Jericho Iteration

15

(Friday, 10:21 A.M.)

We began by trying to get a lead on Beryl Hinckley.

We didn’t have anything to go on at first; her number wasn’t listed in the phone book. Ditto for Richard Payson-Smith, our alleged laser sniper, and although there were four Jeff Morgans listed in the white pages, phone calls placed to three of the numbers quickly established that none of them belonged to our man.

The fourth didn’t pick up, but when the answering machine came on after the second buzz, a still picture appeared on the screen; it was the same person in the photo Barris had showed me. “Hi, this is Jeff” the recorded voice said. “I’m not available right now, but if you care to leave your name and number, I’ll get back to you as soon as I can …” I hung up before the beep. If Morgan was on the run, then he wouldn’t be calling me back, but any message I left could tip off the bad guys that I was searching for him.

I then made three successive calls to the Tiptree Corporation, asking the switchboard to connect me with Hinckley, Payson-Smith, or Morgan; I switched off my phone’s camera when I made these calls. On each try, the computer-generated woman on the screen informed me that none of the three were “available at this time.” Remembering that Tiptree employees wore smartbadges that would pinpoint someone’s location in the complex, every time I called I made up a different excuse for being adamant: a relative phoning Hinckley to tell her about a sudden death in the family, an insurance claims adjuster for Payson-Smith, a dental assistant calling to tell Morgan that next week’s appointment had to be changed. On each occasion, the computer put me on hold, only to come back a few moments later to tell me that none of the three were at the company offices today.

This confirmed my suspicion that the three surviving members of the Ruby Fulcrum team had taken a powder. I didn’t accept the virtual receptionist’s invitation to leave voice-mail messages for any of them; I had a hunch that none of them would be coming back to work anytime soon.

Not long ago, this might have signaled a dead end for a reporter on the trail of a missing person, but Pearl had his own resources. While I was taking the slow boat to China, he had already boarded an SST.

Tracker is an on-line computer service, little known by the public at large but used extensively by professionals who make their living by snooping into other people’s lives: PIs, skip tracers for bondsmen, credit bureaus, lawyers, and direct-mail ad agencies, not to mention a few investigative journalists who didn’t mind playing loose and fast with professional ethics. If you’ve ever wondered why all your credit card bills tend to arrive at the same time you missed a payment on one card, or why you suddenly get loads of junk mail advertising dog food or private kennels only a few days after you adopted a stray mutt from the local pound, services like Tracker are the reason.

Tracker is expensive. At five hundred bucks for the first fifteen minutes and escalating from there, it’s not something you logon at whim. It’s difficult to access-the company that runs it likes to keep a low profile-but if you have its on-line number and a gold card, then you too can poke around in someone else’s private affairs. All you need is that person’s name, and you can find out virtually anything available on them through various private-sector databases.

Pearl seldom used Tracker. As a privacy-minded journalist-and, yes, there are still a few of us around-he was loath to invade the personal business of a nonpublic figure, and peeking into someone’s credit card accounts is the type of thing that has given reporters a bad name. Yet this was one time he was willing to play lowball.

“Here she is,” he said after he had entered Hinckley’s name, hometown, and place of work. I bent over his shoulder to look at his computer screen. Next to HINCKLEY, BERYL was a street address in St. Louis and a phone number. “Try that.”

I picked up his desk phone and dialed the number. “No answer,” I said after I let it ring a dozen times. “She didn’t turn on her answering machine.”

He nodded. “Okay. Now look the other way for a minute.” He shot a sharp glance over his shoulder at me. “I’m going to do something you shouldn’t know about,” he said. “Only a jerk like me would stoop to something like this.”

I turned away while Pearl keyed in a new command. Just outside the office door, I spotted Chevy Dick hanging out in the office corridor, jawing with one of the bohos from the production staff. He was probably dropping off this week’s “Kar Klub” column. If things weren’t so intense right now, I would have wandered over to join the bull session.

“Okay,” Bailey said, “you can look now.” I turned back around to see that a new window had opened at the bottom of the Tracker screen; it displayed the account numbers of three major credit cards-Visa, MC, and AmEx-along with their current balances and the dates of their most recent purchases.

“You’re right,” I said. “Only a jerk like you would do something like this.”

“Nothing TRW doesn’t do every day,” he replied. “Now looky here …”

He pointed at the line next to the Visa number. “Three hundred fifty-dollar ATM cash advance, taken out last night at nine forty-six. And see this?” He jabbed his finger at MC and AmEx numbers below it. “Another three-and-a-half c’s from the other cards, taken out just a few minutes later. Probably from the very same machine.”

“Twenty-one fifty-eight,” I murmured, noting the time entered during the AmEx transaction. “Almost ten o’clock. That’s not long after John was shot … probably right after she took off from Clancy’s.”

