Crow - The Awakening (10 page)

Penipe sniffed the fungus and took a nibble. "Mmmm, this is good!"

"Courtesy of the boy. It seems he also likes that stuff." Sirel made a face. She looked at Lohet, "He's searching for his parents using a computer he built."

Lohet froze, staring at the image in front of him without really looking at it. "And?"

"Not even close." She smiled. "I've set a tracker on him so we can follow his search."

"If he turns over the wrong rock, the Sadari might detect his search." Lohet grasped the edge of the table tightly, denting the hardwood with his fingers and he sat up straight looking at the stone wall behind Migalo, deep in thought. "Could they know about him already?"

"I've seen no indication of their attention." Sirel played with a metal button she had pulled from her pocket, rolling it on the table. "Surely they would have collected him already."

"Do not overestimate your abilities, Sirel." Lohet looked sharply at her. "You may be the technician of our team, but we are nothing more than ants to the Sadari in these matters."

"Perhaps they are waiting for the same reason we are." Penipe leaned forward, still nibbling on the mushroom.

"We must collect the boy soon or all will be lost!" Migalo grumbled. The wait was getting to him and he wanted a resolution of their mission as soon as possible. They had been waiting years for the harvest.

"If we collect him too soon, all will be lost anyway." Lohet looked coolly at his hairy weapons specialist. Then his chilly gaze settled on the other two. "But if they find him first, he will need to be collected or destroyed."

Penipe and Sirel looked downcast at that prospect. Migalo fidgeted. "If we destroy him, we'll be stuck here.” He spoke everyone's thoughts on that possibility. It was a sobering thought to all of them.

"Did you bring a link, Sirel?" Lohet held out his hand. She put the little brass button in it and he manipulated it in his fingers as he looked at it. "Penipe?"

Penipe extracted her brass tube computer back out of its pouch and uncapped one of the ends. Lohet pushed the button into a slot designed for it. She activated it and turned on its holographic display for them all to see. The computer didn't actually shine a true holographic display, but rather stimulated their brains directly so that they all saw the data it was being asked to generate within a predefined area relative to the primary user of the computer, giving the appearance of a holographic representation of what they were intended to see.

"Ooh, he's on the network right now." Sirel grinned, peering at the changing pattern of data. The boy had cracked into the government's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency cyberwarfare botnet and was piggybacking his search on their resources. The botnet was a collection of tens of thousands of computers, both local and foreign, that all received commands from the Department of Defense for the purpose of taking down or cracking into enemy networks or for the purpose of surveillance. "The boy is playing in dangerous waters." Sirel giggled.

Lohet frowned. "He's being watched." He moved his finger in the display area to move the data around, trying to find out how Steven got in. "A subset of the FBI, it appears. They don't know who or where he is, however." He looked over to Sirel. "Abstract his network. Everything he does goes through us first."

Sirel moved closer to Penipe and started moving virtual blocks of data around, turning their own system into a proxy for Steven's connection. "Done. Want me to run a track on those who noticed him and divert them?"

"Not yet. We might be able to use them if we lose connectivity with the deviant." Lohet returned his attention to the microscope. "Things are getting very complicated and very dangerous." He wondered what the DNA snippets he discovered could be for and how they got there.

Migalo left to go hunt and Sirel curled up in her little nest on the ceiling, exhausted from the long excursion. Penipe stared at the screen of their computer, watching their young target perform his search. She hoped against hope that he would not get caught. She had not seen her daughter in so long and desperately wanted to go back home. The deviant represented their only chance to make that happen.

