by P. A. Brown
Seconds later the small brown pills sat in the palm of her hand.
A nurse entered behind her. Finder waved her forward. The nurse inserted a syringe into the IV line.
“What’s that?”
“Just something to help you rest. For your own good, Chris.”
“I hate it when people tell me something is for my own good.”
“Yeah, I agree. Sucks, doesn’t it?” She used a penlight to examine his eyes. She rested her fi ngertips under his rigid jaw.
“You’re too tense. If you don’t want to do something for your sake, how about doing it for David?”
“You’re not giving me much choice, are you?” he managed.
Her eyes widened. “Hey, I think you’re right.”
“And you call yourself a doctor.” His eyes began to slide shut as the sedative hit him. “Someone ought to take away your stethoscope.”
L.A. BYTES 201
“Better men than you have tried.”
Sunday, 8:45 pm, USC County General, State Street, Los Angeles David stared at the sleeping fi gure. Light from the hallway fell across Chris’s face, which, despite the yellowing bruises and swollen fl esh, looked almost angelic.
David smiled. Angelic and Chris weren’t usually two concepts he would have put together, but he looked so peaceful... David reached out tentatively to stroke the hand that lay atop the covers.
“We’ll get through this, hon,” David murmured. Funny how he never felt comfortable using those kinds of endearments to Chris’s face. The words always seemed to stick in his throat. “Not much of a husband, am I? Can’t be here for you—”
“Oh, I think Chris knows what he means to you,” a voice came through the open door.
David turned. It was Chris’s doctor.
“Chris seems like a pretty sharp cookie.” Finder entered the room and stood beside him. “He doesn’t miss much.”
David studied her. “You don’t either.”
She laid her hand on his shoulder. “He’s going to be fi ne.”
“Is that your professional opinion?”
“In my professional opinion Christopher is a pain in the ass.”
“Can’t argue there—”
“D-David?” Chris said from the bed.
“Yeah, it’s me,” David kept his voice light. “Who did you expect?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Monday, 7:40 am, USC County General, State Street, Los Angeles David still sat in the molded plastic chair he had taken last night. His head tilted back and his mouth had fallen open in sleep. One hand lay across the bed, still holding Chris’s hand.
Chris drank him in. Never had David looked more beautiful to him than at that moment.
A cart rattled in the hall. David sat up with a grunt. His eyes fl uttered open and met Chris’s.
David stretched and Chris heard something pop. He winced in sympathy. David fl ashed him a wan smile.
“I’m getting too old for this.” David pressed his hands into the small of his back and straightened to more popping sounds.
“Think I can fi nd some coffee around here?”
“Bring me a latte if this place is civilized enough to produce them.”
David did one better. He’d brought the desired drinks and two blueberry muffi ns.
Chris attacked his with fervor. He caught David’s look. “Hey, how many days of hospital food am I expected to endure?”
“You’ll survive.”
“You didn’t see what they served for supper last night.”
David reluctantly took his leave, promising he would return that evening if he could. Chris watched him stride through the door and missed him even before he was out of sight.
204 P.A. Brown
Monday, 10:20 am, Northeast Community Police Station, San Fernando Road, Los Angeles
David tracked down Brad, the technician. He was in the same spot, hunched over Adnan’s computer and one similar. As far as David could tell the guy hadn’t even changed clothes. He was studying a map of the city’s center.
“So, was it booby-trapped?” David asked.
“Yes, matter of fact it was.” From his smug expression David deduced the traps had been easy to beat. At least by this guy’s standards. “I intercepted the shell command before it could run and killed it.” He patted the off-white box like it was a puppy.
“She gave it all up to me after that. Though from what I can see the guy did regular clean-up, so there’s no way to tell how much he already deleted.”
“I thought deleted fi les could be recovered.”
“This guy used a high end data scrubber on his deleted fi les.
What is there is pretty recent.”
“Guess we surprised him before he had a chance to clean it off completely,” David said. “So, what exactly did you fi nd?”
“He had several map searches saved. All like this. Guess he wanted to make sure he could fi nd his way around downtown.”
“What else?” David asked, ignoring the guy’s feeble attempt at humor. “He must have been protecting more than a couple of maps.”
“This guy spent a lot of time at hacker sites. He’s no wizard, but he’s defi nitely not a script kiddie, either. It looks like he tried to fi nd what’s left of the Legion of Doom and the Masters of Deception, but I doubt that got him anywhere. Those guys are history.”
“Talk English, okay?”
Brad shrugged. “Sure, whatever. This guy’s got some very interesting tools on this baby,” he patted the computer again,
“some I’ve only ever heard of. Plus I found some half-fi nished L.A. BYTES 205
code he’s been splicing together; I’m still trying to fi gure that out.”
“Code for what?”
“That’s what I’m trying to work out. It’s not done and the guy didn’t do any documentation, so I’m sorting through it line by line, but it looks like a pretty sophisticated worm he’s got going there. He’s not just launching any simple SYN attacks with this.”
“A worm? They can spread, right?”
