by Cindy Dees
She dug around in the bottom of her purse and came up with a small tin of gel hair paint. She dipped out a little of the red goop and smeared it through a strand of hair down the left side of her face. Then, she pulled the rest of her hair back into a severe ponytail, put on a pair of so-ugly-they had-to-be-cool horn-rimmed glasses, and her goth, cyberpunk look was complete.
Hard to believe she’d been sprawled all over the next president of the United States less than an hour ago. Harder still to believe that someone who looked like this might be responsible for saving the guy’s life today.
After what had happened to her mother, to her whole family, truth be told, a person would think she’d know better than to dive into deep waters full of big, hungry sharks. Her mother had tangled with bad guys who’d sabotaged her work and made it look as if her incompetence had resulted in a man’s death. She’d resigned from the military and suffered a mental breakdown, existing in a nearly catatonic state for twenty years. She supposed she ought to be grateful the bastards who’d drugged her mother hadn’t killed her outright, but living with the empty shell of her mother for so long had been worse in some ways than losing her completely.
It had torn apart her family. Josie had sided with their mother, Diana with their father in the first months after what they now knew to be sabotage to halt her mother’s research on stealth technologies for military aircraft. When their father finally sent the girls away to a boarding school, the destruction of the family had been complete. Although she loved her sister, she’d never been able to understand Josie’s fanatical loyalty to their clearly crazy mother. Maybe it was because Josie was older when The Incident happened, while she’d only been four. Josie had many more memories of their mother from before the drugs that she didn’t have. Practically her only recollections of her mother until last year were of a gaunt, ghostlike woman only tenuously in touch with reality.
At least at the Athena Academy she’d found a measure of acceptance. The girls and staff there were unanimously too bright to blame her and Josie for their mother’s problems and gave both girls a chance to find a place for themselves. Beautiful, outgoing, confident Josie had fit right in at the Academy. But, unlike her big sister, she’d struggled to find an identity that suited her.
She’d envied her older sister. Wanted to be just like her. But she never quite measured up to the standards Josie set. It didn’t take long for her to head in a completely opposite direction rather than compete with her and lose every time.
If Josie joined a team sport, Diana quit sports altogether. If Josie decided makeup and fashion were important, she threw out every stitch of decent clothing she owned. If Josie studied French, she studied Arabic. If Josie went to swimming camp, she went to horseback-riding camp. And the hell of it was she still ended up just like her big sister. A pale, unsuccessful shadow of her, but just like her. Both military officers, both beautiful women in their own right, both highly intelligent, both with wildly promising futures. Of course, unlike Josie she did her damnedest to hide both her beauty and her brains most of the time, and she was rapidly throwing away her career and her future.
But she couldn’t break away from her family completely. Last year, when Josie set out to clear their mother’s name once and for all, Diana had come running to help Josie. She’d even taken a bullet for her big sister when the same guy who’d sabotaged their mother’s work went after Josie’s research as well.
Was she doomed to repeat her mother’s fatal mistake and take on forces too big for her to handle? Was she headed down the fast track to her own destruction by tangling with the Q-group all by herself?
She pushed the car door open and stepped out. A couple of pedestrians looked away from her hastily. It was amazing how a change of makeup could make her completely invisible to respectable people. Maybe that was why she had so little respect for most of them in return. She stepped inside the surprisingly quiet Internet café. A half-dozen guys dressed in varying degrees of grunge lounged at the coffee bar to one side of the room. Most of the computer terminals were empty at this time of day. The coffee server waved a hello at her and she waved back. Damn. None of her regular hacker buds were here.
She made her way to the back of the room and picked a terminal facing the entrance. She logged on quickly, using the Arabic handle she’d hidden behind to infiltrate the Q-group chat room. No new activity in the chat room since yesterday afternoon. That was odd. They yacked up a storm most evenings. But last night had been completely silent. Like maybe they were all away from their computers. Maybe breaking into her house and getting into position for today’s assassination attempt.
She highlighted the e-mail handle she believed belonged to one of the cell’s leaders. It translated roughly from Arabic to English as “Glory Seeker.” She attempted to trace it back to its source and immediately ran into a firewall, a blocking command by Glory Seeker’s Internet server that prevented her from seeing any further into the source of the transmission. Quickly, she typed in a protocol to circumvent the firewall. No problem. She sailed right past the routine antihacking protection.
She dug into the server’s memory, searching for any trace of Glory Seeker and his point of origin. And hit another firewall. A big, fat honking one this time. She tried her protocol again and it bounced like a Super Ball. Hmm. Time to pull out the big guns. She uploaded a program one of her hacker pals had written a few months back that purported to bust through any firewall anywhere.
She watched the spinning hourglass icon on the computer screen as the program did its magic. This sure was taking a while. It was taking way too long, in fact. At this rate it’d be next week before she got the name of a single Q-group member. She needed more computing power. Or more hacking power, to be precise.
While the firewall buster continued to batter away at the barrier to her progress, she pulled out her cell phone. “Hey, Dynamo, Die Hard here.”
A sleepy voice complained, “Do you know what time it is?”
