Final Victim Page 8

  "You're a prize" was all she said.

  He got behind the wheel, slightly pissed, and threw the handcuffs into the glove compartment. Malavida got into the back; Karen sat up front.

  They pulled past the street gang, headed back to 605, and got on, going west. They rode in silence. Karen knew, Malavida wouldn't run. She had seen it in his eyes when he pleaded with them to take off the cuffs, and again when he first hugged his mother. He would never run with Elena watching. He worshiped her. It startled Karen that John Lockwood didn't know that. And then she remembered what she'd read in Lockwood's file: He'd never known his mother. His mother had been the system. For Karen, it explained everything about him.

  Chapter 11

  CRACKING

  They arrived back at the wood-frame house in Studio City at 1:30. Lockwood rang the doorbell and, after a minute, Claire opened the door. The first thing he noticed was she had cut her hair. It was in a helmet cut that would have been ugly on most women, but Claire was startlingly beautiful, and it somehow flattered her strong Scandinavian features. The short hair gave her an efficient, streamlined, no-bullshit look that he assumed was an asset in her new job at the media-buying firm of Latham, Brown, and Forbes.

  They exchanged deadpan "Hi's," and then she opened the door a little further, her eyes sweeping the street where Malavida and Karen were unloading equipment from the trunk of the LeBaron. The early afternoon sun was hot and a slight breeze ruffled the maple leaves on the pretty flower-lined street. He followed her gaze.

  "They're working the case with me. I was wondering if we could hook a computer to your phone. It's a long-distance call, but I'll pay time and charges-"

  "I see nothing much has changed," she said.

  "That's not fair, Claire. I'm out here on business. If I'd gone to the Federal Building, I wouldn't have had time to see Heather. I couldn't just drop them on a street corner." He felt himself trudging onto a familiar battlefield that, experience told him, would be won by neither of them. He knew they were only a few shots away from a series of low blows that would suck them down the drain of mutual disappointment. He tried to stop it. "Please, let's not do this…"

  "Okay, John, let's not." She opened the door for him. Lockwood motioned Malavida and Karen to come in. They carried the armloads of computer equipment into the house.

  The house was strictly Claire. French Provincial. Oversize chintz-covered furniture stood against flowered wallpaper like overfed visitors.

  He introduced her to Karen Dawson and Malavida Chacone, and thought with dread that it was a testament to the death of their relationship that Claire had not shown a single twinge of jealousy on being introduced to the beautiful criminologist. His ex-wife led them into the den. Malavida and Karen started setting up the equipment on the desk next to the phone.

  "Where's Heather?" Lockwood asked.

  "She's out back. I didn't tell her you were coming, because sometimes, as you recall, you didn't."

  Lockwood absorbed that shot as well. He was determined not to put the gloves on with Claire. He found his way to the backyard where his daughter had set up an easel and was painting with a brush. As he got nearer, he could see she was painting a horse in remarkably accurate proportions.

  "Hi, baby…"

  She turned and, for a moment, stood frozen. He filed away a mental snapshot for the book of memories he kept in his head. She was a miniature Claire. It was as if his gene pool had not even entered the mix. She was beautiful, with her mother's blond hair and blue eyes. Then she unfroze and yelled "Daddy!" as she ran toward him. He wrapped her in his arms, holding her. He could smell her child's fragrance and was instantly aware all over again of how much he had lost. He recalled how each time he had disappointed Heather or Claire, there had seemed to be no other answer; yet when he stood back and viewed the whole ten years, he knew he had been lying to himself and to them. His job had always been the obsession he couldn't control. Whenever he was on the hunt, something he didn't understand overtook him… a need to win, a competitiveness that couldn't be compromised. The job made horrendous demands on his life and was loaded with deadlines, court cases, depositions, stakeouts, surveillances, and drug busts. If he didn't take the junk off the streets, other men's children could die. It was a rationale that vacillated between religion and excuse. Right now, as he held his ten-year-old daughter, he knew it was also a betrayal of his parental obligation.

  "Daddy, how long can you stay? Will you take me to the zoo?"

