Buzzworm (A Technology Thriller): Computer virus or serial killer?

by Theo Cage

  Roger hit the keyboard hard with his short fingers. “Looks like I have email on this system. Jo? Do you have override on his password?” Jo quickly called someone on her cell. She gave Roger and Med the codes.

  Roger opened up the email account. He looked at me. “What?” I asked.

  “I don’t know about your email inbox at work, Detective Hyde, but most people have hundreds to thousands of messages. Frank has a dozen total. And nothing in the deleted files. That’s pretty odd. The emails are all work related. Most of them have the subject line Problems.”

  Med interjected. “He was in the final stages of finishing a project for us. He was working on the beta details. That’s what those messages would be about.”

  It was disappointing to hear that someone had cleaned out Scammel’s system. I was hoping our hacker duo could work their magic. “Could he have — could someone have removed anything?” I looked at Vienna who was standing behind us.

  “Detective. It wasn’t us. I found out before you showed up today that my team didn’t even get a chance to look at these computers. The problems we have been having with our systems lately conveniently erased the trouble ticket log. So these computers just sat in storage for a few days, untouched.”

  “Did you say trouble ticket?” I asked, writing the term down in my notebook.

  “It’s like a repair record when you take your car in for service. Someone creates a ticket in our help deck system with all of the details of the problem. In this case, clean and re-image the desktop. Take everything off that might be security related. But both systems fell through the cracks. Nothing was done.”

  She sounded frustrated, like this was an ongoing problem. “Could Buzzworm have gotten to them?” I asked.

  “They weren’t linked into the network. They were just sitting in a storage room under a pile of old software boxes. But anything is possible lately.”

  Roger stepped back, frowning. “There’s an archive file on here that the email program keeps. It’s a big text file full of anything that’s been deleted for the past year. So whoever cleared out all of the emails didn’t delete the archive. That’s odd.” He tapped away for several seconds. “Anyone smart enough to clean out their email should know better, but it’s worth looking at. There it is.” The screen filled with text. “It’s too big to read through, but I can search for names or words. Anything you want to look for?”

  Med offered first “Buzzworm”. Roger typed in the search word and waited. Nothing.

  “He wasn’t the victim of Buzzworm anyway. That’s interesting in its own right. From what I hear there isn’t an employee in the CIA who hasn’t had at least one run in with the so-called virus. Anyone else?”

  I offered Dodge. Roger typed in the name and punched the return key. In the corner of the screen I could see a small blue box that read searching. Then the screen of text began highlighted words in yellow. Dodge. I leaned in, hoping for a break. Roger scanned through the text.

  “One email from Dodge. They were betting on the Super Bowl. Dodge won.” Roger looked around for more ideas. They tried a few more terms. Nothing. Med asked to try Avion. Roger’s eyebrows went up like he was surprised. Another techy term I wasn’t familiar with. He did the search. Again, nothing. We both looked at Med. She immediately understood that I had never heard the term before.

  “It’s the name of one of our systems. Just curious to know if they discussed it at all.” She turned back to Roger. “Try GIPETTO.” Roger asked to confirm the spelling. Vienna moved in closer, her eyes squinting at the screen.

  Roger looked at Med. “How about your system?”

  She held her hands up. “You’ve got the interesting one. My system was just used for graphics.”

  Roger stood up straight, immediately interested. “Could there be any videos on that system? Anything that would connect it with the Buzzworm nonsense?”

  Med had her arms crossed. She looked unhappy and distracted. “No. I looked. Just tests he created for our program. Nothing of interest.” Then she added as a final thought. “And highly classified.” Roger looked like he wanted to take over the keyboard and see for himself, but he hesitated.

  “How do you know without viewing them?” he asked her.

  I jumped in. “Strange. What do you know that you’re not telling us here?”

  Roger looked from me to Duke and back. “I was hoping we would find some evidence of one of those nasty videos he sent to people. Just getting my hopes up, that’s all.”

