Free Radical (2 page)

In the movies, security guards were always fumbling, senile old men just waiting to be karate-chopped in the back of the neck by the protagonist. Deck had yet to encounter such a guard in real life. This guard in particular looked young and sharp. Like a lot of the younger types, he obviously spent plenty of time in the gym. The white shirt of his uniform did little to hide the bulky physique underneath. He looked serious, bored, and not eager to deal with some idiot banging on the front door of a major corporation at 10 o'clock at night.

"Hey!," Deck yelled though the door, "I left my car keys on my desk. Can I get them?"

"Can't let anyone in. Come back tomorrow." The guard was completely unmoved. He didn't even bother to call him 'sir'.

Crap.

Deck tried again. "Look, my name is Richard Holgate... I work on the second floor in tech support," he said pointing upstairs. "I need my car keys. I work here." He held out his arms to demonstrate how passive and harmless he was.

Reluctantly, the guard slid his chair out and walked over to the door as he fixed "Richard" with a disapproving glare.

Deck tried not to smile. Getting the guard to engage him in conversation was the hardest part. It is always more difficult to refuse to help someone when you have to look them in the eye. This was where the misconceptions about hackers came into play. This guard would expect a hacker to be nervous, shifty-eyed, and menacing. He might suspect "Richard" of being many things: a shallow irritating loser, an irresponsible ass, or an overpaid bootlick. It would never occur to him that he was looking at a ruthless data pirate. Not until it was too late.

The guard brought his scowling face to the glass opposite Richard, "You can't come in, call a cab. Go home."

His face was hard and square, a frame of unhappy distrust. His brown hair was a tight crew-cut popular among the paramilitary types. His blue eyes were set deep in his head, peering out at Deck with suspicion.

Deck sighed in defeat and pleaded, "Look man, I was here all day. I just got back from the worst meeting ever. All I wanna do is go home, have some dinner, bang the wife, and get some sleep... give a guy a break?"

The guard drew in a deep breath and seemed to waver. A long moment passed as he sized up the man on the other side of the door. Deck didn't look like a nut or a terrorist. There was no obvious reason not to let him in for just a moment, except that it was against the rules, and both of them knew it.

Deck held up a set of keys. "Look, this key opens up the door over there," he indicated a black, featureless door at the rear of the lobby, "Just take this key and just go up to the second floor and grab my car keys for me. They're on my desk."

Deck stood at the door, looking pathetic and helpless. He held the keys by the plastic keychain and offered them to the guard. There was another long, silent pause while the guard deliberated some more.

Deck maintained his pleading look and jingled the keys a bit in front of his face. Inside, he wanted to scream. This entire operation depended on getting this guard to open the door and take these keys.

To Deck's surprise, the door swung all the way open, and the guard motioned him inside.

"Thanks, I really appreciate this," he said, grinning like an idiot. The guard waved his hand, dismissing the thanks. All he wanted was for this office puke to shut up, get his keys, and get out of his building. The two of them walked to the back of the lobby together, while Deck, staying in character, rambled on.

"I can't believe I left my keys here. I feel so stupid. I mean, I didn't think we would be coming back this late."

"Uh - huh."

"We were just going out to grab some dinner and the whole meeting went really bad and the next thing we knew it was nine o'clock. Man! So, we had to hurry back here and Allan dropped me off, but by that time it was like nine forty-five and it was wicked late. I didn't even realize my keys were still in my office until after he pulled out. SO embarrassing!"

"Hmm-hmm"

The lobby showed the same excess as the exterior of the building. There were huge black leather couches that were probably never used, next to marble tables with decorative trade magazines nobody ever read. There were live plants, not in simple pots but in marble planters built into the floor. The art on the walls was modern stuff, huge prints of concept paintings for space stations and orbital platforms. Another print seemed to be a montage depicting the cure of cancer. There were several massive cylinder lights - large enough to contain a man - that were suspended from the high ceiling from lines so thin they could only be seen when the light caught them just right. They flooded the lobby with potent white light, obliterating the possibility of shadows.

