Bet Your Life

by Richard Dooling

  I went to the chat window and typed:

  CarvedMeat: Dirk, here, who’s your low-ping buddy? We both know you ain’t that good.

  SnowKiller answered with six more head shots, then a flash bang whited-out my screen. Only the chat box was open, where words appeared, letter by letter:

  GothicRage86: I win.

  5

  HYDE69.EXE

  I GRABBED A REAL phone and speed-dialed Lenny. Nobody answered, then voice messaging clicked in: “This is Lenny. Leave a message, or send an e-mail to Attila-at-Home-dot-com.”

  “Lenny,” I said, “call me. We got switched on the server or something. Somebody broke in on us with a fat pipe for a connection. Way, way fast! I’m a high-ping whiner. Who the fuck is GothicRage86? Just call me back, Lenny! And if you’re doing this yourself, it ain’t funny.”

  Lenny ran a website called WeirdHarold.com, which was a spoof of the Omaha World-Herald, and one feature of the site was a web cam of Lenny’s computer desk called Attila-at-Home cam, where users could click in and see him playing on his home machine, whenever he was in a sociable e-mood.

  I clicked on Zone Alarm for an IP address and identity of the intruder, if there was one. Nothing but twelve-hour-old zombie scans. But maybe they had cut in on Lenny’s machine? Highly unlikely, because if anybody could make his machine invisible to Internet predators, it was Lenny. Which meant somebody was there with him?

  Lenny was probably messing with my head. Maybe he’d spliced in one of his high-speed, low-ping tournament-level pals as a ringer?

  I pinged Lenny’s machine, and the packets came back trace route normal. Then I probed the usual ports with some screwy packets trying to see what services he had running. He was invisible, firewalls up and running. Nothing amiss. If there had been an intruder, they had permissions that I didn’t have. I figured I’d wait ten minutes, then try and raise him with an instant message or a NetPhone call. I tried to get on the Attila-at-Home cam, but it gave me a “404 page not found,” which meant he’d turned the thing off.

  In the meantime, I thought about going back into the warehouse to find Renata and have my way with her in the meat locker.

  Truth is, sex with pleasure partners and game personalities depresses me, because it’s not sex with Miranda. Lenny had told me all about his on-line adventures with Tanya, while her husband was gorked out in the next room, and I knew all about the new singles sex sites offering anonymous, two-way encounters with streaming audio and video, but I wasn’t interested. Sex with real women in meat space was even more depressing, because it ate up a lot more time than cybersex, and for what? Either way I got the same thing: sex with someone who is not Miranda.

  I backed out of Delta-Strike, opened a DOS Window command line, pinged Miranda’s machine (something I did a lot), and found she was up and running, also. Any decent instant messaging program would tell me whether she was up, but it would also tell her that I was on-line. I had the usual desire to “watch” her for a few minutes first before letting her know that I was online. Then she could type to me if she was in the messaging mood, even though it made almost no sense in a local area code—unless you preferred text to human contact, which she often unapologetically did.

  Reliable gives all of its Special Claims investigators free, always-on, high-speed connections from home, on the theory that we geeks will do at least some work at home and, maybe more important, we geeks will purge ourselves of whatever else we do on-line at home, instead of at work.

  Maybe I should call Miranda. Hadn’t she told me to check on Lenny? I could call and tell her that I’d played Delta-Strike with him, and he seemed okay, but then space aliens and gremlins broke in and flamed me and then he didn’t answer the phone.

  I pinged her again and probed her ports for an opening. Why was she up and on her machine? Miranda wasn’t a heavy user. Not like Lenny, who was almost always on; he called his work machine Jekyll and his home machine Hyde, and he frequently connected Hyde to zero-knowledge, anonymous privacy portals, which in essence rent you a “nym”—an untraceable pseudonymous digital identity—and then erase any trace of you when you’re done using it.

  I’d been here before: probing her machine for the heck of it to see if she was on-line, then wondering what she was doing if she was.

