Germ

by Robert Liparulo

  “What’s it doing?”

  “Whenever it tries to mount, the computer locks up.”

  “It’s a full-volume encryption. Everything it needs to know it’s a computer file—the hibernation files, swap files, the resource fork, all of it—is locked up. It’s a pretty recent development in data security. Your computer doesn’t know what to do with it, so it just dies.”

  She felt a wave of relief. “Can you do anything with it?”

  “Probably. I’ll need to send you an app that’ll tell your computer not to attempt mounting it. Then you can send it to me.”

  “Bonsai, could you go somewhere else to receive it?”

  “Are you talking about the tap the feds have on my Tl?”

  “You know about that?”

  “What kind of hacker would I be if I didn’t? I got a second Tl nobody knows about.”

  “I should have known.”

  “You got Wi-Fi?”

  “With a trace-interlock.”

  “Nice.” A trace-interlock was like an antenna for wireless Internet connectivity. It pulled in Wi-Fi signals within a mile radius and ran a quick decryption on any firewalls it encountered, granting the user access without passwords. It was built into the SATD software.

  He gave her a web address where they would meet online to swap files. He also issued her four pass phrases, which she would need to communicate with him online, one pass phrase at a time.

  “I need to get back to my room and reboot,” she said.

  “My site has a VOIP function,” he said. “You know VOIP? Voice Over Internet Protocol?”

  “I know it.”

  “We can talk that way. It’s secure.”

  Walking back to the room, she thought about Bonsai. He’d been a seventeen-year-old high school geek in Denver when he’d hacked into the Strategic Air Defense computers at NORAD’s facility inside Cheyenne Mountain. He had done it only to see if he could, but Air Force brass, NSA goons, and the FBI came down hard on him. Before he’d fallen victim to a merciless judicial system, however, Donnelley had fought for his rehabilitation, pointing out the value of the kid’s incredible computer savvy to national law enforcement. Prosecutors had reluctantly agreed, and Bonsai became a freelance computer hacker for the U.S. government.

  The skinny kid with flaming acne and long oily hair had proved to possess one of the sharpest security minds in cyberspace, going on to make a six-figure income showing corporations the chinks in their firewalls—a computer system’s version of a vault door. Now twenty-one, he had a wife and a newborn boy—Baby Bonz, Goody had called him, though his name was Christopher. Bonsai credited Goody for his freedom. Julia knew he had always wanted to repay the favor. News of his death must have cut deep.

  Repositioned on the bed, Bonsai’s web site on the screen, Julia waited for him to send her the application she needed. She started the transfer of the encrypted memory chip data. A bar graph appeared, indicating that the transfer would take a long time, maybe hours. Bosai’s Tl line was fast, but Julia’s Wi-Fi was slow; transfers always moved at the slowest speed in the conduit.

  “Julia?” His voice came over the laptop’s speakers.

  “Hmm.”

  “Go to bed. I’m going too. I’ll get on it as soon as I get the whole thing.”

  “Thanks, Bonsai.”

  She watched the bar graph. Progress was marked by a blue bar moving from left to right. She stared at it for five minutes, and it barely moved.

  It might have locked up, she thought. I should call Bonsai, see what he thinks …

  But then she was asleep.

  thirty-four

  Eternal night.

  The morgue was as black for the shadowy figure gliding through its halls as it was for the bodies tucked coldly into the endless rows of metal cabinets. If human eyes had caught a glimpse of the fleeting shadow, they would look again and see nothing. It moved quickly along the edge of the corridor. Silent. Aware.

  No amount of Clorox could eliminate the smell of death from the air. The figure inhaled the odor, discerned the metallic blood scent from the pungency of flesh.

  A door opened, seemingly of its own accord. The shadow slipped through.

  A fine beam of light erupted from the shadow, glinted off the lipped edges of an aluminum table. It flashed up to the far wall, which was sectioned into three-foot squares, each with its own stainless steel handle and dangling tag, a copy of the one tied to the big toe of the corpse inside.

