by Alan Brudner
I didn't know much of anything, to tell you the truth.
I wondered whether there was an electronic equivalent of water torture, of bamboo shoots under the fingernails, of ways to interrogate her under hot lights, to make her talk.
Or whether they'd do those things to me, if they managed to track me down. It wouldn't take much to torture me. My head was pounding and I had enough acid in my stomach to refill a car battery.
But Eliza and I had a plan, and I was intent on keeping up my end of it.
I highlighted the next five e-mail addresses and clicked SEND. The screen froze for a second, then declared in bold: YOUR MESSAGES HAVE BEEN SENT.
I was back in business.
My fingers mechanically highlighted names, double-clicked the mouse on SEND, highlighted the next group of names.
My mind wandered back to the days when we taught Schuyler the Alphabet Song. We once had a heated debate over whether the song should end with "tell me what you think of me," which is how I learned it, or "next time won't you sing with me," which I viewed as a corruption but Eliza thought was more nurturing.
One Fish, Two Fish, The Cat In The Hat, Are You My Mother?, Horton Hears A Who, Hop On Pop. Titles and shiny red and blue and yellow covers raced through my mind, along with exaggerated illustrations of odd animals: Sneetches and Zax and Foxes in Boxes.
I had gotten through the P's by four o'clock in the afternoon. The process was slower than I had expected. Still no sign of Eliza. I wondered where Eno had gone on vacation. Whether Bart Casey had returned from the Caymans.
The 60 Minutes program was scheduled to begin at seven. I had completed sixteen letters of the alphabet in fourteen hours. Ten letters left; only three more hours. I would have to quicken the pace. And hope nothing went wrong. Of course, I still had the R's and S's and T's. I remembered from my Scrabble-playing days that more words began with those than any other letters. But these were names, not words, so I didn't know if the same principles applied.
I tried to work faster, tried groups of six instead of five. Held down the mouse button on a single long click rather than double-clicking. I don't know whether it made a difference. But before I got through with the S's, Eliza reappeared.
She was paler, duller, marred by stray dots that would have been called snow in the days of rabbit-ears and Leave It To Beaver.
She was also upset, breathing heavily.
"There's no time to finish, Cliff," she said, her voice fainter. You have to destroy me. Now."
I was off-guard; it was premature. Her absence had permitted me to ignore this part of the plan, make believe it wouldn't be necessary.
"Where were you?"
"Split up into ten different hiding places. To make myself harder to locate. But the codes that enable me to exist as the image you see were all tagged when I cloned the viruses. They're all traceable. And the tracking software is decoding me. I can sense it. They'll figure it out. You've got to do it before it's too late, Cliff. For you and for Sky."
"But I haven't completed the alphabet! What if his CybroMail address starts between T and Z?"
"No time."
"Okay. What do I do?"
"It's not hard. You exit CybroMail. You click on the icon that looks like a little file cabinet. It lists all the files. You click on "Mom.ava." Another little menu pops up. And you click on Uninstall. It asks if you're sure you want to uninstall the program. You click on Yes. Then the process takes a minute or two. It may ask you again if you're sure. You answer in the affirmative."
I stared at her.
"I don't want to lose you a second time, Eliza."
"It's our only chance," she said. "And Sky's."
Then she smiled.
"What on earth could be so funny?" I asked, wiping a palmful of sweat beads off my forehead.
"If we were going to be in Casablanca," she said, "I always thought I'd play Ilsa. Not Rick. But I have an irresistible urge to tell you that if you don't uninstall me soon, you'll regret it—maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon and for the rest of your life."
I felt a widening grin I couldn't stop. Through all of it, she was still the Eliza Briggs I had married.
"We'll always have Paris," I said. I gripped the mouse hard. My clammy palm trembled as it maneuvered the cursor to exit the program. Eliza winked and mouthed a kiss as I quietly whispered, "I love you, Shutterbug."
Then the screen went blank just before I puked all over the keyboard, hit my head on the corner of the desk and passed out.
