Fatal Error rj-13 Read online

  "It's like those lines from 'The Second Coming'… 'The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.' "

  "I guess it is a second coming of sorts. He lost out in the First Age, but now he's back to get it right. And he's got troops to help. The Otherness maintained an active infrastructure during the half millennium the One was imprisoned, while the Ally let its own deteriorate."

  "And hasn't done much to rebuild it since the One's rebirth," she said. "Plus the other side's got something we don't: a specific goal."

  Jack knew exactly what she meant. "Kill the Lady."

  A bizarre errant thought popped into his head and he brushed it away before it could complete itself. Something must have shown in his expression.

  "What?" Weezy said.

  "Nothing."

  "You just made a strange face. What? Maybe it's important."

  "Oh, trust me, it's not important."

  "Can I decide that?"

  "Okay. Don't say I didn't warn you. For an insane instant I heard a strange little voice singing in my head. It went"-he did his best approximation of Elmer Fudd-'I'm going to kill the Waaaaaady!' " He watched Weezy's features go slack. "Warned you. Happy now?"

  She stared at him a long moment. "You know… the way your mind indexes and references is a little disturbing."

  "A little? You should be on this side of it."

  "Not to mention inappropriate at times."

  "Yeah, that too. But we're off topic. Let's get back to their goal of killing the Lady-which, by the way, brings us full circle: We're on defense again-or should I say, as usual."

  Jack had been racking his brain but couldn't come up with any way of taking the battle to them outside of a direct assault.

  Weezy said, "That's always the problem with the conservative position."

  "Who's conservative?"

  "Well, in the basic, non-political/philosophical meaning of the term, we are. We're trying to preserve the status quo, while they're the radicals, trying to undermine it."

  Me… a conservative. What a kick in the head.

  But when he thought about it…

  "I've never been a fan of the status quo, but when you consider the alternative these creeps have got waiting in the wings…"

  Weezy nodded. "The status quo we're protecting now is the Lady's existence. On our side is the fact that nothing of Earthly origin can harm her, including the One himself, since he's human. The only way to strike at her is indirectly-through the noosphere."

  "And they seem to be trying to strike at that via the Internet."

  "Right. By bringing it down."

  Jack said, "But the Internet's already got a whole slew of governments protecting it, and it's so diffuse and redundant it's virtually impossible to bring down. So I don't see how we can be useful on that front."

  "Speaking of the Internet, what was supposed to be in that email you sent me?"

  "What email?"

  "About an hour ago."

  "I haven't been home since early this morning. I checked my email then but didn't send any. And you know I don't have a BlackBerry or anything like that. What did I say?"

  "Nothing. It was blank." She frowned. "Ooh, I don't like that."

  "What's wrong?"

  "You may have picked up a virus."

  "Show me the email."

  He followed her to the laptop sitting on the kitchen counter. She wiggled the mouse, the screen came to life, she clicked around, then pointed to the screen.

  "There. Empty subject line, empty body."

  Jack didn't use email very often, and when he replied to strangers inquiring at repairmanjack.com, he used a pseudonymous remailer. The site used a webmail account on a different server from the Web site. Neither host knew him or his whereabouts, and didn't care so long as the money order for the annual fee arrived on time. This was from the Gmail account he used for the rare email he sent to even rarer friends.

  "Come to think of it, I got a blank email from Abe this morning."

  Weezy was clicking around again. "Damn. Three more emails with no subject line." More mousing. "All blank. I think we've got a virus running here. I could be infected too. Weird. My firewall should have stopped it."

  He thought about Valez stealing Munir's code. Related? But Munir's code was for an online game.

  "What do we do?"

  "I'll check it out later." She straightened and looked at him. "Right now we need to figure out what we do about Dawn."

  An idea had been growing. Not a battle plan so much as a path to explore.

  "I'm going to look into this baby. See if it's really dead."

  "How're you going to do that?"

  Jack smiled. "A friend at the city morgue. Every dead newborn or even a stillborn past twenty weeks' gestation gets a death certificate."

  "And you know this how?"

  He felt his smile vanish. "Emma."

  Weezy looked away, then back. "Oh. Right. Sorry."

  "Anyway, if her baby's really dead, then that ends that trail. If not, then we do our damnedest to find out why they want it. If it's been spirited off, then I'm pretty sure whoever's behind it is connected to the One in one way or another. And if the baby's important to the One, it's important to us."

  Weezy nodded. "Sounds logical. Find out where she's been hiding during her pregnancy and we'll have a good idea who's got the baby. But I can see only one way to learn that."

  So did Jack and he didn't like it.

  "Yeah. Ask her."

  "And that means contact with her, which you think is a bad idea."

  "Because it's pretty obvious that's why she was put here: to make contact with you."

  "Well, let's fall for it. Except we won't be falling for it. We'll be going in with our eyes open. That way we might be able to turn the situation to our advantage."

  Jack wasn't so sure. He had a feeling this kind of second-guessing could lead them in circles.

  "First thing for me to do," he said, "is find out how many newborns died yesterday morning."

  "And I'll start combing Craigslist for a sublet for Eddie."

