This Is Not a Game (38 page)

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Authors: Walter Jon Williams

BOOK: This Is Not a Game
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“How did that make you feel?” Kim asked.
Again with the feelings, as if they alone would justify a charge of murder.
Act on our feelings,
she thought,
and who would ’scape hanging?
Dagmar looked at Kim.
“It made me feel terrified,” she said.
“And angry?”
“And
terrified,
” said Dagmar. “I’d never told him where I lived. He’d tracked me down and ambushed me in my own parking lot.”
There were a few more questions, but they were just variations on the questions the detectives had already asked. She figured they weren’t after clarification; they were just hoping her answers would start contradicting one another, and then they could start picking her story to bits. She stood up.
“I really have to go to work,” she said. “Call for an appointment, and I’ll try to get you those emails.”
The two detectives looked at each other.
“Siyed’s wife is named Manjari,” Dagmar said. “I don’t know exactly how to spell it, but I know they’re in the London phone directory.”
“We’ll terminate the interview, then,” Murdoch said. He looked at his watch and gave the time and then turned off the dictation machine. Dagmar took off her lapel mic.
“How was Siyed killed?” she asked.
“We won’t know till the autopsy,” Murdoch said, “but it looks as if he was beaten to death.”
Dagmar’s reaction, for which she hoped she would later feel ashamed, was relief. She looked down at her hands, her knuckles—no bruises, no cuts. She held the hands up for the others to see.
“Well,” she said, “doesn’t look like I’ve been in a fistfight, does it?”
“The killer,” said Kim, “might have used a club or a pipe or something.”
“Or something,” Dagmar repeated pointlessly. Relief blew through her like a warm desert wind. She walked around the table to the door, then stopped.
“My God,” she said. “Siyed left voice mail last night. I’d forgot.”
She got out her phone, thumbed buttons, brought up voice mail.
“Not yet,” said Murdoch. He reached for the transcription machine. “Can you put the phone on speaker?”
Dagmar could. She waited for Murdoch to engage the transcription device, punched up the volume, and called up voice mail.
“Dagmar, my darling.” Siyed’s voice was distorted and tinny, a reminder that he was speaking from the afterlife.
“I’m sorry, but I couldn’t stay away,” he said. “I just wanted to see you. I watched you go through the gate. I know that’s naughty. I promise I won’t approach you again.”
Words advanced on the screen, then paused. Dagmar’s eyes, tracking the screen, focused on the word
naughty.
“There’s another man here,” he said. “A man watching. I wanted to call you about it, but your phone won’t answer. He is very interested in you. After you went inside, he got out and walked around your car and then looked under it. Now he’s watching again...”
The voice trailed away. The transcription machine waited patiently. Dagmar’s heart filled the silence with sudden thunder.
Siyed’s voice turned impatient. “I’m going to talk to him,” Siyed said. “I didn’t like the way he was looking at your machine.”
Just before the phone call ended came the sound of a car door opening, Siyed marching to his death.
He was such a little man, Dagmar remembered. Five foot three or something. Even the average American couch potato could have given him a thrashing without breaking a sweat.
Damn actors and their egos,
Dagmar thought. Siyed had thought he was a superhero and had walked right up to the man who killed him.
With adrenaline-clumsy fingers, Dagmar punched buttons on her phone and saved the voice mail. Kim turned off the transcription machine.
All the tension seemed to have drained out of the room.
“You’ll forward that to us?” Murdoch asked.
“If I can find out how to do that,” Dagmar said.
“Who’s your carrier?” Kim asked.
Dagmar told him. He wrote it down.
Murdoch’s blue eyes seemed to look at her from a hundred miles away.
“Do you have any idea,” he asked, “who this other watcher might be?”
She shook her head.
The man who was waiting to kill me,
she thought. Fire licked along her nerves.
“I’ve got to leave,” she said suddenly.
But where, she thought, would she go?
 
She didn’t want to think about the killer who was tracking her. She decided to deal with another problem, one that Special Agent Landreth had declined to help her with.
Richard the Assassin sat quietly in his fifth-floor office, his white-noise generator hissing quietly from the window. A series of screens curved around him like a heads-up display the size of the room. The ninja action figures posed in a long glass case on top of his bookshelf.
“Yes,” he said. “I can get you Charlie’s emails, at least providing he was using his AvN Soft email address. Our email clients use IMAP protocol, not POP3. All emails are stored on the server unless they’re specifically deleted.” He glanced up. “It makes it easier for people who use different computers in different locations to get their email.”
“Charlie was in touch with people at brokerage houses,” Dagmar said. “He’d discovered that someone was using illegal copies of Rialto, and he wanted to send a patch to those copies to shut them down.”
Richard looked at her.
“That’s kind of interesting,” he said. “I heard that from one of the Great Big Idea people, and when I told some folks on the AvN Soft side, they said they hadn’t heard anything about it.”
“You’re hearing about it now,” said Dagmar.
Richard drew a finger down the side of his jaw.
“Okayyy,” he said slowly.
Dagmar reached into her jeans pocket and took out the memory stick.
“Here’s the final version of Charlie’s patch,” she said, “along with all the IP addresses that have been harvested so far. There will be more on Monday, when Tapping the Source goes into play.”
Richard took the portable memory and looked at it.
“What do you want me to do with this?” he asked.
“Copy it to a secure location,” Dagmar said, “because I think that’s what got Charlie killed.”
The white-noise generator hissed as Richard looked at the memory stick in his hand.
“Maybe,” he said, “we should find out if this thing works.”
“How?”
“We’ve got the patch. We’ve got IP addresses. Let’s send it out and see what happens.”
Dagmar considered this.
“Firewall the hell out of it,” she said, “and let’s go for a drive.”
Dagmar moved one of the office chairs so that she could watch over Richard’s shoulder. He plugged the memory stick into one of his sliver-thin state-of-the-art laptops and downloaded the patch onto a virtual drive that he created especially for the program. He made certain his firewalls were in place and then ran the program.
A window appeared on his display.
 
