Nine, Ten ... Never Sleep Again (16 page)

When Valdemar
turned fifteen,
he had long ago stopped asking if his
father was going to come for his birthday. Not that Valdemar had forgotten
about his father, no Anna knew he thought about him a lot and about how he had
hurt his mother and him by leaving for another family.

And he hated him for it. The longing for his
acceptance and love had turned into a resentment that Anna saw growing inside
the eyes of her sweet young boy every day that passed. It blackened his
insides, darkened his mind, and poisoned him with a deep, grieving sadness.

Valdemar would never tell her if she asked about
it. He would say things like "Daddy didn't mean to hurt us, Mom. The other
family needed him too."

Stuff like that that Anna knew he didn't mean.
On the inside, his hurt grew deeper and deeper and for every day that passed,
he became more and more isolated. Valdemar had taken a liking to computers and
had taught himself hacking. Using nothing but his toes on the keyboard and the
mouse placed underneath his table, he was able to hack his way into government
sites and secret police files. In the beginning, he showed his mother proudly,
but later he learned it was better to keep it a secret since Anna had freaked
out and told him he would end up going to jail.

But she knew it hadn’t helped that she told him
that. He told her that he wasn't doing it anymore, but she knew he was. And she
had no way of controlling it. Part of her was very impressed with his skills on
a computer and in the garage where he still spent hours and hours creating
inventions that Anna had never seen anything like. She had tried to threaten
him with taking the computer away, but he knew she didn't mean it. The computer
was his everything and, on Anna's modest salary, it was a big sacrifice for her
to be able to buy it for him. She wasn't going to take it away and have wasted
the money. So instead, she decided to try and keep an eye on what he was doing
now and then. But truth be told, Anna had no idea what she was even looking
for.

Valdemar was a lonely child. He didn't have any
friends, but somehow Anna sensed that he didn't care much about it, about other
children. She had a feeling he didn't like them much and found them to be
childish and immature for him, since he had been a grown-up trapped in a
child's body ever since he was no more than two years’ old.

One Wednesday afternoon, a week after his
birthday, Valdemar was sitting in his room, when Anna walked inside. He hurried
up and hid something under the table by kicking it, but it was too late. Anna
had seen it.

"What are you up to now, Valdemar?"
she asked.

"Nothing," he sighed.

"Come on. I'm your mother. I know you. I
can smell when you're up to something. Hand it over."

Valdemar picked it up with his feet and handed
it to Anna. She looked at it, but could make no sense of what it was. "A
dry erase marker? What's so special about that?"

Valdemar looked guilty and Anna realized there
was something inside of the marker. She pulled it out. It looked like a small
circuit board and a lot of wires.

"What is this, Valdemar? Talk, or I'm
definitely taking away the computer."

"You'll just get mad," Valdemar said.

"I'll try not to," Anna said.
"Now speak up. What is this?"

"It's a key."

"A key?"

Valdemar nodded. He pulled out something else
from under his desk with his feet and gave it to Anna. It looked exactly like a
lock to a hotel door with a handle and everything. A small red light was
blinking on top of it.

"What is all this?"

"It's a master key for all hotel room
locks." Valdemar said.

"It’s what?"

"I found a hole in the code to the Onity HT
lock system for hotels. Approximately ten million Onity HT locks are installed
in hotels worldwide. This accounts for over half of all the installed hotel
locks and can be found in approximately a third of all hotels," he said.

"And this is one of those locks, I take
it?" Anna asked.

"Yes. The Code key values consist of 24
bits of data and are used to gain entry to locks. A lock contains a guest code
key value and, generally, one or more master code key values.
Rather
than programming the lock anew for every guest or when master keycards need to
be made, a concept called
card cycling
is used. When a valid card is introduced to the lock, the lock's code key value
is moved up to the value on the card. This allows the lock to automatically
invalidate old cards when new ones are used.
A 24-bit code key
value has 16.7 million unique values, but this is divided by the lookahead plus
one, as any card in that range will be valid. Thus if you have a lookahead of
50, the key space is reduced to only 328,965 values. With the lookahead set to
the maximum, 255, the key space is reduced to only 65,536 values. While this
means that, even in the worst case, you would need to try 32,768 cards in a
door, on average, to open it, this introduces another problem.
If
two doors happen to be close enough in code key value that their lookahead
values overlap, it's possible that a legitimate guest card intended for one
door can open another door at the same property. When the doors are assigned
initial code key values, these are separated by 1,000 to make this less likely.
However, all doors are not created equally in a hotel, it's very likely that
certain rooms will see higher turnover than others, leading to a situation
where the code key values are likely to overlap …"

Anna stopped Valdemar. "I have no idea what
you're talking about, but this is not a good idea, Valdemar."

Valdemar looked down. He bent his head. Anna
stared at the dry erase marker with curiosity. "So it works on all locks
to all hotels, huh?"

Valdemar lifted his head. "Most hotels.
Only those that use the
Onity HT lock system
."

"So how does it work?"

