he switched on the heaters because he was in a hurry.
After changing from his damp clothes into a comfortable gray jogging suit and athletic socks, he brewed a pot of coffee. For Rocky, he set out a bowl of orange juice.
The mutt had many peculiarities besides a taste for orange juice. For one thing, though he enjoyed going for walks during the day, he had none of a dog’s usual frisky interest in the nocturnal world, preferring to keep at least a window between himself and the night; if he
Sometimes Spencer thought that the dog, having suffered a hard life until two years ago and having had little reason to find joy in a canine’s place in the world, wanted to be a human being.
That was a big mistake. People were more likely to live a dog’s life, in the negative sense of the phrase, than were most dogs.
“Greater self-awareness,” he’d told Rocky on a night when sleep wouldn’t come, “doesn’t make a species any happier, pal. If it did, we’d have fewer psychiatrists and barrooms than you dogs have — and it’s not that way, is it?”
Now, as Rocky lapped at the juice in the bowl on the kitchen floor, Spencer carried a mug of coffee to the expansive L-shaped desk in one corner of the living room. Two computers with large hard-disk capacities, a full- color laser printer, and other pieces of equipment were arrayed from one end of the work surface to the other.
That corner of the living room was his office, though he had not held a real job in ten months. Since leaving the Los Angeles Police Department — where, during his last two years, he’d been on assignment to the California Multi-Agency Task Force on Computer Crime — he had spent several hours a day on-line with his own computers.
Sometimes he researched subjects of interest to him, through Prodigy and GEnie. More often, however, he explored ways to gain unapproved access to private and government computers that were protected by sophisticated security programs.
Once entry was achieved, he was engaged in illegal activity. He never destroyed any company’s or agency’s files, never inserted false data. Still, he was guilty of trespassing in private domains.
He could live with that.
He was not seeking material rewards. His compensation was knowledge — and the occasional satisfaction of righting a wrong.
Like the Beckwatt case.
The previous December, when a serial child molester — Henry Beckwatt — was to be released from prison after serving less than five years, the California State Parole Board had refused, in the interest of prisoners’ rights, to divulge the name of the community in which he would be residing during the term of his parole. Because Beckwatt had beaten some of his victims and expressed no remorse, his pending release raised anxiety levels in parents statewide.
Taking great pains to cover his tracks, Spencer had first gained entry to the Los Angeles Police Department’s computers, stepped from there to the state attorney general’s system in Sacramento, and from there into the parole board’s computer, where he finessed the address to which Beckwatt would be paroled. Anonymous tips to a few reporters forced the parole board to delay action until a secret new placement could be worked out. During the following five weeks, Spencer exposed three more addresses for Beckwatt, shortly after each was arranged.
Although officials had been in a frenzy to uncover an imagined snitch within the parole system, no one had wondered, at least not publicly, if the leak had been from their electronic-data files, sprung by a clever hacker. Finally admitting defeat, they paroled Beckwatt to an empty caretaker’s house on the grounds of San Quentin.
In a couple of years, when his period of post-prison supervision ended, Beckwatt would be free to prowl again, and he would surely destroy more children psychologically if not physically. For the time being, however, he was unable to settle into a lair in the middle of a neighborhood of unsuspecting innocents.
If Spencer could have discovered a way to access God’s computer, he would have tampered with Henry Beckwatt’s destiny by giving him an immediate and mortal stroke or by walking him into the path of a runaway truck. He wouldn’t have hesitated to ensure the justice that modern society, in its Freudian confusion and moral paralysis, found difficult to impose.
He was not a hero, not a scarred and computer-wielding cousin of Batman, not out to save the world. Mostly, he sailed cyberspace — that eerie dimension of energy and information within computers and computer networks — simply because it fascinated him as much as Tahiti and far Tortuga fascinated some people, enticed him in the way that the moon and Mars enticed the men and women who became astronauts.
Perhaps the most appealing aspect of that other dimension was the potential for exploration and discovery that it offered—
Now, he sat before one of his computers, switched it on, and sipped coffee while it went through its start-up procedures. These included the Norton AntiVirus program, to be sure that none of his files had been contaminated by a destructive bug during his previous venture into the national data webs. The machine was uninfected.
The first telephone number that he entered was for a service offering twenty-four-hour-a-day stock market quotations. In seconds, the connection was made, and a greeting appeared on his computer screen: WELCOME TO WORLDWIDE STOCK MARKET INFORMATION, INC.
Using his subscriber ID, Spencer requested information about Japanese stocks. Simultaneously he activated a parallel program that he had designed himself and that searched the open phone line for the subtle electronic signature of a listening device. Worldwide Stock Market Information was a legitimate data service, and no police agency had reason to eavesdrop on its lines; therefore, evidence of a tap would indicate that his own telephone was being monitored.
Rocky padded in from the kitchen and rubbed his head against Spencer’s leg. The mutt couldn’t have finished his orange juice so quickly. He was evidently more lonely than thirsty.
Keeping his attention on the video display, waiting for an alarm or an all-clear, Spencer reached down with one hand and gently scratched behind the dog’s ears.
Nothing he had done as a hacker could have drawn the attention of the authorities, but caution was advisable. In recent years, the National Security Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and other organizations had established computer-crime divisions, all of which zealously prosecuted offenders.
Sometimes they were almost criminally zealous. Like every overstaffed government agency, each computer- crime project was eager to justify its ever increasing budget. Every year a greater number of arrests and convictions was required to support the contention that electronic theft and vandalism were escalating at a frightening rate. Consequently, from time to time, hackers who had stolen nothing and who had wrought no destruction were brought to trial on flimsy charges. They weren’t prosecuted with any intention that, by their example, they would deter crime; their convictions were sought merely to create the statistics that ensured higher funding for the project.
Some of them were sent to prison.
Sacrifices on the altars of bureaucracy.
Martyrs to the cyberspace underground.
Spencer was determined never to become one of them.
As the rain rattled against the cabin roof and the wind stirred a whispery chorus of lamenting ghosts from the eucalyptus grove, he waited, with his gaze fixed on the upper-right corner of the video screen. In red letters, a single word appeared: CLEAR.
No taps were in operation.
