Fatal Error

by F. Paul Wilson

“Whatever. I don’t know much about the Internet, but I do know it’s redundant as all hell. You can’t bring it down by attacking a data center.”

  “But you can cause much tsuris for those who depend on that center. They still haven’t restored service. They’ve had effects overseas as well, on the far end of that transatlantic cable they damaged.”

  “But they will get it up and running again—the TV says by the end of the day if not earlier. So what have they accomplished?”

  “Annoyance, bad press.” Abe looked over his reading glasses at Jack. “You’ve met Hank Thompson. You’ve dealt with him. He’s a shmegegi?”

  “Anything but.”

  Jack knew Thompson’s felonious history—a high school dropout into grand theft auto. Might be uneducated, but he was no dummy. He’d sat down and written a bestseller that had induced a horde of people to hail him as their fearless leader.

  “I should think there’s no method to his madness? The papers say EMP generators were used. That is a little scary.”

  Jack had read the papers’ explanations of the effects of electromagnetic pulse on delicate circuitry. He didn’t understand why or how those waves could do their damage, but he believed. Like he believed in gravity and Britney Spears.

  “I guess if they build one big enough, they’ll simply have to drive by a data center and screw it up from outside.”

  Abe shook his head. “I don’t think that’s practical—it would have to be enormous. Better they should use a nuclear explosion.”

  “Let’s not go there. I prefer Kickers limiting themselves to something more conventional—like a Tomahawk missile.”

  Abe stuffed the rest of the bialy in his mouth and spoke around it. “The question is, why such a problem with the Internet? It’s blamed already for fragmenting families and relationships.”

  Families . . . Munir Habib’s words echoed through Jack’s skull . . .

  Save my family!

  Abe was saying, “Instead of playing baseball out in the sun with their friends, kids are sitting alone before their monitors. Instead of neighbors shmoozing over a back fence, they’re on their computers watching a sit-com episode they missed. Sounds to me already like the Internet is doing Thompson’s dissimilating for him.”

  Jack tried to visualize Abe leaning on a backyard fence gabbing with a neighbor. But first he had to picture Abe with a backyard. He failed.

  “Yeah. That’s what doesn’t make sense.”

  “Unless he’s telling the truth about the attack being perpetrated by non-Kickers trying to make his movement look bad.”

  Jack shook his head. “Uh-uh. Those were the real deal.”

  “You’re so sure how?”

  “They showed a clip from a bystander’s cell phone on the morning news.”

  Abe’s turn to shake his head. “A cell phone. Does nothing go unrecorded these days? Privacy is dying.”

  “It’s dead and buried. People just don’t know it yet. Anyway, I recognized one of the players.”

  “From your days in the group?”

  Kewan had bummed more than his share of cigarettes off Jack last summer when he’d been posing as a Kicker.

  Jack nodded. “Yeah. And that means it was an official Kicker operation. They don’t do anything without Thompson’s say-so. Which brings us back to the original question: What’s he thinking?”

  “Maybe it was simply a test run, to see how the EMP gadgets worked.”

  “You could go out and buy a server or a router or whatever they were after and test it on that without exposing your plans.”

  Abe drummed his fingers. “Maybe he was testing data center vulnerability.”

  “Okay. He found that one vulnerable, but that’s only going to make other centers beef up their security. Sounds counterproductive to me.”

  Abe brushed at the onion bits but succeeded only in smearing them. “To have real success against the Internet, he would need to attack almost every data center and Internet exchange point in the world—and even he, despite his large following, does not have the numbers or resources for that.”

  “But even then it would only be temporary, and he’d be in jail and no one would want to dissimilate after that because his name would be mud.” Jack pushed the paper away. “I’ll think about it later.”

  “Something’s chewing your guderim. What?”

  He told him about Munir and what he was going through, and how he’d turned him down.

  “You should feel bad about that? Already you helped him. You pointed him toward his company.”

