Fascination (6 page)

EJ murmured a quiet assent, and they filed out of the kitchen. Sage trailed along last, feeling unsure and yet eager to know what was on the disk. It was obvious Ian thought she might still be in cahoots with Locke—he wasn’t going to let her anywhere near the computer. Ironically whatever it was that they found, she just hoped it was serious enough to keep her out of jail.

I
AN PACED THE ROOM
, making phone calls and trying to dig up information on Locke while EJ and Sage huddled together in front of the computer. He didn’t want to go through official channels just yet, considering his own indiscretions of late, so he called Sarah. She was good at digging and this might be a nice test run for her.

“Sarah? This is Ian Chandler.”

“Oh. Yes?” Cool as a cucumber, as usual.

“How are you?”

There was silence for a moment on the other side of the line—Sarah wasn’t much for formalities and never hit him as chatty. She was probably up to her eyeballs in some computer search. Predictably her reply was vague and distracted. He liked that she didn’t just drop everything and kiss up to him just because he’d interviewed her for a job.

“Uh, fine. You?”

“Good. I’m working on a project that I thought you might be able to help out on. Consider it kind of a trial run for the team. I can get to see you work in the field.”

“What do you need?” Her attention was razor-sharp
now; he heard it in her voice. To the point, no runaround. He respected that.

“I’m trying to dig up information on a hacker named Locke—”

“Locke? Really?”

Ian cocked an eyebrow at her impressed tone of voice and her interruption. “You know him?”

“I know of him, yes. He’s into heavy stuff. He’s about corporate sabotage, big money, that kind of thing. I’ve only seen some of his code, but it’s wildly advanced. Way over my head.”

“Do you know where he is now, what he’s up to?”

She sighed into the phone. “He stays to himself. He’s only seen when he wants to be. I’ve heard some people chatting about some new code on some message boards, so he’s still in the game. I heard a rumor he was being approached by the corporations themselves to attack competitors. Kind of a computer special-forces guy. He’s the real thing. Elite.”

There was almost a sense of awe in her voice, and Ian cleared his throat. Hackers were a weird bunch.

“That’s good to know. We have a line that he may be up to something big right now, but I could use some underground info. There isn’t much about him—next to nothing—in the files. I’d like to know what he’s been up to for the last five years.”

“I’ll do what I can, but I’m not sure how much I’ll be able to find.”

“Why do you say that?”

“He’s slick, the original invisible man. I don’t know
anyone who even knows him personally. I’ve never even heard or seen his real name. He doesn’t hang out in the regular circles. Never gets caught. Usually uses his groupies to do his dirty work. They get busted, he gets lost. And they remain stupidly loyal to him. I think he could be a pretty ruthless guy, if the chatter about him is anywhere near true.”

Ian blinked, looking at Sage, his mind absorbing what Sarah said.

“Ian?”

He returned his attention to the phone. “Yes. Okay—can you send anything you find to me by tomorrow?”

“You got it.”

Ian murmured thanks and hung up. It was effortless working with Sarah. He trusted her already and knew she would deliver. He also liked that she was all business. No flirting, no complications. The bit about a trial run was a stall—he wanted her for the team, but he had to do the background check before he could make it official. The results on that would be in within a couple of days; he was doing an exhaustive check. She’d need security clearance to access government databases, and he wanted to know the people he was working with inside and out.

Sage’s laugh rang suddenly, and Ian’s attention snapped back to the room. Had he ever heard her really laugh? Sure, she had used that sexy chuckle on him, a sarcastic snicker, but he’d never heard the amazingly clear, lighthearted laughter she was sharing now—though not with him. Watching her lean closer in front
of EJ, she pointed to something on the screen, and Ian felt a clutch of something nasty in his chest.

He walked over and stood behind them. “What’s happening?”

Sage sat back in her seat, the laughter stopping. EJ nodded and kept staring at the screen, hitting keys as he spoke.

“Yeah, I think we have it mostly figured out.” He spared a glance in Ian’s direction. “Sage recognized it immediately—it’s her code—but we’ve done a little extra digging.”

“And you found something funny?”