  “So no evidence of a suicide note anywhere?” My last shot. Both Roger and Med shook their heads. “Nothing else?”

  Roger stepped back away from the system he was working on and rubbed his wrists. “If I were leaving a suicide note, I wouldn’t make it an Easter egg hunt. I’d just leave it in plain sight.” That made sense to me too.

  Vienna was pacing in the center of the room now, her nervous energy back. “What else detective? What more do you need from us? Just ask. I have so much work backing up right now.”

  I leaned against the work counter, unsure of the next steps. Then Med spoke. “There’s a third computer in this room,” was all she said. We all looked at her. She pointed at the LCD projector mounted in the ceiling. “It looks like a projector, it’s really a computer.” I didn’t understand. How do you use a computer that is bolted to the ceiling? She could see the confusion in my face.

  “Let me boot it up,” she offered.

  Mary Ellen found a small remote sitting with the stack of books on the workbench and pointed it at the projector. A small blue light glowed on the machine and we could all hear the fan start up. The whiteboard on the far wall began to glow.

  “This is an interactive whiteboard system, detective. A computer is built into the projector. The projector paints an image of a desktop onto the whiteboard on the wall, which is a large touch screen. Anything I write on the board with a marker is entered into the computer. That’s how I enter data without a keyboard. Or I can control the computer by moving items around on the white board with my hand. Or with the remote.”

  Med used the remote to move a pointer around the screen. The whiteboard was now filled with colorful icons, the background a very detailed photograph of a circuit board. How appropriate.

  “Here’s a start.” She clicked on an icon on the lower right of the display. “This is a presentation we put together for Frank’s team. I’ll call up the last presentation.”

  Med moved up to the board and tapped the icon with her index finger. “That’s interesting. It was last viewed the night Scammel was killed. It was last saved at 1:38 AM.” She drew her hand across the board and dragged an icon, then tapped it twice. The screen expanded to fill the whiteboard. The image consisted of dozens of colored boxes. Each had a label. Testing. GUI. Logic. Storage. Rendered. Shader.

  “Can someone give us a laymen’s explanation?” I asked.

  Med pointed to the screen. “It looks like Scammel was running through his project for someone, just before he died. If he were just checking this out for himself, you’d think he would use his own computer. Scammel was working on the video generator routine that created images of submarines. In this case, an example of a Russian submarine running along the continental shelf.”

  She tapped an icon of a submarine and the screen filled with a detailed image of a coastal area, the aquamarine blue of the ocean and near the light colored sand at the bottom, a modern submarine was slowly cruising across the banks.

  “This is what Scammel was working on?” I asked, unable to keep the surprise out of my voice. The image was crystal clear, almost breathtakingly real.

  Vienna jumped in. “He was working with a small developer team on problems with animation and graphics. The light reflecting off the sub for example. The shadow of the sub on the ocean floor. All the little details that re-create reality. He was working with black and white snapshots. From them to this.” You couldn’t miss the pride in her voice. Then she added. “Of course you know detective
that everything you see here is highly classified and cannot leave this room.”

  Med was moving the mouse pointer over the illuminated whiteboard. “I have an idea, Jo. We can replay his presentation frame by frame. At 1:38 AM he brought up the project plan. He must have talked for a while right here then zoomed in on the shader routine.”

  “Shader?” I asked.

  “This is the software they developed that creates the shadows. A tank crawling across the desert would cast a shadow on the sand. The shadow has to be accurate because it adds depth. Has to be the right length, the right density. It has to look as real as possible. The shader routine creates those shadow details.”

  “And has to be able to deal with several sources of light,’” added Jo.

  Med continued. “The desert is easy. One point of light to deal with. The sun is 93,000,000 miles away. But underwater you get reflections of light off the sandy bottom and through the rippling of the water itself. In other situations, you can have several lights casting different complex shadows.”

