Buzzworm (A Technology Thriller): Computer virus or serial killer? (3 page)

She grabbed for the keyboard, striking it hard with her fists. Nothing. The gruesome scene continued to play out.

She screamed out, and then pressed her hand to her mouth. She couldn't breath. The stink around her was incredible. Was she imagining this? She reached down with her other hand and slapped the power switch. The fan whined down, and the power light faded, but the screen refused to dim completely. Instead, the image seemed to brighten and grow closer.

Mary Ellen felt like gagging, a warm broth of coffee, coke, soup and dinner rolls rebelling in her stomach. She vomited into her lap, over the clamped hand on her mouth, across the screen of her terminal. She slipped to the floor, hunched over, her hands on the slick linoleum — her breath coming in ragged bursts. She reached for the power cable. Pulled. It slipped in her hands.

She groaned again, rolled back, felt the cable finally give at the other end, felt it separating from the electrical plug. She heard the monitor above her squeal, and she covered her ears, her head on the cold floor. It was impossible and stupid, but she knew somehow that the creature on the screen was coming for her, that a hand would reach down and pull her into that nightmare.

MED tried to move, but her muscles refused. She lay there in the dark, shivering.

After a moment, she picked herself up shakily and looked over the edge of the desk. The monitor was blank — but she swore she could still hear the voices.

Roger Strange lost the tips of his fingers
experimenting with a homemade pipe bomb when he was fourteen years old. It wasn't an act of extremism - just plain dumb-headed curiosity. He needed to know what made things function. And he was always taking stuff apart to see how it worked.

In this case, what came apart was the family cat. She happened to nuzzle up to Roger at a critical time. The crude bomb ignited, and she lost her life. Roger lost everything from the last knuckle and out on his right hand. But if it wasn't for the cat, which took the brunt of two pounds of poorly packed blasting powder, Roger might have lost his eyes too. Or suffered brain damage. Because of that he always kept a few strays around for good luck. Except, of course here, where they didn't allow it. And that's why he was feeling so uneasy right now - almost naked. He always did his best work around cats.

Strange was working at his computer, his face up close to the screen, when the phone rang. He muttered something unintelligible and felt for the phone without taking his eyes off the monitor. He pushed a square button labeled SPEAKER.

"Roger here," he answered, distracted.

"Roger? Pick up the phone." It was Sharon from eScape. She sounded anxious.

"You're on speaker," he said.

"Pick up the damn phone," she raged, "or say goodbye to the contract of a lifetime."

He turned his head, his eyes still on the screen. Purposefully slow, he put the phone to his ear.

"You're right. This is so much more romantic," he said.

"Strange, I'm not going to waste my time talking to you while you hack code." Roger pressed three more keys. "I need your attention for a change. Shit, you're still at it. Look, let’s forget it. I'll get Dash to work on this. And he’s easier to meet with, if you get my drift."

Strange smiled. Dash was a propeller-head to the nth degree. Spent a hundred hours last month on Internet chat rooms - making out with hot young babes who signed themselves in as Bambi or Dynasty or Vanna. The truth was, they were probably portly old ladies with unwashed hair, or worse, men getting their jollies by stringing him along with a phony handle. Dash gave guys like Strange a bad name. But he was on the outside. He had that going for him. "Dash doesn't know a sub-routine from a sub sandwich."

"He returns my calls."

"Yeah. He's sheer genius with a phone. Especially if its got a 1-900 number."

"Do you want this job or not?" she said, sounding serious.

Strange only blinked. He always blinked when getting his ass chewed out, which was often lately. "I'm still working on the last one you gave me. The client from hell who wants to keep meticulous control over his dazzling universe of 300,000 used dishwasher parts. And I’m on schedule."

She grunted into the phone. She had been on his case about this particular program for weeks now. It wasn’t glamorous work, but it paid the bills. And he was right - he never missed a deadline. "That can wait. This is a government job we're talking about.
Federal
."

She said it the way some women might whisper unmentionable acts in your ear after their sixth margarita. Strange smiled into the phone. "So - who did you have to sleep with to get this one?"

"At least I’m sleeping with members of the opposite sex. Or have you forgotten how that works."

Burhack was a pain in the ass, but she fed him a lot of consulting work. She had a sharp wit too. Just enough to keep Strange on his toes. She also put up with his odd working hours and the inconveniences of his present living arrangements.

