Buzzworm (A Technology Thriller): Computer virus or serial killer? (8 page)

"A lot of the staffers here have come up with their own solution,” said Med. “They’re finding ways to avoid using their computers. They think if they don't log in,
Buzzworm
can’t track them down."

Roger thought about that. ”
Buzzworm
wins both ways then. If employees don’t use their systems, how does the CIA function? Isn’t it hard to evaluate spy imagery if everyone is on a permanent break?”

Med tensed. Roger could tell he had hit a sore spot. She slid closer to him across the table and lowered her voice. “You’ve got to stop this infection, Roger. In a week, we have a major test here. The government is doing a final review of something we developed called GIPETTO. If we fail, this whole division will be shuttered. Four hundred people could lose their jobs.”

Roger was struck by the emotion in her voice. “You want me to stop this thing, but you can’t tell me anything about the program? Do you know how hard that is?”

Med looked away. Roger could tell this was more than just a programmer defending her code. She began carefully. ”Jo and I came up with the idea for GIPETTO. I have been leading the programming development and another team worked on the satellite hardware and servers. We’ve spent five years creating something that is decades ahead of everyone. I can’t give you the details, but I can say that GIPETTO is critical to US security. And though the system should be absolutely hack free, somehow
Buzzworm
got in. I have absolutely no idea how someone from the outside could do that.”

Roger cocked his head to one side. Med could tell he was trying to see how GIPETTO fit into the CIA’s network. “I didn’t come across anything called GIPETTO when I did the network scan. And I was allowed to scan everything. Your network. Langley. NIM. DOD. What did I miss?”

“You can’t see it, Roger. It’s the highest level of security we have. That makes it invisible on the network. But somehow,
Buzzworm
did. I was hoping …” She didn’t seem to know how to finish. Roger seemed to sink in on himself. His failure to see everything felt like a physical blow.

“I’ve just started, Med. Give me a day or two. This isn’t just a job to me, you know.”

“A day or two is all we have. And it isn’t just a job for me either.” Med stood at this point, the empty teacup and spoon in her hand. She was heading back to work. "But before you go, I need one favor." Med hesitated and then sat down again.

Roger finished the last gulp of his coffee. "I need some more information about your friend. I need a name.”

Med couldn’t hide the look of surprise. “For what?”

“Hey, I understand this is personal for you. But if I’m looking for imagery in the system that might be the basis for that video you witnessed …”

Med moved closer to him and whispered. “Roger. If you find any part of that video. Even a fraction. You’ve got to promise me you won’t release it.”

Roger squinted at her. “You mean, don’t even show Jo?”

She bit her lip. Then she put her right hand in front of his face and curved her pinky finger at him. He stared at the finger. “Don’t betray the code of the coder’s,” she said, her warm breath on his face.

Roger stared at her for a moment, frozen.
The pinky ring swear.
He hadn’t seen that since he was eight or nine. When he had real fingers. He raised his right hand in a fist. He released his smallest finger, the shortest, the most damaged. She stared at it, fascinated, but unbothered. He took her pinky in his. “Easy for you,” was all he said, and Med smiled again. A secret kind of smile. A code of the coder’s smile.

She sat back, looking relieved, and gathered up her cup and spoon to return to the wash-up station. She let out a long held breath of air. “His name is David Xavier. With an X. Owns a company here in DC that works with the military. I have no idea why
Buzzworm
would know him. We’ve only been going out for a few months.” She stood up. She seemed to have a second thought. “Nothing that serious, you know.” She shrugged.

As they left the cafeteria, Roger had one more thought. “Did you tell him? What you saw?”

She stopped and stared at him. “No. Partly for reasons of CIA confidentiality.”

“And the other part?”

She waited until another group had passed them in the hall. “I don’t think he would care. I’m not sure why I think that. He is just not a tech type. He’s a purely political animal. A businessman. He reads Forbes, not Wired.”

Roger accepted the answer, although he couldn’t imagine someone not being interested in such a sophisticated ploy designed to play with people’s heads.
They continued down the hall to the elevator bank.

