Cyber Genius (2 page)

“I just don’t want anyone to know where I am for a few
days,” he said with a frightening air of exhaustion. “It’s been a bad week.”

I knew he would be safe when I got him home. This was the
reason I put up with Graham—he owned the fortress I needed to protect my perpetually
troublesome family. That fortress had belonged to our grandfather and ought to
be
ours
. I had calculated that,
several lawsuits down the line, it would be ours—one of the many reasons I was
hanging on to the few dollars we’d salvaged from the theft of the inheritance
our grandfather had left us. But until we proved our ownership, we lived on Graham’s
grace and my ability to act as his virtual assistant.

“The house belongs to all of us,” I said reassuringly.
“You’re welcome to stay as long as you need, or until your father drags you
home.”

“He won’t even know I’m gone,” Tudor admitted, as the train
pulled out of the station.

“Give her a week and Magda will,” I warned. Our mother might
not be maternal, but she always knew where all her chicks were and hunted them
down if they weren’t where they should be.

Tudor closed his eyes and just leaned against the pole that
was holding him up.

Yeah, I kind of had that reaction to our exhausting parent
too. I’m thirty, so I know Magda is pushing fifty, but she has the stamina of a
toddler and the morals of a meth dealer. I’d rather not have her bearing down
on us any time soon.

***

We got off at the station near EG’s private school and
left her, still protesting, at the school office where she could be escorted
back to her classroom.

“The house is half an hour away by foot,” I told Tudor.
“Walk or Metro?”

He was wearing a heavy backpack and had reclaimed his
rolling suitcase. He gazed at the busy traffic and the less-crowded sidewalk.
“You’re going to interrogate me anyway. It might as well be where no one else
can hear.”

“That bad, is it?” I took back the rolling bag.

“Worse,” he admitted. “I may have just sabotaged the entire
internet.”

Ouch
. Tudor has a
clockwork mind. He wasn’t given to self-aggrandizement or exaggeration, so the
grinding in my gut escalated to a buzz saw. He was perfectly capable of having
wiped the internet off the face of universe.

“I’ll be out of a job,” I said selfishly, grappling with the
impossible vision of a world without instant research.

He snorted at my paltry assessment. “Chaos, anarchy, total
economic destruction,” he predicted gloomily.

Yeah, that pretty much nailed it, if he knew what he was
talking about. “Any evidence to support this theory of your omnipotence?”

“The cookie-blocker I’ve been working on?” He raised a
questioning eyebrow to see if I was familiar with his project.

I nodded. By “cookies” he meant the internet hooks that many
websites planted in a computer. Some were nasty little devils that broadcast our
searches to companies that used the information to bombard us with ads.

Cookies didn’t bother me much because Graham’s master network
used a non-commercial operating system and had an impenetrable firewall that
crumbled the hooks like... cookies.

But the huge commercial operating systems sold by corporations
like MacroWare encouraged cookies in the interest of efficiency and—most
importantly—selling more stuff. Most people liked the results and allowed
cookies, not understanding how dangerous those little devils could be in the
wrong hands.

In the commercial world, cookies were a legitimate form of
hacking. Leave it to my genius hacker brother to try to block himself.

“Cookie blocking is pretty standard,” he continued. “To win
the competition, I had to do something
different
,
like expand the program to worm my personal information out of selected websites
and crunch it. If the website’s software is operating according to protocol,
it’s not anything really radical and should only target specific files with my
ISP signature. I tested it on a bunch of commercial sites and it worked
perfectly. Then I accidentally left my program on when I accessed a government
website.”

Tudor stayed silent another half block while formulating his
explanation—leaving me way too much time to imagine what would come next.

“Instead of just crawling into the website’s internet files
and grabbing my data the way it normally does,” he finally continued, “my worm
kept going. It disappeared down some kind of
cyberhole
. It didn’t even need handshake protocol to fall directly
into their server. When I noticed the signal I’d set to show the program was
activated, I opened it up to turn it off, and all kinds of code scrawled by
that shouldn’t have been there.”

