Blind Instinct: A Tess Barrett Thriller

by Michael W. Sherer

  She stroked Swee’ Pea’s neck. For the next fifteen minutes while I walked the horse in a slow circle around the riding ring, Tess and I just talked about nothing in particular—likes and dislikes, favorite subjects, teachers good and bad, best prank on a schoolmate, best summer vacation trip… I made her laugh a couple of times with college tales of derring-do. She recounted similar stories, all pre-accident I noted. She brightened as if she’d thrown off some invisible film that filtered out some of the spectrum of light that shone from within. For that short bit of time, the outside word didn’t exist—no missing uncle, no deadly game app, no condescending board members, no security team… Well, not breathing down our necks anyway. A quick glance confirmed that the SUV was still parked out on the side of the road.

  With about five minutes left, I told Tess to take her feet out of the stirrups, and swung up onto Swee’ Pea’s rump behind the saddle. Reaching around Tess, I gently took the reins from her hands and made a circuit around the ring, explaining what I was doing as we went. Then I put the reins back in her right hand, had her find the stirrups again with her feet and let her guide Swee’ Pea. I loosely wrapped my arms around her waist, and with my chin over her shoulder gave her course corrections and encouragement.

  After a couple of circuits, I hopped off and let Tess ride Swee’ Pea back to the stable, walking alongside with my hand on the horse’s bridle just in case. Just outside the stable door sat a wooden structure built almost like three small open-air stalls with no doors on the front, and covered with a raised roof on posts. A ramp led up to a platform in back running the length of the stalls. The smell hit me right about the same time I remembered that the stalls were meant to compost the heaping contents inside.

  Tess squirmed in the saddle, and held her nose with a sour expression. “Oh, god, that’s awful. What is it, Oliver?”

  “Horse manure. It’s a composting shed.”

  She suddenly went still, looking more thoughtful, and gave a tentative sniff. “That’s it.”

  “What’s it?”

  “That smell,” she said, leaning forward in excitement. “It’s what I smelled on Marcus. Not just manure, Oliver. Horse manure. He’s been on a ranch.”

  “Maybe he was here,” I said.

  She shook her head vehemently. “No, not here. There’s no metallic smell here. No rotten egg smell, either. You have to help figure out where he’s been, Oliver. I’ll bet you anything that’s where we’ll find Uncle Travis.”

  She was right. I recognized it now. The last two times we’d seen Marcus, he’d been around horses recently. Not just horses, but a stable where he’d picked up the smell of manure, probably on his boots. But I couldn’t wrap my head around what that meant. Why would Marcus look for Travis in a stable or on a horse ranch? And if Tess was right, then Marcus either was covering for Travis, or he’d been in on the kidnapping. My unease grew. I’d clued Red in, more to humor Tess than anything. Now I wasn’t so sure. I didn’t know who to trust anymore.

  Chapter 23

  The cell phone on Derek’s desk feeped, signaling an incoming e-mail. He cursed himself for not setting his phone on silent. The last thing he needed now was more distractions. Most of his day had been spent tweaking and making final edits on the software program he’d written to neutralize the worm that had plagued the mini-drone that MondoHard was building for the military.

  His entire career at the company had been in the video games division until company president Travis Barrett had plucked him out of his comfortable obscurity in the legions of programmers at the huge conglomerate a few weeks earlier. Travis had roped him into figuring out what was wrong with the drone project, and Derek had taken the bait. The challenge had appealed to his ego. But now the pressure was on to finish, to fix what had gone wrong with the project for the past year before the bureaucrats in D.C. pulled the plug. In the meantime, Barrett had vanished, and someone had sabotaged his game app. Could it get any worse?

  He tore his attention away from the computer monitor and glanced at the subject line.

  Complications.

  Oh, crap, what now? The sender’s line was blank; he knew if he opened it all he’d see was an IP address that led nowhere. His mystery man. Pulse racing now, he knew he had no choice. He logged onto his secure notebook computer, opened his email and read the rest of the message.