  A hand formed out of the shadow. Clad in black leather, it snatched the tags, turning them toward the light: Willows, R… . Jeffreys, M… . John Doe.

  The hand stopped as the shadow contemplated the non-name: John Doe.

  It lowered to the handle. A metal latch clicked, airtight seals ruptured, steel rollers slid on metal. A white sheet billowed up, drifted down.

  The drawer slammed shut. The shadow hand continued past the names. Then stopped again.

  Another John Doe.

  Another click. Another tissshhh of escaping air. More rollers. The flutter of a sheet as the beam fixed on a face, pale and frozen as statuary.

  The beam clicked off. The shadow, blacker than the dark air around it, engulfed the body. When it retreated, the body was gone.

  A sound startled Julia out of sleep. She was sitting on the bed, leaning askew against the wall where a headboard would be in a nicer motel. Sunlight filtered through the tattered curtains, brightening the room almost reluctantly.

  Julia looked around for whatever had awakened her. Bolts of pain shot up from her stiff neck. She became aware again of aches in her throat and side and other injuries, but realized they were less severe than they had been the night before.

  She started to rise, and her leg bumped the computer, which had toppled off her lap and onto the bed sometime during the night. She tilted it up to look at the screen and tapped the track pad to bring it out of its own automatic slumber. The screen lit up. It showed Bonsai’s web site and the words transfer complete.

  The computer must have chimed to signify that Bonsai had received the file. That was fast. She looked at her watch and realized it hadn’t been so fast. It was 9:28 a.m. She’d slept for seven hours. She wondered how long it would take for him to figure out the encryption.

  She picked up her cell phone from the bedside table and turned it on. It rang immediately.

  Yes!

  “Bonsai?”

  “Where in the name of Clint Eastwood have you been!”

  She instantly recognized the gruff voice of Edward Molland, her boss. Each word rang as sharp as a rifle shot.

  “I have been dialing this number since yesterday afternoon.”

  She thought of slamming the phone down, just dropping it and leaving the motel.

  “The phone was off, sir.”

  “Well, why haven’t you called? Why didn’t you check in with the Bureau’s Chattanooga office? Man alive! The fiasco down here. The death of a federal agent, Julia—Donnelley! And whatever that was you were involved in last night—the bloodbath they called me about. Sounds like you were smack in the middle of it, then just disappeared. They wanted to put an APB out on you, get a warrant for your arrest—your arrest, Julia! I convinced them to wait. Now you have to convince me.”

  “Arrest me? On what grounds?”

  “You name it. You know how this works. At the least, you’re a person of interest. They want to talk to you, and they’ll find a way to haul you in, if you don’t haul yourself in first.”

  “I’m trying to work a few things out first.”

  “Work what out? Julia, you are a federal agent. You are part of a spin-off agency of the FBI, if you need to be reminded. We have procedures, protocol. You’ve broken at least a dozen regulations that I know about. This is not like you, not like you at all.”

  He didn’t say anything for a long time, and she didn’t know how to respond. She wanted to cry or scream or … something. She could picture Molland, tapping manicured nails on the surface of
his immaculate desk, hair just right, suit tailored just so, looking more like a politician than a chief law enforcement officer. Oddly, she wondered if someone was sitting on the black leather sofa in his office. If so, would their expression convey professional concern for her behavior or conspiratorial delight at having found her? She pushed the thought away. If there was a mole in the agency, the chances of it being Molland were slim. Goody had always trusted him. That was why he’d agreed to leave the Bureau for CDC when Molland had asked.

  He cleared his throat. “What’s the take on that guy you and the locals zapped last night?”

  “I have no idea, sir. Hired gun. Very professional.”

  “You know he’s gone?”

  The blood in the base of her neck chilled, then cascaded down her spine.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Someone broke into the morgue this morning. Stole the body.”

  The room grew darker, as if the sun had slipped behind a cloud.

  “Why?”

