Fatal Error Page 21

  “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.”

  Munir nodded. “I’m sure it already has, one that’s still growing. I’m also sure that governments are already aware of it and looking for a way to stop it. Unfortunately, it’s way too soon for the antiviral companies to have a fix.”

  “Then somebody needs to get the word out not to open any email with a blank subject line, especially if it’s from someone they know.”

  Munir shook his head. “Too late for that.”

  Jack swallowed. “Could this bring down the Internet?”

  “No. The Internet’s too big, too resilient. Besides, bringing down the Internet is the last thing hackers want. That’s where they live. It would be like burning down their own home.”

  “A psycho might burn down his own home.”

  “Yes, but this isn’t one psycho. This is a well-organized, well-funded group. Trust me, they want to use the Internet, bend it to their will, not bring it down.”

  Well, Jack thought, he’s right about the well-organized and well-funded part, but dead wrong about its purpose.

  “But they stole the code you were using for that Magog game.”

  “The MMO game.”

  “Whatever.” These acronyms were going to drive him nuts. “What’s that got to do with this email virus?”

  “I found a piece of my code in the virus. It’s something I wrote for the gaming program to accelerate upload and download of video. It triples, quadruples video transfer speed, depending on your bandwidth.”

  “What good is that?”

  “The only thing I can think of is that at some point they’re going to send a video message throughout the botnet.”

  “To what? Sell Viagra?”

  “No,” he said in a grave tone. Probably thought Jack was serious. “It must be something bigger than that.”

  “Ya think?”

  “It may be propaganda, or a religious message.”

  Jack couldn’t see that. The Order operated behind the scenes. Coming out in a video fed to a zillion computers in a botnet didn’t make sense. Had to be something more sinister.

  “You’re sure they couldn’t use it to crash the Internet?”

  Munir shook his head. “I am telling you, these people want to use the Internet, not bring it down.”

  Munir was refusing to get on board that train, so he wasn’t going to be much help in building a scenario of how an Internet kill might work.

  “Gotta go,” Jack said, rising. “Meeting some people later.”

  “If we could get hold of Valez,” Munir said, “we could wring the answer out of him.”

  Obviously he hadn’t heard. How could he? The victims’ names hadn’t been released yet.

  “Valez won’t be telling anyone anything. He’s dead.”

  He gave Munir the news account of the shooting: According to the police, both the driver and his passenger had been shot by the mystery man in the mystery van from Mississippi. Logical assumption. Ballistics would square that eventually, not that it mattered.

  He looked horrified. “Who are these people? What kind of monsters are they?”

  You don’t want to know, Jack thought. You really don’t.

  He pointed to Munir. “As you said, well organized and well financed. And smart. Smart enough to keep any of their people on the lower rungs from knowing the big picture. Even if Valez were alive, I don’t think he could help us. I think he knew he was supposed to acquire your game code and little else. He had no idea what it would be used for. But my guess is he went too far with you and paid the price. What I don’t get is Russ . . . how’d he get involved?”

  Munir leaned back and looked like he might puddle up again, but he held on.

  “I’ve been thinking about that, and as I’ve been explaining this virus to you, the pieces began to fit. Do you know what Russ was involved with lately?”

  Jack remembered him telling him something at Julio’s . . .

  “Some government project to foil hackers. Said he was a ‘white hat’ now.”

  Munir nodded. “Yes. A team of hackers, supposedly put together by the NRO.”

  “ ‘Supposedly’?”

  “I don’t believe the project had anyth
ing to do with national defense. I think they were put together to come up with this virus.”

  “He told me they were doing protection. Said they’d been building firewalls higher, wider, and smarter than anything else out there.”

  Munir looked at him. “And how do you test a firewall?”

  Oh, crap. “You create bigger and better ways to breach it.”

  Munir jerked a thumb at his computer. “And if that was the case, neither the NRO nor any other agency would want their name connected. I think the one thing we can be certain of is that whoever hired Russ was not who they said they were. Maybe it was some other agency, or some group outside the government.”

  The latter, Jack thought. The Ancient Fraternal Septimus Order.

  “You think Russ helped design that?”

