'What good is that?'
'The only thing I can think of is that at some point they're going to send a video message throughout the botnet.'
'To what? Sell Viagra?'
'No,' he said in a grave tone. Probably thought Jack was serious. 'It must be something bigger than that.'
'Ya think?'
'It may be propaganda, or a religious message.'
Jack couldn't see that. The Order operated behind the scenes. Coming out in a video fed to a zillion computers in a botnet didn't make sense. Had to be something more sinister.
'You're sure they couldn't use it to crash the Internet?'
Munir shook his head. 'I am telling you, these people want to use the Internet, not bring it down.'
Munir was refusing to get on board that train, so he wasn't going to be much help in building a scenario of how an Internet kill might work.
'Gotta go,' Jack said, rising. 'Meeting some people later.'
'If we could get hold of Valez,' Munir said, 'we could wring the answer out of him.'
Obviously he hadn't heard. How could he? The victims' names hadn't been released yet.
'Valez won't be telling anyone anything. He's dead.'
He gave Munir the news account of the shooting: According to the police, both the driver and his passenger had been shot by the mystery man in the mystery van from Mississippi. Logical assumption. Ballistics would square that eventually, not that it mattered.
He looked horrified. 'Who are these people? What kind of monsters are they?'
You don't want to know, Jack thought. You really don't.
He pointed to Munir. 'As you said, well organized and well financed. And smart. Smart enough to keep any of their people on the lower rungs from knowing the big picture. Even if Valez were alive, I don't think he could help us. I think he knew he was supposed to acquire your game code and little else. He had no idea what it would be used for. But my guess is he went too far with you and paid the price. What I don't get is Russ… how'd he get involved?'
Munir leaned back and looked like he might puddle up again, but he held on.
'I've been thinking about that, and as I've been explaining this virus to you, the pieces began to fit. Do you know what Russ was involved with lately?'
Jack remembered him telling him something at Julio's…
'Some government project to foil hackers. Said he was a 'white hat' now.'
Munir nodded. 'Yes. A team of hackers, supposedly put together by the NRO.'
' 'Supposedly'?'
'I don't believe the project had anything to do with national defense. I think they were put together to come up with this virus.'
'He told me they were doing protection. Said they'd been building firewalls higher, wider, and smarter than anything else out there.'
Munir looked at him. 'And how do you test a firewall?'
Oh, crap. 'You create bigger and better ways to breach it.'
Munir jerked a thumb at his computer. 'And if that was the case, neither the NRO nor any other agency would want their name connected. I think the one thing we can be certain of is that whoever hired Russ was not who they said they were. Maybe it was some other agency, or some group outside the government.'
The latter, Jack thought. The Ancient Fraternal Septimus Order.
'You think Russ helped design that?'
'Yes. It's a very elegant virus, revolutionary, you could say. You would need a team of experienced hackers- just the sort of blue-ribbon team Russ was working with-to come up with something like that. I think in his conversations with the other hackers he must have mentioned the MMO game enhancer we were working on. He had been impressed with my video code and probably talked about it. The wrong person overheard, and I was targeted. But they couldn't have Russ around when they inserted my code. He'd recognize it. So…'
'So they killed him.'
Munir slammed a fist on his desk. 'They could simply have fired him!'
Yeah, they could have. But death seemed the Order's favorite way of dealing with problem people.
'Do you see any way of stopping this?'
Munir shook his head. 'Until someone writes a program to kill it, you can stop the spread by not opening emails with no subject line. But the virus has too much of a head start. And once in your system, it's almost impossible to remove. It hides in multiple areas. You think you've gotten all of it, but if you've missed any, it immediately regenerates itself the next time you power up.'
'Swell.'
18
'A global botnet created by a virus built to download video,' Weezy said with a slow shake of her head. 'To what end?'
Jack, Weezy, Veilleur, and the Lady sat around the table in the Lady's apartment. With Weezy's help, Jack had explained as best he could what he'd learned from Munir. They seemed to understand.
'That's the big question,' Jack said.
A wild scenario flashed through his brain.
'What if they plan to broadcast a never-ending loop of a hypnotic chant which, if repeated often enough by millions upon millions of people, would part the veil between the worlds and let the Otherness flood in. Or maybe show non-Euclidean designs that if enough people copy will alter geometry and have the same effect.'
Veilleur and the Lady stared at him uncomprehendingly. Weezy gave him the same look as this afternoon after his Elmer Fudd remark.
'This isn't an H. P. Lovecraft story, Jack. This is serious business.'
'I know that. But if their goal isn't an Internet crash, I've got to ask myself what else it can be. And this is what pops up.'
She shook her head. 'Your mind… the Order playing 'Cthulhu fhtagn' over and over?'
'Well, not those exact words, I suppose. Okay. Dumb idea. I'm just throwing things out as they hit me. Here's something else that hit me on the way over: Could the release of this virus have anything to do with the birth of Dawn's baby?'
Weezy's eyes widened. 'Did you find out about him? Is he alive?'
Jack nodded. 'I can't say it's alive, but it wasn't reported dead. No death certificate filed on a newborn with Wednesday morning time of death.'
'According to Dawn, the baby's a 'he,' not an 'it.' And I think we have to assume he's alive.'
Veilleur said, 'Is this the baby laden with the Taint?'
The term threw Jack for an instant, then he remembered that back in the First Age they called oDNA the Taint.
'That's the one.'
After Jack explained the situation, Veilleur looked at Weezy.
'I don't like her moving in next to you. That cannot be an accident.'
'Exactly,' Jack said.
Weezy shrugged. 'No argument. But that's the way it is, so we've got to deal with it.'
Veilleur continued to stare at her. 'She said nothing else about these so-called 'birth defects'?'
'She said she only got a glimpse of him before they whisked him away. Supposedly he'd stopped breathing.'
Veilleur stroked his beard. 'I'm interested in those birth defects. If you speak to her again, ask her what she saw. Any details at all.'