“Yeah. I’m sorry I woke you up. But I’ve got an emergency. The mother of all hacking jobs for you.”
The voice perked up to vaguely human standards. “Anybody done it before?”
She couldn’t help but grin. It was all about status. Be the first guy to break into an unbreakable system and your fame was assured within the secret world of hackers.
She replied, “Nope, it’s a virgin system. A bunch of virgin systems. I’m at the Chaosium. Can you be here in ten minutes?”
“Are you kidding?”
“No, I’m not kidding. It’s really an emergency. I’ll owe you huge if you help me out.”
“How huge?” the guy asked, distinctly interested now.
She laughed. “Not that huge. No sexual favors from me. But hey,” she added casually, “Don’t sweat it. I’ll call CrystalMeth. I bet she can get what I need if you can’t.” It was a dirty trick. Dynamo and CrystalMeth were ex-lovers and archrivals. They hated each other’s guts.
“I’ll be there in five,” Dynamo announced with a definite fire in his pants now.
She repeated the call a half-dozen more times, pleading and wheedling the best hackers she knew into coming down and helping her out. True to his word, Dynamo walked into the café, in his pajama bottoms and a Def Lepperd T-shirt in five minutes flat. She stood up to greet him and leaned over his shoulder as he settled in and signed on at a terminal near her. Several more of the hackers trickled in over the next couple of minutes. They looked startled when they took note of the team she’d assembled. It was a who’s who of East Coast hackers.
She told the late arrivals, “I’ve got eight more hackers online. They’re signed in and waiting for you guys to join them.”
“Jesus,” Dynamo exclaimed. “Are we taking over the Federal Reserve today or what?”
CrystalMeth, the only other woman in the room, retorted, “Been there. Done that. Got the T-shirt.”
The woman also was on probation because of that particular stunt. Before the pair could er
upt into a full-blown spat, Diana directed everyone, “Log on to your most powerful server while I tell you what’s up. Time is of the essence, here.”
“What’s so urgent?” Dynamo asked as his fingers flew across the keyboard.
“I need to find some guys. Track them back to their points of origin, break into their servers and get actual, real-world identities on all of them. And I need it done like yesterday.”
One of the other hackers spoke up. “That’s kid stuff. It’s time consuming, but any garden-variety hacker could do it. Why all this firepower, Die Hard?”
She’d promised Gabe she wouldn’t tell anyone what was afoot. Besides, these guys wouldn’t believe her if she did tell them. Not to mention they might very well refuse to help her. “I can’t give you the details, but this is no-kidding save-the-world stuff. The sort of stuff that could get all of your records cleared.”
That got their attention. Well over half of them had had runins with the law. She had no authority to promise such a thing, but she’d bet Gabe did.
She gave them the address of the known Q-group chat room and assigned a user of the room to each of them to track down. In a matter of minutes the café had gone silent except for the clacking of keyboards as eight hundred-word-a-minute typists body-slammed their way through the Internet.
“Hey, Die Hard, mind if I ask a friend to help us?” CrystalMeth called out.
Diana replied quickly, “Not at all. In fact, all of you, invite anyone you want to jump in.”
Before long, word had gone out literally all over the world, and hundreds of hackers jumped on the bandwagon. Most of them would be no help at all, but with that many operators at work, somebody was bound to stumble across back doors into the right server systems.
She jumped as her own computer beeped. The firewall protocol had worked! She was inside the next layer of protection surrounding Glory Seeker. She typed in a few commands and scanned the code scrolling down her screen. Wow. Nice program architecture. But permeable, nonetheless. She started to type in a set of instructions to get past it. And noticed something funny. The original code at the top of her screen was degrading. Literally eroding before her very eyes! Crud. Somebody was counterhacking.
She typed furiously. She had to get in the final command before the entire grid imploded in her face. She stabbed the Enter button on her keyboard and prayed she’d been in time. The hourglass icon blinked steadily for several seconds.
And a new set of code scrolled down her screen. Bingo.
Reading fast, she identified the type of encryption this layer of security used. She’d seen something like it before. Casting back in her memory, she recalled the command set to bypass it and typed fast. Again, the code started to erode. Whoever was chasing her through this server was good. Damned good.
A fork in the path of the logic loomed ahead. She had to choose one direction or another. And fast. The counterhacker was right on her heels. Abruptly, one of the forks in the path started to erode as she watched. Well, that made the decision easy. She dived in front of the erosion, down the disappearing pathway, racing across cyberhighways like the wind.
Hunched over the keyboard, her fingers fairly flew across the keys as she flung commands into battle like electronic warriors against her foe. She paused just long enough to send a couple of commands designed to confound whoever was tracking her, and then she went back to work attempting to break the encryption. She entered the final command. And sat back to wait. If she didn’t miss her guess, this was the last layer of protection inside this server. If she’d sent the right commands, and if she’d been in time to beat the countermeasures, she ought to see names, addresses, phone numbers and credit card information on her screen when the hourglass went away.
The wait was agonizing. Each second that ticked by was one closer to Gabe’s possible death. The idea of all that vibrant energy, that intelligence, that sex appeal, being snuffed out made her faintly sick to her stomach. She had to get through.
