State of War

14

Jay Gridley walked across the huge laboratory’s hard linoleum floor toward the test chamber. A low, dry rustling sound, as if thousands of leaves were being tossed about in a huge lotto machine, echoed through the room. The air was heavy with the smell of ozone. Across the room, two Jacob’s ladders, the epitome of mad-scientist decor, buzzed, sending hump-shaped blue sparks up their V-shaped electrodes. Close at hand, a bank of Tesla coils radiated even more intense sparkings, and Van de Graff electrostatic generators added their cracklings. A large Lava lamp stood off to the side, and on one of the lab benches, a Rube Goldberg forest of beakers, retorts, and Bunsen burners drove multicolored liquids through tubes and distilled them into yet more containers. At the end of another bench, an old oscilloscope displayed a revolving sine wave. The topper was the huge computer lining the entire wall at the end of the room. Huge rolling reels of magnetic tape rolled back and forth, interspersed with banks of flashing lights. The sound of clicking relays was a touch he had added himself.

Jay grinned. This particular scenario wasn’t actually all his, but since he had the final word in most Net Force VR work, his suggestions had carried some weight.

Frankenstein would be proud of this setup. Or at least the moviemakers who did all those science-gone-mad flicks of the thirties, forties, and fifties would be. Jay was proud, too. His people had done their usual great work.

Around him on the other three walls were hundreds of museum-quality display cases, each one lined with cotton and filled with odd-looking insects. On top of the lab benches, in huge wooden boxes, were thousands upon thousands more bugs: Their assorted wings, legs, and pincers were what made the leaf-rustling sound.

This wasn’t Jay’s usual VR scenario. It wasn’t intended to help him break into other net sites. It wasn’t even connected to the net at all. Instead, it was quarantined in a stand-alone Net Force computer, with no links to the outside net at all.

This scenario was a holding cell. It was also a visualizer and a synthesizer. It translated computer viruses, worms, and Trojan horses into distinctive insectoid shapes, complete with whatever features made each particular program unique. When it came time to see how a new attack program worked, Net Force personnel came here, to the test lab, to see what they were up against.

If the virus ate data, for example, it might have oversized mandibles along with a big abdomen and colors to match the data it went after. If it propagated by hiding in other data, or by catching hold of it, it might have a chameleon-like ability to change color, or spinnerets to ensnare its prey. Each mode of operation, combined with the bug’s delivery and goal, would give Net Force’s software enough info to make a distinctive-looking bug.

Naturally they still had to look at the actual code that made up the cores of the viruses, but the visualizations gave them a better way of tracking how the virus actually worked.

Like now, for instance.

Behind a thick Plexiglas wall was the virus test chamber, itself an analog representation of data transfer between computers. An old-fashioned punch-card printer sat at one end of a long conveyer belt. At the other end was a scanning array and punch-card reader along with a large diagram of a computer that looked like an ant farm.

Everything was a brilliant white, like some scientific version of heaven. Cameras and magnifying lenses surrounded the apparatus to make it easier to watch the process from start to finish. A long section of the Plexiglas wall had been built to make a huge lens that brought sections of the conveyer belt up several levels of magnification.

Jay walked over to the punch-card printer and sat at a terminal. He tapped a few buttons and the printer began to spit cards. What he’d actually done was to upload an e-mail that had been infected with the new blanker virus going around. High-end security software had caught it, but the virus had slid past standard virus-checker stuff, and he wanted to find out why.

He moved to a magnifying glass in front of the printer, one half of which was cut away like a “how it works” kind of drawing, and took a look. There, near the punch card being printed, was a small insect shape. He flipped a larger lens down over the area he was watching and took a better look.

The bug was fairly large. Pale, almost clear, without color, it was segmented into three main sections. It had six legs and six pincer arms, with one pair of each per section. The head was surprisingly small, with tiny feathered antennae, and it had large eyes.

As he watched, the middle thorax — if it could be called that, there being three of them — went completely transparent, and he could see through it.