>
Insert target address.
>
 
“Well,” Dagmar said, “the display’s a classic.”
Richard opened one of the files of addresses and typed.
 
>
161.148.066.255
 
Richard hit Enter, and another prompt appeared. Richard clicked on another window, one of his firewalls, and gave permission for a message to go out.
“It sent some kind of ping,” he said.
Richard typed in another address, hit Enter, and then repeated the procedure several times.
One of the firewall windows opened.
“That first address is responding,” he said.
He gave permission for the firewall to let the message enter.
 
>161.148.066.255 infected. Patch sent.
 
“Damn,” Richard said. “We got lucky first time out.”
He had to give permission for the patch to clear the firewall. Less than a minute later, another message appeared.
 
>161.148.066.255 clean.
 
And not only was 161.148.066.255 clean, Dagmar knew, but it was now busy scrubbing other computers, spreading the patch to every machine in its network.
They had done all this, she reminded herself, without knowing where the target computer was or who it belonged to. Who
any
of them belonged to.
She and Richard spent the next half hour sending the patch to IP addresses on Charlie’s list. Twenty-eight percent were infected and were cleansed with Charlie’s patch.
Charlie’s plan, his demented plan, was working.
Richard pushed his chair back from the machine and rolled his shoulders.
“How many IP addresses left?”
“Thousands. Maybe hundreds of thousands—I haven’t looked.”
Richard blinked. It was one thing to test your ninja mettle against a cunning opponent; it was another to slave over a keyboard in order to type in zillions of addresses.
“Let’s call it a day’s work, shall we?” he said.
“Now you understand,” said Dagmar, “why we want millions of players to work with these IP addresses.”
He nodded.
She raised her arms and stretched, opening her chest, filling her lungs with air.
One of Richard’s other machines gave a chime. He wheeled his office chair to another part of his desk and frowned at the display.
“Someone’s trying to go through the firewall,” he said.
“Not one of the targets?”
“No. They’d be identified by IP address only. This is someone at the company.” He paused as he read the monitor, then turned to look over his shoulder at Dagmar.
“It’s you,” he said.
She looked at him in surprise.
“What do you mean? ” she asked.
“It’s someone using your account.”
She bolted out of her chair to look at the display. “Who?”
Richard shrugged. “He’s calling from off-site,” he said. He frowned at the screen for a moment. “We could let him do what he wants,” he said, “and find out what he’s after.”
“Have you got a secure copy of the patch?”
Richard wheeled to the computer with the patch on it, pulled the memory stick, and held it so that Dagmar could see it. She took the stick from his hand. That left only the copy on the hard drive.
Richard let the intruder through the firewall, and they watched as Patch 2.0 was overwritten by something else.
“Slightly smaller file size,” Richard said after a few minutes’ analysis. “Still an executable file. Best guess is that it’s an earlier version of the patch.”
“Or a patch that’s been rewritten.”
Richard frowned. “Let’s do a comparison.”
More firewalls, software run, code rolling at near light speed on the monitors.
“There’s a difference,” Richard said, pointing. Code highlighted in blinking red. Dagmar narrowed her eyes, looked from one screen to the next.
“It’s a bank routing code,” Dagmar said. “The... intruder”—
the other me
—“he’s changing the program to send money to a different account.” She looked at the prefix. “An account in a different country, I think.”
Richard’s scanning program found other changes. Dagmar scanned the symbols and compared one to the next and tried to summon the programming skills she’d once possessed.
You could tell the difference between the programmers. The original code was elegant and concise; the new stuff consisted of code laid down in huge swaths, clumsy and overhasty.
But it would work, this new code. It would work perfectly well.
“Charlie’s patch,” she said, “sends the patch to every other bot the program knows about, then turns the bot
off.
But that feature has been deleted in this new one. It just lets the program run.”
“But it changes the bot’s owner.”
“Yes. All the profits get sent to the new account.”
Richard nodded. “Elegant,” he said. “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”
The new boss kills people,
she thought.
Dips nails in rat poison and packs them around explosive cores.
He looked at her. “Which one of the bosses is the bomber? Which is the Maffya?”
She thought about it. “Does it matter?”
Richard’s face took on a grim cast. He rolled his chair to a third machine and began typing.
“I’m going to find out what our intruder’s been up to.”
He scanned data for a moment, then turned to Dagmar again.
“You’ve been in all sorts of places where you’re not allowed,” he said. “Someone’s given you superuser status.”
“Who can do that?” Dagmar asked.
“Me. And Charlie Ruff, but he’s dead.”
“Can you find out who made me a superuser?”
More tapping. He frowned. “Someone who shouldn’t be a superuser, either, but he is. He has the handle CRAPJOB.”
A thousand pieces fell into place in Dagmar’s head, an action like a reverse explosion, a million bits of shrapnel flying together to form a perfect, seamless platonic solid.
She was astonished there was no sound. She should have heard the universe cracking.
Her heart and the jolt of adrenaline caught up long after the moment of comprehension, too late, useless for anything except making her hands tremble ...
Richard tapped his keyboard. “Man!” he said. “That CRAPJOB account is only three days old! And then all CRAPJOB did was grant you superuser status, and since then all the activity’s been on
your
account.”
He turned, looked over his shoulder. “Any idea who this is?”
Dagmar shook her head. Unconvincingly, she thought.
Richard turned back to his machine. “I’ll cancel that account,” he said. “And yours. And then we’ll give you a new account.”
“
No!
” Dagmar lunged from her chair and put her hand over his. Richard looked at her in surprise.

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