Buzzworm (A Technology Thriller): Computer virus or serial killer? Read online

  She also needed someone to tell her she wasn’t hallucinating.

  Mary Ellen was only seconds away from placing a phone call that would ring alarm bells right back to the White House. And all she could think about was — would she be able to say the words? Would she be able to get it out without sounding like a babbling fool?

  As she reached for the phone, some other part of her consciousness was marveling at how a few dots on a computer screen could make someone’s palms sweat and their heart race. Or could launch World War Three.

  She turned back to the scene on the monitor, her stomach muscles knotted so tight it was as if she were expecting a physical blow. The gray and brown shapes were still growing, still marching across the big screens. She was just beginning to make out thousands of smaller shapes now, green specks flowing around larger ominous dark masses. The specks were supposed to be soldiers. Tens of thousands of them. Damn. And exactly where they shouldn’t be. The bigger shapes were tanks. And then like clockwork, another blurry green mass appearing where it shouldn’t be. Then another. The tanks were growing like a wild mold all over the Iraqi desert of the Hawr Al Hammar. But worse, they seemed to be popping out of nowhere.

  It was like David Copperfield was entertaining enemy troops by making one hundred-ton tanks suddenly appear.

  Then she yanked her hand back from the phone, her mouth gaping open. She saw something else now - across the screen in black letters.

  YOU’RE FUCKED!

  The dots on the screen, something her computer had determined were thousands of Soviet T-55 heavy tanks, enhanced from an on-line video feed from an American K-2 class spy satellite, had blurred momentarily. When they did, for just a brief second, the words had almost popped right out of the screen at her. Then suddenly, there was just a mass of tanks again, or more precisely, little mushy clusters of pixels that eighty million dollars of software was telling her were tanks. The software was unequivocal on this point. Unusual really.

  Sometimes a fuzzy image would cause GIPETTO, their nickname for GPTO — Global Positioning Telemetric Online, to draw up a list of possible suspects. Czechoslovakian T-69’s perhaps. Or Romanian M-77’s. But not this time. GIPETTO was adamant that over 6,000 T-55’s, bristling with hardened tacticals, had materialized somehow about a hundred miles north of Basra. All within the last few minutes. The only conclusion was a vast network of underground bunkers had somehow just disgorged a frightening military force. Probably headed for Kuwait.

  Gulf War III looked imminent — but with the present alignment of pro-Arabian forces, this war had the potential to be much dirtier, much more prolonged.

  Mary Ellen knew it was entirely possible to bury tanks in the desert, but she still couldn’t believe her eyes. And it was more than questioning the damn strategy. Every minute she hesitated could mean thousands of lives . . . and there it was again, floating inches in front of her nose. YOU’RE FUCKED!

  The images on the big screens seemed to crawl, then blur. She wanted to believe someone was punking her, that some hacker on her team was playing a joke. But that was impossible. You can’t play games with this kind of secure technology. This could not be an inside joke. And doing this from the outside was just not physically possible.

  Her hand on her chest, she defocused her eyes again. But try as hard as she might, she couldn’t make the words come back. God, is this what stress does? Armageddon is marching across my monitor, and I’m seeing wacky stereo mirages? Could I be imagining all of this? She removed her reading glasses and rubbed her eyes. The three-dimensional impression had been so powerful, the words floating above the screen so clearly. She could have reached out and touched them. But the dark-green words — vibrating slightly, like they were alive somehow — dissuaded her from trying.

  She remembered a trip once to the Mall of the Americas and the Virtual Reality Store; walls covered with framed pictures full of meaningless patterns of color that would suddenly pop into 3D Klingon ships or werewolves or dolphins arcing through the air. Defocus slightly, then POW.

  And it happened again.