At the elevators, Med turned to him, her arms crossed. “By the way, you asked before why this building is so cold? Because when it was built, the contractor asked how many staff would be working here, so they could plan the heating and cooling. The CIA said it was confidential, so the contractor had to guess. He guessed wrong.” She smiled again. “Just another sacrifice we make for national security. It’s worse now because of
Buzzworm
. But its never been right.”

Roger just nodded, suddenly feeling naïve and clumsy in her presence. Her day job was watching out for World War Three. He couldn’t imagine what that felt like.

“You’re on sub 3,” she offered. “Let’s talk again tomorrow. Or sooner if you find anything.” With that, she turned and left. Roger stood at the elevator. He lifted his pinky finger up, trying to imagine what it looked like to someone else. Someone else not used to partial fingers. He was surprised to note that his finger still tingled from her touch.

Buzzworm
always began his day
the same way. He believed all men chosen for greatness had their rituals, and he was no exception.

Before dawn, he carefully filled a tall mug with his special white powder, pure anhydrous caffeine he purchased in bulk, his first dose of the day the equivalent of ten cups of coffee. He mixed the snowy powder with fruit juice and greedily downed the concoction.

Almost immediately, he felt the energy surge through him like he had plugged himself into a high voltage cable. His vision became clearer, his mind racing ahead of him with delicious new ideas of revenge and retribution. He remembered then how his special mission had begun many years before.

Her name was Valkerie. She was tall, muscular, as perfect as possible in that post-apocalyptic world she lived in, her bare arms tattooed with the scars of a dozen battles. He had stared across at her, his hand on the hilt of his sword. They were finally alone on some nameless carbonized battlefield, a village off in the distance. He walked up to her, the sunset reflecting off his armor. He imagined he looked like a golden god.
How beautiful he was
she must be thinking.

He had typed, “Our children will rule this world.

Valkerie laughed then. She answered almost immediately, her gothic script scrolling along the bottom of his screen. “Not in this universe. Or any other.”

Then she drew her arms up, a sign she was about to cast a spell on him. Clearly she was not interested in sharing genes with this stranger. He had lured her away from the village ruins with a fantastic story about a quest for jewels. She had fallen for his lie. They were alone now, no witnesses. That was good. He could do what he wanted with her. He moved swiftly with the two-handed melee sword, his impossibly powerful body a blur on the screen. The big blade slashed across her midsection. She shattered like a crystal and her fading scream filled his ear buds.

Following her death, he had sat back in his office chair, looking disappointed. He had hoped against all odds that she would accept his offer. Sex between avatars was rare on Ganymede, the war planet on the
Universe Two
online gaming system, and that’s why it would have scored him massive points. He had hacked
Universe Two
and given himself superhuman powers and wealth so that he was virtually unbeatable in battle. But he couldn’t hack the other players. Valkerie, whoever she was, would re-appear on some other world after her virtual death, reborn as usual. She would be angry with him, vowing revenge if they ever met again, and still flashing those giant tits she had purposefully selected from the games character-building pull-down menu.

As a long time player of online fantasy games,
Buzzworm
had learned that this seduction of other virtual players was difficult and time-consuming. No different than the same game played out on the streets and bars of Washington D.C. every night. But here, in virtual reality, he had power and wealth and impossible good looks. In the real world, he had none of these. This thought made him feel helpless and alone.

After signing off the game on his computer, he looked out through the frosted glass window of his small office. He could see the blurry shapes of other CIA staff moving past his private cave.
How appropriate. Fuzzy people uncertain about their goals. Unlike him. His mission was as focused as a laser beam.

The man who called himself
Buzzworm
always had a file open on his desk, ready in the event someone knocked on his door. That was as rare an event in those early days as it was now. He was as forgotten in the intelligence complex as honor and duty. He was like a salaried ghost.

Buzzworm
knew he could have submersed himself into the fantasy world of
Universe Two
every day, all day, if he wished. No one would know. No one expected any output from him anymore. He used to be part of a cyber terrorism team that prowled around inside the computer guts of Al Qaeda and Hezbollah. They called him a penetration expert, and he was good at his job. But he never got along with the rest of his team. They were a different generation from him; they worked here to get exposure to new technology, but there was no loyalty. No obvious love for country. Sure, they brought their sleeping bags into work and never left their keyboards except to guzzle Red Bull. But that didn’t make them patriots.

