Buzzworm (A Technology Thriller): Computer virus or serial killer? (13 page)

Vienna stood inside the braincase of GIPETTO and took a deep breath. She shivered in the cold air. This Monday was the big day. GIPETTO would go online and begin serving intelligence to a dozen different branches of intelligence, solidifying the future of Division 213. Nothing could go wrong. All leaves were cancelled for the coming weekend and everyone would be going over the system in detail one final time. This was like a shuttle launch and she was the pilot. So much depended on delivering the payload.

Vienna
turned and pressed the panel that opened the door again to leave. She waited. After a few seconds the door sighed and opened. She felt the slightest flutter of anxiety. She seemed to remember the door opening more quickly before. She would have to ask the Avion team to look into it. Was it just her imagination or was it true that every technology in Building 213 seemed hesitant lately, like every action was being re-processed or managed from a distance.

Programmers called this latency, the slight pause you would feel if you moved your mouse on your desk and waited for the reaction on a computer screen a thousand miles away. A sense of being just slightly out of control. That was how things felt lately. Latent. That was one of the reasons why she had brought in Strange.
Buzzworm
was still a worry since the worm expert still had not had any success in tracking down the virus. Luckily, no one on the GIPETTO program had reported any problems. The virus seemed confined to the regular day-to-day network.

Could the Avion ever be infected by a computer virus affect? She couldn’t see how. And the Avion team was absolute on the question. An Avion simply could not be hacked. That was good enough for her.

Life is freakin’ complicated
in the 21
st
century,
thought the man who called himself
Buzzworm.
Just ordering yuppie coffee required new language skills today. You had to have a clumsy and infuriating conversation with your car just to dial the hands-free phone. Your new crock-pot sends you an email when stew is ready. And the CIA drags a certified hacker out of a foreign prison to help them figure out why their computer system is possessed.

Go figure.

This new guy, this so-called ethical hacker and parolee, was brazenly poking around in all of
Buzzworm's
old haunts. He was into the CIA’s general data system looking for changes to file names. He had spent a good part of the day sussing out the firewall technology looking for evidence of a break in.

BW didn’t like it. He hardly felt threatened, but he still didn’t like an outsider going through his personal sock drawer. And that was how BW saw the agency’s system. It was his to do as he saw fit.

BW had several options to consider. It would be easy to fire a shot across this worm expert’s bow; wipe out his personal files for example. Or burn up his personal hard drive. He had done it before. Imagining smoke pouring out of Mr. Strange’s laptop made him smile.

No. There was a better way though. Attack him outside of the CIA. That would divert him again, make him waste whatever time he had available. The CIA wasn’t going to give Strange unlimited time to fix the problem so the more time he wasted on dead ends, the faster he would be gone.

BW thought about the options for a few minutes. Maybe Mr. Xavier would have to get involved. That could be interesting. Not as diverting and addictive as the undercover work Xavier was doing with Mary Ellen Duke. But interesting in a very different way.

BW mixed another caffeine pick-me-up, another full gram of the glorious white powder blended with chocolate milk. He did this at his desk, his eyes on his monitoring screen. He was watching Strange, tracking his movements, and chug-a-lugging the gluey caffeine blend. He always knew when it was time to take another hit, when his hands stopped vibrating. Pure caffeine gave him what he called
the
shakies
and a constant ringing in the ears. Off the stuff, he developed a migraine headache that was totally debilitating. He preferred the tremors.

It was then that BW realized what he needed to do to Strange. His idea might get the hacker kicked out of the agency permanently. At minimum even get him seriously in trouble with the law. He would use the backdoor technology he had secretly installed on the network. The same trick he had used years ago as his new mission was just beginning to become clear to him.

During that first week, when
Buzzworm
initially took control of Langley’s heating and air conditioning system, the workers in administration began suffering brutal temperature swings. Day one began sweltering, but before maintenance could arrive, he had the air conditioning cranked up to a new previously unknown maximum. People who had pulled off sweaters and jackets were now looking for plug in heaters. He played this game for a week, even drove over to Langley one afternoon to see for himself and enjoy their misery. Little was getting done in the department and the local manager was harried and angry. He actually used the f-bomb on one of the repair people; something that shocked his staff. BW gave himself his first bonus point. Pushing people to the edge was an engrossing new hobby.

