If Josie joined a team sport, Diana quit sports altogether. If Josie decided makeup and fashion were important, she threw out every stitch of decent clothing she owned. If Josie studied French, she studied Arabic. If Josie went to swimming camp, she went to horseback-riding camp. And the hell of it was she still ended up just like her big sister. A pale, unsuccessful shadow of her, but just like her. Both military officers, both beautiful women in their own right, both highly intelligent, both with wildly promising futures. Of course, unlike Josie she did her damnedest to hide both her beauty and her brains most of the time, and she was rapidly throwing away her career and her future.
But she couldn’t break away from her family completely. Last year, when Josie set out to clear their mother’s name once and for all, Diana had come running to help Josie. She’d even taken a bullet for her big sister when the same guy who’d sabotaged their mother’s work went after Josie’s research as well.
Was she doomed to repeat her mother’s fatal mistake and take on forces too big for her to handle? Was she headed down the fast track to her own destruction by tangling with the Q-group all by herself?
She pushed the car door open and stepped out. A couple of pedestrians looked away from her hastily. It was amazing how a change of makeup could make her completely invisible to respectable people. Maybe that was why she had so little respect for most of them in return. She stepped inside the surprisingly quiet Internet cafe. A half- dozen guys dressed in varying degrees of grunge lounged at the coffee bar to one side of the room. Most of the computer terminals were empty at this time of day. The coffee server waved a hello at her and she waved back. Damn. None of her regular hacker buds were here.
She made her way to the back of the room and picked a terminal facing the entrance. She logged on quickly, using the Arabic handle she’d hidden behind to infiltrate the Q-group chat room. No new activity in the chat room since yesterday afternoon. That was odd. They yacked up a storm most evenings. But last night had been completely silent. Like maybe they were all away from their computers. Maybe breaking into her house and getting into position for today’s assassination attempt.
She highlighted the e-mail handle she believed belonged to one of the cell’s leaders. It translated roughly from Arabic to English as “Glory Seeker.” She attempted to trace it back to its source and immediately ran into a firewall, a blocking command by Glory Seeker’s Internet server that prevented her from seeing any further into the source of the transmission. Quickly, she typed in a protocol to circumvent the firewall. No problem. She sailed right past the routine antihacking protection.
She dug into the server’s memory, searching for any trace of Glory Seeker and his point of origin. And hit another firewall. A big, fat honking one this time. She tried her protocol again and it bounced like a Super Ball. Hmm. Time to pull out the big guns. She uploaded a program one of her hacker pals had written a few months back that purported to bust through any firewall anywhere.
She watched the spinning hourglass icon on the computer screen as the program did its magic. This sure was taking a while. It was taking way too long, in fact. At this rate it’d be next week before she got the name of a single Q-group member. She needed more computing power. Or more hacking power, to be precise.
While the firewall buster continued to batter away at the barrier to her progress, she pulled out her cell phone. “Hey, Dynamo, Die Hard here.”
A sleepy voice complained, “Do you know what time it is?”
“Yeah. I’m sorry I woke you up. But I’ve got an emergency. The mother of all hacking jobs for you.”
The voice perked up to vaguely human standards. “Anybody done it before?”
She couldn’t help but grin. It was all about status. Be the first guy to break into an unbreakable system and your fame was assured within the secret world of hackers.
She replied, “Nope, it’s a virgin system. A bunch of virgin systems. I’m at the Chaosium. Can you be here in ten minutes?”
“Are you kidding?”
“No, I’m not kidding. It’s really an emergency. I’ll owe you huge if you help me out.”
“How huge?” the guy asked, distinctly interested now.
She laughed. “Not that huge. No sexual favors from me. But hey,” she added casually, “Don’t sweat it. I’ll call CrystalMeth. I bet she can get what I need if you can’t.” It was a dirty trick. Dynamo and CrystalMeth were ex- lovers and archrivals. They hated each other’s guts.
“I’ll be there in five,” Dynamo announced with a definite fire in his pants now.
She repeated the call a half-dozen more times, pleading and wheedling the best hackers she knew into coming down and helping her out. True to his word, Dynamo walked into the cafe, in his pajama bottoms and a Def Lepperd T-shirt in five minutes flat. She stood up to greet him and leaned over his shoulder as he settled in and signed on at a terminal near her. Several more of the hackers trickled in over the next couple of minutes. They looked startled when they took note of the team she’d assembled. It was a who’s who of East Coast hackers.
She told the late arrivals, “I’ve got eight more hackers online. They’re signed in and waiting for you guys to join them.”
“Jesus,” Dynamo exclaimed. “Are we taking over the Federal Reserve today or what?”
CrystalMeth, the only other woman in the room, retorted, “Been there. Done that. Got the T-shirt.”
The woman also was on probation because of that particular stunt. Before the pair could erupt into a full-blown spat, Diana directed everyone, “Log on to your most powerful server while I tell you what’s up. Time is of the essence, here.”
“What’s so urgent?” Dynamo asked as his fingers flew across the keyboard.
“I need to find some guys. Track them back to their points of origin, break into their servers and get actual, real-world identities on all of them. And I need it done like yesterday.”
One of the other hackers spoke up. “That’s kid stuff. It’s time consuming, but any garden-variety hacker could do it. Why all this firepower, Die Hard?”
She’d promised Gabe she wouldn’t tell anyone what was afoot. Besides, these guys wouldn’t believe her if she did tell them. Not to mention they might very well refuse to help her. “I can’t give you the details, but this is no- kidding save-the-world stuff. The sort of stuff that could get all of your records cleared.”
That got their attention. Well over half of them had had runins with the law. She had no authority to promise such a thing, but she’d bet Gabe did.
She gave them the address of the known Q-group chat room and assigned a user of the room to each of them to track down. In a matter of minutes the cafe had gone silent except for the clacking of keyboards as eight hundred-word-a-minute typists body-slammed their way through the Internet.
“Hey, Die Hard, mind if I ask a friend to help us?” CrystalMeth called out.
Diana replied quickly, “Not at all. In fact, all of you, invite anyone you want to jump in.”
Before long, word had gone out literally all over the world, and hundreds of hackers jumped on the bandwagon. Most of them would be no help at all, but with that many operators at work, somebody was bound to stumble across back doors into the right server systems.
She jumped as her own computer beeped. The firewall protocol had worked! She was inside the next layer of protection surrounding Glory Seeker. She typed in a few commands and scanned the code scrolling down her screen. Wow. Nice program architecture. But permeable, nonetheless. She started to type in a set of instructions to get past it. And noticed something funny. The original code at the top of her screen was degrading. Literally eroding before her very eyes! Crud. Somebody was counterhacking.
She typed furiously. She had to get in the final command before the entire grid imploded in her face. She stabbed the Enter button on her keyboard and prayed she’d been in time. The hourglass icon blinked steadily for several seconds.
And a new set of code scrolled down her screen. Bingo.
Reading fast, she identified the type of encryption this layer of security used. She’d seen something like it before. Casting back in her memory, she recalled the command set to bypass it and typed fast. Again, the code started to erode. Whoever was chasing her through this server was good. Damned good.
A fork in the path of the logic loomed ahead. She had to choose one direction or another. And fast. The counterhacker was right on her heels. Abruptly, one of the forks in the path started to erode as she watched. Well, that made the decision easy. She dived in front of the erosion, down the disappearing pathway, racing across cyberhighways like the wind.
Hunched over the keyboard, her fingers fairly flew across the keys as she flung commands into battle like electronic warriors against her foe. She paused just long enough to send a couple of commands designed to
