Crisscross rj-8

by F. Paul Wilson

  It was almost ten A.M. when Jack arrived at Russell Tuit's apartment. Jack had looked him up a few years ago—before his conviction—and had made the mistake of pronouncing his name 7bo-it. "Tweet," Russ had told him. "As in Tweety Bird."

  "Hey, Jack," he said as he opened his door. Jack had called earlier, so Russ was expecting him. But apparently he wasn't expecting how Jack would be dressed. "Wow. Look at you. You didn't have to get all spiffed up for me."

  Jack wore a blue blazer over gray slacks, a blue oxford shirt, and a striped tie—all for his meeting with Jamie Grant.

  "Oh, hell! I didn't? You mean I could've worn jeans? Damn!"

  Russ laughed. "Come on in."

  His tiny two-room, third-floor apartment overlooked Second Avenue in the East Nineties. His five-story building looked like a converted tenement, wrought-iron fire escape and all. Even though the Tex-Mex bar and grill next door had yet to open for the day, his front room was redolent of grilled meat and mesquite smoke. Rumbling traffic from the street below provided sub-woofer Muzak.

  Russ himself was the quintessential computer geek: a pear-shaped guy in his early thirties, big head, short bed-head red hair, and a blackhead-studded forehead; he wore an i-pipe T-shirt, baggy jeans, and ratty flip-flops. Looked like he'd been designed by Gary Larson.

  Jack glanced around the barely furnished front room and noticed a laptop on the desk in the far corner. He hadn't asked during their brief and intentionally oblique phone conversation, but he'd been sure Russ would have some sort of computer.

  Jack nodded to it. "You're not worried your parole officer will drop by and see that?"

  "No problem. My parole says I'm not to go online or consort with other hackers. But not to have a computer at all—that'd be cruel and unusual, man."

  "Staying offline… knowing you, how're you going to survive twenty-five years of that?"

  Russ had been caught hacking into a number of bank computers and coding them to transfer a fraction of a cent of each international transaction to his Swiss account. He'd been sitting back, collecting well into six figures a year until someone got wise and sicced the Treasury Department's FinCEN unit on him. His lawyer pled him down to two years of soft time in a fed pen but the judge imposed a quarter-century ban on going online.

  He offered a sickly grin. "Only twenty-two-point-three-seven-six years to go." The grin brightened. "But you've heard of cyber cafes, haven't you?"

  "Yeah. You're not afraid they'll catch you?"

  "I'm pretty sure they're monitoring my lines, but they don't have the manpower to follow me every time I go out for a cuppa." He rubbed his hands together. "So. Whatcha got for me?"

  "Well, it's what you're going to get for me."

  "Long as it's not an online thing, I'll see what I can do."

  "Okay. I need to find a way to erase a hard drive and make it look like an accident."

  Russ dropped into the swivel chair by his computer. "Windows?"

  Jack tried to envision the computer he'd seen in Cordova's attic back in September. It hadn't looked like a Mac.

  "Yeah. Pretty sure."

  "Well, you could reformat it and reinstall Windows, but that doesn't happen by accident. He'll know." He leaned forward. "Why don't you tell me exactly what you want done."

  Jack hesitated on baring the specifics, then realized he didn't have to.

  "This guy's got certain files on his computer I want to wipe out, but if just those files disappear, he'll know who's behind it. So I want to wipe all his files."

  "What about backups?"

  "My gut tells me he stashes those someplace where, say, a fire wouldn't hurt them."

  Russ grinned. "And you want to follow him to the backup."

  "You got it."

  Not exactly, but why waste time explaining it to someone who didn't need to know.

  Russ thought a moment, then snapped his fingers. "Got it! HYRTBU!"

  "Her taboo? I don't need voodoo, 1—"

  Russ laughed and spelled it for him. "It's a mischief virus. Deletes all kinds of files—docs, jpegs, waves, mpegs, gifs, pdfs, and just about every other suffix you've ever seen—without harming the programs. In fact, it doesn't just delete the files, it overwrites them."

  Jack was relatively new to computers. He'd bought his first about a year ago and was still feeling his way.

