enhanced gene splicing]. That could include the Frankenfood, Roland thought, the corn, soybeans, all the other stuff. The second program was something called [the ten-eyck chimera project].

This was the first mention of the Ten-Eyck Chimera Project he had seen in all of the browsing he had done in the Gen-A-Tec system, so he went all the way to the root directory and gerped for the text string on ten-eyck chimera. This took him a while, but the search came back:

NO RESULTS

The only mention was in the e-mails he already had. He looked for the table of file systems and found it. There were two related files:

/dev/hda8/chimera

/dev/hda9/chimera

So there was a Chimera file. He had no idea what the hell it was, but Roland was getting jazzed. He was on the case. He issued a mount-a-command to load up every related file in the system. Then he asked for a complete list of file directories. What he got back looked like gibberish. "What the fuck is this?" he wondered aloud.

Inside the Gen-A-Tec building an alarm went off and Lincoln Fellows walked over to his computer and saw that a window had popped up, warning:

TEN-EYCK CHIMERA ACCESSED BY SASSON. MONITOR?

Line was about to allow it when he decided, just to be safe, to check the sign-in logbook. It was after 2 a.m. and, although some Gen-A-Tec employees worked screwy hours, this seemed worth investigating. The Chimera file was restricted to A-list in-building use. For Sasson to legally access the file he would have to be in his office down the hall, and it was a little strange for the CFO to be working here at this hour.

Line checked the logbook. Dr. Sasson had gone home at five and had not signed back into the building. Link resented it when corporate cheese thought they could just walk in at strange hours and ignore his security system. He was the one who would get reamed if there was a breach. So Lincoln Fellows left the control room and walked down the hall to the corporate offices on Mahogany Row.

Sasson's office was empty and dark.

The guy was downloading secure files from his home computer… a complete breach of security!

Link stormed back to his control room and snatched up the phone.

While Lincoln was waking up Jack Sasson, Roland was downloading the corn file. He went back to the systems directory to prowl around, and found another strange encryption: ›@dA»p amp;AE01. This one was shorter, so Roland thought he could break it with the encryption programs in his toolkit. He downloaded it for later.

Then, as the reshcorn files completed downloading, Roland went back to the problem of penetrating the Ten-Eyck Chimera file.

"Yes?" Jack Sasson's voice was thick with sleep.

"Dr. Sasson," Lincoln said, trying to keep the anger out of his voice.

"Who is this? It's two in the goddamn morning."

"This is Lincoln Fellows, the night systems administrator at Gen-A-Tec. I need to advise you, Doctor, that you are in violation of our security mandates right now."

"What the fuck are you talking about?" More awake now, and really pissed.

"We, Doctor-you, that is, have clearance to work from home, sir, but you cannot copy secure files off-site to your home computer."

"I'm not working. I'm sleeping. I've got to be on the damn six-A.M. flight to L.A. today for that silly butterfly trial, so leave me alone, you idiot!"

"You're not at your computer right now?"

"No, dammit. Stop bothering me!" And Jack Sasson hung up.

In his hotel room Roland now had the Ten-Eyck Chimera file up on the screen. The entire fifty-two-page program was completely encrypted.

Roland knew that if the Gen-A-Tec systems administrator was on his toes he'd certainly be aware of the security breach by now and would be trying to run a back-finger search program to trace Roland to this computer site. He had to get out of the system pretty soon. He downloaded the fifty-two-page encrypted file, wondering what could be so important that the file would be in code inside an already secure system… secure that is, to anybody but Roland Minton.

Once the file was downloaded Roland logged off the Gen-A-Tec system. He knew he hadn't been back-fingered, because the alarm in his hard drive, set to detect such nastiness, hadn't gone off. He shut down his laptop and lay back again, lacing his fingers behind his head. "Chew me, dickhead," he said to his opposite number in the control room back at Gen-A-Tec. But he had developed some respect for the guy. Whoever it was, he was pretty good. He just wasn't the best. He wasn't the "master of the game."

Lincoln Fellows knew he had been breached and knew he was about to get toasted for it. He launched a back-finger program to try and trace the cracker, but, as he feared, the guy was already a ghost.

Lincoln knew he couldn't call Vincent Valdez at DARPA with a bag full of apologies. His only chance of saving his job was to come up with some counterintelligence to give to Mr. Valdez, some critical piece of the puzzle. He turned to the Gen-A-Tec exterior security cameras and accessed the video tape decks, starting with the late-afternoon shift change. He ran the four camera platforms high-speed, fast-forward, scanning all four screens. There were three cameras on each platform: one regular, one light-enhanced, one infrared. There were also two front gate camera positions. Lincoln figured that in order to phreak the system so effectively the cracker must have, at some time, been working from the telephone company junction box up the street. He watched as cars and trucks zipped past the gate in fast-forward. After twenty minutes he saw him-a figure moving past the front gate, a telephone repairman with a white hat and tool belt. Lincoln froze the tape with the man in midstride.