Pearl nodded his head. “Uh-huh. She headed straight to the nearest ATM and took out as much cash as she could-just over a grand altogether-and there hasn’t been another charge on any of her cards since.” He glanced up at me. “She didn’t want to leave any tracks behind her.”

“Credit card receipts?”

“You got it. Your girlfriend didn’t want to have to pay for anything with a card because that would allow someone to trace her, so she grabbed as much cash as her credit limit would allow. That’s a sign of someone who’s going underground.” He rubbed his jaw pensively as he stared at the screen. “Now I wonder if she …?”

He called up her driver’s license, then cross-referenced it with her credit cards. “She didn’t rent a car,” he said after a few moments. “Car rental agencies always ask for a license and enter it into their records, but this shows she hasn’t used her license for anything.”

“What about Morgan and Payson-Smith?”

Pearl shrugged. “I’ll check, but I bet we won’t find anything for them, either.” He bent over the keyboard again; this time he allowed me to watch over his shoulder as he began to repeat the same process for the other two Ruby Fulcrum scientists.

Modemed phone numbers, passwords, menu screens accessing the files of credit bureaus: Pearl was doing something almost akin to art, albeit strange and terrible to behold. Not to mention scary. If an amateur like Pearl could hack into credit files and use inductive reasoning to second-guess what a fugitive had been thinking the previous evening, what did this portend for the rest of us?

Bailey must have sensed my line of thought. “When I was a kid,” he said as his fingers wandered across the keys, “and my great-grandfather was still alive, he told me that his uncle Samuel had been an escaped slave from Tennessee, way back during the Civil War. He had taken the Underground Railroad up north to Chicago, and it was a hell of a ride. Hiding out in fruit cellars during the day, riding in the back of hay wagons at night, running from one abolitionist house to the next. Once he had to outrun some bloodhounds in some hick town in Kentucky and didn’t shake ’em until he lost the scent by wading several miles down a shallow creek.”

“But he got away, didn’t he?”

He nodded. “Yeah, he got away, but they only had bloodhounds back then. If great-uncle Sam had to do the same thing now, he probably would have stolen a car … and if he wasn’t paying cash all the way, then every time he stopped at a charge station, some database would have recorded a number with his name behind it. How long do you think he might have lasted? Probably not even to the Illinois state line.”

There was a sharp rap on the door; we looked around to see Jah standing in the corridor. He seemed nervous. “Gerry,” he said, “I’ve got something I think you ought to see.”

“Joker?”

He shook his head. “Joker’s clean,” he said, “except that everything you had stored on it has been dumped. It’s the backup disk you took from John’s PT. It …”

Jah took a deep breath, then crooked a finger at me. “Just c’mon down to the lab. You’re not going to believe this.”

Jah’s computer didn’t show anything unusual, at least at first glance; the screen displayed the same root directory I had seen the night before on my own ’puter, the cryptic acronyms for a couple hundred different files. He sat down at the computer and pushed a button on the CPU. The CD-OP bay slid open; the backup I had made from Dingbat’s original mini-disk was nestled in its drawer.

“When I got down here,” he began, “I booted it up like you see here and copied the files into the hard drive. When I was through doing that, I punched into the directory to see what I could find-”

“Sure,” I said, “that’s just what I did.”

“You did?” He glanced over his shoulder at me. “So what happened to you?”

I shrugged, not quite understanding what he was asking. “Well … nothing happened, really. I scrolled through the directory and tried to find something that looked like a front door, but I couldn’t.”

“Yeah?” He scratched at his head. “Then what happened? Did you try punching into a BAT file, or did you get out of the directory?”

I shook my head. “Naw, I didn’t get a chance to go that far. I got a phone call and … um, that’s about when the feds broke down the door. But I didn’t do anything before that.”

“Uh-huh. And they just unplugged everything and took it …”

“Yeah, right. What are you getting at?”

Jah pointed at his screen. “Well, I did the same thing you did, but when I tried the BATS and EXECS I couldn’t find a front door either. Everything came up BAD COM. So I decided to get out of the directory and log into a search-and-retrieve program I’ve got installed in this thing … a standard little number I put in here a few months ago to help me find lost files when I’ve been fucking around a little too much. This way I figured I might be able to unlock a back door or something. Anyway, I was entering the SAR program when-”

He snapped his fingers. “Boom boom, out go the lights. The whole screen went dead for a moment. It was like the computer had spontaneously decided to reboot itself, but I didn’t even get so much as a c-prompt. I was still looking under the table … y’know, like to see if I had managed to kick out the plug or something stupid like that … when the screen came back on again a moment later.”

“Yeah, that’s weird, all right.” It might have been caused by something stupid like kicking out the plug if anyone else had been using the computer, but Jah wasn’t a stupid kid. Particularly not when it came to ’puters; in that respect he made even his dad look like a novice. “So what happened?”

