Seven Unholy Days (3 page)

4

9:20 PM CENTRAL DAYLIGHT TIME (LOCAL)

MEMPHIS INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT

             
Gulfstream two-one-six, Memphis Tower. Cleared for departure on runway three-six left, sir.”

“Roger, Memphis Tower, Gulfstream two-one-six. Departing runway three-six left.”

“Roger, two-one-six. Contact Memphis Center on one-two-eight-point-five, and have a good flight, sir. Looks like a beautiful night all the way.”

“Memphis Tower, two-one-six. Airborne, contacting Me
mphis Center on one-two-eight-point-five.”

The cabin of the twin-engine business jet was quiet by the standards of kerosene burners, immaculate by any measure. Only three months old, the aircraft’s interior smelled of new leather and carpet. Hart swiveled his seat to face the window on his right as the pilot arched the G-V smartly upward, ascending out of Memphis airspace at two thousand feet per minute. The street lights below first became soft-edged amber-orange pools of light, then a glittering medley of interconnected and criss-crossing lines as the plane turned to a northeasterly heading while continuing to climb.

Twenty miles laterally and four miles vertically from Me
mphis, the city looked like a seething cauldron of hot coals laced with a thousand rivulets of molten lava. Hart returned his seat to the forward-facing position, musing to himself that Hell probably looked something like that from a distance, with its fiery lakes of brimstone. Except that Hell could not be turned off.

He moved to another seat, pulled his laptop from an attaché, and raised the lid. He connected to the Internet through the Gulfstream’s satellite-connected WiFi system. Still no word from Decker. What was that hedonistic nightmare of a human being up to? He checked his watch. Less than four hours r
emained.

10:25 PM CENTRAL DAYLIGHT TIME (LOCAL)

IUKA COUNTRY INN

We were on our way back from the crime scene, where someone had broken poor Beeman’s neck before tossing him in the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway. No suspects. No clues. Nobody saw a thing.

“Wonder where old Beeman is right now,” Tark said as we headed back toward the opulence of the Iuka Country Inn.

“Zipped up in a black bag?”

“Nah, that’s just his body, worthless as tits on a boar hog now. I’m talking about his eternal soul. It’s all that matters in the end, you know.”

Here it came, Jesus mumbo-jumbo, soul-saving in the Bible Belt, time for me to get right with God. Oh how I knew the song and dance. “I don’t mean to be rude, Tark, but I’d just as soon steer clear of religion. I don’t believe in it.”

“Don’t believe in religion, you mean, or don’t believe in God at all?”

“None of it.”

“What a shame.”

“Not a shame to me, I’d just rather deal with the reality in front of me. And that reality just got a bit stranger, wouldn’t you say?”

“What do you think is going on here, Matthew?”

“I think Beeman screwed with my code and it got him killed. You?”

“Hard to figure. I just don’t understand what anybody has to gain by tinkering with the juice.”

“I’d like to shore up the security in CEPOCS, put a few extra blockades in place until we can figure out exactly what’s going on.”

“You think they might try something else?”

The temptation to tell him about the email was strong but I had no way to know how he’d react. If I could track these people down without spawning twenty questions from the authorities about my past, so much the better. “You never know. I think they’ve proven they’re serious.”

“No argument there. What exactly can you do?”

“I can implement a total system lockdown.”

“Class three?”

I nodded. He sighed. “That disables AGM,” he said.

Automated Grid Maintenance was the CEPOCS feature that made it possible for three-man crews to keep fifteen to twenty states running smoothly. It monitored every grid, every switch, constantly making adjustments and rerouting flow. Without it, every bit of that was done manually.

“True enough,” I said, “but that’s the only way to guarantee no more modifications until we can get a handle on this situation.”

“When did you have in mind?”

“Sooner the better. How soon can you have a crew in place?”

“It’ll take a crew of at least twelve or we’ll have fried switc
hes all over the place.”

“I’m aware of that.”

“I’ll go home and start working the phone. We’ll shoot for first thing tomorrow morning; best I can do, Matthew.”

“Morning it is.”

