Catalyst

by Steve Winshel

  It didn’t seem to bother Freddie that Rigas ignored his greetings. He was pretty much used to it. He was too glad to have her calling directly for him, wanting to talk to him, only him, to care. Plus, this sounded kind of interesting. “Okay, tell me what it says at the top of the black box, right along the edge.”

  Rigas squinted in the dim light. “wx_vip_09221.exe. What the fuck is that?”

  “It’s a program. But it’s not a program I know. The stuff on the screen is the output of whatever it does. Did you say addresses, like somebody’s house?”

  “Yeah, then a bunch of numbers.” Rigas read off the numbers.

  Freddie interrupted her. “Okay, that’s easy. I thought you were going to give me something tough. Those are IP addresses. The program gives you the physical address, like a house or office, where the computer with that address is connecting to the Internet. Where’d you get it?”

  Rigas ignored the question. “Is this…I don’t know…worth something? Is it super secret or something?” Rigas figured maybe Barnes had invented it and he was being extorted to get it.

  Freddie laughed. “Naw, it’s cool and all. I mean, you’d have to be pretty good to make it. I could do it if I wanted to,” he had to add. “But it’s not a state secret or anything.”

  “Thanks.” Rigas hung up without thinking about Freddie, who waited a minute before hanging up too, smiling like Rigas had just asked him out for a drink to thank him for his help. Rigas looked at the screen for a minute. This couldn’t be what someone was trying to get from Barnes, not according to Freddie. So what the hell was it? She looked at the last address on the list as it flashed repeatedly at her.

  * * *

  Goddamnit, goddamnit, goddamnit, Helen thought. She had used the information Barnes gave her to get to the email address. She got the email and its attachment. She had downloaded it and saved it to her hard drive, then sent it straight to the printer so she could read a hard copy and make sure it was the Ventrica design, all of it. While the printer started feeding paper and spitting out pages of text and drawings, Helen sent an email that made her feel better. Using the private address her boss changed once a month, she let him know of her progress:

  Ventrica design in my possession. I’m verifying completeness. Will let you know asap. Also need to clean up some loose ends.

  She hit Send and watched as the email program spooled the message for transmission.

  It would take a while for the document to print. In the meantime, she took care of a little item she’d had in the back of her mind. It was a shame about Crawford, but business is business. She typed in the information that accessed her Cayman Island account then did the same for the one she’d set up for Crawford. It took her less than a minute to transfer the entire amount into her account. A little bonus.

  Then a grinding noise distracted her. Goddamnit. The printer had eaten a page and gotten jammed. Goddamned old printer; she knew she had to replace it. Opening up the top, she could see a piece of paper crumpled and wedged deep inside. She didn’t feel like dealing with this – it would take fifteen minutes to try to clear it out, getting her hands covered with ink, and that was if it actually worked. She was no tech expert and didn’t know how to fix whatever the underlying problem was. Starting to get irritated now, she gave up and went back to the computer. A couple clicks of the mouse and she brought up the Ventrica design and opened it on her screen, figuring she’d just have to suffer the eye strain so she could confirm what she had and ship it off to her boss. The document opened and she saw the same first page that was sitting in the printer’s bin. Before she could scroll to the next page, the screen went bright blue and a large, yellow exclamation point filled the center of the screen. What the hell? Below the yellow punctuation mark was a gray box. She read the words there – some dire warning there had been a hardware failure. The network card was disabled and could not be repaired. She was instructed to replace the card if she wanted to be able to connect to the Internet.

  Helen’s blood was boiling. She jumped out of the chair and took one step toward the printer and kicked it so hard the heel on her pump broke as the printer flew off its stand and went halfway across the room. She picked up a folding chair and raised it over her head, ready to hammer the printer lying cracked on its side on the floor. She was breathing heavily. After a few seconds, she put the chair down and went back to the computer. Brushing a few strands of hair out of her face, she got rid of the warning screen and was able to see the Ventrica document. She skimmed through and decided it was legit. But she couldn’t send it out until she had a new goddamned network card. She strummed her fingernails on the keyboard. No, she decided, waiting until morning was a bad idea. She tore the network card out of the side of her computer and wrote down the words appearing on it. She grabbed her keys and changed her shoes. Someplace would be open Saturday night.