“So I figure it’s just a software glitch,” he continued, sweeping his dreadlocks back from his face, “and go back to what I was doing before … except now I can’t access the SAR. At least not right away … it took me two or three minutes just to pull up the opening screen, and that was after running through all the different startup commands.”

“Hmm …”

He raised his eyebrows. “Yeah, man. Twilight zone shit. So I get suspicious and I start thinking to myself, y’know … Jesus, maybe the disk is infected with a virus or something.”

He turned around in his chair and pointed to the telephone wall jack next to his desk. I saw now that the flat gray cord was lying on the floor beneath the jack, its module disconnected. “So the first thing I do is yank the plug, just in case it really was a virus and someone is trying to call in while I’m doping out this thing.”

“Good idea,” I murmured. If Jah’s hardware had been infected with a virus and he didn’t know exactly how it had been transmitted to his computer, then it made perfect sense to isolate his system. Jah was anything but discourteous to other users, although it was a good thing he wasn’t a sysop for even a minor BBS; otherwise, dozens of other computers might have been infected by now. “So what happened then?”

“Now it gets really weird.” He held up a finger. “I opened a window into my antigen subroutine and asked it to check the system.” He shook his head. “It comes back and tells me it can’t find anything. No viruses, no missing batches or boot sectors, no nothing. According to my computer, I’m clean as a whistle. But I’ve still got the creeps, so I do this …”

Before I could ask, he turned back to the computer and used its trackball to log into a program on the directory. A moment later the opening screen of his search-and-retrieve program flashed on; when its menu bar was up, he moused a subroutine listed as VR SEE and toggled it open. “Okay,” he said, “now here comes the interesting part. Put that on.”

He pointed to a department store mannequin propped up against the wall next to the desk. The dummy was African-American and female; it was decked out in some exotic black lace lingerie straight out of any kid’s favorite wet dream. I had to wonder which one of Jah’s girlfriends had donated this little bit of nothing to his trophy room.

“Uh, Jah … I hate to tell you this, but-”

“The helmet,” he said impatiently. “Put the HMD on.”

I looked at the mannequin again. Right. A head-mounted display was propped on the dummy’s bald head, almost neutralizing the sexual effect. The HMD vaguely resembled a bicycle helmet except for the oversize opaque visor. A slender cable led from the back of the helmet to the serial port on Jah’s computer. A pair of naugahyde datagloves were draped around the dummy’s shoulders.

I picked up the HMD and weighed it in my hands. “Is this really necessary?”

Call me an old fart, but I dislike tripping in cyberspace. I was a kid when the first Virtuality arcades opened in St. Louis; although some of my fellow mall rats used to spend their weekends in the VR simulators, hunting each other through bizarre three-dimensional landscapes or waging war in giant robots, the experience had always left me disoriented. Riding the roller coasters and whirligigs at the Catholic diocese fair was fine, but being thrown into a cybernetic construct tended to make me nauseous.

Sure, I know the old saw about cyberspace being what you do when you’re on the phone, but making a phone call is so prosaic that you seldom think twice about it. VR tripping … that’s like skydiving to me. Some people dig it and some people don’t, that’s all.

“Hey, I did it,” he replied, as if he had just jumped off an old railway bridge into the Missouri River and now wanted me to experience the same rush. “Don’t worry, it won’t toast your brain. Now c’mon … I don’t know how much longer this is going to last.”

What’s going to last? I wanted to ask, but Jah was gnawing at the bit: a teenager eager to show off to an adult who might appreciate this sort of thing.

I reluctantly donned the thick datagloves, then I took a deep breath and pulled the helmet over my head. Jah adjusted the padded visor until it was firmly in place against my eyes.

“Okay, kid,” I said. “Show me what you got.”

And he did.

For a few moments, there was only darkness … then the universe was filled with iridescent silver light, featureless yet fine-grained, as if I was looking at a bolt of electronic silk that had been wrapped around my head. After another second the backdrop faded to dull gray; as it did, a small silver square appeared directly in front of me, a gridded plane floating in null-space.

“Okay,” I heard Jah say, “that’s a representation of the computer’s memory. Each box you see on the matrix is a different program or file I’ve got stored on this thing … touch it and you’ll come in closer.”

I hesitated, then raised my right hand and watched as its computer-animated analog rose before my eyes. I curled my fingers and pointed straight at the matrix and suddenly found myself hurtling forward …

“Hold on!” Jah yelled. I heard his chair scoot back from the desk, then his hands grabbed my shoulders.

“Maybe you ought to sit down for this,” he said as he guided me into the seat. “Okay, that better?”