  "What's the difference?"

  "When something is deleted, it's still there on the disk. You can't get to it through the operating system because its references are gone from the system tables, but it isn't gone until it's erased or overwritten with another file."

  "But if you can't get to it—"

  Russ was shaking his head. "You can get to it. All you need is a data recovery program, and there are dozens of them."

  A scary thought, that.

  "But HYRTBU overwrites every file and leaves a doc with the same name in its place."

  "Doc?"

  "Yeah. A document file, each with the same message: 'Hope You Remembered To Back Up!' Get it? It's an—"

  "An acronym, yeah." Jack was baffled. "You mean someone sat down and spent all that time writing the code for this HYRTBU thing, just so he can screw up strangers' hard drives?" He shook his head. "Some people have way too much time on their hands."

  "Guy probably justifies it by telling himself he's teaching his victims a valuable lesson: Always back up your files. I bet once you've been hit by HYRTBU you become a compulsive backer-upper."

  "But still…"

  "Hey, it's like Everest, man. You do it because it's there. Back when I was a kid, in my phreaking days, I used to break into the phone company's computers just to see if I could. And then I'd push it to see how far I could go, you know, seeking system mastery. Of course later I figured how to get myself free long distance, but that wasn't how it started."

  "All right, Sir Hillary, how do we get HYRTBU into this computer?"

  "Easiest way is to send it with an e-mail. Guy opens the attached file and, if he's doesn't have his AV setup to screen e-mail, kablooey—he's toast."

  "Audio visual?"

  "Antivirus software."

  "1 don't know the guy's e-mail address, don't even know if he goes online."

  Russ looked glum. "Everybody goes online. Everybody but me." He sighed. "Well then, you've got to get to his computer and physically slip the virus into his system."

  "I'm planning to visit his office."

  "Perfect. What's his rig like? New? Old?"

  "Unless he's replaced it, I'd say it has a few miles on it."

  "Great. A floppy should do it. For a very reasonable fee I can put together a special boot disk that'll get you past any password and AV protection he's got and infect his hard drive."

  "How reasonable?"

  "How's a half K sound?"

  "Sounds like a lot."

  "Hey, I got expenses."

  Jack made a show of looking around. "Yeah. I can see."

  He spotted a variety of blank invoice forms on Russ's desk. He picked one up. Yellow Pages was printed across the top next to the walking-fingers logo in the upper-left corner.

  "Oh, no. The invoice game?"

  Russ shrugged. "Hey, I gotta make ends meet."

  Phony invoices… a small-time, hit-or-miss scam. A guy like Russ would invoice medium-to large-size companies for services that hadn't been rendered. Unless someone was watchdogging it, more often than not the invoices got passed to the accounting or bookkeeping department where they were paid.

  "You're on parole, Russ. You get caught, you're back inside, and most likely not in a country club like last time."

  "Yeah, but they gotta catch me first. And then they gotta convict me. You see, nobody ever bothered to trademark 'Yellow Pages' or the walking fingers. They're public domain. Now, check out the lower-left corner."

  Jack squinted at the tiny print. " 'This is a solicitation'?"

  "Right. As long as I've got that there, I'm within the law—at least the letter of the law."r />
  "So you go through the Yellow Pages and bill companies for their listings."

  He grinned. "The bigger ones with the display ads are the best. They advertise in so many places they expect lots of invoices and don't look too closely. Works like a charm."

  Jack tossed the invoice blank onto the desk and shook his head. "Still… you're on parole…"

  "What else am I gonna do? I was a frosh at CCNY when I caught the hacking bug and dropped out. I know one thing, man, and I'm not allowed to use it. Shit, I'm not even allowed to work in Circuit City. And I need money for tuition."

  "Tuition?"

  "Yeah, I gotta look like I'm bettering myself, so I'm taking courses back at CCNY. Started as an English major, so I figure I'll go back to that, look like I'm trying for a degree. Makes my parole officer happy, at least."

  "But not you."

  He shook his head. "Taking a lit course. Now I know why I dropped out. Prof's got us wasting our time reading Marcel Marceau."