I’m tech savvy enough to know that a worm is a small program
that works its way through software to spy on other servers and sometimes
commit acts of sabotage. I wasn’t seeing how eating or blocking cookies was the
end of the world, but a
worm
, that
could be problematic. I waited without comment.

Tudor gritted his teeth and continued. “My cookie monster started
eating
through all data files
, not
just my website information. There should have been an impenetrable firewall
between that website program and their servers!”

Eating
files?
Eating, as in destroying entire computer files? I couldn’t even understand how
that was possible with a worm. Hacking for information, I understood.
Destruction...? Automatic destruction—as in a giant delete button? Had it eaten
through the website program itself? That would certainly destroy the internet.

“What website?” I asked, trying to ground my spinning
thoughts.

“I got accepted to MIT and Stanford. I was just checking to
see what kind of visas I needed,” he said gloomily.

Talk about being torn! I needed to smack him over the head—what
visa website?—but I was refraining from screeching in joy and hugging him in
the middle of the street. To me, a college education was the epitome of success.

“MIT?
Stanford
?” I
cried in such excitement that heads turned around us. Attending college had
long been a wish of mine, one I wasn’t much likely to attain given my GED and
lack of funds. But scoring the cream of the college crop? I was in awe. “You
didn’t shout it to the world?”

Tudor shrugged again. “I just got the letters. I was kind of
excited. That’s why I didn’t think to turn off the cookie monster program when
I went to the visa website. I shut down as soon as I saw what was happening,
but the site crashed while I watched. The whole site was still down yesterday.
If my worm is no longer performing search and destroy on just
my
ISP signature and isn’t blocked by
firewalls, it can conceivably creep through every network connected to the
server.”

If this had been our half-brother Nick, I’d call him an
arrogant idiot for thinking he’d personally destroyed the internet with one
website crash. But this was Tudor. He hadn’t told me the worst.

“Okay, I’m back off cloud nine now,” I said in resignation. “What
did you do, decide to experiment more with Scotland Yard’s operating system?”

“No, I was simply accessing the U.S. Department of State,”
he said with a sigh. “My monster went on a search-and-destroy mission for ISPs
and wiped out entire government data files before I could break the connection.
That’s when I bought the plane tickets.”

I shivered in the cold November wind as Tudor and I
strolled toward the Victorian-era neighborhood that I called home. Towering
painted ladies and enormous brick edifices lined narrow residential streets,
now occupied mostly by embassies and foreign ambassadors instead of families.

Our grandfather’s house was substantial, taking up almost
the entire footprint of a large lot. An antique wrought iron fence lined the front
walk. A foot of green grass separated fence and foundation. It would be warmer
inside, out of the wind.

We did not turn in that direction.

With the buzz saw of fear whirring in my gut, I steered Tudor
around the block and down a less fancy street of deteriorating old homes. Tudor
glanced at me worriedly, especially when I trespassed on the broken concrete parking
lot of an enormous abandoned building that looked part church, part warehouse.

“We don’t live here, do we?” He studied the high block walls
and eccentric mansard roofline.

“I have it pegged as someone’s half-remodeled carriage
house,” I said as I trotted across the parking lot to a gate hidden among the
brambles along the property line. “Let’s not lead anyone tracking you straight
to the front door.”

I didn’t know if the State Department was capable of tracing
incredible inedible worms back to Tudor, but I was betting infuriated roars had
federal techies around the world scrambling to find the creator of destruction.
And I didn’t like any of the possibilities of what they would do to Tudor when
they found him.

Tudor’s eyes widened in surprise as I opened the rusty gate
to reveal a fantasy land of vined arbors, herb and rose gardens, complete with
haunted house. Accustomed to the damp cold, he halted to gawk at the gables and
towers of our newly acquired sort-of home.

“What did you do after you ate the state department?” I
prompted before we went any further.

