01-01-00

by R. J. Pineiro

  “Yes, sir?” he muttered.

  “Come with me.”

  “How about my break—”

  Whack.

  “All right, man! Damn!”

  The corpulent guard led him through one of the cell blocks, a long, damp, and murky corridor flanked by two-man cells, each with its own sink and toilet, many of which got backed up every day. The putrid stench struck him like a moist breeze as the guard made him step up the pace, exiting at the other end of the quiet block, through a thick metal door that screeched after he unlocked it.

  “Where are we going?” Bloodaxe asked.

  “Shut up, moron. Keep walking.”

  Bloodaxe complied, heading into the large warehouse building connected to the kitchen. Then a sharp object struck him behind the head and all went dark.

  The prison’s main entrance and visitor’s center faced north. The south end of the prison grounds was bordered by double chain-link fences separated by a gravel walkway patrolled by guard dogs, Dobermans. A single gate connected the access road curving up from the highway a mile away to the central kitchen and storage buildings. Used mostly by delivery trucks, the gate was lightly guarded and only used on weekdays, like today. No one questioned the blue and gold dairy truck that approached the rear gate, its arrival time matching that of the day’s log. The double gates slid back and the guards waved it through. It continued on to the single delivery dock behind the kitchen building, where it made its normal delivery. Before it headed back, two guards loaded a large box onto the rear of the truck and covered it with a canvas. One of the guards was the African-American, who that day would become twenty thousand dollars richer, four times the amount of money he had lost two years ago to a hacker.

  3

  “He’s what?” Susan Garnett leaned forward on her chair at work.

  “Gone, ma’am,” replied the warden’s assistant at Haynesville, where the FBI analyst had just phoned to set up another appointment with Bloodaxe.

  Susan clutched the phone tight against her ear. The noon sun shone bright in the clear skies over Washington, D.C. “Gone? How? When?”

  “We’re trying to figure that out. It happened sometime this morning. He didn’t report during roll call after breakfast. That’s when we first took notice that he wasn’t inside the prison grounds.”

  “This is … amazing. I can’t believe this!”

  “We started a manhunt in Virginia an hour ago. The office of the U.S. Marshal is involved. We’re hoping to find him in the next twenty-four hours.”

  “Do you have any leads? Anything at all?”

  “Nope. There’s also the issue of the dead guards.”

  “Dead guards?”

  “Both shot in the back of the head. Execution style.”

  Susan stood, a hand on her forehead, her mind trying to catch up with the shocking news. “Where?”

  “Right outside the south perimeter. We found them a couple of hours ago.”

  “And no one heard the shots?”

  “The police investigators are still at the scene. No details have been released yet.”

  Susan urged him to contact the FBI if they got a break in the investigation. Then she thanked him and hung up, trying to size up the implications of Bloodaxe’s escape. Did he break out on his own, or did he get help from either the inside or the outside, or both? Was it possible that he used his computer privileges somehow to get himself out of jail? It sure seemed like an incredible coincidence that he’d vanished less than forty-eight hours after getting access to a computer. Was he really that talented? Did she grossly underestimate his skills?

  Just then Troy Reid walked into her office wearing a fresh look after going home and getting a decent night’s sleep. “What’s new?”

  “You don’t really want to know.” Then she told him.

  Sitting on the edge of her desk while Susan paced in front of him, he asked, “Do you think it had anything to do with last night’s slaughter at the local ISP?”

  Her arms crossed, Susan shook her head. “I don’t know what to think. First he agrees to help us, and his help leads us to a most unusual place in Yucatán. Then we have the killings at the local ISP. Then I do a little digging to learn more about the Maya, and find some very incredible coincidences between the event and that ancient civilization. Then this morning, after having a brief Internet chat, where everything seemed normal, he just vanishes, leaving behind two guards shot dead plus a million unanswered questions. And in the meantime, we have made zero progress on this virus.”

  “I wouldn’t call it zero progress, Sue.”

  “You’re right. It’s not zero progress, it’s negative progress. I’m getting a really bad feeling that Bloodaxe has been playing us all along. I’m thinking that this is either his virus or he took advantage of the virus, using it not only to bargain a more pleasant stay in jail, but to gain access to a computer and use it as an escape tool.”

  “We still have to crack the virus, one way or the other, with or without Bloodaxe’s help.”

  “You’ve got that right,” she said, returning to her laptop and invoking the last source code given to her by Bloodaxe, the refined Scent-Sniffer programs. “And the best way to get a fresh start on cracking this virus—which is still my highest priority—is to use code carefully checked by no one but myself.”

  “What about Bloodaxe?”

  “I frankly don’t care what happens to him anymore. If he escaped, then I’m sure the U.S. Marshal’s office will eventually capture him. In the meantime, I’ve got an event coming up in less than eight hours, and I’m not anywhere near ready.”

  “Will you be ready?”

  “I can’t afford not to be.”

