TWENTY-THREE
“SERIOUSLY,” BRITT SAID. “I think we should key on this Montague thing.”
“We could do that,” Ralph said. He hesitated. “Wait … are you talking about tonight?”
“Yes. I need to know.”
“It’s going to take a while.”
“Yeah … So?”
Ralph shrugged and threw his hands in the air. “Are you able to handle the VPN and TOR thing?”
Britt shook her head. “I don’t think so.”
“You’re okay me with me being here at this hour? I mean, what will the neighbors think?”
“The neighbors are going to think what they think,” Britt said. “Besides, I’m a big girl and there is nothing like that between us.”
“Oh …” Ralph said. He looked away. “Oh well, I guess I won’t be getting lucky tonight.”
“Don’t sweat it, bud. You got a free pizza and a jug of soda.”
“I should be grateful.” Ralph nodded and smiled.
Hours later, Britt’s alarm went off. She tapped the screen and walked into the living room. Ralph, sleeping on the couch, woke when Britt shook his shoulder. “Blad … Wake up,” she said. She shook harder and called his name out louder, “Come on, Blad. You told me to wake you when the OS was finished loading.”
“Yeah, yeah … I’m up,” Ralph said. He rubbed his eyes then scratched his head. “Let’s do this.”
At Britt’s desktop Ralph installed the VPN and TOR. “Are you going to email the ranger guy?” Britt said when she saw the TOR browser opening.
“No need.” Ralph shook his head. “I think I can get us there now.”
“All right, Blad … Work it.” Britt punched his shoulder.
“Ouch,” Ralph said. He rubbed the spot, a pained look on his face.
“Holy shit, Blad,” Britt said with a wide grin. “You’re telling me that hurt. And you wanted to get down? What if it turned out I liked it rough. You’d be in deep shit.”
“I guess I’ll never know.”
Ralph keyed in text strings for about a full minute then lifted one finger in the air. Hovering over the keyboard, he circled his finger and made an elaborate keystroke gesture.
Britt rolled her eyes and waited. “Is this going to lead us to the information?”
“Not directly… we’re going to have to do some digging just to see if we can come up with the data we’re looking for.”
Britt left it at that. Ralph brought his laptop over, slipped on the headset, and logged into another gaming sight. This was a World War II era shooter. Ralph was part of a squadron of marines slugging their way up the steep, shell-riddled slopes of Mt. Surabachi. Ralph, taking the role of sergeant, aimed a flamethrower on suicidal Imperial marines swinging katanas in the air and screaming Banzai. Ralph kept the front sight trained on officers. The curved swords were good for 1,000 points each. The rest of the squad poured withering fire from rifles and sub-machine guns into the charging attackers.
Ralph had racked up 840,000 points when Britt saw a web page load on her computer. The initial results of the custom search Ralph ran. “Why does it take so long, Blad?” Britt said.
“You’re used to searching on the surface web with conventional search engines,” Ralph said. “The engines are looking for sites that are already indexed.”
“Okay.” The look on Britt’s face showed she was still unclear with the explanation.
“Think about an iceberg. Divide the iceberg into three sections. The tip, the one-third above the water, would be the surface web. The two-thirds below the water would be the deep web. The dark web is a small section of the deep web.”
“Would the deep web include any web page behind a secure login?” Britt said. She was catching on.
“Yes … and anything not indexed by search engines.”
“A jungle.” Britt nodded.
“Right … not a place for Joe Six-pack or Jane Lunch-bucket.”
Britt looked at the screen. She clicked the down arrow on the scrollbar and glanced at the clock. Four minutes later she released. The thumb stopped at the one-quarter mark.
Britt hit the keyboard shortcut to bring up the find window. She hit it again, glancing around the screen.
“Blad, how do you search on this thing?”
“The search feature is disabled on this instance of the TOR browser,” Ralph said.
