Ted leaned back in his chair, folded his hands across this stomach, and thought a minute. “There’s a known security flaw in all Haier microwaves. I read about it a few months ago.”
“How can a microwave have a security flaw? It’s an appliance.” She lowered her bulk into one of Ted’s cherry-wood chairs.”
“Here’s the thing. These new microwaves, and I’d bet Whirlpool is the same, have an Internet connection. It allows you to turn it on or off from your cell phone. No one ever expected anyone to want to hack a microwave, so they didn’t put in any firewalls to block outside interference.” Ted reached for his coffee cup. “I’d bet that someone exploited that flaw to cause these fires.”
Abiba shook her head. “But why? Why would anyone want to start a bunch of fires? What purpose would it serve?”
Ted put his cup down and held his fist to his lips and tapped his thumb on his cheek bone. “Let’s see … What purpose … Okay, how about this, someone is a pyromaniac with hacking skills. He did it to watch the fires.”
“No Mr. Ted, I’m not buying that. It’s happening all over the country, he couldn’t possibly watch all the fires. I have a feeling …” she paused, and her eyes rolled up and in. “There is a hand behind this.” Her voice sounded far away. “Yes … A black man, someone very evil. Oh!” She jumped in her seat. “I see your friend having the heart attack. They’re both the same man.”
Ted sat up straight and crinkled his whole face. “What the hell are you talking about? A black man, Dan’s heart attack.”
Abiba was pale beneath her ebony skin. Her breath came in shallow gasps. “I don’t know, Mr. Ted. They’re connected. Somehow.”
“Abiba, go home.” Ted said in a firm tone. “Let me worry about this. You know that Bear and I might be here all night.”
“No, Mr. Ted. If you’re here, I’m here.” She said in her clipped British accent.
“What about your family? You don’t want to stay through till morning.”
Abiba took the coffee cup from Ted’s hand. “My daughter knows my work. I’ll call and let her know I’m not coming home and not to worry.” She looked in the empty cup. “Would you like a refill, sir?”
“No.” Ted stomped his foot. “And you’re impossible.” He rose and walked towards Bear’s little huddle of cubicles.
“You or Mr. Bear need anything, you let me know,” Abiba said to Ted’s back.
“Humph.” Ted shrugged as he walked.
A black man. Did she mean race or soul? Microwaves, heart attacks, the CryBaby virus. How are they connected?
The cyber security department took up only a small percentage of the total floor space. A group of four desks, surrounded by cloth cubicle walls, created a bull pen for its inhabitants. At the present time, the inhabitants consisted of Bear. His helpers had long since gone home.
“You makin’ any progress?” Ted asked as he plopped down in front of a workstation. “Do you know how they did it?”
“This is impossible,” Bear growled. “This is the third time I’ve gone over this code line-by-line, and I don’t see anything. Either this guy is really good or I’m going blind.”
Ted sat at a workstation, beads of sweat forming on his forehead, and opened a window filled with computer code. “I don’t discount the second possibility at all.” He searched on “Ted, you stopped here.” He always left a marker when he got up from his desk so that he would know where to go back to work. The cursor moved to the yellow highlighted string. Ted removed the comment. “It’s in here somewhere. We just have to keep looking.”
“You know the definition of insanity, don’t you, Hero?” Bear ran his paw through his mass of unkept red hair. “We need to try something new.”
Ted swiveled in his chair to face Bear. “What you got in mind?”
“I’m thinking we need a little help.”
“Okay.”
Bear’s face lit up in a grin. The first Ted saw since Bear moved in. “I have a friend. You ever heard of the Iceman?”
Ted furrowed his brow. “Yeah. Some kind of super hacker. He’s in Europe somewhere. Often works with Interpol on their cyber cases. Isn’t he the guy who cracked the mañana virus.”
“Yep. I met him once. In person.”
“You’re shitting me. No one even knows what he looks like.”
Bear smirked at Ted and rolled back from his keyboard. “Nope. Just me. He gave me his card.”
