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Without Martinez peering over his shoulder, Chris opened up the most notorious cracker site Sandman/Adnan had visited.

He hadn’t told Martinez—or David for that matter—that he kept a handle on several of those sites. Not that he subscribed to cracking, but it never hurt to keep a fi nger on the pulse. He logged in with his handle, Dark Water Outlaw, and went into the most active forum to see who was online.

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Sandman422 wasn’t one of them. He did see a couple of names he recognized.

DARK WATER OUTLAW: U C S4NDMN422? GT SOMETHING H3 4XD 4

HOBBIT: NT 2D4Y

DATA VELOCITY: 54Y5 H3 G0T 4 5URPRI53 F0R 7H3 M4N

Chris didn’t like the sound of that. Carefully he typed, doing his best hakspeak.

Dark Water Outlaw: i 5p1ic3d 50m3 m0d5 f0r him h3 57i11 n33d 7h3m? He wanted to know if Sandman was still looking for code.

HOBBIT: H3 G07 W47 H3 N33D5 BR34K 1IG75 H3 54Y5

What the hell did that mean? Sandman already had everything he needed? That really didn’t sound good. Chris wondered if these guys had a clue. They’d probably seen bits and pieces of the unfi nished code, and weren’t sharp enough to put it together.

DATA VELOCITY: (001 GR347 (|-|347 (0D3

These guys thought Sandman was writing cool cheat codes for some RPG game. Numbnuts.

DARK WATER OUTLAW: B47713FR0|\|7 |-|410

HOBBIT: M0R3 1IK3 G74 GR347 (|-|337 (0D3 G0I|\|G 70

BR34K 1IG|-|75 411 0V3R

So it wasn’t like Battlefront, the war game, or Halo. These guys thought Sandman was developing new ways to manipulate GTA, the ultra-violent urban video game. But what did they mean by break lights?

Or could it be brake lites? Break lights or brake lights? Chris suspected the former. So how did he plan to break them, and what lights was he talking about?

Chris pushed his chair back, stretching to ease a growing crick in his spine. He sensed these two didn’t know anything else.

Sandman/Adnan had either deliberately misled them or they had chosen to believe his motives were as simple as theirs. To L.A. BYTES
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a lot of them their cyber world was more real than the physical one they were forced to live in. Maybe they couldn’t conceive of real evil being done with the simple words they put down in their computers. They were happy to mess up a few thousand corporate computers, or see the name of their latest virus on CNN’s nightly news, but for most of them that was as far as their ambition went.

He signed off the cracker site and went back to his captured logs. He had to fi gure out where this guy was.

If he didn’t, Chris had the feeling all hell was going to break loose soon.

Wednesday, 8:10 am, Civic Center, Los Angeles
David woke slowly. He blinked several times, but couldn’t see anything. Something covered his eyes. His hands were bound behind his back. His mouth was taped shut.

He rolled his head sideways, instantly regretting the movement.

The bare metal surface beneath him was hot on the exposed skin of his face. The air was overheated and stale. He smelled engine oil, gasoline and his own sweat.

An insectile buzz fi lled his ear. A fl y settled on his open wound and David fl inched to drive it away. It came back. He forced himself to ignore it, concentrating on more important things.

He probed through the fog of his memory. Chris in the hospital. No, Chris had disappeared from the hospital. Another memory... taking Chris’s computer to Brad.

His cell phone rang.

He twisted his head around, driving the feasting fl y away again. He squirmed, pushing down with his bound wrists. He only succeeded in ripping several arm hairs out by the roots. The phone kept ringing. His struggles grew more desperate, until his skin grew slick with sweat and blood and his lungs screamed for oxygen. The tape around his wrists didn’t budge. Belatedly he realized his legs were also bound.

Finally, he subsided in exhaustion. The ringing stopped. The fi rst fl y returned, joined by a second one. This time they settled on the fresh blood and torn fl esh of his wrists.

He groaned. The sound was muffl ed by the tape over his mouth.

Remember.

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He strained his ears, listening, trying to sort out anything that might tell him where he was. Maybe it would trigger a memory that would tell him where he’d been.

Remember.