  “Yeah, but if he doesn’t bring the feds in on it, that’s not going to help. He needs lots of eyeballs searching employment records.”

  “Which you can’t give him, so guilt you shouldn’t feel.”

  “You’re right. A hundred percent right. So why do I feel like I let him down?”

  “Because you’ve been farblondjet lately.”

  If so, Jack figured Gia and Vicky’s trip was contributing to it. He glanced at his watch. Almost time for the gathering.

  “Gotta run.”

  “Where?”

  “Meeting with the old folks.”

  Abe nodded. “Methuselah and his mother. And your old girlfriend too, I suppose.”

  “She was never my girlfriend.”

  He and Weezy held irregular meetings with the Lady and Veilleur, and one was scheduled for this morning. Maybe they could figure out what the Kickers were up to.

  2

  Munir snatched up the phone on the third ring. The hated voice grated in his ear.

  “You had me a little worried this morning, Mooo-neeer.”

  “What? What do you mean?”

  “When you left. Thought you might have been sneaking off to meet someone.”

  He must be watching me.

  “I did not!”

  He’d left the apartment for food and newspapers. But he had no appetite and hadn’t been able to concentrate long enough to make sense of a single paragraph in the paper. He’d spent his time wandering from room to room, waiting to hear from the monster, wondering what his next demand would be. And all the while his promise of sending proof that Barbara and Robby were still alive gnawed at him. The way he’d said it . . . even the voice distorter couldn’t obscure the obscene glee slithering through his tone.

  “I know that. But it got me to thinking how you might be talking about your situation through email. That’s a no-no.”

  “I swear I have not!”

  “So you say, but I don’t trust you. So I sent you an email. You will open it on both your home computer and your laptop.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “The email contains a rootkit that will allow me to monitor your activity.”

  A rootkit would allow the monster more than that—it would take over his computers.

  Without thinking, Munir blurted, “I can’t!”

  “You what?”

  “Wait-wait-wait. I didn’t mean that. It’s just that the laptop has proprietary data belonging to my company.”

  “Are you refusing?”

  Panic squeezed his throat. “No, I don’t care about the company. I—”

  “Have you any idea of the consequences?”

  He jumped from his chair and started for his home office.

  “I-I-I’m going to the computer right now. I’ll open your email immediately.”

  “You’ve really crossed the line now, you Arab twinkie. You know that proof you wanted about your whore and brat being alive? It’s on the way.”

  He hung up.

  Munir repressed a scream. He wanted to smash the phone into a thousand pieces but repressed that as well.

  Jack’s idea about it being a Saud employee, past or present, ran through his head. A rootkit would allow the monster to take control of his computer and use his passcodes to hack into the company’s system. Why would he want to do that unless he was connected to the company? Jack’s theory was looking better and better.

&
nbsp; He reached his home computer and checked his mail. There . . . 911avenger . . . that had to be him. Munir clicked it open and found a message.

  Leave them running. If anything is encrypted, send the decryption key now.

  With shaking fingers, he complied immediately. Maybe if he showed no hesitation the monster would show mercy. Munir had a terrible feeling about the “proof” that was on the way.

  3

  Claude Fournier met him across the street from the Order’s Lodge in Lower Manhattan.

  Eddie had arrived early and had been dismayed by the number of scurvy types dawdling on or about the front steps, smoking in the chill air. Over the years he’d attended a number of meetings in that venerable, granite-block building. Now it looked like some sort of halfway house.

  “What is going on here?” he said as Fournier stopped next to him.

  The man removed the cigarette that had been dangling from his lips and gazed across the street. He didn’t look happy at what he saw.

  “Kickers. Didn’t you know?”

  “I’d heard talk, but . . .”

  Fournier was nodding. “Yes. I know. A scruffy bunch.”

  Outsiders in one of the Lodges. It wasn’t supposed to happen. And yet, here they were.

  “Whose idea was this?”

  “Word came from the High Council last year to give them the run of the place. The High Council would not make that decision lightly. It must see them as useful in some way.”

