Shadow Dragon (24 page)

CHAPTER 53

Montana

In the kitchen of his small trailer house “Big John” Morris cracked open another Black Star and took a big swig. The trailer was located just south of Route 209, on the eastern side of Highway 83, a few miles north of Swan Lake. There wasn’t anything special about its location as far as Big John was concerned. It had just been the cheapest place he could find when he had been looking for somewhere to stay.

He slammed the door shut on the old refrigerator and hobbled back into the living room where a rerun of
Wheel of Fortune
was blaring on the TV. He plopped down with a groan, the worn out springs of the brown Lay-Z-Boy creaking in response. Beside the chair was a rickety TV tray, its wooden surface marred with cigarette burns and water rings. He shoved aside the bag of Doritos and the plastic tray caked with the remnants of refried beans from his enchilada dinner. He sat the beer down, wiping the condensation on the belly of his dingy undershirt before he grabbed another handful of Doritos.

He took a look at the board on the TV. “G!” he called out, as if the contestants could hear him.

The lady currently up, a frumpy schoolteacher named Helen, guessed, “P.”

“Dumb bitch,” John muttered, showering Doritos crumbs down his chest.

“Sorry, no P,” said Pat Sajack.

Big John nodded in satisfaction and took a big swig of his beer.

The next man spun. Before his guess, Big John shouted out, “G!”

Larry, the realtor from Spokane with a bad comb-over, guessed, “R.”

“Dumbass,” Big John said, shaking his head in disgust.

“There are two Rs on the board,” Pat replied as the audience cheered. “Spin again.”

“Huh,” Big John’s forehead scrunched up in concentration as he took another swig. Then it came to him.

An eruption of angry barking suddenly came from out back. “Shut up, Butch!” he yelled, but the dog continued its frenzied barking. There was a crashing sound, like that of a garbage can being knocked over.

“Stupid dog,” Big John grumbled as he hefted himself from the recliner. The harsh winter had forced some of the bears down from the mountains. At least one had been rummaging through people’s garbage lately. He limped into the kitchen, flipped on the back porch light and peered out into the darkness. He couldn’t see more than about twenty feet out back. Beyond was nothing but blackness.

He opened the door, the cold air prickling his stubbly beard, and stood there listening. He didn’t want to have to go out there, not because he was afraid of bears, but because he was tired and the cold made his left knee ache. The damn thing had never been the same after the accident. But at least his disability payments were enough for him to live off of, and it
sure
as hell beat working for the highway department, sweating your ass off in the summer and freezing it off in the winter.

There was a sudden yelp, and the dog fell silent.

“Butch?” Big John called out, but the dog had stopped barking. The damn thing was constantly running off, chasing after every damn rabbit and squirrel it saw. A couple of times it had come back all scraped up and bedraggled, like it might have tangled with a coyote or a bear.

The sound of applause came from the TV in the living room. Big John slammed the door and hurried back into the living room to see if he had been right.

“All right,” said Pat Sajack. “Time for the next word after we come back.”

“Goddamn it,” he growled. He had missed the answer and he was sure he had known it.

While the commercial was on, Big John pulled on his shoes and lumbered to the closet. He put on his old coat and pulled out the shotgun he kept there. On his way back through the kitchen, he reached into the pantry and took down the battery-operated lantern he used whenever the power went. He stepped out back.

“Butch?” he called out, but there was no sound of the dog.

He hobbled through patches of snow and dead grass, past the rusting carcass of a ’54 Ford pickup that had been there when he bought the place, and into the darkness beyond the reach of the porch light. Thirty yards ahead loomed the dark wall of trees.

Big John had never been afraid of anything. He had always been big and strong enough that no one ever messed with him much. That wasn’t to say that a few hadn’t tried, but they had all learned their lesson quick enough. But tonight, something about the pitch-black forest seemed foreboding, as if something lurked within its depths, something big and mean enough that it spooked even him.

He held the lantern over his head and tried to see past the edge of the tree line while he kept the shotgun at the ready in his right. But the darkness remained impenetrable. Cast by the porch light behind him his shadow stretched across the ground but fell short of the woods, as if it too was afraid to enter.

