Buzzworm (A Technology Thriller): Computer virus or serial killer? (18 page)

Standing behind the door
of the second-floor lunchroom at Langley, his eye out for intruders, Paul had his hands on Melissa Coyne’s breasts. Their affair, now in full bloom, if not in full sight of the rest of the office, was entering its fourth month, and Melissa seemed to invite and appreciate these mid-afternoon groping sessions. They frustrated Paul, but the novelty of a woman of Melissa's stature who enjoyed his touch, even if it was only a furtive one, kept him interested in the game. Fine. If the boss walked in for a coffee, she wouldn't find them in full act on the cafeteria floor, but two employees clutching behind the door next to a broom closet might raise some eyebrows. Then the rumor mill would start chugging its way through Data Processing and pretty soon these frequent necking sessions would be a thing of the past. He squeezed her harder, imagining taking her right there. When she arched her back to him, he groaned out loud. She laughed and pulled away.

"One of these days they're going to catch us," she smiled, straightening her very short dress and placing her hand on a small lunch table, their coffees still sitting untouched.

Paul winked. "One of these days I'm going to padlock the door and when they hear you scream they'll call the fire department." Melissa was very vocal during lovemaking and never made a secret of it. Paul loved it; her noisy response was a turn-on. She winked at him and shivered slightly. "Oooooh. Quick. Lock the door."

Paul's eyes went to the handle of the cafeteria door then back to hers. If it could be locked, they would have reached this point weeks ago. But it didn't. He heard a hand on the door. As he turned away towards the fridge, a stout woman by the name of Nancy, someone he had seen before, but didn't know well, came in with a plate and coffee cup. She seemed to ignore Melissa and headed for the sink. Melissa grabbed her untouched coffee cup and left before Paul turned, an apple in his hand.

"Awful thing about Frank over at 213," said Nancy, turning to him, "wasn't it?" Talk about Frank Scammel had replaced talk about weather between Central Intelligence worker bees who only passed each other in a hall or found themselves pressed together in a crowded elevator at five o'clock.

"I played ball with Frank a few years ago. Seemed like a nice guy. Kind of a loner though" He stood there leaning against the fridge, waiting for Nancy to reply or leave. He could still smell Melissa's musky odor on his hands. Frank was one of those men Paul could never figure out, could never dig out a nugget of anything they held in common. He had started a few conversations that always ended in grunts and Frank seemed to lack a sense of humor. He heard he was a dedicated employee. Probably had no life outside of his job.

"It's too bad," added Paul, turning for the door. "Well, back to the salt mines." After a short walk down a hallway that ended in one direction at STORES, Paul entered the busy office area of Langley's second floor, a maze of cubicles that made up the bulk of the DATA COMM department — 200 people who routinely entered data into computers, massaged numbers and recorded conversations, attempted to give context to an onslaught of intelligence data coming in from hundreds of sources. Paul's area of expertise was ‘Transatlantic Access’.

Paul headed a group that received a daily file of overseas phone calls with information about sender and receiver. A large computer on the fourth floor used a piece of in-house software that listened in on thousands of phone calls, looking for key words. When it detected one, the sender number, receiver number, and the keyword were recorded. Keywords were many, but one of the most common was 'bomb' or 'execute'. TRANS ACCESS then ran the numbers against known sources such as the United News Syndicate or CNN. If the number was new, it went to an investigation list. It was Paul's job to take this tangle of phone connections and create a weekly report to the Intelligence Directorate. Lately, his reports had been briefer than usual. Was he getting bored with his job or having a tough time getting Melissa out of his thoughts?

He turned the corner on his small corner office and sat down heavily in his chair. He chewed on his apple absent-mindedly. When he looked up from his desk, he almost choked. On his screen, he saw a grainy video image, its point of view a corner in the ceiling of the small lunchroom he had just left. Melissa was standing in front of a man, grinding her backside against him, her eyes closed, her mouth open. He had both hands on her breasts, one leg wrapped around her knees. Paul flushed suddenly, thinking that someone had caught him in the act. He moved closer. It wasn't him. It was Southern, his immediate supervisor.

Paul swallowed hard, his mouth feeling full of sand. He clenched his fists and hammered at the keyboard.
Who was doing this?
This was someone's idea of a joke?

Then it looked like he had the back of her dress up. She was leaning forward, slowly rotating her hips against his lap. The bastard was screwing her in the lunchroom exactly the way he had imagined it a dozen times. And Melissa... wasn't he enough for her? Besides the fact that she was married too. And who else was she screwing on the second floor?
And he had imagined he was actually in love with the bitch?

