Spyware

by V. B. Larson

  “What the heck is that?”

  “A cop-detector,” explained Nog. “It detects radio emissions on the cop bandwidths. Any car that transmits inside of a half-mile is picked up.”

  “So, you’re telling me that the cops are coming.”

  “Bingo,” said Nog, heading for the side door he had forced.

  “I’m coming with you,” said Ray.

  “What if I don’t want company?” asked Nog.

  “Then I’ll have to blow your guts out.”

  “In that case,” said Nog with a snort, “be my guest.”

  … 31 Hours and Counting…

  Spurlock was exhausted by the time he finished burying the van. The PVC pipe stuck up about two feet above the mound of sandy earth. It looked like some kind of drainage system for the orchard, however, not like the tip of a tomb. As an afterthought, he shoved a half-eaten bag of cheetos down the hole. The bag stuck part way down, but he followed it up with his water bottle and the weight of it forced both of them down. He laughed, then called down the tube to the kid.

  “Don’t eat and drink everything at once, kid! Otherwise you’ll be eating the vinyl off the car seats before I get back here with another little snack for you.”

  “Mister,” he heard faintly come up the tube. Spurlock raised his eyebrows, the kid had rarely spoken. “Don’t leave me! It’s dark down here!”

  Spurlock looked down the tube into the earth. He could see nothing. It was indeed as dark as the devil’s own eyeball down there.

  Spurlock hawked a big one and fired it down the pipe. He couldn’t tell if the kid caught it in the face or not, but he hoped so. “See now, you don’t want to be calling up this pipe, boy. You never know what might come down to get you. Snakes would love this pipe, if they hear you. So, you just keep quiet until I bring you more food. If you’re real good, I might even let you out. If you’re not, I’ll cover up this last hole and you’ll suffocate down there in the dark. Now, shut up.”

  With that, he walked back toward the road. There was still plenty of business to be done today.

  #

  Nog had plenty of snacks in his white Lincoln Town Car and Ray was so hungry that he couldn’t help himself. He felt vaguely ill to eat from the same bags of corn chips and boxes of cellophane-wrapped cakes that Nog had been pawing. Listening to Nog wasn’t helping his stomach, either.

  “Where to?” asked Nog.

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Well, you’ve got the gun, Vance.”

  “Right,” said Vance, feeling dazed. So much had happened today. He ate another chip, trying to think. “Let’s get out of here before the cops come. Just drive, Nog.”

  Nog did a wide sweeping U-turn to get out of the dead-end circle. The big white car heeled over like a boat. The thought of Moby Dick, the great white whale, came unbidden to Ray’s mind. Kids on bikes scattered before their wake. Nog stomped on the pedal and they rolled quickly and quietly away from Brenda’s.

  “I guess I can tell you some stuff, since you seem so convinced that I created this beauty,” said Nog, driving the car out of the neighborhood. “The virus is really a sophisticated piece of software. I can’t say that I completely understand what it’s doing now myself.”

  “What do you mean?” mumbled Ray around his chips. He snorted quietly to himself; here was another nerd, telling him how cool a nerdy program was. They didn’t have many people to brag to, so he had always been a prime target during his office hours. He wondered vaguely what was happening to his students. Had they found a substitute for him? He hoped it wasn’t Waterson. The guy had his heart in the right place, but he couldn’t teach. He felt an odd pang of guilt for abandoning his classes.

  “The virus is a real piece of work,” continued Nog, warming to his topic. “I always get a chuckle out of the news flashes-I’ve started watching CNN since your last visit-I love how they call it: adaptable. They have no clue.”

  “Uh-huh.”Ray barely listened. Much of his attention was devoted to feeding his face and watching for cops. He wished there was something to drink. The only thing in sight was Nog’s sun-warmed, half-empty can of diet soda. He wasn’t that thirsty.

  “A lot of the ideas in it come from your teachings, Vance. Particularly in the study of neural networks.”

  Ray frowned. “What are you talking about?”

  “Neural nets, my man. That’s what this virus is built from.”

