Wormhole (37 page)

The command deck on the Bandolier Ship materialized around him, his body enfolded by one of the four supple couches. Smoothly curving walls dissolved around him, leaving Mark hurtling through space, just like the first time he’d tried on the alien headset. They’d all tried on the alien headsets: Heather, Jennifer, and Mark. And in that state, they’d established a common link that enabled them to share each other’s thoughts and feelings. It was one of the things Jack had encouraged them to explore. It was one of the things they’d all learned to block.

But if he was linked into the ship, where were Heather and Jen? And where was the ship’s AI that had attacked his mind? He’d thrown up every block he could muster to try to protect them all from that attack. Mark ran through a quick mental diagnostic. Apparently, after releasing all his rage at the AI, he’d restored his
own mental shields and left them in place. Maybe that was why he couldn’t feel the girls’ presence through his headset.

Remembering how it felt to touch Heather’s beautiful mind, Mark dropped his mental defenses. The vision of himself hurtling through the vast emptiness of space achieved a new level of clarity, so many stars in the blackness, tiny pinpoints of light, pulsing with an energy all their own. He could feel their energy ripples softly brush his awareness.

Suddenly, the surrounding space-time warped violently as a powerful vibration distorted the blackness. In a rush of realization, Mark knew...he wasn’t alone anymore.

She had him! The rush of joy almost broke the nascent mental link, but Heather wasn’t about to let that happen. She opened herself completely and their minds flowed together. As frightened as she’d been of letting Mark invade her innermost sanctuary, she now welcomed the sharing of all that was right and wrong about her. Neither was she repelled by Mark’s dark thoughts and embarrassments. After all, that mixture of good and evil, beauty and ugliness, was a big part of what it meant to be human.

“I love you,” Mark’s thoughts whispered in her mind.

Funny. Despite how they shared each other’s thoughts, mental conversation still came most naturally.

“Right back at you.” Heather felt Mark smile at her response. “Always have. Just didn’t know how much.”

“How’d you manage the mind link without our headsets?”

“Jen led me to it. I would have managed sooner if I hadn’t tried to overanalyze it.”

“You made my day. I’ve missed you.”

Heather’s eyes welled up. “Me too. But I feel you now.”

“So you ready to get the hell out of here?”

“I’m working on a plan.”

“They’ve turned on the laptops, at least one of them.”

A vision of Mark typing commands into the stolen cell phone played in their joint minds. The fact that the laptops had been turned on meant every electronic system in the building now had multiple back doors through which Heather, Mark, or Jen could take control of the system.

“We’ll need access to a networked computer. I need a facilities layout so I can see exactly where each of us is being held. Jennifer’s been playing her mind tricks with one of her handlers, but they’re drugging her so heavily she’s been fading in and out.”

Heather felt Mark scan her memory, his anger a gathering storm. “Heroin? They’re intentionally addicting her?”

“You thought they’d play nice?”

“Guess not. Still makes me mad as hell.”

“That’s fine. Use it, but don’t let it use you. Our chance is coming. One other thing, I think Jack’s nearby.”

“How do you know?”

“I don’t. But it’s what my visions tell me. I think he’s out there waiting for us to make our move, putting himself in a supporting position.”

“And if we can’t break out?”

“Like I said. Our chance is coming.”

For two and a half hours, Heather laid out the details of what she had in mind, refining the plan with Mark’s feedback, playing through the scenarios in such vivid detail that they both experienced the same dreamworld rehearsals. But to make the scenarios
complete, she was going to need a completely accurate layout. And she wasn’t likely to get that until their break was already under way.

Mentally exhausted, Heather terminated the last vision. As she felt her hold on their link fade away, Mark’s final thoughts brought a tired smile to her lips.

“So we’re just going to wing it. Sounds like my kind of plan.”

“You with me, Jen?” Heather’s mind reached out for her friend.

“Better than most days. Worse than some.”

Indeed, Heather felt far less haze in Jen’s mind than she’d felt in several days.

“Jen, I need you to get as much clarity as you can for the next few minutes, even if it costs you later.”

Heather knew that the effort of shunting the heroin effects away for a while would inflict a heavy penalty on Jennifer once she relaxed from the effort, as if she had endured a sudden overdose. Heather knew it, hated it, but asked her to do it anyway.

She didn’t need to ask twice. All at once, Heather felt Jen’s mind reacquire its normal cutting edge. That was good. The opportunity stood in front of her right now, but in five minutes it would be gone.

“OK, Jen. In a few seconds I’m going to want you to do your thing, but you’ll need to follow my thoughts and do it through me.”

“Sounds like fun. Let’s go for it.”

Heather relaxed back into the real world, feeling Jen like a hitchhiker in her mind. Dr. Jacobs detached the last of the sticky electrodes from her temples, wound up the cords, and returned them to their case.

As he turned to place the items back on his cart, Heather focused on what she needed, felt Jen pick up the thoughts, and then almost lost consciousness as a wave of vertigo carried her into Dr. Jacobs’s head.