Sage looked up at him sharply. “No, not funny at all. I wasn’t laughing about that, it was—”

“It’s not important.” He directed his questions to EJ. “How could this be her code? I thought it was from Locke.”

Ian didn’t respond as the hot color that infused Sage’s cheeks told him she wasn’t happy about being cut off, but he trained his eyes on the screen, calming the intense agitation that had overcome him when he’d watched Sage sitting there laughing with EJ as if they were old friends.

Line after line of code swam before him on the monitor. He could make some sense of it, but programming wasn’t his strong suit.

“So what does it mean? Is this our virus?”

EJ seemed a little struck by Ian’s harshness, as well, and looked up, narrowing his eyes at his friend. “Since it’s her code, Sage can fill you in.”

“So what does it mean?”

“I have a name, you know. It wouldn’t kill you to use it and to be even slightly aware that I am a human being, not some dog you can just kick when you feel like it.” She rose, whirling on him.

Ian took in the high color in her cheeks, the furious breathing that caused her breasts to swell against the thin material of her shirt. He felt a small curl of admiration. He liked that she would stand up for herself, and it made him want her even more. Though he wasn’t about to give much ground, he gave some.

“Sage. Tell me about your code.”

“Figure it out yourself, you jerk.” She spun, still angry, ready to leave the room, and he crossed to her in a second, grabbing her arm none too gently.

“And just where do you think you’re going?”

She blinked but didn’t waver. “Away from you.”

“We have a deal, Sage.” He said her name with more inflection this time, filling it with intention that was clear, and he saw the understanding in her eyes. “You help me, I don’t arrest you.”

Because of EJ’s presence, he left out the other terms of their “deal,” but he knew she understood when he dragged his thumb along the sensitive inner skin of her arm and saw her catch a breath. Pulling her arm away, she rubbed the spot, though he knew he hadn’t been holding her hard enough to hurt her. He would never do that, no matter how much she pissed him off. And there was more in her eyes than anger now.

“Okay. Fine. Jeez.”

Ian turned back to find EJ watching them speculatively before he discreetly turned back to the monitor and cleared his throat.

“Ian, this is an old piece of code, something Sage wrote long ago. Though it has some new notations in it.”

“Notations?”

“Programmers keep notes in their source code—it reminds them of problems, keeps their place. Some of Sage’s old programming notes are here, but there are new ones, things Locke wrote—to her, ostensibly, anyway.”

Ian fixed his gaze on Sage again, directing his questions toward her. “What kind of notes?”

“He fixed bugs, closed a back door I had built in—he thought that was funny. He kind of graded it, like a teacher would, showing me all my mistakes.”

“Why would he do that?”

“For fun. To show me how much better he is at this than I am, to assert his superiority. He always was kind of like a teacher.”

Ian didn’t say anything, but a tight feeling took over his chest again as he blocked ideas of what Locke must have taught Sage—and not about computer code. Even though it was years ago, the knowledge chafed him.

“So what is it?”

“It’s an old bot.”

“A bot is a small program that carries out some specific kind of function it’s told to do,” EJ explained.

“Yeah, it’s distributed out on the Net and it finds a computer to hide away in and waits for instructions.”

“What did your bot do, Sage?”

She smirked. “Nothing. I couldn’t get it to work. But in theory it could do most anything you would want it to do—crash a computer, gather information—”

“What information?”

She shrugged. “Whatever you want. Credit card numbers, accounts, names and addresses, whatever payload you wanted.”

“But the bot is only part of the program, right?”

She nodded. “Yeah, you have the worm or the virus that delivers it and then the payload—what it is supposed to get, or do.”

“So why would Locke have sent you this now?”

Sage took a deep breath, meeting his eyes. “I’m not sure, but I guess it’s a clue. He said he’d finished the program, and he can’t just mean the bot. But he and I used to talk….” She drifted off, looking away, and Ian honed in, wondering what made her so uncomfortable all of a sudden.

“Talk about what?”

“I had this idea. You know, just a crazy idea, mostly. Most viruses attack computers—they mess up the networks, but they hit fast and hard, like the distributed denial-of-service attacks that hobbled major online companies in 2000. That makes them easy to detect and deal with within a few days. They do damage, cost money, but they are more or less controllable.”