  She jumped back so hard she almost knocked her glasses off. In front of her now, undulating, dark green letters, their sides glossy and segmented, were the words FOR A GOOD TIME CALL MARY ELLEN - and her actual phone number. Her face did a funny thing then, moving through fear and anger and rage in a few seconds. She felt she was losing it this time, a new sensation for her. Whoever was playing a joke on her right now, knew more about GIPETTO than she did. That made her suck in her breath hard. She couldn’t imagine for a moment, despite having had a hand in designing GPTO from the beginning, how to pull off something like this.

  If it wasn’t a joke, it was time to start doubting her ability to do her job properly. This thought almost made her sick to her stomach.

  Mary Ellen fell in love with the CIA at the age of thirteen. It’s not something she could ever try to explain or put on a resume, and she knew it wasn’t par for the course down here where most of the staff was ex-military personnel or technocrats. But that didn’t change the facts. She suspected it said something about a young woman who had few friends or interests and one powerful obsession. A girl who grew up in a middle-class suburb in Minneapolis, her father who spent his entire life as a systems analyst working for Prudential Life. Working on the old mainframes. The big iron they used to call it.

  Was it excitement she was looking for that brought her first to the SCOPE Division at Central Intelligence? Mary Ellen Duke? The girl who collected Star Trek limited edition plates? Who hadn’t eaten at home for five days because she was sleeping in her office? She would never admit it to anyone, but all she wanted to be was a CIA agent. In the field. How was that ever going to happen to her though? Programmers and techies don’t get promoted to international postings. Especially employees who embarrass the United States security services internationally by declaring an invasion that she hallucinated.

  She snapped off the power switch on the terminal with a quick flick of her right hand, an action she almost instantly regretted. She had reset the entire system. Unable to accept what GIPETTO was telling her, she was daring it to duplicate this nonsense a second time around.

  She waited for one minute, then powered the system back on and drank absently from her diet pop, listening to a floor polisher whine somewhere off in some distant corridor. The secretive division of the CIA she worked for, once called the National Photographic Interpretation Center (NPIC) and now known only as Division 213, was more home to her than her tiny bachelor apartment. And the division was never empty. It was like working in a 7-11. You could bump into anyone at any hour of the day or night, hunched over a coffee in the cafeteria or wandering the hallways, their eyes (or yours) blood shot with either lack of sleep or border-line hysteria. Was that how she looked? She was glad no one could see her right now. Thank God it was rare to have visitors from other departments. Space here, like information, was sacred territory. Careers were won and lost on less careless an act than overseeing some project or file that just wasn’t meant for your eyes. But she found the sound of the floor polisher reassuringly normal, if that made any sense.

  When GIPETTO came back up to the file she had been working on, the desert north of Kuwait was empty again. The tanks were gone. She zoomed back. Increased the edge-detection. Still nothing. What she had seen before was more than just a glitch — but wars had been started for less. She felt her heart slowing back to normal. She noticed suddenly how much she had perspired in the last few minutes and began to shiver in the icy air of the computer room. She had to file a report now, but at least she wouldn’t be making any high-security phone calls to the Secretary of Defense. Or should she? Hadn’t she just witnessed a level-four security breach? Could this be someone’s idea of a prank? Or a terrorist hackers little midnight game?

  Her division boss, a widely-known tight-ass by the name of Vienna, a Ph.D. in Computer Science who's idea of fun was spending the weekend house-cleaning her hard drive, had the most i
mportant meeting of her life planned for next Monday. Something about the Chiefs of Staff and final budget approval for GIPETTO.

  She rubbed her eyes one more time, knowing it wouldn’t do any good to blame the system. GIPETTO was as secure as you could get. In military parlance, A1 security. The kind governments paid big dollars for. Her confidence in this system was so strong she knew it had to be her and not the software. But she didn’t feel that woozy. And she had never hallucinated in her life. Maybe it was time to call Vienna.

  Then it struck her. No hard copy. Without a printout, it was her word, an over-worked middle-manager in Intelligence, seeing bogeys that didn’t exist, against millions of dollars worth of hardware that up to just a few minutes ago had been flawlessly spitting out intelligence for months.