"Low blow, Sharon. But I appreciate your sympathy.” He whistled softly. “My buddies, the Feds. What makes you think they'll let me do it?" He took his eyes off his computer screen for the first time and reached for his coffee cup. "So far I hear they're still paying their bills."

He heard the sounds of paper being moved around on her desk. "This is big. And they asked
specifically
for you. I really built you up the last time we made those changes to their in-house security program. Which still works, as far as they can tell. We'll both make a lot of money on this if you can just keep your mouth . . ."

He jumped in. "Are we talking firewall work?" Firewalls were software programs that protected sensitive computer systems from hackers.

"You're going to be eternally grateful to me."

"Sharon, you own a software consulting firm. Now if you were sitting on the parole board . . . "

She was shuffling through papers again. She was clever, but he imagined her office looked like the aftermath of a SWAT TEAM attack. "They're painfully aware that you know every computer virus on a first name basis."

Roger stopped drinking coffee. He was finally starting to pay attention.

"They've got one?"

"Big time. And this one isn't on anyone's list. I checked."

"Somehow I doubt that. Has it got a name?"

"They're calling it
Buzzworm
."

Roger stopped staring off into space and peered up at the wall chart just above his work area. It was a list supplied by one of the bigger companies that produced anti-viral software. The list had over 4,000 names of viruses.
Buzzworm
wasn't there. Nothing unusual though. At last count, there were 8,500 cataloged viruses in existence. "Haven't heard of that one, but so what. Could just be another one of those endless variations on SatanBug, Tremor or that Jurassic virus from Spain they've been chattering about lately."

"This is definitely not a derivative. It's new. And it's as slick as baby poop on linoleum. All they can tell me is it’s
poly,
and it’s infected all of their critical systems." Poly meant polymorphic - a virus that changed shape constantly to avoid detection. Very hard to find. Even harder to write.
Who could launch such an aggressive attack on the American government?
"They need you PDQ."

"So I'll call 'em. Give me the number." That was a joke because Rogers’s phone only received calls. He had no way of calling out of his cell.

"No need for a call. They need you there. Now."

"There?" Roger had just filled his mouth with the vile stuff he brewed everyday they had the nerve to call coffee, his whole body resisting the urge to spray it all over his tiny cell. Home was Overton, a minimum-security prison in southern Ontario. He had fifteen months to go, if his behavior met the parole board’s standards next time they met, a meeting he wasn't looking forward to. The
boards
always made him feel like a six-year-old kid about to fill his pants - but even worse, in the back of his mind, was always the threat that they could send him to a real prison. If he didn't toe the line. Or they didn’t like his answers. Real prison was a place without computers - a place with lots of guys with shaved heads and shivs, lurking around the showers, looking for a drive-by romance. A place where his ex-partner still languished, at least four years left on his sentence, and a lot of pent-up anger and revenge filling his empty days.

Roger swallowed, then shuddered slightly. He was paying off an unusually large fine by doing computer consulting out of his cell for eScape - but he didn't want to rock the boat.

"This is a joke, right? Or have you got a prison break planned? By the way, if anyone is listening in, that was only meant as gallows humor."

“You’re a laugh a minute, Strange. Langley called . . .”

"Shit.” He sat down.” He had written a program for the CIA two years before, clearly the biggest project of his career. It taught him more about modern high-tech security than just about anyone on the planet. It also taught him how to break into highly classified computer networks, which was the reason he was getting his room and board paid for by the Canadian government.

"They sound desperate. Desperate enough to pull out all the diplomatic stops and make a deal with their northern neighbors to have you sprung."

"If this is a joke, Burhack, your dishwasher parts guy is going to find that his inventory has been automatically FedEx’d to Lithuania." Half of him wanted to jump up and hoot. Freedom was something he tried not to think about lately. The idea of breathing fresh air made him dizzy. Another part of him, the harder chunk that sitting in a jail cell had honed over the past year, was humming like a fire alarm about to go off. This didn’t feel right at all. This felt like a trap. He didn’t know why, it just did.

Burhack continued. “Your lawyer called me an hour ago. He'll have the papers drawn up by the end of tomorrow. Finish this job and you get a full release and pardon. Plus one hundred an hour for the work you do to solve their problem. And I've already got your flight booked."

"And what's in it for you?" he asked, always feeling she only worked with him because she knew he was the best and she could charge more because of his notoriety. He sensed deep down that she thought he was just another con with the morals of a flatworm.