Brad had found... something on Chris’s computer. What was it? He’d called it a web bug. Said it could be used to spy on other machines.

What was Chris doing with a web bug? Had he found the Sandman? But if he had, why was David here... Something must have gone wrong...

His mind hit a wall. No more memories.

He strained to hear anything that would give him a clue to his location. A steady stream of fast moving vehicles overhead suggested a freeway. Which hardly narrowed things down.

His head throbbed. His stomach ached. It had been hours since he’d had anything to eat or drink. Unwanted thoughts of water, cool from the fridge, of steaks, fresh off the backyard grill, and mesclun salad fl ooded his mind. Thoughts of wine.

Which led to the unexpected memory of champagne. A bottle of Mumms. Mumms had become a Christmas Eve tradition with them. The energetic sex that invariably followed the bubbly was another new tradition. Chris had a way of getting past his reserves, even when it came to trying something David never would have considered in his wildest dreams.

Before Chris, sex had been a rare and, by choice, a furtive occurrence. Fearful of exposure, he hid his desires behind a wall of work and lies.

Until Chris forced him to acknowledge everything publicly.

Because his desire for the man several years his junior had proved stronger than his secrets.

He heard voices. Loud male voices shouting in rapid Spanish over the steady beep-beep-beep of a truck backing up. A third voice entered the fray, growling something in a heavy Bronx accent almost as incomprehensible as the Spanish.

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The voices faded. They were moving off. David snapped into motion. He had to get out of here.

With his arms bound behind his back, it was a struggle to move his upper body. Flexing his shoulders brought with it corresponding pain. His body shifted a couple of inches, rolling him over onto his chest. The stink of old oil and gas, heavier near the fl oor, stole his breath, making it hard to suck in enough oxygen to keep his head clear.

It would be simple to drift into an uneasy sleep. Rest. Maybe his head would clear up if he got some...

He slammed his head sideways onto the fl oor, sending a bolt of pain through his skull and down his spine. He couldn’t rest.

He couldn’t expect to lie here and be rescued. No one knew where he was. It was up to him to free himself.

He tugged his arms again. When he encountered nothing, he hunched around, knowing the only way he was going to free himself was by fi nding a way to cut the bindings. He slammed against the wall again. Behind his gag he grunted.

Spreading his numb fi ngers, he fl exed his leg muscles and began inching his way along the corrugated wall, feeling for an edge, a broken seam. Anything sharp enough to cut his bonds.

He bit at the gag, scraping his face along the fl oor in an effort to rip off what he assumed was duct tape. It didn’t budge. He did it again and again, smashing his face into the fl oor until blood trickled from his nose and he was forced to stop.

The fl y was back. It landed on his cheek, mincing across the bridge of his nose before dipping into his left nostril. Another swipe at the fl oor drove the insect away.

There were no more voices outside. The hum of traffi c grew heavier. Rush hour? It would make sense that it was early in the morning. He had spotted Chris on Hyperion around ten o’clock.

He’d followed him to the freeway heading north. Where could Chris have been going? The I5 led past any number of small California communities: Sun Valley, Pacoima, Santa Clarita,
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Saugus. None of them stood out in his mind as places where Chris had any interest.

A fresh trickle of blood oozed from his nose. The penetrating smell of blood overwhelmed the stench of oil and gas. The sound of the hungry fl y returning was an incessant irritant. He wanted to scream, but couldn’t even grunt behind the gag.

The temperature climbed, confi rming his feeling that it was coming up to late morning. He doubted the vehicle was in full sun; otherwise it would be even hotter. With the unseasonable heat of Southern California they’d been experiencing lately, he knew it would soon get killing hot.

Wednesday 9:30 am, Cove Avenue, Silver Lake, Los Angeles
Chris stared at the computer screen. Every now and then he broke off long enough to glare at the telephone, which remained stubbornly silent.

Martinez had left over an hour ago, saying he needed a warrant for Adnan’s fi nancial records, though what he hoped to fi nd Chris didn’t know. As far as he could see, they were just chasing their tails at this point.

Nothing new had come in on Chris’s web bug. Adnan was deliberately remaining offl ine, or he had done all he needed to online. Either way Chris wasn’t having any luck fi guring out where he was.

