“Milo? The boss wants to see you.” Hart opens one of the glass doors and motions for Milo to follow him, leaving the rest of us to our work. We spend the next few hours in silence—a good thing for me because that bloated virus is back and I’m no closer to identifying the purpose. I know it’s a worm—a type of virus that can easily replicate and carry a variety of payloads—but this worm still isn’t carrying anything. There are no malicious or encrypted files . . . in fact, the payload just seems to be replicating itself.
Seventy-four characters over and over again: 596F7520646F6E2774207265616C6C792062656C696576652068696D3F20446F20796F753F
I don’t get it. On top of the worm being obsolete and a low security risk, it was written in assembly code. If the author wanted the virus to avoid detection, it would’ve been written in a modern polymorphic code.
And yet it keeps coming back again and again, getting detected, getting deleted. What’s the point?
I sit back, stare at the screen. What if . . . what if I’m looking at it wrong? What if I’m seeing what it can’t be instead of what it is?
I punch “hexcat” into my Linux workstation and watch the lines of hexadecimal code scroll past. My breath catches.
The virus doesn’t make any sense because it’s not a virus. It’s a message.
You don’t really trust them, do you?
13
All the hairs on my arms go rigid. I sit a little straighter, pretend to stretch as my eyes cut across the room. Everyone’s at work. It’s a relief until I realize I’m being stupid. What am I looking for? A gigantic sign above someone’s head saying “I sent that!”?
I scowl, look at the message again.
You don’t really trust them, do you?
Well, I did. I do.
No, I need to. The word is a small but incredibly crucial difference. I need this to be the real deal because if it isn’t . . .
There’s a link below the question, but it’s a link to what? Proof? Pictures? A cheap Viagra prescription?
Odds are, it’ll give my computer some virus I’ll have to fix and Kent will flip out because I should know better than to dig into this. I drum my fingertips against the edge of my desk because I do know better.
I click the link anyway. It opens another page in my web browser, taking me to an article published yesterday about a dead man.
A dead former judge, Alan Bay.
My hands go cold, clammy.
No. It couldn’t be. It couldn’t. I skim the top paragraph, hitting all the high notes: Apparently, Alan Bay was at home when his pacemaker malfunctioned—at least they’re speculating that it was malfunctioning. Full details won’t be known until after the autopsy, but an “insider” maintains it kept turning on and off—multiple times, according to the data history—until he died.
In agony.
I suck air. Suck more air. I cannot get enough breath.
It kept turning on and off. It kept turning on and off.
Because I kept turning it on and off. Bile tips into the back of my mouth and I scroll to the top, read the website name: Datajunkie. It’s like a forum, but this is the only post. That’s good. It makes the whole thing feel made-up.
I need it to be made-up.
I scroll down, check the time stamp. The article was published late yesterday, but was posted to the forum this morning. An hour ago. I take a breath and hold it, keep holding it. Think this through. I’ve been getting these viruses since the first day I arrived. It couldn’t be the same link, though, because I hadn’t hijacked Bay’s pacemaker yet. Which means the previous viruses were what? Other messages? Junk?
I’ve permanently deleted them so I’ll never know, but this message comes so close on the heels of my conversation with Hart—plus there’s only one article posted.
Maybe it’s a prank.
Or maybe that’s just the nausea talking. It’s simmering under my tongue. If this is true . . . I was the person turning the pacemaker on and off.
I tortured Bay, the man who denied my mother’s restraining order and pushed through Bren’s adoption paperwork. I exposed his sons as murderers. He was my last job for Carson and this has to be a coincidence because if it’s not . . .
I take two sharp breaths. How many times did Norcut tell me to do it? Four times? Five?
No. Leave it. Don’t go there. I open another window in my browser—keystroke logging programs be damned—and search Alan Bay’s name. Out of the thousands of results, only the top four are about his death and they basically all say the same thing: Bay fell from political grace, his pacemaker failed, and now he’s dead. Everything else is about his sons and their murder spree.
Because I’m a minor, my name’s never appeared in any of the news articles, but people who were involved with the case knew I was there the night they caught Ian and Jason. Does this person know too? Is that why they sent me the link?
No, better question: Why would Norcut want me to kill Bay?
There’s a wordless roar in my brain again. I rub my forehead, feel the scab by my hairline, and wonder if I shouldn’t take another couple painkillers. I need to think.
No good, the only thing I can think of is tracking down who sent this to me, and maybe for the first time in my life, my hand stops. I don’t reach for the mouse.
Used to be, I would’ve done an investigation. I would’ve bargained, snooped, spied. I would’ve found whoever sent it.