"Four hundred an hour," she confessed. "For putting up with you this past year, I deserve it." She was right. This work had helped him keep his sanity, but had strained hers to the breaking point. He was not easy to get along with under the best of circumstances. Good thing he was so damn good at what he did.

When he got off the phone, he stood up and stretched, waiting for the call from his lawyer. His paranoia was beginning to evaporate. He was almost beginning to feel good - feeling in demand by the big boys and at the top of his form, despite being locked up like a rabid dog. Finally, some of that experience was going to pay off. But something gnawed at him. She had said they had a virus. That had to mean it had found its way through the CIA's security system that he had helped design personally. And that was impossible. More impossible than anyone could imagine.

CHAPTER 3

Frank Scammel’s so fat now
he’s straining the seams of his circa ‘82 Grateful Dead T-shirt.

He’s losing his hair, his back hurts all the time, and he can feel a tingle in his wrists he knows is the onset of carpal tunnel syndrome. But he’s got a hard-on so fierce it makes him feel like he’s sixteen again, so he doesn’t give a shit. The fact that his occupation, even though it’s one of those ‘knowledge-worker’ buzz-crap jobs, is killing him slowly, doesn’t seem to matter right now. Like anything matters. Maybe having his boss walk in on him right now, might matter. But at two AM? How likely is that? Although it wouldn’t surprise him to know she was still in the building.

Frank had found the mother lode, and it made his hands shake. He had been tracking down a system intruder for the past few weeks, his own private project, and he’d finally struck gold. A telltale address left in a deleted file that shouldn’t be there. An address that didn’t make sense, unless of course you were a hacker trying to hide your trail.

Frank had gone to the Internet address immediately to satisfy himself that this clue had to be a mistake. The people messing with the CIA’s computer network were good. They had hired the best. And people that good usually don’t leave obvious clues. But maybe he was just too tired to put that all together right now, or maybe he was hoping he just got lucky for a change. Whatever his excuse, it was a stupid mistake someone had made. He had found the file and deleted it. But he couldn’t bring himself to leave. The server he had identified was one of the most complete kiddy-porn collections he had ever seen. Of course, Frank never called it kiddy-porn or even thought of it as pornography, because he was after all, a serious collector. He liked to think of this as just his hobby and he didn’t understand why Joe public had such a problem with it.

Some part of his brain at this point was trying to ask a few key questions, but it wasn’t finding an audience. What does this site full of naked kids have to do with a bunch of hackers smart enough to crack the toughest computer security on the planet? A diversion? A coincidence? A trap? Despite the internal warnings, his excitement hadn’t flagged one iota. He’d never seen anything like this before.

It was almost as if someone had read the dark recesses of his brain and built a site that matched all of his peculiar fantasies.

A homepage from hell for Franky.

He chuckled at that, almost gutturally, because it was funny and sick all at the same time. Then he saw something that made the sweat freeze on his hairy back. Now he had really done it, he thought. Slipped into the
Twilight Zone
.

He recognized someone in one of the pictures.

Which was impossible.

It was too long ago.

Nausea gripped him, shook him like a predator shakes prey. Then the picture began to move, first haltingly, then up to speed. Despite his heart racing and his head feeling like it had come disconnected, his erection remained taunting him, holding the reins of his madness, refusing to let go.

Because it had to be madness. Nothing else explained it. And he couldn’t move. His personal life (and all its jagged unfinished bits) was now flickering on his computer screen — right there for everyone to see. The things you should never see. Even Frank, who had participated in these acts and even relived them on occasions, wasn’t meant to see them again like this — the lighting harsh, the ugly details full of color.

Suddenly he hated this man on the screen smiling like a jackal, standing over a frightened young girl. He hated him for his history, hated him for the way he justified himself, made excuses and lies to a wife who once loved him, but would now rather see him rot in Hell. This person, this thing on the screen didn’t deserve to live, couldn’t live, especially if this material went public.

Then he read the message attached to the video file. He recognized the sender. He had one chance to keep these images of him and his daughter away from the public and his wife. One chance to protect them.

Only one.

The message on the screen was clear.

It was signed DX. DX kept his promises. Frank knew that. He had witnessed the man’s cruelty.

Frank was crying now, blubbering like a child. Where had it all gone wrong? A timer was counting down on the screen now. He had only minutes to complete his part of the bargain.

When he got up to find a weapon, he discovered to his surprise, he still had an erection.