Splicer (A Thriller)

by Theo Cage

  Rusty had gone white. She could hear his teeth rattling.

  "Secondly, they can do a bacterium count in bodily fluids. Decomposition. But it works best if it’s an older corpse."

  Rusty swallowed loudly.

  "In Shay's case, death was by … garroting." She stopped for a moment, exhaling slowly. She felt her heart flutter in her chest. "As with Ludd, whoever did it, used a fine steel cable, much finer than necessary. I think they learned something from Ludd's death."

  "What?" croaked Rusty, slouched in his chair, his eyes staring at the green tile floor.

  "That a fine steel cable makes a … perfect weapon of torture."

  CHAPTER 53

  Jayne looked over at Rusty whose head was down, his shoulders shaking. He was sobbing quietly. She walked over to the coffee maker and automatically went through the steps required to fill and set the machine. She placed one mug beside Rusty then sat down again on her stool.

  The pain for Rusty was greater than he would have guessed. It took all of his strength to remain upright, to hold back a howl of torment and anguish that the neighbors would hear. Tears as hot as solder fell on his bare arms. He could see Shay, as she was when they first met. It wasn't love at first sight but it was close. Shay wanted more out of life and Rusty recognized that. Until he met her, he was aimless, going through the motions. She became his catalyst. If Shay wanted a big house, Rusty would work for it - find a way. He ground out sixty-hour weeks, moonlighted - for Shay. And she believed in him, she returned his love. The job at GeneFab was a perfect reward for them; generous salary, recognition, an annual bonus plan.

  When Rusty told her he was leaving GeneFab she was surprised, but she still had faith in him. His moves before had been successful steps up the ladder. When the lawsuit and the arrest confronted them, she had been worried about money but supportive. Six months after the arrest they had to sell their house. Rusty could see what was happening but went through a lengthy period of denial. I'm not losing my career. I'm not losing my freedom. I'm not losing my wife.

  Rusty was hurt but not surprised by Shay's decision to leave. She needed the security of money and possessions; things he had suddenly lost the ability to create. The split was foggy in his recollection, another symptom of this denial. When Shay had found Quinn, he was almost relieved. When he learned later that Quinn and her were involved almost from the week of his arrest, he failed to feel surprise.

  Shay's death had struck at a spot well covered with scar tissue. The realization that she had suffered so much before she died, filled him with revulsion and guilt. After all, she was a beautiful, vital human being - someone who had never hurt anyone in her life. And he was responsible. Because for once in his life he tried to do what was right instead of just going along. Rusty's failure at saving her from this unfortunate end was typical. He picked up the heavy white mug and welcomed the way the coffee burnt his lips and throat.

  "I know what they're after," he said softly. Jayne arched her eyebrows. "But why would they think she knew, Jayne? Why? Who did this"?

  "Someone dedicated. Soulless."

  Rusty shook his head. "Nobody should know. But somebody does. Somehow, I messed up."

  Jayne, always the lawyer, looked like she wanted to cross-examine. She bit her lip instead.

  "You know Jayne, we've talked about the awful things you could do with the Splicer. Create a horrible disease in hours? Well, you could also cure a terrible disease in hours. Imagine instead of spending twenty years to find a cure for MS, you might be able to do it in twenty days. And when Ludd told us this, back in the first days of GeneFab, we all felt like we were God's missionaries. Saviors.

  I have a niece with MS. Imagine how a parent feels - a little girl deteriorating in front of your eyes and there's nothing you can do. We imagined ourselves handing the cure over to thousands of parents, tears of gratitude in their eyes. We were crazy then, we worked straight for days. For months. But we were the good guys so it didn't matter if our eyes were always red or our wives were mad at us. We were going to change the world. Then, when they made me Marketing Manager, I started working on proposals ... to clients that didn't exactly fit our vision of this miracle. Like the military. Both the Canadian and U.S. Departments of Defense. This bothered me and I asked Ludd. He told us it was part of the game, funding etc. That we needed the Military sales to pay for the bigger picture. But we didn't believe him and I'm not sure I know why. He never specifically lied to us; I just got the feeling that he wasn't going to be able to handle the monster we had created. That it would all blow up in our faces. He was just too damn interested in the money.