  * * *

  Josh didn’t know how to pick a lock or hack into an alarm system as it blared its siren noises, so he crossed his fingers as he walked down the dark street to Helen’s house. He tried the front door, just in case. No luck. Around the back there was a balcony a few feet off the ground. He hopped up and tried the door. It was locked. He didn’t have time for this, he thought. He picked up a small metal deck chair and smashed it through the window. She was going to know someone was here anyway, and crime wasn’t unfamiliar to the nicer parts of LA. He’d just make sure to grab some stuff to make it look like a burglary. He waited a few seconds for the alarm to start sounding. She had left in too much of a hurry to bother putting it on.

  The chair was more effective than Josh had expected. The entire pane of glass shattered inward and there weren’t even shards hanging from the wooden frame. He stepped in, avoiding the bulk of the glass. The noise had been loud, but with no alarm sounding and the houses not on top of each other, he was probably okay. Better the police catch him than Helen, anyway. He walked into the living room and took a minute to get his bearings. Josh knew what he was looking for; he needed her computer.

  Josh wasn’t surprised to find Helen had a well-equipped home office. It didn’t matter that her business was blackmail and murder. The view out her window was much better than his and there was a distinctive female touch to the Spartan but expensive furnishings. An overturned printer was out of place with the rest of the immaculate room. Her steel-framed desk held just a few standard items and was dominated by a gorgeous plasma screen much larger than Josh had in his office. It was ironically offset by the presence of the small gun Helen had casually threatened him with earlier that evening. It sat on the desk as innocuously as a Scotch tape dispenser. Josh concentrated on the screen. He immediately saw Helen had opened the Ventrica design. That meant she had navigated around the fake warning from the virus. But the network card for the laptop connected to the screen was sitting there, unplugged. She must have pulled it out to see what the make and model were. That meant she believed the warning that the card wasn’t working. A stack of small, square notepaper was next to the network card along with a pen. Josh could see on the top square the imprint of writing from the missing square she must have used and ripped off. She had pressed very hard with the pen. He was guessing she was pretty agitated when she left. There were no cables anywhere, meaning her computer used a wireless network somewhere in the house and did not use a physical connection between the network card and her access to the Internet. Josh kicked himself for not thinking of that. When you use a wireless system, you need a special network card. She might have figured something funny was going on if she knew the difference, but so far his luck was holding out. He slipped the network card back into the slot on the side of her computer.

  Josh pulled the memory stick from the pocket of his jeans. It contained a program he couldn’t hide in a virus. It was both too big and too complicated to sneak onto someone’s computer without them knowing. He plugged it into the back of Helen’s computer.

  Josh took a breath. Sitting in front of the computer was comfor
ting, familiar. But his right eye throbbed as if there were a migraine coming on. He looked around the room and got a dose of reality. He had no experience to compare this too. How did burglars do it, walking into someone else’s home, invading their space, without breaking into a sweat and whipping around at every sound to see who was coming? He looked back at the broken glass, half expecting Helen to pop up and shoot him. Josh started to feel a little lightheaded, the reality of what he was doing sinking in. He was way out of his element. He could feel panic rising and his stomach grumbled. But he knew he couldn’t lose it now. If he did, he would be useless. He took a deep breath, then a couple more. His hands on the keyboard, which he hadn’t noticed had been shaking, quieted. Focus. Just for a few minutes.

  Careful not to change what was on her screen in any way she would notice, Josh was able in a few keystrokes to get the computer to recognize and open the files on the memory stick. The virus he sent earlier had already installed the keylogger program and was set to periodically email to him the file containing everything typed onto the computer, once every twenty-four hours. But he needed more than that. He needed to be able to see or, at least, to hear, what Helen said and did. The program Josh installed now was another kind of spyware. This one didn’t log keystrokes, it recorded sounds. Every teenager knew computers were great for downloading and listening to music, but most people didn’t know the same machines were excellent for recording, too. The program Josh installed overrode any commands from the user of the computer to turn off the microphone in case they knew they could even do that. The microphone would be always on. He wanted to hear what Helen said in this room; he wanted to catch her planning her work.