  "Good." That was how they'd found this sublet for Weezy. "If one of the dead newborns was Dawn's, we're back to square one. But if not…"

  "Then we start looking for the baby."

  Jack had a thought. "What if they want us to find the baby?"

  "Well, then I think they'd have let Dawn keep it when they moved her in across the hall."

  "Maybe they want us to work for it."

  She gave him a sidelong look. "Are we overthinking here?"

  "Could be. We could end up in a poisoned-cup debate."

  She rolled her eyes. "The Princess Bride?"

  "Sorry."

  He couldn't escape the way his mind worked. And he couldn't escape the uneasy feeling that they were missing something.

  15

  Munir ignored the incessant rings from his in-box. A blizzard of emails was filling it. They seemed to be coming from everyone he knew and even some he didn't-or didn't recognize. And not just one from each, but multiples, all without a subject line, all blank. He had stopped opening them.

  Somebody somewhere had a virus.

  When the storm abated he'd delete them en masse. Right now he was more interested in the rootkit virus that Valez had forced him to allow into his computer. It had hijacked his system and refused to be removed.

  It gave him something to do. Barbara was at the hospital at Robby's side-they were taking shifts-and Munir was supposed to be here at home resting. But he couldn't rest. Robby would be back in a day or two and they'd have to start dealing with the aftermath of all this horrendous trauma. This was a way of keeping his mind occupied.

  He'd located the virus but it had integrated itself so deeply into his system that he could not pry it loose. Three times now he thought he had eradicated it, but it reappeared each time he rebooted his system.

  And then he realized this wasn't the original rootkit. A second vir
us, introduced sometime since Tuesday, had overlaid the first.

  He could see it now: This had to be related to the email assault. But what was the purpose? It wasn't even slowing down his machine. It was merely annoying.

  He wished he could contact Russ. He'd been calling him all day, ever since Valez had said he'd heard of the game code from Russ. Munir couldn't believe he'd been involved in any way with what had befallen him and his family, but he needed to know the connection between the two. He also needed Russ's hacker expertise to help eradicate this virus.

  Of course, Munir could simply wipe his hard drive clean and reinstall everything. A simple, effective solution, but he was loath to admit defeat.

  After another half hour of tinkering, he finally managed to break into the rootkit's code.

  What he found there sent him running to the phone to call Russ.

  But once again Russ wasn't answering. So Munir called Jack.

  16

  First thing Jack did when he got home was check his various email accounts. All had multiple blank letters with no subject line from seemingly everyone he'd ever emailed. Not a large number, since he preferred the ephemeral nature of a phone call to committing words to electronic blips that could conceivably exist forever in cyberspace.

  Conspicuously absent from the in-box were Gia and Vicky. Gia liked to send him a link now and again, and he'd occasionally shoot Vicky a cartoon or joke he thought she'd like. But Gia was about twelve hundred miles away from her computer.

  Weezy said he'd caught a virus. Where from? Abe's email? Did these other folks have it too? Whatever, he'd leave finding a solution to Weezy. The intricacies of the Net were a mystery to him and he was content to let them remain so.

  He checked his voice mail and found a message from Munir saying he had to talk to him, immediately.

  Yeah, in a minute. Someone else he had to talk to first.

  He called Ron Clarkson for the second time in two days. Ron worked at the city morgue in Bellevue. He'd probably think Jack was calling with a complaint about the color-matched finger he'd supplied for Munir, but Jack only needed him to answer a question this time.

  "Hey," he said when he recognized Jack's voice. "Figured you might be calling."

  "It's not about the merchandise," Jack said. "That was fine."

  It had all been for nothing, but none of that was Ron's fault.

  "Well, I'm glad to hear that, but I was talking about Russ."

  "Russ who?"

  "Tuit. Who else? I thought you was calling 'cause you'd heard the news."

  Not something Jack wanted to hear from a morgue attendant.

  "Aw jeez, you're not telling me-"

  "Yeah. Fished him out of the Hudson this morning, poor guy. Looks like he drowned."

  Jack couldn't speak for a moment. Russ… geeky, good-natured, harmless Russ. The feds listed him as a felon, but he was one of the least violent people Jack knew. His crime had been hacking a few banks and skimming a fraction of a cent off their transactions. For years he'd been Jack's go-to guy for all things cyber-to solve a problem or sometimes create one. When Jack had been looking for a contact in the morgue, Russ had put him in touch with Ron.

  "Any signs of foul play?"

  "I ain't the ME, but preliminary word is no."

  Jack wasn't buying that for a second.

  "Shit."

  "Yeah. Good guy. Coulda knocked me over with a feather when I heard. But if you didn't call about Russ-?"

  Jack told him about looking for a newborn who died Wednesday morning.

  "Piece o' cake," Ron said. "Lemme run a check on the computer and call you right back."

  Jack hung up and stared at his computer screen. Valez said they'd heard about Munir's game code from Russ. How? Bigger question: Why kill him?

  Because Jack had no doubt Russ had been murdered. Drowned in the Hudson? No doubt true. No sign of foul play? Easy enough to do. Take a guy out on the river for a party or a girl or some weed, whatever, and push him over. The water out there in February is not much above freezing. No matter how good a swimmer he is, he can't last fifteen minutes, if that, before his muscles seize up and he sinks.

