Runaway Heart

by Stephen J. Cannell

  She turned and trudged to the elevator for the ride back up to the cardio unit, thinking that if she lost her father she would just as soon die herself.

  Chapter Five.

  Roland Minton had taken a room in the new

  Fairview Hotel, on the thirty-second floor, with a spectacular vista of the San Francisco Bay. He always stayed at the new Fairview, because he thought the place looked like a huge rectal thermometer jutting up into the San Francisco sky, round and silver-tipped, its lone, mirrored spire flipping off the whole town.

  He was planning to hit the bricks later in search of some prime female tatta, but first he decided to pursue the downloads he had cracked from Gen-A-Tec. Trouble was, the more he studied the stuff, the lamer it looked to him. The bio-corn file seemed like it was just low-grade PR, not the kind of sophisticated technical material you'd put in a secure computer.

  So what gives? he wondered. He had just clicked over to the e-mails and was fast-scanning the messages when something got his hackles up. He couldn't pin it down at first, but something was definitely skeevy here.

  What was it? He slowed his scan and began to page the e-mails one sheet at a time.

  Hold it! Stop!

  The e-mail he was looking at was a communique from the head of personnel. He'd seen that e-mail before, somewhere else. He selected a different e-mail box and searched through it.

  There it was again. The same request to submit credit forms for reevaluation.

  What is going on here? Roland wondered. He tried a few more boxes, and each one of them had the same e-mail loaded in with a bunch of other worthless clutter. Come to think of it, none of these e-mails looked legit. There were no letters containing specific project names, and that same, damned e-mail from personnel was in half-dozen inboxes. Okay, he thought. So maybe the company sent this same request to a bunch of employees. Roland switched to the outbox files and started scanning.

  There it was again!

  The same e-mail requesting credit forms. What is going on? He could see how a group of employees could all have received the same e-mail, but how in the hell did ten or twelve people all send out the same e-mail, each message worded exactly the same?

  What the fuck is this} Am I getting chewed here?

  Was this whole system he'd accessed just an elaborate shadowbox of some kind? Had he been tricked? He sat back and scratched his purple hair, all thoughts of poontang gone. His credentials as "master of the game" had been severely called into question. Maybe the systems administrator at Gen-A-Tec wasn't such a Barney after all.

  As Roland scanned through his stolen material he became more convinced that he'd been scammed. The lousy security, the

  holes in the version software, the easy password file the whole thing was dogwash. Roland Minton, Cyber Hood of the Internet, had gone down in front of this scam like a broken deck chair.

  The systems administrator was smart, but in the end he'd gotten lazy and started to fill up his dummy mailboxes with the same memos and Roland caught him.

  The shadowbox is a nice little piece of security, Roland thought. But what are they protecting? Whatever it is, they sure don't want anybody outside the company A-list to see it. Roland decided he would find a way in, even if it meant forgoing the belly ride in Berkeley.

  As he continued to scan the e-mails, another line popped out at him:

  We should put in a request for additional funding before darpa closes its budget in the fall.

  Roland had heard of DARPA. It was a black-ops U.S. government defense agency that developed advanced weaponry. The acronym stood for Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

  In composing his phony e-mails, Gen-A-Tec's SA had obviously cut up some real ones and scattered them around in the boxes as filler. This reference to DARPA was ominous and interesting. Why does DARPA, a weapons research agency, fund genetically enhanced foods? Damn strange…

  Roland sat back, glared at his screen, and tried to devise another way to gain access to the mainframe of the Gen-A-Tec computer. He needed to get around the shadowbox that protected it. He sat on the edge of his bed and ran through his options for almost fifteen minutes.

  In the end, he decided it would be best to go in the way someone at Gen-A-Tec would go in if they were working from home. Would they go in via the Net? He decided the security system looked way too slick for that. Gen-A-Tec would have layers and

  layers of safeguards to protect them from the millions of nosey Net users.

  So, how then}

  After a half hour of more brain-drain he decided to use the company's own phone lines again. Most big companies have lines with some sort of remote phone access, usually for the bigwigs who want to work at home.

