Final Victim Read online

  It was almost 5:30 P. M. on Sunday afternoon as he sat in the hot enclosed space, the little generator motor purring outside. The shallow tidewater lapped at the side of the huge empty metal hull. There was no breeze and the afternoon Florida heat and humidity were oppressive in the windowless enclosure. He was deep inside an old rusted garbage barge that had once served the businesses on the Little Manatee River. He had bought it when he saw the name in faded letters on the stern.

  He was wearing only his Jockey underwear, and his own foul-smelling, sour sweat was all over him. His big, corpulent thighs glistened. Slick, smooth, and white, they were like the underbellies of dead fish. His computer was on an old wooden school desk in front of him. He had a surge protector on the power line leading from the generator.. but something must have happened, because he got the stack error message from the Systems Administrator at Pennet, then he had logged off with Satan and had just reentered the Pennet system. Once accepted, he had shot through cyberspace and returned to the locked chat room that he shared once a week with Satan. He was telnetting from his site to a second site where he had an account under a different username.

  Then he would telnet from there to Pennet. He had also set his client-mode to invisible, and the chat channel to private. He had created it that way for security, because he and Satan often discussed their killings.

  Satan was one of his special gods. He had vision and strength and was never afraid, even now as he sat in prn on death row in Oslo, Norway. He was an unrestrained carnal visionary. The Rat had read about him in a Death Metal fan magazine. His real name was Peter Van Wilkinsen. Satan Wolf was his stage name, and he was the lead singer for the band Necrophiliac. He was on death row for killing a rival band's lead singer on stage, stabbing him twenty-three times during a battle of the bands that got out of control and turned into a riot. The Rat thought it was a glorious act that gave the singer eternal value.

  Satan Wolf was the god of Death Metal. There were a few promising imitators, like Satan T. Bone, in Tampa, but they had not yet achieved the dimension of the original. Talking to Satan Wolf always made The Rat's skin begin to glow as if he were in the beginnings of a transformation. But he knew he was not. He had just coveted in Atlanta and the sensation of transforming took at least a week, sometimes two. The tingling in his nipples and on his skin was just a reminder of what was lying there, waiting to release and glorify him.

  "Where did you go?" Satan Wolf typed onto the screen from Oslo. "I had a stack error," The Rat replied.

  "Tell me more about Atlanta. You have cut off the arms of this whore, this cunt. You have severed her limbs, which are worthless, lustful appendages. How did it feel? Did you taste her blood this time? It has been a week. How did it feel?"

  Satan always wanted him to taste flesh or blood, but meat of any kind was forbidden and punished by fire. He didn't understand that The Rat first coveted, then The Wind Minstrel possessed. They had been corresponding for six months, always at the same time on Sunday. Sunday was a good time for The Rat because it was God's day of rest, and he felt he could better elude His watchful vengeance. It was good for Satan Wolf because the prn staff in Oslo was at half-strength on Sunday, and there was nobody watching him while he used the computer late into the night in the prn law library. He was supposed to be working on his appeal. They left him in the locked room, chained to the floor. He always took a break around midnight and met The Rat in their secret place.

  "I have not finished. I have one more victim… My final victim will complete the Beast. She will then be reborn. The answers will be clear. It will also prove the bitch Shirley was wrong. Man can be immortal. The wicked do not suffer punishment in eternal hell and are not destroyed or annihilated in a special mosaic of cleansing."

  There was a short wait and then Satan replied:

  "Enough about this. I've told you each session I can't use your religious rantings. Tell me about your kills. About the mutilations…"

  Again there was a short lull as The Rat wondered how somebody he held in such regard could not see the religious significance, but it was always this way. Then he typed:

  "I must transform every week or two. The coveting begins much earlier now… sometimes on Monday. I have tried to slow it down; sometimes I can stop it by preparing gifts. Twice I have sent totems to people I admire. I have sent things that don't matter in shoe boxes. I didn't need the hands from the one in Atlanta…"

  Satan replied: "You must send me something wet."