  Vienna touched the whiteboard and zoomed in on the submarine. “The final video has to be as realistic as possible. Game developers have figured this out years ago, but are very proprietary about their code. So we had to re-invent the wheel. Scammel’s team did, anyway.”

  Med moved the mouse and pointed to the bottom of the submarine, now suspended on the screen and rotating slowly. “Scammel was having a shadow problem. He was trying to get it fixed before the launch this Monday. And he was stuck. Whoever he was presenting this to that night knew about the project. That would narrow things down quite a bit.”

  I stepped up closer. “Why do they not show up on the log then? The person or persons who visited Scammel?”

  Vienna was chewing a fingernail. “Good question. Med? Can you call up the security videos from that night?”

  Med ran her hands across the board, shrunk the current window and tapped on another icon, then another. She was very skilled with the interface — like the conductor of an orchestra. The images flew by. She quickly came to several rows of small thumbnail images. They were all dated. She tapped one, which expanded to fill most of the screen.

  “There, that’s the outside hallway at midnight. Empty of course. I’ll fast forward. The time is shown at the bottom.” The minutes scrolled by, but the image remained unchanged. “Nothing changed until after four o’clock when the cleaning people go in and find Frank.” At this point, two people, one pushing a floor cleaner, came into view.

  Roger stepped up behind Mary Ellen and took a closer look. “Med, go back. To around 1:30 or so,” he asked her. It was the first time I’d heard her referred to as Med. Her initials.

  She slid her fingers across the images and they rolled in reverse. She stopped at 1:30 and slowly tracked forward in time, her fingers tapping on the whiteboard. The hall was empty. “Nothing,” was all she said.

  I studied the screen. “So what are you suggesting, Ms. Duke? That Buzzworm somehow doctored the video? You say he showed this presentation to someone, but they’re not evident on the security logs.”

  Mary Ellen turned to me. “And why not, detective? If Frank was an expert on video editing then he could also have manipulated our security data. He or someone else working with him could have erased anything.”

  “And you can’t tell? They just erased the person?”

  Roger asked again. “Play it back one more time, Med.” This time she advanced the frames slower. “Stop it right there. Back up just a few frames. What the hell is that?”

  We all stared at the shimmering screen. Vienna was the first to react. “I think it’s a shadow. Or the ghost of a shadow.”

  Roger stepped right up and examined the gray smudge on the edge of the carpet in the hallway. “Sure as shit it’s a shadow. A shadow out of nowhere.”

  Med moved up closer to the image, her body partly in the stream of light from the projector, her blond hair lit up like it was on fire. “It’s a shadow. But caused by the second light source here. The light coming from the glass door into one of the other labs. See here, Jo? This video has the same problem that Frank’s shader program had. The application got confused by the multiple sources of light coming from the ceiling. So whoever tried to erase this person from the video forgot that the error would leave behind a telltale clue.”

  Roger traced the shadow with his stubby finger. “Look at it again. It’s absolutely a man. You can tell by his shoulders somehow. And the shape of the head.”

  Vienna commented from further back, her eyes squinting behind her thick glasses. “He looks tall. Absolutely. I would estimate medium length hair. Well-built.” I wasn’t sure if we could draw that much from the wisp of a single muddy shadow, but the comments made sense. There were enough frames of movement to suggest gait, scale and even gender.

  I asked the obvious question. “Who is he? He visited Scammel minutes before he killed himself. And then erased his presence from the logs and video?”

  Vienna turned to me, the light from the projector glaring off of her glasses. “That’s impossible, Mr. Hyde. With our security as tight as it is there is no way that a stranger could have walked in here. Manipulating a video is one thing. As preposterous as that sounds. But how did he get into the building? You can’t Photoshop yourself into the CIA.”

  Roger responded almost before Vienna finished her thought. “It wasn’t a stranger. He was an employee.” Everyone froze momentarily, digesting the idea of a terrorist in their midst.

