Runaway Heart

by Stephen J. Cannell

  Roland quickly went through his next few cracker steps. He needed to access his ISP where he had already set up a phony account using a stolen credit card number. "Man, what don't I do for the Strockmeister?" He smiled as he thought of the overweight attorney. When he first met Herman he thought the dude was a complete drudge, but Herman had slowly won him over with his passion for causes and his fairness. Roland's mother, Madge, had found Strock while Roland was fielding grounders in the federal joint, convicted of computer crimes. Strock took his case on appeal and got it overturned. In exchange Roland had volunteered his hacking services. The two became an unlikely pair, as different emotionally as they were physically, but they shared a blistering intelligence, and now there was very little that

  Roland wouldn't do for Strock. He thought Strock was the bomb finer than frog hair.

  Roland dialed into his ISP using one of the phone numbers from inside the Gen-A-Tec phone block, then logged on to his new phony Internet account. He had already composed a special e-mail message. The Gen-A-Tec e-mail host was only supposed to pass e-mails on to the recipient it was addressed to, but the hole Roland was using allowed him to add a few commands that the host would automatically execute. He sent an e-mail request to send a complete list of Gen-A-Tec's password files to the bogus account. All he had to do now was settle back and wait.

  The late afternoon sun was hot on his skinny shoulders, but Roland didn't mind. He was thinking about pussy now, wondering how he was going to open some clam after work. He was thinking about cruising the bars, looking for cream, maybe making a trip out to Berkeley to flash his new sash out there, let his awesome purple headdress vacuum up the skank, throw those college girls a sausage party.

  While he was pursuing those fantasies his computer beeped and he looked at the screen that flashed: YOU'VE GOT MAIL. He opened the e-mail and, sure as shit, there was the Gen-A-Tec password file. Among other things, it had pairs of user names and encrypted passwords for the 3,500 Gen-A-Tec employees:

  C0M725M 13Jen45 1415ube

  F1i eter Jsasson K1ezso

  OROTHu 2 Bfi b 7

  SEoblp#w81

  Rhyde

  Pzimmer

  Bnorton

  It went on for pages. Roland knew it was mathematically impossible for him to decipher these encryptions, but he also knew

  that most corporate executives were pretty sloppy about what passwords they used. Usually a wife's name or a child's was a good candidate. Roland picked a program out of his CD case. The one he chose first had the two hundred most common adult names already encrypted. He quickly ran that program against the list the e-mail host had just supplied him. Nothing. Then he picked out a second CD and did the same for the two hundred most common baby names.

  Bingo! Two matches popped up. One was a secretary and not worth working on. She wouldn't have top-shelf security. But the other match was JSASSON. He already knew from studying the corporate prospectus that this was probably the user name for Jack Sasson. Sasson's encrypted password was "2Bfib7," which matched the encryption in Roland's baby-name file for "Brandon."

  "Go no further, my man," Roland told himself. Jack Sasson was major corporate cheese, Gen-A-Tec's chief financial officer.

  Now Roland could go right through the front door, right past their bullshit security system directly into the company e-mail. He logged in with the user name JSASSON, then typed the password BRANDON. The e-mail host immediately displayed a Gen-A-Tec welcome screen. One of the choices listed was SYSTEMS PROMPT.

  "Fuckin' A," Roland giggled. This system has more holes than a military rectal exam, he thought. Roland quickly clicked on SYSTEMS PROMPT and was immediately into their Local Area Network inside the Gen-A-Tec building. Roland was losing respect for this systems administrator at warp speed. The fool hadn't patched the known security holes in his software. He hadn't even guarded against frequently used passwords. The guy was a complete pant-load. Butt toast.

  The Gen-A-Tec nighttime systems administrator's computer beeped a warning and Lincoln Fellows, a skinny, twenty-three-year-old African American, master geek and computer nerd, whose net handle was Darkstar, ambled over and pushed his ebony features down into the blue-lit screen.

  "What have we got here, my man?" he said softly as a window popped up on his screen with the warning:

  CRACKER IN THE SHADOWS. MONITOR?