The computer screen went dark. Her heart dropped into her feet. Damn!
But then a small, rectangular window opened in the middle of her screen. Would the server administrator please enter a valid password?
She sagged in relief. A simple password block? No sweat. She typed in the standard protocol for bypassing a password request. This shouldn’t take more than a minute or so. She couldn’t believe how many people thought their computers were actually safe because it took a password to get to the data. Every twelve-year-old hacker wannabe in the world knew how to get past that.
The screen flickered. And lit up.
Hot damn! She’d done it. A system administration screen opened in front of her. Quickly she entered the handle, Glory Seeker, into a search field. And moments later, the screen began to erode. Data melted off of it like butter off a hot knife.
C’mon, c’mon, she urged the search engine. Just a name. A lousy name, and then the whole damn server could implode for all she cared.
The search window began to melt.
But then a name flashed up in the reply box. For no more than a second. But it was enough. Tito Albadian. In New Jersey. And then it was gone.
Rapidly, she accessed the Social Security administration and broke into the system through a back door she could drive a Mack truck through. No record of a Tito Albadian in New Jersey. She frowned. Maybe she was looking in the wrong place. She tried the Immigration and Naturalization Service and got an immediate hit. She called up a copy of the guy’s work permit. Using an illegally obtained police code, she requested a picture of this Albadian guy.
A laser printer behind her spit out a sheet of paper.
“I’ve got a name, folks,” she announced. “Could a couple of you help me look for known associates of this guy?”
Every pair of shoulders hunched higher around their ears. Hackers were nothing if not competitive. Over the next several minutes, assorted curses and crows of triumph were heard. Finally, Dynamo shouted out, “Gotcha!”
Diana moved over behind him as he traced a credit card number to a driver’s license in California and called up a picture of the owner. “Way to go!” she congratulated him.
He sat back, rolling his shoulders. “Man, that was close. I had a counterhacker on my heels the whole way.”
“Same thing’s happening to me over here, too,” CrystalMeth spoke up. “But I’ll beat the bastard.”
One by one, the hackers, some working alone and some working in teams, broke into Internet server systems all over the world and harvested names and faces from the participants in the Q-group chat room. In all, fourteen faces printed out on the printer to go with the handles of the Q-group chat members. Undoubtedly, not all of these guys were part of an active Q-group hit squad. Some of them were innocent people, just looking to connect with a few immigrants like themselves and going about their lawful daily lives. But some of them were here in Washington, right now, planning to assassinate Gabe Monihan. Of that, she had no doubt.
Diana picked up the sheaf of printed photos and took them over to the copier machine in the corner. Quickly she made a duplicate set of the pictures and stapled them together. She put a yellow sticky pad on them and scribbled the name, Owen Haas. How she was going to get the pictures to him, she had no idea. But she had faith he’d know what to do with the pictures once he got them. He was a sharp cookie and hadn’t missed her veiled warning to him that someone was out to get Gabe Monihan today.
What she really needed to do now was run these names and pictures through the Oracle database. It was plugged into computer systems that these hackers didn’t even dream existed. She scooped up both sets of the pictures and her purse and headed for the door.
“You guys are the best. I won’t forget this,” she called out as she exited the café.
And was grabbed around both upper arms by a pair of powerful men, one on either side of her.
She struggled in the men’s grasps to no avail. “Hey!” she shouted. “What do you think you’re
doing? Let go of me!” It was women’s self-defense 101. Make a very loud stink if someone tried to snatch her. Most kidnappers, rapists and murderers weren’t looking for a troublesome public confrontation.
Several people on the sidewalk were staring at her, and a couple of passersby looked as if they were reaching for cell phones. Three cheers for civic-minded citizens!
“Sorry ma’am,” one of the men intoned, deadpan. “We can’t let you go.”
“Why the hell not?” she shouted back at him, still trying to draw attention.
“You’re under arrest.”
10:00 A.M.
“I’ m what?” Diana exclaimed.
“You’re under arrest, ma’am.”
“And you might be who?” she demanded of the men holding her.
“Army Criminal Investigation Division. If you’ll come with us, ma’am. We need to ask you a few questions.”
She cursed under her breath. She so did not have time for fun with CID right now. Gabe would be inaugurated in a scant four hours. “Look fellas. Can I take a rain check on this? I’ll be happy to talk to you later this afternoon. But right now I have extremely urgent business to take care of.”
“That’s what we’d like to talk to you about ma’am,” one of them replied stolidly.
She cursed under her breath. Their questioning could take hours. She thought fast and yanked back hard on the guy’s hands. She didn’t break their grip on her, but in the ensuing tussle, she managed to drop one of the photocopied sets of pictures on the ground and kick it behind them. It was the best she could do. Maybe someone inside the café would see Owen Haas’s name on the photos and get them to him somehow. It was a long shot, but it might be all she had.
Capitulating abruptly, she walked forward rapidly, all but dragging the Intelligence officers away from the Chaosium Café and the sheaf of papers on the ground. She stuffed the remaining set of pictures into her purse.