“Uh, yeah … thanks.” I hadn’t even noticed that I had lost my balance. The flat square had expanded into a transparent three-dimensional cube made up of dozens of smaller cubes. It resembled a crystalline version of some mind-fuck puzzle my dad used to have, a plastic toy where the idea was to shift the interlocked pieces until all four colors were on the same side … yeah, a Rubik’s Cube, except now I could see all the way through the thing.

“Okay,” Jah said, “you see the matrix clearly now? You see all the packets?”

“Yeah, I see it.” Each box-or packet, to use Jah’s term-in the matrix was labeled with a different alphanumeric code; those would be the programs stored in the memory. Yet, as I slowly orbited the cube, I could now see that not all the packets were silver; closer to its center, a small nucleus of packets were cream-colored, and as I watched, one of them suddenly turned silver.

“It’s changing color,” I said.

“That’s been happening since I first accessed the matrix,” Jah said. “When I looked at it the first time, only a few of the packets were silver, and the rest of ’em were white … but the ones that had turned silver were the system drivers. Everything else is the other files and programs on this machine.”

“A virus?” I asked, and I heard him grunt. “But you said your antigen program hadn’t discovered any-”

“Nothing it could detect,” he said. “But even that’s been absorbed by this sucker … and believe me, Scud is the best virus hunter-killer you can find.”

I shook my head. That was a mistake; the cyberspatial construct swam back and forth before me. I clutched the armrests with my hands, fighting a brief spell of vertigo. “I don’t get it,” I said after the cube was dead-center in front of me again. “If this program’s still working, then it must not have been taken over yet …”

“Oh, no,” Jah replied. “ProVirtual-the program we’re using now-was one of the first to go, and that’s the weird thing. Everything the virus has taken over still works as it did before. It’s just … well, here, let me show you. Back away from the matrix, willya?”

It took me a second to understand what he was asking me to do. Then I tentatively raised my hand again and pointed to a bit of blank space above the cube. At once, I zoomed to a higher orbit above the matrix; it diminished slightly in size, but I could still see the entire thing.

“I’m booting up an old game I erased from memory a couple of months ago,” he said. “It’s called MarzBot … pretty stupid once you got it figured out … anyway, I’m taking the master disk and throwing it into the floppy drive, not the hard drive. Now watch this …”

Off to one side, I saw a small isolated packet appear off to one side of the matrix, as if it was a displaced cream-colored electron. For a second, nothing happened …

And then something happened.

Almost quicker than the eye could follow, a bridge extended itself outward from the cube: a string of silver packets, following a weightless pattern that, during its zigzagging motion, vaguely resembled the L-shaped movement a knight takes upon a chessboard. Before I could take a breath, the bridge had connected with the isolated packet of information containing MarzBot. There was the briefest moment while the packet still remained off-white.

Then it turned silver.

Then it was sucked straight into the cube as the bridge collapsed in upon itself, reeling in the packet like a fisherman towing in a trout that had taken the bait. Within a second, the MarzBot packet was gone …

And the cube was slightly larger.

“Goddamn,” I said. “How did you do that?”

“I didn’t do anything,” Jah said quietly. “The computer did it by itself. I haven’t touched the keyboard since I slipped MarzBot into the floppy port and hit the ENTER key. The virus reached out to the program, broke through its copy-protect subroutine, accessed its source code, and absorbed the game … all in the time it took for us to watch.”

I pulled off the HMD, shook off the aftereffects of VR decompression, and stared at the monitor. The image of the matrix cube on the computer screen was much flatter now, less lifelike than what I had seen in cyberspace … yet it was no less threatening.

“Holy shit,” I whispered.

“Fuckin’ A, man.” Jah was staring at me, his eyes wide with fear. “This thing is the balls. I don’t know what you found, but it’s no ordinary virus. It can’t be detected, it can’t be fought off, but it takes over anything that even gets close to it.”

He pointed at the screen. “I’ve tried everything I could throw at it,” he said, his voice filled with both anger and awe. “Other antigens, Norton Tesseract, Lotus Opus … shit, even a shareware disk containing a virus that someone once gave me as a gag … and it swamps every program I’ve given it.”

Jah shook his head in wonderment. “Whatever it is, it’s one hungry son of a bitch. If I didn’t know better, I’d think it was-”

The antique Mickey Mouse phone on his desk buzzed, interrupting his train of thought. Jah swore under his breath as he bent backward to pick it up; he listened for a moment, then cupped a hand over the receiver.

“It’s Dad,” he said. “He wants you to come upstairs right away … says that he just got a call from someone who wants to talk to you.”

I was still staring at the monitor, watching as the last few packets in the matrix went from white to silver. “Is it important?” I murmured, not wanting to distract myself with a call from some yahoo. It’s not very often you get to look the devil straight in the eye. Jah asked his father if it was urgent, then he cupped the receiver again.

“He says it came from someone named Beryl Hinckley,” Jah said. “She wants to meet you an hour from now.”