  His voice was thin as he uttered the words one more time, "I can't, honey. I have a meeting tomorrow morning in Washington, so I have to leave tonight." And then he looked up and saw Claire watching through the window. Her expression told him that, without hearing, she knew what he had just said.

  The den was small, but there was a nice French Provincial desk where they set up the laptop, unpacked the large monitor from its box, and connected it. Malavida attached the modem and, when Karen was not looking, he slipped a disk out of his tool kit into the laptop, and typed a quick sequence, starting a logging program which would lurk in the background and save everything that was typed in. The last thing he did was unroll his favorite poster: Snoopy, with his straight-line smile, in his trusty red biplane, scarf flying. He taped it to the desk in front of him. "Good-luck charm," he said to Karen. "We're set up now, but first we need to log into a host computer. How 'bout the one at U. S. Customs in D. C.?" he asked. "If you have a local dial-up, we won't stick Lockwood's ex with the phone bill."

  "Good idea."

  "You know the login password and the access codes?"

  She sat in front of the terminal and then looked at him. "It's confidential. You'll have to turn your back or, better still, go stand across the room."

  "Sure." He got up and moved to the far side of the room and looked out the window. " 'Cept for dream furloughs, I only got outta Lompoc once last year and that was for my appeal, which was denied. It's good to be on the outside," he said, looking out on the tree-shaded street.

  "Dream furloughs?" She looked at him; his back was to her.

  "That's where you dream you're out of prn… It's a freedom dream. It's not as good as this, but it's better than nothing." While he talked, she typed in the local phone number to access the U. S. Customs dial-up. The modem beeped out the Touch-Tones and the screen said:

  CONNECT 57600 uscs6 login:

  She checked to see if Malavida was still looking out the window. He seemed lost in thought. She entered her username, "redwltch," and password, "67930*M"; then the screen said:

  U. S. CUSTOMS COMPUTER NET, WASHINGTON, D. C. WELCOME redwitch

  "I'm in," she said.

  He turned from the window and crossed to her. He didn't yet know what he would do with it, but his keyboard logging program on the diskette had secretly copied her entire login procedure. He could now access the Customs computer anytime he wanted, with her login and password. He sat down at the terminal and faced the screen.

  "Okay, what's this remailer called again?" he asked.

  "Pennet."

  "You got the address?" He closed the keyboard log. As she retrieved the address from her purse, he popped the diskette out and slipped it into his pocket. "Okay, let's use the Customs computer as our host…"

  "But we've been locked out of Pennet from that computer," she reminded him.

  "Won't matter. We're going to telnet to another account that I have… That way, the Pennet computer will be reading an account which is not banned by their telnet. They won't see the Customs computer at all, even if they finger us."

  "Okay," Karen said, and wiggled in her seat with excitement. She knew a finger program was a tracer, an identification program.

  "Do we have ignition?" He grinned at her.

  "We have ignition." She smiled back.

  "Snoopy is cleared for takeoff," he said. He telnetted to one of his accounts:

  Telnet redbar3. Cc. Rutledge. Edu Trying 192.168.43.127…

  And then:

 
Connected to redbar3. Cc. Rutledge. Edu Escape character Is 'Ar

  SunOS UNIX (redbar3)

  login:

  He typed "snoopy" and his password. When he was logged into his own account, he telnetted to Pennet at the Internet address:

  rIng2Ice. Anon. Pennet. No

  Then it gave its greeting, now familiar to Karen:

  Connected to ring2Icesanon. Pennet. No Escape character is 'AY

  SunOS UNIX (rIng2Ice)

  login:

  "Instead of trying to crack it right off," he said, "let's just get on the system first and go for a low-level program like a new users' menu." "Whatever that is…" she said.

  "New users' menu… sort of lets them get to know us and vice versa. This is a secure computer whose main service is to protect the identities of senders. They'll keep us in a protective shell, so we can't crack through to the inside where the good stuff is. We've gotta penetrate that. Sometimes, it's easier from a low-level program like a new users' menu."