  There was one problem with this approach, though. Sound files, the data captured when you recorded sounds or voices, were large. That would make it hard to keep the recording secret. Helen would notice her machine running slowly or running out of memory. But Josh had planned for this.

  Years earlier in grad school he had studied language processing as part of his doctoral work in the cognitive sciences: how the human brain listened to spoken language and figured out how to turn those sounds into words. Lots of smart people had done a lot of good research, yet it was still largely unknown how this worked. That made it very difficult for all the software entrepreneurs who thought it would be cool to write a program that could understand spoken language. It was hard enough if all you wanted to do was speak into a computer and have it print out the words; it was still virtually impossible for the computer program to actually understand what those words meant when strung together into sentences. The fantasy of building the computer from Space Odyssey 2001 or Star Trek where it talked back and forth with people in a natural way was still that: a fantasy. However…there were some decent programs for recognizing individual words. You could train one of these programs to listen for your voice to say specific words. Even cell phones could do this in a limited capacity. “Dial home” or “Call Allison” would work after a little practice on most cell phones. The program Josh installed on Helen’s computer was a somewhat more sophisticated than that – at least it was after he had done some tweaking. It listened for certain words while the microphone was recording and stored two minutes of speech before and after any of those words were spoken. He had to pick the list quickly, guessing at what the important triggers were. He chose his name, the company’s name, Ventrica, and a few others. If Helen were chatting with someone about the weather in the same room as the computer, it would record and listen but not save any of that, instead throwing it away and not using up any space or processing power. If she mentioned the Ventrica, it would keep two minutes of the conversation preceding when that word was spoken, and keep saving until two minutes had passed where none of the other trigger words were used. Then it would email that sound file to Josh once every twenty-four hours. Very useful and very illegal. It took him just under ten minutes to install it on Helen’s computer. He figured he had burned five minutes breaking in to the house, plus this ten, so he had twenty-five minutes until Helen returned. He was in good shape, which didn’t keep his palms from sweating or his head from swiveling around the room every two minutes. Now it was time to set up the fake burglary. Josh’s main concern was still the computer. She would wonder why it wasn’t stolen. The best bet was to focus on other rooms in the house and make it look like some amateur just grabbed whatever was close by and left. As he started to move her monitor back into its original position and put the Ventrica design up on the screen, he wondered what she had done after downloading the email with the design in it earlier that evening. He knew the keylogger file was running and there was still time to take a peek. A couple of keystrokes that wouldn’t ever be put together accidentally by someone using the computer resulted in pulling up a box on the screen that asked for a password. Josh typed in a complicated string of numbers and digits, both upper and lower case. A text file popped open. It contained every keystroke Helen had made since the program started, sixty-four minutes ago according to the log. Much of it was gobbledygook since the program used special characters to represent when the user hit the Space bar or Return or other keystrokes that weren’t letters. But in the midst of all this he could see she had sent an email.

  Ventrica design in my possession. I’m verifying completeness. Will let you know asap. Also need to clean up some loose ends.

  Was she emailing another partner? No. This was probably her boss, the one who had ordered her to get the Ventrica design and who was responsible for putting Josh and his sister in danger. His heart was pounding. They were the loose ends. Josh needed to get the evidence on Helen quickly, get the cops to stop her. He started to doubt his plan, his timing. Too much to worry about; he had to do what he could now. He noted the address she sent the note to, but what caught his eye was what came next. The log showed a long string of digits and a bizarre set of characters you wouldn’t find on the face of a keyboard. This meant she had been accessing encrypted information, something sufficiently important that it was encoded and scrambled. Josh could see she had accessed it from a web site, one with a name he didn’t recognize. She used a password to access the information, then again at a second web site with similar encryption. Then there were a bunch of meaningless characters. That meant she had used her mouse to click on a button on the Web page. There was no way for him to know what the button did. It could have been anything, since the keylogger only showed what you typed or what buttons you pressed. But as he looked at the screen, Josh realized what it was. Helen had been accessing a couple of bank accounts. He didn’t know anything about the accounts except the passwords and the Web sites, but he knew at least one of them contained two and a half million dollars because that’s the figure Helen had typed in at one point. Is that what the Ventrica design was worth to her? Suddenly, he didn’t have time to think much more about it.