  Roland knew that, no matter how state-of-the-art a Local Area Network was, Murphy's Law assures that if something can go wrong it will. Roland hooked up his laptop to the modem jack in his hotel room and brought up a piece of software called a Tone-Loc. It was also known as a War Dialer, or Demon Dialer.

  Roland then told the Tone-Loc to dial every number, beginning at 555-6000, through 555-6999, and to log the results on his laptop. When his dialer called each of those lines, one of six things would happen: If it got a live person, the dialer would immediately hang up, it might also get a no-answer, a fax, an answering machine, voice mail, or a busy. Roland was looking for busy signals, and he particularly wanted one on a line that belonged to a high ranking officer at Gen-A-Tec someone with A-level systems access.

  He knew this process would take a few hours, but he had gone into killer mode. He viewed his defeat earlier that day as a personal challenge. Roland Minton was about to kick some cyberass.

  Two hours later, he printed out the results of his demon dialer:

  0 ANSWERING MACHINE1734 HRS

  1 DISCONNECT1734 HRS

  5556191 VOICE1840 HRS

  5556198 VOICE MAIL1842 HRS

  5556195 BUSY1842 HRS

  5556309 BUSY1915 HRS

  5556419 V. 39 FAX1915 HRS

  It went on like that for twenty pages. Now Roland concentrated on the busy lines. He noted who was talking, or if they were talking at all. Often a busy meant somebody was working from home on a computer. Roland needed to phreak the phone system and eavesdrop on each of these busy connections.

  Feeding a specific sequence of paired tones much like touch tones down the phone line, Roland was able to get a behind-the-scenes look at the local system. A little more phreaking and his computer was acting as a terminal to the phone company System-7 switch-operating software. In essence, he now had the same access and capabilities as a 6n Repair Operator. Next, he brought up the Gen-A-Tec numbers that were busy and sampled them one at a time. Several were conversations, but then he got one with the distinctive sound of a modem hiss, indicating that the person was hooked to the mainframe computer inside Gen-A-Tec from his home computer. One by one, Roland went down his list of busies, accessing each, checking against his management list, looking for the right password, searching for a Mahogany Row guy with total access.

  After an hour of sampling lines, Roland finally hit upon exactly what he was hoping for. It was his old bud, Jack Sasson. He was working on-line from home.

  Roland set a monitor on Sasson's phone line to steal any data that crossed that port, then kicked Mr. Sasson off the system.

  Roland smiled. He could imagine the CFO at home, cursing the computer system that had just fed him a line error and unceremoniously logged him off. Now Sasson would have to go through the complicated relog-on process with all the damned security checks just to get back in, and Roland Minton, master of the game, would vacuum up the entire security code.

  Roland waited patiently in his hotel room for Sasson to log back in. Within seconds, the CFO was coming back on-line. Now, Roland's little sniffer captured all of Sasson's secure data, line by line. The access and security code would give Roland a red-carpet ride right past the shadow system, straight into the main data bank at Gen-A-Tec.

  Onc
e he had the code, Roland turned off his computer and looked at his watch. It was 7:40 in the evening. He picked up the hotel phone and requested a wakeup call for 2:30 A.M. He figured by then Mr. Sasson would long be off the system and Roland could jump on and take his place.

  He lay back and laced his bony fingers behind his neck. He couldn't help but smile, because he knew he had assed-out the systems administrator, big time. The Robin Hood of cyberspace was back in charge, about to jack some serious shit.

  Chapter Six.

  Susan watched through the window in the cardio

  unit as her father was placed on the bed next to the defib machine. The nurses removed his shirt and had him lie back on the table, then smeared gel on his furry chest. Herman looked up and saw her worried expression through the glass. He stuck his tongue out at her. She couldn't help herself she laughed. Then she put her thumbs in her ears and wiggled her fingers back at him. She was scared out of her mind, but as she'd predicted when she suggested the more intrusive operations to him twenty minutes ago, he had just listened with a sad expression and shook his head no.