  You’ve got problems. T. gave the app to someone who shouldn’t have it—Austin Dunn. You better find answers quick.

  A rising tide of panic welled up in his chest, threatening to drown him. A link floated on the message screen like a life ring. His hands dove for it, fingers swimming across the keyboard. The link pulled up a drop box, and Derek quickly typed a reply.

  Who’s Dunn? What answers? Where? How do you know this? Why are these MY problems? Why can’t you fix them? Wall!

  He hit “Send” and waited. Paranoia set in with the next wave of panic. Derek forced himself to breathe slowly, leaned back in his chair and stretched, casually glancing over his shoulder. Across the room, Paul sat with his back turned, absorbed in his own work. His other two office roomies had gone out for a late lunch and hadn’t come back. Hell, all three of them were out to lunch mentally, but they were decent coders if he told them exactly what to do. He sat up and glared at the small notebook screen, willing it to reveal a new email. His phone beeped suddenly. He grabbed it, set it on vibrate and opened the incoming message on his notebook.

  Only so much I can do from here. Lucky to find out this much. I’m counting on you.

  Derek knew further questions would only result in equally enigmatic answers. His shoulders drooped as he closed out of the window. Why him? Why was everyone suddenly turning to him for answers? He was just a gamer who’d happened to luck into a job that let him do exactly what he wanted most of the time. But the more he thought about it, the more he realized that he was more than that, a heck of a lot more. He was the best damn coder at MondoHard, for sure. And in his younger, dark-side days, he’d held his own against some fearsome wizards in hackerdom. He wasn’t some pansy-ass poser like Paul. He was the real deal.

  So, act like it.

  Okay, so first things first. Find out who this Austin Dunn was. Easy enough. Derek ran an online search. To his surprise, the name popped up almost immediately in every search result on the first page. He linked to one page and saw some story about a kid in D.C. Next link, same kid. Derek read the story more closely. The kid was the son of Vice President Josiah Dunn. Okay, so the kid was famous, but not so famous that Derek had ever heard of him before. Maybe Dunn was famous among middle school girls who read Teen and People magazines. So what was the big deal? So, Travis gave the kid a beta copy of the game. That didn’t mean it was one of the infected copies. And even if it was and the kid went a little nuts like Matt had, what would it do other than get him kicked out of school? Might not help his dad’s political career, but the vice presidency was a dead-end job anyway.

  Still, Derek didn’t want anyone to have a bogus copy of Never Bitten until he figured out what was wrong with it. One, it would kill his rep if people thought he had anything to do with the bogus version. And two, the more he learned about what the AI infection could do, what kinds of biometrics it could track, the more he worried about much influence it could exert over someone playing the app. He’d already started on a fix. Problem was, he’d had to devote most of the day to debugging the other major fix Travis had tapped him for. Well, he’d done enough for the day.

  He glanced at his cell phone display and was surprised to see that it was long past quitting time. He had done enough. Time to return to this little project. But first, he needed something to nosh on. His stomach growled at the same time he realized he’d worked through lunch. He spun his chair around.

  “Yo, Paulie,” he said. “I’m starved. Want to split a pizza?”

  Paul clicked a few more strokes on his keyboard and turned around to look at him. “No, thanks, man. Appreciate the offer, but I just wrapped up for the
day, and I am outta here.”

  “Hot date?”

  Paul blushed as he stood up and peeled the windbreaker off the back of his chair. “Not really. Dinner and a movie with friends.”

  “Cool. Just thought I’d ask.”

  “Sure. Thanks again. See you tomorrow.”

  Derek waved as Paul turned for the door. “Yeah, goodnight.”

  He swiveled back to his desk, picked up his phone and speed-dialed a pizza joint that delivered. As soon as he’d placed his order and disconnected, the phone vibrated in his palm. He checked the display nervously, wondering if Mystery Man had more bad news. But this time it was a text message from Tess. He opened it.

  Board won’t nix launch. We need proof. Bradley “looking into it.” Help!