  The difference this time was that I now had the means to see what she was doing on-line, if I was vile enough to use them. See, Miranda is an ace when it comes to finding people or information using browsers or search engines, but she doesn’t know much about security, or the real world. She relies on keywords, Boolean logic, and metasearch on the job, and she relies on Lenny and me to protect her from the outside world by keeping her ports reserved and her system interiors uncorrupted. Her mistake was trusting us.

  A few months back, Lenny and I had gone over to her place to eat La Casa’s pizzas, slosh high-end wines, and get her new machine up and running. We set it up on a fiber-optic connection, installed her firewalls, partitioned her hard drive—the nouveau-geek equivalent of a barn raising. I tested her shields myself at the Gibson Research Shields Up! site. She scanned clean and was invulnerable to corruption behind a virtual private network firewall.

  Then, a few weeks ago, she’d called late and said she was getting IP stack errors on the machine we’d set up for her, which I jumped on as an invitation to go over and reconfigure her stack. While I was in there checking her kernel and her system registry, I found a little spoor left by Lenny, the Internet freebooter and predator of cyberintimacies. It was a Back Orifice program appropriately named hyde69.exe, and he’d preflagged it as “quarantined,” so her antivirus software wouldn’t detect it running at boot time. It was a tiny, well-concealed code back door for Lenny, which would allow him to visit Miranda’s machine whenever he wanted, with full privileges, “watch” her while she was on-line, even record all of her keystrokes in a copycat file to be perused at his leisure.

  Hyde69.exe was the mark and spoor of BeastMaster Lenny—another one of his obsessions out on a leash. My first thought was to serve him right then and there and tell her what he’d done. But she was in the midst of pouring me a Leonardini reserve cabernet (my reward for fixing her machine), and I could feel her warming up to another sordid tale of insurance fraud. If her voice was all I could have, I wanted as much of it as possible. So I let her go on, while I terminated the hyde69 task, removed the launch instructions from the boot sequence, deleted hyde69.exe from her hard drive, and silently cursed Lenny’s self-indulgent depredations.

  Miranda approached, carrying two Riedel lead crystal goblets (thirty-ounce), three fingers of ruby-red in each—the kind of glass that says: Tonight’s activity is wine. She nuzzled the mouth of the bowl for a long, slow whiff of cab fumes, the way she and Lenny always did before rhapsodizing about “the nose” half the night. They were the wine nuts, and we were all of us old-movie buffs (the only kind of movie you can rent deep in the Mid-Heartland on a Friday night). Miranda handed me the wine, and I could see her slip into my favorite character sketch in her repertoire: a dead-on rendition of the savvy dame in another film noir about murder for insurance money. She set my wineglass at my elbow and smiled at me, as if I were playing the piano in a gin joint in Key Largo and she was my chanteuse, sashaying over to sing a number while I accompanied her on the computer keyboard.

  She gave me a hard look and wrapped her elegant wrist around the monster goblet.

  “Suppose you and I fall in love and get married,” she said.

  “I would love that,” I said.

  She dropped a beat but picked right up. “I’d think about it,” she said, “but you’d want marriage to be like a life insurance policy. You’d want a two-year contestability provision, so you could rescind the deal at any time during the first two years.”

  “No,” I said. “I’ll do it any way you want it. What’s good for you? Next week?”

  “How about never,” she said. “Is never good for you?”

  She wrinkled her nos
e at me, then slipped back into her role. “Anyway, we’re married, and we start our own dot-com e-business together,” she continued, running her fingers once through my hair. “We sell sex toys and erotic paraphernalia on a site called HarmlessLust dot-com.” She snagged a tissue and wiped the fingers she’d run through my hair. “We both work real hard and get rich. By sheer willpower we transform ourselves into valuable assets, and to protect our investment in ourselves we take out five-million-dollar life policies on each other.”

  She draped herself over the minibar and gave me the limp wrist, the painted eyelids, the decadent, hooded gaze, the dulcet, low-throated croon of Lauren Bacall in The Big Sleep or Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity.

  “I need more background,” I said. I was not about to miss her performance, but I was also staring at the empty, blinking cursor where Lenny’s hyde69.exe program had been. I knew why the conniving pervert had done it, because I was right behind him in line at the peep show: imagining what it would be like to access Miranda’s system, anytime. Day. Night. Just check in on her whenever I wanted, and see what she was up to.