  Now Dr. Lance Shiller and two nurses manned an electro-shock machine. They hooked Herman to

  a negative ground and placed a rubber plug between his teeth to prevent him from biting his tongue. Dr. Shiller picked up the defib paddles, put them against Herman's chest, and let him have it.

  Susan jumped; she actually cried out when her father arched his back under the current. Then she leaned forward, trying desperately to read the faces of the people in the room. Did it work? She couldn't tell.

  They did it three more times and Susan thought she was going to faint. Tears of relief came to her eyes when Dr. Shiller turned and gave her the thumbs up. A few minutes later he left the room, joining her outside where she was still glued with her nose to the window.

  "Okay. He's converted," Dr. Shiller said.

  Susan nodded and smiled, but she couldn't speak. Her eyes were still on her father, who was being disconnected from the negative ground and getting the goop cleaned off his hairy chest.

  "We'll keep him here overnight on an EKG monitor to make sure he's all settled down. Then you two can go roll the bones with his life, if that's still your plan. Go fight your damn lawsuit, Miss Strockmire, but this is, in my opinion, an extremely high-risk idea. So you keep your eye on him. Here's my pager number. If he goes into an arrhythmia I want to know immediately."

  She took his card. "Thank you, Doctor." She said, finally looking away from her dad and fixing her reef-water blues on Dr. Shiller, seeing anger flash in his dark browns. "Don't be mad at him; he's only trying to do what he thinks is right."

  "So am I," the young heart surgeon said.

  Susan brought Herman a tuna sandwich on a tray from the cafeteria. The cardio unit food was bland, vitamin-enhanced pabulum. While she went over the pretrial briefs and motions Herman

  revised his opening statement, eating and scribbling notes on a yellow legal pad. He had a nine o'clock appointment to prep the last of his three butterfly experts.

  Dr. Deborah DeVere was a world-renowned entomologist Herman had flown in from the University of Texas. He was going to put her on the stand first, to explain the monarch butterfly's eating and migration pattern. He had another doctor and a university professor on retainer to describe the deadly effects of bio-corn on the monarch's genetic structure and reproduction. Dr. DeVere, whom he hadn't actually met but had briefed over the phone, was scheduled to arrive in about twenty minutes.

  Herman continued scribbling on his yellow pad, scratching out phrases, reconstructing ideas and arguments, while Susan worked on her laptop retyping the new version and printing it out on her portable printer. She glanced at the heart monitor beeping ominously from his bedside table.

  "Stop looking at that thing, it's not going to go off. It is in my control," Herman said, switching to his spooky Outer Limits voice: "We control the horizontal. We control the vertical."

  She reached out and took the hand that was still finger-clipped with several electrical feeds. She squeezed it carefully. "I still don't see why you won't just ask for a continuance."

  "Honey," he said, "you know we don't have a choice here. You know we have to go now. This is really important. If I ask for a continuance with the federal docket so congested we'll never get back in front of a judge before the monarch migration."

  "I know, Daddy. It's just…" She wanted to say how frustrated he made her sometimes, how her own heart was aching right along with his, and how desperately she needed him to be alive and there for her. "It's just I don't want to lose you." He turned, pulled his half glasses off his nose, and looked at her.

  "Understandable. Why would anybody want to lose something as beautiful as this?" he spread his hands out to include his fat, hairy body. "I'm just too big and sexy to lose."

  "You know what I mean, dummy." She smiled at him.

  "Honey, I'll make you a promise, okay?"

  "Yeah, sure," she said, knowing what was coming because he'd made this "I'll take care of myself" promise a hundred times before, and it was always just to shut her up.

  "I'll tell you what… if I start to feel even slightly wrong I'll get the continuance and I'll check back in here quick as a bunny."

  "You mean, like you did this morning, when you had a pulse rate of a hundred and eighty while you were trying to hold onto our three wussy clients instead of getting your big, sexy ass over here?"

  "Well, maybe this morning was bad judgment on my part… pretty foolish, okay? I'm admitting that. I'll cop to it, but from now on I'm gonna be a good patient, okay? Gonna win the Patient-of-the-Year Award."