  The idea of pizza suddenly didn’t seem so good. His stomach knotted. He needed more time. James Barrett had spent years working on artificial intelligence. Derek knew the stories. He’d spent his early years as a hacker reading up on Barrett, learning everything he could about him. Even when he’d gone dark-side for a year or so, he’d kept tabs on what Barrett was working on. It was probably what had kept him from stepping so far over the line that he couldn’t come back to the light. It had definitely influenced his decision to join MondoHard. But Derek had less than two weeks to learn what James had developed and figure out how to outsmart it.

  It couldn’t be done. Derek slumped in his chair. He could figure it out eventually. He knew he could. But in two weeks? No way. If Tess hadn’t been able to buy time from the board, though, what was left? Proof. Sure. Tess was right, proof that the app had been tampered with would buy time. But it had to be solid. Derek knew he couldn’t rely on the little he’d gleaned from his earlier digging. A few random copies downloaded from one of the servers? They’d simply say it was a hardware glitch and pull the server off-line. He had to find evidence that incriminated whoever was behind this, something that would nail them.

  He glanced at the text again. Bradley was on the board of directors. And now he knew Tess was aware of the bogus app. The terminal outside Bradley’s office had been used to upload the infected version to the server. Derek had a hard time believing a board member and the head of software development would try to sabotage his own company. But he’d seen some pretty weird stuff in the past few weeks. Near as he could tell, there was a battle going on inside the company that practically no one knew about. Even Travis didn’t seem to know who he was up against. Derek had made his choice, picked his side. If Bradley’d had anything to do with what they’d done to Never Bitten, he’d be covering his tracks, and soon. Pizza would have to wait.

  He checked the time once more—already past 7:30—tucked his notebook computer under his arm, grabbed an extra external hard drive off a nearby work table, and headed out. The halls were quiet, the way he preferred it. While he had no doubt that plenty of people still slaved over projects at their desks, most had gone home for the evening. He’d already been there for more than fourteen hours, but he didn’t feel tired. Adrenaline fueled him now.

  He worked his way up two floors and across the building to the section in which Bradley’s office resided. Derek had been in the vicinity only once, to drop off work he’d done for another project manager soon after he’d started at the company. He remembered being introduced in the hall as Bradley came out of his office. While Derek had heard murmurings in offices on the floors below, this floor was almost deathly still. He wasn’t surprised; bosses had gone home while workers bees continued to drone in the hive below. It made his present job easier.

  Surreptitiously checking both directions as he approached Bradley’s office, he slipped inside and headed straight for the large mahogany desk. He circled behind it and sat down, placing his gear on the desk. He glanced underneath the desk to see if the CPU was turned on, but didn’t bother pulling out the keyboard drawer. To be safe, he tried not to touch anything. He opened his notebook and connected it to Bradley’s computer with a USB cord. He knew Bradley’s computer would be password-protected. The guy headed up one of the biggest software divisions in the country—he knew how important security was—and Derek didn’t want anyone to be able to detect that he’d tried to log on. Instead, he used some tricks he knew to clone Bradley’s encrypted hard drive onto the spare he’d brought along. He figured that Bradley probably stored most of his files in the “cloud,” but Derek could track a lot of his email and probably get into most of his files by checking the temporary files on the CPU.

  While the CPU’s files copied to Derek’s external hard drive, he pulled up a key-logging program he’d customized and tinkered with it. In his hacking days, he’d used “rootkits” to hack into encrypted systems, but over time operating system security had gotten better. Now he used a special “bootkit,” a more powerful version of the rootkit. He’d hacked into IT’s system and gained administrative access to every computer in the company his second week on the job. Old habits die hard. Now all he had to do was used that access to do “routine maintenance” on Bradley’s computer and install the bootkit in the process. Once installed, it was undetectable.

  Just to be sure, he double-checked that IT hadn’t installed any new security patches since he’d last tested the bootkit. The company intranet was slow for some reason, and he caught himself before he started to drum impatiently on the desk with his fingers. He wiggled them over his keyboard instead, willing both the file transfer and the network connection to go faster. Finally the check of the IT updates stopped running, and Derek quickly scanned down the list. He saw nothing that concerned him, so he used his admin access to insert the bootkit on the CPU’s drive.