He hit the keyboard hard again, this time several of the keys came loose and bounced across his desk like loose teeth. They should be Southern's teeth. The asshole had come to the CIA two years after him, had smiled his way right past him into a job that easily paid ten to fifteen grand more, and he was now having his way with the best relationship Paul had had with a woman in his entire life. Now he had his hand over her mouth on the screen. Shit. It was a rape. She was pulling away, but he was holding her hard by the neck, her blouse pulled up over her face now, blurring the image on the screen.
And she hadn't said anything?
Paul felt a bloom of nausea and rage grow in his gut and spread. He had assumed this was an old recording, but he could clearly see the clock above the refrigerator. 10:11. He looked at his watch 10:11
. Goddamn it, this was happening now.
He threw himself out of his chair and raced down the corridor.

Only minutes before, James Southern had been alerted at his desk of a security problem. He had never been privy to a security alert before. He only assumed, with the death of the computer operator the day before, down in Sat Comm, that changes had been made to the employee network. His personal menu popped up on his computer with an addition at the bottom he hadn't seen before. SECURITY. And it was flashing. Southern clicked his mouse on the heading, and a message came up, framed in red.

TO: Jim Southern

URGENT: Security has just been informed that the employee responsible for Frank Scammel’s death has been identified as Melissa Coyne. Security is presently interrogating her in the employee lunchroom on the 2nd floor. You are asked to attend without delay.

Southern looked blankly at the screen. This is a joke, he thought. Melissa Coyne? The data entry clerk he hired last summer from Los Angeles with the long red hair? She killed Frank? And why hadn't they phoned him personally? He got up slowly, confused. The computer system had been acting up lately. This must be a screw-up. He wandered over to Melissa's station. It was empty. The woman in the next cubicle, Marjorie, volunteered that Melissa had just left with two security guards. He stepped back, surprised again. He ran the hundred yards to the lunchroom and tried the door. Someone was holding the handle from the other side. He banged on the door, his anger rising. What was going on here? Had everyone gone crazy? There was no response.

"It's Southern. Open up."

The door opened carefully. One guard had a gun in his hand, the other stood by Melissa. Her eyes were the color of her dress, dark red.

"Is this an interview or an interrogation?"

"We were informed she was dangerous. We had to search for weapons."

She had been crying, her hair was out-of-place, one strap on her blouse hanging down.

"This is crazy. Who gave you these instructions?"

"They came from Dodge over at Building 213. He's on his way."

"You’ve no right to search this woman."

"They say I killed someone, Mr. Southern," sobbed Melissa. Southern stepped into the line of fire, to the left of Melissa, who had found a handkerchief and was wiping her eyes. One of the guards told Southern not to interfere, just as Paul flew into the room in a rage and threw himself at Southern. The guard with the gun fell to the side, discharging his weapon twice. One of the bullets plowed through the fridge door releasing a cloud of Freon. The second entered Mellisa's right eye, just above the smeared mascara, and exited in an ugly splash of red and gray.

BW was standing at a urinal
in the Men’s washroom just down the hall from his stuffy office, emptying his bladder for the third time in less than an hour. His hair was sticky with perspiration — his heart stuttering in his chest. He had often wondered what a heart attack felt like, and he was afraid he was about to find out. All he could think about was where they would find him — face down on the floor by the toilets, his lips blue, unzippered.

When he had first heard about the shooting at Langley, he thought that someone else had trumped his game. It wasn’t possible that the simple trick he was playing with people’s computers at head office could have led to another death. But when he looked at the video he had captured and examined the emails, everything added up. A panicky security officer and a jealous boyfriend somehow added up to a stray bullet that just happened to end the life of Mellisa Coyne. What a shame, he thought. She was gone. But he did have some interesting things to remember her by.

BW had often watched her on live video while she worked at her desk or in the Langley main lunchroom. She was tall, beautiful. Even on a blurry video screen her exuberance and long red hair and lithe body seemed to jump out of the screen at him. He had known there was something going on with her and other workers. It wasn’t hard to figure that out from their emails. BW went into a rage when he found out. Somehow he convinced himself that his little game with Paul was only meant to make the affair public. Maybe scare him away. In the end, sadly, the unfaithful bitch deserved to die.

Months before, BW had engaged David Xavier to seduce Melissa Coyne. The reasons were complicated. BW needed a handful of chosen CIA staffers he could manipulate into compromising CIA security from within. Melissa was one of the people he chose. It was no surprise that Xavier showed no reluctance in carefully carrying out the instructions. BW learned that Xavier was stubborn about killing. Not squeamish. He had killed many times before, but apparently only on foreign shores. On the other hand, seduction was one of his specialties. It ranked high on his resume. He had quickly agreed to work a list of targets, almost all of them women.

