01-01-00 (21 page)

Susan shook her head.

I bet,
she thought, staring at the color screen, deep inside still considering the possibility that Bloodaxe was either the creator of this virus or perhaps was using it as a way to meet some other goal or secret agenda.

Susan remembered the section of code in the virus that she had been unable to translate, the one that would be executed on 01-01-00. She had E-mailed that section to Bloodaxe the day before in the hope that he would be able to decode it.

She broke the chat connection and proceeded to review her E-mail, importing the C
++
program containing the refined Scent-Sniffer programs. Launching her system's C
++
compiler, she converted Bloodaxe's source code into an executable file, and ran a test case in a secured directory of her hard drive, monitoring how the Scent code infected the files in the petri directory. Unlike the previous Scent, this one mutated every time it replicated itself. She then launched the Sniffers, which also replicated themselves, just as a virus would, but instead of attacking any file at random, its execution subroutine commanded the Sniffers to seek out their individual Scents, matched by a two-byte-long mutation code. Given the proximity of the Scents, the Sniffers immediately began to bark, converging onto their targets in a millisecond.

Susan decided that the code seemed ready, and she deployed it across the Internet before logging off and preparing to head into work. It was going to be another long day.

2

Hans Bloodaxe stood patiently in the long breakfast line formed along a narrow, poorly lit corridor leading to the mess hall. The food lines at Haynesville sometimes lasted for an hour or more, depending on the number of fights among the inmates, which had a tendency to slow things down. Hungry inmates from various cell blocks took turns at lining up for their daily meals. Bloodaxe's group was next, roughly one hundred men, most of them serving sentences ranging anywhere from twenty years to life.

Someone whacked him in the head.

“Hey!” Bloodaxe turned around.

“Hey, moron.”

The hacker frowned, rubbing the back of his head. The large African-American guard had apparently taken a special liking to him. Bloodaxe had learned during his first week here that the guard had lost his savings because a hacker had wrecked the company he had invested in.

“Yes, sir?” he muttered.

“Come with me.”

“How about my break—”

Whack.

“All right, man! Damn!”

The corpulent guard led him through one of the cell blocks, a long, damp, and murky corridor flanked by two-man cells, each with its own sink and toilet, many of which got backed up every day. The putrid stench struck him like a moist breeze as the guard made him step up the pace, exiting at the other end of the quiet block, through a thick metal door that screeched after he unlocked it.

“Where are we going?” Bloodaxe asked.

“Shut up, moron. Keep walking.”

Bloodaxe complied, heading into the large warehouse building connected to the kitchen. Then a sharp object struck him behind the head and all went dark.

The prison's main entrance and visitor's center faced north. The south end of the prison grounds was bordered by double chain-link fences separated by a gravel walkway patrolled by guard dogs, Dobermans. A single gate connected the access road curving up from the highway a mile away to the central kitchen and storage buildings. Used mostly by delivery trucks, the gate was lightly guarded and only used on weekdays, like today. No one questioned the blue and gold dairy truck that approached the rear gate, its arrival time matching that of the day's log. The double gates slid back and the guards waved it through. It continued on to the single delivery dock behind the kitchen building, where it made its normal delivery. Before it headed back, two guards loaded a large box onto the rear of the truck and covered it with a canvas. One of the guards was the African-American, who that day would become twenty thousand dollars richer, four times the amount of money he had lost two years ago to a hacker.

3

“He's
what?
” Susan Garnett leaned forward on her chair at work.

“Gone, ma'am,” replied the warden's assistant at Haynesville, where the FBI analyst had just phoned to set up another appointment with Bloodaxe.

Susan clutched the phone tight against her ear. The noon sun shone bright in the clear skies over Washington, D.C. “Gone? How? When?”

“We're trying to figure that out. It happened sometime this morning. He didn't report during roll call after breakfast. That's when we first took notice that he wasn't inside the prison grounds.”

“This is … amazing. I can't believe this!”

“We started a manhunt in Virginia an hour ago. The office of the U.S. Marshal is involved. We're hoping to find him in the next twenty-four hours.”

“Do you have any leads?
Anything
at all?”

“Nope. There's also the issue of the dead guards.”

“Dead guards?”

“Both shot in the back of the head. Execution style.”

Susan stood, a hand on her forehead, her mind trying to catch up with the shocking news. “Where?”

“Right outside the south perimeter. We found them a couple of hours ago.”

“And no one heard the shots?”

“The police investigators are still at the scene. No details have been released yet.”

