Buzzworm (A Technology Thriller): Computer virus or serial killer? (15 page)

It was before six in the morning
— and there I was, as usual, fumbling with the coffee maker in my kitchen — a cranky machine I hated for over a decade, but never found the time to replace. My wife’s. She left it behind. I know why too. The coffee it produced was as thick as motor oil and about the same color.

I had just poured this morning’s undrinkable batch down the sink when my cell phone vibrated, signaling a text message. I reached for it, guessing it was my daughter again, keeping me up to date.

I have information 4 u on the Scammel case.

It obviously wasn’t my daughter. The sender ID was just a stream of random numbers. I’d never seen that before.

Who are you?

Doesn’t matter.

I can track your address.

You’re wrong. Go ahead and try. It will just waste time. You don’t have a lot of that left.

I stared at the tiny glowing screen.
Time for what? I thought.

I know where you can find
Buzzworm
.

Buzzworm
again. Whoever this was obviously didn’t know that the department had decided Scammel’s death was officially a suicide. There was a peculiar odor to the whole business now with Wishnowsky involved, but I wasn’t Internal Affairs. I had other cases to work on. Hundreds.

I don’t chase viruses. Now you’re wasting my time.

There was no immediate response. I was guessing our mysterious sender was reconsidering. Some computer geek who thinks the world revolved around a computer virus and shocked by my total disinterest. But how did he get my cell phone number?

Scammel wasn’t suicide. He was given orders to die.

How do you know that?

You’ll find out. Can we meet?

Where?

By video conference call.

No. Has to be in person.

NGTH.

?

Get up to speed Hyde. NGTH =Not going to happen.

I don’t have access to a video conference.

There’s a Kinko’s on every damn street corner. All have video setups

How do I connect?

I’ll send an address. Give it to the Kinko’s clerk and they will hook you up.

Shit. It’s bad enough I have to deal with these people face to face. Now I’m teleconferencing with assholes.

I downed something out of the fridge that looked like orange juice, but tasted like radiator coolant and headed out to a mall not far from my place. The traffic was light this early in the AM; the sun just starting to glow behind rows of industrial warehouses. While driving I got another text message. A link to a Skype address.

Ipscott wasn’t going to be happy with me today. He thought I was wasting too much time on a case that was still classified as undefined. Now I was racking up credit card expenses for video conferencing. But there was a new wrinkle. One of Division 213’s employees, a friend of Scammel’s, David Dodge, was now missing. He hadn’t shown up for work for two days and apparently that wasn’t his style. Emile went out to his place, a small bungalow in the North end of the city, and found no one home. Dodge’s truck was parked in the driveway. Emile got into the house somehow and found sour milk in the fridge, a stuffed mailbox and truck keys on the kitchen table. No signs of a struggle. Dodge was definitely MIA. He had no family in Washington, so we had very little to go on. So we issued a bulletin.

On the Scammel case, we made a request to the CIA to examine the two computers he had in his lab the night he died. No response yet. When I pulled into the Kinko’s lot I called Emile and woke him up. One of the simple pleasures of life. I asked him to run a report on the Canadian virus contractor Jobime had mentioned. I gave him the name. Was it a coincidence that within minutes of Strange arriving, two people were dead or missing?

The chubby clerk at the local Kinko’s was surprisingly helpful. Probably a morning person. He led me to a room a little bigger than a phone booth with a Mac computer and a shiny blue web cam mounted above the monitor. He set up the call based on the coordinates I showed him and then closed the door behind me.

If you’ve been on these webcam calls before you know the drill. A blurry face greeted me, a wall of books behind. The image quality never seems that good over a standard Internet connection, so I wasn’t surprised when the caller moved his head, the image smeared across the screen, sometimes freezing or jumping from place to place. On this call it took a while for the face to settle down. As if the person on the other end was agitated or moving around to get comfortable or just playing with me. When the image cleared, I confess for a few seconds, I couldn’t breathe. It was Frank Scammel. He was wearing the faded T-shirt he died in. He looked as alive as possible on the small screen

“Who are you?” I said into the microphone.

“What does it look like?” Scammel smiled.

“It looks like a cheap computer trick. Congratulations. You are one skilled fruitcake. But I am done here.” I got up to leave.

“You’ve hurt my feelings, Detective. Cheap? I spent years perfecting this software. And if my work hadn’t been interrupted, I would have made this even better. Please sit down. I want to bring you up to speed on your case.”

I hesitated. I couldn’t see the national security angle to hacking consumer grade web conferencing. Which is what this was. Had Frank worked on this in his spare time? Outside the CIA? Had they taken Frank out to steal this technology? I sat down slowly. Now I really wanted to get my hands on whoever was playing this game.

The Frank on the screen moved in closer to his camera. The image was detailed enough I could see the grease in his hair and the cheap stitching on his T-shirt. That was impressive and he seemed to notice. “That’s good. You’re doing better than I expected. Is it because you and I had a brief relationship?”

“Investigator to corpse. I wouldn’t call that a relationship.”

The video version of Scammel laughed. “It’s mesmerizing, isn’t it? To think that this was Frank’s crowning achievement for the CIA. To re-create the exact likeness of a person over a video link. In real time. Fully dimensional. And there’s more you haven’t seen yet. It was a shame he had to go. Think of what he could have accomplished!”

“Before or after the chemical castration?”

“Ouch. We are bitter, aren’t we, detective. Relax. Frank is no longer a threat to society. It just looks like he is.”

“But you are.” I let that sink in. The Frank on the screen didn’t move. He seemed to be contemplating the thought. “And how does it feel hiding behind a child molester?” I added.

