Virtually Undead

by Robert I. Katz

  “Good thinking.” Harold Strong smiled. “The forces of truth and justice have already reached that conclusion.”

  “Then you must have followed up. How? Are there any surveillance cameras in the area?”

  “Yes. All the surveillance cameras have been checked. They show nothing and nobody suspicious, except for the usual assortment of homeless people in the vicinity. We have also checked the mechanism itself. It seems that there is an arrangement of baffles and manifolds that shut off as the capacity of the pipelines becomes overwhelmed, which shunts the runoff out into the local waterways. We did find some suspicious fingerprints. They belong to a man named Joseph Rogan, a vagrant living on the streets in the neighborhood. Joseph has a long history of alcoholism, drug abuse and schizophrenia. Joseph, to put it bluntly, is one hundred percent out of his mind. However, Joseph was wearing an almost new coat and he had cash in his pocket to the tune of one-hundred-forty-two dollars. He was arrested and freely admitted to having sabotaged the overflow mechanism. He claims that he was paid to do so. The fact that he had more money than any vagrant could normally come by certainly supports his statement.”

  Michael stared at him. “Then what?”

  “Then nothing. Joseph was able to tell us that the person who paid him is male, white and has dark hair. Beyond that, he either doesn’t remember or never noticed. He can’t give us a height, an eye color or even an approximate build. Joseph’s observational skills, along with his perception of reality, are not what any of us would term reliable.”

  “Where is Joseph now?”

  “Sitting in a psych ward, happy as can be, eating three meals a day, watching television and sleeping on a bed that you and I might find lumpy, but to Joseph is unimaginable luxury.”

  “What else did he say? Anything?”

  “The guy who paid him seemed nice. That was about it.”

  “Nice,” Michael said.

  Harold Strong nodded. “Like I said, not a mental giant. Joseph can barely string two sentences together, much less express a coherent train of thought. It’s a wonder he was able to follow directions, but it’s not a complex mechanism. All Joseph had to do was climb down an open manhole and turn a couple of valves.”

  “The system was sabotaged twice. Did Joseph do it both times?”

  “He says that he did. His were the only fingerprints we found.”

  “And all of these incidents could be completely unrelated.”

  “True.”

  “So, it’s a dead end,” Michael said.

  Harold Strong shrugged, reached into the box and retrieved another donut, cinnamon, this time. He took a bite out of the donut and thoughtfully chewed. “Pretty much,” he said.

  Chapter 15

  The rest of the conversation had been unproductive. Michael expressed displeasure at not having been told that at least some progress had been made on the case. Harold Strong had been unimpressed with his displeasure. Michael’s involvement was, from a cop’s point of view, both superficial and of little significance. Michael had no need to know and Harold Strong had more important things to do than keep him informed. Michael resented this opinion but he couldn’t argue with it and he didn’t try.

  Harold Strong thanked him, both for his interest and for the donuts, and that was that.

  After Michael left, Al Horowitz wandered into Harold Strong’s office. He sat down in the visitor’s chair and said, “What do you think?”

  “You were listening?”

  “I was.”

  “I think he’s clever, but he’s stumbling around like a bull in a china shop.” Harold Strong shrugged. “At least he seems to know it.”

  “He’s given us some information we didn’t have.” Al Horowitz frowned. “I have to admit to some embarrassment over that.”

  “If it can be believed. A payoff to Sandra Devine and Gary Woodson does open up a few possibilities.” Harold Strong swallowed the final bite of his donut. “Six degrees of separation: that was also clever.”

  “No matter what line of bullshit he tries to sell us, there is no way that he got that information legally.”

  Harold Strong shrugged. “A few items on a spreadsheet.”

  “And nobody,” Al Horowitz said, “so far as I know, has ever managed to hack into the financial system of the Cayman Islands. The information came from somewhere else.”