"Is that you, Clarence?" he said to the dark image of the man whom he had frozen, left heel down, right toe pointed up.

In the shot the sun had just disappeared behind the hills, throwing the street into shadow. The picture was too dark to get a good look. He switched to the infrared camera. It didn't improve the shot much, so he went for the light-enhanced. Instantly, the shadowy shot lightened. Lincoln could now see what the guy looked like-rail-thin, with wisps of hair escaping from under the brim of the white hard hat. A geek-a-thon. Lincoln released the tape and fast-forwarded. He saw the guy driving away in a white Camry, hat off, purple hair blazing. Lincoln froze the shot with the car still in frame. He looked hard at the rear license plate, couldn't quite read it, but he figured this was all he was going to get. His security command sheet said any breach on DARPA projects had to be communicated first to the DARPA A.D. in Washington.

With a shaking hand he called the emergency number. It was 2:45 a.m. here, which meant 5:45 a.m. in Washington, D.C., but he had been told that Mr. Valdez always got in before sunup.

"Agency," a voice said after two rings.

"I need to speak with the assistant director. This is Lincoln Fellows," he said.

"Is this an emergency?" the secure operator replied. Line could hear a beeping sound indicating that his call was being taped.

"I'm afraid so. Tell him it's the Night SA at Gen-A-Tec in San Francisco and that the secure computer has been breached. We have downloads."

While he waited for Valdez, Line made a digital transfer of the cracker's image and drive-away, copying from the security tape to a backup, then loaded it on the sat-link to send to DARPA in D.C. He knew it was the first thing Mr. Valdez would ask for.

The assistant director came on the line. Line had only met him once, a swarthy, dark-haired spook with black eyes and the cold disposition of a desert reptile.

"This is Valdez."

"Sir, our secure computer has been compromised. A cracker penetrated our shadow system and completed some downloads."

"What did he get?" Valdez 's voice was calm. That was the thing about Mr. Valdez, he never seemed to be alarmed, as if he always had a tight rein on himself and the situation. It was his one overriding personality trait; that, and a reputation for utter ruthlessness.

"He got the program on engineered food. Corn mostly, some test results, some e-mail…" Lincoln 's heart was beating harder against his chest, "and the entire encryption for the Ten-Eyck Chimera project."

There was a long silence on the other end of the line. "You're joking," was all Valdez said.

"I think I have him on a security camera," the trembling SA inserted quickly. "A shot of him and his car pulling past the gate. I'm going to sat-link it to you right now."

"While I'm dealing with that, I want you to look through the entire hack and see if he left any electronic clutter behind."

"I will, but I don't think so, sir. He was pretty damned sharp."

"Right. Of course he was. But I thought you were sharp. That's what you said when we hired you. Obviously, we were both wrong."

Before Line could present his alibi, Valdez hung up. Line hurried across the room and hit the satellite send button. A secure channel on a scrambled frequency shot the digital image into space, where it bounced off a platform a mile up, then streaked down to the windowless DARPA headquarters inside the Beltway in Washington, D.C. Elapsed time: fifteen seconds.

Vincent Valdez quickly scanned the tape when it arrived, then sent it down to Video Enhancement with instructions to digitally enhance the license plate.

Fifteen minutes later he had a hard copy printout in his hand. It was a blowup of the back bumper on a white Camry, with California plate igi 378.

"And?" Valdez said softly to his assistant, Paul Talbot, who had just handed him the photo.

"The car came from the concierge at the new Fairview Hotel in San Francisco," Talbot said. "It was rented to a guest there. A Mr. Roland Minton, Room 3015." Talbot survived in close proximity to Valdez because, like the male black widow spider, he had learned to interact with his poisonous mate by appearing innocuous, moving fast, and staying out of range. Talbot's bland personality masked a shrewd mind that was always scheming.

Vincent Valdez stared at the photo. He hated screwups. But, he reasoned, at least the ball was still in play. He looked at his watch. It was currently 3:07 a.m. in San Francisco.

"How fast can we put a response-retrieval team in play?" he asked Talbot.

"We can scramble a team from Ten-Eyck and have them ready in less than an hour."

"That puts 'em there before five a.m. Daylight Savings out there gives us an extra hour of dark. So do it." Victor leaned back. A second thought crossed his mind… dangerous, ironic, but maybe exactly right. They were ready for a field test on one of the D-units, so why not now? He spun around and stopped Paul Talbot before he left the office. "Tell Captain Silver to send a DU along with the team."

"You sure you want to do that?" his assistant asked, turning and wrinkling his pale brow.

"Let's see if what we've been building is really worth all this trouble," Victor Valdez said, thinking that at least this would add some excitement to a monumental cluster-fuck. "Tell Silver to put a chip vest on the unit with full abort-destroy capabilities. I don't want to leave any DNA behind if it goes bad."