  As The Rat was reading this reply, his heart froze. He saw a small rectangle flashing in the upper right-hand corner of his screen. A back-finger program he had running in the background had just notified him that somebody had fingered him at Pennet. Someone knew he was there! He quickly did a names command to show him everyone on the private channel. He saw his own alias, WindMinstrel, listed twice. But he had logged out when the stack error occurred and had only logged back in once. He wondered if somebody had snarfed his password when he reentered the system and was now trying to hide on the channel, pretending to be him. His heart slammed in his chest, but he didn't panic. The Rat was cunning. He didn't tell Satan of his suspicion, because it would notify the eavesdropper that he had seen him. The Rat started a second screen session and took a look at the backfinger log to try to locate the intruder without alerting him. He could only do this as long as the intruder stayed online. Once the intruder's telephone connection was broken, it would be almost impossible to trace. He quietly went to work tracing the second WindMinstrel coming into the private chat channel, trying to trace it back through cyberspace to its place of origin.

  In the second window, his backfinger log showed the site he had been fingered from:

  redbar3. Cc. Rutledge. Edu

  It was a university in the United States, although it couldn't show him who at that site had fingered him. He hacked out to a system prompt and used ps to list all processes or programs connected to Pennet. There was only one:

  USER PID%CPU %MEM… TT STAT START TIME

  snoopy 14232 70.6.06… r6 R17:12 0:00

  COMMAND

  /usr/ucb/telnet rIng2Ice. Anon. Pennet. No

  He then fingered that account, all the while keeping up his communication with Satan, talking about things of no importance. Satan was becoming frustrated and began demanding more bloody information about his Atlanta kill. In minutes, The Rat's finger command revealed the host computer:

  Login name: snoopyIn real life: RedBaron

  Directory: /redbar3/snoopyShell: /binicsh

  On since April 14 17:09:23 on ttyr6

  from uscs6. Fedworld. Ustreas. Custms. Gov

  His brilliant, twisted mind was now spinning with thoughts of survival. U. S. Customs? His fat, gluttonous body glistened with sweat. The Rat knew he couldn't safely finger a U. S. Treasury host directly and let some backfinger they had set up get a log entry on him. He'd have to go in some other way, get in and out like lightning, disconnecting from the Treasury host before someone started fingering him. His mind was racing. He knew now that he'd been followed into his invisible chat channel after the stack error. The Rat knew the sendmail program on any system always had to have high-level access rights since it had to be able to write and receive e-mail. Sendmail was notorious across the Net for security holes. CERT, the Computer Emergency Response Team, was constantly posting security hole bulletins.

  As he set up a packet-sniffer on the incoming mail port, The Rat typed a message of praise to Satan. Messages telling Satan of his glory always mollified him:

  "You are more beautiful than death. You are the god of fuck and mutilation," he wrote.

  Then he wrote a program which would spoof sendmail at the Treasury host into executing a set of commands. He would have sendmail "grab" out all listings of telnet sessions to redbar3. Cc. Rutledge. Edu. He would be waiting…

  The instant it rolled off the top of his window, he hit ‹Ctrl›-‹C› and killed off his connection to rutledge.

  He looked throug
h the scrollback buffer and saw:

  Login name: redwitchIn real life: Karen Dawson

  Directory: /staff10/redwitchShell: /bin/csh

  On since April 14 17:02:51 on ttyr6 from USCS-stc5. Gov

  It looked like this Karen Dawson person was logged via a modern from a Pacific Telephone POP (Point-of-Presence) in Studio City, California. Now, if only Karen Dawson would just stay logged on. He set his packet-sniffer on each phone connection to the POP, then set up a second window, which was the exact duplicate of the session he was having with Satan in his first window. That was the connection he would use to trace Karen Dawson.

  He popped another disk into his PC from his kit. This one generated DTMF tones, "Touch-Tones" of a sort. In particular they generated an inquiry sequence similar to Caller ID. This had been designed by the phone company to allow customers to trigger an identification of any number on their system that was currently in use. It was a tracking device.

