Cell (25 page)

GEORGE'S APARTMENT

WESTWOOD, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA

FRIDAY, JULY 4, 2014, 7:20
P.M.

T
rue to his word, Zee appeared at George's front door an hour later, freshly showered and wearing a pair of baggy sweats. He was holding a coffeepot filled with fresh brew. In his other hand, he was balancing a carton of Red Bull and a carton of Marlboro cigarettes on top of a fishing tackle box filled with tools, computer CDs, and other paraphernalia. In response to George's comment that he had a lot of stuff, Zee said he was loaded for bear.

George eyed the cigarettes. “I'd rather you don't smoke.”

“Sorry, dude, but ciggies are a must if I'm gonna have any luck. It's the cigs or nothing.”

“Okay, fine,” George relented, recognizing that there were people who couldn't concentrate unless they had their smoking ritual, which was sometimes more important than the nicotine. He pointed toward his dining room table, where he had his laptop set up and ready to go next to Sal's smartphone. He'd put Kasey's back in the box in the closet.

“Where's your modem?” Zee said, scanning the room.

George pointed it out next to his TV. Zee went about inspecting it.

“It works well,” George said. “The cable people said it was a good one.”

“It's a piece of shit, but it'll do.”

George realized that everyone who ever commented on his apartment either referred to it or what was in it as “shit.” When all this was over, he'd have to address the issue. Assuming he was still around when it was over. He was painfully aware that what he was doing could very well impact his career.

Zee plugged in his coffeepot and stowed his Red Bull in the refrigerator, then settled down at the table and opened his toolbox. The time for small talk was over. He went to work on Sal's smartphone first, removing it from its orange case and opening its back. He put on a pair of binocular loupes and closely examined its inner contents.

George watched him for a while but became bored. He went to his refrigerator and scanned its contents. “Care for something to eat?” he called out to Zee.

Zee didn't even respond, which was a good thing, because there wasn't much of anything to offer. George took what was there and made a sloppy sandwich, eating it while standing over the sink. He again thought about calling Paula in Hawaii but decided to wait until he had some more proof that her beloved iDoc was in trouble. He imagined she was going to resist belief in a big way. He wondered what effect it might have on their friendship. Probably not good.

ELECTRONIC SURVEILLANCE VAN

GEORGE'S APARTMENT COMPLEX

WESTWOOD, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA

FRIDAY, JULY 4, 2014, 8:52
P.M.

T
here was a prearranged knock on the back of the van. Steven, the shorter of the two technicians, reached out and unlocked the door. Andor Nagy, a handsome, powerfully built man, climbed in. He wasn't wearing his suit jacket and his tie was loosened.

“What's up?” Andor said with a slight Hungarian accent. He took a seat on a small bench along the side of the van.

Steven, manning the visual leads, pointed out Zee sitting hunched over a dismantled smartphone. “Your guess is as good as mine. We have what we believe to be a neighbor working on a smartphone, which we guess belongs to the mark.”

“Any idea why?”

“None whatsoever. The neighbor came in more than an hour ago, but there has been almost no conversation.”

“Where's Wilson?”

Steven pointed to another, darker screen showing the inside of George's bedroom. George could barely be seen lounging on his bed, watching TV with the sound turned way down.

Andor called up to Lee, who was manning the headphones a little farther forward in the van, to confirm that the two men in George's apartment had been silent.

“That's right. No chatter,” Lee replied.

“What's he looking at online?” The laptop on the dining room table was angled so the screen wasn't visible to any of their cameras.

“Nothing. So far,” Steven said. “He's just been messing with the cell phone.”

Andor shrugged. “We'll just have to be patient, then. Has Wilson made any phone calls or sent any texts?”

“Nope.”

“Let me know if and when anything changes,” Andor said, rising to leave.

“You will be the first to know,” Steven assured him.

GEORGE'S APARTMENT

WESTWOOD, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA

SATURDAY, JULY 5, 2014, 5:40
A.M.

G
eorge was rousted from a deep sleep when Zee rudely shook his shoulder. George had fallen asleep in his clothes while watching television. The TV was still on.

Zee was in a dither. “I'm done, and I'm out of here.” He looked like a madman. His eyes were red and his face drawn and pale. The combination of the night's activities plus all the coffee, cigarettes, and Red Bull had given him a visible tremor in his hands, and his voice was raspy.

“What do you mean you're out of here?” George asked.

“It means I'm out of here!” Zee disappeared out into the living room.

George leaped off the bed and ran after him while trying to get into his shoes.

Zee was throwing his tools and junk into the tackle box while muttering to himself, “Shit, shit, shit.”

“Where are you going?”

“I'm dropping off the grid until this blows over.”

“Until what blows over?” George said, bewildered.

“Everything,” Zee replied cryptically.

“What did you find out?”

“Too much.” Zee snapped his toolbox shut. “Way too much.”