“And? What was your idea?”

“I just thought that wasn’t enough. We were supposed to be trying to disable the companies we were objecting to—those who abuse third-world workers, who pollute the environment and deceive their workforces and their customers.”

“Your ‘cause.’”

She nodded. “But I couldn’t see how individual attacks were doing all that much damage. A lot of hacking is social—you know, engineering relationships so they will work for you, allow you to get access or information. That’s the basis of the markets, as well—people have to trust the seller to keep the markets going.”

EJ had turned, paying close attention to Sage as she spoke. She was caught up in explaining now, her eyes bright with excitement.

“So I thought instead of these massive attacks that were debilitating but only temporarily, how could we really disable these corporations? We had to do it by disrupting the relationship they have with the consumer.”

“So you needed to infect the consumer as well as the company,” EJ said.

Sage sat back in her seat. “Yes, but not just their computers, their minds—affect how they think about online commerce. So I came up with this idea that you could send out millions of these bots. They would collect information as people made online purchases and send it back to a central database. Until they were supposed to do something, they would just sit quietly, un
noticed. They work very slowly, very stealthily, to avoid detection.”

“Then what? What do they do?” Ian couldn’t help being drawn in, as well, though he tried to maintain an objective attitude. Her story was like a good murder mystery.

“At a certain point a program would be executed that would start employing the information gathered by bots and infecting the transactions people made were making with online companies. For example, if they bought a pound of coffee, they would be charged for ten—things that seemed like normal errors, on individual accounts everywhere. Little at a time, though, and not all in one place.”

“Bogging down the companies with fixing bad transactions,” Ian chimed in.

“Right. But scale was the key—small bugs but so widely distributed that it made a real mess. It ends up discrediting the online commerce system, ruining the public trust in making online purchases. The program could be implemented over weeks, maybe even months, and eventually it would crash the trust people have in e-commerce. Vendors could fix it, but it’s so small and slow, and companies would be in deep before they realized what was even there. People would be very hesitant to buy anything online anymore.”

“Christ.” EJ’s exclamation was a whisper. Ian just stared at Sage.

“And you actually wrote this thing?”

She shook her head, balking a little now. “No, I
could barely write this little bot and get it to work. This was just brainstorming, you know, kicking around big ideas. But to actually be able to pull something like this off would take much more talent than I had. And a lot of time. It’s a pretty enormous project.”

“But maybe Locke did it? He finished it?”

She looked at him, her eyes serious. “Sounds like it. He had the time. You were asking what he’d been up to for the last five years, well…this could be it.”

“Is there a way to find out what companies are targeted? Warn them?”

She shook her head. “You can guess it will be major retailers. I remember some of the ones we were after, but it’s a crapshoot, depending on where consumers buy. You could hypothetically target it, I suppose, by tracking purchases and consumer records, but that would take a lot of time. Anyway, there’s another problem. EJ found it.”

“What’s that?”

“The new bot is booby-trapped, for all practical purposes. There’s a notation about a fail-safe in it that if Locke doesn’t send the right command or gets shut down before it executes, it fatally crashes every computer it’s planted in.”

“Which could be millions?”

“Yes. Or more.”

“So there’s no way to stop it?”

“You’d have to get his computer—his mainframe—and shut it down from there before it executes. There’s
no way to tell where all the bots are and no real way to know all the companies he’s hitting, at least not at first.”

Ian walked over and stared out the window. Millions of computers crashed, paralyzing businesses, hospitals, governments, schools, personal computers—wherever these little programs had buried themselves—or a massive attack on e-commerce. Great choices. He turned back to Sage and EJ.

“I guess we have to find him then, and fast. According to the note he left with the disk, we can assume Tuesday’s the day he plans to execute the program, in honor of your release. That gives us three days. Let’s hope it’s enough.”

S
AGE’S EYES WERE BLURRING
. She and EJ had been sitting at the computer all day, digging deeper into the code, seeing what other hidden goodies they could find. Ian had been in the background, on the phone, though a few times when she had peeped out to see what he was doing, his charged glance had locked with hers as he’d continued speaking softly into the phone, not missing a beat.