Steven typed quickly, trying to elude detection. He found he wasn't the only one exploiting the security holes that software and hardware contained. In order to add muscle to his search, he had incorporated several distributed networks and added his own network as a controlling node, albeit surreptitiously. Normally no one would have noticed this since he was doing everything completely behind the scenes. But someone else was in that part of the network as well. He wasn't sure what they were doing, but they did notice him and he had to shut several doors behind him as he retreated and worked to flank his pursuer on the network and bottle him in. He formed what he called a honey pot, a virtual representation of himself that was less hidden and used that as bait to distract his opponent while he covered his tracks and returned to anonymity. Then he stopped and waited, holding his breath. The other guy took his bait, then he slammed the honey pot down. That appeared to be satisfactory and the chase ended. He could tell that the other guy had put in place traps of his own, forming a mine field that he had to tiptoe through as he continued inserting himself into the botnet.

From there he pointed his new tool at the census databases, the ones that were not public, and started mining them for information about his parents. If they existed, they would surely be there. Even with a distributed network of thousands of computers, mining the database required a long wait. There was a ridiculous amount of data to go through and he had to do it in a way that didn't attract attention, meaning a slower search rather than a brute force frontal attack. The number of computers did come in handy when it came to dissecting the data, however, so it was a matter of hurry up and wait. Steven sat back, bouncing on his chair as he waited.

Growing hungry, Steven reached to the right of his computer for the mushroom he was sure was there. Only, it wasn't there anymore. He looked at the counter, then on the floor and stood up and looked around the tree house for the mushroom. Everything appeared to be in perfect order, except for the missing mushroom. Sitting down, he thought hard trying to remember. But he knew he had left it there. The windows were closed. Could a squirrel have slipped in through the hatch? But then it would still be in the tree house, unless they're able to open the hatch and leave. He sat down and pondered that. Perhaps someone had entered his tree house? But to do so would have required someone who was definitely not afraid of heights and good at climbing on the bark itself without branches. He didn't see any sign of scarring from climbing tools as he clambered up the tree this afternoon, so it was unlikely that a person had been there. Sighing, he reached into his backpack and pulled out one of the mushrooms he had collected for his godfather. He'd have to collect another one on the way back.

He looked out at the meadow reflectively. He hoped that he had put his nightmares behind him with what he had done. Conquering his dreams using his imagination and ability to form fantasy lands and people seemed unorthodox, but he expected it would be effective. The meadow was no longer a mysterious place but one he had a distinct connection to - and more importantly, one that he made his own refuge. He grinned at his Asherah. She was cute and witty and a little silly. A good companion to confide in. Brandon was a decent friend but even he wasn't privy to Steven's deepest secrets. Even if Asherah was imaginary, it was nice to have someone he could openly talk to. The glare of the sun interrupted his reverie. It was low enough to shine directly into the window, which meant the day was coming to a close. Sighing, he shut his computer down and turned off the inverter circuit. Today was nearly over, but tomorrow was another day full of promise. He especially looked forward to spending more time in the meadow. He nimbly hopped and dropped straight out of the hatch, pulling on the rope handle of the hatch cover as he fell through so that it closed behind him. He landed on a branch a few feet below and he began his typical rapid descent to the ground, already planning his projects for the next day.

Laurence stood in the lobby contemplating the memorial of officers lost in the line of duty. There were two recent additions that he took note of, both within the last couple of years. There were no names on them, no text describing the portraits. Just the pictures. This stressed the secrecy of this government organization while at the same time paid homage to those who worked for it and died in the line of duty. He looked at his watch and looked at the reception desk. The secretary was on the phone talking to someone. Behind him were some comfortable sofas arranged around a table with a selection of periodicals stacked neatly on it. The only thing that differentiated this reception area from any corporate foyer were the armed guards and the body scanner at the entrance. Laurence nodded at a guard that had noticed him and met his gaze with a steely look, then he returned his attention to the plaques on the wall. He heard a door open and turned to look.

"Mr. Johnson?" A thin and balding man stepped out of the door, carrying a tablet computer. Laurence saw the screen of the tablet for an instant from across the room, but the glance was enough for him to see what was on the display. He relaxed a little. It was his portfolio and credentials, naturally. Today he is a computer expert and investigative analyst that has had extensive consulting experience with the DoD. It would appear that they are convinced he is legitimate. He smiled and waved, walking confidently toward the man.