  “That’s the question. Coroner went in this morning, and the corpse was gone. Like he got up and strolled out.”

  “He had to have been shot two dozen times.”

  “That’s what I heard.”

  Long pause. Molland spoke again, his voice much softer, even compassionate.

  “Look … Julia. I’m sorry about Goody. I can’t tell you how much. I know you two were close. I understand that you panicked, freaked out. But it’s time to get back on track. Let’s catch his killers, huh? What time can you be here? One? Two?”

  “I need more time,” she blurted. “I mean, I haven’t slept, and I need to get organized.” What she really needed was to sort through her notes and memory, then make a definitive decision either to go to the Bureau with her suspicions or to go somewhere else, like directly to the attorney general. She also wanted to give Bonsai time to decrypt the information on the chip.

  “Okay. I understand. How about three?”

  “Tomorrow morning would be better.”

  “Tomorrow?” He didn’t say anything for a while, then: “Okay, look. You’ve been through the wringer. Take the day off. Be here first thing in the morning, right? My office.”

  “Thanks, Ed. See you tomorrow.”

  “Julia?”

  “Yeah?”

  “First thing in the morning. I mean it.”

  She disconnected and set the phone back on the bedside table. She had taken two steps toward the bathroom when it rang again. She picked it up and looked at the caller ID. Private number. Bonsai or Molland again. She pushed the talk button.

  “This is Julia.”

  “We need to talk.”

  “Who is this?”

  “Dr. Parker. Remember? We need to talk,” he repeated.

  “Parker?” She’d forgotten about leaving her number with him. “What do you mean, we need to talk?”

  “Somebody tried to kill me last night. Twice.”

  “What? Who? No, wait—” Her head was spinning now. She expected Rod Serling to step through the door, calmly introducing the Twilight Zone episode her life had become. Meet Julia Matheson. Lonely federal agent. Her job requires her to think in terms of black and white, in logic and fact. But she’s about to discover a place where logic and fact have no meaning. A place called .. . the Twilight Zone.

  She said, “Are you where I can call you back in three minutes?”

  “A pay phone.”

  “Give me the number.” She memorized it. “Okay, three minutes.”

  Julia hung up, dug into her purse for coins, and walked in her stocking feet to the pay phone outside the hotel’s management office. She dialed the number and dropped in the coins. When Parker answered, she said, “All right, who tried to kill you?”

  “Three different people. One of them had a badge.”

  “A federal agent?”

  “A local cop, a sheriff’s deputy, I think. Another was a big guy, had a gun with a laser—”

  “A gauntlet?”

  After a moment, he said, “I didn’t see anything like that. But he was fast and moved better than you’d think for a man that size.”

  “Glasses?”

  “Yeah … thick black frames. You know this guy?”

  “He attacked me last night too. He died in a shootout with the cops.”

  Parker made a noise that might have been a gasp or murmured profanity. She watched through the office’s front window as an old man came out from a back room absently rubbing his chest under a stained T-shirt. He spotted Julia and waved.

  Parker said, “So? Can we meet?”

  “Me, as a cop?”

  “No, not really. Maybe … Not officially. I don’t know.”

  She laughed. “I think I know what you mean.”

  “Just you. No other agents, no cops, no surveillance.”

  “Just me.”

  “Okay. Meet us at the Appalachian Cafe on Market Street in Knoxville at—”

  “Whoa, whoa. Knoxville?”

  “There or nowhere.”

  “You’re afraid of being in Chattanooga?”

  “You’re not?”

  “I’m shaking in my socks. Who’s ‘we’?”

  “My brother. He was with me last night. Noon?”

  “Noon it is. Appalachian Cafe.” She hung up.

  A dozen thoughts tripped over themselves for her attention: the stolen body, the meeting with Parker, his attempted murder, Molland expecting her tomorrow morning … She squeezed her eyes shut and willed them all away. Not now, not now. Mentally, she constructed an agenda: shower (yes, long and hot… okay, not so long; Knoxville is a two-hour drive), enter the new data into her case journal (skip that, no time), check out of the motel (can’t stay anyplace too long), hop a cab to a car rental company to replace her agency car, shoot up to Knoxville.

