Germ

by Robert Liparulo

  Whenever she could, she’d quietly sit in on Goody’s case meetings, just to watch him work and learn the investigative ropes, if only vicariously. At first she was merely a curiosity, a pretty woman with a thing for criminal investigators.

  But her attraction to him had nothing to do with the man’s physical appearance. She conceded that his trim frame, chiseled features, and Caribbean-blue eyes were a handsome combination, but she believed his greatest asset was his ability to capture criminals.

  After all, physical characteristics were simply handed to you: luck of the draw. She knew that people found her attractive. But what she admired—and wanted people to admire in her—were accomplishments, strength of character, applied logic. Things for which a person had to work.

  Goody was a good investigator because he wanted to be, he tried to be. That’s what she found alluring.

  One day an argument had flared up between Goody and Special Agent Lou Preston, a surveillance expert, over the reason several wireless transmitters kept malfunctioning. Preston had placed the bugging devices under the tables in the visiting room of the Quincy State Correctional Facility to monitor conversations between a hood named Jimmy Gee, imprisoned there, and his brother-in-law, Mike Simon. The Bureau suspected Gee of negotiating with Simon to kill a young woman who had witnessed Gee murder a rival.

  But during Simon’s visits, white noise—in the form of continuous static, sudden loud pops, and high-pitched whistles—interrupted the reception for five or more minutes at a time.

  The snatches of conversations that were clear had led Goody to believe he had one last chance to get the scheme recorded. White noise at the wrong moment would blow attempted-murder charges against the two and could cost the young woman her life.

  “You’re telling me there’s nothing you can do?” complained Goody. He stood at the front of a small conference room. Someone had taped color pictures of the suspects on a dry-erase board. Beside them was a portrait of the intended victim, a blonde in her twenties with girl-next-door freckles and a radiant smile. A diagram of the visiting room leaned against a tripod. Humming fluorescents bathed the room in a bluish-white glow.

  Preston’s anger strained his voice and got him out of his seat. “You know electronic surveillance is prone to all kinds of problems—background noise, weak signals, even electromagnetic interference from the sun, for crying out loud! We’re lucky we got what we did.”

  Other agents around the long table appeared to shrink in their chairs. Julia watched in fascination from the back of the room.

  “So this girl’s gonna die because of solar flares?” Goody asked, pointing at the portrait.

  “I’m not saying that’s what’s causing the white noise. But we’ve considered everything.” Preston began counting on his fingers. “Are we too close to the kitchen? No. The laundry? The wood shop? The metal shop? No, no, no. Could one of the guards have a device to intentionally disrupt our reception? We’ve changed guards. Could Gee or Simon be carrying something? Our searches came up with zip. We’ve replaced the bugs and the receivers and the tape machines. What more do you want?”

  “I want to get an entire conversation recorded for once.”

  Preston threw up his arms and turned his back on Goody.

  Julia stared at the diagram on the tripod. Before realizing it, she had raised her arm.

  Goody gawked at her faintly waving hand, as rare in these meetings as albino bats from Mars. “Julia, what is it?”

  She cleared her throat. “Excuse me, sir, but what’s in the corner there?” She pointed toward the diagram. “There, where the row of tables stops? There’s room for another table, but it’s not on the diagram.”

  “Maybe they ran out of tables!” Preston blurted, obviously annoyed.

  “No,” said Goody. “It’s a Coke machine.”

  Julia stood, counting on her firm posture to belie her shaky confidence. She focused on Goody’s interested face, knowing that a glance at the other agents in the room would be as ruinous to her composure as a novice mountain climber’s look down.

  “Pop machines are not the problem,” Preston said sharply. “We’ve planted bugs in them before.”

  Goody waved him off. “Julia, what’s your point?”

  “If the electrical contacts—the brushes—in the Coke machine’s compressor motor are worn, they would spark more than usual. Electrical sparks produce broadband radio signals—white noise. Such broadband interference covers most of the usable RF spectrum, which is why replacing the bugs and receivers didn’t work.”

  Goody’s smile broadened. He looked at Preston, who just glared.

  “Like a household refrigerator,” she continued, walking to the front of the room. “The motor kicks on only when the temperature inside rises above a preset point. That’s why the interference is sporadic. And look …” She tapped a spot on the diagram. “We’re monitoring from this room on the other side of the wall from the Coke machine. Some motors spit out more sparks than others, even when they’re working fine. The brand that goes in this machine may be that kind. I’d bet even replacing the motor won’t entirely fix the problem, considering its proximity to the receiver.”

  She stopped, realizing she may have overstepped her bounds. She had said we, though she was not part of this investigation. Worse, she had flaunted her textbook understanding of electronics in front of Preston, who would find this humiliation hard to live down.

  She lowered her head and said quietly, “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Donnelley said. He grasped her shoulder and gave it a brief shake. “There’s nothing to be sorry about. It’s about time we reaped the benefit of your presence.” He winked.

  Julia was sure only she saw it.

  “Preston! What do you think of Agent Matheson’s analysis?”

  “Might work. We’ll unplug the thing and see.”