The rest of the drive back was fairly quiet. It had been a long day and another lay just ahead. By eleven o’clock I was burrowed into my bed and listening to the soothing hum of the old air conditioner.

5

11:36 PM CENTRAL DAYLIGHT TIME (LOCAL)

IUKA COUNTRY INN

             
The urgency of needing to know where the email came from won out over fatigue; I got out of bed and fired up my notebook. Espionage and tiptoed malice were bad enough. Murder was an escalation that demanded answers. My quarry had made it personal and he needed a name, something for me to focus on. After staring at his email address for a bit I settled on “69” as a nickname for the bandit and penciled it in on the top of a legal pad, then drew a vertical line to split the page. On the left side I’d keep track of steps and clues. The right would be a list of any weaknesses I found along the way.

I logged into a shell account that hid my identity under a dozen layers of aliases and went to work. The first order of business was building more anonymity, thick insulation against intrusion detection that could be traced back to me. I did this by routing my activity through a series of servers in disparate ge
ographical locations. Seattle to New Delhi, over to Madrid and back to New York, then to London by way of Taipei. Satisfied that I was sufficiently cloaked, I worked my way back into the Hotmail server and then into the first anonymizer service 69 had used. A commercial service, it was set up quite well, enough so to keep out 99% of those who might come knocking. Three minutes later, the details for the account holder scrolled into view on the screen. I penciled in JANE SMITH on the pad. Paid for the account with a money order sent through snail mail. Not good.

Stepping backward through the trail led me to another cloaking service, again commercial. JANE SMITH. The next leg of the journey was more of the same. JANE SMITH. The legal pad had plenty of entries on the left, and finally a couple of chinks in the armor for the right-hand column. I wrote in RE
PETITION, and directly underneath, COMPLACENCY. 69 was confident the three cloaking services provided unbreakable anonymity. I looked over the notes again to be sure I hadn’t missed anything, and found more balance for the right side of the page. All three services were American companies. I penciled in USA, certain that 69 was inside the country.

The entry point into the third service was the end of the cloaking trail. This was the point of embarkation for 69’s online journey. All that remained was to decipher his actual logon, a process in which thirty to forty hops through a chain of servers is not uncommon. I cracked my knuckles and let loose a ligh
tning flurry of pings and traceroutes, separating the real hops in his logon from any spoofs he might’ve managed. There were nothing but clean routes; I had the bastard.

My heart pounded from the thrill of the hunt as I closed in. I keyed in the last few commands and waited for the system to show me exactly where he came from, the very place he jumped onto the Internet. What scrolled onto the screen sank my spirits.

According to the query report I was reading, 69 was a direct node on an AT&T fiber backbone, not logged on from anywhere, just a phantom on the Internet. There were only a handful of people in the world who could pull off a direct connection without leaving any fingerprint as to location, but there it was in blue and white. He was either an uberhacker or he had one working for him.

Exhaustion hit me in a big way, but I needed a plan before turning in. A very serious thug wanted me to pack my bags. Why? Anyone with this level of chutzpah surely knew invest
igative hell was about to be rained down upon their sorry ass. In the face of such an assault, what threat did I pose? There was only one logical answer. Terrorism was about to bare its rotten fangs again; they were planning another hit on CEPOCS.

Bailing out and going home was an attractive theory, but running leaves an aftertaste I don’t care for. And as Tark said, CEPOCS was my baby. The thought of someone screwing with it pissed me off, and the ramifications of leaving it unprotected were staggering. An extended blackout across a whole state—or, perish the thought, across several states—could be cat
astrophic. Hospitals, traffic systems, commerce, communications, and air conditioners—no trivial matter in August—all dead.

I had to do something but this had crossed the line from hacking to murder and I was in over my head. The FBI needed to be here. They probably already had a file open on the blac
kout but they needed more than that. It was time for a task force, wide open and full bore. I didn’t want them nosing around that email, but who said they had to know about it at all? I had already proven it to be a dead end as far as finding its source, so there was really no reason to mention it. It could remain my little secret, and maybe I could draw out 69 myself. I opened the email, clicked REPLY, and started typing.

