"Staying offline… knowing you, how're you going to survive twenty-five years of that?"
Russ had been caught hacking into a number of bank computers and coding them to transfer a fraction of a cent of each international transaction to his Swiss account. He'd been sitting back, collecting well into six figures a year until someone got wise and sicced the Treasury Department's FinCEN unit on him. His lawyer pled him down to two years of soft time in a fed pen but the judge imposed a quarter-century ban on going online.
He offered a sickly grin. "Only twenty-two-point-three-seven-six years to go." The grin brightened. "But you've heard of cyber cafes, haven't you?"
"Yeah. You're not afraid they'll catch you?"
"I'm pretty sure they're monitoring my lines, but they don't have the manpower to follow me every time I go out for a cuppa." He rubbed his hands together. "So. Whatcha got for me?"
"Well, it's what you're going to get for me."
"Long as it's not an online thing, I'll see what I can do."
"Okay. I need to find a way to erase a hard drive and make it look like an accident."
Russ dropped into the swivel chair by his computer. "Windows?"
Jack tried to envision the computer he'd seen in Cordova's attic back in September. It hadn't looked like a Mac.
"Yeah. Pretty sure."
"Well, you could reformat it and reinstall Windows, but that doesn't happen by accident. He'll know." He leaned forward. "Why don't you tell me exactly what you want done."
Jack hesitated on baring the specifics, then realized he didn't have to.
"This guy's got certain files on his computer I want to wipe out, but if just those files disappear, he'll know who's behind it. So I want to wipe all his files."
"What about backups?"
"My gut tells me he stashes those someplace where, say, a fire wouldn't hurt them."
Russ grinned. "And you want to follow him to the backup."
"You got it."
Not exactly, but why waste time explaining it to someone who didn't need to know.
Russ thought a moment, then snapped his fingers. "Got it! HYRTBU!"
"Her taboo? I don't need voodoo, I—"
Russ laughed and spelled it for him. "It's a mischief virus. Deletes all kinds of files—docs, jpegs, waves, mpegs, gifs, pdfs, and just about every other suffix you've ever seen—without harming the programs. In fact, it doesn't just delete the files, it overwrites them."
Jack was relatively new to computers. He'd bought his first about a year ago and was still feeling his way.
"What's the difference?"
"When something is deleted, it's still there on the disk. You can't get to it through the operating system because its references are gone from the system tables, but it isn't gone until it's erased or overwritten with another file."
"But if you can't get to it—"
Russ was shaking his head. "You can get to it. All you need is a data recovery program, and there are dozens of them."
A scary thought, that.
"But HYRTBU overwrites every file and leaves a doc with the same name in its place."
"Doc?"
"Yeah. A document file, each with the same message: 'Hope You Remembered To Back Up!' Get it? It's an—"
"An acronym, yeah." Jack was baffled. "You mean someone sat down and spent all that time writing the code for this HYRTBU thing, just so he can screw up strangers' hard drives?" He shook his head. "Some people have way too much time on their hands."
"Guy probably justifies it by telling himself he's teaching his victims a valuable lesson: Always back up your files. I bet once you've been hit by HYRTBU you become a compulsive backer-upper."
"But still…"
"Hey, it's like Everest, man. You do it because it's there. Back when I was a kid, in my phreaking days, I used to break into the phone company's computers just to see if I could. And then I'd push it to see how far I could go, you know, seeking system mastery. Of course later I figured how to get myself free long distance, but that wasn't how it started."
"All right, Sir Hillary, how do we get HYRTBU into this computer?"
"Easiest way is to send it with an e-mail. Guy opens the attached file and, if he's doesn't have his AV setup to screen e-mail, kablooey—he's toast."
"Audio visual?"
"Antivirus software."
"I don't know the guy's e-mail address, don't even know if he goes online."
Russ looked glum. "Everybody goes online. Everybody but me." He sighed. "Well then, you've got to get to his computer and physically slip the virus into his system."
"I'm planning to visit his office."
"Perfect. What's his rig like? New? Old?"
"Unless he's replaced it, I'd say it has a few miles on it."
"Great. A floppy should do it. For a very reasonable fee I can put together a special boot disk that'll get you past any password and AV protection he's got and infect his hard drive."
"How reasonable?"
"How's a half K sound?"
"Sounds like a lot."
"Hey, I got expenses."
Jack made a show of looking around. "Yeah. I can see."
He spotted a variety of blank invoice forms on Russ's desk. He picked one up. Yellow Pages was printed across the top next to the walking-fingers logo in the upper-left corner.
"Oh, no. The invoice game?"
Russ shrugged. "Hey, I gotta make ends meet."
Phony invoices… a small-time, hit-or-miss scam. A guy like Russ would invoice medium-to large-size companies for services that hadn't been rendered. Unless someone was watchdogging it, more often than not the invoices got passed to the accounting or bookkeeping department where they were paid.
"You're on parole, Russ. You get caught, you're back inside, and most likely not in a country club like last time."
"Yeah, but they gotta catch me first. And then they gotta convict me. You see, nobody ever bothered to trademark 'Yellow Pages' or the walking fingers. They're public domain. Now, check out the lower-left corner."
Jack squinted at the tiny print. " 'This is a solicitation'?"
"Right. As long as I've got that there, I'm within the law—at least the letter of the law."
"So you go through the Yellow Pages and bill companies for their listings."
He grinned. "The bigger ones with the display ads are the best. They advertise in so many places they expect lots of invoices and don't look too closely. Works like a charm."
Jack tossed the invoice blank onto the desk and shook his head. "Still… you're on parole…"
"What else am I gonna do? I was a frosh at CCNY when I caught the hacking bug and dropped out. I know one thing, man, and I'm not allowed to use it. Shit, I'm not even allowed to work in Circuit City. And I need money for tuition."
"Tuition?"
"Yeah, I gotta look like I'm bettering myself, so I'm taking courses back at CCNY. Started as an English major, so I figure I'll go back to that, look like I'm trying for a degree. Makes my parole officer happy, at least."
"But not you."
He shook his head. "Taking a lit course. Now I know why I dropped out. Prof's got us wasting our time reading Marcel Marceau."
Jack blinked. "Um, Marcel Marceau was a mime. A man of few words, you might say."
"Well, then, Marcel somebody. Long-winded guy—zillions of words about nothing. The most boring shit you've ever read." He shook his head again. "My life sucks."
"If you're trying to break my heart, it worked. Five hundred for the disk. Half down, half when I know it did the job."
Russ's face broke open with a big grin. "I'll have it for you tonight. Jack, you just made my day!"
Deadpan, Jack reached for his wallet. "That's me. Jackie Sunshine. It's what I'm about. I live for moments like this."
3
Jack didn't feel completely naked walking through town without at least one weapon hidden somewhere on his person, merely stripped to his underwear. At the stroke of noon he arrived at The Light offices, just west of Times Square. A peek through the glass doors of the front entrance made him glad he wasn't carrying. Jamie Grant hadn't been kidding: An armed guard and a metal detector waited just inside.