  Meanwhile, Grieves is the wonder kid at GeneFab. He's way ahead of schedule. He was able to do this because he had perfected these little subroutines years before when he worked for Dow Chemical."

  "Subroutines?" Asked Jayne.

  "He wrote programs that write other programs. If you need a million lines of code, which might take ten years to write, he would set these little subroutines up which would each write the code needed to make the program that runs the Splicer work."

  "Rusty, I've got to understand this."

  "Okay. Let's say you, by yourself, have to build the Empire State building. You sit down with a piece of paper and figure that it will take you, by yourself, five thousand years. That's a problem. So instead, you carefully design and build a robot that pours concrete. Another that paints. Another that installs windows. Then you tell them to duplicate themselves. Then you simply write a plan that gets them to build so many units per floor etc. The robots duplicate themselves by the hundreds and set to work. A year later, the building is finished. It works like that in software. These robots, if you want to call them that, were Grieves' invention. He had built some of them at Dow for the same reasons, to speed up his work."

  "Are there others like him? Other programmers who use subroutine robots?"

  "Sure. But not in biotech, as far as I know. And I think he started to realize that, near the end. Started to understand that what he was creating was unique and that no one else would be able to duplicate it. He told me he couldn't do it anymore, that he wasn't interested in doing software that the military would use. But the intellectual part, the challenge to get it right, drives you on. The standard answer you get when you tell someone you can't ethically continue is that someone else will just come along and do the job for you, so there's no percentage in quitting. Work with the system they'll tell you. It's horseshit. Grieves came to me a week before he quit to tell me what he was about to do. He was going to erase everything. And not only what was in our systems department, but find the codebooks and erase every last vestige of the Splicer from GeneFab's computers. Because no one else was even close to figuring out what Grieves had created. He felt sure that by doing this, he could stop the Splicer from ever becoming a reality as some kind of war machine."

  "And did he?"

  "He came close. He erased all the files I guessed he would and more. Then he walked out. He never came back.”

  "What did Ludd do?"

  "Ludd wasn't happy but he wasn't a fool either. He had been copying Grieves' files everyday and Grieves supposedly wasn't aware of it. Ludd - now remember, this man has an ego the size of a cement truck - he figures he'll just hire someone else to finish up. The Splicer, minus a few bugs, was almost working at this point. What Ludd didn't know, and discovered a few days later, was that these neat little subroutines that Grieves used had timers built into them. Every couple of days, they asked for a special code word to be typed into the terminal. When no one could answer the correct codes, the subroutines died and of course the whole system failed. Then they tried to take apart the subroutines, see what made them tick, but couldn't. Grieves had taken care of that too."

  "How do you know all this?"

  "I'm a hacker. Grieves told me about his subroutines. I would copy them, take them home and try to figure them out."

  "How could you if they were locked?"

  "These
weren't. They were the original programs before he compiled them. He was still developing them. Even then I had a hard time with them. Too far advanced for me."

  "So when Ludd found out that his Splicer project no longer worked, what did he do?"

  "He called the cops. Made up a story about stolen files and equipment. We got arrested. Ludd was absolutely sure that the code was hidden away there somewhere in that mountain of paperwork. But in the meantime, the files sat in the police warehouse. And time was ticking away. He asked Grieves to reconsider. Grieves told him to stuff it. Now think about it. GeneFab can't go public until it has the Splicer. The Splicer project is sitting on a shelf collecting dust. No one they hire can figure out how to save the software. Then you know what happens?"

  "What?"

  "Grieves gets sent to jail. Now Ludd is doubly screwed. Rosenblatt and Ludd are watching tens of millions of dollars slip from their grasp. Maybe billions."

  "And all the time I'm defending you from GeneFab, what Ludd is really looking for is the codes that will get his money machine running again," said Jayne.