  Lincoln clicked on OK and the alert window went away.

  Line got one or two of these a day. Kids mostly, trying their skill against an organized security system, trying to see if they could break in. Everything here, the holes in the version software, the easy-to-crack password files, everything was put there intentionally by Lincoln Fellows. Just hard enough to seem real, just easy enough to let them in. Once the kiddy crackers thought they were in, they would bounce around inside his BS shadow system thinking they had found the real deal, but it was just an elaborate stage set designed and orchestrated by Lincoln Fellows, master of the game. The crackers would screw with worthless data, download dummy files, do their best to steal or change shit, and leave their mark on the system. But as soon as they logged off the shadow system went back to the way it was before they came in, waiting for the next moron to try. The cracker always left without ever getting past Lincoln's little funhouse to the real computer and data systems beyond. Brilliant. Unorthodox. Devastating. "I am de man. I rule." Lincoln smiled to himself as he watched the intruder move around in his shadow system.

  Outside in the bushes Roland decided to try to find out how employees might be organized into work groups at Gen-A-Tec. He tried looking at the /etc/group file and the systems administrator let him do it. Roland's contempt for this SA was becoming enormous. The guy was a beast, a Barney, an e-jerkoff.

  Roland could see that Jack Sasson's systems access rights were pretty high. In fact, he was on all the key user groups, including the one called RESHCORN, that probably stood for Research Corn. "There we go, my man. We is strollin' with Roland… hittin' wid Minton." Roland grinned as he downloaded the entire corn file, but as it came in on his screen it seemed pretty damned ordinary. The kind of stuff you'd find in the newspaper: descriptions of bio-enhanced corn, stories about its new insect-repellent qualities and increased vitamin content nothing that the Strockmeister could use in court. Roland shrugged. At least he got the goods as promised. Before logging off he downloaded a few of the company's "Mahogany Row" e-mail boxes for perusal later.

  He disconnected his laptop, closed the phone junction box, packed up his equipment, then calmly walked back to his rental, got in, and pulled away.

  "Adios, dickhead. You've just been kavorked," Roland said to the five giant blocks of blue tile as he drove off.

  Lincoln Fellows watched as the cracker in the shadows logged off. The hacker had downloaded some newspaper articles and dummy e-mails. "Good crack, butt-munch," he said softly to the empty screen. "Come back any time."

  Chapter Four.

  "He's not converting as fast as I'd like," the

  solemn-faced Dr. Lance Shiller said, slapping nervously the metal clipboard in his right hand against his thigh. He was looking at Susan Strockmire and she, not her father, was the one causing his nervousness. The woman was exquisite. He was determined to impress her with some medical wire-walking, maybe take her downstairs for a cup of mud and a little case consultation, get her away from the manic frenzy of the Cardiac Care Unit at Cedars.

  It was hard to get any romantic traction with code blues going off all over the place, while crash carts whizzed by and cardiovascular post-ops rolled through on bloodstained sheets.

  "If you want, we could explore some options,"

  Shiller said. "Tell you what, I'm off in twenty minutes and I haven't eaten since this morning." He looked at his gold watch. "Holy Moley, that's almost eight-and-a-half hours ago. No wonder r m starved. How 'bout we jump downstairs now and get a bite. I think we need to discuss getting your father a more permanent result. The drug therapy doesn't seem to be doing it."
r />   "Okay," she said nervously. "Okay… sure… whatever you think is best, Dr. Shiller."

  "Right. Well, that's what I think is best… and I prefer Lance."

  The windowless cafeteria was overlit and bustling with medical people of all shapes and specialties, as well as a few civilians from the four o'clock visitors crowd. Most were carrying trays or hunched over processed meals at institutional tables, looking uncomfortable in straight-back metal chairs. Susan and Lance were in one of the few leather booths along the wall. Susan only ordered coffee and Lance was poking at something called "The California Plate" that was just an avocado and chicken salad with honey-mustard dressing. He really wasn't hungry because, truth be told, he had eaten only an hour ago.