Valdemar smiled. With his feet, he grabbed the
marker out of her hands. He put the circuit board inside and closed it on the
back, then he grabbed the lock and put it on the table. Anna watched closely
and couldn't help feeling a little proud of her son, yet terrified he would get
himself in trouble with this.

"Now the Onity brand of key card locks most
commonly used in hotels have a power jack on the bottom that doubles as a
1-wire communications port …"

"Simplify it, please," Anna said.

"Okay," Valdemar said. "See that
small hole underneath the lock?"

Anna bent down and saw it. "Yes."

"Okay. Now I place the end of the marker
down at the bottom here and give it a small push into the hole and then … now
look, did you see the lamp went from red to green?"

"That's right, I saw that," Anna said,
trying hard to not sound excited.

"Now you can turn the handle."
Valdemar said.

Anna reached down and turned the handle.

"And the door is open."

Anna looked at her boy, then leaned over and
kissed him. "You're a genius," she said. "Just promise me one
thing."

"And that is?"

"Don't ever use it, alright?"

"It was never meant to be used. It was just
an experiment."

I waited
nervously for
what felt like hours at the hospital
before the doctor came out and told me Sune was in recovery.

"We managed to close him up. He’s lost a
lot of blood," the doctor said.

I was standing next to officer Jansson who had
driven me to the hospital in his police car with blaring sirens and all.

"But he will make it?" Officer Jansson
asked.

"It's too early to determine. The next
twenty-four hours are crucial. We'll keep him under close observation."

"But he can live on without a spleen,
right?" Officer Jansson asked.

"Yes. You can live perfectly well without
your spleen
.
But
because the spleen plays a crucial role in the body's ability to fight off
bacteria, living without the organ makes you more likely to develop infections,
especially dangerous ones like those that cause pneumonia, meningitis, and
other serious infections. His own doctor will make sure the patient is given vaccinations
to cover these bacteria."

I sat on a chair once the doctor was gone. I hid
my face in my hands. "I can't believe this is happening. I can't believe
it."

Officer Jansson sat next to me. He put his hand
on my shoulder. "I'm sure he'll be alright."

"He has a son," I said. "I need
to tell Tobias. He's back in Karrebaeksminde with his nanny."

Officer Jansson nodded. "Let me take care
of that. I'll get the local police to contact them and have him transported
here. Don't worry about that part."

Officer Jansson left the room talking on the
phone. I took mine out and looked at it. Then I called Jens-Ole and told him. I
hung up crying, then called Peter and told him not to say anything to Julie
until I knew if Sune was going to live or not. Peter was very quiet and said
nothing but
yes
and
no
.

Probably feeling guilty
,
I thought when I hung up.

The wait was terrible. My emotions ran amok. At
one point I was crying for Sune and for the baby that might not get to know his
father, then I was overwhelmed with guilt. If only I had been there. Maybe the
organ thieves would have left him alone? Maybe I could have stopped them? Then
I became angry. Angry at the thieves, at this cruel way to treat other people.

Officer Jansson soon returned. "Tobias is
on his way in a police car. They told him his father was in the hospital, no
details so far."

"I'll take care of him when he
arrives," I said.

"Good." Officer Jansson sighed.
"I'm afraid I have more bad news. There was another case last night."

"Two cases at the same time? What's going
on here?" I asked.

He exhaled and touched his forehead. "I
have no idea. This is crazy."

"What happened this time? Organ theft
again? You think it was the same person?"

"That's the strange part. It was a woman
this time. All the others have been men," Officer Jansson said.

"Maybe it doesn't matter to them if it is a
man or woman. An organ is an organ, right? On the black market, it probably
doesn't matter. Or do you think they might be responding to orders? That
someone places an order for a spleen from a woman to make sure it fits?"
The thought was repulsive and made my stomach turn.

"I have thought about it. But the worst
part about this one is that it was performed in her own home."

"What?" I asked.

"She lived in an apartment in Silkeborg,
where she was found this morning by a friend she was supposed to go to Aarhus
with today. The door wasn't locked, so the girlfriend walked right in when the
woman didn't answer the door. She found her on the floor, blood
everywhere."

"What organ had been stolen?"

"That's the even stranger part. She had
been cut open using one of her own kitchen knives and several organs had been
cut loose, but none were missing. When the forensic team put her together it
was all there. Some were on the floor and blood had spurted everywhere, like
the person doing the cutting had gone berserk, but nothing was missing."

"That doesn't sound much like the other
cases?"

"No not at all. In the three previous
cases, the organ thieves have been very professional and even left the victims
in ice with a note to tell them to call 112 when they woke up, if they woke
up."

I felt sick picturing Sune sitting in the
bathtub filled with ice-cubes. Who in their right mind could be this cruel?

"Maybe there are many of them out there?
Maybe this one wasn't as controlled and professional as the others?"

"I don't know. It makes sense that there
should be more of them since they struck at almost the same time last night in
two places in the same town."

"Kind of makes you want to lock your door
with extra locks, right?"

"And sleep with one eye open," Officer
Jansson said. "I don't think I'll be able to sleep again before this case
is solved."