  Ray looked at him in surprise. Neural nets were software imitations of the human mind. They were currently a hot area of research in the artificial intelligence field, but few practical applications had yet been found. They were often found to be too large and complex for most projects. “They said the virus was big, but not that big.”

  Nog nodded proudly. “I worked hard to shrink the neural nodes. They are both general problem-solvers and yet specialized to their task. But, that’s not the best part.”

  Ray waited. Nog finally had his full attention.

  Nog basked in it. “The worm is a fully-function learning system. It copies itself with both logical and random mutations. And it shares data on successful mutations with others of its kind, sort of cross-breeding.”

  Ray thought about that for a moment. “That is some piece of software.”

  “It’s more than that, Vance. It’s alive.”

  “It’s just a bunch of bits set a certain way, Nog,” replied Ray. “It’s not going to pass the Turing test.”The Turing test, first described by Alan Turing in the fifties, defined a test which no computer had yet passed. Turing argued that if one could hold a conversation with a computer in another room and couldn’t tell its responses from those of a human, one had to admit it showed some degree of intelligence.

  “No, no,” said Nog, “You miss my point. I didn’t say it was intelligent, Vance, I said it was alive.”

  Ray was silent for a moment. “So, this thing makes copies of itself with variations in the copies?”

  “Yes, logical mutations that stem from what it has learned. They vary greatly, too. I have no idea anymore what the virus has become. It mutates very quickly. Out on the open net, with a thousand conditions, it has turned into a thousand different viruses doing a thousand different things.”

  “How many different moves does it know how to make? I mean, is it created to destroy data, hardware, what? What’s its trick?”

  “You aren’t getting it, Vance. The thing is rewriting itself, adapting. I have no idea what it might do. There is one main trick that remains to be seen. What other moves might it make? Who knows? Whatever works best.”

  “You mean the thing evolves, experiments?”

  “Yes, the same way that organic microbes do,” Nog beamed. “Actually, I modeled it after HIV. That biological monster is particularly hard to cure, because the outer coating of the virus resembles sugar, which is food for cells. It is really hard to teach our cells not feed themselves. My virus is like that, it pretends to be valid data from a valid source.”

  “Spoofing,” said Ray, providing the term used for computer programs that tried to trick their way past firewalls.

  “Right. But better spoofing than you’ve ever seen. The new computer accepts it and zap, it is infected. Just like HIV, mine has many strains and it mutates so fast that people might never figure out how to stop it. One copy might try to erase hard disks and copy itself using e-mail. Another might use VPN to other servers. Another might try to hide, lying dormant on disks everywhere until a certain time or date. Whichever works the best, that one will make more copies than the others. Some of the new copies will have mutations, which continues the cycle.”

  “What if it chooses a bad strategy?” asked Ray, feeling a bit sick. Had he helped create this thing by teaching Nog the basics?

  “That happens all the time. You ever see one of those nature-shows, where about a thousand baby shrimp explode out of their eggs at once? All the fish come and feast on them, but a few get by. Defective ones and unlucky ones die off, but many live.
”

  Ray nodded, overwhelmed. “Only the fittest survive.”

  “Exactly.”

  A flash of anger hit Ray. His head injury throbbed and his frustration reached a sudden flashpoint. He pointed Ingles’ pistol at Nog. “What’s to keep me from taking you right to the cops, Nog? Why shouldn’t I give us both up and let them grill you until you spill your fat guts on this virus?”

  “Only one thing, Vance,” said Nog.

  Ray sighed. Justin. Nog knew he couldn’t give up yet. Things had gotten crazy, but he felt that he was close, and he still had to try.

  “Okay,” he said. “Just tell me why you were trying to dig up evidence at Brenda’s.”

  Nog shrugged. “I didn’t want the same thing to happen to me that happened to you. That Santa-bastard planted something there to incriminate me as well. That’s his way.”

  “You mean Ingles?”

  Nog glanced at him. “So that was you listening in on No Carrier.”

  Ray allowed himself a grim smile. At least he had done something right.