  “Yes. It’s a very elegant virus, revolutionary, you could say. You would need a team of experienced hackers—just the sort of blue-ribbon team Russ was working with—to come up with something like that. I think in his conversations with the other hackers he must have mentioned the MMO game enhancer we were working on. He had been impressed with my video code and probably talked about it. The wrong person overheard, and I was targeted. But they couldn’t have Russ around when they inserted my code. He’d recognize it. So . . .”

  “So they killed him.”

  Munir slammed a fist on his desk. “They could simply have fired him!”

  Yeah, they could have. But death seemed the Order’s favorite way of dealing with problem people.

  “Do you see any way of stopping this?”

  Munir shook his head. “Until someone writes a program to kill it, you can stop the spread by not opening emails with no subject line. But the virus has too much of a head start. And once in your system, it’s almost impossible to remove. It hides in multiple areas. You think you’ve gotten all of it, but if you’ve missed any, it immediately regenerates itself the next time you power up.”

  “Swell.”

  18

  “A global botnet created by a virus built to download video,” Weezy said with a slow shake of her head. “To what end?”

  Jack, Weezy, Veilleur, and the Lady sat around the table in the Lady’s apartment. With Weezy’s help, Jack had explained as best he could what he’d learned from Munir. They seemed to understand.

  “That’s the big question,” Jack said.

  A wild scenario flashed through his brain.

  “What if they plan to broadcast a never-ending loop of a hypnotic chant which, if repeated often enough by millions upon millions of people, would part the veil between the worlds and let the Otherness flood in. Or maybe show non-Euclidean designs that if enough people copy will alter geometry and have the same effect.”

  Veilleur and the Lady stared at him uncomprehendingly. Weezy gave him the same look as this afternoon after his Elmer Fudd remark.

  “This isn’t an H. P. Lovecraft story, Jack. This is serious business.”

  “I know that. But if their goal isn’t an Internet crash, I’ve got to ask myself what else it can be. And this is what pops up.”

  She shook her head. “Your mind . . . the Order playing ‘Cthulhu fhtagn’ over and over?”

  “Well, not those exact words, I suppose. Okay. Dumb idea. I’m just throwing things out as they hit me. Here’s something else that hit me on the way over: Could the release of this virus have anything to do with the birth of Dawn’s baby?”

  Weezy’s eyes widened. “Did you find out about him? Is he alive?”

  Jack nodded. “I can’t say it’s alive, but it wasn’t reported dead. No death certificate filed on a newborn with Wednesday morning time of death.”

  “According to Dawn, the baby’s a ‘he,’ not an ‘it.’ And I think we have to assume he’s alive.”

  Veilleur said, “Is this the baby laden with the Taint?”

  The term threw Jack for an instant, then he remembered that back in the First Age they called oDNA the Taint.

  “That’s the one.”

  After Jack explained the situation, Veilleur looked at Weezy.

  “I don’t like her moving in next to you. That cannot be an accident.”

  “Exactly,” Jack said.

  Weezy shrugged. “No argument. But that’s the way it is, so we’ve got to deal with it.”

  Veilleur continued to stare at her. “She said nothing else about these so-called ‘birth defects’?”

  “She said she only got a glimpse of him before they whisked him away. Supposedly he’d stopped breathing.”

  Veilleur stroked his beard. “I’m interested in those birth defects. If you speak to her again, ask her what she saw. Any details at all.”

  “Why?” Jack said.

  “Just . . . curious. A creature so rife with the Taint might have predictable deformities.”

  “Like what?” Jack said.

  “Let’s wait until you hear what the mother has to say.”

  Weezy looked offended. “ ‘Creature’? It’s a child.”

  The Lady shook her head. “One so heavy with the Taint might not be quite human.”

  Weezy paled and said nothing.

  Jack tried to steer the talk back to his original question.

  “The baby was born yesterday morning. The virus shows up all over today, which means it was probably released yesterday. Connection?”

  Weezy shrugged. “Maybe. But synchronicity doesn’t signify a causal relationship.”

  “Thank you, Ms. Sting.”

  She offered a sour smile. “That’s Ms. Sumner to you.”