  Both men fell silent as they pondered this. Harold Strong sipped from a mug of Earl Gray tea. “Hacking is almost always done at the weakest points. Sandra Devine and Gary Woodson would have had personal computers. The security in a Cayman Island financial institution is an order of magnitude greater than that of a PC. What happened to those computers after they died?”

  “I guess we should find out,” Harold Strong said.

  Al Horowitz nodded. “Yeah.”

  It turned out that Sandra Devine’s PC had wound up in the hands of her twelve-year old niece, a student in middle school. Gary Woodson had left all his worldly possessions to his brother, a graphic artist in Columbus, Ohio. The brother used the PC now and then to surf the web but had recently purchased a more powerful computer that he used for design work. Both Sandra Devine and Gary Woodson’s PC’s were equipped with Norton Security, but neither had been updated for more than two years.

  “Yeah,” Al Horowitz said. “That would do it.”

  Harold Strong glumly nodded.

  Michael had a date with Stephanie that evening, their third. He was looking forward to it.

  In the afternoon, he had surgery for removal of an acoustic neuroma. His portion of the case went smoothly, and when he was done, the ENT surgeons took over to insert a cochlear implant. Stephanie also had to work late, so they met at the restaurant, a Thai place that Michael had never eaten at but Stephanie loved. He arrived first and had just been shown to a table when Stephanie walked in. He enjoyed watching her as she came toward the table. She had a glint in her big, dark eyes and a crooked smile, just for him, he thought. She sat down, breathed a sigh, picked up her menu and seemed to relax.

  “Rough day?” he asked.

  “Long day, but now it’s over.” She opened the menu and studied it. “And I’m starving.”

  They settled on an assortment of dishes and agreed to share. The place had an excellent beer list. They decided to split a full-sized bottle of Duvel.

  “I admire your taste in beer,” Michael said. “Most women I know stick to white wine with almost everything.”

  She frowned at him. “I’m trying to decide if that’s a sexist comment.”

  “Not at all. I specified ‘women I know,’ thus stating upfront that my experience is limited to a specific subset of womankind, consequently avoiding any possible stereotypes.”

  The waiter arrived, took their order and asked, “How hot would you like that?”

  Michael glanced at Stephanie. She grinned. “The maximum,” she said. “Four chili peppers.”

  Oh, crap, Michael thought. “Really?” he said. The waiter gave her a doubtful look.

  She shook her head. “Okay, then. Three chili peppers.”

  The waiter shrugged and walked away.

  “Four chili peppers?” Michael said.

  “We lived in Singapore for seven years when I was a kid. My father was teaching at the National University. I got used to it. Even four chili peppers is mild compared to what you get in Singapore. I keep telling them I want it hotter but they never believe me.”

  Michael drew a deep breath. “Okay,” he said. “Three. I’m game.”

  The appetizers arrived quickly. First, chicken satay, lightly crisped on the outside and tender on the inside, redolent of curry, peanut sauce and a small bowl of cucumber salad on the side. Calamari were tender, barely breaded, then fried, with sweet chili sauce. Neither dish was particularly hot. The main course arrived a few minutes later. First, red snapper, with a brown crust, smothered in a fragrant sauce with flecks of diced onion and green chilis. A half crispy duck lay in a shimmering, red pool, surrounded by
snow peas, bamboo shoots, chopped onion and cubes of eggplant. Michael’s mouth began to water.

  Stephanie spooned some duck and white rice onto her plate while Michael carved the fish. She smiled at him. Michael took a forkful of snapper and drew a deep breath. “Here goes,” he said, and popped it in his mouth.

  The fish was sweet and sour, very fresh, with a kick of heat and ginger. The duck was rich, with a complex flavor of lime leaves, lemon grass, coconut, a hint of fish sauce and chilis. Many chilis. Michael felt a wave of fire spread through his mouth, up his nose and down his throat. He gasped and took a long swallow of beer.

  “How do you like it?” Stephanie said.

  “Great,” he wheezed.

  “Hot enough?”

  “Barely. Could be hotter.”

  “Yeah.” She sighed. “I think so, too.”