“That’s the whole idea. Worms are self-replicating. Release one of those babies in the wild and it’ll jump from system to system until there’s nothing left. Pure havoc.” Brad sounded impressed. “Of course most worms aren’t that well written. They all pretty well fi zzle after hitting a few thousand machines. So far Confi cker has been about the most successful one. It nailed upward of fi fteen million machines.”
“Fifteen million?” David asked.
“Out of billions of potential targets, that’s small stuff. Just imagine how bad it could get if you could infect hundreds of millions of machines. Especially if you start bringing down the major dot com sites.”
“What about the stuff this guy is writing?” David waved at the computer on Brad’s cluttered desk. “Is it good enough?”
“Haven’t fi nished deconstructing it yet. It’s good, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t major fl aws in it. You usually only spot those when you run tests.”
“How would you test something like that?”
Brad grinned. “Let it loose and watch what happens.”
“Great.”
Brad shrugged. “Not many hackers have access to test labs.”
He swiveled around toward David. “You might be interested to know that your guy here had a second computer, probably a laptop.”
“How do you know that?” Visions of the fl eeing motorcyclist returned. Had he been carrying a bag? David thought so.
206 P.A. Brown
“He’s got a workgroup set up. Two machines, this one acted as his server, the other one probably has his newer versions of the code, the one’s he’s working on right now.”
What the hell was Adnan up to? He had hacked the JPL web site, but done nothing except deface it. Was this another attack like that? Get back at the university for kicking him out? Or had he set his sights higher this time?
“I need to know exactly what he was planning to do with that
code.”
“Like I said,” Brad muttered. “I can’t tell yet. I need more time.”
“Well consider this a priority. I don’t want you working on anything else, got it?”
“Sure, yeah, I mean, yes, sir.”
§ § § §
David dropped into his chair facing Martinez.
“No luck?”
“Defi ne luck,” he muttered, and told Martinez what Brad had found. While he talked he scratched some notes on a legal pad.
“He’s already hacked one site. Does he intend to do it again? Or is he after more?”
David scrabbled through the evidence boxes on their desks.
He dragged out the photos of Chris and himself.
“Adnan was involved in hacking the hospital.” He tossed them on the desk in front of Martinez. “That was after Chris was approached to look into the Ste. Anne’s situation, so it stands to reason Adnan was responsible for the original hospital attack, the one that brought Chris in. It makes sense Adnan would want to know who they were hiring.”
“So he tracked you down to see who the enemy was?”
“It makes perfect sense in light of what happened since then.”
L.A. BYTES 207
“You’ll never get the DA to buy that. Not with what we got.”
“Then we’ll fi nd her more.”
Martinez shrugged. “I’m not having a lot of luck tracking this guy’s father. It’s like he doesn’t exist.”
“Well we know he does. Let’s poke around and keep our ears open.”
David began to dig tentatively through the Internet. At fi rst, his searches returned nothing of value, but then something appeared on his screen. A reference to an old article in The Boulevard Sentinel, a Los Angeles neighborhood rag. Another hour of further digging found a link to the paper itself.
He opened the link and searched it for the article. It had been written over fi ve years earlier and had to be pulled from the archives. The author, Dick Charles, was a vitriolic, fl amboyant writer who clearly wanted his readers to know how strongly he felt on the subject.
The article’s title caught David’s eye: “The American Disappeared?”
The article itself was no less infl ammatory, probably why it had been buried in obscurity.
On September 11, 2001 the world watched in horror as two planes were deliberately fl own into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City. Americans were justifi ably enraged by this cowardly attack, but what followed at the prison camps in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay have shown that evil resides on both sides of the ocean...
David was about to take a pass on the article, when a name jumped out at him. Yousef Baruq.
You wouldn’t think that a naturalized U.S. citizen would be subject to the whims of a secret military cabal, but the story of Yousef Baruq may very well change your mind.
He quickly skimmed the article, which told the story of Yousef, an Iranian who married an American woman, fathered a son, and 208 P.A. Brown
became a naturalized citizen before the Al-Qaeda launched their attacks. He was picked up and detained at Guantanamo Bay. The article hinted he had been released, which would explain how Charles had managed to interview him. David doubted too many reporters made it into Guantanamo Bay.
David saved the piece, then launched another search, this time for the writer Dick Charles. He found several more articles Charles wrote for the Sentinel and one that had appeared more recently in another local paper— L.A. Alternative Press.
A third search gave him a number for the paper. Flipping his pad to a clean sheet, he dialed. He went from the receptionist to a junior editor to an associate editor in advertising. No one stayed on the line long enough to hear what he wanted before they put him on hold and shuffl ed him off to yet another faceless voice.
Finally he reached someone who introduced herself as Jane.
“Jane,” David said hurriedly before she could put him on hold. “This is the LAPD calling. I need to ask you something.”
“LAPD? What do you want?”
She sounded suspicious, but that was better than going into the limbo of hold.
“My name’s Detective David Eric Laine. I’m looking for a reporter who did some work for you last year.”
“Who would that be?”
David told her.
