by B. V. Larson
Ingles nodded. “Second time at bat, eh?”
Ray blinked, wondering where Ingles was going with this. The man was rarely direct. “Right.”
Ingles flicked open the lighter, toyed with the thumbwheel. Brenda tensed visibly. He closed the lighter with a snap. “‘Very well.’ Abrams kept saying. I wonder what he meant?”
Ray felt a jolt in his deadened mind. “He’s on the approval committee this year.”
“Eh? Which committee?”
“The tenure committee,” said Ray, realizing thoroughly that he had been led down the primrose path once again by Ingles to a point of logic. Ray wondered if his students hated that approach or loved it.
“Ah, yes,” said Ingles, as if just reaching the same conclusion himself. “About this virus, Ray...”
Ray looked at him warily, preparing for yet another mental assault. Sometimes dealing with the brilliant idiosyncrasies of the other faculty took a great deal of patience.
“It seems to me that it sounds too sophisticated for a student to create. Too much work, too many different functions... I wonder what the Feds will say.”
Ray blinked and frowned. This time he didn’t follow Ingles at all.
“Well, I’ve got to go see what backups I have myself. Is the system up again yet?” asked Ingles.
“Still rebooting,” answered Brenda. “Give us another half-hour. But we won’t be online again for user access for some time. We have to assess the damage and try to eradicate the virus. The FBI will probably slow things down, too.”
Ingles nodded and headed toward the exit. Standing half-in and half-out of the lab, he lit up his cigarette. Brenda’s face reddened as blue smoke wafted into her lab. On a U. C. campus, smoking anywhere was a huge sin.
“One last thing, Ray,” he said from the door. “Don’t skip anything with the Feds. Don’t leave something out that looks bad later.”
Ray frowned and opened his mouth to ask what he meant, but the doors were already swinging shut.
#
Ray barely had time to gulp down half a tuna sandwich and a paper cup of boiled coffee before the feds arrived. To his mild surprise, only one of them had a crew cut and neither wore sunglasses. Even more unexpected, one of them was a Hispanic woman. She was the mean one.
“Agent Johansen and Agent Vasquez,” gushed Rhonda Wells, leading them in. “This is the lab where the unfortunate incident occurred.”
“Correction, madam,” snapped Agent Vasquez. “The incident only began here. It is far from finished.”
Wells blinked, then recovered his composure. “Surely, this thing will soon be under control.”
“Possibly,” said Vasquez. “But it isn’t even known how many systems are infected yet. Many feeder systems have pulled off the internet, others have yet to get the word. We have no idea yet how many are infected. They can’t connect back up without knowing the net is clean, so the damage is continuing in any case.”
Wells nodded and blinked faster. Ray hid a smile. Wells was overly impressed by authority figures. He suspected that was why she had sought to work her way up as far as possible.
“This is Brenda Hastings, she is the director of our main computer science lab,” Wells continued as smoothly as possible. Her tone seemed to indicate that the agents were on a field trip rather than conducting a criminal investigation. “And this is Dr. Ray Vance, computer science faculty.”
The agents eyed him and he nodded back. No handshakes were offered. Ray was too tired and irritated to care.
They began an impressive series of questions, quickly isolating the events of the morning. Johansen, a stocky man of medium height, recorded everything with a hand-held voice recorder. Vasquez took occasional notes.
“So it was you, Dr. Vance, who shut down the system. Why?”
Ray had known this question would be coming, and he felt he was ready for it. “Because I believed that the virus was stalling us, making it look like we could recover if we allowed the disk backup to finish before shutting down. I believe that it was using the time to infect more systems.”
Vasquez raised her eyebrows a fraction. The silent Agent Johansen frowned and aimed his recorder at Ray. The red indicator light on the device glowed. “On what do you base this belief, Doctor?” asked Vasquez.