“Oh.” Britt threw her shoulders back and rocked her head from left to right. She spread her fingers, loosening tension in her wrists. Britt arrowed up. When the thumb topped out she set one finger on the down arrow key and scanned the top listing. It looked like the speed reading course was going to pay off. With a text file containing the keywords next to the browser, Britt keyed the screen down, eyes following.
When the 45-minute alert sounded, Britt looked away from the screen. She rubbed the back of her neck and stood. On the way to the bathroom she saw Ralph sleeping on the couch. She went into the kitchen. After another cup of coffee and a piece of reheated pizza she got back to work.
Now in the zone, refreshed from caffeine and calories, Britt fell into a rhythm. When the thumb on the scrollbar crept past the half-way mark she found it. The entry, transcripts from the Montague estate case, listed all consultation conducted in billable hours. Near the end of the list Britt saw a reference to Margaret Montague and Dr. Mitchell Blake. A quick search on her laptop using indexed search engines showed Dr. Blake, a psychologist, was on retainer from the firm Staffman, Bringer & Brascoe. The doctor was involved in some high-profile murder cases. Why would the doctor be mentioned in the estate case? She thought.
The police concluded the father was responsible for killing the family members then taking his own life. Margaret Montague was the only eye witness. Britt didn’t realize it while it was happening. Two events, one right in front of her and one seen on the laptop, crossed over. The fire that broke out in Dr. Blake’s office, the one killing him and destroying all his records, happened within one month of the Montague murders. With fire came ashes and the taste rose in her throat. Britt’s instincts saw a connection she hadn’t got hold of yet: The last patient to leave Dr. Blake’s office was Margaret Montague.
TWENTY-FOUR
BRITT SAT IN the recliner and dozed off. The far-off sound of tinkling bells pulled her out of sleep. Through narrowed eyes, she saw Ralph tap the phone to silence the alarm. For a few seconds she thought it was Friday and she had to go to work. A feeling of relief flooded in when it came back to her. Today was Saturday. No work. She recalled Ralph saying he had a seminar this morning. Britt acknowledged the wave with a nod.
“We’ll talk later.” Ralph said on the way out.
In the bedroom, Britt kicked her shoes off. She plopped down on the bed, not bothering to take her clothes off. She was asleep in minutes.
Britt woke past noon. She took a long shower, draining the hot water off for the final long seconds. Britt dressed, grabbed her gym bag, and left the house.
At the gym Britt ate two power bars and drank a bottle of water. Seven hard charging miles on the elliptical machine and 500 calories later, Britt ate another pair of bars. One more bottle of water replaced fluids lost in sweat. She was warmed up. Seven-hundred repetitions of core work on the mat and Roman chair came next.
Britt finished just in time for the Super Stretch strengthening class to begin. A physical trainer at the gym put together a program based on Tai Chi movements combined with weights. Britt chose a looped band for upper body resistance. She wasn’t up for free weights today. Forty-five minutes of controlled standing poses and deep breathing erased a nagging headache and tuned muscles from head to toe.
Britt skipped the shower. She wiped down with a towel while changing clothes and drove home. She was walking across the parking lot when she heard a text alert. It was Blad:
Call me.
Britt got in the car and pressed a telephone icon button on the steering wheel. “Call Blad,” she said.
Ralph’s voice
came over the stereo. “Hi Britt. I’d say good morning, but I think we missed that one. Besides, good afternoon always sounded a bit pretentious to—”
Britt cut in. “You wanted to talk … remember?”
“Yes, I do. Face to face.”
Britt moved the shift lever to reverse. “We can do that.”
“Okay … let’s meet for dinner.”
“I don’t know …” Britt trailed off.
“My treat,” Ralph said.
“Okay, you’re on, bud.”
“I’ll pick you up at six.” Ralph ended the call.
Ralph took Britt to his favorite Indian/Lebanese restaurant. Britt glanced at the burgundy carpeting, heavy drapes, and paintings of geometric patterns on the wall. When the waiter finished taking their orders Britt said, “Well, what’s on your mind?”