It wasn’t like anything she’d ever experienced. Although she’d touched Jennifer’s memories, she hadn’t wanted to pry into that part of her mind. Certainly this was nothing like the psychic link she shared with Jen and Mark. This was an empathic bond that gave access to the target’s innermost feelings.

On the surface, Dr. Jacobs seemed very happy with his perceived progress, but beneath that lay a raging sexual urge to do things to his patient that would never be sanctioned by his bosses. If only he could be alone with her for an hour without that damned camera.

Like a tick, Jennifer burrowed into that feeling, amplifying the sick urge and feeding it back into Jacobs’s mind. The doctor turned toward Heather, stepping close to where she lay so that his body blocked the camera’s view. Sliding his stethoscope over his ears, he leaned down.

“Take a deep breath and hold it,” he said, sliding the cold end of the device beneath her gown, his hands gently resting against the curve of her breast.

Once again Jennifer amped up the man’s hidden desire.

“Now, let it out slowly.”

Heather complied, feeling his hand move a little farther up the curve of her left breast, a tremor passing through it as he paused.

“Now, once more.”

Again his hand shifted and again Jennifer ratcheted up his excitement. Suddenly, his eyes closed as a shudder passed through his body. When they reopened, he frowned, withdrew the stethoscope, turned, and hurriedly pushed the cart to the door. When he pressed his hand to the biometric reader, the electronic lock opened, then locked behind him again as he backed the cart into the corridor. Then, with the squeak of rubber wheels on concrete, he was gone.

Heather glanced up, then rolled onto her side, away from the camera. As she felt Jennifer slip back into her drug-induced haze, Heather’s fingers stroked the touchpad of Dr. Jacobs’s Android cell phone.

The worm was designed to penetrate security holes in Windows, Linux, Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, Mac OS, OS/2, Android, Palm, and IOS. It mutated using an evolving genetic algorithm, opened multiple root-level back doors, mapped the host system’s routing tables, services, and attached devices, then hid itself to await external commands. It didn’t do much, but what it did, it did well.

It provided one additional service that Heather immediately brought into play: it opened a telnet port that provided remote shell access to every network-accessible infected system. While she lay curled into a fetal position beneath the sheet, Heather’s fingers flew across the tiny cell phone keyboard, scrolling through a list of nearby hosts and routers. One by one she accessed the systems, made a quick check of attached or networked devices, then moved on.

She calculated the odds that Dr. Jacobs would discover his missing cell phone within an extended time window. Jennifer’s subtle manipulation of the man’s suppressed urges had left him with sticky underwear, shocked and embarrassed, so mentally flustered he just wanted to get someplace he could shower himself clean. If he used an on-site shower facility, a 98 percent probability, she might have as little as thirty minutes before he discovered the missing phone. Heather had set her mental clock on a thirty-minute countdown. It now stood at twenty-four minutes, eleven seconds and counting.

Heather knew the facility had been designed with multiple layers of TEMPEST cages, but she knew something else too. Dr. Jacobs collected data from his cell wirelessly. He also used Wi-Fi from his cell phone to network to his office. That meant the TEMPEST integrity of the lower levels was floor by floor, connected with other floors via secure fiber. And she didn’t need to wirelessly connect to the primary control center. She just had to be able to wirelessly access a computer that was linked to that local area network.

Heather stared at the small screen, feeling a sudden burst of exhilaration. She’d found it, a route to the security system that controlled the door locks. As happy as that made her, she had to find one more node before she could override that system. It would do little good to take control of the locks if they could watch her every move through the network of cameras.

The camera in her cell had a coax cable connection. That meant the other security cameras were probably hooked into the monitoring system the same way. You could bet the same contractor installed the whole shooting match. If that were true, they would show up as directly controlled devices on some system. But even if some of the cameras were smarter, network-enabled devices, she could still take control of them. There would still be
a central computer that sent out the IP commands that told them what to do and that routed the video streams to the appropriate clients.

Twenty minutes, thirty-four seconds.

An adrenaline surge almost caused her to roll to a sitting position. Heather funneled the feeling into a big smile.

“Gotcha!”

She didn’t need long. Five minutes. Maybe less, just enough time to get from her cell to the nearest room with some more capable networked computer systems, time enough to take out any resistance and get up on the local area network.

Heather entered the commands to force an immediate shutdown of the camera control system, switched telnet targets, and unlocked all electronically locked doors throughout the facility, forcing a reboot of the security control system. Then, to add just a bit more confusion to the coming mayhem, she killed the facility lights—not the power, just the lights.

As the lights went out, Heather leaped from her bed, pulled the heavy cell door open, and hit the corridor at a dead run. Although the sound wasn’t loud enough to provide a bright image, the echoes from her running footfalls provided enough detail for her to clearly see her surroundings. She didn’t need louder sounds. She wanted to see the sounds made by others.