  “Useful how?”

  He gave a typically Gallic shrug. “They have not yet deigned to inform me.”

  Eddie was surprised at how offended he felt. And chagrined at how deeply he’d bought into being a brother in the Order.

  “We’re not meeting with one of them, are we?”

  “Hardly. An Actuator maintains an office there. It’s him we are meeting.” He gestured across the street. “Shall we?”

  Actuator? Eddie thought as he followed Fournier. Why does that sound familiar?

  They crossed the street and headed up the stone steps. The lounging Kickers gave them curious stares but no one challenged them until they stepped through the heavy front doors into the large open foyer.

  “Can I help you guys?” said a bearded heavyset fellow who looked like a biker.

  “We have a meeting.”

  “Who with?”

  Appalled by the spectacle of brothers of the Order explaining their presence in a Lodge to an outsider, Eddie wandered deeper into the foyer and stared at the bas relief sigil on the rear wall.

  As a kid, whenever he’d seen it over the door of the Lodge in his hometown, he’d found the pattern vaguely confusing, like an optical illusion. Now he was so used to it—hell, it was seared into the skin on his back—that he found the Möbius-strip quality almost comforting . . . a promise of eternity . . . or infinity.

  He noticed a dark smudge or smear on the edge at about seven o’clock. It looked like something had been wiped off. He wondered what.

  Fournier appeared at his shoulder. “The Actuator is in a meeting that is running late. He will see you as soon as he is free. Come with me.”

  He led Eddie to a small room furnished with a couple of chairs and nothing else. Their footsteps echoed on the bare hardwood floor.

  “Wait here. It won’t be long.”

  Eddie walked to the window as Fournier left. He stared out at the street for a moment. Nothing interesting there, so he sat in one of the chairs and tilted it back against the wall. He began rehearsing what he’d planned to say when he noticed a murmur of voices. He looked around and saw the door was closed. So where—?

  A ventilation grille was set in the wall just above the baseboard a few feet away. He leaned closer. That was the source. But where from? Curious, and with nothing else to do, he dropped to a knee and tried to listen.

  4

  Nelson Ferron’s grin shone through his thick white beard as he turned off the network broadcast he’d recorded. The attack on the data center was all over the news.

  “Hear that? My babies worked like a charm.”

  Hank nodded and decided the fat Dormentalist deserved some props.

  “Yeah. Those guns made crispy critters of the servers. You did good.”

  And what was better, their use of EMP had really shaken things up. All the on-air experts were wringing their hands at the “dire implications” of this sort of attack.

  “Yes,” Drexler said from the far end of the table. “Excellent work.”

  “What about me?” said Kewan, the fourth attendee around the basement table. “I’m the guy who ran the show. I took out that transatlantic cable.”

  “You surely did,” Hank said. “But you got yourself caught on that cell phone. Not good.”

  He rolled his eyes. “Can’t help that. If y’gonna be on the street, there’s always that chance. Everybody got phones.” He turned to Ferron. “Hey, can’t you make a bigger EMP thing?”

  Ferron shrugged. “Of course. How big?”

  “One big enough so we don’t have to show our faces or risk getting nabbed. Something that can fry those circuits from a distance, or zap the whole city in one shot.”

  “Not possible—at least with existing technology. That would take a nuclear explosion.”

  “I didn’t say blow the place up—”

  Hank had heard this before but he didn’t mind listening again. The subject fascinated him.

  “You wouldn’t have to,” Ferron said. “You’d detonate the bomb outside the atmosphere. In fact, the higher the better. Set one off thirty miles above Lebanon, Kansas, and you—”

  “Why there?” Kewan said.

  “It’s the belly button of the lower forty-eight. Right smack in the center. Explode a nuke thirty miles over that and you toast all the circuitry in the Midwest. Set it off three hundred miles up, and you take out all of North and most of Central America.”

  Kewan’s eyes lit. “You mean the whole country would be an Internet-free zone? Let’s do it!”