“Wow! You have the Iceman’s card?” Ted flipped both of his hands up and out. “Can you bring him in on this?”
Bear held his hands together in front of him as if in prayer. “I can try. If this hack doesn’t interest him, he’s dead.”
“Great, get in touch.” Ted frowned. “Call him right now.”
Bear dug through his backpack until he found a slender wallet case. “All my important business cards.” He waved the wallet at Ted. “I happen to have his email address at the Eide Prolytechnique de Lusanne.”
“The what?”
“It’s the MIT of Switzerland. Our boy’s a professor there.”
“How do you know these people?” Ted asked as he rolled back to his workstation.
“That’s not all. I have the Joker’s address, too.”
“The Joker?” Ted turned back to his friend. “You’re shittin’ me. He’s the world’s most infamous hacker.”
Bear gave Ted and “ah, shucks” grin. “Yeah. During the elections, he hacked the Russian Foreign Ministry’s web site and put up a notice that if they continued interfering in the American election, he’d launch an all-out cyber-attack against them. The leaks of DNC emails to wikileaks.com stopped.”
“You know the Joker?”
A smug look crossed Bear’s face. “Yeah. He used to be in the Army, in their cyber security division. He got frustrated because his superiors wouldn’t let him strike back when he found another country attacking us, so he quit. Now he runs a group of vigilante hackers who strike back any time they find another country hacking us. He probably set China’s hacking program back five years.”
Ted smiled, twirled in his chair and high-fived Bear. “Can you bring him in on this too?”
“I can try.”
The hours went by. Ted crawled through the operating system patch code line by line. His vision blurred, and he ran to the bathroom every half-hour or so to relieve himself of Abiba’s potent coffee.
He made notes on a yellow legal pad as he scrolled through the lines. His eyes refused to stay open. His head lolled to the side.
“Hey, buddy,” Bear said. “You falling asleep? Maybe you should take a break.”
“Nah, I’m fine.” Ted stretched his eyelids and bulged out his eyes to clear his focus.
“You know, when you’re so groggy, you probably missed something. You have to stay sharp to do this.”
Ted shook his head. “Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’m good.”
He went back to his computer screen. Hmm … what’s this?
He found an RPC (Remote Program Call) to an application he had never heard of. He tracked down the application on his hard drive. It was a very small, compiled .exe file with a hexadecimal name. Where did that come from?
With so many downloads, emails, and other ways to infect a computer, there was no way to know when or how the file got there. But it was there, and he didn’t know what it was.
“Bear, look at this.” He turned his screen so Bear could see. “What do you make of that?”
Bear rolled over to Ted’s screen. “Don’t know. Have you decompiled it yet?
“Just found it. I found an RPC from our Windows patch to it. I don’t know how long it’s been sitting on my computer. The time/date stamp is six months old.”
“Yeah, but in hacking 101 they teach you how to manipulate the time stamp.”
Bear slid back to his computer and typed a few keystrokes. He opened his File Explorer and typed the file name into the search box. He waited. The little blue progress bar at the top of the screen moved slowly to
the right.
Ted knew the value of patience. He closed his eyes and leaned back in his chair as the operating system searched for the file in Bear’s system.
He opened his eyes when Bear spoke. “Yeah, I got it, too. Let’s check some other computers.”
They moved from desk to desk, logging in as admins on each desktop, and searching for the executable. They found it on every computer.
“Okay,” Ted said. “This is the virus. We don’t know how it got here, but it’s on every computer. There’s a call in Windows that opens the file on a certain date, then they’re off to the races.”
Bear stood up from the computer he was working on. “You got that de-compile done yet?”
“I dunno, let’s see.” Ted got up and headed back to his workstation.
“Yeah, here it is.” He opened the file. “Man, it’s gonna take some time to look through this. I’ll send you the file. I think I need breakfast. How about you?"
“Abiba,” Bear yelled. “We need food.”