  He’d been so intent on his work that he hadn’t paid attention to his surroundings at all, but gradually the sound of voices penetrated his focus, and he jerked up in alarm. Listening intently, he heard what sounded like an argument. The voices weren’t that close. He checked the progress of the hard drive transfer—almost done. Heart pounding, he raced to the office door on tiptoe, opened it a crack and peered out into the hall. Bradley and another veep. Derek vaguely recognized stood next to the elevators in heated conversation. Crap! Bradley could head for his office at any second! He was trapped!

  Derek raced back to the desk, slid the notebook and external drive off the top and crouched next to the chair. Silently, he willed the files to transfer faster. Come on, come on! Almost there! The voices grew louder, closer. Derek caught only fragments.

  “…what do you want me to do?” the veep said. “Stonewall?”

  “She’s a kid!” Bradley said. “With no authority. What’re you afraid of?”

  “Losing my job.”

  “Don’t forget who your boss is,” Bradley menaced.

  Their voices dropped to murmurs for a moment, and Derek focused on his computer screen. The progress bar hesitated, blinking, and finally hit the end. Success! Derek shut the notebook and quickly yanked the cable out of Bradley’s CPU and the notebook, unplugged the external drive and stuffed them both in his pocket. He held his breath as the voices stopped right outside the office door. Peeking over the top of the desk, is heart nearly jumped out of his chest as he saw it open. He ducked his head and slowly sucked in another deep breath, sure the thumping in his chest would give him away. Bradley would discover him in a matter of seconds.

  How the hell was he going to explain what he was doing under Bradley’s desk? His thoughts raced.

  “…no, you have to see this first,” the veep said.

  “Now?” Bradley was clearly annoyed. “All right, fine. Let’s do this quickly. I have to be somewhere.”

  The veep’s voice replied, but from farther away. They’d gone! Derek released the breath he’d been holding and quickly tiptoed to the door, notebook clutched in his hand. He poked his head around the doorframe. Bradley and the other man disappeared into an office down the hall. Derek slipped out into the hall and practically flew in the opposite direction, ducking into the nearest stairwell.

  Chapter 24<
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  Tess didn’t think she’d ever been so confused in her life. For two days she’d ridden an emotional rollercoaster, not knowing from one minute to the next what was around the next bend or over the next crest. Events cascading around her had made it hard to tell what was normal anymore. Matt’s frenzied outburst at school had been horrifying, more so because it had been so unlike him. Her uncle had disappeared, and she couldn’t help thinking that the man in charge of her safety and security was responsible. Her first board of directors meeting at the company she would soon inherit, and maybe eventually run, had gone disastrously wrong because no one would take her seriously.

  The only bright spot had been the chance to ride Swee’ Pea. Horses had never interested her. She’d always been into more physical pursuits—snowboarding, her jiu-jitsu, tennis in the summer. But the rocking motion in the saddle had been almost hypnotic. The feel of the horse’s power beneath her, wrapped in gentleness, had instilled her with awe. Swee’ Pea somehow understood her, sensed her emotions, her thoughts. Tess had almost freaked out when Oliver had climbed on behind her. It had seemed so random, so weird until she realized that he wanted to teach her how to control the horse. After that she’d actually kind of enjoyed his presence. Comforting somehow. She knew that assisting her—even taking her horseback riding—was Oliver’s job, but sometimes, like yesterday, he acted more like a protective big brother.

  All of that whirled through her mind, but she couldn’t focus on any of it—not homework, not Yoshi’s practices, not the horrible things that had happened. All she could think about was Tim.

  Yoshi slammed her to the mat for the gazillionth time that morning. Tears sprang to her eyes and she cried out in pain. Once again she’d lost focus, thinking about everything but the task at hand. Now she was bruised and sore. It wasn’t fair, but she had no one to blame but herself.