  She was on the other side of the screen, and too far into her acting binge to notice anything I was doing.

  “But I got a thing going with your best friend, Al,” she continued, “who just happens to be a cardiologist and an Ironman triathlete. Al and I can’t keep our hands off each other. You start getting suspicious that I’m seeing someone, but who? Not your best friend, Al. Never! After a while, I don’t come home once or twice, and you go medieval possessive on me and threaten to dissolve the marriage, the business, the insurance, unless I come clean and tell you whose ceiling I’ve been moaning at lately.”

  “How old am I?” I asked her.

  “You’re almost fifty,” she said, “with a family history of heart disease but no symptoms. I’m thirty-five and looking twenty-eight. On top of all that, our dot com stock plummets ninety-five percent, and I could use five million. Oh, I forgot, my boyfriend, Al, and I recently determined that you are emotionally abusive, and I’m a psychologically battered woman forced to take action because my situation is intolerable. Your buddy, Al the cardiologist (my boyfriend), tells you it’s time for a routine physical, blood and urine, and a twelve-lead EKG.”

  “Uh-oh,” I said. “I feel chest pains coming on.” I looked up across the top of the monitor to let her know how much I admired her routine. Then I was back at that blinking cursor on her screen and thinking how easy it would be to leave my own little remote-access program behind. I’d only use it once, I told myself, to check back in a week or two and make sure that Lenny hadn’t sent her another Trojan horse by e-mail. I wouldn’t leave anything as vulgar as Back Orifice. How about that Trojan horse written in C named Girlfriend? Or a SubSeven variant?

  By then Miranda’s eyes had the key-cold gleam of Lady Macbeth contemplating murder to collect insurance money, and she said, “Maybe you think it’s unusual when I say I want to tag along with you when you go in for the EKG. ‘We’ll go to lunch after?’ I say. Maybe it seems peculiar when, instead of the usual EKG tech, you wind up alone in the room with your best buddy, Al the doctor and me, your wife.”

  “I like you as my wife,” I said, “but please don’t hurt me.”

  Then it was almost automatic, like somebody else was doing it, not me. I downloaded a SubSeven remote-access program called Rubicon.exe from the web and then looked for an inconspicuous folder in C:Programs where I could hide it. Her WindowsUpdate folder had two-hundred-plus objects in it, plenty crowded and out of the way, so I pasted Rubicon.exe in and went back to her desktop.

  It was just a bit of code, I told myself, but it wasn’t. It was a covert act of intimacy, a breach of trust, a violation of her machine’s integrity. Exactly. I almost erased it then and there, but then I realized it gave me the power to access her machine and erase it any old time, so I left it there and listened to her story instead.

  “Maybe you don’t want to know what’s happening,” she said, “when Al the doctor grabs the paddle electrodes of the defibrillator? Maybe you think, Hey, those aren’t part of the EKG equipment, are they? He doesn’t bother to synchronize with your cardiac rhythm before he zaps you with a thousand joules.”

  “Go on,” I said. “It really happened?”

  “Two years ago. Sacramento, California,” she said. “It was on the Fraud Info Newsletter today.”

  The ingenuity of the scheme enchanted her. Dying in a doctor’s office could be negligent or unusual, but doctors kill patients every day, and the body count almost never inspires a homicide investigation. No marks on the body, no trace poisons, no blunt trauma, only paddle-electrode burns, the high voltage dispersed by gel pads. Why? Because the poor husband had suffered a heart attack, of course, whereupon his good friend the doctor repeatedly attempted cardio version and defibrillation but could not resuscitate the patient.

  I exited back out to her desktop, just as she came around the monitor stand and slid onto a stool next to me.

  “Wicked,” I said.

  She sniffed the cabernet again, took a sip, held it in her mouth, swallowed. At such times her lips, her throat, her slender hands were too much for me, but I couldn’t look away. She’s the definition of “fetching” when she’s role-playing the latest insurance crime.