  “You goddamned sonofabitch.”

  Never in his entire life had Josh been so startled. It was like the sudden jerking that happens just as you’re falling asleep and your whole body jumps for some unknown, dream-related reason. He must have popped two inches off the floor. He hadn’t heard her come in the house or walk across the living room, up the two stairs, and into the office, despite all the hardwood floors. Helen stood in the doorway holding a much larger, darker gun at her side. She also had a white plastic bag from Office Depot in her other hand. With his heart beating fast enough to cause a stroke and fear rising in his throat, Josh still managed to realize his miscalculation. Helen hadn’t gone to the Fry’s Electronics, which is where Josh would naturally have gone for the network card. She went to the more mundane, and much closer, Office Depot that sold them as well. That decision saved her twenty minutes and got her back to the house in time to catch him red-handed. He didn’t know what to do. Not a goddamned clue. She had the design, she had the network card, and she had a gun. She didn’t need him any more. Josh could see the anger in her eyes subside as she realized how perfectly he had solved a problem for
her.

  The perfect smile returned. “A little breaking and entering, Josh? Kinda ballsy, don’t you think? What was your plan?” She waited and Josh tried to calm down. Panic wasn’t going to get him anywhere. “You weren’t going to hurt me, were you sweetie? After how close we’ve been?”

  Josh shook his head, trying to keep his thoughts clear. The truth would buy him a few minutes, maybe. “I wanted to catch you, get the police to stop you.” He pointed at the computer as if that explained everything.

  Helen raised the gun. Josh had never actually looked into the barrel of a gun. It seemed very large and very close. It looked dark and deadly. “Wait! I sent you a bogus file. That’s not the Ventrica design. It’s a fake. I wanted to buy some time…”

  Helen didn’t even hesitate. She just laughed. “I looked at it. It looks real to me. You’re stalling. I’ve got what I want and I don’t need you. I’m just killing a burglar who broke into my home.”

  He knew she was seconds away from pulling the trigger. Josh didn’t break eye contact with her but peripherally could see to his left and right. There was nothing to run to, nowhere to hide. He could try to leap out the glass window behind him, hoping to survive any sliced arteries or the plunge down the embankment. He didn’t have time to do the math. He was caught and he was going to be dead. Josh could feel despair rising. But then he realized this wasn’t like a plane crashing, where he had no control at all. He could at least try, not just stand there and be shot like a rabid dog. And if he didn’t do something, he wouldn’t be there to protect Allison. He remembered the gun on the desk. James Bond would have ducked, grabbed, and shot all at the same time. Instead, Josh looked down despite his instinct not to. Helen followed his gaze and then they looked back at each other. Josh reached for the gun as she pulled the trigger. He heard a loud boom, like a clap of thunder inside a tunnel, echoing off the walls and threatening to burst his eardrums. A trick of the acoustics made him think he heard two sounds, almost at the same time, one an echo of the other. In the heartbeat of time it took Josh to hear the explosion caused by Helen’s gun, he imagined what it would feel like as the hard, tiny missile pierced his body and started shattering bone, tearing blood vessels, damaging vital organs. It would probably hurt, but he didn’t know if it would knock him unconscious before it killed him or if he would be writhing on the ground, bleeding to death in agony. As Josh’s hand reached the gun on the desk, he felt rather than heard the remaining unbroken glass window shatter behind him. It didn’t make sense, in that split second, that she could have missed. He looked up from the small gun that was now in his right hand, expecting to see Helen moving forward to tighten her aim and finish him off. But what he saw was her body still in mid-air, the left side of her face torn away, the flawless cheekbone now a mess of blood and cartilage. Her eyes were open, staring at Josh in disbelief, and he held them as she hit the ground with both arms splayed in front of her. She blinked once and Josh saw the consciousness seep out of her. The whole scene took less than a handful of seconds. Some part of him knew what was happening and reacted. He pointed the gun at the door to the office, above Helen’s body. The tip of the gun was shaking. He could hear footsteps racing toward them now. He didn’t know if there was a safety on the gun or exactly how to work it, but he could aim and pull the trigger. Josh brought his other hand up and used it to steady the right. Whoever had shot Helen was coming for him next and he was going to be ready.