  “I agree,” Veilleur said. “But I think we must assume a connection. The people behind the virus could very well be the people who hid Dawn away during her pregnancy. My money is on the Order. So yes, there’s a connection. But whether the baby’s birth triggered the release of the virus, I can’t say.”

  Jack said, “Fair enough. But I think the baby should be our focus now. It’s the only lead we have. It’s important to someone—important enough to hide its mother away during her pregnancy and then lie about it dying. So that, I think, makes it important to us.”

  “We have to consider that the baby might be dead and unreported,” Weezy said. “There might have been something about his deformities, whatever they were, they didn’t want made public.”

  Jack looked at her. “Do you buy that?”

  “Not for a second, but it is a possibility.”

  Veilleur said, “The child is an enigma at this point. It had its origins in a crude plot conceived by Jonah Stevens to create a descendant richer in the Taint than any other living being. But you all know that.”

  Jack nodded along with the others. “But how did he know about the Taint?” He glanced at Weezy. “Or oDNA?”

  “As a boy he lost his left eye in the Great Lower Mississippi Valley flood. After that he began to have visions in whatever was left of that eye.”

  Jack thought of Diana and her dad. “Sort of an Oculus for the Otherness.”

  “I suppose. Back in the spring of 1941, after I slew the One—at least his physical form—his essence, instead of dissipating, found a place to hide: the body of a unique human infant.”

  “Unique how?” Weezy said.

  “I’ll save that for another day. Suffice it to say that the Ally was unaware of this, and decided it didn’t need me anymore, and so it freed me to grow old and die.”

  “After millennia of service?” Jack said. “Some reward.”

  Veilleur smiled. “After all those millennia of watching loved ones die while I went on . . . trust me, it was a magnificent boon. But the Otherness knew where the essence of its champion hid, and it brought in a protector: Jonah Stevens. The visions led Jonah to adopt that unique human infant—the ‘vessel,’ the One’s unknowing host. The One was trapped within that helpless little body, a passive passenger, unable to exert any influence. Jonah’s task was to guard the vessel until he grew to be a man who fathered a very special child.”

  “The One,” Jack sa
id.

  Pieces were falling together.

  “When was that?” Weezy said. “You’ve mentioned he’d been reborn a number of times, but when exactly was this?”

  “I believe the exact date of his reconception was on or about February tenth, 1968, in the village of Monroe on Long Island. He was reborn November seventh in Hickory Hill, Arkansas.”

  Jack shook his head. “Eleven-seven. Supposed to be lucky numbers.”

  “Not so lucky. After the One’s rebirth into a new body, to a new life devoted to the cause of the Otherness, Jonah stayed with him and his mother, guarding him as he grew. But I believe the part of him that made him uniquely suited for the guardian post also led to his eventual betrayal of his charge.”

  “That’s why he’s no longer with us,” Jack said.

  Veilleur nodded. “Exactly. For a while he took his job seriously, moving the child and his mother throughout the South to elude any Ally-influenced people who might try to harm him.”

  “So there was a movement to stop him?”

  “Yes, but not terribly ambitious. It very nearly succeeded in Monroe, but fell apart after a horrific failure. I doubt that whatever iota of the Ally remains involved here considers him much of a threat. The One has been very circumspect, very cautious.

  “But back to Jonah. As the One grew, so did his powers, and Jonah came to see a day coming soon when he would no longer be needed. From his visions he knew that he had been chosen as the guardian because of his bloodline, which we can assume meant he carried an abnormally high level of the Taint—supremely high. But he decided it could be higher. So he began his plan to concentrate it further, to create a child with a Taint so deep and so dark that it could replace the child he guarded and become the One. Then the One would be Jonah’s progeny.”

  “Putting his bloodline in the catbird seat when the Otherness took over?” Jack said. “How was loading a child with the Taint going to accomplish that? I don’t follow the logic.”

  Weezy shook her head. “Neither do I.”

  “It would not have worked,” the Lady said.

  Veilleur shrugged. “He may have known something we do not, or he may have misinterpreted some of his visions. But as it turned out, he never had a chance to find out. The One learned of the plot and, though occupying the body of a ten-year-old boy at the time, arranged a slow agonizing death for Jonah Stevens.”