Chapter 36
"Pretty complicated machine you have there," said a very tall man with a long slender neck, one of four men, two very tall and two very short. Each of them had a big silver crescent decorating the back of his white nylon jacket like a team emblem. As my vision crept back into focus I realized there were only two intruders.
"Expensive looking," said the one who was shorter by two feet but had a voice like an electric bass compared to the big guy's tin whistle. The short guy was also considerably rounder and had spiked hair that looked as if he had sucked it dry with a vacuum cleaner hose.
"You pay extra for the vomit on the keyboard?" said the one I started to think of as Giraffe.
"Hey, fella," said Hedgehog—you know which one he was—pointing to my cheek. "Looks like you had a pretty bad fall there."
"And a worse winter," I quipped, my knees cracking as I pulled myself up in an effort to sit lotus-style on my rug. My head felt as if a 3-year old was pounding colorful wooden shapes through it with a wooden hammer.
"Why don't you wash up," said Giraffe, or the bulging Adam's apple which I wasn't sure he controlled, or both. "Then we've got a few matters to discuss."
The icy bathroom water brought some circulation back to my face, cleared off the blood that had dried near my mouth. My cheek was swollen from its ill-planned rendezvous with the edge of my desk.
It was already five-thirty.
When I walked back into the den, I noticed that the keyboard was clean. Hedgehog saw me staring at it.
"Washed it," he said. "These expensive babies can withstand a little water."
"What do you guys want?" I asked. "Last time I looked, this was my house."
"Maybe," said Giraffe. "But it's got something of ours in it."
"Yeah," said Hedgehog. "Viruses. Car bombs and Trojan Horses and Pandora's Boxes. To name a few. Top-notch stuff."
"Viruses?" I tried to look incredulous. "Come closer, I'll sneeze on you."
"Don't play dumb, Mister Lightman. We know you're a hacker. Anybody who could break through our firewall—"
"With a system this sophisticated—"
"And with our viruses—"
"Okay," I said, nodding. I held up my hands, "I surrender" style. "How'd you find me?"
"We work in the Virus Control lab," said Giraffe. "Cybronics has two sister labs, Creation and Control."
"Right," said Hedgehog. "Our job is squelch, squash, destroy."
"But how do you know I have them?"
"Creation advised us they'd been copied," said Giraffe. "Well, Creation's not stupid. The company's state-of-the-art bugs didn't just decide to swim over here through the phone lines and take up residence."
"They're not sperm cells and this house isn't an egg," Hedgehog added.
"So Creation put a tracer on them?" I asked, trying to speak the language.
Giraffe nodded, laughed a wimpy nasal laugh for a guy whose vocal cords must have been as long as a yo-yo string.
"Even if I stole them, you guys are trespassing." I tried to sound stern, mad, as if I could do something to stop them. I don't think staring at them helped, but it was the only defense I could muster for a few moments. "So what do you want?"
"We're not criminals," said Hedgehog. "We just want what's rightfully ours."
"The computer," specified Giraffe.
I shook my head to clear it.
"The computer is mine," I said firmly. "It's the viruses that are yours."
&n
bsp; "You might have a point there, Mister Lightman," said Hedgehog. "Tell me, how did you get a multi-million dollar computer certified for Cybronics employee-only use?" He beamed, obviously figuring he had me. So I threw the question back at him like a hot potato.
"Don't you know about me?"
Hedgehog looked up at Giraffe. Giraffe looked down at Hedgehog. They made diagonal eye contact.
"We checked employee records," said Hedgehog.
"No Cybronics employees named Lightman," said Giraffe.
"That's because I do top secret work for Avery Kord," I said, trying not to hesitate. Kord's deletion of Schuyler's personnel files had become a lucky break. "Avery doesn't want me listed on any official documents. I'm what you might call an independent contractor."
"And we're supposed to believe that?" G and H asked simultaneously, their voices an odd duet.
"Nobody works directly with Mister Kord," Hedgehog said definitively. "We barely know the guy really exists."