  The Rat had his program send the tones. They left his computer in Florida and went through an intermediate host into the Electroinc Switching System at UCLA and over to the 5-ESS switch in Studio City, California. Then the signal was traced back through The Rat's telnet connections and printed:

  818/555-7693

  The Rat knew he could easily get the address for this number, so he ended his conversation with Satan and shut off his equipment. Whoever had done this to him was brilliant, but The Rat now knew he was better. He had back-traced the intruder without her ever knowing. He stood up, his white body glistening in the sauna-like heat. The walls seemed to close in on him. He lumbered up the metal ladder, out onto the deck of the rusting garbage barge. The late-afternoon sun had turned the heavy cloud-strewn Florida sky orange. He didn't see its beauty. A horrifying thought had just struck him: Maybe this intrusion was the beginning of the two-thousand-three-hundred-day journey? Maybe his six years of torture had just started? He knew he could never survive it… but could he stop it? Could he close the door of redemptive cleansing once it had been opened? He didn't know the rules. Shirley had taken all the knowledge with her. He didn't have the answers. How could he find out?

  He ran across the weeds and brambles in his bare feet and underwear, not even feeling the thorns. His run was always sort of a gallop… They had teased him about it in grade school. He had looked stupid, slow, and uncoordinated on the playground, galloping as he ran. The sun was almost down when he got home. The pale moon was coming up over the swamp. He could hear the night birds flying low, hitting their wings against the swampy water. Insects keened in the humid darkness. When he got to the house, he ran downstairs and crouched in the corner of the basement, out of breath. He huddled there as the sweat cooled on his body. The Rat was vile and wretched, but his mind was clear.

  "The cornered Rat will fight," he said, his voice a harsh whisper. He was already in terrible pain and he knew he couldn't stand the agony of the two thousand and three hundred days of redemptive punishment that Shirley had promised him. He knew he had to attack this clever eavesdropper. If he killed him, maybe it would close the door of his eternal cleansing.

  ***

  When the screen went dark in Claire's den, it took a moment before the three of them said anything. The first to speak was Malavida: "That is one very sick puppy.

  "I told you this remailer was a cesspool!" Karen said in triumph.

  "It could just be a couple of white squirrels getting off, trying to horrify each other," Lockwood said, not really believing it. The ungodly nature of the messages rang true.

  Karen got up from her seat and started pacing around the room. "You don't believe that and neither do I… All that religious stuff, all that ersatz fire and brimstone, that's Grade A sexual repression. 'The wicked do not suffer punishment in the eternal hell and are not destroyed or annihilated in a special mosaic of cleansing.'… That sure ain't 'Onward Christian Soldiers.' "

  Karen Dawson impressed Malavida more and more.

  "Listen, guys… this is something. I know it," she said. "The Rat sounds like a serial psychopath. According to him, he's on a two-week degenerating cycle. He said the coveting begins much earlier now, and he has to slow it down by mailing totems."

  "What's a totem?" Malavida asked.

  "It's a trophy," Lockwood said. "A body part… In this case, it sounds like he sent someone a hand."

  "Get the fuck outta here," Malavida said in shock.

  "Look, we've gotta go cross-check this through the FBI's VICAP serial crime computer in Washington," Karen said. "He said he killed and mutilated somebody in Atlanta. There's got to be a record of that.

  Let's get outta here." She moved to the desk and started to help Malavida unhook the modem from the phone and disconnect the monitor from the PC.

  "We gotta get Malavida back to Lompoc," Lockwood reminded her. "I gotta drop him at the Burbank sub-station. I've made arrangements with the L. A. Sheriff to transport him up there tonight."

  Malavida had been dreading this moment and now he made his play. "You're making a mistake, Jefe," he said. It was one of the few times he looked straight at Lockwood.

  "I'm sure I am, but it happens all the time, so I don't let it bother me."

  Malavida finished unhooking the computer and they moved the stuff into the living room, where Claire was standing with Heather.

  "This guy constructed an invisible chat channel on the Internet," Malavida continued. "You know how hard that is to do? Forget for a moment that he's going around killing people. This guy is a real ace computer hacker. Nobody but me would have ever found that room, let alone gotten in there. He may even know we cracked in." That thought had been bothering Malavida. In his haste, he had not bothered to mask their location. "If he does know we were lurking, he'll be even tougher to find. If you ever want to catch him, you're gonna need me. Nobody else could do it. Certainly not that bunch of middle-lane road dogs you got working for you in Customs. I'll shoot this puke down… You got the Snoopy double-your-money-back guarantee."