“First, the lines were all coming alive, showing a lot of activity on the ports that wasn’t our doing. Second, the virus was very sophisticated, and could have easily been devised to destroy the disk data thoroughly—but it didn’t. Instead, it disabled the Optical drive, messed up the disk, not completely mind you, just enough to panic us, then left us an out with the backup drive system.”
There was moment of quiet while everyone looked at Ray blankly. “Dr. Vance, are you aware that there is no record of any virus that would be so sophisticated?”
“Yes, I teach the operating systems classes here.”
“I see, so viruses are definitely in your field of expertise.”
Ray nodded. Uncontrollably, he yawned.
“Haven’t you been sleeping, Doctor?”
Ray shook his head. “We had trouble with the system last night. Brenda and I were working on it until three.”
Agent Vasquez nodded and made a note in her notebook. Ray began to wonder how long they would want to go over this. He had already cancelled his 1:00 PM class and planned to leave early to get some sleep before Justin came home and tackled him. To be sure, he would come in and spend the evening and much of the night in the lab again to try and isolate the virus files. Sarah was going to be pissed.
“How did you get into the room with the computer hardware, Doctor?”
Ray blinked. “I—ah, I have a copy of a master key. It works with most of the doors on campus. A lot of the faculty have them.” He felt a guilty heat rising in his neck. He looked around and noticed that everyone was staring at him seriously. No one was talking or smiling. Their lack of movement was disconcerting.
“Dr. Wells,” said Agent Vasquez, turning to face the dean. “Are you aware of an informal agreement among the faculty to have access to such a key?”
“Certainly not,” she said. She avoided Ray’s eyes.
“Wait a minute, here,” said Ray. “I think we’re getting a bit off track. Aren’t we supposed to be isolating the virus and finding out how to eradicate it?”
Agent Vasquez nodded in agreement. “There is another team coming up from Los Angeles tonight. They will work with the system all night until the virus is isolated and understood.”
“I’ve got it rebooting now,” said Brenda.
“Good,” Vasquez said. She turned her ever-serious gaze back to Ray. “Does that concern you, Dr. Vance?”
“No, not if we’ve cut out all the external lines.”
“So, if we keep the machine isolated, disconnected from the internet and from the outside lines, the virus can’t get out of the system?”
“Ah, no—wait,” Ray said, as things finally began to sink in. He flicked his red, burning eyes over the four of them. Only Johansen met his gaze. The man never stopped flatly staring at him, watching him, as if he expected him to do something at any moment...
His mind raced ahead. He had overreacted, they were right. All he had needed to do was pull all the external lines. If he had cut the connections to the outside world, he could have stopped the virus from damaging anything more than their local system. He had made a mistake. In a flash, he recalled Dr. Ingles’ words: Don’t leave something out that looks bad later. That cagey bastard. He had foreseen all of this.
“Okay, I see what you are driving at,” said Ray. “You have a point. I could have just cut the outside lines. I think I overreacted. But I just didn’t want it to get out. As a data-destructive virus, it had to be stopped before it trashed every other server it could reach.”
Vasquez turned to Johansen. “Are there any reports of data-destructive behavior outside of this lab?” she asked.
“No,” answered Johansen. He gazed coldly at Ray whi
le he spoke, “The virus is spreading with frightening speed, but so far it hasn’t done any damage other than eating up resources. The only erased files we know of are right here.”
“Well,” said Ray, trying not to stammer. “I wasn’t even sure which of the peripherals back there controlled the external lines, so I killed them all to be safe. I just didn’t know what the thing was doing,” he finished lamely.
“A moment ago, you claimed to know exactly what it was doing, Doctor,” said Agent Vasquez. “I quote: ‘Second, the virus was very sophisticated, and could have easily been devised to destroy the disk data thoroughly—but it didn’t.’“
They were all looking at him again now, with a new coldness in their eyes. For the first time, he felt something more than embarrassment. For the first time, he felt alarmed.
“Whoa, hold on a minute here!” he said, laughing tightly. “I see where this is going. You people don’t actually believe that I would release a virus, do you?”