George couldn't believe what was happening. “What exactly do you mean by ‘dropping off the grid'?”

“It means exactly what it sounds like. I'm heading for the hills until things blow over. I have some friends up north near San Fran. They got a cabin someplace in the High Sierras. That sounds about perfect at the moment.”

George couldn't believe that Zee was leaving. “Why the rush? What did you find?”

“If you really want to know, you better get your ass up to my apartment while I get a few things together.”

George wondered if he was dreaming. “You're planning on leaving right away? Now?”

“As soon as I can get my shit together.” Zee moved to the door, then stopped. “The money you promised?”

“I have to go to the bank for that kind of money. I was planning to do so at nine o'clock Monday morning. If you can just wait—”

“How much do you have on you?”

George shrugged. “A couple hundred bucks.” He'd stopped at an ATM after leaving the salvage yard, having been cleaned out by the tow guy.

“I'll take it. I'll get the rest later.”

George handed over the money. “What about what I was paying you for?”

“Upstairs.” With that Zee was out the door.

Mystified, George followed Zee up into his apartment. Zee ducked into his bedroom. George tagged along.

“Wait a second,” George said, thinking he could reason with Zee. “Take a deep breath and calm down. What did you learn?”

Zee started throwing clothes into a couple of duffel bags. “You were right,” he admitted. “Something weird is going on with iDoc. I was able to hack into Amalgamated's servers. I checked the records for all of them: Kasey, Sal, Tarkington, Wong, and Chesney. At first everything looked normal. In fact, I was about to give up. Then I noticed something odd. An artifact is the best way to describe it. It was hardly noticeable, but there all the same. So, in each of the five patient records I backtracked and discovered this artifact that appears exactly seventeen minutes before the physiological data went nuts, signifying the beginning of the death event. Seventeen minutes on the dot for all five patient records. Pretty suspicious.

“I tried to figure out exactly what this artifact was—its reason for being, you know what I mean?” Zee didn't pause for an answer. “And while I was working through the possibilities, it hit me! Bam! I realized what it reminded me of: Stuxnet.”

George shook his head. He had no idea what Zee was talking about.

Zee explained. “Remember when the U.S. and Israel ‘supposedly' hacked into the Iranian computers that were running their nuclear centrifuges?”

“No. Can't say I do,” George said.

“Well, the hack left an artifact behind. That's how it was discovered. The hackers wanted to show the Iranians one manufactured set of data while hiding the real data showing what was really happening. It's called a man-in-the-middle attack. The artifacts I found in the iDoc records are very similar, meaning someone hacked into the iDoc servers and did an overwrite of whatever was on those five records prior to the hack.”

“I'm lost.”

“The way I see it,” Zee said while continuing to throw things haphazardly into his bags, “is that someone was trying to cover the tracks of either the application's dumping of its reservoirs or a hacker initiating the dump. Now that I think about it, it must have been a quick fix, because they intercepted each record at the exact same time prior to the patient's death. They should have varied that to hide it better, but when you're in a rush . . . Anyway—app dump or hacker dump—the records have been overwritten.” Zee stopped packing and counted off the reasons on his fingers. “To hide the dump signal, to hide wherever the dump signal originated from, and to hide the subsequent physiological-signs data that showed the patients' reactions to the dump up to and including their deaths. The reason I'm confident of this is that Sal's cell phone definitely received an ‘all-dump' message. I was able to retrieve his unaltered data records, so I'm absolutely sure in that particular case. Again, whether it originated as a function of the iDoc algorithm or as an outside hack, I do not know.”

“You said they tried to hide it, but do you have any idea where the overwrite came from? Could you trace it to its source?”

Zee zipped up his bags. “It wasn't easy, but that's what I was doing just an hour ago. I found traces of a couple of high-anonymity proxy servers—they're called that because they try to hide their IP addresses, which a regular old proxy server does, too, but these things even try to hide the fact that they are proxy servers to begin with. They're very stealthy. Anyway, there are some tricks I know of to unmask them and get a read on who they're fronting for.”

“And who is that?”

“That's why I'm out of here. That's what's most disturbing of all.” He headed into his bathroom, emptying the contents of his medicine cabinet into a plastic garbage bag.

“One of the server banks they're fronting for is close by. If I had to guess, I'd say it's somewhere up in the Hollywood Hills. Weird location, huh?”

“That's making you run?”

“No, there's another location involved, either contributing to the overwrite or just monitoring it, someplace in Maryland.”

George was surprised, knowing that Amalgamated was still not well represented on the East Coast.

“That one is not part of Amalgamated,” Zee said, as if reading George's mind.

“How do you know?” George asked.

“Because I know it is . . . the federal government.”

George sank down to sit on the edge of Zee's bed, shocked. This made absolutely no sense to him. “What?”