Susan urged him to contact the FBI if they got a break in the investigation. Then she thanked him and hung up, trying to size up the implications of Bloodaxe's escape. Did he break out on his own, or did he get help from either the inside or the outside, or both? Was it possible that he used his computer privileges somehow to get himself out of jail? It sure seemed like an incredible coincidence that he'd vanished less than forty-eight hours after getting access to a computer. Was he really
that
talented? Did she grossly underestimate his skills?

Just then Troy Reid walked into her office wearing a fresh look after going home and getting a decent night's sleep. “What's new?”

“You don't
really
want to know.” Then she told him.

Sitting on the edge of her desk while Susan paced in front of him, he asked, “Do you think it had anything to do with last night's slaughter at the local ISP?”

Her arms crossed, Susan shook her head. “I don't know
what
to think. First he agrees to help us, and his help leads us to a most unusual place in Yucatán. Then we have the killings at the local ISP. Then I do a little digging to learn more about the Maya, and find some very incredible coincidences between the event and that ancient civilization. Then this morning, after having a brief Internet chat, where everything seemed normal, he just vanishes, leaving behind two guards shot dead plus a million unanswered questions. And in the meantime, we have made zero progress on this virus.”

“I wouldn't call it
zero
progress, Sue.”

“You're right. It's not zero progress, it's
negative
progress. I'm getting a really bad feeling that Bloodaxe has been playing us all along. I'm thinking that this is either his virus or he took advantage of the virus, using it not only to bargain a more pleasant stay in jail, but to gain access to a computer and use it as an escape tool.”

“We still have to crack the virus, one way or the other, with or without Bloodaxe's help.”

“You've got that right,” she said, returning to her laptop and invoking the last source code given to her by Bloodaxe, the refined Scent-Sniffer programs. “And the best way to get a fresh start on cracking this virus—which is still my highest priority—is to use code carefully checked by no one but myself.”

“What about Bloodaxe?”

“I frankly don't care what happens to him anymore. If he escaped, then I'm sure the U.S. Marshal's office will eventually capture him. In the meantime, I've got an event coming up in less than eight hours, and I'm not anywhere near ready.”

“Will you be ready?”

“I can't afford
not
to be.”

4

Antonio Strokk watched his sister backhand the lanky hacker across the face. It was four in the afternoon and he couldn't wait any longer to get his information. By now the authorities would have found out about his disappearance and a manhunt would be on its way. Although he had covered his tracks efficiently, eliminating the closest buffer to the target, thus breaking the linkage to the kidnapping, Antonio Strokk remained alive in this business by being overly cautious. And besides, he had paid over fifty thousand dollars to get this man out of prison and delivered to his safe house, an abandoned building on the outskirts of Washington, D.C. While two armed subcontractors guarded the stairs of the decrepit brick building—at one point in its life a bustling banking center—Strokk and Celina had dragged the unconscious hacker up to the fifth floor, secluding themselves in an empty office with a distant view of the city's skyline beyond a pair of wood-framed windows.

It was time for Antonio Strokk to get his money's worth.

Hans Bloodaxe, hands bound behind his back, sat on a chair in the middle of the room. A lamp dangled over his head from a cord as he peered at his captors. “Who—what do you want?”

“Information,” said the international terrorist, grabbing a chair, sitting in front of him.

“In—information? What kind of information?”

“To control the virus.”

“Control it?”

“That's right,” replied Strokk. Control of the virus meant power, and his client was willing to pay handsomely for such power.

“I don't understan—”

Celina slapped him hard.

“Please … don't hurt me,” he said, a trickle of blood flowing from the corner of his mouth to his chin. “I'm just an inmate … I—”

Celina got in his face. “Don't lie,
puto!
Or I'll cut off your
cojones.
” She produced a knife and showed him the long steel blade.

The bearded hacker went ashen at the sight, his eyes widening in fear.

“We know about your tracking programs and your arrangement with the FBI, so stop pretending,” said Strokk.

“I … I'm helping Susan Garnett find the origin of the virus.”

“We know that,” said Strokk while Celina walked behind him. “What else?”

“The initial program led us to the Yucatán Peninsula.”

“And?”

“And I've written a more refined program to make sure that the tracking program wasn't fooled by a decoy from the virus.”

“And?”

“And that's it.”

Celina cupped his chin from behind and jerked the hacker's head back, pressing the sharp blade against the stretched skin of his neck, right beneath his Adam's apple. “I told you not to lie to us,
puto!
” she hissed, leaning down, her face only inches from his. “Stop playing with us!”

“It's useless to resist,” added Strokk. “You will tell us everything we want to know, it's just a matter of how much pain you're willing to endure before you do so. Now, why don't you tell us how it is that such an advanced virus could originate from such a remote location?”