“I shut down my computer as soon as my alerts flashed, but
it’s not my fault that there’s a
hole
in
their security,” he said defensively. “We really live here?” he asked in awe,
averting the painful subject. “Is there a dungeon?”

“Yeah, and the dungeon’s mine.” I let him get away with the
diversion while I explained the lay of the land. “Our landlord has spyholes all
over the house, apparently left over from our grandfather’s regime. How much of
your problem do you want known?”

“None, if possible.” He looked like a little lost boy.

“Tell me how bad this hole is in the firewall,” I demanded,
lingering by the gate. “Will a patch fix it?”

He hesitated and looked longingly at the tower. But Tudor
had known he’d have to pay the price of my curiosity if he showed up here.

“The website’s program was stored in a MacroWare operating
system. I tore apart the MacroWare code on my computer,” he said, “and I
couldn’t find the source for a security breach. I thought maybe the flaw was in
the firewall of the website. But that doesn’t explain how my worm was able to
get past the website program and continue destroying files in a government server.”

I had only learned enough code for basic hacking. I lacked
Tudor’s expertise and grappled for terms I could comprehend. “You’re saying
there’s a spyhole—a backdoor—in the state department’s computer, possibly in
their
operating
system—not their
website program—that isn’t in a normal computer?”

He nodded miserably. “That’s what it looks like without more
experimentation. MacroWare operating systems are used by most government and
commercial organizations because they work with the majority of computers. Most
cookie blockers work with them, so I designed my software like a virus that
went one step further. It’s supposed to eat through dangerous cookies and any
data containing my ID. It works perfectly even on Chinese and Russian websites.”

I tried not to roll my eyes. “In other words, you created
illegal malware that infects websites.”

“It might be
technically
illegal, but it was never designed to act as a Trojan horse to open doors
directly into computers—that’s way over the top dangerous and requires that
someone on the other side let it in. I didn’t program limits into my software
for going beyond its intended target, because I never expected it to go any
farther. For all I know, it somehow got corrupted and started multiplying and
hunting ISPs one digit different from mine, then two digits... But unless there
was an open back door, my worm shouldn’t go further than the website address
directory. It shouldn’t have been a problem.”

“Evil minions,” I muttered, thinking aloud. “In your
scenario, wouldn’t the hole have to have been built into the State Department’s
MacroWare system? If MacroWare can plant spyholes in one government computer,
how many others can they be spying on?”

Tudor glared at me. “Stephen Stiles wouldn’t do anything
like that. He’s a genius who doesn’t need to spy to get rich. He’s a hero who
gives fortunes to the poor and to medical research. He wouldn’t deliberately
plant holes in a system that practically runs the world.”

“Don’t be naïve,” I said scornfully. “For all you know,
that’s how he gets government contracts, by knowing what his competitors bid.”

Tudor looked me fearlessly in the eye. “He’s not that kind
of creep. I sent him and his top staff a message warning of the problem before
I left, and they acknowledged it immediately. You’ll see, they’ll fix it. I
just need to wait it out.”

“Which is why you ran like hell, got it,” I said, proceeding
toward the house, trying not to reveal that the buzz saw in my stomach had been
joined by a jackhammer at this latest news.
Tudor
had notified Stiles of the flaw? The
Stephen Stiles who was just
hospitalized for poisoning?

I feared I would pass out at any moment as numbers added up
in my head. Coincidence didn’t happen in my world. “When did you send the
message?”

“Tuesday evening, my time. Guess that’s Tuesday morning,
your time. I’m wiped. Can we talk about this later?”

I led him to the kitchen entrance, but I was already
formulating the timeline—Stephen Stiles and company went to the dinner on
Wednesday night, a day and a half
after
Tudor had sent his frantic e-mail warning. If whoever had received that
email—and Tudor was crafty enough to have private corporate email
addresses—gone directly to Stiles, there had been time before the dinner for a whole
lot of techies to get their panties in a twist.