“As best I could determine, it's an agency that I couldn't even find a reference to on the Internet. It's called URI, Universal Resource Initiative.”

“If you can't find a reference to it, how do you know it's the federal government?”

“I got in their system, dude! Stay with me here.” Zee's nerves were completely fried, which obviously contributed to his outburst. He paused and tried to calm himself. “Sorry. URI is tied in with another agency called the Independent Payment Advisory Board. Now, that one does have references. A lot of them. It's well-known, and it's fairly new. It was set up by the Affordable Care Act—Obamacare—supposedly to advise on ways for cost control of Medicare and Medicaid. ‘To bring spending back to target levels' is how I think they word their mission.”

Zee moved into his kitchen, loading groceries and dry goods into more garbage bags. George followed. “I stumbled into a hornets' nest! And one thing I am absolutely sure of is that they are mighty pissed that I hacked into their setup. That, my friend, is why I am heading for the woods. Because they are going to be coming here. To this apartment—actually to your apartment, now that I think about it. And I intend to be as far away as possible. I advise you to do the same. You do not want to be here when they arrive. It's you and your computer that they'll be coming after at first. But there's no doubt that they'll trace it to me, with my history of hacking. It won't take them long to put it all together and realize that you don't know jack shit about hacking into computer systems. Even if you don't tell them about me, it won't take long. And that's not going to happen: you will talk. They'll do things to you to make you talk. Believe me.”

“This sounds extreme, Zee,” George protested. He tried to speak slowly in contrast to Zee's rapid pressure of speech.

“Hell it is!” Zee shot back. “Do you remember the case of Aaron Swartz last year? The Reddit dude? He was hacking into MIT, and that was just to get academic journal articles free of charge to give to students. Look at what happened to him.”

“What happened to him?” George had never heard of the man.

“He's dead! They claim he hanged himself. They were going to throw the book at him and what he did was child's play in relation to what we just did. Think about it. They can't let you walk around knowing what you know.”

Zee collected his duffel and garbage bags and started for the door.

“I just can't believe you're actually running.”

“That's the only option. Run! And don't look back!”

“I can't leave. I have a residency position . . .” George trailed off, wondering just what his options were.

“You can't treat patients from jail. Or from a grave.”

“You're overreacting, Zee! Look, you're all hyped up on caffeine and nicotine and—”

“What I'm hyped up on is survival! On breathing! Yes, call me crazy, but I'd like to be able to continue doing that!”

George followed Zee out of the apartment and down the stairs, trying to get him to give the situation more thought. But Zee was convinced he had given the situation all the thought it deserved.

In the carport Zee slung his bags into the trunk of his old Toyota and went around to climb into the driver's seat. He rolled down the window.

“Listen, George, grab some clothes and come with me. This is serious. Let it play out from far away. Get word out from where they can't find you. Then come back.”

“No.” George shook his head. “No way. I'll handle it from here.”

“It's your life,” Zee said. He shrugged. “All I can do is warn you.”

George leaned down to the open window. “Listen, Zee. I'm sorry for getting you involved.”

Zee shook his head. “You didn't force me to do anything. A hacker should always be prepared to take off. It's part of the gig.”

“Thanks, Zee. I'm going to get this handled. Check in with me somehow, you'll see. But the thing is, all I have proof of is that iDoc apparently sent out a dump command to Sal's reservoir.”

“The proof of that is on your dining room table. And it's pretty clear to me that the others got the same message.”

“But who did it?” George demanded. “Who initiated the command? I don't have a bad guy! I need a bad guy, don't you understand? You can't leave me until you give me some more information!”

“I'm out of here while I can go. I did what I could.”

“But I don't have the proof I need to go to the media!” George yelled in frustration. Considering the past ballyhoo about “death panels” when it was merely suggested by the government that it might be prudent to include talking with seniors about end-of-life treatment alternatives in the Affordable Care Act, he was sure that an exposé of the iDoc killings would ignite a firestorm.

Zee fired up his Toyota, its engine noisy in the stillness of the early morning.

“Do you have any ideas about what I could do to try to find the origin of the dump commands?” George pleaded.

Zee jammed his aged transmission into gear with a grinding noise. “I don't think much more can be learned from hacking. Probably the only chance you would have is if you can get someone on the inside who has broad computer access at Amalgamated.” Zee held up his closed fist for George to bump. “Good luck, man.”

George stared at the closed fist a moment, then tapped it with his own. “Same to you.”

Zee pulled out, hitting a dip in the pavement at the entrance to the street, igniting a cascade of sparks from his loose tailpipe.

George watched the dilapidated car until it reached the corner and disappeared out of sight. He realized that Zee was probably right about the limited options. George immediately zeroed in on Paula. She had to have extensive computer access at Amalgamated. The only problem was whether he could convince her to help him.

George turned and headed back to his apartment. He didn't notice the black SUV as it pulled away from the curb and followed Zee.