  He turned back to her, satisfied. “Thank you, Julia. Feel free to interrupt anytime.”

  She smiled and nodded. She left the room and walked back to her cubicle. Her mouth was dry. Despite the positive outcome, she feared that the way she had imposed herself on the tight group of men would label her overeager and unprofessional.

  A half hour later, Goody leaned into her cubicle. “Good job, kid,” he said. “I mean it.”

  “Thank you, sir. I’m sorry I stepped on Agent Preston’s toes like that.”

  “Preston needs more than his toes stepped on. Don’t worry about it. He knows you’re right. We all do.”

  “Sir? I wouldn’t unplug the Coke machine.”

  “Oh?”

  “Might tip ‘em off. If it doesn’t dispense pop, or the display lights are out, Gee and Simon might talk about everything but what you want them to.”

  “What do you suggest?”

  She squared herself in her chair. “Well, clip only the compressor’s wire. Do it early, or if you can’t be sure when Simon will show, run the wire through the wall and disengage it only when he shows up, so the drinks will still be cold.”

  Goody paused. “Good idea—again.” As he walked away, he called back to her, “Keep it up, and I’ll think you’re after my job.”

  I am, she thought.

  Turned out she was right; the Bureau captured Gee’s evil scheme on tape, helping to send him to prison for life, and Simon for five years. The incident started the department grapevine buzzing, and among other congratulations, Goody insisted on putting a letter of commendation into her personnel jacket. Julia soon found herself working alongside him, designing complicated surveillance strategies and brainstorming with other crack agents about the best way to nail felons.

  It was the beginning of a deep friendship. Though only fourteen years her senior, Goody treated her like a daughter, advising her on career decisions and trying to set her up with the few men he felt were worthy of her attention. By the time she spent that first Christmas with him and his wife and two boys, the feeling of family had permeated their relationship. And whe
n he was transferred to CDC-LED, he pulled enough strings to bring her along.

  seven

  Now Goody was out there on his own, a carload of killers probably bearing down on him at that very moment.

  The farther Julia moved away from the last place the SATD had detected him, the more panicked she became. That spot was at least twenty miles behind her now. The two center lanes of the urban, six-lane highway had given way to a wide grassy median, and the speed limit had jumped to seventy.

  Atlanta was gone, and so was her partner.

  She continued her breathing exercises, but the tension wouldn’t leave her. Use it, she thought. Turn the stress into sharper focus. What happened? What went wrong?

  She chided herself for losing him. She never should have left the hotel, despite Goody’s instructions. He hadn’t been thinking clearly, all those guns, trying to protect Vero. And when she left the area, she should have remained closer; two blocks was too far.

  Was she to blame for the SATD’s malfunction? Once it was running, the program required nothing from the user but watchful eyes. Trouble with the host satellite was a slim possibility; geosynchronous satellites were famously reliable, which accounted for their proliferation.

  In one of the SATD’s more innovative constructs, the locator signal was routed through a commercial satellite. Commercial communication satellites tended to be more robust, making them less susceptible to adverse weather. More important, hiding the SATD’s signal in a random, nongovernment satellite kept savvy criminals from blocking or scrambling it. Not even the operators of the host satellite were supposed to know the SATD was hitching a ride.

  She thought now that they might have uncovered her covert intrusion, but the program was designed to maintain surveillance even while feeding false data to the operators who had stumbled onto it. To them, the SATD program would look like a minor system corruption. While they tried untangling the glitch, the covert user had ample time to switch host satellites. At that time, the “glitch” would vanish, without so much as a trace of the program’s trespass.

  In this case, the signal had blinked out without warning. When she had tried to shift host satellites, she could have been pounding on a dead keyboard for all the good it did.

  Now that she thought about it, even the way it malfunctioned seemed odd. Most crashes resulted in the screen simply locking up; blinking cursors stopped blinking and keyboard commands yielded no computer activity at all, but the image always remained frozen on the screen. With this malfunction, first Goody’s signal had blinked out, then the map had disappeared—

  Almost as if someone had stolen it, one component at a time.

  Julia cranked the wheel right and braked to a stop. She punched the gear lever into park and unsnapped her seat belt. Her hands flew to the laptop’s keyboard. She used a special key code designed to override system failures to restart it, then waited for the operating system to load.

  She tapped a staccato rhythm on the laptop’s case as cold moisture seeped from her pores. The feeling that something hellish and huge had descended upon them threatened to cloud out all rational thought.

  As if someone had stolen it…

  Let me be wrong. Let me be wrong.

  A few seconds later, the program came online. She instructed it to uplink to the same host satellite. The screen flashed the words MAKING CONNECTION …

  Then CONNECTING TO: SATCOM6 455HR21911.89 v.62. *2

  After a brief pause, as the laptop’s hard drive whirled, the words on the screen changed to:

  CATALOG B-TREE ERROR

  RESOURCE FORK, BLOCK 672 (NODE 792, RECORD 4)

  > ?

  Julia moaned. The satellite was interpreting her current attempt to connect as unauthorized probing, so it was sending a false error message back to her to make her think the old program was nothing more than a system problem. This red herring would fool a good 99 percent of the world’s satellite operators.