A key requirement that had complicated the contract with Xavier was BW’s insistence on constant video or photographic surveillance. Pictures needed to be taken of everything. At all times. And every additional requirement also meant more money for Xavier, whose greed seemed boundless. But it was worth it because the quality of the video was exceptional. Xavier had the best equipment and had shown a talent for setting up the hidden cameras and microphones. He was the highest paid pornographer in Washington.

There was no question for BW that out of all the individuals involved, Mellissa had stood out. She was the first target that Xavier had bedded, and she was inventive and tireless when it came to sex. Some of the best video wasn’t even covert. She was a willing participant. Even the mundane conversations over breakfast or an occasional late night snack in bed at Xavier’s condo had an engaging quality that caused BW to watch them over and over again. Many nights he hardly slept.

Now that she was gone, BW had a difficult decision to make. The video had to go. The Washington police would be back again asking a lot more questions. Hyde would be there as well, Homicide Division’s token bull in a china shop, rutting around in BW’s business. BW had hoped to find a way to bribe him off the case and even though Wishnowsky had told them that the cop was untouchable, he had set up the conference call to feel him out. But it didn’t take long to see that Wishnowsky had been right for once. Hyde was too stupid to see the light. Fuck him then. BW would find another way to get to him. In the meantime, the evidence had to be destroyed.

All it took was one press of a mouse button. BW closed his eyes, not able to watch as the files disappeared, one by one. The chime that rang signifying the task was complete gave BW an instant headache. When he turned to stand, he felt a sudden weight on his chest and the room begin to lurch out of focus. He had never felt so weak. He staggered to the small washroom down the hall, hoping to avoid another employee — someone who could read the fear on his face.

He was standing there now, looking at himself in the mirror, unsure of who he was. The face that stared back was pale and bloodless, puffy from lack of sleep. But his eyes were like bloody open sores. He put his hands in the sink and splashed cold water on his face, which only succeeded in soaking his shirt. In the mirror, he looked like a man out of control. Anyone confronting him now couldn’t help but see the guilt and uncertainty in his expression. He needed to get his act together.

Hurrying back to his office, his head down, BW began to think about his next move. Slamming the door shut, he sank into his chair and closed his eyes. His heart had finally settled down, and the sweat was starting to dry on his neck. Three deaths now. He had caused three people to die. All totally untraceable. Imagine that. He began to see how liberating it was to take people out of the equation; vote them off the island by merely punching the Enter key. Click. Scammel gone. Click. Removing Strange had been as easy as sending a few emails. Click. And he couldn’t forget Xavier. David Xavier was a flash of brilliance right from the beginning — his puppet agent on the loose.

Thinking back to those first few weeks, when the idea of taking down the hated CIA had begun to seem more and more possible, BW became almost nostalgic. Some of the early stuff, the simple hacks, the first stumbling attempts at embarrassing people who thought they were in positions of power, had given him the biggest charge. He remembered making his team leader’s life miserable for weeks. He was sending emails to his wife from their bank questioning payments to an escort service. It was pretty childish, but he capped it off with a couple of security photos that Scammel whipped up. A blowjob in the backseat of a limo is apparently pretty easy to fake. The couple almost got a divorce. The more upper management was distracted by the chaos swirling around their personal lives, the more freedom BW had. He was also learning the value of a good photograph.

Playing with people’s computers was endlessly entertaining too, but it also began to wear a bit thin after a while. Besides, too much attention on the heating system or phones or computers that seemed to have minds of their own, might attract the wrong attention from some rare bright bulb at the Help desk, who might stumble on to what was going on.

BW needed to expand his authority as well, move beyond the limited confines of what one can accomplish through a computer network. He needed partners. A dangerous idea. He wasn’t about to trust anyone with his secret. But the CIA was the essence of covert action and had thousands of resources designed to work anonymously and with complete deniability. They were NOCs. People under non-official cover.

BW had gone through the list of active CIA agents he found deep in a secure server at Langley, a database that took hundreds of hours to find safely. Today that would be far more difficult, but security was laxer then. Active agents in the system could be outside contractors, employees or NOC agents. NOCs got paid well, but they were outside of government protection. They had no deniability. If they were arrested or detained in a foreign country, they were on their own and would likely do time. Or worse.

There were hundreds of names and BW wasn’t exactly sure what he was looking for. But he had some ideas. Loyalty shouldn’t be a problem. But he needed someone close by who knew Washington. And someone who was available.

He had scanned through a number of files with details on skills and experience. He was looking for a real James Bond type. A charmer. Someone who could compromise female employees. But also someone who could muscle cops. Nothing cerebral; a tough guy who followed orders.

BW stopped at one lengthy file. Xavier, David. Weapons experience. A marathon runner. Liked to travel. He owned a small company that built GPS technology that was sold all over the world, but mostly to the U.S. military. His office was in Washington D.C. There were no pictures, but BW imagined someone with those credentials would look the part.

