Alex O'Donnell and the 40 CyberTheives

by Regina Doman

  “Hope these guys come every year!” Sam enthused, pocketing his twenty dollars.

  Alex even decided to change the hotel’s elevator music to science fiction soundtracks, just for fun. He half-wondered if he should be wearing a mask himself, to add to the holiday enjoyment for the guests.

  But surprisingly, there didn’t seem to be a lot of mingling going on among the guests once they arrived. Alex fully expected them to use the pool area, the weight room, or even the conference room, which they had booked, but the halls were deserted, except for arriving guests. Maybe they were all tired from their travels? Or they were visiting between rooms? Alex wasn’t entirely sure.

  The day went on. Alex checked in the next two guests, two men in Spider Man masks, both in business suits. Next came a heavyset woman in a tiger mask, carrying a bulky briefcase and wearing shorts that were too small for her. A half hour later, a Japanese man, monosyllabic, carrying a laptop and several bags, entered, not wearing a mask. At first Alex wasn’t sure he was with the same group.

  “You here for the gaming convention?”

  “Ah, yes. Yes I am,” the man said hurriedly. He bent down, took something out of a bag, and put it on. An Adolf Hitler mask.

  “Oh, that’s better,” Alex said. “So, you’re a gamer too?”

  “Actually no,” the man said, trying with difficulty to adjust the mask.

  “You just coming to hang out with your friends?”

  “Yes. It’s a lot of fun, the gaming convention,” the man said, taking his key and hurriedly going down the hallway.

  Another man came in wearing the mask of a samurai. He paused in the doorway and gave a tremendous sneeze.

  “Bless you!” Alex said, looking around on the ground. Sure enough, he spotted Link the Cat sniffing at something on the carpet. Quickly he left the desk. “Excuse me,” he said, and swiftly ran Link back down the hallway to the apartment. “Stay here!” he said, setting him on the couch. “Mom! Make sure the cat stays in!”

  “Sam or David must have let her out!” Mom said from the couch, where she was folding laundry.

  Shaking his head, Alex ran back down the hallway to the lobby, and stepped behind the desk again, wiping his hands with antibacterial cleanser. “So sorry about that,” he said. “Can I help you?”

  “Checking—atch!—for the Windham—Achoo!—Olaf—” the samurai choked, pulling on his mask. “I need a—pet free room.”

  “Absolutely. Those are on the top floor,” Alex said, checking him in. “Say, weren’t you here before?”

  “Achoo!—No, I don’t think so,” the man said, sniffing. “Can I have my keys please?”

  “Here you go. So sorry. Sam! Get his bags for him!” Alex said, and Sam, who had just come back into the lobby, hurried to comply. Alex stared after the man, whose build looked familiar. And I could have sworn I recognized his sneeze.

  Kateri was vacuuming the breakfast area, which she had just finished shutting down, but made more coffee after one guest requested it. “Wonder if I should bake another batch of rolls?” she wondered aloud.

  “Maybe not a bad idea,” he said, scanning over the computer list of reservations. Thirty-nine guests checked in. The hotel was almost full.

  He looked up eagerly as the door opened to admit a weary couple with a baby, but it turned out that they didn’t have a reservation. They had just stopped in from the highway. Apologetic, Alex recommended the bed and breakfast downtown, or one of the other motels. After the couple left, he figured he might as well turn on the “No Vacancy” sign. Hopefully the last guest with a reservation would know to come in anyhow.

  Still no stir from the guests who had already arrived. It was getting towards the dinner hour. Several pizza men and Chinese takeout delivery boys arrived and went to various rooms. But aside from that, not a peep.

  “I’m wondering if we should get takeout ourselves,” Kateri said, pushing out a cart to stock up the breakfast area for tomorrow morning. “That Chinese food smelled delicious.”

  “Why not? I’ll order now,” Alex said, glancing at the clock. “I’m off in twenty minutes.” He checked to see if anyone had requested anything on the answering machine. Nothing. Unusually non-demanding guests. “So what do you want?”

  Kateri said, “Something with lots of vegetables.”