BW became fixated on a comment one of the admin staff had posted on Facebook that week. They figured the CIA was haunted.
Well fine, let’s riff on that, he thought.

The hacking community had a number of dirty little tools available to insiders, one of them known as backdooring. Backdooring was a method of sneaking into someone’s computer without them noticing and taking over control. With backdoor access, a person thousands of miles away could erase and move files, monitor what a person was typing on their keyboard and even see what they were watching on their computer monitor. But BW could go one step further. He could not only now control anyone’s computer in the system, he could also backdoor the entire CIA network so that he could play his games from any computer terminal on the planet that was connected to the Internet.

The admin staff had an interesting day Wednesday, especially the woman who had posted the haunted office story. After taking her first sip of coffee that morning, she heard an unfamiliar sound. She then watched as the tray on her CD drive slid out. She looked at it curiously. She had never used the CD burner on her office computer and was completely unaware that it existed. She stared at it for a moment. Then it slid closed again. As soon as she touched her coffee to her lips, it whined open again. She paused. Was it waiting for something? Am I supposed to put a CD in?

She asked the woman in the next cubicle if she was having the same problem. Her co-worker winked and suggested that her computer must be haunted too. Then the drive opened and closed several times in quick succession, the tiny gears groaning, taunting her. While this continued her computer screen flashed blue, then white. Soon the screen was acting like a migraine-inducing strobe light, flashing in syncopation with the bedeviled CD drive.

She jumped up and ran to her supervisor who looked up at her, waiting for another room temperature report. They walked back to her cube. The computer sat quietly, her monitor displaying a blurry photo of her Chocolate lab chewing on a deflated soccer ball. The CD drive was closed and silent. She frowned.

BW knew all of this because he had taken control of the webcams mounted on all of the employees PCs as well as the security cameras liberally mounted in offices and hallways.

When the woman’s manager left, her computer bit her. That was how she described it to friends later. She sat down at her desk and reached for her mouse when the CD drive opened again. She swore under her breath, something she rarely did. She sneered at the little plastic tray, daring it to move again. She moved her hand toward it, expecting it to slide back into the case. She touched it carefully, her finger slipping into the round hole at its center when it suddenly slammed shut, pinching her finger painfully between the sharp plastic case and the tray. She yelped so loud her co-worked, the one who thought haunted personal computers was such a hilarious idea, spilled her coffee all over her new dress slacks.

Building 213 has the most expensive security system
I’ve ever seen. It puts Fort Knox to shame. And I know, because I toured it once. I’d love to know what they’re protecting here because it sure as hell isn’t gold bullion.

Vienna set up a meeting with me and two security techs — two guys with low foreheads and no personality. We walked around most of the public areas in the building. I learned that the complex around 213 was covered by over ninety color cameras feeding into something they called a video server array. The array recorded everything — twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. All time coded. Security had the ability to order up any surveillance going back as far as five years. As well, all security card data, such as who went where in the building, was also synchronized with the video. So when you saw a person entering an elevator on the screen, which was an example they showed me, the person’s name was shown right beside them. Very slick.

Using their array, we went back to the night Scammel died. He had a lab on level sub four, corner, no windows, and one door. There was a camera in the hall outside, but nothing inside the lab itself. They explained that was another kind of security precaution. They needed to track people’s movements, but not intrude on what might be very secretive work. So, unfortunately, his actual death went unrecorded.

They explained that anyone coming or going through all sections of the building had to scan their security card through a card reader, to open doors and elevators. They mapped all employees in the building in real time.

We watched as Scammel entered his room at 10:12 AM, on the day he died. He was alone. Throughout his final day he had only two visitors. At 10:47, a programmer from the video team met with him about a software problem. I knew that because I talked to the employee. He said he spent about half an hour going over a problem with a shading routine. He explained that this was part of a program that calculated shadows — their shape, size and color. He couldn’t tell me what it was used for.

