No Way Out (2 page)

After a few more seconds of work, she paused, satisfied with the results of her labors. Then, with a couple of clicks on the left button of the mouse, she selected a menu item called “build.” This action inaugurated a two-stage process known to computer programmers as “compiling” and “linking.” It was this process that actually created the finished computer program. By the time forty eight seconds had elapsed, she had created a
new
version of the program.

And what a new version!

She thought about it now, almost wistfully. Getting the original source code had been rather tricky. She’d had to use some of her old contacts to break down the bureaucratic barriers. But many States had public records or freedom of information laws. She wished that she could infiltrate the altered program
everywhere
. That would be something of a coup! But she had to be realistic.

When she first started out, she had no idea that she would even be able to do it. It was more idle curiosity than a firm agenda that had prompted her to explore the possibility. But when she studied the documentation and asked a few questions of a professor to understand how the software worked, it suddenly dawned on her just how easy it would be.

Of course, slipping it in
undetected
would be the hardest part. There were various ways she could do it. One way was to hack into the server computers and upload the new program. But that was risky. The fact that an organization maintained a server that was accessible from outside did not necessarily mean that it was vulnerable. Interactive websites were usually protected by strong firewalls.

There was, however, another way to infiltrate the new version of the software that didn’t involve direct use of the internet at all – social engineering. The trick was to
get the systems administrators to install it themselves
. The key to this method was to make it seem as if it were a modification of a current program that they were already using. By packaging the program complete with forged letterhead, printing on the DVD surface, throwing in some  fancy multicolor process-printed documentation and then sending it out by special courier, she could trick their Systems Administrators into installing the new version under the erroneous assumption that they were getting an upgrade from the software company.

It would be the ultimate software hack followed by the ultimate in social engineering.

But what
was
the new program? It was
not
one of those so-called “Trojan horses.” Neither was it a virus that could replicate itself. Nor yet was it a trap-door that would enable her to get into the system later. Indeed, once inserted into the system it would simply do its work.

And now she was going to make the niggers pay!

Bethel was nineteen – too young to remember the Sixties and too bored to care about her grandparents’ reminiscences – like how her mother was conceived at the Woodstock festival.

Pathetic!

But the sound of Buffalo Springfield’s
For What it’s Worth
was ringing through her head, via the earphones of her iPod, as she stood by the roadside, waiting for help.

She knew little of the context of the song and nothing about the closing of the
Pandora’s Box
nightclub or the Sunset Strip Curfew Riots. But the voice of Neil Young was haunting. It was easy to sleep through high school civics classes – even to sleepwalk through the assignments and exams. She knew a bit about the Vietnam war and the civil rights struggles of the Sixties. But it was all superficial academic knowledge, of the kind she picked up almost by default while daydreaming about the proverbial football team quarterback.

It stayed in her mind not as a coherent picture, but as a collection of sound bites: “We shall overcome,” “I have a dream,” “Power to the People,” “Burn baby Burn!” The voice of anger still echoed across the decades. But it echoed faintly. A time-gulf separated Bethel from the turbulence that had almost ripped her country apart. And the time-gulf was ever widening, so all that was left of the ringing timbre of history’s voices were the fading reverberations of barely-remembered heroes. Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, the Chicago Eight. Names and slogans to Bethel, but no substance… except, perhaps, the occasional substances she used to take her mind off the boredom of academic learning.

But she liked the song.

It had a pleasant hook to it that made it stick in her mind. What really sent shivers up her spine was that haunting phrase at the end of chorus, urging the young listeners to pause and assess the situation. She had no more than the merest inkling of what it meant. Whatever it was, had “gone down” long ago.

It doesn’t really matter
, she told herself. It belonged to her grandparents’ generation anyway. She belonged to another generation, the one that was more concerned with finding a job than changing the world. Bethel had known her own personal share of hardship in life, but it had been an exceptional episode and not something that affected others of her generation.

Her full name was Bethel Georgia Newton and she was a mixed bag of human elements. In the looks department she was all bleached blonde and classic cheerleader figure: a carefully cultivated complexion and polished-tooth smile. Neither svelte, nor-buxom, a kind of perfect “in-between” for her 5’6”, athletic, but in that soft, not-overdone sort of way, with well-toned leg muscles, but not rippling ones. On the socio-economic side she was middle class and far removed from the culture of the street, the stoop or the ‘hood. Yet when it came to experience of life she wasn’t entirely naïve. She might not exactly have been streetwise, but she had tasted the bitter taste of life.

She stood by the roadside in her white tight-fitting T-shirt and shorts that showed every curve of her firm body, holding out her thumb every time a car went by. She thought it would be easy hitching a ride, with her breasts thrusting out in front, straining against her T-shirt, and the perfect ripe complexion of her thighs showing like white silk in the California sunshine. But people were paranoid, she realized now.

A few yards away, her car had broken down and she couldn’t even call for help because the battery of her cell phone was flat. She had made a half-hearted effort to fix the car herself, but she didn’t really have a clue when it came to car engines. So all she could do was flag down a Good Samaritan and ask them to take her to a garage where she could get proper help.

Secretly she was hoping that some good-looking man with technical skills and a cool family fortune would stop and rescue her, not just from the roadside but from the aimless drifting boredom that seemed to have engulfed her life lately. But she would settle for an elderly couple taking her down the road to a pay phone if necessary. Only she wasn’t even getting
that
.

Life was unfair.

And then her luck changed.

An aquamarine Mercedes slowed down as it approached her. A recent model and from the up-market end of the European car industry. The owner was clearly affluent… and probably young. By the time it had pulled over by the roadside, she could see that the driver, in his late twenties, was a black man.

