packets it was riding evenly led him to think it was randomly selecting them, which would make it tough to get a handle on.
At the other end of the test chamber, Jay watched the packets slide past the scanning array, which was actually a standard, off-the-shelf virus detector. He wanted to see how this bug got past them, after all. Putting one of his own cutting-edge programs there and squashing the bug with it wouldn’t tell him anything.
He was disappointed, though. The bug didn’t do anything special to defeat the security program. The off- the-shelf killware wasn’t designed to detect trinary bugs, and so it didn’t.
Jay saw the virus-bug reassemble itself, and then proceed to a large clear sheet of glass that represented the video subsystem of the computer setup. Once there, it sprayed the glass with some kind of ink, blacking it out. If he had been in the real world, he would have just seen his computer screen blank out.
Jay ran the test several times to confirm that the virus was indeed randomly selecting packets to leap onto, his thoughts turning over the same question.
Why would someone go through so much trouble to develop a virus that couldn’t be defeated by modern checkers, just to make someone’s screen go blank? It seemed like a lot of work for not much gain. Somebody that smart could be making good money programming.
Maybe they were, of course. Though that still begged the question of, Why bother?
As he watched the bug on the third test, something else occurred to him. There was something familiar about the way it moved, the shape of the antennae.
He walked toward the most current bug case on the wall of the lab and started looking. He glanced at hundreds of recent viruses, red, green, big, small, all kinds of them.
It was the filler, the really recent one that had made the rounds a few days before, the virus that had been eating up hard-drive space.
He took a closer look, pulling it carefully from its cage.
The antennae were identical to those of the blanker he was running in the test chamber. He turned the bug over, and saw it shimmer: another invisibility routine.
Jay got a live sample of the filler and took it to the test chamber. After a few runs, he was satisfied that whoever had made the filler had also made the blanker. An analysis of the written code showed portions that were exactly the same. This, plus the fact that the bugs had been released only three days apart, told him that they’d probably been developed at around the same time.
Which led to a particularly nasty thought, one that offered a possible answer to the “Why?” question.
In addition to everything else going on, it looked like they had a serial hacker piping cutting-edge viruses out onto the net. Jay cleared the VR scenario and reached for his virgil to com Alex.
Junior had made the drive from D.C. across the bay, taken Highway 301 north to SR 300, and driven east over the state line into Delaware. From there, it was only another dozen or so miles to Dover.
It had been dusk when he got there. Dover wasn’t much of a town, but it was big enough to have a branch of Hopkins Security. Like Brinks or Pinkertons or the other big security firms, Hopkins offered service patrols and electronic alarms for homes and businesses. They also offered armed guards.
If you were their customer and your alarm went off, they didn’t just call the cops like most agencies did. They sent an armed response of their own.
This was a huge selling point for them. In most places, the local police forces were stretched pretty thin. Answering a security call to an empty house, no matter how much money the owners had, just didn’t rank right up there with burning homes or 911 calls where individuals could be in danger. Oftentimes that gave smash-and-grab thieves enough time to kick in a door and steal half someone’s furniture before the police showed up.
Hopkins claimed that its armed response teams were the best private security around. They promised security personnel who were sharp, smart, and could all shoot. Every one of them had to qualify on the pistol range quarterly, and Hopkins’s standards were higher than those of seventy-five percent of the major metro police departments in the country.
All of which was exactly what Junior was looking for.
The way he figured it, shooting another cop would be too risky. Cop killings were rare enough that somebody might try to link them together, and he definitely didn’t want that. Even an armed security guard killed with a.22 might raise some eyebrows, though he had done all he could to protect himself there. He was planning to use only one gun this time, and the ballistics report would show that the bullets came from a different weapon. Doing it in another state should help, too.
It still wasn’t smart. He knew that, but just the thought of it thrilled him more than anything else he could think of. Yeah, sex was great, but it was nothing like clearing leather and pulling steel against a man who was trying to kill you. No drug he had ever tried — and Junior had tried more than a few while in the can — no drug came close.
This was the ultimate rush. Lose, and you were dead. Win, and you were like a god. You got to say who lived and who died. What could match that?
He ought to have made this trip before. He should have scouted it out, gotten the lay of the land and all, but Ames had been keeping him too busy running around lately. So what he ought to do now is to make this the scout — find a good place, set it up, check the response time and all.
That’s what he ought to do. He knew it, too. But it wasn’t what he was going to do. He was hooked, a junkie looking for his next fix, and he just couldn’t wait any longer.
He drove toward the outskirts of town, looking for a place that would work. It didn’t have to be perfect, but he wanted to find a spot far enough outside the city limits that they’d have to call the sheriff’s office, or even the state troopers. It had to have a Hopkins sign posted, of course, and it also needed to be some kind of business or warehouse or something that, after five o’clock, would be mostly empty. A residential neighborhood was riskier. Too many people, too many eyes. Sure, he had swiped a set of license plates from an old car parked on a D.C. side street, and those were now on his car, but he still didn’t want a crowd around. People in a neighborhood sometimes did weird, unpredictable things.
He remembered a time down in Mobile ten or eleven years ago. He’d been driving a car for a couple of guys who had said they knew where there was a gun safe full of cash. The house didn’t even have a burglar alarm, they told him, and it was in this middle-class neighborhood full of soccer moms and working dads. The two guys — Lonnie and Leon — had waited for a night when the homeowner had gone bowling. The three of them drove up, Lonnie and Leon went to the house, kicked in the door big as you please, and waltzed on in. Junior sat in the car with the engine running. What they figured was, Lonnie and Leon would crowbar and sledge the safe open inside five minutes, grab the cash, and run.
It was Leon and Lonnie’s plan. Junior was just the wheel man.
The safe turned out to be a better model than they had figured. After five minutes all they’d done was make a lot of noise, clanging and banging away at it. Junior could hear them out in the car even with the house’s doors closed, the car window rolled up, and the air conditioner going.
The neighbors must have had good hearing, too, because lights went on all over the place and people started coming out of their houses to see what was what.
The neighbors clearly knew that the guy who owned that house was bowling, it being eight o’clock on a weeknight, because they spotted Junior right off and started his way. That alone would have made him real nervous, but he also saw that some of them had guns.
Junior was a pretty good handgunner even back then, but he wasn’t about to try and take on five or six guys with shotguns and squirrel rifles coming at him in the dark on a hot summer night in Mobile. People up north might hate guns and all, but men in this neck of the woods knew how to use them, and there was no way that he was going to hop out of the car and shoot with them. He’d signed on as a driver and lookout, not security.
Junior laid on the horn to warn Lonnie and Leon as best he could, then put the car into gear and left rubber halfway to the corner.