  "Okay." She squeezed his hand again and sighed. There was a light knock on the door, and a surprisingly attractive forty-eight-year-old woman with salt-and-pepper hair stuck her head in.

  "Hi," she said. "I'm Doctor Deborah DeVere." Her anxious eyes immediately taking in all of the bedside equipment beeping and flashing like a NASA launch computer.

  "Come in, Doctor. Pull up a chair. Can we get you a bypass, a heart transplant, or a manicure?" Herman said, smiling at her. She smiled back and Herman liked her on sight. Over the phone she had sounded knowledgeable and angry at the government's callous disregard for the monarch. Now, looking at her, he was sure she was his kind of witness: a doctor who worked hard to save threatened life-forms, did cutting-edge research science, and had a pretty fine ass on her to boot.

  She strode into the room displaying runner's legs. Susan rose to shake her hand. "I'm Susan Strockmire, Herman's daughter. We spoke."

  "I assumed," she smiled. "Nice to meet you." Dr. DeVere pulled up a chair and sat, but a frown crept across her handsome face, spreading like a dark shadow. "Are you really okay? This looks serious."

  "I always do this before court," Herman grinned and put down his legal pad. "You'd be surprised how a little electro-cardioversion and an EKG can calm you before a trial."

  "Seriously, Mr. Strockmire, are you okay to go into court?"

  "I have my doctor's approval. Right, baby?" He looked over at Susan, who smiled and nodded, then turned her gaze back to the window so she wouldn't give away her true feelings.

  They spent the next half hour prepping Dr. Deborah DeVere, although she was already up to speed on the issues. She was going to be a dynamite witness. She even suggested some good secondary questions to ask that would allow her to interject some overpowering scientific facts, including how genetically engineered bio-foods that produce their own pesticides not only affect the butterfly, but also damage the caterpillar before its metamorphosis.

  At 10:30 the nurses cleared the hospital room and Dr. DeVere, who had become Dedee, got up to leave. She shook Herman's hand and smiled at him.

  "See you in court, Dedee," Herman said. "I'll be the one wearing the backless nightgown and the EKG clips."

  "I can hardly wait for that one, Herm," she said with a wink, then left.

  There could definitely be something going on here, H
erman thought as he watched her go.

  Susan gathered up her laptop and printer and started packing her stuff away. "Dad, what are you going to do about getting another client?" she asked. "You said, don't worry about it, but I can't help but worry. Judge King is going to demand we represent someone. In order to get a jury trial we had to add a suit for damages to the injunctive relief. We need a plaintiff who's been damaged."

  "We're in luck. We've just been hired by the Danaus Plexippus Foundation," he said.

  "And what on earth is the Danaus Plexippus Foundation?" She was smiling at him now. That was just like him to have something up his sleeve.

  "It happens to be Latin for 'butterfly.' It's a DBA operating in Michigan, and they've gone all over the country spending money on saving the monarch. I had it on standby, just in case. By the way, you're the secretary-treasurer, and you are looking at the president and founding partner."

  "A sham foundation?" she said, arching her brow at him.

  "Honey, it's the best we've got. It's going to pass muster. We'll just amend the plaintiff list with this motion before court tomorrow." He ripped a page from his yellow pad and handed it to her. She scanned it. It was in his curlycue, hard-to-decipher script. Only Susan and Leona Mae Johnson, his secretary back in D.C., had ever successfully translated an entire page. She folded it and put it into her purse.

  "Dad, if Judge King finds out…"

  "How is Judge King gonna find out? Three people know about it. You, me, and Leona Mae, and unless you guys blow me in, we're cool."

  She nodded, then turned off his bed lamp. "I love you, Daddy."

  "I love you, too, sweetheart. I count on you more than you know."

  Then she leaned down and kissed him, holding her father close to her, almost afraid to let go. His heart was beating with hers as she pressed against his chest, strangely in rhythm, his was electronically beeping from the bedside monitor while hers was frightened about the future.