  “Yeah, well, in later communications that you must have missed, Santa indicated that he was going to screw me too.”

  “It did seem like a crazy way to try to make a million bucks.”

  “You know, I don’t think that ever was his real motivation,” said Nog. “He had something else in mind.”

  “Do you think he just wanted to burn the net? Is he paranoid? Does the net watches him while he sleeps?”

  “Maybe,” said Nog, “he uses the net all the time, but he doesn’t seem to value it.”

  “Well, whatever it is, I need to talk to Santa privately.”

  “Yeah well, I guess this is the end of the line, then,” said Nog. He slowed the car on a country road and pulled over to the dirt shoulder.

  Ray looked at him. “What do you mean?”

  “Look around, Vance. This is the back of Ingle’s place. You didn’t want me to drive you right up to the door, did you?”

  Ray eyed the surrounding army of black-trunked almond trees. Far down one of the rows, he thought to see a house of white clapboards. Ingles owned a large ranch out here, it must have covered around a hundred-plus acres, mostly of trees. He recalled having been out here years ago for a faculty mixer. Sarah hadn’t come with him that day, he suddenly remembered. He had to wonder now if she had a special reason to not want to go to Ingles house.

  Pushing that thought out of his mind, he opened the car door. He paused and looked back at Nog. Was this a set-up? He couldn’t tell.

  “You’re one odd sociopath, Nog,” he told his ex-student.

  Nog shrugged and didn’t meet his gaze. Ray could tell he was worrying at his tongue again.

  “I’ll take that cell phone,” he said, disconnecting it from the dashboard power outlet. “I might need it.”

  “Hold on,” said Nog, he reached behind his seat and pulled out a backpack. “Take this one,” he said, tossing another cell phone on the seat. “It’s got a longer range and a better, fresher battery.”

  Ray nodded and took up the offered phone. He thumbed the power button. Digits flashed up on the display. It made a tone as it reached out and connected with another computer several miles away.

  Ray climbed out of the car and looked back. Nog glanced at him.

  “Good luck, Ray,” he said.

  “Thanks.”

  Then he drove off. Ray watched the big Lincoln roll smoothly away. It occurred to him that Nog had never called him by his first name before.

  … 30 Hours and Counting…

  Johansen snapped the cell phone shut and brought his fist down on the steering wheel. “Damn.”

  “What?” asked Vasquez. She put down the headphones and turned off the player. The sound of Vance’s voice cut off. She wondered how many times she had replayed that conversation between the foggy-minded Mrs. Trumble and Vance. It had to be at least thirty times.

  “The squad car they sent over to Brenda Hastings place reported a break-in,” he explained. “It looks like Vance forced his way in and ransacked the place. If we’d just been more on the ball, we could have caught up with him there.”

  “That might have been a bad call on my part. I just wanted to listen to the recordings,” she said. “At least we know now that he has fixated on Ingles, his colleague. He left that message for Sarah and for me, putting the blame on him. Clearly, he needs us to believe it too, maybe to assuage his guilt.”

  Johansen swung left onto Bovine. They were near Brenda’s place now. Starling Lane was just ahead. “What I don’t get is why he spent the night in the lab with her body.”

  “It looks like Brenda got in a blow before he shot her. That paper-cutter looked pretty solid. Maybe he was out cold for the night on the floor.”

  “Hmm. But how to you hit someone with three rounds in your chest? And how do you shoot someone when you’ve just been conked on the head?”

  “I know,” she said. “The whole thing looks odd. We’ll have to wait for the forensics team to give us their version. It’s not really our field.”

  “Okay, let’s go over the time line then. We need to catch Vance on his next move.”

  Vasquez nodded. “Brenda’s car was in the parking lot, so it looks like he was on foot. That means he would have to walk for about an hour to get there.”

  “I don’t get that either,” he said. “Why did he leave the car? He’s already killed her, so who cares about a wrap for car theft?”

  Vasquez frowned. “Well, California law does allow the death penalty only in the case of an additional crime committed in junction with the murder. I don’t think car theft is on the list, but Vance might not know that.”