“That remains to be seen, Dr. Vance,” said Agent Vasquez.
... 78 Hours and Counting ...
It was Wednesday and Justin’s school always let out at 1:30 PM on Wednesdays. When Justin left for home, he was glad that the gray van was nowhere in sight. He was in such a good mood that he walked on the edge of the curbs almost the entire way home—the whole three blocks—his Nikes slipping off into the gutter only twice. It was a personal record for him, and he felt that today would be a lucky day. He practiced his whistling, which he really couldn’t do yet, but he tried. As he walked he shaped and reshaped his mouth to make hissing and peeping sounds vaguely like cartoon theme songs.
When he reached home, he realized right away that no one was home. This was not the usual for a Thursday, as Daddy was generally home by this time, but it wasn’t unknown, either. What he was supposed to do was go to Billy’s grandma’s house and watch TV with Billy until his dad got home. But he didn’t want to do this, because Billy didn’t watch the same cartoons as he did in the afternoon and because Billy’s house and Billy’s grandma smelled kinda funny. So instead, he used his secret way in.
Going through the side gate and around to the back, he found the window into the guest bedroom that never shut right and pulled off the screen. Within a minute he was inside and climbing down off the bed. He began to whistle again, proud of himself, when he heard something.
There was a rattle and a thump. Something was in his parents’ bedroom; something was in the drawers. Justin thought of the bird that had flown into the living room last summer and had to be caught in his dad’s jacket and tossed outside. Or maybe it was the neighbor’s cat, who always seemed to be sneaking in and running around on the counters in the kitchen.
Then he heard the creak of floorboards. It was a person, a robber, almost certainly. Justin thought about climbing out the window again, but he was worried that the robber might hear him this time. There was no easy way out the front door, so Justin crept down the hallway to the study. He lifted the phone handset. In the dimly lit room, the glow of the keypad seemed bright and the drone of the dial tone seemed like the roar of an engine. With shaking fingers, he dialed 9-1-1, just as the kids always did on those real-life rescue shows.
He didn’t do anything else, however. He just put the phone down. He didn’t want to talk to anyone and he knew that just calling was enough to get the police to come there. He just suddenly knew he had to get out of there. If he talked, maybe the robber would hear him. Dialing 9-1-1 had brought it all home to Justin somehow. It changed things, it had made it all real. He shook with fright.
Even as he turned he realized that the sounds coming from his parents’ room had ceased. An odd quiet hung in the house. Only the humming of appliances and the tiny ticking of clocks could be heard.
There was a man standing in the doorway. For a few moments neither of them spoke. Justin froze, some primitive part of him telling him to hide, to pretend he was part of the air, part of the dim shadows of the study. Perhaps the predator would lose interest and go away.
“You did it, didn’t you? You little frigger,” whispered the robber.
Justin ran for it, right at the man’s legs. With a surprised grunt and a chuckle, the man stepped to one side, letting him pass. “Where are you going?” he asked in an amused tone.
Justin slipped passed him, smelling his dirty jeans as he brushed up against them. He headed not for the front door, nor the back door. He went into the guest bedroom and climbed up onto the bed. The window was still there, open, inviting.
There was a sound behind him as he reached the sill. Before he could get out, a long hairy arm circled his neck. Justin saw and felt the rows of scratchy scabs on the inside of the man’s arm as it curled around his throat. He saw the hand at the end of the arm, too. It had a doctor’s glove on it, one of those yellowy plastic ones that you could see through. Justin could see the man’s thumb inside the glove. A big silver ring encircled the thumb.
Justin knew the van man had him. He opened his mouth, sucking in air to scream. The other hand clamped itself over his mouth. It was also wearing a doctor’s glove. Justin tasted the dry rubber.
“Can’t have you falling and hurting yourself again, klutz,” whispered the van man. “You really should’ve gone to your friend’s house like you were supposed to.”