  "Exactly."

  "Well, that explains the computers-in-the-prison story."

  "Huh?"

  "Grieves! While he was in prison, he received a visit from Rosenblatt. Then, a couple of weeks later, the facility gets a private donation of a dozen new computers. And Grieves has one for his own use, ostensibly because he's teaching cons how to program. Kozak will tell you that Rosenblatt felt badly about Grieves. Did they make a deal?"

  "You mean did Grieves start working on the Splicer again? No way," said Rusty.

  “Grieves doesn't strike me as the Albert Schweitzer type. Maybe they got to him with money?"

  "Maybe they did, but he would trick them. There is no way that he would complete or give them a full working copy of the Splicer. Sure, Grieves had some run-ins with the law when he was younger. He has a record of shoplifting and kiting checks, but that doesn't mean he wanted to turn into Dr. Strangelove. He probably accepted the gifts of the computers so he'd have something to play with while he was in prison."

  "Did he know you had copies of this software, the subroutine robots?"

  "Before, I didn't think so. But now I realize that he must have known. I'm sure we talked about it at some point."

  "And he never mentioned it to you? He scoured the system at GeneFab. Broke into an office, committed a felony to insure this software was destroyed. Yet he knew you had it and didn't say anything?"

  "Two reasons I can think of. One, he forgot and remembered later in prison."

  "That might upset him."

  "Sure. Might scare the hell out of him, too"

  "And two?"

  "He trusted me."

  "Well, he doesn't anymore."

  "What else is new?”

  "You don't get it, do you? Grieves despised Ludd because he stood for everything he hated. Ludd was good at manipulating the media, was loved by the business community. He's making backroom deals with the military. Just to punish Grieves, Ludd uses his clout to send him off to spend two years in jail. Two very long years from what I hear. Grieves hated Ludd with every fiber of his being, and I think Rosenblatt fueled the fire. Killing Ludd was automatic. And framing you was a warning that you should have recognized. Grieves was getting back at you."

  "And Shay?"

  "Shay was tortured for the codes."

  "By Grieves? That’s crazy."

  "I wish you hadn't had those four margueritas. Grieves doesn't need the codes. Remember what you said about programmers never destroying information? Grieves never destroyed his own copies did he?"

  "I wouldn't if I was him."

  "Right. So now we know why he's in hiding."

  Rusty looked at her quizzically.

  "He's hiding for his life. Whoever is after the Splicer has only two choices, Grieves or you. Because you have the subroutines too, don't you Rusty?" He nodded as if in a trance. "Where are they?"

  "You really want to know?"

  "No. You're right. Is there any reason why they would think that Shay knew about them?"

  "She didn't. But I can see her answering the phone. She didn't like to bring attention to the fact that we were separated. It was a sign of failure to her. And she tried to protect me from creditors and such. She would probably tell a stranger that I was out of town on business or something, implying that I still lived there."

  "And at work. What address did they list?"

  "Shay's,” Rusty groaned. "Everything led to Shay's."

  "There's something else we know about the killer. If Grieves was the only one who knew you made copies of those codes, then he had to have told whoever it is that went after Shay."

  "Tortured Shay!"

  "Which is another reason for us to find him. Whether he knows it or not, he knows who killed Shay!"

  CHAPTER 54

  The McEwan house was a remodeled Victorian two-story with glowing oak flooring, crisp white walls and a massive wooden table in the main room that was built from the planks of a demolished wartime bowling alley. In the back, behind the renovated kitchen, was a porch/storage room converted to a guesthouse. It had its own entrance onto a densely treed backyard with an oval swimming pool. This was Rusty's home for the past week. Although he was told he could wander free in the main building, he felt like an interloper.