  Roger continued. “It’s unavoidable — and this confirms it. An outsider might be able to scam the system, but he can’t con his way in the front door. It has to be someone with access. This is an inside job.”

  “When you say insider, do you mean Building 213 or the entire CIA?” I asked.

  Vienna shook her head. “Unfortunately it could be anyone within the entire security community. CIA. Defense. NIM. Homeland Security. Anyone with a valid security pass can walk in here.”

  Roger jumped. “Wait. It’s one thing to break into this security system and erase a date and time. I can see how that could be done. But the security contractors working at the front entrance? They see everyone coming and going. Wouldn’t someone remember a visitor on that day? Someone from another branch?” He had a point. It was time to talk to the security team that screened employees every morning.

  “Vienna. I’m going to need that video footage for evidence. Can you make a copy?”

  “If it will get me out of here sooner, I’ll do it myself.”

  “Appreciate your cooperation.”

  Roger returned to the computers on the workbench. He turned to Mary Ellen, who was still captivated by the video on the screen. “I have one other search word I’d like to check out before we’re finished. I hope you’re OK with it.”

  “What are you talking about?” she said, distracted,

  “This,” he said and typed Xavier into the search tool. I watched as he tapped the return key, unfamiliar with the name. Or was it another technology term, another virus. The computer whined. He kept his back to Med. The search finished. Nothing. He groaned.

  “You want to explain that?” She was behind him now, angry, her arms crossed.

  “I have reason to believe that Scammel and your David friend knew each other.”

  Med glared at him, her face turning red. “That’s ridiculous. Where would you get that from?”

  Roger stopped working the keyboard and turned. “I didn’t find your video, Med. All I have is a scrap of information that says that David Xavier met with Frank over five years ago. Something to do with a sex crimes investigation. Also connected somehow with this Vice cop shooting himself.” Roger looked at me then. He was holding something back. This Xavier obviously knew Med. And he also had a connection with Wishnowsky.

  Med leaned forward, her voice a little louder. “Sex crimes? You’re saying David was involved in a sex crime?”

  “No. No. Scammel was somehow involved in that. But Xav
ier knew him.”

  “But how would David be part of…”

  Roger tensed. Everyone could tell he clearly didn’t care for this Xavier character. “Med. You know him. Was he involved in law before he got into spy planes?”

  Med shook her head from side to side. “How do you know any of this? Have you been spying on me?”

  “You don’t know, do you?”

  Med turned on him. “Listen, Roger. David is none of your fucking business. Just because I gave you his name doesn’t give you permission to hack into our personal lives. Especially when it has nothing to do with your contract or any of us.” She turned to me. “Are we finished here detective?”

  “No,” I said. “Not even close. But you can go for now.” She turned back to the worm expert. “You’re worse than the virus, you know that, Strange? I wouldn’t be surprised if you created it just to get some attention. From your other hacker losers. You’re on your own from now on. Arrest me if you want, Hyde. I could use a break.” And with that she flew out of the room.

  CHAPTER 29

  At 8:22 AM on Thursday morning, Roger Strange had been stopped by Division 213 security and was searched.

  Shortly after that, Detective Wishnowsky of Washington Vice arrived and arrested the suspect in the lobby. BW knew this because he had watched the security feed. He enjoyed the drama immensely. And why not? BW was the writer and director of this fascinating little morality play.

  The moral was fuck with the devil and he will cast you out.

  All of that joy faded away instantly at 1:37 PM when an alert chime made BW jump in his chair. He pulled up the window on his computer that gave him access to all of the security camera feeds. There he was. Strange. Walking back in the building with that hulking homicide detective, Hyde. BW could have sworn he saw the hacker smile directly into the security camera like he knew he was being watched. BW swore quietly under his breath. How had Wish messed this up? Had Hyde finally figured out what the terminal cop’s role was at police HQ?