  4

  Antonio Strokk watched his sister backhand the lanky hacker across the face. It was four in the afternoon and he couldn’t wait any longer to get his information. By now the authorities would have found out about his disappearance and a manhunt would be on its way. Although he had covered his tracks efficiently, eliminating the closest buffer to the target, thus breaking the linkage to the kidnapping, Antonio Strokk remained alive in this business by being overly cautious. And besides, he had paid over fifty thousand dollars to get this man out of prison and delivered to his safe house, an abandoned building on the outskirts of Washington, D.C. While two armed subcontractors guarded the stairs of the decrepit brick building—at one point in its life a bustling banking center—Strokk and Celina had dragged the unconscious hacker up to the fifth floor, secluding themselves in an empty office with a distant view of the city’s skyline beyond a pair of wood-framed windows.

  It was time for Antonio Strokk to get his money’s worth.

  Hans Bloodaxe, hands bound behind his back, sat on a chair in the middle of the room. A lamp dangled over his head from a cord as he peered at his captors. “Who—what do you want?”

  “Information,” said the international terrorist, grabbing a chair, sitting in front of him.

  “In—information? What kind of information?”

  “To control the virus.”

  “Control it?”

  “That’s right,” replied Strokk. Control of the virus meant power, and his client was willing to pay handsomely for such power.

  “I don’t understan—”

  Celina slapped him hard.

  “Please … don’t hurt me,” he said, a trickle of blood flowing from the corner of his mouth to his chin. “I’m just an inmate … I—”

  Celina got in his face. “Don’t lie, puto! Or I’ll cut off your cojones.” She produced a knife and showed him the long steel blade.

  The bearded hacker went ashen at the sight, his eyes widening in fear.

  “We know about your tracking programs and your arrangement with the FBI, so stop pretending,” said Strokk.

  “I … I’m helping Susan Garnett find the origin of the virus.”

  “We know that,” said Strokk while Celina walked behind him. “What else?”

  “The initial
program led us to the Yucatán Peninsula.”

  “And?”

  “And I’ve written a more refined program to make sure that the tracking program wasn’t fooled by a decoy from the virus.”

  “And?”

  “And that’s it.”

  Celina cupped his chin from behind and jerked the hacker’s head back, pressing the sharp blade against the stretched skin of his neck, right beneath his Adam’s apple. “I told you not to lie to us, puto!” she hissed, leaning down, her face only inches from his. “Stop playing with us!”

  “It’s useless to resist,” added Strokk. “You will tell us everything we want to know, it’s just a matter of how much pain you’re willing to endure before you do so. Now, why don’t you tell us how it is that such an advanced virus could originate from such a remote location?”

  Celina released him. The hacker coughed, clearing his airway, breathing deeply, coughing again, blinking rapidly. She abruptly grabbed his groin. “I’m going to start squeezing unless I hear something interesting.”

  The hacker lowered his gaze to the daggerlike polished nails at the end of long fingers in between his legs. “I’m not being totally honest with the FBI,” he said quickly, shifting his gaze between his groin and Celina.

  Strokk stood to the side, watching with half amusement at his sister at work.

  “The pigs,” he continued. “Bastards put me in jail and specifically ordered no computer privileges for me. Do you know what that meant? I’d rather get executed than not be allowed to get on the Internet, to write code. That’s my life! And those pigs took it away, and only when they needed me did they come back and offer to grant me those privileges in return for my assistance.”

  “So you gave them the initial version of your tracking code,” stated Strokk. “But with a slight twist.”

  “Damned right. I added an offset to the coordinates reported by the Scent-Sniffers to have some fun with the bastards and keep them busy for a little while to give me time to retrieve some of my old code and trigger a virus that I can use to hold them up for ransom later on.”

  Strokk waved Celina off and squatted in front of Bloodaxe, leveling his gaze with the hacker’s. “To trigger a virus that you can use for ransom? What about the virus that’s striking every day now? Where did that one come from?”

  Bloodaxe shrugged. “I have no idea. I’m not responsible for it, though the program I released to the FBI this morning should help get them. I eliminated the offset. The revised Scent-Sniffers would yield the true coordinates, which should still be somewhere in the Yucatán jungle because my original offset wasn’t that significant, just enough to keep the FBI from getting to the source of the virus right away, which they’ll be able to accomplish with the Scent-Sniffer version, but by then it would have been too late. My own virus would have been all over the Internet, waiting for my signal to strike … but I didn’t get a chance to release it. I was going to do it after breakfast. Then I was kidnapped.” He made a face.

  “Do you know the significance of this virus coming from the jungle?”

  “I have no clue … and that’s the truth. I just created the Scent-Sniffers. I didn’t tell them where to go, except for the small offset.”

  Strokk exchanged glances with Celina. If the hacker was telling the truth—and they would soon find out—then all they knew was that this daily virus did originate in the Yucatán Peninsula, and that it may have something to do with the Maya, according to the conversation between Garnett and Slater.

  They left Bloodaxe alone in the room to have a private chat in the next one, another empty office with a view of the capital in the distance through large fifth-floor windows.

  “This is not going to be that simple,” Celina commented when they were alone. “We’re going to have to increase our electronic surveillance of Susan Garnett to see where the unaltered Scents lead her to.”

  “What about having the hacker do the same for us right here?” He checked his watch. They still had over three hours before the virus struck again. “You can set him up with a computer, can’t you?”