  "Never thought of that. Esta de pelos. Andamos con mcis despacho, chico," she rattled at him in Spanish, telling him, "That's cool, let's get started, buddy."

  He looked over at her and they traded smiles of excitement. "You speak Spanish?" he asked, surprised.

  "Spanish, French, Greek, Latin, and psychobabble. Lockwood might have been ready to let you talk to your mother in a language he didn't understand, but I checked out every word."

  Malavida realized that if she had understood everything he had said to his mother without indicating anything, he would have to be more careful with her. She might not be as big a mark as he thought.

  Malavida logged in as a new user. The system let him on, assigned him a new username, and made him choose a new password, then asked if he would like to see the new users' menu.

  "Let's go for it." He typed "y" for yes and got a menu on screen of things new users could do on the system, among them:

  E)nter Bulletin Board System L)eave message for SysAdmin

  "Let's try the 'Leave message for SysAdmin,' " Malavida said. "He's a jerk. I've already had a brush with him."

  " 'Cause you went right at him. I'm gonna look real harmless. The `Leave message' option should put us into electronic mail. That's a good one for us. E-mail is an easier program to use to crack out of this protective shell. Because e-mail has to be able to write to everyone's account, it's tougher for them to protect."

  He typed "L" and the top of the screen now said:

  PICO

  "Yesssssss," he said and pumped a fist.

  "What is it?"

  "We're in e-mail. PICO is a little text editor, sort of a memo writer or scaled-down word processor used on most UNIX-based systems like Pennet for typing up e-mail messages."

  "What now?" Karen said.

  "Now that we're in and we know exactly what editor they're using for e-mail, we can use some of its own internal commands to break out and get to the underlying UNIX system prompt where we can talk directly to the computer, using its own language. This is where it gets tricky, but with a little practice and a jacker cracker, sus ordenes magnificos"-he bowed slightly-"I'm gonna make this jukebox do the right thing." And as he spoke, his fingers flew across the keyboard. He typed in:

  Ctrl-X

  That put him in at the exit options menu of PICO.

  send; abort; e)dlt;…

  In order to keep PICO running without having the system dump him back to the users' menu, he typed:

  Ctrl-Z

  They waited until the screen said:

  Stopped (signal)

  "Win-win! We're out of the shell," he said, grinning. "Compared to the Pentagon, this is like stealing from a cart vendor."

  "Are you confessing to hacking into the Pentagon computer?" She smiled.

  "Aren't you supposed t'read me my rights before askin' a question like that?" Then he grinned. "Some people get high smoking crack, I get high doing a crack. Right now, this system is good as jacked."

  "What's next?" she said, still looking at the screen with amazement.

  "We see who else is talking to this thing. First we type in `ps,' which stands for process or program and can show us everything running. We'll give ps three switches: an 'a,' which stands for all people using, `u' for user info, and 'x' so ps will even show us processes which have no controlling terminal." He typed:

  ps-aux

  And up on screen flashed:

  USER PID %CPU %MEM… TT STAT START TIME COMMAND

  lover 18083 76.9 0.5… r5 R 23:06 0:00 ps-aux rat 18077 7.7 0.3… pf S 23:19 0:00 /usr/ucb/bbs balsa 17024 0.0 0.0… qb IW 00:06 0:00 /usr/ucb/bbs

  The list went on for about twenty lines.

  "What's all that?" she said.

  "That's who's on the remailer computer right now and what they're running. It's very thin because it's past midnight or something in Norway." He pointed to one of the symbols under the COMMAND column. "BBS stands for Bulletin Board System. Okay, since we don't have a password, let's see if we can spoof one of these users into giving us his."

  "How we gonna do that?"

  "We'll send one of them a message that nobody but him will see. We'll get him to log off and then log back in, but we'll be lurking here. Then we'll snarf his login with my special foo file. Okay, let's finger one of these users."

  "I thought a finger was a tracking program."