Clever. The author of this little bug had come up with a new invisibility routine, a don’t-look-at-me-I’m-not-here bit of misdirection that made viral data less noticeable.

As Jay watched, the bug worked its way toward a small pile of punch cards.

The first batch of cards dropped down from the printer onto the belt, which inched itself forward just enough so that the next batch of cards wouldn’t hit the first, and then stopped. The bug didn’t go yet, though.

It waited for the second set of cards — which actually represented a packet of data — to begin stacking up. Then it reached between the second and third sections and did something to detach the last set of arms and pinchers. That segment moved toward the cards, went transparent, and began cutting at them with its claws. When it had made enough room, it burrowed in and pulled a section of torn card back to cover itself. The bundle of cards dropped onto the conveyer belt a few seconds later, and packet number three began printing.

Fascinated, Jay watched as the bug split itself apart again several packets later and the second segment burrowed into another stack of cards. The very next stack got the last third of the bug.

Impressive. A trinary virus — and, if he was right, one coded to ride different packets.

The last stack of cards dropped onto the conveyer belt, and then the belt sped up, taking the cards toward the scanner at the other end of the test chamber.

The cards were VR representations of packets of information: the e-mail he’d forwarded broken down and sent in little bunches. The way it worked was the first packet had a list saying how many packets were coming, kind of like a cover sheet for a fax. The last packet had a little tag saying, “The end.” The packets in between contained the actual e-mail itself.

The computer or server getting the data would watch for all the packets and confirm delivery of each one before forwarding on to the next link in the chain. If there were any errors, the problem packet would be re-sent.

Early virus writers had taken advantage of the fact that each packet was a set size. That meant that if your message was, say, ten point two packets long, eleven packets would still be sent. The point oh eight unused space would usually be filled with zeroes, and that was where the virus would hitch a ride.

The virus checkers had gotten wise to this, though, and started carefully checking the size of messages against the number of characters sent.

So the innovative virus writers had gone one better, and had their creations cut out sections of legitimate data in the middle of the stream and hide there.

This would change the size of the packet, of course, which would throw an error, but that wouldn’t set off any alarms. Errors in transmission were pretty common. Line noise, bad connections, time-outs, there were many, many legitimate reasons why errors occurred. The receiving computer would simply flag the error, the entire stream would get sent again, and the recipient would get their data unaware of the hitchhiker that had come along.

This had led to binary viruses, where the virus would split into two innocuous-looking sections that didn’t do anything until they were reassembled at the other end of the chain.

This was the first time he’d ever seen a trinary, however. In addition, the way the bug had not spaced the packets it was riding evenly led him to think it was randomly selecting them, which would make it tough to get a handle on.

At the other end of the test chamber, Jay watched the packets slide past the scanning array, which was actually a standard, off-the-shelf virus detector. He wanted to see how this bug got past them, after all. Putting one of his own cutting-edge programs there and squashing the bug with it wouldn’t tell him anything.

He was disappointed, though. The bug didn’t do anything special to defeat the security program. The off-the-shelf killware wasn’t designed to detect trinary bugs, and so it didn’t.

Jay saw the virus-bug reassemble itself, and then proceed to a large clear sheet of glass that represented the video subsystem of the computer setup. Once there, it sprayed the glass with some kind of ink, blacking it out. If he had been in the real world, he would have just seen his computer screen blank out.

Jay ran the test several times to confirm that the virus was indeed randomly selecting packets to leap onto, his thoughts turning over the same question.

Why?

Why would someone go through so much trouble to develop a virus that couldn’t be defeated by modern checkers, just to make someone’s screen go blank? It seemed like a lot of work for not much gain. Somebody that smart could be making good money programming.

Maybe they were, of course. Though that still begged the question of, Why bother?

As he watched the bug on the third test, something else occurred to him. There was something familiar about the way it moved, the shape of the antennae.

He walked toward the most current bug case on the wall of the lab and started looking. He glanced at hundreds of recent viruses, red, green, big, small, all kinds of them.