What would my parents think?
She wondered with a smile at the fleeting fantasy of turning up on her liberal parent’s doorstep with this young man in tow.

Think
rather than
say
.

She knew that they’d be warm and welcoming in their words. But she wondered if they were capable of walking the walk as well as they could talk the talk. It occurred to her that even now she never really knew her parents. And yet here she was away from home, trying to find herself.

As the young man leaned out smiling and asked if she needed help, she could tell from his confident voice that this some one who was going places. She was drawn to his youthful good looks and quiet, cool self-confidence and she warmed to him instantly, even if his diction betrayed the lingering traces of a background that she half-suspected he was trying to conceal – or maybe just forget.

He took a look under the hood and after about a minute shook his head and said “I’m not really all that good with engines. I’m better with people.” He won her over with that line and a disarming smile. Two minutes later she was in the Merc and they were rolling along down the road, getting to know each other better. Somewhere along the line, she noticed that he had turned off the main road.

She was about to ask where they were going, when she caught a glimpse of his profile and saw his lips twist upward into a smile. But she couldn’t tell if the smile was friendly. And as the first traces of apprehension formed into a knot in the pit of her stomach, she realized that she was too afraid to inquire further.

“I’ve got butterflies in my stomach Gene,” said Andi as the car snaked its way through the streets of Los Angeles. A sharp turn later and the car began slowing down as the office building loomed up ahead.

“It’s too late to go back now.”

They both laughed. This was becoming a bit of an in-joke between them. They had both been nervous about leaving the Big Apple and crossing the continent to a new life on the West Coast. But Andi’s career had demanded it.

Andi Phoenix, sitting silently and brooding nervously, was in her late thirties. She had kept her looks through healthy eating, regular workouts and a bit of cosmetic surgery. Her breasts had been enhanced from 34B to 36D with silicone implants and she had taken a botox injection to remove the first lines of age. But the rest was from hard work and healthy living. The blonde hair came from a bottle; the original had been a decent but boring mousy brown. Changing the color had been a form of therapy after the rough ride of her youth, but the enhancements as a whole carried with them the payload of attention from men that she could well do without. She was a few inches shorter than the black woman who sat next to her, and some ways felt in her shadow.

Gene touched Andi’s forearm gently.

“Just remember this honey.
They
don’t know
you
either. But they were ready to take a chance on you.”

In the driver’s seat, in more ways than one, was Eugenia Vance, the six foot, muscular, black woman who had playfully wrestled with her in bed that morning – and won – as always.

They had met over twenty years ago, when Andi was still in her teens. Gene had helped Andi through her teenage crisis years, and they’d been together ever since. In all the time they had known each other, they never used the word “lesbian” to describe their relationship. It wasn’t denial. It was just that their every instinct railed against categorization. Neither Gene nor Andi loved “women”; they simply loved each other.

“I’m just wondering if this whole thing is a big mistake.”

Gene snorted her mockery at Andi’s self-pity.

“You’ve picked a
hell
of a time to start wondering girl!”

Here in California, Andi’s specialty was much in demand. She had majored in psychology before going on to get her Juris Doctor degree from the Northeastern University School of Law, where she thrived amidst its progressive atmosphere that encouraged social responsibility. But after graduation she had found the law to be an irritating environment in which to work. Most of her criminal work involved plea-bargaining rather than trial work and usually that meant helping criminals plead guilty to lesser charges – hardly the service of justice and way off from the ideals that had driven her into the legal profession in the first place.

Matters had come to a head after she contracted pneumonia, forcing her to take a prolonged leave of absence from the law firm that had initial hired her and held out so much hope and promise. But when she went back to work, she found herself welcomed with less than open arms. She was protected by labor laws from outright dismissal, but found herself increasingly sidelined. She joined another firm but then spent the next eight months playing catch-up.

It was in this period that her interest in the subject changed. Although there were innocent people out there needing to be helped, criminal law meant – for the most part –helping the guilty. And that was not something she particularly enjoyed doing. So she did the old “poacher turned gamekeeper” routine and got herself a job with the DA’s office, in the domestic violence unit, where she thrived for a while. Starting at the bottom of the ladder meant that she didn’t get to do much courtroom work. Most of it involved working directly with victims, reading reports and collating evidence. But she was happy to do this. It gave her a sense of purpose.

Paradoxically, it was only when promotion gave her more courtroom work that disillusion set in for a second time. Because she found herself doing exactly the same thing as she was doing before, but from the opposite side of the table: plea-bargaining with criminals. She found their lawyers to be vile, for the most part, and she realized how contemptible she must have seemed to the DA in her earlier days as a defense attorney.

At the same time, she had developed another interest: crime victim litigation. There was a growing industry involving the pursuit of civil remedies for crime victims and she very much wanted to be part of it. So she got a job working in that fledgling field for a large law firm, but realized very soon that she had hit the glass ceiling.

However, her employers were far from displeased with her performance and wanted to keep her on. They just didn’t have the right vacancy. But they made it very clear that there were more prospects of upward mobility on the West Coast and if she wanted it, there was a job waiting for her at their Los Angeles office.

She wasn’t altogether comfortable about moving to the West Coast. But that was where the work opportunity took her.

“And what if I don’t make the grade?” asked Andi, still seeking reassurance.

“
Hey, listen
,” said Gene firmly, “I don’t want to hear any of that. There’s nothing to stop you except fear – and if you let that get to you, I’ll be right behind you, ready to take a paddle to that cute little butt of yours.”