FROM: [email protected]

TO: [email protected]

SUBJECT: DO I KNOW YOU?

If you have business with me, state the nature. If not, keep your spam out of my mailbox. I have no time for games or bad poetry.

A click of the SEND button and it was on its way. I shut down my machine and burrowed into bed once more. This time sleep c
ame quickly.

DAY ONE

TUESDAY

And I saw, and behold a white horse:

and he that sat on him had a bow;

and a crown was given unto him:

and he went forth conquering, and to conquer.

Revelation 6:2

6

12:06 AM CENTRAL DAYLIGHT TIME (LOCAL)

DOWNTOWN IUKA

              The Christian brothers rolled through downtown Iuka in a rented Jeep. “Welcome to Pisswater! Let’s hope the second man followed instructions,” Riff said. “I know you told Hart we were re-installing the code ourselves but we really don’t have time for that.”

“I’ll be sure to ask him before I kill him,” Dane said. He took an amber vial from his pocket, opened it, shook the last two Percodans onto his tongue, and swallowed them dry.

“He’s mine,” Riff said. “You got to do the other one.”

“That sawed-off little worm barely counted, but whatever. Tell you what, drop me off here and pick me up after you’re through with him.”

“Drop you off here for what?”

“I need to see the pharmacist.”

“You need to see a doctor. You can’t keep taking that crap like that.”

“I don’t need a lecture. I need to stop this jackhammer in my head. Stop the truck, there’s a nice little drugstore right over there.”

“Damn it, Dane, you’re putting us at risk with this crap. You don’t need to be breaking into a drugstore in the middle of this operation. We’re bad short on time, and besides, we never do jobs alone.”

“You can handle him just fine, baby brother. Call me when you’re through and I’ll tell you where I am.” Dane stepped out of the Jeep.

He watched the Jeep until it turned a corner and then walked through the parking lot on the side of the Good Neighbor pharmacy. A narrow alley ran along the back of the building. He stepped to the rear door and examined it with a Mini-Mag-Lite. No sign of an alarm system. He pulled a pick set from his pocket and tried to open the lock but his hands were shaking too badly. A quick jab with his bare fist shattered one of the panes of glass in the old door. He reached through, unlocked the deadbolt, and stepped inside. A fast look around the inside doorjamb verified that there was no electronic protection. Stupid hicks.

12:12 AM CENTRAL DAYLIGHT TIME (LOCAL)

FULTON RESIDENCE

Brett fought to free his wrists but the duct tape held his hands firmly behind the back of the chair. Riff stood in front of him, leaning over so they were nose to nose. “Fulton, I’m way short on time, I want out of Pisswater, Mississippi, and I don’t have the energy for a lot of dramatics. So I’m not gonna bullshit you. You’re about to die. You’ve been deemed a liability in a sector that’s already been a trouble spot, and we can’t take a chance by leaving you hanging around. But I can make it easier for you, if you’ll cooperate. Interested?”

“Screw you,” Brett tried to say through the duct tape over his mouth.

“Okay, tough guy. Have it your way. I really hate to do it like this, but if you won’t tell me where the computer is you leave me no choice. I was going to be merciful and put a bullet in your brain before I light the house, but I guess you’d rather burn to death sitting in that chair, eh?”

Brett’s eyes grew wide and he shook his head.

“You’ve had a change of heart?”

He nodded. Riff unsheathed a small stiletto from his thigh, slipped it between tape and cheek, and cut. He put the knife back in its sheath and with one swift motion jerked the tape from around Brett’s head, taking clumps of hair with it. Brett let out a yelp.

“Talk.”

“I left the computer in my locker at GCE after I ran the pr
ogram this afternoon,” Brett lied. He had loaned the computer to his sister, Jana, for a fundraising project she was organizing. His original plan had been to get it back from her in time to slip out to GCE and run the program as ordered, but that was before all hell broke loose this afternoon. After that, he decided he’d rather just give these people their five grand back and be done with it. He thought the program he ran earlier was designed to copy information out of CEPOCS, not put some kind of virus into the system. To hell with that. It would appear, however, that they were uninterested in refunds.