There.

It was the filler, the really recent one that had made the rounds a few days before, the virus that had been eating up hard-drive space.

He took a closer look, pulling it carefully from its cage.

The antennae were identical to those of the blanker he was running in the test chamber. He turned the bug over, and saw it shimmer: another invisibility routine.

Hmm.

Jay got a live sample of the filler and took it to the test chamber. After a few runs, he was satisfied that whoever had made the filler had also made the blanker. An analysis of the written code showed portions that were exactly the same. This, plus the fact that the bugs had been released only three days apart, told him that they’d probably been developed at around the same time.

Which led to a particularly nasty thought, one that offered a possible answer to the “Why?” question.

There’s more to come. This guy is seriously messing with the net, and not just for fun, either.

In addition to everything else going on, it looked like they had a serial hacker piping cutting-edge viruses out onto the net. Jay cleared the VR scenario and reached for his virgil to com Alex.

Junior had made the drive from D.C. across the bay, taken Highway 301 north to SR 300, and driven east over the state line into Delaware. From there, it was only another dozen or so miles to Dover.

It had been dusk when he got there. Dover wasn’t much of a town, but it was big enough to have a branch of Hopkins Security. Like Brinks or Pinkertons or the other big security firms, Hopkins offered service patrols and electronic alarms for homes and businesses. They also offered armed guards.

If you were their customer and your alarm went off, they didn’t just call the cops like most agencies did. They sent an armed response of their own.

This was a huge selling point for them. In most places, the local police forces were stretched pretty thin. Answering a security call to an empty house, no matter how much money the owners had, just didn’t rank right up there with burning homes or 911 calls where individuals could be in danger. Oftentimes that gave smash-and-grab thieves enough time to kick in a door and steal half someone’s furniture before the police showed up.

Hopkins claimed that its armed response teams were the best private security around. They promised security personnel who were sharp, smart, and could all shoot. Every one of them had to qualify on the pistol range quarterly, and Hopkins’s standards were higher than those of seventy-five percent of the major metro police departments in the country.

All of which was exactly what Junior was looking for.

The way he figured it, shooting another cop would be too risky. Cop killings were rare enough that somebody might try to link them together, and he definitely didn’t want that. Even an armed security guard killed with a.22 might raise some eyebrows, though he had done all he could to protect himself there. He was planning to use only one gun this time, and the ballistics report would show that the bullets came from a different weapon. Doing it in another state should help, too.

It still wasn’t smart. He knew that, but just the thought of it thrilled him more than anything else he could think of. Yeah, sex was great, but it was nothing like clearing leather and pulling steel against a man who was trying to kill you. No drug he had ever tried — and Junior had tried more than a few while in the can — no drug came close.

This was the ultimate rush. Lose, and you were dead. Win, and you were like a god. You got to say who lived and who died. What could match that?

He ought to have made this trip before. He should have scouted it out, gotten the lay of the land and all, but Ames had been keeping him too busy running around lately. So what he ought to do now is to make this the scout — find a good place, set it up, check the response time and all.

That’s what he ought to do. He knew it, too. But it wasn’t what he was going to do. He was hooked, a junkie looking for his next fix, and he just couldn’t wait any longer.

He drove toward the outskirts of town, looking for a place that would work. It didn’t have to be perfect, but he wanted to find a spot far enough outside the city limits that they’d have to call the sheriff’s office, or even the state troopers. It had to have a Hopkins sign posted, of course, and it also needed to be some kind of business or warehouse or something that, after five o’clock, would be mostly empty. A residential neighborhood was riskier. Too many people, too many eyes. Sure, he had swiped a set of license plates from an old car parked on a D.C. side street, and those were now on his car, but he still didn’t want a crowd around. People in a neighborhood sometimes did weird, unpredictable things.