  Ten minutes later, Stephanie narrowed her eyes at the nearly empty bottle of Duvel. “What do you think? Another beer?”

  “We’d be fools not to.” Michael’s head was swimming, his fingers and toes tingling. A light sheen of sweat covered the top of his head. He noticed the waiter, smirking at him from across the room. “Great stuff,” Michael said. “We should have gone with four chilis.”

  Stephanie snickered.

  “You are an evil woman,” Michael said.

  He barely remembered the rest of the meal. They talked about something, probably not important. After a while, his mouth and throat subsided to a continuous burn, and he gamely struggled on to the end.

  “Tell me,” Michael said. “How do you feel about sushi?”

  She wrinkled her nose. “Despite my childhood in Asia, I never warmed up to raw fish. I’m okay with a California roll.” She wrinkled her nose. “As long as it’s cooked.”

  Michael breathed a sigh of relief.

  Finally, Stephanie sighed and patted her lips with a napkin. The second bottle of beer was empty. “Dessert?”

  “Why not?”

  She narrowed her eyes at him. He thought that he might have been swaying. He wasn’t sure. “Ice cream,” she said. “Coconut and mango. It will cool you off.”

  “That sounds good.”

  They each ordered two scoops. Michael ate it slowly. The cold, smooth creaminess coated his mouth and throat, knocking the burn down a couple of levels. “Great meal,” he said. “We’ll have to do it again, soon.”

  She looked at him, considering, then seemed to come to a decision. “Why don’t we go back to my place?” she said. “The night is still young.”

  A slow smile crossed Michael’s face. “Great,” he said.

  He left early, while Stephanie was still asleep. It was Saturday, but he had inpatients to see in the hospital. He showered, tiptoeing around the apartment so as not to wake her, left a note expressing his appreciation for the evening and suggesting that they get together again in a couple of days.

  Before he left, he took one last look at Stephanie, naked and curled up on one side of the bed. The blankets had slipped off one smooth shoulder. Wow, he thought. He closed the door carefully behind him and took the elevator down to the lobby, a spring in his step, feeling better than he had in weeks.

  Rounds over, orders written, all patients tucked in and doing well, he grabbed some breakfast in the cafeteria, then left the hospital, changed into sweats and went for a jog in the park. He didn’t push it, a nice easy couple of miles, thinking while he ran.

  What did they have? Obviously, somebody with the ability to hack into the traffic control and city power systems. Real Skynet, Hal 9000 sort of stuff. Spooky and frightening on so many levels…but on second thought, was any of this obvious at all? Somebody with the ability to influence the traffic control and city power systems. That was obvious, but there was more than one way to influence a system. The sewer system was low tech. The simple turning of a valve had sufficed to cause a significant amount of damage. The fact that the traffic control and power systems were connected to the web did not necessarily mean that the web had been used to interfere with them.

  But what was the motive?

  Michael, whose car had once been keyed when parked downtown, and whose parents’ house had on more than one occasion been bombarded with eggs, toilet paper and silly string on Halloween, was very much aware that the simple urge to commit mayhem was a common motivation. Some people just enjoyed fucking things up.

  This all seemed a little too elaborate for such simple, adolescent impulses, however. No, most likely, somebody, somewhere, had something to gain. Love or money, and considering that a corporation on the verge of bringing some new, innovative products to market had been a principal target, money seemed more likely.

  And really, there was no discernible tie-in between screwing with the city-wide infrastructure and Remington Simulations except the fact that both sets of crimes seemed related to computer hacking and both had taken place around the same time. And if they were being critical (why not be critical, a defense attorney certainly would be) the business with the traffic lights, the power outage and the gas line could have been glitches in the system, simple mechanical failures, and not crimes at all.

  As a physician and surgeon, Michael was required to attend a monthly meeting of the departmental Quality Assurance Committee. The more complex a system and the fewer fail safes built into the system, the more that could go wrong with it. That was simple, standard dogma. Regarded as one, giant, integrated system, New York City was pretty damned complex, with eight million residents and billions of moving parts.