  No sign of foul play… not one bit. And if you liquor him up a little beforehand, the ME's got all he needs to construct a neat little scenario: He got drunk and fell into the river.

  Bastards.

  Or maybe… maybe he had jumped or fallen. Maybe he'd been involved in what had happened to Munir and felt so guilty Not Russ. If he'd wanted the game code, he could have gotten it without all the drama that had gone down. All he'd have had to do was ask Munir for a copy.

  No, Russ had not been involved. But for some reason, he had been murdered.

  His cell rang and he recognized Ron's voice.

  "That was fast."

  "Told ya. Piece o' cake…"

  17

  Munir took Russ's death pretty hard.

  Jack had figured he would. They'd been friends, working together on a freelance project. And the way Russ had gone to bat for Munir when he was in trouble said a lot about how close they were.

  So that was one of the reasons Jack had come over for a face-to-face. The other was his naivete about the world of computer viruses. He figured he'd understand better in person.

  So the two of them sat in Munir's computer room. Jack watched him rub his teary eyes and struggle to get a grip. Finally he did.

  "Do you really think it was an accident?" he said.

  "Not saying it's impossible, but my gut says no."

  "That leaves murder."

  Jack nodded. "Yes, it does."

  "If that is so, then it makes it more important than ever to find out who's behind this virus. Because if we find them, we find the people behind Valez and the ones who murdered Russ."

  Jack had already come to that conclusion-and knew the answer-but how had Munir arrived at the same place?

  "What makes you say that?"

  "On Tuesday morning Valez sent me an email. Just opening it allowed a virus into my system. That isn't supposed to happen. Email programs were vulnerable to that back in the day, but the glitch was fixed. Nowadays no program allows an email to execute code just by being read or previewed. Usually you have to click on a link or do something to allow the virus in. But this one has some new workaround." He gave Jack a quizzical look. "Low-level binary data bursts on open ports, maybe?"

  "You're asking me?"

  "Sorry. Whatever they're doing, the upshot is the hijacking of your system."

  "Like hijacking a car?"

  "Exactly. It takes over the driver's seat. And what this one does is invade your email address books, cull all the addresses, and then send a blank email to everyone on your lists."

  Jack nodded. "I got one this morning from an old friend."

  "And you opened it?"

  "Well, yeah."

  "Of course you did. It's only natural. You recognize the sender so you open it. But each email the virus sends out contains a copy of itself. That email from your old friend's infected system infected your system as well, then emailed itself to everyone in your address book."

  "Not many."

  "It doesn't matter. Every computer you infected went on and sent infected mail to every computer in its address book, and then each of those did the same, and on and on. It's a geometric progression with an unfixed, ever expanding ratio. It must be creating a tidal wave of email around the globe."

  Tidal wave… tidal waves destroy things.

  "Around the globe? Wouldn't that take a while?"

  Munir shook his head. "Not at all. A geometric progression can do astounding numbers in almost no time. There's an old story about a king paying a dowry for his daughter. The prince asked simply that he place a single grain of rice on one square of a chessboard, two grains on the next, four on the third, eight on the fourth, and so on, doubling on each square up to the final, sixty-fourth square."

  "I can see how that might involve a lot of rice."

 
; "A 'lot'? Try a little over one-point-eight times ten to the nineteenth power. That's eighteen quadrillion grains of rice. A quadrillion is a billion billions. The entire world produces only a fraction of that in a year."

  Jack nodded. Impressive.

  "So this virus-"

  "If each infected computer infects just two new computers every minute-and we know it infects many times more because of all the email addresses people store-it will pass the two-billion mark in just over half an hour-thirty-two minutes, to be exact."

  "And how many computers in the world?"

  "We hit the billion mark in 2008. We may be nearing a billion and a half now. Of course, it can only infect those computers that open email. But how many computers don't have email? And it would have to wait through a twenty-four-hour cycle for people around the world to wake up and check their email. So, in a single day it's conceivable that it could have infected a billion computers-and that's a conservative estimate."

  A billion?

  "Could this bring down the Internet?"

  He saw the Lady's imaginary mountain lake, its water spilling downhill through the damaged wall… saw its feeder tributary from the Internet choking off… the lake drying up… the Lady disappearing…

  Munir shook his head. "Not even close. It's a spam tsunami, but the Internet can easily absorb it."

  That was a relief, but then…

  "What's the point?"

  "Sometimes it's prankish maliciousness, simply to cause trouble. Other times there's a definite purpose-like creating a botnet. That's what I think we have here."

  "Means nothing to me."

  "All right. Let's see. My computer is now what can be called a zombie or a slave or a robot-it's under someone else's control. So is yours. So is everyone in our address books who opened email from us. If you link up all our zombie machines, you've got a robot network, or botnet, that you can force into coordinated efforts. A botnet can be used to assault another system with what's known as a DDoS attack-a distributed denial of service. It uses all the computers in its network to target a system and overwhelm it with a barrage of traffic and shut it down."

  "So this virus is creating a global botnet."