  Hank shook his head. That had been his own reaction. Then he’d learned that more than the Internet would be affected. “We’d also be cell phone–free and car-free, plus—”

  “Wait. What you mean, car and phone free?”

  “Well, cell phones use the same kind of chips as computers, and all modern cars have onboard computers.”

  “Right,” Ferron said. “If you had a vintage car with original equipment, you might keep that going, but you’d have trouble finding a working gas pump because there’d be no electricity.”

  Kewan frowned. “Why not?”

  “Because the EMP would also toast the power grid.” Ferron snapped his fingers. “Like that we’d be back in the eighteenth century.”

  “Okaaaay,” Kewan said slowly. “Let’s not do that.”

  Hank knew that the Change was coming soon, bringing the Others back to this world, and he’d been doing his best to prepare the way for them—hopefully guaranteeing himself better treatment when they took over. But he didn’t want to go back to burning wood for heat until they showed up.

  “Right,” he told Kewan. “Let’s just limit our target to the Internet.”

  Kewan nodded. “We’re gonna need more of those guns, then—lots more.”

  “Wrong. The data centers and exchanges aren’t the real targets. We just want people thinking they are.”

  He looked offended. “You mean last night was all for show?”

  “Yes. And you put on an excellent show. Too excellent, perhaps.”

  “What that mean?”

  Drexler spoke up. “Your image was captured on that cell phone, Mister Lyford, and shown on national TV. You must leave the city.”

  “I ain’t leaving. This where I live.”

  Hank leaned toward him. “It’s okay, Kewan. You’re being transferred to one of the field groups.”

  “What’s that? I never hearda no field groups.”

  “That’s where the real work’s going to be done. They’re gettin
g set to move. And when they do, it won’t be for show.” He glanced at Drexler. “Any word from your man on that final piece of code?”

  Drexler nodded. “He guarantees sometime today.”

  “About time. And if it lives up to its press, when can we expect Jihad to be ready?”

  “Jihad?” said Kewan. “What’s this Jihad talk? We dealin’ with Arabs?”

  Hank caught Drexler’s furious look. He shouldn’t have mentioned that in front of Kewan and Ferron. Until his slip just now, he’d been the only Kicker in on the virus. Top-tier Dormentalists knew, but Ferron wasn’t one of those.

  Drexler composed his features. “Just a figure of speech, Mister Lyford. Jihad is a holy war, and we’re leading a holy war against the Internet.”

  “You mentioned ‘code,’ ” Ferron said. “Are we talking virus here?”

  Shit.

  “Another kind of code,” Hank said quickly. “One we need to break.”

  But Ferron was right. Jihad—its official designation would be Jihad4/20—was one hell of a virus. If all went according to plan, it would be spread across the globe by the end of the week.

  5

  “The Internet is not their real target,” the Lady said.

  Jack studied her. She looked better than she had last summer right after Rasalom and his boys in the Kickers and the Order damn near killed her. Against all odds, despite the Fhinntmanchca, the mythic killing force that had zeroed in on her, she’d survived. But just barely.

  Jack first met her when he was a kid. She’d appeared then as an eccentric old woman with a three-legged dog. Over the ensuing years she’d stepped in and out of his life as females of varying ages, always with some sort of dog at her side.

  The dog was gone now—it hadn’t survived the assault—but she persevered. But only as an old Lady. Used to be she could change her looks, but she seemed to have lost that ability. Used to be she could shift her presence to anywhere on Earth, but no more. She never left this apartment.

  “Sorry,” Weezy said as she stepped into the room, late as usual.

  She’d shed some weight since popping back into Jack’s life last summer. Instead of the baggy sweat suits she’d worn then, she was now dressed in fitted jeans and a long-sleeved black sweater under a ski vest. She’d let her dark hair grow and had it tied back in a simple ponytail. Her pale face was makeup free, a far cry from the heavy gothesque eyeliner she’d worn as a teen. She carried the Compendium of Srem under her arm.