  Jayne's collection of music and books was unusual. She had a large collection of CD's - many of them unfamiliar to Rusty, who generally stuck to mainstream rock and roll. She collected Celtic and Gaelic folk music peppered with modern Jazz and surprisingly, a number of Tony Bennett collections. Her walls were filled with books, the majority of them on the subject of Law. She also had a well-stocked section on Forensics and Criminal Investigation - another on Ethics and Philosophy. But there were surprises too. LaVey's Satanic Bible was propped up between a Tom Clancy novel and a worn copy of Little Women.

  Rusty had picked up the Bible out of curiosity and was scanning it, unable to sleep, when he had the sudden urge for something cold and wet. He pulled on his bathrobe and a pair of jeans and quietly snuck into Jayne's kitchen. It was long after one in the morning. He had been up early, but couldn't sleep. The run in with Grieves had pumped him up, but the scene on Bay Street with the mystery tracker had lit a fire in his brain. The news about Shay had hit him harder than he expected. His paranoia machinery was over revving. And Jayne was being affected by it too. She hadn't smiled today and had blamed it on her workload but Rusty thought he knew better.

  Rusty popped open the fridge and grabbed a mineral water, then thought better of it and exchanged it for a vodka lime cooler. The label read 8% alcohol. It was cold and bittersweet and for a few seconds Rusty forgot about threats on his life, his truncated career, and rubbing up against forty. He had the bottle straight up, his eyes closed, when the room’s lights flashed on. He spasmed, spilling lime drink down the front of his chest, choking on the laced sugar-water. For the first time that day, he heard Jayne laugh behind him. And when he looked up, he choked briefly again on his midnight snack and broke into laughter with her. She was crouched slightly by the kitchen door, wearing a striped nightshirt, a length of plumbing pipe in her hands.

  "Wait! Let me guess," he said. "Mrs. White did it ... in the kitchen ... with a lead pipe." Jayne convulsed and dropped the tubing noisily on the floor, which sent Rusty into another fit of hysteria. Jayne was laughing so hard she was doubled over, her hands on her stomach. She stumbled over to the counter by Rusty, trying to catch her breath, but every time she looked up to see her suspected intruder, vodka lime running out of his nose, his hair standing up at the back, she was overcome. She reached out with her hand, waving it back and forth, pleading with him. And then when she just began to get control, he would spit out another spray of his drink and that would set her off again.

  Jayne finally pulled the bottle from his hands, took a sip and set it on the counter, her hair in disarray around her lowered face.

  She croaked
. "Oh God. I thought I would explode."

  "I did," said Rusty, wiping his chin and his chest with a paper towel. She smiled and pulled a handful of hair away from her face.

  "It's good to know I still can." She smiled, her hand out, gesturing. Rusty looked at it, hovering in front of his face. It was shaking slightly, the fingers small and narrow like a child's. He took it with his right hand. Jayne lifted her head, still smiling, then seeing the look on his face, her eyes narrowed slightly. He was looking at her hand, cradling it.

  "Are these the hands that would have brained me with that plumbing pipe?" he asked. She tilted her head slightly, confused. He had a distant look. "I was thinking tonight," he added thoughtfully. "What if this was my last day on the planet?"

  "And ..." she said, warily.

  He looked right into her sleepy eyes. "So I made a list of things I had to do. Before my time was up." He reached out and took her other hand, pulling her toward him. "It's a short list." She resisted, but he could tell she was curious.

  "Someone once said - it’s a crime to have lived and not loved," he declared, mockingly serious. Then he pulled her hands to his side, moved close, and kissed her. After a moment she pulled back slightly.

  "Who said that?" she asked, almost in a whisper.

  "A troubled philosopher. A man smitten in his prime by a woman of unique intelligence, yet unable to declare his love for her. Ever."

  She turned her head and lightly took his upper lip in her teeth. Breathing into his mouth the scent of musk and lime, she asked "And who might that be?"

  "Me," was all he said. She bit into the soft flesh of his mouth again and pulled on it. He moved against her, feeling all the soft heat of her body through the nightdress. Her tongue touched his and he felt a jolt of energy - like a living thing, it left a coppery after-taste in his mouth.

  "Your place or mine?" she giggled.