Giraffe nodded.
I kept the tables turned.
"I have the computer," I pointed out.
"Big deal," they both shrugged in unison.
"It wasn't reported as stolen."
They nodded a bit.
"I got over the firewall"—I borrowed their terminology, not quite sure of what it meant—"and I knew exactly how to clone your viruses. From a top secret, digitally securitized facility." I hoped I sounded like I knew what I was talking about. I also realized these guys fit Eno's description of his visitors, Ben and Jerry. "And I know all about the winery."
The nods grew more pronounced, accompanied by furrowed brows.
"None of that proves squat," Hedgehog said, sounding uncertain.
"I'm going to let you guys in on a little secret," I replied. "You can check with the company if you want. We have a Code One lab down in Tampa."
"Code One?" they both asked. Four eyes widened like saucers. Maybe I had gone a little overboard. But my year of professional (okay, minor league) pitching taught me how to act unruffled even when you don't have your best stuff. Try to fool the batters with your calm approach, get them to swing at pitches outside the strike zone. Problem now was, I didn't have any relievers warming up in the bullpen.
"Secret. Unpublished. Unnamed and unaddressed," I said, trying to keep my voice steady. "It's at the Tampa Rey cigar factory. We do work for NASA. Spy satellite software. Star Wars. Foreign intelligence. I've been there. My work's related to that. But I can't tell you exactly what I do."
"Step out for a minute," Hedgehog said, motioning me toward the door.
I obliged and shut the door behind me. I couldn't hear exactly what they were saying, but I had the sense Hedgehog knew something about Tampa and maybe I had struck a chord.
They reopened the door.
"If you've been to our Tampa facility," said Hedgehog as I walked back in, "you have a special key."
I stared at him.
He stared back, eyes narrowed to their normal shape, figuring he called my bluff.
I zipped over to my bedroom and took Katie's key ring from the top of my dresser. I also grabbed my suitcase. I carried both back to the den.
"Here's my luggage," I said, plopping the old Gladstone in front of Hedgehog. "You'll note that the most recent airline tag says Tampa-St. Pete."
"Could've gone to Busch Gardens," he said, as if he still had me.
He didn't.
"Here's the key," I said, tossing him the ring. "If you've been there, you know which one it is." He grabbed it from the air, glanced at the plastic card key, stared at me in silence.
"Well?" I finally asked.
He rubbed the card key with his thumb. Then he smiled. "At Cybronics—"
"We make life worth living." I completed his sentence.
"He's okay," Hedgehog said to Giraffe.
"But he cloned the viruses," came the high-pitched reply. "We still have a job to do."
"He's right," agreed Hedgehog. "A job." He opened his white shirt-jacket and removed a Philips screwdriver.
"Look, let me make a suggestion." I grabbed his wrist hard and the screwdriver dropped to the floor. "Avery's gonna be on t.v. soon. I'm sure we'll all want to watch him. Why don't I just e-mail all the virus clones to your office? It won't take more than a minute."
"But you'll still have copies. They're proprietary. You're not allowed. If Mister Kord wants you to have them, he'll make sure you get them some other way."
I nodded. "What if I tell you that my whole purpose was to see if I could access them? To see how long it would take you guys to track me down, so I can report back to Avery on the integrity of our virus creation, maintenance and security programs?"
They looked at each other again.
"How'd we do?"
"You caught me in less than twenty-four hours," I said. "I think the country is in great hands."
"The country?" asked Hedgehog.
"Oops," I said with a smile. "I meant the company. Although there's still room for improvement."
"You'll report to Mr. Kord that Virus Control was right on your tail?"
"Absolutely."
"Okay," said Hedgehog. "You e-mail us the viruses. We'll check with our office to be sure the package is received in the in-box. But I'm afraid I have to add another step."
"What's that?"
"You'll have to destroy your copies."
"And the program you stole them with," added Giraffe. "Our systems show a complex stealth program of some kind. Something foreign and dangerous."