He remembered a time down in Mobile ten or eleven years ago. He’d been driving a car for a couple of guys who had said they knew where there was a gun safe full of cash. The house didn’t even have a burglar alarm, they told him, and it was in this middle-class neighborhood full of soccer moms and working dads. The two guys — Lonnie and Leon — had waited for a night when the homeowner had gone bowling. The three of them drove up, Lonnie and Leon went to the house, kicked in the door big as you please, and waltzed on in. Junior sat in the car with the engine running. What they figured was, Lonnie and Leon would crowbar and sledge the safe open inside five minutes, grab the cash, and run.

It was Leon and Lonnie’s plan. Junior was just the wheel man.

The safe turned out to be a better model than they had figured. After five minutes all they’d done was make a lot of noise, clanging and banging away at it. Junior could hear them out in the car even with the house’s doors closed, the car window rolled up, and the air conditioner going.

The neighbors must have had good hearing, too, because lights went on all over the place and people started coming out of their houses to see what was what.

The neighbors clearly knew that the guy who owned that house was bowling, it being eight o’clock on a weeknight, because they spotted Junior right off and started his way. That alone would have made him real nervous, but he also saw that some of them had guns.

Junior was a pretty good handgunner even back then, but he wasn’t about to try and take on five or six guys with shotguns and squirrel rifles coming at him in the dark on a hot summer night in Mobile. People up north might hate guns and all, but men in this neck of the woods knew how to use them, and there was no way that he was going to hop out of the car and shoot with them. He’d signed on as a driver and lookout, not security.

Junior laid on the horn to warn Lonnie and Leon as best he could, then put the car into gear and left rubber halfway to the corner.

The neighbors didn’t shoot at him, fortunately. A man who had grown up knocking squirrels out of oak trees wouldn’t have had any trouble hitting a car pulling away at all.

Later, he heard from a guy he knew who shared a lawyer with Lonnie and Leon that they hadn’t heard the horn, and were still banging away at the gun safe when the neighbors snuck up behind them and started clicking off safeties. He’d lost track of Lonnie and Leon after that. Which was just as well; neither one of them was too swift.

So, no, Junior didn’t want any neighbors coming to help out the security guy. The fewer people around, the better. He didn’t need an audience, either. He wanted it to be man against man, with no witnesses except the guy who walked away. Which would be Junior.

This one would be more dangerous than the last time. A guy coming out on an alarm would be expecting trouble. And if what the company said in its advertising was true, he’d be a better shooter than most cops. Plus the whole thing would have to go down quick, because the cops would show up eventually.

Which was just fine with Junior. He didn’t want it to be too easy after all. If there wasn’t a chance that the security guy would drop him, then there wasn’t any point. He might just as well sneak up behind somebody and shoot him in the back. There wasn’t any challenge in that, no victory, no glory.

He passed a couple of possible prospects before he found the one he wanted. Kim’s Business and Industrial Center, the sign said. There was an “Armed Response” sign warning that the property, which looked to be some little prefab shop and offices, all single-level and joined, was protected by Hopkins Security. He had passed a city limit sign, so he was in the county. Exactly what he wanted.

There was always the slight chance the local sheriff or state trooper might make it here first. If that happened, Junior would have to decide how to handle it, but he was betting the security guy would show up before the others.

He parked the car under the shadows of a big tree in the first corner of the dimly lit parking lot, got out, and walked around the building. There was an old flatbed truck in front of a little machine shop down on the east end, but the truck was locked and the engine cover was cool. There were no other cars. A few windows had lights on, but it didn’t look like anybody was home.

Perfect.

He found a nook between two buildings where a car pulling through the lot wouldn’t see him. After running over it a couple of times in his mind, he nodded to himself and went to kick in a door. The window had a Hopkins sticker, and a blinking sensor showed the place was alarmed.

He hit the door and it popped open on the first kick. An audible alarm blared, hooting over and over like one of those European ambulance sirens, eee-aww, eee-aww!

That ought to do it.

Junior strolled back to his hiding place. He loosened his Rugers in their holsters, pulled them from under the vest, then reholstered them. He felt the sweat break out, his heart cranking up faster. It’s killin’ time, Junior.