Riff brought blood from Brett’s right cheek with a cracking backhand. He walked around the chair three times before sto
pping in front of it and starting to speak in a low growl that sounded more animal than human. “You were clearly instructed for that computer to never be out of your sight until we retrieved it from you.” He walked over to a wall shelf and picked up a picture of Jana.

“Where’s your little sister, Fulton?”

“How should I know? She doesn’t live here.” That was technically true. She lived in Tupelo but since taking a nursing job at the Iuka Hospital E.R. a couple of months go, she did spend a lot of nights at Brett’s house. Thankfully she was working tonight.

“I know everything about her sweet ass, Brett. Maybe I’ll go by the hospital and say hello.” Riff smiled a wicked grin. “Ma
ybe we’ll even go for a ride.”  He gently kissed the picture, looked into Brett’s eyes, and tugged at his crotch.

Brett had spent a lifetime blustering his way out of tight spots without having to get physical. The few times he had go
tten as far as an actual fight, he had lost. It was time to win one. He worked up a mouthful of spit and unloaded into Riff’s face.

The grin turned into a snarl as Riff threw the picture against the wall and brought both hands to his face to wipe his eyes.

Brett leaned as far back as he could, then slammed his head forward into Riff’s face. He felt a sickening crunch of cartilage and bone and saw his stunned captor reeling backward from the blow. Knowing that any hesitation would result in instant and lethal retaliation, he lunged to his feet with the chair still wedged between his arms and spun around so that his back was to Riff. He bent down as far as he could and flung himself backward with every ounce of strength he could summon. Two feet later, he hit Riff and kept pumping his legs until they crashed into a wall. The tension on his arms eased as the chair cracked into a dozen splintery pieces.

Riff grabbed him in a stranglehold from behind. Brett stomped Riff’s right toes as hard as he could and the hands dropped from around his throat. He took two steps forward, whirled around, and landed a solid kick to Riff’s crotch. Riff crumpled to the floor in a guttural moan. Brett strained every muscle in his arms and shoulders, and duct tape gave way to adrenaline. Riff was pulling himself back up, blood and mucous from his mangled nose covering his face. Brett kicked again and caught him squarely in the throat.

With Riff holding his throat and gasping for air, Brett bent over him and first slipped the stiletto from the sheath on his thigh, then pulled a Colt Government Model .45 semi-automatic pistol from his waistband. Advantage established, it took Brett about five seconds to decide whether his next move would be to exact revenge, run, or both. It felt great to ram the narrow knife into the asshole’s chest.

He left the house with tires bawling, headed to his parents’ farm out on Highway 25. His father would know what to do. Find a lawyer, something like that. After he got there he’d call the hospital and warn Jana to stay away from his house.

Or maybe he’d better call her now. He pulled the cell phone from his pocket but it hadn’t fared well in the fight. The face was shattered and dark. The speedometer needle was nudging one hundred miles per hour when he gave up and threw the phone onto the seat beside him. He looked back to the road and screamed as the car hit the shallow curve a mile short of the farm. He slammed his foot on the brake but it was too late. The car left the road, nosed down into a drainage ditch, and began flipping end over end. Brett was not wearing a seat belt, and he was thrown through the windshield midway through the car’s third somersault. Death was instant.

12:13 AM CENTRAL DAYLIGHT TIME (LOCAL)

IUKA HOSPITAL

“You’re sure you don’t need me to stay?” Jana Fulton said to the supervising E.R. nurse.

“Go on home, we’ve got it. If we get busy, I’ll call.”

“Thanks. I’ll see you tomorrow.” Jana walked through the exit and made her way across the parking lot to her car, happy to get an unexpected night off due to a scheduling foul-up that resulted in an extra nurse on a slow night. She wasn’t sleepy and with any luck she’d be able to finish laying out the brochures and flyers for the Nurses’ Auxiliary fundraising auction that was coming up in two weeks.