Which didn’t bode well for fi nding David.

Chris blinked and tried to focus on the screen. Maybe there was something there he had missed. But when he brought up one of his captured logs he couldn’t concentrate on any of it.

The words were there, but no matter how many times he read or reread them, they made no sense.

He knew his lack of rest was catching up to him. More than once while studying the words he so desperately needed to understand, his eyes closed of their own volition. He would jerk L.A. BYTES
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upright, only to fi nd that several minutes had passed while he wandered in la-la land.

His phone rang. He snatched it up. It was Martinez.

“You gotta come down here right now,” he said.

§ § § §

Chris stopped on the way and grabbed two bottles of Red Bull. Still, he waited fi fteen minutes while the offi cious jerk at the front desk found Martinez and they were able to agree that Chris was expected. Finally he got his visitor’s badge and, guzzling his fi rst energy booster, followed Martinez.

But instead of taking him through to the detective’s room, Martinez led him towards the rear of the building and down a narrow fl ight of stairs.

The guy who popped out of the unmarked door at the end of the hall looked too young to be a cop. A patchy attempt at facial hair didn’t even begin to hide his acne. His name tag said he was Brad Dortlander, IT Forensics.

“Dortlander,” Martinez said. “This is Chris. He does that computer stuff too, so I fi gure he can translate that crap you were telling me earlier.”

“Brad.” The guy held his hand out. Chris shook it. “I just found a couple of things on Adnan Baruq’s machine.”

“Tell him what you found,” Martinez said.

“I deconstructed a mass of code I found on this PC,” Brad gestured back at the room he had come from. “This is some pretty impressive push technology, and I suspect this isn’t even the fi nal version.”

“And?” Chris urged him on.

“He’s got a source route insertion program that will practically rebuild an IP packet so that it avoids almost any IDS. He could get this worm past most fi rewalls.”

Martinez winced. He turned to Chris. “Translation.”

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“He’s fi gured out a way to make a computer accept a destructive payload without triggering an alarm from an intrusion detection system. He can wipe out a system before anyone knows he’s there.” Chris turned back to Brad. “But what’s he sending in?”

“I did some pattern matching on parts of the code and came up with a Denial of Service attack. I’ve resolved several IP

addresses that appear to be the target. But...”

Brad looked confused. Chris had the feeling he knew why.

“The IP addresses are bogus, aren’t they?” He glanced at Martinez. “The attack targets are dummies. He didn’t put in the real addresses, just place holders.”

Martinez’s face fell. “So there’s no way to tell who he means to go after?”

“Sorry, no.”

“Just what can this kind of attack do?”

“Depends on how well set up it is,” Chris said. Brad nodded. “If it’s well orchestrated it can bring down a company’s infrastructure.”

“All their computers, you mean?”

“A lot more than that, these days. Everything’s controlled by computers. Power. Phones. Lights...” Chris trailed off and thought of what he had found out at the cracker site. Break lights. “But what’s his target?”

He realized he had spoke aloud when both Martinez and Brad leaned forward and said “What?”

Chris outlined his visit to the cracker site and his online

“conversation” with Data Velocity and the Hobbit. How they thought the Sandman was working on a game hack, but Chris knew it was something more sinister.

“Well, I may be able to tell you where,” Brad said. He spun on his heel and used his passkey to let them in through the unmarked door.

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It was the police server room. Several ancient IBM servers hummed away along the far wall. Two newer workstations sat atop a desk to the left of the door.

A third machine, much newer than anything else in the room, sat connected to a keyboard and monitor. Brad nodded at the machine.

“This is Adnan Baruq’s server. I’ve already cloned it onto that hard drive,” He indicated one of the IBM workstations. “Along with a few different versions of the code, I found links to several maps.”

“Maps?”

“Google Earth, MapQuest,” Brad said. “Something called Cartifact. I guess he liked different perspectives.”

“Maps of what?” Martinez snapped.

“All the same place, around Temple, 1st, Los Angeles—”

“That’s all government buildings,” Martinez said. “Federal Courthouse, Detention Center, City Hall, Caltrans... PAB is down there, too.”