Talbot nodded and left the room.

Twenty minutes later, a helicopter was touching down in the desert north of Palm Springs. Its landing lights illuminated the sagebrush and sand that blew under the chopper, tattooing the side of an old weathered barn. The pilot was from a DOD scramble flight group in L.A., but he'd never been out in this part of the desert before. The area was restricted by a Code 61, which prohibited flyovers without special DOD clearance. When he landed, the chopper captain was puzzled because the place looked deserted-just barren miles of fenced, open desert. He watched as four men ran out of the old barn dressed in black government assault gear, flak-jacketed with body armor, and packing fully automatic MP-5s with thirty-round clips. Two of them were wheeling a metal cage. They slid the heavy box into the bay of the helicopter and piled in after it. The pilot looked back. There was Something alive in the box. For a second he saw unearthly fingers come out and grasp the metal bars, but then they disappeared inside the cage. What the hell? Then he heard heavy breathing and a very strange noise, unlike anything he'd ever heard before, high-pitched and angry. Suddenly, a dank, fetid odor clogged his nostrils.

"Shhh, Pan," one of the soldiers said.

"Let's go. Get it up," Ranger Captain Dave Silver ordered as he jumped into the helicopter.

The pilot pulled back the collective and the Bell Jet Ranger lifted off the desert floor, heading toward the landing pad on top of the Federal Building in San Francisco.

Roland was still hunched over his computer working offline an hour after he had finished the download from Gen-A-Tec.

He was in the zone.

It happened like that sometimes-you just lost track of everything. He couldn't get Herman on the cell phone, and the overweight attorney wasn't at Streisand's house, so Roland finished composing an e-mail to Strockmire and sent it off to Herman's computer.

TO: strockmeister@earthlink.net

FROM: cyberhood@thirdwave.net

SUBJECT: no subject

CC:

DEAR STROCK…

I want a raise… I'm too fucking good… I have again saved your dumpy white ass amp; am expecting some big bucks in return. No more of your empty promises. Send $$$!!! (heh-heh-heh)

I am e-mailing some downloads I got from the Gen-A-Tec computer. I was magnificent, by the way. I wrecked the SA they had on night duty out there. Stole all this shit right out from under his bony ass.

Enc. include the RESH file on corn, e-m, amp; some skeevy looking encryptions that were filed under DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency). DARPA is a secret gov't weapons research org I've heard some evil shit about… I think we found some bodacious bogosity. Why would gov't spooks be investing in food research? What evil lurks? Gen-A-Tec had this program coded in a secure data bank so this is DEFINITELY something they don't want seen.

If you or Susie get a chance, run this out to Zimmy, my bud I told you about. He's a cryptology freak who plays with this kinda shit when no one's looking after-hours. He ties ten sun solar mega-workstations together amp; does complicated decoding problems for fun. He'll jump at this challenge, but keep it to yourself, Strock, 'cause if they catch him he'll get booted for misuse of computer time. Zimmy should be able to break this in a few nights of gut-tickling fun (heh-heh-heh).

PS: There was something else in the Gen-A-Tec computer that was encrypted-a short line that I'm doing myself. (I need my workout, too.) I'll let you know if it turns into anything juicy. In the meantime…

I remain the one and only. MASTER OF THE GAME

ATTACH

After he sent the e-mail, Roland went back to work decoding the short line of code he had found in the Gen-A-Tec database. Like his buddy Zimmy, Roland thought that breaking code was a wonderful mind game. He had been working for a half hour and already had three letters. He wrote them on a paper cocktail napkin on his bedside table, then looked down at the letters once again, wondering what they might stand for:

OCT

He was just starting the cracking sequence on the fourth.

OCT. October, maybe? But why would Gen-A-Tec go to all the trouble of decoding the name of a month? Probably because it wasn't a month. It was something else. Then his program beeped and he quickly had the next letter, 0.

OCTO

October: the tenth month. Ten maybe? He wrote it down. October? Octogeneric? Octopod? Keep going, he thought. He was already over halfway through deciphering it and started running sequences on the next two symbols.

The windowless van had been parked outside the new Fairview Hotel for almost ten minutes when Ranger Captain Dave "Hi-Ho" Silver returned. He was dressed in a black business suit, and he immediately began stripping off his tie as soon as he got back inside the vehicle that was loaded with video and sound monitors.

"I think Valdez must be psychic," Captain Silver said. They have security cameras on all the floors… in boxes. We could disable the one on his floor, or maybe throw the hotel video system into temporary phase jitter, but it's not gonna be covert and will take too much time, so I'm gonna put a DU down."

The entire response-retrieval team looked at the heavy metal cage on the floor of the van. They couldn't see the DU but they could smell it and hear it breathing.

"Pan," Captain Silver said. "It's time."