Justin tried to bite, but the Van Man just chuckled and slipped his fingers away. He ruffled Justin’s hair momentarily. “Look at all that blond fluff!” he said, his breath stinking of stale cigarettes. “You’re sure a cute kid, you know that? A damn, fine, good-looking kid.”
. . . 77 Hours and Counting . . .
Ray had spent the longest hours of his life in a small conference room next door to his own office. He wondered why they hadn’t taken him into custody yet. Perhaps it was because they didn’t want to leave the university until their back-up team got there from L.A. Agent Vasquez, whom he now had decided was a thorough bitch at heart, was seated across from him. Johansen manned the closed door, his recorder running on the tabletop in front of Ray. He had changed the batteries once. Ray hoped he would run out of batteries or memory space soon, just so he could see an expression of frustration on the man’s face. That would be gratifying. Unfortunately, the man’s supply of both seemed to be inexhaustible.
“Let’s go over it again, Dr. Vance—” she began.
“Yes, let’s,” answered Ray immediately. He was so tired and angry now that he didn’t care what happened. He was in survival mode, just plodding ahead, wanting to beat them at their own game of wearing him down through sheer determination. He actually looked forward to repeating his statement the thousandth time. He thought they must be getting as sick of it as he was, and the idea that he was causing them discomfort, in any small measure, made him feel good.
Vasquez didn’t bat an eye at his enthusiasm, but he thought it was getting to her a bit anyway. But she was a cool one, and she didn’t let it show. “First let’s discuss last night. You worked late. There was a lot of activity on the net, so you couldn’t bring down the system for maintenance.”
“Right, right,” nodded Ray, doing his best to seem eager, alive and interested. Vasquez glanced up from her notes at him without moving her head. She flicked her eyes back down. She looked slightly annoyed. Ray felt a rush of victory.
“Next, you—” she broke off as there came a persistent knocking at the door. Johansen looked at her. She nodded.
He opened the door and there stood Brenda, looking worried and a bit pissed. Ray found it reassuring that she wasn’t afraid of these agents any longer. It never took her long to lose her fear and respect for anyone.
“I think you people have gotten your statement from Dr. Vance. His wife is on the phone and she is very upset—”
“I’m sorry,” interrupted Agent Vasquez. “But we are conducting a very serious criminal investigation and we —”
“Look,” said Brenda, taking a half-step into the room. “I know what you’re doing is important, ev
en though I think you’re barking up the wrong tree entirely. In fact, I think you’re in the wrong forest. But this is an emergency. Sarah says there was an emergency 9-1-1 call from their house about an hour ago, and that Justin is nowhere to be found.”
Ray stood up. “What?”
Brenda nodded to him. “She hasn’t found him yet.”
“Where’s your phone, Brenda? Mine’s locked in the car. Have you got your cell in the building?”
Brenda stepped forward, holding up the phone. “It’s right here, and Sarah’s on it.”
Johansen moved to block her, but Agent Vasquez spoke up. “It’s all right. The testimony hasn’t changed remotely in the last ten passes.”
Ray couldn’t help but feel a flash of pleasure at the tone in her voice, but it was immediately washed away again as he took up the phone. “Sarah?”
“Ray? Ray, do you know where Justin is?”
“No, Sarah I —”
“Why didn’t you pick him up? Why didn’t you call if you couldn’t make it?” demanded Sarah, her voice cracking. It was the tone more than her words that scared Ray. Sarah was always level-headed, she almost never became unglued over anything. Anything except for Justin, that was.
“Sarah, I’m sorry, never mind about that now. Tell me what’s going on.”
“Justin is gone, Ray. I think he’s really gone,” she paused here to sob. Remotely, distantly, Ray felt a piece of his world crumble and fall away. He felt one step closer to the abyss.
“What happened?” he asked, his voice flat.
“He left school at two-thirty, no one was home so he should have gone to the Trumble’s house, but he didn’t.”
Ray felt a glimmer of relief. “Well, Babe, what if he just went off home with some other friend?”