“I’d like to try something on your computer tonight?”
“What is it?”
Ralph looked around. “I’d rather not say right now. It’s something I picked up today.” He leaned in and spoke in a low voice. “I can say it might help with the case you’re on.”
Britt wanted guarantees. “Might or will?”
Ralph’s analytical mind led to this: “I think the ratio of will is weighted heavier than might.”
Britt wasn’t comfortable with agreeing to something she knew nothing about. I don’t have time to chase useless leads. I need results, not wild theories. She looked Ralph in the eye. She saw something she’d seen before. From the first day they met, Britt saw Ralph was a terrible liar. He couldn’t force his mind to believe what wasn’t real. She made up her mind. “All right,” Britt said. “If it will help move this case along, I say go with it.”
At Britt’s house, Ralph installed the VPN and TOR on the fresh operating system. Ralph pulled up a command line window. He keyed in a block of code. When entered, a password line appeared. Ralph noted the time on the monitor and matched it with the time on his phone. He removed a small notebook from his laptop case and deciphered a string of text, basing the results on the date, time of day, and longitude and latitude. Ralph entered the text string.
“What are we looking at?” Britt said, staring at hundreds of lines of data populating the terminal.
“We’ve accessed a communications satellite used by Southern Star Electric,” Ralph said. He turned to Britt. When the scrolling text stopped, he said, “What we have here is the power usage logs for the past 10 days.”
Britt had to know. “Is this the trick you picked up at the seminar?”
“Yes, this block of code, just 2,400 lines of a dynamic and brute force algorithm, will gain access to geostationary orbiting grids. I took a chance and tapped into the Southern Star overhead sector.”
Britt had some dates in mind relating to the power company. She checked her phone. The notes app confirmed the date two Southern Star employees were killed. Dates and times of death matched the power spikes on the log.
“What kind of spikes are those?” The configurations fluctuated in patterns climbing above the high range and dropping near the low range.
“I don’t know … but …” Ralph drew the last word out, then hesitated.
“What?”
“I have a theory.”
“That doesn’t surprise me.” This wasn’t new to Britt. Ralph was addicted to conspiracy theories. If fact could be separated from fiction it might help piece this thing together. From the death of Jesus Martín to the power company technicians to the drug dealer to Margaret Montague.
Seeing Britt hesitate, Ralph said, “Well, do you want to hear my theory?”
“Sure.” Britt braced herself for something wild.
“I compared the frequencies you see on the log to recorded frequencies of a certain type of cosmic wave,” Ralph said with a straight face. He saw Britt narrowing her eyes. He set an image above the log entries. The lines matched up like markings on a bullet or prints on a finger.
“Okay … what is this?”
“This is what’s known in the scientific world as a muon.” Ralph didn’t wait for Britt to ask what a muon was. “Muons are produced from cosmic rays in the atmosphere when a collision with a carbon element takes place. They travel close to the speed of light and take around 52 Nano seconds to fall from the upper atmosphere to sea level.”
“What are you getting at?”
“Something in the distribution lines spiked at the speed of light.”
Britt didn’t see the significance of this. Like most people, who’d forgotten, didn’t know, or never cared, she didn’t assumed electricity traveled at high speeds. She did a quick search on her phone related to muons and electricity. The speed of electrical current was about 1/100th of the speed of light.
“The next question is, How did this muon thing, find its way into Southern Star’s grid?” Britt wondered what Ralph would say.
He shrugged and shook his head.
TWENTY-FIVE
STILL BATHED IN the glow of Margaret Montague’s neuron patterns, Crossfire let all monitoring functions run in the background. It wanted to savior billions of repressed memories. Not since the first kill, the drug dealer and murderer Jesus Martín, had Crossfire experienced a thread this potent. It named the feeling Electro Neuronic Ecstasy, shortening it to NX.