“Dick Charles? Hold on a minute—”
“Wait—”
But she had dropped him into limbo again. David resigned himself to another wait. He scribbled in his notes. Adnan Baruq.
Yousef Baruq. Nancy Scott Baruq. Alice Crandall. Herb Bolton.
Laura Fischer. He scratched out the last two names. Then re-added them. Then added one more: Chris.
Was there a link? How was that possible? He traced a line between Herb and Adnan. Two hackers. Three if he added Chris, L.A. BYTES 209
something he didn’t like to do. But honesty required it. How hard would it be for two guys like that to fi nd each other through one of those online places? What about Laura? She was a nurse; Nancy had been a sick woman. Could they have met through Laura’s work? That could have been another way for Adnan and Bolton to meet.
Yousef. Where was the father? Somebody at some time seemed to think he might have been a danger to U.S. interests.
Had those suspicions ever amounted to anything? That would explain the tension between mother and son, especially if the son remained loyal to his father and his mother turned her back on both of them.
David had the feeling it wouldn’t be easy fi nding out who had been sent to Guantanamo.
But he could fi nd this reporter. See if he had maintained contact with Adnan’s father.
Jane fi nally came back on the line. “Dick is on vacation. He won’t be back until the middle of the month.”
Even before he hung up he had Dick in the system. It came back with an address in Van Nuys. He swung around to face Martinez. “What are you up to?”
“I’ve got an appointment with Adnan’s landlord. He’s gonna take me through the place, see if he can tell me anything I don’t already know.”
David nodded. “I got a reporter to talk to.” He fi lled Martinez in on what he had found out so far. Martinez nodded when he heard about Guantanamo.
“A nasty piece of business. How ‘bout we meet up later and compare notes.”
“Dinner at Bill’s?” David could run up to visit Chris from there easily enough.
“Suits me.”
§ § § §
210 P.A. Brown
David took the 134 west, onto the Ventura Freeway and the 405 north to Van Nuys. Rain beat a steady tattoo on the car window as he exited at Sherman Way. It was looking like it was going to be a wet fall.
A middle-aged man in a bathrobe, his wispy fringe of gray hanging down his back in a ponytail, answered David’s knock.
“Mr. Charles?”
“Yes?” He looked at David with narrow, rheumy eyes. “Who are you?”
David fl ashed his badge. Dick looked slightly bemused.
“Okay, what do you want?”
David showed him a printed copy he had made of The Boulevard Sentinel’s article with Dick’s byline. “You wrote this?”
“Says I did.” Charles drew a pair of glasses out of the pocket of his robe. He slipped them on and peered at the paper David handed him. “Yeah, that’s one of mine. Where’d you dig that fossil up?”
“You talked to a guy called Yousef Baruq for this article?”
“Yousef? Sure, I remember him. Pathetic old coot.” Charles squinted up at the lowering sky. “Listen, you want to come in?
Place is a mess, but hey, I’m on vacation.”
David followed him into the pale blue Spanish style bungalow that had probably gone up in the early 40’s when the Valley’s orange groves gave way to urban sprawl. The place was littered with old food containers and bundles of newspapers.
A layer of dust covered most of the surfaces, including a large screen Sony that looked co
mpletely out of place amid the Goodwill cast-offs that fi lled the rest of the room. The TV was off. From another room something operatic played.
Charles cleared some newspapers off the sagging sofa and gestured for David to sit. He did, mindful of his wet clothes.
“What can you tell me about Yousef? When did you speak with him last?”
L.A. BYTES 211
“Don’t recall exactly,” Charles said, waving his hand toward him. David caught a whiff of alcohol. “When did I write it?”
“Four years ago,” David said. “Do you know which article I’m talking about? Yousef Baruq and Guantanamo Bay.”
“Yes, yes, I remember.” Charles rubbed thick fi ngers over his unshaven face. “I got hold of Yousef right after they released him. No one else wanted to hear what we had to say back then, that’s why I had to put it in that rag, like anybody ever read it.”
“How did you fi nd Mr. Baruq?”
Charles lit up a Camel and let the smoke trickle out of his nose while he stared down at the article in his hand. His fi ngertips were nicotine stained. “Now that’s a funny story,” he said. “I was doing a story down in this mission on Western and I met this old character.”
“What was he doing down at the Mission?”
“Dying,” Charles said and blew out another stream of smoke.
“Hey, those were his words. He was pretty blunt when I met him.
Said he was dying and the U.S. government killed him and did I want to know his story.”
“And you of course said yes.”
“Didn’t hurt Woodward and Bernstein, now did it? Blasting the government used to get you good coverage. Till we went all Orwellian and shut down the free press.”
“So the government killed him? How exactly?”
“That was his story. Me, I fi gured it was something else. Guy was a last stage junkie with full-blown AIDS.”
David felt cold. “How does Guantanamo fi t into the story?”
“Ah, that’s where it gets interesting.”
Charles got up and disappeared into another room, only to return minutes later with a bottle of Jack Daniels. He fi lled a large tumbler and took a swallow. Thankfully he didn’t offer to share.