  Jack blinked. "Um, Marcel Marceau was a mime. A man of few words, you might say."

  "Well, then, Marcel somebody. Long-winded guy—zillions of words about nothing. The most boring shit you've ever read." He shook his head again. "My life sucks."

  "If you're trying to break my heart, it worked. Five hundred for the disk. Half down, half when I know it did the job."

  Russ's face broke open with a big grin. "I'll have it for you tonight. Jack, you just made my day!"

  Deadpan, Jack reached for his wallet. "That's me. Jackie Sunshine. It's what I'm about. I live for moments like this."

  3

  Jack didn't feel completely naked walking through town without at least one weapon hidden somewhere on his person, merely stripped to his underwear. At the stroke of noon he arrived at The Light offices, just west of Times Square. A peek through the glass doors of the front entrance made him glad he wasn't carrying. Jamie Grant hadn't been kidding: An armed guard and a metal detector waited just inside.

  After confirming that John Robertson was expected, the guard passed him through the detector without a hitch. He was told to wait until someone from editorial came to escort him up.

  Soon a heavyset woman with short, curly ginger hair and a puffy face showed up and extended her hand. Jack immediately recognized the voice.

  "Robertson? Jamie Grant."

  As they shook hands, Jack checked her out: Early forties, about five-five, a large chest and bulky torso but thin arms and legs. She wore a loose white blouse over dark brown slacks. Small gold earrings, thin gold necklace, no rings. Her eyes were bloodshot and she smelled like an ashtray. Other than that she was a dream girl.

  "Thanks for meeting me." He handed her one of the Robertson cards, then jerked a thumb at the metal detector. "I'd thought you might be kidding. Why the high security?"

  "It's new. We've got an ongoing threat situation here. The Light pisses off a lot of people, so we're always getting one kind of threat or another. But nothing like what's come in since my Dormentalism article." She flashed a nicotine-stained smile. "I now hold the death-threat record. Hallelujah." She turned and motioned him to follow. "Let's retire to my boudoir."

  She led him to a messy little third-floor office that looked like it had been trashed by burglars on PCP. Books, magazines, newspapers, printouts everywhere. As she lifted an elastic-bound pile of papers off a chair, Jack noticed that her right pinkie was only a stub—the last two bones were missing.

  She dropped the papers on the floor. "Have a seat."

  Grant plopped into the chair behind her littered desk and lit a cigarette. Jack noticed how the skin on her right index and middle fingers was the color of rotten lemon rind, but then his gaze drifted again to the pinkie stub. On the way in he'd seen one of those This Is a No Smoking Building signs but didn't bother to mention it now. He couldn't imagine her caring.

  "So," she said, leaning back and blowing a long stream into the air, "you say you're on the trail of a missing Dementedist."

  Without using names, Jack went over everything Maria Roselli had told him about Johnny.

  Her smile was wry as she shook her head. "And you think you're going to find sonny boy by joining the church? Forget it—unless of course you're willing to spend lots of years and lots of bucks."

  "How so?"

  "You'll enter as an RC, the lowest of the low, and you'll have to climb pretty far up the FL before you can get close enough to the TO to sneak a peek at any membership files."

  Jack twisted a finger into his right ear. "I thought we were speaking English here."

  Grant laughed. "Dormentalese. They use initials for everything. I'll translate: You'll enter as a Reveille Candidate, and you'll have to climb a good way up the Fusion Ladder before you can get close enough to the Temple Overseer."

  Jack realized he had more to learn than he'd thought.

  "And the 'lots of bucks'?"

  "This is what you've got to realize about the Dementedist situation: The church is set up to squeeze every last dollar from its members. They promise self-realization, maximization of potential—the goals of a million self-help books—but they go beyond that. At the end of their rainbow is a supernatural pot of gold. But there's one major catch: You can't do it alone. You need to become a member of the Church, you need Dementedist guides to help you along the ten rungs of the ladder to 'Full Fusion.'"

  "That would be FF, I assume?"