Deck continued lamenting his day that never happened. The guard bobbed his head, trying to acknowledge that he heard, without the risk of possibly encouraging further conversation.

Deck sized up his opponent as the two of them walked together. He was carrying a real sidearm and not a stunner, which was rare. Guns were pretty much illegal for everyone but the police, and for TriOp to gain firearm permits for all of its security forces must have cost a great deal. The guard walked carefully, not letting Deck fall behind him. His right hand never strayed far from his weapon, but never got so close that it might cause alarm.

The two of them reached the back door and the guard turned to Deck, waiting for him to open the door.

The problem here for Deck was, he really didn't have any way of opening this door yet.

"Oh! Keys!," he said, still grinning, as if he had forgotten what they were doing. He began to search through his pockets and came up with the same keychain he had offered the guard before. He frowned at them, realizing they were not the "right" keys.

"Here... hold these a second?," he said, offering the keys dangling from the plastic keychain in his hand as he continued to go though his pockets with his other hand.

The guard hesitated, not knowing why he would need to hold this stupid set of keys, but then reached out and took them. As his hand touched the metallic surface, their eyes met for a brief second. Deck jabbed a button on the keychain that delivered a micro-pulse of electrical energy similar to the impulses used by the human nervous system. The result was a spastic convulsion from the guard as he toppled over.

Deck glanced out through the windows to the street, to see if anyone had taken obvious notice. The street looked pretty clear. He hated the brightly lit lobby, elevated in front of the street for any passerby to see. It was like being on stage, and the last thing he wanted right now was an audience.

The guard had conveniently fallen beside a couch so that his body could not be seen from the street.

Deck sized up the door that led to the main offices. It was featureless, save for the smooth black panel (probably a palm scanner) with a small keypad and keyhole underneath. The keypad was alphanumeric, so the correct password could be any combination of letters or numbers of any length. The keyhole was a flat slot - obviously for electronic keys and not something that could be picked. Deck was guessing it unlocked the keypad. So to get in, you needed to have either the correct hand, or the right key and the proper password. Using the palm reader was out of the question. Deck wasn't about to lug the guard's body over to the door and try to get his hand onto the reader. Some passerby outside would almost certainly notice. Besides, it was doubtful someone of the guard's low position would be allowed the luxury of using the hand scanner - a privilege usually reserved for executives.

Deck checked the guard's keychain and found a number of electronic keys. Each was a flat, transparent piece of plastic with a tiny strand of metallic ribbon running though its surface in a specific pattern. Deck tried each one until the keypad lit up. Now all he needed was the password.

The reception desk was a massive wood and marble edifice that dominated the rear of the lobby. The back wall of its sunken desktop contained seven display screens. The three on each side were cycling through various external surveillance views, while the larger center screen simply showed the triangular TriOptimum Logo. He assumed it was a slave screen for portables.

He took his rig and a slender backpack out of the briefcase and tossed the briefcase aside.

He retrieved a roll of duct tape from his backpack. As he rolled the guard over onto his stomach he was met with an overpowering stench. The guard's bowels and bladder had let go after being hit with the pulse stunner - a common side effect. Deck took the tape and quickly wrapped the hands, feet, and the guard's mouth. Once the guard was secure, Deck relieved him of his sidearm.

Deck didn't really know how to use a gun very well. He didn't usually carry one because it was just extra bulk, and they were really expensive. The whole point of doing his job was to get what he wanted without ever needing a gun. He wouldn't be able to move around the city with it, so he decided to hang onto it until he got out of the building. Traveling though the streets with it would be suicide anyway.

He dropped his rig onto the reception desk and powered it up. The keyboard was a smooth, flat surface with a series of tightly arranged squares bearing letters and symbols according to the standard Dvorak layout. As it started up, each square bubbled outward. The surface of the keyboard felt like bubble-wrap beneath the fingers, yet each key gave with a satisfying click.

