Satan always wanted him to taste flesh or blood, but meat of any kind was forbidden and punished by fire. He didn't understand that The Rat first coveted, then The Wind Minstrel possessed. They had been corresponding for six months, always at the same time on Sunday. Sunday was a good time for The Rat because it was God's day of rest, and he felt he could better elude His watchful vengeance. It was good for Satan Wolf because the prn staff in Oslo was at half-strength on Sunday, and there was nobody watching him while he used the computer late into the night in the prn law library. He was supposed to be working on his appeal. They left him in the locked room, chained to the floor. He always took a break around midnight and met The Rat in their secret place.
"I have not finished. I have one more victim… My final victim will complete the Beast. She will then be reborn. The answers will be clear. It will also prove the bitch Shirley was wrong. Man can be immortal. The wicked do not suffer punishment in eternal hell and are not destroyed or annihilated in a special mosaic of cleansing."
There was a short wait and then Satan replied:
"Enough about this. I've told you each session I can't use your religious rantings. Tell me about your kills. About the mutilations…"
Again there was a short lull as The Rat wondered how somebody he held in such regard could not see the religious significance, but it was always this way. Then he typed:
"I must transform every week or two. The coveting begins much earlier now… sometimes on Monday. I have tried to slow it down; sometimes I can stop it by preparing gifts. Twice I have sent totems to people I admire. I have sent things that don't matter in shoe boxes. I didn't need the hands from the one in Atlanta…"
Satan replied: "You must send me something wet."
As The Rat was reading this reply, his heart froze. He saw a small rectangle flashing in the upper right-hand corner of his screen. A back-finger program he had running in the background had just notified him that somebody had fingered him at Pennet. Someone knew he was there! He quickly did a names command to show him everyone on the private channel. He saw his own alias, WindMinstrel, listed twice. But he had logged out when the stack error occurred and had only logged back in once. He wondered if somebody had snarfed his password when he reentered the system and was now trying to hide on the channel, pretending to be him. His heart slammed in his chest, but he didn't panic. The Rat was cunning. He didn't tell Satan of his suspicion, because it would notify the eavesdropper that he had seen him. The Rat started a second screen session and took a look at the backfinger log to try to locate the intruder without alerting him. He could only do this as long as the intruder stayed online. Once the intruder's telephone connection was broken, it would be almost impossible to trace. He quietly went to work tracing the second WindMinstrel coming into the private chat channel, trying to trace it back through cyberspace to its place of origin.
In the second window, his backfinger log showed the site he had been fingered from:
redbar3. Cc. Rutledge. Edu
It was a university in the United States, although it couldn't show him who at that site had fingered him. He hacked out to a system prompt and used ps to list all processes or programs connected to Pennet. There was only one:
USER PID%CPU %MEM… TT STAT START TIME
snoopy 14232 70.6.06… r6 R17:12 0:00
/usr/ucb/telnet rIng2Ice. Anon. Pennet. No
He then fingered that account, all the while keeping up his communication with Satan, talking about things of no importance. Satan was becoming frustrated and began demanding more bloody information about his Atlanta kill. In minutes, The Rat's finger command revealed the host computer:
Login name: snoopyIn real life: RedBaron
Directory: /redbar3/snoopyShelclass="underline" /binicsh
On since April 14 17:09:23 on ttyr6
from uscs6. Fedworld. Ustreas. Custms. Gov
His brilliant, twisted mind was now spinning with thoughts of survival. U. S. Customs? His fat, gluttonous body glistened with sweat. The Rat knew he couldn't safely finger a U. S. Treasury host directly and let some backfinger they had set up get a log entry on him. He'd have to go in some other way, get in and out like lightning, disconnecting from the Treasury host before someone started fingering him. His mind was racing. He knew now that he'd been followed into his invisible chat channel after the stack error. The Rat knew the sendmail program on any system always had to have high-level access rights since it had to be able to write and receive e-mail. Sendmail was notorious across the Net for security holes. CERT, the Computer Emergency Response Team, was constantly posting security hole bulletins.
As he set up a packet-sniffer on the incoming mail port, The Rat typed a message of praise to Satan. Messages telling Satan of his glory always mollified him:
"You are more beautiful than death. You are the god of fuck and mutilation," he wrote.
Then he wrote a program which would spoof sendmail at the Treasury host into executing a set of commands. He would have sendmail "grab" out all listings of telnet sessions to redbar3. Cc. Rutledge. Edu. He would be waiting…
The instant it rolled off the top of his window, he hit ‹Ctrl›-‹C› and killed off his connection to rutledge.
He looked through the scrollback buffer and saw:
Login name: redwitchIn real life: Karen Dawson
Directory: /staff10/redwitchShelclass="underline" /bin/csh
On since April 14 17:02:51 on ttyr6 from USCS-stc5. Gov
It looked like this Karen Dawson person was logged via a modern from a Pacific Telephone POP (Point-of-Presence) in Studio City, California. Now, if only Karen Dawson would just stay logged on. He set his packet-sniffer on each phone connection to the POP, then set up a second window, which was the exact duplicate of the session he was having with Satan in his first window. That was the connection he would use to trace Karen Dawson.
He popped another disk into his PC from his kit. This one generated DTMF tones, "Touch-Tones" of a sort. In particular they generated an inquiry sequence similar to Caller ID. This had been designed by the phone company to allow customers to trigger an identification of any number on their system that was currently in use. It was a tracking device.
The Rat had his program send the tones. They left his computer in Florida and went through an intermediate host into the Electroinc Switching System at UCLA and over to the 5-ESS switch in Studio City, California. Then the signal was traced back through The Rat's telnet connections and printed:
818/555-7693
The Rat knew he could easily get the address for this number, so he ended his conversation with Satan and shut off his equipment. Whoever had done this to him was brilliant, but The Rat now knew he was better. He had back-traced the intruder without her ever knowing. He stood up, his white body glistening in the sauna-like heat. The walls seemed to close in on him. He lumbered up the metal ladder, out onto the deck of the rusting garbage barge. The late-afternoon sun had turned the heavy cloud-strewn Florida sky orange. He didn't see its beauty. A horrifying thought had just struck him: Maybe this intrusion was the beginning of the two-thousand-three-hundred-day journey? Maybe his six years of torture had just started? He knew he could never survive it… but could he stop it? Could he close the door of redemptive cleansing once it had been opened? He didn't know the rules. Shirley had taken all the knowledge with her. He didn't have the answers. How could he find out?