  She did one more scan to be sure, and then consulted the temporary file document; the file that should represent the picture she saw before she shut the system down. The image was blank. That didn’t make any sense either. Dozens of feet below her, surrounded by an impenetrable wall of concrete and lead, sat one of the most powerful computers on the planet. GIPETTO didn’t make mistakes. Now more than ever, the evidence was suggesting that she had been seeing things. And not only tanks swarming all over bloody Iraq — but spelling out a three-dimensional message that told her she was screwed!

  Some part of her realized the message was right. She was screwed. She couldn’t lie in her report and ignore this incident, because for all she knew, this hoax could be some division heads idea of a clever security test to make sure Mary Ellen wasn’t sleeping through her scans. Sixty-five hundred enemy tanks are hard to ignore. She rubbed her forehead for a moment and then decided just to record the bug as a power surge. She’d heard others talking about gremlins over the past few weeks. Weird stuff where letters fell off the screen or archived photos would turn from a nice shot of the President and his wife kissing dignitaries to some doctored picture of the both of them in the buff at Camp David doing the midnight mambo.

  She took a deep breath, but it didn’t make her feel any better. It was time to call it a night.

  Then the screens flashed bright white.

  Mary Ellen was partially blinded by the sudden glare. Her hand bumped the wireless mouse off the table. It landed on the hard anti-static flooring with a clatter.

  When she opened her eyes, the screen had changed. It was a deep crimson now. Gray shapes were moving about the screen, but she had difficulty making them out. She tapped the RETURN key on her keyboard, but to her surprise it had no effect. Here we go again she thought. She squinted again, the shapes becoming clearer.

  Then she sucked in her breath.

  In the middle of those awful reds, she could just make out a woman, a blonde like herself, prone on a table. The woman’s face was torn by fear. It was surprisingly authentic. Not quite photographic - but strangely real.

  The woman’s eyes were wide, two shiny points in the red fog. A thing, like a man, heavily distorted, was moving over her. He was dark; his arms high over his misshapen head. A dark cape draped over his shoulders. Was this some x-rated video game they were feeding her? She almost laughed. This was clearly someone’s idea of a joke. And they had figured out how to serve this out over a multimillion dollar highly secure net?

  Mary Ellen shook her head, fascinated by the quality of the images. The monster on the screen was rocking on its feet now. No — they weren’t feet — they were more like claws. Long sharpened hooks projected from the creature’s heels and dug into the earth.

  Mary moved closer to the screen, her face bathed in the blood red glow. It was a rape scene. How awful. The creature was pushing at the woman and laughing, but there was something terribly wrong with the whole scene. It took Mary a second to understand. Then the scene turned, and she winced. This was some juvenile fantasy at work. The creature had a massive penis. Worse yet, it had hooks and ridges running its scaly length, like an ancient weapon. She looked closer. Her hands went suddenly cold. The woman being ravaged looked just like her.

  Then the male turned its head toward her and now suddenly Mary could hear voices and sounds. Distant screams. Scuffling sounds. She looked into the face of the devil on the screen, unable to look away. She knew the face. It was David, a very close friend. What kind of sick prank was this? She’d gone out with him maybe a half dozen times now. Why would he show up in an internal database? He had no connection with the Intelligence community. None of her co-workers knew about him.

  She grabbed for the keyboard, striking it hard with her fists. Nothing. The gruesome scene continued to play out.

  She screamed out, and then pressed her hand to her mouth. She couldn't breath. The stink around her was incredible. Was she imagining this? She reached down with her other hand and slapped the power switch. The fan whined down, and the power light faded, but the screen refused to dim completely. Instead, the image seemed to brighten and grow closer.

  Mary Ellen felt like gagging, a warm broth of coffee, coke, soup and dinner rolls rebelling in her stomach. She vomited into her lap, over the clamped hand on her mouth, across the screen of her terminal. She slipped to the floor, hunched over, her hands on the slick linoleum — her breath coming in ragged bursts. She reached for the power cable. Pulled. It slipped in her hands.