Most users preferred keyboards that offered some sort of tactile feedback. It increased typing speed and reduced mistakes if the user could feel the boundaries of each key with their fingers. On the other hand, keys that protruded from the surface of the unit were usually a liability for hackers because of the increased volume and physical breaking hazard.

The bubble keys were a nice compromise, although they cost quite a bit. Deck had been a member of the flat keyboard way of thinking for a long time, which valued compact and durable over a few keystrokes per minute of typing speed. However, he saw a chance to have the best of both worlds when he set out to build the ultimate rig. Compared to the tremendous amount of money spent on the internal components, the small fortune spent on the keyboard was trivial.

The rig was unnaturally heavy. Most portables were the size of a compact keyboard, which meant they were mostly empty space. Usually they had to be weighted down a bit so that they didn't seem flimsy, and would remain still while the user was typing. Deck's machine was an exception. He'd filled its volume with banks of storage and processing units. He had spent months buying components and putting them together to build this thing. It was almost a hundred times more powerful than the average rig, and he was going to need all of that power to get the job done.

The machine represented several months' worth of income, most of which he still owed to a number of ruthless and increasingly impatient lenders. Even worse, he had wasted a great deal of money in the construction of the thing. It was far too powerful to be legal, and so there was no real guide on how to build a machine like this. Many processors had been burned out or overloaded in the process. In the end, he had thrown away almost as much as he had successfully put into use. He tried not to think about the money when he used the unit, since it would only serve as a terrifying distraction.

The center screen on the desk lit up as it detected the nearby portable. The two devices negotiated for a second or two and then the screen became the display for his machine.

Attached to his rig Deck had a Universal Interface Unit - an almost completely mis-named device, since it would only interface with a small set of compatible devices. When the UIU was first released a number of years earlier, it was boasted as the last interface device anyone would ever need. It would connect any two network-enabled devices and allow them to operate together, assuming you had the right software. They could exchange information, share displays, and even share memory and storage. Again: assuming you had the right software. It had great marketing, but not so great technology. There was a lot of network-enabled stuff manufacturers didn't want everyone connecting to and possibly hacking. ATM's, payphones, and utility meters suddenly needed special shielding and encryption to protect them from a UIU. The software for connecting to legitimate commercial products never really surfaced. Pretty soon the only people who really used them were hackers. It didn't take long for UIU's to get banned, but not before a black market of the things emerged to supply the technology hungry counter-security culture.

Keypads were smart enough to know that if someone was entering passwords at a rate faster than humans could type, or if the user was entering a lot of bogus codes, then it was probably being hacked. It would then lock itself down and trip the local alarm. Deck had written some software for his UIU to enable it to analyze keypads by searching their memory for valid codes or passwords without actually trying all of the codes. The only drawback was that it took a long time. The keypad's memory would almost certainly be encrypted, and would need to be deciphered before the code could be extracted. This internal encryption would have to be fairly light or else it would slow the device down too much for it to function properly. In theory, his overpowered machine should be able to break it in under half an hour.

Deck took the UIU from his rig and taped it over the surface of the keypad with the duct tape. The surface of the UIU was battered and covered with old tape residue and grime from all of the other devices it had been attached to during its long and useful career.

Deck sat down at his rig, which acted as the interface for the UIU. He fired up KEYPDBRUTE, a program he designed for just this sort of job. However, he didn't want to have to wait for this to finish. The UIU was just insurance, in case he couldn't get the password by other means.

He checked the front desk for a button that would "buzz" employees in. It was an unlikely long shot - since it would negate all the security on the door - but he still had to check. On the underside of the desk he found a small red button, which he assumed was a security alarm. A "buzzer" would most likely be more obvious, and not colored red. Either way, he wasn't about to press it and find out.