  Julia knew better.

  She bit her lip. The top secret program was to reside in the host satellite only as long as it received microbursts of passwords from the base computer every six seconds. That kept it from remaining in the satellite in the event the base computer failed before its user could instruct the program to withdraw. But her laptop—the program’s base computer—had failed. And she had restarted it, which would have kept even a functioning system from feeding passwords to the program for more than a minute.

  The old program should not have been running.

  But it was.

  And that meant only one thing: someone else was feeding it the correct passwords.

  She snatched up the radio microphone and keyed the talk switch. “Goody! Goody! If you can hear me, listen.” She enunciated her words carefully. “Turn … off … the … tracking … transmitter. Someone else is receiving the signal. Someone else is tracking you. Turn off the transmitter.”

  She tossed the microphone down. What else could she do? She could not defeat the program—not with the limited software utilities her hard drive contained, probably not with all the utilities in the world. Its programmers had anticipated that criminals would continue to increase their technical sophistication. They had made it nearly impossible to disable.

  The best she could do for Goody now was to find him—fast.

  eight

  Blood flowed from him like sap from a broken pine, and dehydration parched his throat. His hands were sticking to the steering wheel. Donnelley focused on the road and tried not to think of his damaged body.

  He was tilting forward and sideways now, keeping the wound away from the seat back. The hole in his flesh, piercing him with icy-hot ripples of pain, was just under his rib cage, between side and back. He looked at Vero. Dark skin. Black hair. Coarse features. Mexican or Brazilian, he guessed. The one thing he was sure about: the man was dog-sick.

  “What’s wrong with you?” he asked.

  Vero’s lips bent up on one side of his face. A new fissure opened in his bottom lip. “My employer fired me.”

  “Fired?”

  “Instead of a pink slip, he gave me a virus. Not so strange. Gangsters shoot each other. Makes sense biologists infect each other, no?”

  “You’re a biologist?”

  “Virologist, really.”

  Donnelley thought about it, leaning more than he knew he should against the steering wheel. “So, what, like the flu?”

  Vero laughed or coughed, he couldn’t tell. “If only it was tame like that.”

  He glanced over. “Are you dying?”

  “Oh yes, yes.” He read Donnelley’s expression. “It’s not contagious.”

  “You sure? My throat’s a little sore… Maybe it’s just the dehydration.”

  “No, it’s this. You got a cold, friend.” “But I thought you said—”

  “What I have is no cold.”

  “But I caught a cold from you? You’re not making any sense.” He waited for a response, but Vero just turned his head to stare out the glassless side window. After a minute, he started fiddling with his Windbreaker. Donnelley thought the zipper was stuck, then he heard the material rip. When he looked, Vero was removing something that had been sewn into the lining. He held it up, a black sliver of plastic the size of a postage stamp.

  “This will explain,” he said. “I made it for the CDC.”

  Donnelley squinted at it and held out his hand. When Vero hesitated, he said, “If that’s what got us both killed, you gotta let me hold it, man.”

  Vero placed it in Donnelley’s palm.

  “Is this a camera memory chip?”

  “Like it, but much higher density.”

  Donnelley closed his fingers over it. “You want this to get in the right hands, you gotta let me have it.”

  Their eyes locked.

  “I’ll take care of it.”

  Vero nodded.

  Donnelley dropped it into the inside pocket of his jacket. “But if I find out the only thing on it are pictures of your family re
union,” he said, “I’ll come after you.”

  Vero smiled weakly and turned away.

  Donnelley glanced at the police-band radio. It dangled from its bracket under the dash, torn open and gutted. Looks like I feel, he thought.

  They’d been driving a long time when Donnelley saw the sign that marked the Georgia-Tennessee border. Given the tenacity of their assailants, he half expected another attack: a fiery ambush or even sudden death from a military-type strike—an Apache attack helicopter or a LAW rocket, maybe. He wouldn’t put anything past them after the barrage they’d just let loose on him and Vero.

  Time to pull over and let Julia catch up. If he didn’t get to a hospital soon, his life would simply drain out of him. But the prospect of letting his guard down on an operating table without someone he trusted standing over him was more nauseating than the lack of blood. Besides, if he was going to die for something, he wanted to make sure it got into the hands of the good guys—whoever they were.

  Where I-75 branched east, Donnelley went west, onto I-24 and into the heart of Chattanooga. Green hills rose around them, and a humid, musky aroma of honeysuckle filled the car. For the first time in over an hour, he smelled something other than his own blood. He glided into an exit lane and found himself on Belvoir Avenue. Turning east on busy Brainerd Road, he spotted a good place to stop and cranked the wheel into a nearly deserted parking lot. He edged the war-torn sedan into an alley behind a brick building and killed the engine.

  He stretched slowly, carefully, testing for aches and discovering which movements caused spears of pain from the wound. He found renewed strength, slightly, in having something to do. He shouldered the door open, the twisted metal popping and screeching. As he stood on shaky legs, he examined the rear of the building: lined with back doors, as he expected. He hoped the one he wanted was unlocked so they could slip in without being exposed to the main street. “Let’s go.”