So after the third blow up, this one involving a monitor he had thrown at one kids pimply head after he had made an ignorant comment about Ronald Reagan, they made him a manager. A manager of no one. They gave him the smallest office on the floor so they could hide him away from the others. He was an embarrassment; an ugly right-winger wasn’t fashionable in the muddy new world of twenty-first century geopolitics. Maybe he knew too much for them to let him go. They certainly didn’t want him around other staff. He made them uncomfortable, and that wasn’t good for productivity.

At the time of the ‘promotion’, he was living with his mother in a small tumbledown house in Benning Heights. His father, the big shot, had deserted them years before because he couldn’t be bothered caring for a wife diagnosed with schizophrenia. Then the city issued an expropriation notice. They were widening the highway to build a new onramp. The shock of losing her home killed the old lady. The day after the funeral he learned that she had willed all of her assets to a local end-of-days fringe church called the
Holy Soldiers of The Revelations
. She left him nothing. Not even a stick of furniture. He smashed every framed picture in her small house that afternoon, then hauled her other possessions out on the street in the rain. Then he just walked away.

The next morning, his head about to explode with frustration, he had signed onto
Universe Two
and went on a global killing rampage. He ruthlessly hacked and killed dozens of other players, burned buildings, destroyed whole villages. No one was able to challenge the god-like powers he had manufactured. At one point, he even considered the ultimate hack, where he would nuke the entire planet, maybe destroy the whole universe. Wouldn’t that wake up all those millennium generation self-absorbed computer nerds?

The next day, nursing a massive caffeine-induced migraine, he found himself locked out of
Universe Two
. He wasn’t surprised. Luckily, he had masked all of his entry into the game. They couldn’t track his whereabouts, and he had never used his real identity to register. Still a ghost.

That day he decided to create a new identity for himself. This was a significant event and he needed a name to match. He was filled with nervous energy when he first scribbled it out on a memo pad by his monitor.
Buzzworm
. He stared at the letters. The word seemed to jump out at him like it came unbidden from some powerful place in his unconsciousness. And that seemed only fitting.

He also liked the dark edginess of it. He had opened a new book now. He felt bolder. More committed this time. There was difficult and dangerous work ahead of him — he could sense that. But he was back in the game. And yes, he had exceptional powers again, but it wasn’t as easy this time. The people who ran
Universe Two
had plugged some of the holes in the game play. Their security was tighter. That’s how it worked. Weaknesses you exploited could become traps. Never go after the same chink in the armor. There was always another one anyway. That was the real game.

BW, that’s what he thought of himself when he wasn’t gaming, had been sitting there, impossibly bored, when another blurry shadow passed his window. Who was that silhouette? He could only guess but he had easily recognized the pointy breasts and the perky bottom. He didn’t know her name, all he knew was she was a staffer who routinely ignored him in the halls. What if he wanted to reach out to Ms. Blur? Like he did in the virtual world?
Buzzworm
could feel blood rushing into his head, his heartbeat in his ears. The CIA after all, was like any other quirky universe. It had it’s dragons, trolls, shamans, monsters, and maidens in distress. And a lot of cannon fodder.

That same afternoon, his new life began with a simple bloodless game of BW’s invention. Born out of boredom more than malice. Simple manipulation. Something that would grow until it was impossible to control anymore.

The heating and air conditioning system in the CIA complex had been completely modernized and computer-controlled years before. BW wondered then if he could change the temperature in the building without drawing attention to himself.

He went in and looked at the control code. No one had thought to protect the systems that controlled temperature inside the building from staff. So it would be easy.

But just because it was doable didn’t mean it wouldn’t be monitored. If he went in, someone could track the day and time and who he was.

So he needed an identity, an employee that didn’t exist. Which as it turned out wasn’t that hard. Two years before a retired analyst by the name of Tonkin had retired. Some techie on the help desk had forgotten to close his access to the computer network.

So BW took a deep breath and cranked up the heat in the Administration group by twenty degrees. Mr. Tonkin was going to bake those little ladies in administration.

And he wouldn’t even be around to enjoy it.