  "What other kinds of things are you suggesting?" Susan asked, leaning forward, her beautiful, delicate features porcelain and perfect even under the harsh neon glare. But her pale blue eyes, the color of reef water, were clouded with concern.

  God… I am falling in love, Lance thought, as he nibbled and considered. "To begin with, you have to understand how the heart works." He took a gold pen out of his hospital white coat, clicked it open, and started to draw on the paper place mat. "Your heart is shaped like this." He drew a rough oval and divided it into four quadrants. "The atria and the ventricles work together, alternately contracting and relaxing to pump blood. The neuro-electrical system of our body is the power source that makes this pumping action possible." He looked up and smiled. He thought he had a killer smile and he did. Susan smiled back.

  "This electrical pulse is triggered in the sinus node, up here in your nasal passage." He drew a small circle somewhere above.the heart then traced a line down to the oval as he talked. "The impulse travels a special pathway like this, down and through your heart, where it then triggers the heartbeat. In your father's case, something age, maybe diet or alcohol, or even stress has interfered with this delicate process, and when that happens the heart fails to respond to the impulse and goes out of rhythm. It can then start to beat erratically. It speeds up or goes way too slow, even sometimes threatening to shut down, and this is the general condition we call arrhythmia." He clicked his ballpoint closed for emphasis. "Lecture over." He returned the pen to his pocket and smiled again.

  "Doctor, I don't mean to be rude, but I know all of this. He's had four arrhythmias now. I've had the condition explained to me three times. I'm not looking for a description of his problem. I'm looking for a cure. Would you mind if we get to the bottom line? I want facts. I want an actuarial prognosis. I want survival percentages." A legal mind used to finding solutions jumped out from behind that angelic mask and surprised him.

  Okay, Lance thought. Go for it. Give her what she wants. "Your father has severe ventricular tachycardia fibrillation, which is one of the life-threatening arrhythmias. It requires urgent treatment or death can occur. Generally, we start with drug therapy and, often, as you know, this can correct the problem for long periods of time. In your father's case we have seen that option come and go. Failing that, we still have a range of other options available to us. One is electrical shock cardioversion. It's basically paddles and juice to the chest walls. The idea is to shock the heart back into a normal rhythm."

  "Will that last, if you do it?"

  "It might. It's a case-by-case situation. Sometimes, yes. Sometimes, no."

  "What else?"

  "We can install a pacemaker under the skin on the chest. It's a battery unit that monitors the heart rhythm, and when it senses an arrhythmia it gives the heart a little electric boost that gets it back in rhythm."

  "How long does that take?"

  "About two days. It's normally an outpatient procedure, but speaking quite bluntly, your father is in pretty bad physical shape. I would want him here for at least two days."

  "He's got a trial that begins tomorrow morning. He'll never go for that."

  "Convince him."

  "Yeah, right," she said. "You don't know him. What else?"

  "Surgery. We induce an arrhythmia, get his heart in fibrillation, and then, using cameras and probes, we go in through the groin, snake our way up a vein to the heart, and look for the offending spot usually, it's a fatty growth of some kind. We probe for it, watching his heart rate on the monitors and on the TV. When we hit the problem spot his heart will stop fibrillating, and then we give that place a little zap of radio frequency and burn it off. In ninety-five percent of the patients it fixes the problem forever."

  "What are the risks?" Susan asked, prompting Lance to lean back and lay down his fork.

  "With yours truly on the drums, almost none. I've done forty or fifty of these radio frequency ablations never one mishap."

  "How long will he be in here?"

  "One day of preop, a day of postop, and a week of bed rest."

  "Too long," she said. "He won't go for it."

  "Make him."

  "Listen you think I haven't tried? He's a warrior. He fights for causes he views as more important than himself. He won't do it, and he's in charge of his life, not me. If it's going to take that long he's not going to sign a consent for surgery."

  "Then we should try and convert him with the paddles. That's

  the next best option. If it works, he should be able to leave first thing in the morning. But he's nuts if he tries a case in his condition. He's very sick. The man needs rest. Christ, he must feel.like hell."