"Bill Paul," the man said, holding his hand out. Ah, a man with two first names, Laurence thought to himself as he grasped the extended hand in his own. Bill smiled broadly. "We just got your clearance."

"Thanks. I was wondering why it was taking so long." Laurence picked his jacket up off the sofa and the two of them stepped through the door that closed and locked behind them. The room they entered was huge and full of cubicles with a lot of busy agents crunching and filing collected intelligence. A few looked up as they walked past, still obviously focused on their work but taking a moment to see who was walking by. There were no greetings except for a few nods. These people were very focused. Bill ushered Laurence into a windowless conference room where they were joined by a couple of other agents, and the door was shut. Bill typed a code on a wireless keyboard sitting on the conference table, and part of a wall lit up and displayed what appeared to be a web of dots, some connected, others not, but none with any common point.

"That is the work of someone we call the Ghost." Bill took a chair and Laurence another. The other two were already sitting down and shuffling their notes. "The name is more descriptive than you might think. The intruder appears out of nowhere, leaves to nowhere, and leaves no trace of where he came from or went. All we know is what servers he has accessed and what files he looked at." Bill looked at Laurence over his reading glasses. "He's been deep in DARPA, Mr. Johnson."

"How do you know it's the work of one person?" Laurence looked at his handout that listed files accessed and servers exploited.

"The basic pattern he leaves is a complete lack of identifying information." Bill sat back. "The best any of us can do is forge identifying packets. He..." Bill hesitated for a moment, "or they..." he didn't want to reinforce an assumption, "don't even have that. All the packets we've filtered appear local to every server, as if originating on that computer. There is no hint of any network activity whatsoever. The consistency of it represents a pretty clear fingerprint."

"You've vetted the personnel at the compromised locations?" Laurence pursed his lips as he fingered through the reports.

"Yes. Some of the locations are remotely managed data centers too, like Seattle." Bill pointed on the report Laurence was holding. "There were no staff present at those locations at the time of the incursions." He scanned over the data, already familiar with the Seattle occurrence. "The abundance of incidents hints at a team of hackers, but the identical nature of the attacks points to an individual. Even our own teams demonstrate a small level of variance in their attacks no matter how closely they work together."

"How far did you get on tracking these events?" Laurence already suspected the answer.

"What you see is what we have." Bill threw up his hands and leaned back. "There's no real pattern in the files that are accessed, or even the project being hacked into. He's hit up administrative servers and research servers."

"The pattern could be the lack of a pattern."

"We've considered that and tried culling non-critical files. It hasn't helped in tracking the intruder down, however." He looked at the other two who sat without a word. "There's, uh..." Bill looked down, "something else." He took a breath. "We had two agents working on this consecutively."

Laurence sat quietly, looking at him. He knew exactly what Bill was talking about, remembering the two recent additions to the memorial. Bill fidgeted in his seat, playing with his pen and looked at Laurence. "There is more to this than what we see here." He tapped the folders with his pen. "We have no idea if they got close or not. Only that they both ended up having... accidents." Then he leaned forward. "Consider this full disclosure."

Laurence nodded. Bill looked at him for a moment, then he and the other two stood up. "Good. Welcome to the team. I'll send you on to Linda for your access card and phone. I'm sure you know the drill." Laurence grabbed his folder and followed Bill out. He pointed the way and shook Laurence's hand again.

Linda smiled at him as Laurence walked up. "Hello, Mr. Johnson."

"Hi." Laurence smiled back.

"Put your right hand on the scanner, please." Linda looked at her computer as Laurence complied. "Okay, left." He switched hands. "Thanks. Now put your chin here and look at the red dot." She pointed to what looked like something Laurence would find in an optometrist's office. The red dot flickered briefly. "Good. Now, put your index finger on that, please." Laurence saw what looked like a little scanner but it just had a dot. As he put his finger on the groove, he felt a quick prick. A blood sampler for DNA collection.