  She groaned again, rolled back, felt the cable finally give at the other end, felt it separating from the electrical plug. She heard the monitor above her squeal, and she covered her ears, her head on the cold floor. It was impossible and stupid, but she knew somehow that the creature on the screen was coming for her, that a hand would reach down and pull her into that nightmare.

  MED tried to move, but her muscles refused. She lay there in the dark, shivering.

  After a moment, she picked herself up shakily and looked over the edge of the desk. The monitor was blank — but she swore she could still hear the voices.

  CHAPTER 2

  Roger Strange lost the tips of his fingers experimenting with a homemade pipe bomb when he was fourteen years old. It wasn't an act of extremism - just plain dumb-headed curiosity. He needed to know what made things function. And he was always taking stuff apart to see how it worked.

  In this case, what came apart was the family cat. She happened to nuzzle up to Roger at a critical time. The crude bomb ignited, and she lost her life. Roger lost everything from the last knuckle and out on his right hand. But if it wasn't for the cat, which took the brunt of two pounds of poorly packed blasting powder, Roger might have lost his eyes too. Or suffered brain damage. Because of that he always kept a few strays around for good luck. Except, of course here, where they didn't allow it. And that's why he was feeling so uneasy right now - almost naked. He always did his best work around cats.

  Strange was working at his computer, his face up close to the screen, when the phone rang. He muttered something unintelligible and felt for the phone without taking his eyes off the monitor. He pushed a square button labeled SPEAKER.

  "Roger here," he answered, distracted.

  "Roger? Pick up the phone." It was Sharon from eScape. She sounded anxious.

  "You're on speaker," he said.

  "Pick up the damn phone," she raged, "or say goodbye to the contract of a lifetime."

  He turned his head, his eyes still on the screen. Purposefully slow, he put the phone to his ear.

  "You're right. This is so much more romantic," he said.

  "Strange, I'm not going to waste my time talking to you while you hack code." Roger pressed three more keys. "I need your attention for a change. Shit, you're still at it. Look, let’s forget it. I'll get Dash to work on this. And he’s easier to meet with, if you get my drift."

  Strange smiled. Dash was a propeller-head to the nth degree. Spent a hundred hours last month on Internet chat rooms - making out with hot young babes who signed themselves in as Bambi or Dynasty or Vanna. The truth was, they were probably portly old ladies with unwashed hair, or worse, men getting their jollies by stringing him along with a pho
ny handle. Dash gave guys like Strange a bad name. But he was on the outside. He had that going for him. "Dash doesn't know a sub-routine from a sub sandwich."

  "He returns my calls."

  "Yeah. He's sheer genius with a phone. Especially if its got a 1-900 number."

  "Do you want this job or not?" she said, sounding serious.

  Strange only blinked. He always blinked when getting his ass chewed out, which was often lately. "I'm still working on the last one you gave me. The client from hell who wants to keep meticulous control over his dazzling universe of 300,000 used dishwasher parts. And I’m on schedule."

  She grunted into the phone. She had been on his case about this particular program for weeks now. It wasn’t glamorous work, but it paid the bills. And he was right - he never missed a deadline. "That can wait. This is a government job we're talking about. Federal."

  She said it the way some women might whisper unmentionable acts in your ear after their sixth margarita. Strange smiled into the phone. "So - who did you have to sleep with to get this one?"

  "At least I’m sleeping with members of the opposite sex. Or have you forgotten how that works."

  Burhack was a pain in the ass, but she fed him a lot of consulting work. She had a sharp wit too. Just enough to keep Strange on his toes. She also put up with his odd working hours and the inconveniences of his present living arrangements.

  "Low blow, Sharon. But I appreciate your sympathy.” He whistled softly. “My buddies, the Feds. What makes you think they'll let me do it?" He took his eyes off his computer screen for the first time and reached for his coffee cup. "So far I hear they're still paying their bills."