  "That's great, but I still have to get you back to the Federal pen or take a pile of heat, and I still have to catch the six o'clock flight out of Burbank to make my Internal Affairs hearing Monday morning."

  "Take me with you, Karen," Malavida said, his eyes turning soft as a puppy in the pound. "I can help you. Honest, I can. What good am I gonna do you in prn? You'll be wasting a generic resource."

  "Wasting a generic resource?" Lockwood said, amazed.

  Then Karen nodded her head. "You should've seen him. He went through that computer's security like he had Nintendo magic mushrooms. I can't do what he can. Our only other choice is to just walk away from this, and I think this Wind Minstrel guy, or Rat or whoever he is, is white-hot. He's degenerating. If he's for real, he could kill again in two weeks or less."

  "Okay," Lockwood said after almost no thought. "I'm probably gonna get benched by IA tomorrow anyway. I might as well go ahead and clobber my pension while I'm at it."

  They loaded the stuff in the trunk of the LeBaron, and Lockwood went back to say good-bye to Heather. Claire was standing by the door with her hands on her hips and watched while he hugged and kissed his daughter. Then he faced Claire. She was so beautiful he was momentarily stopped. The afternoon light played on her face and made his heart ache… How could he have let this divorce happen? He could find no words, so he walked back across the street, but she dogged him. When he turned and faced her, he was looking into ice-cold Nordic blue eyes.

  "Thanks for bringing a convict over to meet our daughter, John."

  "Claire, he's just a computer hacker. He wouldn't hurt anybody."

  "One of these days, you're gonna get a sobering experience. I just hope it grows you up before somebody else gets hurt." Then she turned and walked back across the street and into the house. She never looked back.

  Chapter 13

  BACKTRACK

  At seven o'clock Sunday evening, the blue-and-white Citation jet climbed out of a dingy brown smogbank that was chok
ing L. A. and headed east across the San Gabriel Mountains.

  Before it was seized by the U. S. Customs, the plane had belonged to a Colombian drug dealer who had outfitted it with a TV, videos, and electronic games. Malavida had found some Nintendo software and hooked it up. He had his feet up on the couch, halfheartedly playing Donkey Kong, gonzoing dinosaurs and collecting massive bunches of electronic bananas, while Karen began to construct a criminal profile of the man they had found on Pennet. She took out a yellow legal pad. Under "The Rat," she wrote: "a. K. A. 'Wind Minstrel'-male, probably Caucasian. Twenty-five to thirty-five, organized, compulsive, bad self-image… nocturnal?"

  Across the aisle, Lockwood was on the Airfone trying to hose down an angry Harvey Knox.

  "Look, Harvey, I know what you're saying and, believe me, if I could have gotten him back there by Sunday night, I would have. But this thing just started growing on me. I can't let him go back for a couple more days. You gotta call the prn for me, give 'em the big okey-dokey from DOJ."

  "John, you kill me. I told you this was in the margin to begin with." Harvey's voice squeaked over the Airfone.

  "Yeah, I know, but he's in custody, cuffed to a bed. Wanna talk to him?" He didn't wait for an answer. He put his hand over the receiver. "Hey, Malavida, pause that thing. This is Mr. Harvey Knox… He's your stay-out-of-jail card, so be nice. The answer to any question he asks is: 'Mr. Lockwood told me I can't say anything about that.' "

  Malavida paused the Donkey Kong and moved back and took the phone. "This is Malavida Chacone. It's a pleasure to talk to you, Mr. Knox," he said in perfect, unaccented English.

  "Where are you guys? You in Lompoc?" Harvey asked.

  "Well, sir, Mr. Lockwood said I can't say anything about that." He looked over at Lockwood who raised his eyebrow and nodded approval. "But, sir… I'm being very well guarded, and I promise there will be no problem, and I think I'm really helping the U. S. Prosecutor with this case."