His hands and feet were beginning to get cold. His left knee ached. “Butch, get back here,” he called again, but the forest had fallen silent.

And then he saw the amber reflection from a pair of eyes glaring at him from amid the trees. They were up high, staring down at him like an owl stalking a mouse. Maybe it was just an owl, but it didn’t look like any owl he had ever seen before.

He lifted the gun and fired a shot off into the trees.

When the smoke cleared, whatever it had been was gone.

Big John turned and hobbled back to the trailer as fast as his stiff, achy legs could carry him.

Inside, he laid the lantern and the shotgun on the table. He jerked open the refrigerator and grabbed another Black Star. He popped the top and slammed half of it. With his nerves sufficiently settled, he shuffled back into the living room and sank into his easy chair once more, all thoughts of the dog and the ruckus out back already put out of his mind.

“Doris, it’s your spin,” said Pat.

“G!” Big John shouted. Against his advice, Doris guessed, “T.”

“No, I’m sorry, no Ts,” came Pat’s reply.

Big John just nodded and shook his head.
Stupid bitches never learn
, he thought as he slammed down the rest of the beer.

CHAPTER 54

Denver

Charlie Wiesman stared at the monitor, anxiously waiting while the latest in a series of programs he had tried continued to run. “Come on, baby. Come on,” he coaxed, rubbing the side of the CPU tower.

He picked up one of the last fries from amid the pile of grease-stained take-out sacks, pizza boxes, and Red Bull cans that littered the dining table next to his computer desk. The desk was in the dining area because the light was better and there was more space than in his apartment’s tiny bedroom. He took a bite of the fry, made an awful face, and tossed the remainder back. The oil had congealed. They had moved beyond the point of no return.

He pushed his glasses back up from the end of his nose and continued monitoring the latest program’s progress. He was getting close. He just
knew
it. He had been going at it for almost thirty-six hours straight, slowly worming his way deeper and deeper into GenTech’s intranet, until now he felt certain that once he managed to gain access to this current node, which had been the hardest to crack by far, he would find what he was looking for.

Getting into the system initially had been easy enough. It was amazing how many people would give out their access ID and password when called by someone who professed to work in the IT department and who needed their info to test out a new user-verification program they were installing. It really didn’t matter what the excuse was. Virtually every time, all it took for the ruse to work was to keep calling until you got a hold of someone who wasn’t all that familiar or comfortable with computer networks—most often women—and bombard them with technobabble until they gave you what you needed.

Once into the company’s intranet, Charlie had run a program that mapped out the network and then gone in search of those systems that appeared to be associated with research and development and had the most security protecting them. Those were the ones most likely to contain important company data. Once identified, he began breaking into them one by one and examining their contents. It would have been much faster if he could have used Moe, Larry, and Curly—his systems at the office—where he could have had all three processors working on different nodes at the same time, but that was strictly forbidden by the boss for any activity like the one he was currently conducting, so he was forced to tackle them one at a time.

So far, he hadn’t come across anything he thought was useful, at least not to him—just a bunch of scientific data regarding some of the drugs they produced, including the formulas and clinical trial results. If he had been an industrial hacker, it might have been of great value, but he knew it wasn’t what Carrie was looking for, so he had kept at it until he had come across the node he was trying to hack now. He had almost skipped it without even trying to access it, because the mapping program he used had identified it as an unknown processor type. Looking at the settings for the system, Charlie figured it was one of the company’s old, outdated mainframe systems that had been tied into the network during the conversion and then never removed from the network. But when he tried to access the node to see what it was, he hit a firewall. And not just any generic, off-the-shelf variety, either. This one was custom-designed, and a kick-ass one at that. Charlie had been trying to gain access for the last day and a half, without even the slightest hint of success. He had been totally stumped to the point that he was forced to ask some of his hacker friends for help. One of them said it sounded similar to one he had run across when he hacked the Department of Defense’s network prior to their upgrade and had e-mailed Charlie a copy of the program he had created to crack that one.

The first few attempts had failed, but this time, it had already run twice as long without getting kicked out, which was a good sign.