  "Backfinger is a sort of tracking program to see who was fingering you. Finger gets info on a user. Let's pick one of these first three guys, here. You're looking for a sex criminal… How 'bout Mr. Rat? He sounds scummy." Malavida hunkered over the keyboard and typed in "finger-m rat," and in response, the screen printed out:

  Login name: ratIn real life: WindMinstrel

  Directory: /alumnl3/ratShell: /bin/csh

  On since April 14 21:33:09 on ttyr3 from tropic. Seas. ufla. Edu No unread mail

  "In real life, Wind Minstrel. What's that?"

  "In real life his name is whatever it is, but Mr. Rat doesn't want to tell his or her real-life name. He's using a computer alias… Wind Minstrel. I like it. Very cool." He studied the screen. "Okay, the good news here is this tells us what host computer Wind Minstrel is using. It's a box named 'tropic' at Science and Engineering Administration Services at the University of Florida."

  Malavida went into his cracking tool kit, pulled out another disk, and slid it into his PC. He typed "sz," sending the file to his new user's account on Pennet, a file he called "F00." It was a program he had written which would send a phony error message.

  "Okay. Now, what I'm trying to do is create a phony system message on Mr. Rat's screen so he will think he has to log in again, and when he does, I'll steal his login and password," Malavida said, grinning. Then he typed:

  FOO-ttyr3-root@

  "This program's gonna tell Mr. Rat to log in again." On his screen, Malavida showed Karen the message that was being sent to The Rat's computer:

  Message from root@ring2Ice. Anon. Pennet. No

  FATAL STACK ERROR

  ACCOUNT PROCESSES HALTED PLEASE LOGIN AGAIN.

  ring2Ice login:

  "How do you know it's saying that?"

  " 'Cause that's what I programmed it to say. It's total bullshit." He smiled at her.

  "Cool." She smiled back, but was beginning to get lost. She had a 180 IQ, but didn't have enough ground-level information to understand all of this. She made a mental note to pick up some more books on computer hacking in the U. S. Customs crime lab and speed-read them as soon as she got back to Washington.

  On the screen, The Rat logged in again with his username and password:

  rat Mut118oR

  "We got it. Write this down," Malavida said as Karen grabbed a pen. "We're really in," she said.

  "Now all we have to do is follow The Rat to his chat room. That part is a snap. Then we'll just make ourselves look like him and slip in behind."

  Out in the backyard, Lockwood and Heather were talking quietly. She was telling him about her riding lessons.


  "Daddy, you wouldn't believe how big he is. And I'm taking lessons twice a week. He's so beautiful. He's a Morgan gelding, but my teacher says he's sixteen hands tall. That's as big as an Arabian."

  "That's great, honey. I'd love to come see when you have a dressage program."

  "I'll call and tell you. This time, I promise… I'll give you plenty of warning." The remark stung him slightly.

  Karen stuck her head out the back door. "John, you'd better get in here. You aren't going to believe this… "

  Chapter 12

  CHATTING

  The Rat was on the same wooden chair that Shirley always made him sit on when she found out he'd dbeyed the sanctity of the covenant or eaten chocolate or, worse still, the meat they served at the school cafeteria. He could never lie to her, because when he tried, he always lowered his head to avoid her scathing eyes. It was a reflex he couldn't control. If he got caught lying, it always ended up with the fire… She would take him down to the basement and yell at him until he admitted he was foul and ugly. She would leave him there and he would sit on the straight-backed wooden chair, wondering if maybe this time she would not burn him, but she would always come back down later and light the candles.

  He knew he was the anti-type of the great mosaic of her faith and that he had not yet begun his hateful journey. Shirley had told him his journey of penance would last two thousand and three hundred days, until he came to his final event, which would be the cleansing and the sanctity of his spirit. She hinted that she knew a way to avoid taking the journey, but she had not told him how or even when that six-year journey would begin. His mistake had been setting fire to the house before he knew all the answers. He had been waiting now for twelve terrible years for his journey through hell. The ax of its awful arrival hung heavy over him, its weight crushing his spirit, slowly turning him into a worthless creature who hid from God and scurried in the dark. Only when he was The Wind Minstrel did it change… but the change was both relief and agony.