Halfway between the hospital and Brett’s house she dialed his cell. “The wireless customer you are calling is not available. Please try your call again later,” squawked the recording. She dropped the phone into her purse and drummed her fingers on the steering wheel while she waited for a traffic light to change.

Three minutes later she turned into the driveway and parked behind a Jeep she didn’t recognize. Brett’s car was gone. She walked to the door, unlocked it, stepped inside, and turned on the light.

12:13 AM CENTRAL DAYLIGHT TIME (LOCAL)

GOOD NEIGHBOR PHARMACY

Dane took the time to bandage the hand he sliced when he broke the window, then left the drugstore with a bag full of painkillers. Percodan, Percocet, Vicodin. The dimwits even left bottles of Dilaudid and Oxycontin on a shelf instead of in the Schedule II safe. He could survive for months. He slipped to the corner of the building and looked around it. The parking lot was clear and there was no traffic on the street. Riff sure was taking his time for a simple job; he’d been gone a good twenty minutes. And he wasn’t answering his phone. Odd.

According to the Pisswater map the Fulton house was only two blocks away, so Dane started walking. Even past midnight, the August air was humid and sticky. As he turned the corner at a convenience store a raucous band of teenagers came out, loa
ded into the cab and cargo bed of a pickup, and left the parking lot of the little store shouting and singing, being teenagers. He stopped for just a moment and watched, marveling at the exuberance of their youth, thinking about how they saw the future as endless and unknown, and almost saddened as he thought about the reality of their brief remaining time. The feeling passed soon enough.

He was angry at Riff for breaking communication, but a couple of the Oxy should ease his frustration. There really wasn’t time for a fight, and besides, his brother could be nasty on the other side of an argument. The truckload of teenagers flashed through his mind again.

He felt the oxycodone begin to work and looked at his watch. 12:17. He only had an hour to meet up with Riff, get to GCE, and take care of business. Where is that silly brother of mine?  Sometimes the pills didn’t work like they were supposed to, but this was a good night and the searing pain in his forehead was easing. As he turned onto Fulton’s street, he remembered having once been a teenager himself. A year older than Riff, he remembered his first vehicle, a raggedy old Ford pickup.

The nostalgic buzz ended as he neared the house. The Jeep was in the driveway with a car parked behind it. He walked to the driveway and felt the hood of the car. Hot. Over the chir
ping cicadas and rustling of the leaves in the old oak trees that lined the street, he could hear the metallic tick ... tick ... tick ... of the car’s exhaust system cooling.

Just as he touched the knob on the front door, a blood-curdling scream shrieked from inside. Instinct took over as he drew his gun and kicked open the door. Charging through the broken doorframe in a semi-crouch, weapon-forward stance, he took a rapid survey of the zone. Nine o’clock, clear ... twelve o’clock, clear ... three o’clock, what the hell? A woman, he’d seen her picture before, Fulton’s sister. She stood shaking, gas
ping for breath, little broken sobs, tears rolling down her face. At her feet was the only human being on the planet he cared for, his lifelong companion. Riff lay with his feet out and his back propped against the wall. The front of his black tee-shirt was wet, glued to his body by blood that poured out from around the blade of the knife in his chest. His eyes were open, locked in a look of surprise, hands covered in his own blood. He would’ve tried to pull the knife out. Somebody’s going to pay for this.

“Lady, start talking or I’ll send you where my brother is.”

She kept crying, but said nothing. Dane took three steps and stopped in front of her. “I’m not a patient man.”

The sobs were easing, the tears drying up. “I don’t have any idea what happened. I just walked in and found the place like this. And him sitting there like that. Who are you?”

“Where’s your brother’s laptop?”

“In my car.”

“How long has it been there?”

“It’s been in my car since this afternoon, but I borrowed it about a week ago. Why?”

“Damn it!” Dane rubbed his forehead. “Let’s ride.”

“Why do I need to go?”

“I’m short on time and I figure you know your way around. And trust me, going with me beats the alternative.”

“What’s that?”

“You’re not dumb, lady, so don’t insult me by acting it.”

 
“All right, let’s ride.”