  She nodded. “I could, but I don’t trust him. What prevents him from tricking us just like he tricked the FBI? There is no way for me to monitor his work simply by looking over his shoulder. Hackers are a strange breed of people, hermano. They can accomplish much more than the average programmer with the same number of keystrokes. Instead of deploying his code to track the origin of the virus, the little bastard could just as easily accomplish that while also sending a flash message to the FBI about his abduction. They’ll track us down the phone line in minutes, and the building would be surrounded with pigs before we knew it.”

  “What options do we have?”

  “Not many,” she said.

  “What good is he to us?”

  “We still must learn if he has been lying. Beyond that…”

  Strokk nodded. “All right, then. Do what you must. In the meantime, I’m going to set up a new surveillance post.”

  5

  Susan Garnett was used to deciphering other people’s computer code. She had first done it as a senior at Harvard, while majoring in computer engineering, where she got the unenviable job of translating programs from one language to another—mostly from Pascal or Fortran to C++—as part of a modernization effort at the computer department to get all of its programs in C++ instead of the ancient Pascal and Fortran. Susan continued to take programs apart while earning a master’s degree in computer science at Yale. While working on her Ph.D. thesis at Yale on advanced computer algorithms, she had spent months consulting for Honeywell and later on for Siemens on the translation of complex control systems algorithms used by the oil and chemical industries as those corporations switched to newer and more versatile software.

  Susan now performed a similar task, combing through thousands of lines of codes, probing, examining, dissecting, just as she had done for most of her career. Only this time she did it not to translate into another language, or to correct malfunctioning software, or to improve the efficiency of a control systems program. Today Susan performed high-tech surgery on a complex C++ program to find evidence of Bloodaxe’s trickery.

  First she reviewed the original Scent-Sniffer algorithms that Bloodaxe had given her two days before, following their initial meeting. After checking the short Scent code, whose job was to attach to the queen virus during the seconds before and after the event, Susan pulled up the Sniffer code, frowning after the first few minutes. The hacker had not followed proper programming rules, failing to create a structure that flowed smoothly from top to bottom. Instead, the program jumped all over the place depending on the values of a number of variables, including the Sniffer’s current physical location on the Internet, its last location, the expected new location according to the last known location of the nearest Scent, and the calculated quickest route to that new location. The program performed a constant loop through these variables, using the last set as input to the new loop, constantly adjusting its route to follow the Scent to the source of the virus.

  On the surface, the code appeared to perform as programmed, but Susan had been around hackers long enough to know to look for subtleties in the code, for minor anomalies usually overlooked by the average programmer. The basic body of the Sniffer program consisted of a tracking section, where the variables were computed over and over as the Sniffer made its way toward its target, and a message section, where the location of the virus, in longitude and latitude, was coded and sent back to Susan for monitoring. Within the message section there was a unique snippet of code chartered with the delivery of the final message, or Bark, to mark the origin of the virus, the results of millions of iterations of the tracking section. Susan paid special attention to this last area, the place that told her where the virus was located, the spot she suspected Bloodaxe may have altered to fool her into thinking that the virus had originated in Tikal.

  As she jotted down the essence of the code on a notepad next to her laptop, Troy
Reid walked into her office.

  “There’s still no news on Bloodaxe,” he said, pulling up a chair. “Any news on your end?”

  “I’m not sure yet,” she said, tapping the screen with the eraser of her pencil. “This is the section that generated the final set of coordinates for the origin of the virus.”

  “Which pointed to Tikal, right?”

  “That’s right. Now, look here, this is how it works.”

  ROUTINE ADJUST

  IMPORT ADJUST1, ADJUST2

  LONG = LAST_LONG + ADJUST1

  LAT = LASTLAT + ADJUST2

  CALL MESSAGE LONG, LAT

  “The new longitude and latitude of the virus is calculated by making adjustments according to the most recent location of the Scent code attached to the queen virus. ADJUST1 and ADJUST2 mark the difference between the last location and the new location in degrees, minutes, and seconds, providing an accurate position within a dozen feet. Once the adjustments have been done, the set of variables, LONG and LAT, are transferred to the MESSAGE routine, which fires them directly to me.”

  Susan tapped the PAGE DOWN key and browsed to the MESSAGE routine, inspecting the cryptic C++ code, and then writing:

  ROUTINE MESSAGE

  IMPORT LONG, LAT

  RLOGIN SGARNETT@FBI.GOV

  PASSWORD *******

  FTP LONG

  FTP LAT

  LOGOFF

  RETURN

  “It’s pretty simple, actually,” she said. “Just grab the last set of coordinates, remote log into my account, and FTP the coordinates into my account before logging back off. I have a script that automatically reads the E-mails and maps them to my tracking chart.” FTP was a Unix command to transfer a file from one location to another.

  “I don’t see any evidence of wrongdoing,” commented Reid, the wrinkles of his face moving as he frowned.

  “On the surface,” she said. “But you’re forgetting about blank spaces to the right of the variable name. Did you notice the blank space between LONG and the comma? There’s a blank space there. Watch.”