  She went back to her room, stripped off her clothes, and laid them out on the bed. She added Call Mom to her list. Then she stepped into the steaming jets of the shower and let the pounding water wash away her concerns, if only for a short while.

  She found a different phone booth to call home. Her

  mother sounded tired, but she claimed to be mobile. She insisted she didn’t need help. The next call Julia made was to Homecare, the home health agency. The company had a checkin service; a nurse would swing by the duplex every four hours to make sure everything was as it should be. That ought to drive her mom crazy.

  thirty-five

  Gregor knocked on the observation window until

  Karl Litt turned from a biosafety cabinet. His arms were pushed into gloved ports that allowed access to the cabinet’s sensitive contents. Gregor motioned and Litt nodded, pulled his arms out, and spoke to a young man standing beside him. A moment later, the laboratory door opened and Litt stepped through.

  “A lead on Parker and the Matheson woman,” Gregor said as Litt stripped off surgical gloves and smock and dropped them into a bin.

  “Can we count on it?”

  “Coffee?”

  The compound’s break room always featured a half pot of vile black sludge. Litt loved the stuff.

  Litt nodded and stepped up to a metal door and absently passed his face before a square panel of black glass set in the wall. Behind the glass, an infrared camera scanned his physiognomy, creating a pattern of the invisible heat generated by the blood vessels under the skin. The scanner compared this thermal image with ones filed in its hard drive. Finding a match, it disengaged the door’s lock.

  When Gregor had first heard of a foolproof identification system that recognized individuals’ unique thermal facial patterns—distinguishing even between identical twins—despite aging, cosmetic surgery, and the total absence of light, he had lobbied Litt to get the compound’s security doors retrofitted for it. Years earlier, they had agreed to spend the bulk of the organization’s financial resources on research and security, and because Litt had recently landed a lucrative contract to supply a Middle Eastern dictator with biochemicals, he had
consented to Gregor’s request.

  They stepped into another corridor, this one much dimmer than the one that serviced the labs. Only one in three fluorescent tubes worked, and many of those sputtered on the brink of death. A dank odor filled the air. In some sections, the “corridors” were nothing more than large, corrugated-metal tubes, dripping water from the rivets and buckling and splitting like overstuffed sausages where earth pushed through. The military base had been abandoned over forty years before and wasn’t in the best condition when new. Now it threatened to disintegrate back into the surrounding land, though Gregor knew Litt had done his best to keep it operational.

  Falling in step beside the other man, Gregor continued. “The transaction-monitoring people have an affinity agreement with an organization that intercepts telephone transmissions. So, say your subject’s away from his usual Internet service provider and uses a credit card number to temporarily tap into a new provider—something that happens frequently, I take it, if the subject suspects his lines are bugged. The transaction-monitoring guys pick up the credit card sale, which includes the new IP address he’s using, and that, in turn, is associated with a phone or data line. The phone guys step in and bam, instant bug.”

  “Parker accessed the Internet?” Litt asked.

  “No, he called the female federal agent, Matheson. He’s not stupid, he watches TV, so he goes to a pay phone—and uses his credit card to make the call.” Gregor grinned.

  “Ahh,” Litt said, appreciating the irony.

  “So the phone bug kicks in—it’s all automatic. Now we not only know which phone booth the guy is using—we got his conversation too.”

  “We got it?”

  “MP3. I had it in my BlackBerry two minutes after he hung up. I forwarded it to Atropos.”

  “What’d he say?”

  “No response yet.”

  They reached the break room, saw a biologist with a magazine and a mug seated at the only table, and stepped back into the corridor.

  “Our accountant called this morning,” Litt said quietly.

  “Atropos doesn’t come cheap.”

  “He mentioned another offshore transfer. Twenty thousand.”