Abiba appeared at the workstations, looking fresh and ready to go. “What do you want, Mr. Bear?”
“I don’t know, Ted?”
“Pancakes. Sausage or ham. Eggs.”
Abiba smiled at them as if she was house mother to a couple of out-of-control frat boys. “You want Glo’s? You want me to order in, or do you want to go see Glo?”
Ted and Bear exchanged glances. “Let’s go,” they said at the same time.
“You wanna come?” Ted asked.
“No, Mr. Ted. I think I’ll just go home.”
Both Ted and Bear grabbed their jackets and pocketed their cell phones. As they started towards the door with triumphant swaggers, Abiba stopped them.
“Mr. Ted. There’s something you should know.”
Ted stopped and turned around.
“Huh?”
“I know you don’t believe in me like Mrs. Flaherty did, but I have to tell you.” There was a long silence. “Your man, your hacker. He’s here, close by somewhere. He lives a normal life, has a normal job, but he’s evil. He has a band of evil followers, and they are going to cause a great disruption to all of our lives.”
“What the heck?” Bear asked. “How could you possibly know that?”
“I just do.”
Bear looked at Ted.
Catrina believed in Abiba’s extraordinary powers of perception. We’ve solved more than one case based on her intuition. But how much do I trust her?
“How did you get this insight, Abiba?” Ted asked.
“I sat there, in front of my computer, and all of a sudden, I felt his presence. If I had something that he touched, I could tell you more.”
“Something he touched?” Ted asked. “Fuck. He’s a ghost. He hasn’t touched anything.”
“Do you really believe this mumbo jumbo?” Bear asked.
Ted looked from Abiba to Bear and back again. He stared hard into Abiba’s eyes. “Yes. I don’t know what it is, but Abiba has a gift. She’s been right more times I can count. If she says it, I believe it’s true. We just need to decode her message.”
Chapter 11
Hope sat naked on her bed, looking at her bruised and battered body. Tears flowed from her eyes as she fingered the scars left from her surgeries. Will Chris even want me now? There were five scars from the bullet wounds she got in Mexico and a long white line where the surgeons had gone in to repair her lung.
Well, I guess this means the end of my bikini days.
“Ezperanza, honey, there’s someone here to see you,” Mama shouted from the living room, using her Spanish name.
Hope dragged on a pink robe and stumbled to the door. Who?
As she emerged to the living room, a short Latino man in a Men’s Warehouse suit extended his hand.
“Miss Higuera, I’m Oscar del Toro,.” He flashed a badge. “Special agent for the FBI.”
“The FBI?”
“Please Mr. del Toro, sit.” Mama waved her hand towards an over-stuffed chair. “Can I get you some coffee, maybe Mexican chocolate?”
Del Toro took a seat. “Mexican chocolate? I haven’t had that since I was a kid.”
Hope let out a small groan as she sat on the sofa. “What can I help you with Mr. del Toro?”
“I’m here about your accident. I just have a few questions.”
Hope wrinkled her brow. “Why would the FBI be interested in a traffic accident?”
Del Toro took out his note book. “There have been a series of similar accidents around the country. You may have heard about Senator Jacobson.”
Hope nodded her head.
He looked up at her from his notebook. “When did you know your car was out of control?”
She answered the questions until Mama entered the room with a tray with three steaming mugs and a plate of pastries. “Señor del Toro, I hope you like pan dulce.”
“That smells like home.”
Mama served each of them a cup of chocolate and seated herself on the sofa next to Hope.
Hope sniffed her mug. It had the rich aroma of spices and chocolate. The frothy mixture was topped with cinnamon sprinklings.
“Why are you so interested in my accident?” Hope asked.
“We think these accidents are all related. Our investigation shows that the computers in the cars went crazy.”
“I understand that, but why the FBI? Why not the National Traffic Safety Board? What interests the FBI?”
Del Toro took a sip of the chocolate. “Miss Higuera, I’m really not at liberty to discuss an on-going investigation.”