  She was a farm girl from Ottumwa, Iowa, an apparent virgin when it came to personal experiences of fraud or depravity. After just two years in Special Claims, she still hadn’t had sex with anybody, as far as we knew, but she was jaded when it came to insurance fraud. She knew a thousand different scams a speculator could use to, uh, shuck her out of ten grand. She had nothing but contempt for low-level operators and saved all of her admiration for murderers who had the sheer face and steady hands needed to pull off million-dollar stings involving cloak-and-dagger intrigue, offshore money laundering, industrial-strength shredders, and bodies buried under poured concrete. The sordid, high-octane frauds made her eyes light up with horror and fascination, as if she stood in awe of villains who could accomplish such gargantuan feats of evil without the slightest compunctions of conscience.

  “You’d have to be oozing evil right out of your pores to kill your husband with paddle electrodes,” she said, looking as if she wanted to be Catwoman and was constrained only by habits of conscience configured into her neural networks by the Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Duchesne Academy, in Omaha.

  “Turbo evil,” I said. “Stephen King could make a whole novel out of it, and a screenplay, to boot. How’d they get caught?”

  “The usual,” she said. “They turned on each other.”

  I’D LEFT THE SubSeven program running on her machine, and now here I was for the third or fourth time, on the verge of slipping in the back door. I wasn’t worried about getting caught, because I knew that if Lenny came looking for hyde69.exe processes and got squat, he’d be so afraid that we’d figure out it was him he wouldn’t say boo about a missing Back Orifice file.

  I decided to sleep on it. I didn’t want to enter her machine as the lovesick puppy with a head full of booze; I wanted my wits about me when I took that step. Why do something I might regret in the morning?

  I left my machine up and running, slid onto the couch, and looked for the TV remote. When I saw it across the room, my eyes fell shut; even TV was just not worth the effort, and I slipped below the waves in the sea of sleep.

  6

  THE FINAL CARTOON

  BY DEFINITION THE SUPERNATURAL is elusive and almost intangible. Sometimes the only symptom is a stirring in the roots of the hair accompanied by a premonition, some preconscious awareness operating outside the bandwidth of the five senses. Cops call it the “blue sense,” the primal and uncanny ability to smell danger like ozone in a dark alley, where a professional killer waits with a gun, an 0-and-2 felony count, fire in the belly, and a suicide’s resolve to stay out of prison.

  I woke up with it. Instead of being hung over on wine, port, brandy, and Lenny’s superpotent
bud, I sat up and gasped, breathless, hyperaware. I’d been dreaming, maybe was still dreaming and seeing 3:37 A.M. glowing in green on an LCD readout below the surveillance camera in the darkness of my maximum security prison cell. I heard another prisoner being tortured somewhere off in another cell block, his screams of horror resounding in the cement-and-steel gangways. He was pleading with his sadistic keepers, begging them to spare him. And just as his words took shape—reverberating in the afterechoes of his agony—I recognized his voice. It was Lenny.

  Maybe the coming catastrophe infected even my memory of waking. Whether I was imprisoned in a dreamscape penitentiary or just passed out in a cheap West Omaha apartment with fiber-board walls trimmed in vinyl—either way, I knew that Lenny was in mortal peril and beyond my help.

  I got off the couch and went for my machine, thinking I’d try to raise him on instant messaging, or ping him and see if he was up and running his machine or playing another game in the full manic phase. And just as I reached out to touch the keyboard, up popped the message window. I was sure it was Lenny, as sure as I knew he was in trouble, but it wasn’t him.

  WantonMP: You theere?

  It was Miranda! I was afraid she’d caught me sniffing her ports, or knew I’d been lurking earlier. Had she found the back door?

  CarvedMeat: Hi, M. I thought you were going to sleep?

  WantonMP: I’m worrieda bout Llenny, somethings’ worng with him.

  The apprehensions I’d had about GothicRage86 and his cryptic message became flesh—cold, certain, and dreadful. I typed:

  CarvedMeat: Did you talk to him?

  Miranda, normally an impeccable typist, even when e-mailing or instant-messaging, typed:

  WantonMP: We were instant-mESsaging aand he starteDd typing slloppy nonsense lal over the screen. I started thinking it wsa somebody else, or he’d had one of those breaks. I think we should gover there now!! I’m calling on the phone.