  Alex made a face as he pulled out his cell phone. “Something with a lot of vegetables. Can you be more specific? There’s a menu in the desk drawer there.”

  He waited for his phone to connect, but instead “Looking for service” blinked on the screen. “That’s odd.”

  Not wanting to wait, he dialed the number from the desk phone and ordered General Tsou chicken, moo gai pan, and vegetarian hoisin for Kateri. When he finished, his mom came out, rolling her wheelchair and looking puzzled.

  “Hey mom. I just ordered some Chinese for me and Kateri. Did you want anything?”

  “No, the boys and your dad and I ate earlier,” Mom said. “Something odd just happened. I was using the Internet, and I got booted off. Now I can’t get back on.”

  “Where’s Dad? Have him check our connection.” Alex opened the door to the office, where his dad was ensconced as usual. “Dad, Mom can’t get on the Internet.”

  Dad switched off the database work and slid to the hotel computer. “She’s right. It’s down.” He clicked on the menu, then after a moment or two, frowned.

  “It can’t find the connection. That’s really, really odd.”

  He kept working on it while Alex and Kateri chatted with Mom and waited for their food. But by the time the Panda Chef order arrived, he still hadn’t managed to repair it. Alex and Kateri took their cartons of food into the office and watched him work on it.

  Finally, Dad pushed himself back from the computer. “Something’s wrong with our system,” he said. “It’s completely down.”

  Alex whistled. “Do you think it’s the hacker?”

  “Could be. But that’s odd, because I've been monitoring suspicious access patterns, and there haven't been any intrusion attempts.” He got up. “I’m going to go check the connection.”

  Alex followed him down to the utility room in the basement. His dad slid the card through the lock and opened it. Turning on the lights, he went over to the panel, and began to look at the wires. Finally, he shook his head. “It looks like we have a hardware problem.”

  “That stinks. That means the guests can’t connect either. Weird that we haven’t heard them complaining.”

  His dad was studying the panel. “I could try to fix this, but I’ve got to get on duty. I’ll send an e-mail to our tech guy and have him come by in the morning.”

  “Dad,” Alex said, as they walked back upstairs. “Um. How are you going to send an e-mail if we can’t get on the internet?”

  His dad smiled. “I’ve got another way to connect,” he said.

  Upstairs in the office, he booted up a program on his laptop. “It’s a software ad-on I put together. It can detect any wireless networks being used in the area.”

  “But we’re up on a mountain. How many wireless networks can it find up here?” Kateri asked, eating her broccoli with chopsticks.

  “Well, normal wireless adapters just scan for other networks that they can be connected to. This one’s going to look for any traffic out there, any broadcasting points in the vicinity. Sometimes you’d be surprised at what you can find.” He clicked an icon on his screen.

  Alex reached for the duck sauce, and glanced at his dad, who was staring at the screen. “So, are you surprised at what you found?”

  His dad blinked. “That’s an understatement. I thought I’d get the usual trace of one or two signals near here, but this mountain is crawling with traffic.”

  “What?” Kateri and Alex both leaned over his laptop.

  “There’re lots of users using the internet all around us. But not through our network. They have a network of their own.” He adjusted his glasses and looked closely at the screen. “And they’re al
l communicating with the same access point. An access point which isn’t identifying itself.” He watched the stream of lines crawling across his screen. “I’m counting ten signals—no, twelve—fourteen—curious. Wonder how many there actually are?”

  “Can you find out?” Alex said, as his dad continued to stare at the screen.

  “I’m not sure—wait, call David. Get him over here.”

  Alex vaulted over the desk chair and hurried out to hunt down David. He found his younger brother at the pool, reading a novel, and beckoned to him.

  “Dad wants you.”

  When David came into the office, Mr. O’Donnell said, “Hey, David—do you still have that cantenna you and I made in Scouts last year?”

  David was toweling his hair. “Yeah, I actually do. I hid it in the back of my closet so Kateri couldn’t downsize it.”

  Kateri stuck out her tongue at him as he passed, hurrying back to his room.

  “Okay, so what’s a cantenna?” she asked.