“That’s not fair.” The color rose in Hope’s cheeks. “You come in here and ask me all sorts of questions, then don’t even have the courtesy to tell me what it’s all about.”
Del Toro put down his mug and patted the air with both hands. “I’m sorry, Miss, but the Bureau has procedures that I can’t break . . .”
Hope took in a breath of air, ready to start a new harangue.
“But let me just say that we think that someone took over the cars’ computers and caused these crashes. That’s all I can tell you.”
****
Abiba was at the end of her tether. On the short drive from Flaherty & Associates to her apartment on First Hill, she was surprised that she hadn’t melted into a blob. She shook herself awake several times.
She took the elevator to the third floor and slid her key into the lock. The door opened smoothly. Abiba stepped inside and dropped her purse on the hallway table. Hmm … there was a piece of paper, folded in half, with “Mom” written on the outside. She took off her jacket and hung it on a wooden peg behind the door.
She picked up the paper and unfolded it. It read: Mom, I’m at the UW performance center practicing with Kim and D’Anthony. Be home for dinner.
Abiba tossed the paper back on the table and headed straight for her bedroom. Wooden masks and spears adorned the hallway walls. Her bedroom centered around a king-size bed. A small night-stand was on one side, a large carved armoire stood at the foot of the bed with a flat-screen TV on top of it. Over the head of the bed hung a colorful picture of an African woman walking down a road with a basket on her head.
Abiba kicked her shoes towards the mirrored closet doors and pulled her bright orange dress over her head. She couldn’t wait to claw her bra off. As she unclipped it and slipped it off her shoulders, she said, “There you go girls. Freedom.” Her huge breasts fell free.
Without stopping to put on night clothes, she pulled off her panties and crawled under the covers.
The night was dark. Her alarm clock on the nightstand was blank. She stirred and looked down the hallway. It was dark. No night light. She flipped the switch on the light on the nightstand. Nothing.
We having a power outage?
She got up and wandered into the living room. The lights there didn’t work either. She opened the drapes on her million-dollar view. She might live in a cheesy neighborhood, but the view of Elliot Bay and Puget Sound were magnificent.
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Everything was dark. All the street lights were out, no buildings had any power. The ship yards and unloading docks were blank. They never shut down, any day, any time.
What’s going on?
She felt a presence behind her and spun around.
“Good evening, Abiba,” the shadowy form said.
She clutched her arms over her breasts and backed up to the wall.
“I’m not going to hurt you – this time.” The figure had a slight accent. Was it Middle Eastern? “I’m here to warn you. Stop snooping around in my business. You already know too much about me. Stay away.”
“Who are you? How did you get in here?”
“You don’t need to know who I am. And how did I get here? You brought me here. You summoned me.”
Abiba sat up with a start. Sweat ran down her face. It was broad daylight, mid-day.
****
The minute hand on the wall clock ticked over another mark. How many of those minutes ticked by since the ordeal started?
Ted wiped his hand over his eyes. It didn’t help. The world still looked fuzzy. He scratched at the three-day old beard. Man, I gotta get outta here and take a shower. A couple hours sleep would be nice.
“What time is it?” Ted asked without looking up.
“You gone blind, Hero,” Bear responded. “You got clocks all around you.”
Ted mumbled and looked at the lower right-hand corner of his computer screen. 4:23 a.m. Christ. They’d done it again. Worked through the night.
He looked over at this partner. Bear’s orange hair was wilder than usual. It stuck out at all angles as if he were electrically charged.
“We gotta take a break. I’m not even reading the code anymore.”
“Go ahead,” Bear said. “I want to finish this piece before I lose track of what I’m doing.”
Ted stumbled out to the reception area and lay down on the couch.
When he opened his eyes, he felt as if days had passed. He leapt up and ran to the work area. Bear was gone. Sunlight peeked in the windows.
He picked up the pizza box and napkins and threw them in the trash. As he reached for his coffee cup, a thought struck him.
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