The employee thought Frank’s behavior that afternoon was BAU.
Business as usual
. Distracted by his work and not overly friendly, but nothing out of the ordinary. Not how you would think someone suicidal would act.

At 3:36, Vienna dropped by. Again, recorded on video and by security log. I spoke to Jo again. We went over Scammel’s attitude that afternoon. She said he seemed like the regular Frank. A bit of a pain in the ass, but nothing unusual.

At 5:02 Frank left his lab, recorded on video when he left the room. I watched it several times, from a camera placed outside the hall. Nothing in his body language hinted at a change in mental state. You couldn’t help but notice how big he was on the video, so round he even had a bit of a waddle in him. Long hair, but no beard. Apparently they wouldn’t let him grow one. One win for the establishment.

Frank went to the front foyer that afternoon and received a delivery from Pizza Pizza. He paid cash. One large meat lovers. I called Pizza Pizza and they said he was a regular. Always the same order. They knew that because they tracked customer preferences and purchases on their computer system.

I didn’t tell them that Frank was dead. I wonder how long it will take for their computer to start missing him.

Watching him lumber back to his lab with the pizza got me thinking. Did Frank bring in the Demerol himself? There was no trace of a container in the room following his death. We watched him walk from the foyer, pass through security, wait for the elevator. He talked to no one. No one could have handed him the pills.

The Crime lab had checked his clothes. I wanted to know if he could have carried them in his pocket. Again, no trace anywhere except his right hand. It was frustrating. We could watch him on the video anywhere in the hall, the elevator or outside his door. Once he swiped in, we were in the dark.

After the pizza pickup, he never swiped out. Ever.

What had changed Scammel between five PM and early in the morning from a man interested in pizza to someone in a hurry to die?

I sat in the temporary parking area outside Building 213, in my gray Vic, thinking through next steps. I had my list in front of me.

Vienna mentioned that he had talked briefly about his daughter that last day. She said she was surprised. He almost never talked about family. I checked the birth records in the crime database. Lorilee Scammel. Seventeen. Lived with her mom in Dupont Circle. I had no other angle, so I decided to drive out there.

I took Rock Creek Parkway north and turned on Pennsylvania. They lived in an apartment block in Foggy Bottom that needed paint and new windows. Frank’s ex-wife was not home, but Lorilee was making supper.

She was a sullen looking girl wearing too much makeup. I asked her if her Mom would call me. She took my card. I said I was sorry about her Dad. She just shrugged. She didn’t seem too upset.

Her mother, Katherine, called me about ten minutes after I left, so I turned around and drove back. They were both eating a pasta dish when I rang up. She invited me in. She offered me a plate, but I made an excuse, told her I had already eaten, which was a lie.

“Sorry to bother you, Mrs. Scammel. This is just routine. I won’t be long.” She seemed more tired than anything, and as soft spoken as her daughter. She apparently had just put in ten hours at the Georgetown Best Western where she was an assistant manager.

“Do you have any idea why Frank would commit suicide?”

“I can’t tell you much, Detective. We’ve been split since Lorilee was twelve. I haven’t talked to him for months.”

“How about you, Lorilee? Did you see your Dad recently?”

Katherine answered for her. Lorilee had her head down, twirling her fork. “Lorilee never had much to do with Frank.”

“Yeah. Teenagers. I have one myself,” I said.

“That’s not it. She would love to have a father around. Frank wasn’t… you probably know about Frank’s run-in with the police years ago?” I nodded. “Frank had a few problems in that area. Lorilee wanted nothing to do with him after that. She’s a smart girl.”

I watched them eat for a moment then decided they couldn’t be of any more help to me. “Sorry to bother you. I’ll let myself out.” When I stood up though, I thought of one more thing. “Mrs. Scammel, there is a very slim chance that Frank’s death wasn’t suicide.” She looked up at me, her fork suspended in the air. “We haven’t ruled out murder. Do you have any idea who might want to see him dead?”

Lorilee answered, not taking her eyes off her plate. “Only everyone,” was all she said.