against old brick and iron railings, waiting by the three steps that led up to Lucy’s heavy oak front door.
“They make colorful ones in the little dispensaries,” Berger’s shadowy face said as it looked at the Baggie. “Ones that aren’t transparent.”
Lucy dropped Jet Ranger’s job well done into a trash barrel. She said, “Hope you haven’t been waiting long. He’s not a city boy. Must have had a real grass yard with a white picket fence in an earlier life. His name’s Jet Ranger, as in the first helicopter I ever owned. Jet Ranger, meet Jaime. He doesn’t know any tricks, like shaking hands or high-fives or hovering. He’s pretty simple, aren’t you, boy?”
Berger squatted to rub Jet Ranger’s neck, not seeming to care that her long shorn mink coat spilled around her on the dirty sidewalk and she was blocking foot traffic. People detoured around her in the cold dark as she kissed the top of the bulldog’s head, and he licked her chin.
“That’s impressive,” Lucy said. “He doesn’t like most people. Funny thing about living with an asshole. I don’t mean me. Whoever owned him before me. I’m sorry,” she said to her dog, petting him and touching Berger’s shoulder as she did. “I shouldn’t openly discuss your painful and private past or use the word owned. That was rude of me. I don’t really own him,” she said to Berger. “In fact, I have to pay him a considerable sum to let me feed him, pet him, take him out, sleep with him.”
“How old?” Berger asked.
“Not sure.” Lucy massaged Jet Ranger’s spotted ears. “Not long after I moved here, I was leaving the West Thirtieth heliport after flying in from Boston, and saw him trotting along the West Side Highway. You know that panicky look, when a dog’s lost? He was limping.”
Lucy covered Jet Ranger’s ears so he wouldn’t hear the rest.
“No collar,” she said. “Obviously dumped out of a car, probably because he’s old, got bad hips, half blind. You know, not fun anymore. They usually don’t live past ten. He’s probably pretty close.”
“People suck,” Berger said, getting up.
“Come on,” Lucy said to her dog. “Don’t be upset by Jaime’s coat. I’m sure every one of those poor little minks died of natural causes.”
“We should have the passwords soon,” Berger said. “Maybe that will help explain the rest of it.”
“I don’t know what the rest of it is, since I barely know the first of it. We’re just getting started,” Lucy said. “But there’s enough for me to be worried about my aunt. And I’m worried.”
“I got that when you called.”
Lucy inserted an interactive key into a Mul-T-Lock Mortise cylinder, and the alarm system began to beep as she opened the front door. She entered a code on the keypad and the beeping stopped, and she shut the door behind them.
“When you see what I’m talking about, your first impulse will be to fire me,” Lucy said. “But you won’t.”
Shrew considered herself a crackerjack Web administrator, but she was no programmer. She was no information technology expert.
She sat at her computer, watching the Gotham Gotcha home page continue its maniacal loop while a technician from the Web hosting company told her over the phone that the problem was a buffer overflow. He explained that the number of users attempting to access certain information on the site had exceeded the server’s enormous capacity and at this moment the situation was so out of control, millions of people per minute were clicking on a photograph in the dark room, and this, in the technician’s opinion, could mean but one thing: “A worm,” he said. “Or basically, a virus. But nothing I’ve ever seen. It’s really more of a mutant worm.”
“How could a worm, mutant or otherwise, have infiltrated the programming?” Shrew asked.
“It’s likely that a remote unprivileged user somehow executed arbitrary code and exploited the buffer overflow vulnerabilities of the Web proxy server. Whoever did this is extremely sophisticated.”
He went on to say that typically what happened was someone sent an attachment containing a worm that wasn’t recognized by any virus-detection program known to the industry. This worm mimicked users opening an image that took up a lot of space, “such as a photograph,” he said, adding that “this self-replicating worm mimics millions of people opening the same image at the same time, which causes the server to run out of memory, and in addition, it would appear that this worm is also performing the malicious action of destroying data. In other words, it’s an odd mutation of a worm, a macro virus. And possibly a Trojan horse if, for example, it’s also spreading the virus to other programs, which is what I fear.”
He repeatedly emphasized that the saboteur was someone who really knew what he was doing, as if the technician was secretly envious of whoever was clever enough to create such destruction.
Shrew innocently asked which image was the culprit, and he replied unequivocally that the worm was launched by a photograph of Marilyn Monroe. As he continued to explain the havoc caused by the mutant worm, Shrew was imagining the conspiracy behind it. Whoever was involved in Marilyn Monroe’s murder almost half a century ago still had a vested interest in the public’s not knowing the truth.
That pointed at the government, which implied politics and organized crime. Maybe there were terrorists back then, she considered. Maybe these people were somehow connected and had their eye on Shrew, all because she’d been foolish enough to take a job she knew nothing about and served at the behest of anonymous people who might be criminals.
For all she knew, the technician on the phone was a criminal, a terrorist, or a government agent, and this business about the Marilyn Monroe photograph launching the mutant worm was an attempt to muddy the waters so Shrew didn’t figure out what was really going on: The website had self-destructed like those tape recorders in Mission: Impossible, because without intending to, Shrew had inserted herself into the middle of a massive plot against a world power or an Evil Empire.
She felt extremely confused and overwhelmed by anxiety.
“You realize, I hope,” she said to the alleged technician, “that I have no idea what’s going on. I want no part of it, and never intended to be part of it. Not that I know anything. Because I certainly don’t.”
“It’s complicated,” he said. “Even for us. I’m trying to tell you this is a very sophisticated code someone’s written. Has to be. By code I mean a computer program that’s embedded in something that seems innocuous, such as a data file or an attachment.”
She didn’t care what he meant, and she didn’t care that the mutant worm couldn’t be stopped and that all attempts to shut down and restart the system had failed. She glazed over as the technician suggested they could attempt loading an archived earlier version of the Gotham Gotcha site, but his only other available servers didn’t have much disk space and were much slower, and that also could cause a crash. Possibly, they should purchase a new server, but that couldn’t happen instantly, and he’d have to clear it with the “business office,” and in the UK it was five hours later than it was here, so he wasn’t going to get anyone.
He pointed out that loading an earlier version would also mean Shrew would have to repopulate the website and repost all the latest information, and fans would need to be alerted that e-mails and images they had sent should be resent. The fixes required of Shrew would take days, maybe weeks, and the public was going to be angry, and those who most recently had joined the site wouldn’t be in the older version of the database and would be deeply offended. The website could be down for days. It could be weeks.
When the Boss found out the worm had been launched by the Marilyn Monroe morgue photo, at the very least, Shrew would be out of work. She had no backup plan. It would be like a year and a half ago, only this time there would be no windfall from a job offer made by anonymous strangers. This time she really would have to give up the apartment, which was the same thing as giving up what little she had left of who she used to be. Only worse. Life for virtually all decent people had only gotten harder. She didn’t know what on earth she would do.
She thanked the technician and got off the phone.
She checked to make sure all the blinds were closed, and poured herself another bourbon and gulped it down as she paced, half mad with fear, and near tears, as she thought about what likely would happen next.
The Boss wouldn’t fire her directly but rather would have that UK agent who barely spoke English do it. If the Boss was really tied in with some terrorist sect, then Shrew’s life was in danger. An assassin could find his way inside her apartment while she slept, and she’d never hear him.
She needed a dog.
The more bourbon Shrew drank, the more depressed, scared, and lonely she got. She contemplated the column she’d posted several weeks before Christmas that mentioned the same chain of pet stores Terri had recommended after Ivy had died and she’d offered to pay for a replacement.