  “Pretty neat thing. We made it out of a tomato juice can. It extends the reach of a computer’s wireless adapter,” Mr. O’Donnell clicked on another icon, then stood up and rummaged around in one of his junk drawers until he found a cable. “Alex, grab the video camera tripod from that corner and set it up near here.”

  By the time Alex had located and set up the tripod, David had returned holding a tin can with a couple of screws sticking out of it and two wire rings around it holding it to a clamp. He mounted it to the top of the tripod with expert precision, so that the can was pointed up at the ceiling.

  “Point it south. Best signal from down there,” Dad said.

  Meanwhile, Kateri cleared off a spot on the office counter and sat on it, shaking her head.

  Dad had plugged one end of the cable into his laptop, and handed the other end to David, who screwed it into the side of the can.

  “You did this in Scouts?” Alex asked.

  David shrugged. “Most of us will do anything for an Eagle’s badge,” he said.

  Dad was focused on the screen again, counting. Then he shook his head.

  “Too many to see. I’ll run it through a script filter for a unique count…”

  He typed quickly on his keyboard and frowned. “Now this is very, very odd,”

  he said slowly. “It’s almost—sinister.”

  “What?” Alex and Kateri and David crowded around the screen.

  The screen said:

  Unique wireless connections detected: 40

  Alex stared at the message from the wireless detection software.

  “Forty connections detected? What does that mean?” Kateri demanded.

  “It means that in this immediate vicinity, there are forty people connected to a wireless signal broadcasting from an unknown access point somewhere in this area,” Dad said in a slightly strained tone.

  “Where would the signal be coming from?” Kateri asked.

  “Hm. Did you see anyone carrying in a parabolic antenna?” Dad asked.

  “Sort of like a large satellite dish?”

  “One of the guests did have an awful lot of luggage,” David said.

  “My guess is that the unknown access point is a satellite connection, and that’s what they’re all using to connect. A private satellite network they set up in the hotel.” Dad glanced out the window. “Or maybe in the woods.”

  “So forty people using a private satellite network. And the bizarre thing is,”

  Alex said, mentally checking his reservation book. “We only have thirty-nine guests checked in.”

  This sank in.

  “So chances are that our guests,” Dad said slowly, moving the mouse over his screen, “are all techies.”

  “Or cyberthieves.” Kateri supplied.

  They all continued to gaze at the monitor. Forty unique wireless connections. And thirty-nine guests had arrived in masks. And possibly someone else was in the woods, with a satellite dish, helping them all to communicate.

  “The oddest thing,” Alex murmured, “is that we can’t tell if this is an emergency or not. Yet.”

  “Maybe you should call that FBI agent, just to see what he says,” Kateri suggested.

  “Not a bad idea,” Dad pulled out his cell phone. “Rats. No service.”

  Alex immediately checked his again. “Okay, mine’s still off too. Dad, someone’s running a jammer.”

  “Use the landline,” Kateri said, getting to her feet.

  But when Alex picked up the hotel phone, it was dead.

  “I’m going to guess that whoever disabled the internet connection cut the phone lines too,” Dad said.

  “But it wasn’t cut when we were down in the basement a few minutes ago,”

  Alex said. The two men looked at each other, and thought the same thing.

  Alex ran to the family living quarters and grabbed a bokken from the weapons wall. Kateri followed him. “What are you doing?”

  “Going to check the basement for rats.”

  “You’re crazy.”

  “Stay up here.” He shrugged off the red jacket and pushed the blade of the wooden sword through his belt loops, figuring that the chances of his looking like a medievalist fool were diminishing, and hurried to the basement steps.

  He opened the door softly, and looked downstairs. The lights were on.

  Stealthily, he sidled down the steps. He heard someone moving about below, and, drawing his sword, mentally prepared himself.

  When he reached the bottom, he saw that the utility room door was propped open. Inching his way towards it, he could hear someone. When he peered in, he saw a large heavy-set man wearing an albino Wookie mask crouched in front of the main circuit board for the hotel. The hairy head turned when Alex came in, and immediately the man drew a semi-automatic.