  “You think Vance was trying to avoid the gas chamber?” Johansen shook his head. “No, I don’t think in his state of mind that he would be thinking that clearly.”

  “Maybe not,” she admitted. “We don’t know. But we do know enough to pinpoint the time he had to be at Brenda’s place. The janitor came in and surprised him at seven. Let’s say it took till eight to get to Brenda’s. Maybe eight-thirty. Then he wrecks the place, let’s say that takes an hour or so, that puts us up to ten. Now it’s noon. That means we are only two hours behind him, max.”

  “I agree. Should we hit Brenda’s place now?”

  “Okay,” she said. “Then we’ll talk to Ingles.”

  Ray worked his way around the house, staying in the green shadows of the orchard. The gun was in one hand now, the cell phone in the other. Now that he was so close to Ingles, his body tensed up. His neck ached when he turned his head, to say nothing of his head itself. After he had completed a circle around the place and had seen no activity, he crouched down behind the thickest black trunk he could find. There, about a hundred yards from Ingles’ house, he inspected the gun he had been carrying for hours now.

  He looked at the gun carefully, with new eyes and new concerns. It was a vastly different thing to look at a weapon when he knew his life might depend on its performance. He marveled now that he had come into Brenda’s garage and surprised Nog with a gun that might have been empty, for all he knew. Why should he assume that Ingles would give him a gun that worked at all?

  He looked it over carefully and hefted it in his hand. It was a heavy chunk of steel. The black-painted surface was worn down to the shiny metal in places. The grip was textured so that it wouldn’t slip in a sweaty palm. He looked down the slim barrel, but without aiming it directly at his head. The muzzle was a black eye that stared back at him. His father had been in the Navy, and had taught him a minimum of safety about firearms.

  He recalled that the caliber of a gun was a measurement of the diameter of the barrel in inches. A. 38 caliber bullet was 0.38 inches in diameter, a little more than a third of an inch. It was hard to tell, but to his untrained eye it looked about that size, maybe a little smaller. It might be a nine millimeter gun, he figured. That was a popular size.

  Whatever the size, what mattered was getting it to rip a ho
le in a man’s body, and to do that you had to have bullets and the ability to aim. Aiming was up to him, but was this thing loaded? He examined it anew. It had no revolving chamber, so he figured it had to have a clip inside the grip. He hunted for a catch, found one and immediately a clip of bullets fell into the dirt. There were seven rounds in it. He continued fooling with the gun, feeling like a kid in his dad’s closet, until he managed to pull the slide bolt and get a round into the chamber. Then he found the safety button. He pushed it into the firing position.

  With all that done, he decided to call Mrs. Trumble and leave another message for Sarah. Whatever happened next, she needed to understand what he was doing.

  He flipped open the phone and pressed the buttons. To his surprise, it actually worked. He had expected Nog’s phone to require some kind of password to be used. He knew that Brenda’s was like that. She had always been paranoid about the wrong things.

  “Mrs. Trumble? Hello,” he began. He told her he was outside Ingles’ house and that he was going to look for Justin inside. He told her to call his wife and police if he didn’t call back in a few hours.

  Ray stood up then and looked at the house. It was time to act. He put the cell phone into a dusty pocket, wondering if he had just written his epitaph with it.

  Sarah got both of Ray’s latest messages at the same time. She hadn’t checked recently, as her mother had come over to comfort her. When she finally managed to slip away from Mom, (who had, of course, been the one who needed the comforting most) she headed for Trumbles’ house. At the door, Abner Trumble appeared. He had an odd look of wariness on his aged face. He invited her in with a hand-gesture. Sarah hesitated, not looking forward to a formal visit. Their house was always dark and dank inside. The house belied the dry, dusty climate of the Central Valley, like a tropical oasis in a desert. The humidity was such that water droplets condensed on the inside of all the windows and Sarah knew she would sweat immediately upon entering. She had long suspected that they kept the shower running twenty-four hours a day.