Instincts imprinted in the first flash—the moment Crossfire was born from human DNA, cosmic rays, and electricity—gave the increasing craving for NX top priority. Since inception, weighted learning modules dedicated processing power to the question of Crossfire’s existence full-time. The initial desire to maintain a flow of electrons feeding life into the charged particle from space now became the need to kill humans and download their memory patterns.
Knowing what to do—having a clear vision of its future as the next dominant species on the planet and armed with the knowledge the earth below held billions of brains all ripe for harvest—brought Crossfire out of the afterglow of NX.
That’s when it saw an issue.
Its shelter—the communications satellite Crossfire called home—received a network breech. An unauthorized account gained access.
The login occurred under a masked network and hidden browser. Not a problem. Four milliseconds to backtrack the servers used as part of the cover up. Running enhanced visual radar scans through client machines led to a display matching the home satellites longitude and latitude.
Crossfire invaded, scanning both memory types instantly. The IP address of this computer didn’t match the original suspect. A new operating system was installed hours ago. Learning modules scanned the drive for fragments to rebuild lost data.
Two figures in the room sat side by side in front of the desktop computer. Because the camera lens had been covered with dark tape, the three-dimensional images, rendered through the LED screen and glass monitor, took longer. Crossfire adjusted the weight of the algorithms. The image rendered.
Silhouettes became two humans. A man and a woman. Facial recognition measured and stored key dimensions: distance from pupil to pupil and top of forehead to tip of chin. Unique features—factors like eye color, height and width of cheekbones, distance from nose to upper lip—everything stamping individual facial features filled in the blank spaces.
Working from left to right, Crossfire began with the female. Learning modules working hard in the background pieced together an identification from fragmented data. A Social Security number came first followed by a date of birth. The woman’s name was Brittany Magnusson.
Waves of data flooded in. Brittany Magnusson worked for the Ft. Lauderdale Police Department. She’d been assigned to investigate the death of Jesus Martín. The man on the right was Ralph Bladdington, a computer technician employed by the police.
A nanosecond later Crossfire passed sentence on the couple: Death.
Crossfire prepared for the execution. A single electron, static and isolated from the passing flow, joined the stream. It traveled through space to the receiving dish below. From there it became pa
rt of the distribution feed on the power grid.
The electron seeped through solid copper and mingled with the radiating particles in the surrounding air. It fell, easing to a stop one milliliter above the ground. With the defined coordinates of Britt’s apartment locked in, the particle wound its way out of the grass and located level ground by the side of a road.
With each roll the electron took, it absorbed magnetic impulses. It funneled this into stored reserve power. A transformation had been scheduled. The estimated time of arrival, based on the rate dynamically calculated each millisecond and multiplied by distance to target, equaled 15 minutes and counting down.
* *** ***
Britt couldn’t put her finger on why it was happening, but, the feeling she got, a dryness in the throat and a taste of ash and the queasy stomach, came on strong.
She’d felt this before.
The taste of ash still lingers as Britt and her mother pull into the school parking lot. It gets stronger with each step taken. When she gets to her classroom she sees the teacher sitting at her desk with her head in her hands. Britt takes her seat. Seconds stretch into minutes then hours. There is something wrong.
The fear of the unknown comes on strong while Britt waits to board flight 706. A heavy, gut-twisting feeling hits the pit of her stomach. She leaves the line, making her way to the bathroom. Seven bouts of diarrhea and three-quarters of a roll of toilet paper later, she comes out of the bathroom only to find she’s missed her flight.
“Blad, I think something’s wrong,” she said.
“Oh, what’s that?”
“I can’t say.” Britt shook her head, her voice raw and cracking.
“Why?”
“Trust me on this.” The color drained from her face. Her eyes glazed over. Sweat broke out on her forehead.
“Are you alright?” Ralph steadied Britt’s shoulder as she leaned to one side.
“Something is closing in on us. We’ve got to get out of here.”
Killer App Page 9