There were two issues now. One was he had to make contact in the proper manner. These people were careful. Two, he needed to fund this agent somehow. That would take cash. Lots of it.

It took BW days to track down the NOC agent. He tried several secure channels, all of them dead ends. Was the agent ignoring his request or had he somehow breached a protocol? After all, there wasn’t a manual on how to find intelligence mercenaries.

One morning, the caffeine racing through his veins, his high-security email alerted him. Ping. It was that simple. Xavier agreed to make contact. The hairs on BW’s arms had gone up immediately. He felt like he had just turned a street corner and come face-to-face with Sean Connery. Or Jeffrey Dahmer. He wasn’t sure which yet.

A request came for the project code. He responded.
DST. Code name: Buzzworm

There was no logic to the codes then. DST stood for Department of Science and Technology, the tech arm of the CIA. But name and project codes were sequential and verifiable by date and generated by some randomizing program. BW had guessed most agents didn’t care. If someone could speak to him on a 128 bit encrypted messaging service from inside the agency, then he must be legit.

I have an asset. A CIA employee arrested by Washington police. Need you to meet with him and convince him to bribe officer involved — make evidence disappear.

There was a delay. Xavier was considering his options.

Not my specialty. What’s the bribe? Cash? How much?

Officer has a gambling habit — he’s into loan sharks. Don’t know how much. Can you find out? We need him back ASAP

Give me names and details on both. Let’s start with 100K and go from there...

BW smiled. You had to admire these people. They were out there, in the wind, no net, no friends. But this Xavier knew where he was going, and he knew which way to turn. He could answer a simple question. He was also pretty clear about the money. One hundred thousand dollars wasn’t going to be easy to find.

BW remembered the long hours he had spent working on the money problem. It had almost defeated him. At one point, he had even considered calling his estranged father and asking for a loan. Maybe he would tell him that he needed the money to buy a house. The thought sickened him. His father had played a small part in getting him his job at the CIA.
Mr. Connections.
As if the asshole thought that would make up for all the years of being ignored and abused. BW could see another side though. He could see the wonderful irony of someone funding their own execution. Despite that, he still couldn’t make the call.

BW had been incredibly naïve then, thinking he could just hack his way into the CIA to accomplish all of his goals. He knew now that hacking was child’s play. The real power was in people. People and private information. A handful of dark secrets could change the path of history. So BW went on the hunt for dark secrets.

On that morning, before contacting Xavier, BW had gotten very lucky. He had learned that a CIA employee had been arrested by the Washington police. Most people knew that the CIA monitored email, web and radio traffic coming into the United States. This wasn’t a big secret. What wasn’t that well known was that in order to manage the cost, only a small number of keywords were being searched for at any one time. There were about fifty million messages a day bouncing back and forth through the Internet cloud, so monitoring every message was expensive and tied up a huge bunker full of scanning technology.

It was possible to scan radio and air traffic as well. There was technology in place that could sniff out spoken words as well as written words. Agents and directors with projects could request that certain words, names or phrases, be included in future scans. So BW had made his first formal request back then to track Washington police scanner activity. The request was under a cloaked ID of course.

Washington DC police scanner chatter was monitored 24/7 and archived in daily text files that could be searched later for names and addresses. So BW tried something audacious. He crossed the home addresses of all CIA staffers with the police scanner data on a daily basis. He was looking for CIA employees who had run-ins with the local cops. Over the first few months he came up with three successful hits. One was a break and entry. Not much he could do with that. Another was a drug bust. Good to know, but the name of the offender didn’t match any CIA employee names. Could have been a renter. The third was a goldmine.

The police had been called to 380 Hawthorne to pick up a man on an arrest warrant. The officer called it in as a 10-89. A sex charge. BW felt his pulse speed up. That had been a code word he was searching for. Hawthorne was the address for long time CIA employee, Frank Scammel. He checked and Frank definitely lived there during the time of the arrest. Could good old CIA employee Scammel be mixed up in something ugly? Luckily for BW, he was. It was a fateful day for everyone involved.

BW felt better now. The creepy sense of doom that had washed over him was gone now, if only momentarily. He had downed a large quantity of caffeine, this time mixed with vodka, and he could feel his body vibrating like a high-tension cable. He had gone over his plan again and was confident there were no holes. Xavier was following through with exacting professionalism. Scammel had been valuable, a smart draft pick. Xavier had managed him like a trained dog for years. And if Roger Strange continued to be a problem, for whatever reason, there were any number of people out there on the streets of Washington more than happy to do some wet work for the greater good. The greater good of
Buzzworm
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