“Good point, Detective. I decided to start this call as Frank even though I’m aware he was a bit of an unsavory character. It seemed appropriate. But easy to change as you will see. But you are confused. I am not a threat to you. Unless you are on the payroll of the CIA like everyone else in this town.”

“Like Wishnowsky?”

The video version of Frank hesitated. I have no idea how something like this works, but I could almost see him drop his guard for a second. His gaze fell slightly. Like the program was reading his real face and building another on top with the fake likeness. But the tell came through. I had rattled him ever so slightly.

“I don’t know that particular name, detective. But I do know that thousands of cops in Washington are on the take. How do I know you’re not?”

“You’re the super hacker, asshole. Check my bank account.”

The fake Scammel didn’t think that was funny. “I did. That’s why we’re talking. By the way, it’s a shame what cops get paid in this town.”

Now I was the one caught off guard. How much did this guy know? And it wasn’t any of his fucking business what I made. “So talk. You just said it was a shame Scammel had to go, that his suicide was assisted. Who pushed him over the edge? ”

“We’ll get to that in a minute. But let’s drop this Scammel act and try something more interesting. How about Osama Bin Laden?” The screen blurred again, like the caller was shaking his head rapidly for a few seconds. The likeness of Scammel was then replaced by a much older, slender man, bearded, wearing a faded green army jacket with a gold shawl draped over one shoulder. The background scene was now a rough cave. I was no expert, but the person on the screen clearly looked like Osama.

“Brilliant wouldn’t you say?”

“Too bad you can’t do the accent. This is all very impressive, but I can pull the plug on this in a second. You can’t control that. I’m busy and you’re still wasting my time?”

“I thought we could have a chat together. Man to man
.
”

“My terms are simple. If you want this to continue, you need to tell me who you are. And the details around Scammel. Otherwise we have nothing to chit chat about.”

The Osama figure sat back and folded his arms. “Bullshit, detective. I’ve read about you and looked at some of your case files. You’re like a hound on the scent. You live to solve these cases. How would you like to solve a dozen serious homicides? Or are you more interested in banging your fat head against your cubicle in aggravation over the suicide of one sorry sack of shit.”

It was hard to read this guy. He loved to talk and he was obviously bright. He could be dangerous, but he also might just talk himself right out into the open if I let him. “If you have any evidence on Washington murder cases, you need to hand it over.”

“That would implicate a dozen local agency operatives. They are always mixed up in local intrigue. And you know that. You crawl around in that muck everyday.”

I needed to keep him talking, get him to unwind. “You got a problem with Central Intelligence?”

Osama paused to consider that. “The CIA has lost its way. Because of a total lack of leadership, the different states of the intelligence community are on the verge of civil war. It’s true and I suspect you know that. You live in this town. And when that breaks out, all of our enemies will come looking for a hole in our defenses. They’ll find plenty of them. I’m just not going to let that happen. I’m going to save your ass. Save your country. You don’t know it yet, but I am one of the good guys.”

“That’s what all of the psychopaths tell me.”

Osama’s face hardened. “You don’t know me, Hyde. I will do whatever needs to be done to shake people awake. Even the sheep. Your boss and his boss and all the other bosses are just a chain of corruption. You’re a part of it even if you don’t know it. Even if your scrawny bank account doesn’t show it.”

“And that’s why you convinced Frank Scammel to kill himself? To clean up the city? What did you have on him?”

“He was a disgusting rodent. The CIA loved him though because of what he could do for them. All I did was put him in my pocket for a while, so I could keep tabs on what he was doing. Then I convinced him that ending his life was a better deal than me doing it. Because if I had to do the dirty work I would then be paying a visit to the rest of the members of his family.”

“You’re all charm, aren’t you?”

“Hah. You know nothing. Do you know what Frank was working on? Those videos of weapons of mass destruction we all heard about before the war in Afghanistan? Frank’s division created most of them out of thin air. The images were very moving. I had a lump in my throat. High resolution color motion pictures really tug at the heart strings.”

Osama’s arms were in the air, his face red with excitement. I just sat back and waited for him to explode. Or have an aneurysm.

“Show the Secretary of Defense a grainy black and white photo, basically a bunch of gray blobs supposed to represent the movement of nuclear materials and you get a big yawn. Show him full color enhanced video and suddenly he has a military grade hard on. They will always go for the video. And so will the media. It’s surveillance porn at it’s best. Most people forget that all of our country’s best surveillance from space is monochromatic. Black and white. Boring still images like you’ve seen of World War II. Frank and his team figured out how to create a program that would turn them into smooth video drenched in color. And nudge reality if necessary to make a point. That’s what Project 213 is secretly toiling away at. A skunk works. Mostly unapproved, but sometimes tolerated and always funded. It’s survival of the fittest. In government parlance, fit means political survivability.”

“Thanks for the lecture on politics 101. But I don’t get why you’re telling me this if it’s all classified.”

“Everything we do in intelligence is a big lie, detective. Everything. And the bigger the lie the more the American taxpayer swallows it all up. Agencies like the CIA and Department of Defense used to be about collecting intelligence and keeping an eye on the other guy. Now everyone can do that. A ten year old can monitor foreign powers using the Internet and YouTube on a rainy weekend when his Xbox is down. Intelligence today is about tarting up what everyone knows already. Give it a political angle. All you need is a sexy sound bite or an image that they will have a hard time forgetting. We are all in the advertising business now. We’re just selling a new kind of soap.”

Hyde watched the slow swirl of pixels on the screen that represented a man that wasn’t there and another he couldn’t see. He began to see what this Osama look-alike was talking about. After a minute or two his brain began to accept the illusion. The picture wasn’t that clear and the sound was fuzzy, but the overall impression worked. It was mesmerizing – watching Osama giving a lecture on modern Western politics.