  "Keerect. The Fusion Ladder—that's the steps it takes to fuse your xel-ton with its Hokano counterpart—started out with five rungs, then it went to seven, now it's ten. The instruction sessions, the books, the tapes, and all the other paraphernalia for each new rung cost more than the last. The FAs—that's Fusion Aspirants—are promised increasing powers as they advance along the FL. And then there's the big carrot of Full Fusion where you're promised to be transformed into some sort of demigod."

  "Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound?"

  "Pretty much. But Dementedism differs from most religions in one important respect: Yeah, it offers everlasting happiness, but it has no good and evil, no good god versus bad god, no Jesus and Satan, no yin and yang. You've been separated from your Hokano xelton, so you can't expect perfection. If you've failed in the past, it's not your fault. All you need do is weather the long process of fusing the two halves of your xelton and your problems will be over. You'll go from homo sap to homo superior."

  "'Not your fault.' I can see how that would go over big."

  "Yeah, the everyone-is-a-victim Zeitgeist has swelled their ranks. But it can cost you about a quarter mil before you're through. To reach the High Council you've got to achieve the tenth level of fusion… hardly anyone gets past the eighth unless they're very rich, very determined, and more than a little crazy. Members get so wrapped up in the FL situation they take out second and third mortgages on their homes to finance the climb. The ones who don't have any assets either go out and recruit new members or mortgage themselves to the church as volunteers."

  "What does that do for them?"

  "Helps them pay the fees for their current FL rung. But they receive discounts instead of cash. They also get discounts for every new member they bring in."

  "Sounds like a Ponzi scheme, or multilevel marketing."

  Jamie nodded. "Amway as religion. Headhunters and staff workers paid in a currency not subject to withholding, Social Security, or Medicare deductions."

  "Nice."

  "But there's a more sinister side to it. Not only does this serfdom situation keep you in almost constant contact with other Dementedists—thereby reducing exposure to conflicting opinions—but the church works the volunteers till they drop, knowing full well that exhaustion makes people more susceptible to suggestion."

  "They sound like swell folks. Is that why you're after them?"

  Jack saw Grant stiffen. He sensed a door slamming closed.

  "Is this conversation about Dementedism or me?"

  "Demen—Dormentalism, of course, but I was just�
��"

  "Just nothing! None of this is about me! And I swear, if they sent you here on a fishing expedition—"

  Whoa, Jack thought. I do believe I've touched a nerve.

  He held up his hands. "Hey, hey, easy. I'm not after you and I'm not after Dormentalism. I just want to find sonny boy."

  She seemed to relax, but just a little. Jack realized she was stretched tight. Scared.

  "Sorry for sounding paranoid, but you don't know what it's been like since that article came out. Phone calls—I had to change my home number—threats, lawsuits, people following me, every type of harassment you can imagine."

  "You're not paranoid if they're really after you."

  "Oh, they are. When I applied for membership I gave a phony name and address. Didn't take long before they found out. They designated me UP—that's Unwelcome Person—and kicked me out. But with that article I graduated to what's known as a Wall Addict—"

  "That would be a WA?"

  "Right. But I'm not just a WA, I'm also IS—In Season. That's an 'enemy of the Church' and fair game for all their smear tactics. They use character assassination to try to discredit you privately and professionally, and they're ruthless. And now I hear that some person or persons unknown have been prying into my personal situation—financials, past relationships, hell, even the movies I rent. That's why you see so few investigative pieces on De-mentedism. Reporters and editors are afraid of the shit storms that follow."

  "But not The Light."

  She allowed a tight little smile. "No. Not The Light. That's why I stick with the small-time weekly—formerly small-time, I should say. Those ex-clusives we had on the Savior last June bumped our circulation and it's stayed up."

  Jack wondered what she'd do if she knew she was talking to the so-called Savior.

  "I've had offers from every other paper in town, plus the Washington Post and Times, even the San Francisco Chronicle, but this is where I stay. And you know why? Because The Light isn't afraid of anyone. It's not in the pocket of some larger corporation that's always trying to cover its ass. George Meschke's a tough son of a bitch of an editor, but he's fearless. Oh, he makes damn sure you've got your facts straight and your sources lined up, but if that's all copacetic, then he goes to press."