He decided to risk taking a bathroom break. He hated leaving the room while a program was still running. It seemed like every time he did, something happened while he was gone. And if he missed any information that scrolled up the screen or the system locked up on him, he would wind up wasting time having to backtrack.

He hurried down the hall, took care of his business with all possible haste, and rushed back. He was still zipping up when he returned to the dining nook only to find that—as usual—something had happened while he was gone. The screen was now filled with a menu of eight numbered items, below which the computer’s command prompt blinked patiently while it awaited his input.

He was in.

With a whoop of delight, he plopped into his chair and began his exploration of the system. He spent the next several hours downloading everything he came across that he thought might be pertinent without taking time to go through any of it. It was nearing 6:00 a.m. on the East Coast, and he didn’t want to be online when the company’s IT people started showing up to work. He worked as long as he could safely before he backed out of the system, making sure he hadn’t disrupted any of the files and removing all evidence of his intrusion from the system logs. Lastly, he inserted a small block of code that created a back door for him in case he needed to reenter the system later and then severed the connection.

Bordering on delirium but fueled by adrenaline and copious amounts of Red Bull, Charlie began the tedious task of sorting through the immense amounts of data where he would find all of the answers that he and Carrie had been searching for, although what he found was more incredible than either of them could have ever dreamed.

CHAPTER 55

After he dug through the data for over an hour, Charlie was confident he knew what had happened. It was improbable and unbelievable, and yet there it was on the monitor before him. He had waded through gigabytes of information, most of it confusing and far beyond his level of comprehension, but he felt certain there was enough hard evidence contained therein to blow the story wide open.

He grabbed the phone and dialed Carrie’s cell. It was just after seven now, and she was probably still asleep, but he couldn’t wait to tell her what he had found. This was the kind of shit that made national news. It was like Woodward and Bernstein and Watergate. It was the kind of shit that won the Pulitzer Prize, for God’s sake. It was fucking unbelievable!

There was no answer.

“Carrie!” he practically yelled into the phone as her voice mail picked up. He was so exhausted and wired and excited that he was babbling, but he couldn’t help it. “I’ve found it. I know you told me not to do it. But I couldn’t help it, and it was worth it ’cause I found it and you’re not going to believe it. Call me as soon as you get this. I have to talk to you ASAP. Call me.”

After he hung up, he tried to think of how else to get in touch with her. He had to get the information to her as soon as possible, but there was so much of it he couldn’t send it via e-mail. The e-mail server for the paper’s network would kick it out as being too large even if he compressed it. Instead of sending it all to Carrie at once, he wrote her an e-mail summarizing what he had found and attached a couple of what he considered to be the most important files as proof. Hopefully, she would check her e-mail and phone for messages this morning and call him back. In the meantime, he would copy all of the information to a flash drive and FedEx it to her. Just to be safe, he would make another copy to take to the paper.

*

Montana

Carrie stared at her face in the mirror. It was as if she were looking at a stranger. It had been so long since she had worn makeup that she had almost forgotten what she looked like with it on. Now, standing there, eyeliner still in hand, she looked at the results and began to reconsider. Her plan was to go to the Hungry Horse Reservoir Control Station to ask if they had noticed anything unusual regarding the fish and wildlife in the area, and if she got lucky, obtain a copy of the water analysis reports for the last two years. She knew it was a long shot, but she also knew from past experience that men would do just about anything if you played them right, which meant makeup, her red V-neck sweater, and a little flirtation.

After the problems with Bret, she had done everything she could to avoid drawing attention to herself, which included eliminating makeup. She had taken steps to make herself unattractive and undesirable and therefore—in her mind—as safe as possible.

Now she was intentionally doing just the opposite. She hated what she was doing. It made her feel cheap and manipulative, but she knew her chances of success increased greatly if she played the game. And that was all that mattered to her now. More than anything, she was determined to find the answers she was searching for, and if it wound up costing her a little self-respect, then self-respect be damned.

Once finished with her makeup, she plugged in the blow dryer. She was going all out today, which meant no ponytail. She had worn her hair pulled back for as long as she had been going without makeup, but today, it was coming down. She flipped the switch, and the whistling drone of the blow dryer continued her uneasy transformation.

Across the room, the ringing of the cell phone in her purse went unheard.