  And whatever can go wrong, will go wrong.

  During World War II, there had been over 400 accidents involving B-17 bombers. These had all been investigated and the conclusion of the investigations was always the same: human error. The pilots had screwed up. Finally, some bright boy with a wider perspective had pointed out that the controls for the wing flaps and the controls for the landing gear were identical and right next to each other on the control panel.

  Whoops. They changed the knobs, so that neither set of controls could be mistaken for the other. The crashes stopped.

  What did this have to do with the current situation? Maybe nothing. Let’s put it aside for the moment. Michael was not equipped to deal with the ins and outs of the citywide infrastructure. He just wasn’t, and all the speculation in the world was not going to allow Michael Foreman, MD, to solve this particular set of problems.

  Ralph Guthrie had been killed, however, and nine other people had been killed with him. There was no doubt about that.

  It helped, when you were stumped by a problem, to go back to the beginning, to examine your first assumptions, to re-confirm what you thought you already knew. Michael didn’t know who had anything to gain, but there were obvious possibilities. Remington Simulations’ competitors, for one thing. Bellerion the Great had given him a list of companies, most small, but some divisions of much larger companies, that were working on the same basic ideas and products. Michael doubted that Sony, Nintendo, Acer or Microsoft felt threatened by Remington Simulations, but they were, in some sense, competitors. And there were others.

  He finished his run, showered, changed and sat down by a window, staring without seeing at the pedestrians far below.

  Slowly, a smile spread across his face. He had an idea.

  “Why would you want to know that?” James Jameson asked.

  Ralph Guthrie had taken James Jameson and Ellen Scott at face value, assuming that they were the corporate VIP’s they had presented themselves as, but a little digging had revealed that the two were glorified salesmen, hired to sell the product. Jameson may or may not be acquainted with the bottom line situation, but he seemed like a good place to start.

  “When the dust settles,” Michael said, “your technology and your physical assets will still be worth something, possibly quite a lot.”

  Jameson gave a small, disinterested shrug. “Not my business. I’m an employee, not a shareholder.”

  “But it might be my business,” Michael
said. “I am a private investor. Buying low and selling high is what I do.”

  Bullshit, of course, but Michael got a kick out of saying it. Was this interfering with a police investigation? He didn’t think so. All he was doing was pretending to be something he was not and asking a few questions. And anyway, maybe he wasn’t pretending at all. He was a neurosurgeon, though he had not announced this particular qualification to James Jameson. He had a few hundred thousand sitting in a money market account. If he wanted to invest his money, whose business was it, anyway?

  “I would like to know,” Michael said, “what the corporation’s plans are?”

  “Right now, our plans are to lay as low as we possibly can, to cooperate with the police and the federal authorities and see how it all plays out. Obviously, we’ve been sabotaged. That might, when all is said and done, translate into some sympathy.”

  “And there is no such thing as bad publicity,” Michael said. “Isn’t that so?”

  Jameson gave him an incredulous look. “That might be the case if you were a Hollywood celebrity. Bad boys make credible villains. It’s certainly not true if you’re trying to build a reputation as a manufacturer of reliable, quality products. Nobody wants to buy something that might turn around and kill them.”

  “Undoubtedly true,” Michael said. “However, as you’ve indicated, once the police and the FBI get to the bottom of whatever has taken place, you will wind up with a company that is far better known than it used to be. That notoriety can presumably be leveraged.”

  Talk about bullshit…Michael was enjoying this far more than he had expected to.

  James Jameson held a hand up and waggled it back and forth. “Maybe,” he said, clearly unconvinced.

  “So,” Michael said. “Who stands to gain the most if Remington Simulations goes out of business?”

  “Vista Technologies. Industrial Dream Machines. Gerard Avionics.” Jameson shrugged. “Maybe Elsinore Light and Fantasy. They’re all working on similar products.”