"I've got them all stored in one place. The stealth program stores them. You sure I have to destroy that one, once the viruses are gone?" I asked.
"Good cops wouldn't leave a car thief with his crowbar," he replied.
"You wouldn't want to cost us our jobs," added Hedgehog. "We've got to follow S.O.P."
"I hear you," I replied. "Hey, would you guys like a beer?"
"Nah," said Giraffe. "We're on the job."
"Just testing," I said. "I'll be sure you get another credit in your personnel files."
I walked up to the computer. The monitor was blank. Now I was playing their ballgame. I hoped I could fake it. I double-clicked the mouse. CybroMail appeared. The list of addresses scrolled right to the point at which I had left off.
"You're into your e-mail directory already?" asked Hedgehog.
"This guy's good," commented Giraffe. 'Look, his directory contains only Cybronics addresses."
"What's your address?" I asked.
"VIRUSBUSTERS," said Giraffe.
"Never would have guessed," I laughed, wondering if he meant [email protected]. I scrolled down. That address actually appeared. I highlighted the name and hit SEND. In about a second, the screen read: YOUR MESSAGE HAS BEEN SENT. Just like the thousands of others I had been sending.
"Good show," said Hedgehog. "Now I have to call to get confirmation."
He started toward my phone, then stopped and unclipped his own cellphone from his belt instead. He made his call and was advised that a new CybroMail message had been received. Unlike a regular message, he was told, the new one appeared as an icon resembling a blue Tiffany's box with a white ribbon tied around it. Eliza's handiwork.
"I like your style," Hedgehog said as he clicked off the phone. "Now let's get rid of your virus file and the theft program."
I sat in my chair in front of the monitor. I tried to recall exactly what Eliza told me to do to uninstall her. I exited CybroMail and saw a little icon that resembled a file cabinet. I clicked and it listed a large number of files. I scrolled down to Mom.ava and highlighted it.
I was about to double-click the mouse when I heard Hedgehog's husky voice from above and behind me.
"This thing is called MOM?" he asked.
I thought about it for a few seconds. I couldn't remember what Schuyler said MOM stood for.
"Mind Over Matter," I said, trying to sound nonchalant.
"You hackers sure are creative," said Giraffe.
"Security?" Giraffe asked.
I nodded.
"Then you will understand why we have to kill you," said Giraffe, pulling a black revolver out of an inner pocket of his nylon Cybronics jacket and jamming it into my temple. He pressed so hard I thought he'd leave a hole even without pulling the trigger. I knew his immediate intent was to force me out of my desk chair. Needless to say, I quickly obliged.
"We just can't have people hacking around, breaking in, cracking Cybronics codes," Giraffe said.
"But thanks for highlighting the virus theft program," said Hedgehog, assuming my seat in front of the monitor. "Now that we know which one it is, we'll take it apart and learn exactly how you did it."
Chapter 37
"I clicked but it won't start up," said Hedgehog. "Something's wrong. The usual code sequences won't bypass the password requirement. And I can't find any back doors."
"Maybe we should try a core dump," offered Giraffe. He had pulled the muzzle off of my temple and moved behind me, but I could see in the hall mirror that he kept the gun pointing at my head at a downward angle like Oswald's bullet through Kennedy. Funny what you remember from college.
"That could fuck it up for good," Hedgehog answered. "We might never be able to reconfigure the data."
"You need the password," I said, uncertain of what they were talking about but able to breathe a little deeper anyway.
"Nah," said Hedgehog. "We'll just take the whole computer to the lab and study the program at our convenience."
"Yeah," said Giraffe. "Posthumously."
He laughed and walked around in front of me, keeping the revolver aimed at my head. From my vantage point, the barrel looked like the Holland Tunnel.
"Say your prayers," Hedgehog said, holding his wrist up and looking at his watch. "You have exactly one minute."
It was clear Giraffe wouldn't have much reluctance to pull the trigger. I wished I was with someone I loved. I was running out of time.
"Shutterbug!" I shouted as loudly and clearly as I could.