  Instinctively, Alex brandished his sword, but he was aware as he did so that he had chosen to carry a non-lethal weapon, and that the man had the upper hand.

  “Get back against the wall,” the man rasped.

  Alex obeyed, but didn’t relax his two-handed grip on the sword.

  The Wookie came closer, fiddling in his pocket. He pulled out a pair of handcuffs as he came through the door into the hallway and advanced on Alex.

  “Put down the toy sword,” the voice came through the mask. Alex fixed his eyes on the gun. Definitely not a toy. Deadly, gleaming blue steel.

  “Come on, move it!” ordered the man, motioning from side to side with the gun, and, staring at the gun, Alex caught a glimpse of a white dot on the side of an angled metal switch. In a second, he realized what that meant. The gun’s safety was on.

  It would only take a second for the man to click it off and fire, but Alex seized his fraction of an advantage and swiftly swung his sword, simultaneously lunging out of the line of fire.

  With a crack, his wooden blade landed on the flat of the man’s hand. The man roared in pain and dropped the gun.

  Alex reached down for the gun, and in a split second recognized he’d made a mistake as the Wookie launched forward. Shoot.

  Next thing Alex knew, he was flat on the floor with the big man on top of him, and he had lost both his sword and the chance of grabbing the gun.

  Snarling, the man punched Alex in the side with his good hand.

  Alex twisted around, trying to get out from under the man, but the Wookie pushed his fat stomach right onto Alex’s face. Unable to breathe, Alex gasped and tried fruitlessly to free his nose and mouth while the man grabbed at Alex’s arms. Realizing he was about to get definitively pinned, Alex decided to squeeze himself further under his opponent. With a violent effort, he pushed himself downward, towards the man’s feet, evading the man’s brawny arms. Yelling, the man tried to regain his hold on Alex, but Alex, wriggling ferociously, popped out from under the man’s side and tried to scramble to his feet. But the Wookie grabbed him by the legs and tackled him again, causing Alex to trip and fall, this time on top of the handcuffs.

  This guy might not know how to fig
ht, but he knows how to use his weight. Alex pushed himself up on his elbows and with a fierce twist, smashed the Wookie in the face with his right elbow, changed direction and grabbed the Wookie’s arm to shoulder-roll his opponent over and off him. The Wookie landed flat on his back with a crash, and a relieved Alex jumped to his feet and lunged for the gun—only to be stopped by a wrenching pain in his wrist. Stunned, he glanced down and realized that during the grappling, the Wookie had snapped the handcuff on his left wrist. Now the masked man had Alex chained, and was holding the other cuff in both his meaty hands.

  Desperate, Alex tried to snatch at the gun with his free hand, but it was just a few feet too far away. Quickly the Wookie yanked hard on the cuffs, and Alex, thrown off balance by his reach, went down. The big man kicked him in the side, and bent over to pick up the gun himself, but Alex kneed him in the gut.

  When the man stepped back, gasping, Alex regained his feet. With a roar, the big man swung Alex around into the wall, out of reach of the gun.

  Winded, Alex tried unsuccessfully to jerk the cuff out of the man’s hand, but the Wookie still wasn’t letting go. He tried to pull Alex closer, but Alex swung away, circling him, avoiding the metal support pole in the center of the basement room.

  Alex was thinking fast. If I can get the cuff out of his hand, I could loop it around my own fist and use it as a brass knuckle. That might be enough to give me a slight advantage. But the Wookie had a good grip on that cuff and was angling himself to pull Alex into a headlock.

  Let me see if I can use that weight of his against him. Alex tugged on the cuffs, and the man tugged right back. Hoping to throw him off, Alex pushed his cuffed hand suddenly towards the man, and the man predictably pushed right back at him. Seizing the moment when his opponent was off balance, Alex aimed a quick blow at the nerve cluster of the man’s forearm. He struck, hard.

  The man let go of the cuffs and fell—but unfortunately Alex had misjudged both his own position and the man’s weight. The Wookie-man plunged right into him, crushing Alex to the ground for the third time. Stars flared up in his vision as he lay stunned on the floor.