  She sat absolutely still, and for a moment Lance Shiller didn't think she was going to respond. Then she looked up at him and in her eyes he now saw something else. It was resolve. No, not quite resolve it was more like fierce pride.

  "He told me once that most of the important work being done in the world is being done by people who don't feel very well," she said.

  "How much of it is being done by dead people?" Dr. Shiller said angrily. He saw her eyes go cold and knew instantly he had blown it with her, but, damn it, even though he wanted to connect with Susan Strockmire he was still a doctor, a brilliant chest-cutter, and a fine fucking surgeon. He hated it when his patients chose the wrong option.

  Susan left Dr. Lance Shiller in the cafeteria still picking at his California plate. She wandered out onto the patio where the sun was just going down. She couldn't believe that L.A. was this hot in April. She thought of her apartment in Washington, D.C., and of her father's cramped little house where she grew up after her mother split, leaving them to take care of each other. Now that little bungalow located two blocks off the beltway housed Herman and the Institute for Planetary Justice.

  It was still cold in D.C. at this time of year blustery. L.A. had it all: beaches, mountains, deserts, and bright sunshine twelve months a year. And yet there seemed something prefab and superficial about it. A town designed for tourists. The fringe celebrity commerce of Tinseltown seemed absurd to her: maps to the stars' homes, a tour of famous actors' gravesites in a twenty-year-old black Cadillac hearse, plus the tacky Hollywood sign. In L.A. fame towered over accomplishment. That was a concept that didn't fit the heroic proportions of Herman Strockmire Jr., a man

  she fought daily to protect and whom she adored.

  Susan had grown up watching her beloved father run headlong into legal and political brick walls, often badly damaging himself. "No, Daddy, don't!" she would yell, feeling helpless to stop him, even as an adult. Then she'd watch in awe as her battered father would pick himself up, shake it off, back up, and do it all over again. Always in pursuit of an idea, a principle, an underdog. He became her hero early in life and had never once disappointed her. She never saw him do one thing she couldn't respect.

  Not that he didn't have his shortcomings. Hell, he wore them like plates of tarnished armor and he had plenty. He didn't seem to know that sometimes discretion was the better part of Valor. He couldn't distinguish between causes, taking on an important lawsuit against the Pentagon for illegally developing bio-weapons at Fort Detrick with the same fervor that he chased after the silly Area 51 alien thing. But, to Herman they were equal
ly important, because to him it was always about morality, honor, and integrity.

  Herman was the last defender of justice in a world that no longer cared, because life in America now seemed to be only about celebrity, money, and success. The core values her father stood for had been left in the vapor trail of a seesawing Dow Jones Average.

  Sometimes she cried for her father as she watched him standing alone against huge corporate bullies and government tyrants, sick and bloodied, but unbowed. A squat little warrior with a runaway heart who wouldn't back down no matter what; not when he was protecting the weak, not when the cause was just. And yet somehow, despite all of his courage, she knew that to most people who bothered to look, he came off as old-fashioned, silly, and more than a little bit corny.

  Susan sat on the stone bench in the courtyard and watched the windows of Cedars-Sinai Hospital turn orange with the refleeted sunset. She couldn't let her father die. She couldn't let him risk his life, but she didn't know how to stop him. When he was committed there was no turning him back. She had tried everything in the past: tears, begging, prayers, but he would just hold her hand and smile sadly, because he wanted her, above all others, to understand. He wanted her to get it.

  "Honey," he would say. "Some people are unlucky, and you know why?"

  "Why, Daddy?" But she knew.

  "Because they have second sight. Or maybe it's just that they have a better view. They can really see what's going on, while the rest of society is out buying a new, hip wardrobe. But if you've been given this gift of sight you must use it. It's bigger than any one life, certainly bigger than mine." That was what he would tell her. If she went up there now and pleaded with him to ask the court for a continuance so he could get the radio frequency ablation, he would just smile sadly mildly disappointed that she didn't understand. Then he would tell her all over again.

  Herman Strockmire Jr. is the last great knight, she thought proudly.