"You're in my light," she said, pointing to a Tensor lamp that he was standing in front of.
"You need light to swear at this stuff?"
"Hey… please. Okay? I know we've been assigned to work together, but spare me the breezy bullshit."
The computer got a "timed-out" signal and she turned to try it again.
He leaned over, picked up her crib sheet, and glanced at it for a moment. Written on the top was "Pennet." "What's Pennet?" he asked.
"It's a remailer computer program in Oslo, Norway. You know what a remailer is?"
"Yeah. It's a computer that masks the identity of the senders. You can send a message to somebody through a remailer and it will encode your name and then send it on, hiding your identity from the receiver."
"Not exactly." Her tone seemed to say she was already tired of him.
"I thought you were supposed to be updating data for a new program for sex offenders on the VICAP computer…"
"I'm caught up to everything Operations gave me. They're sending down some new packets. So until they come, VICAP can wait."
VICAP-the Violent Criminals Apprehension Program-was a computer system originally designed by an L. A. cop named John St. John. St. John had reasoned that since serial criminals often had fractured personalities, they might also be nomads and wander. With that in mind, he had convinced police departments all over the country to put any unsolved, brutal, ritualistic sex killings into a computer data bank. The idea was that if these killers were wandering around, committing murders all across the country, then maybe the similarities in their assaults would go undetected. The computer would match them up and see a serial crime where local police might not. Because of VICAP, serial murderers like Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy had been discovered.
"What're ya doing, messing around with a remailer computer in Oslo?" Lockwood finally asked.
She looked at him with her jaw set and no apparent intention of answenng.
"That's an official question posed by your new shit-for-brains Fort Nowhere teammate."
She seemed to be evaluating him; then her body language changed slightly.
"Okay, look… I'm sorry. I'm mad, but not at you. I'm mad at the situation. They've got me updating old cases. I'm a doctor of abnormal psychology and criminal profiling. I didn't agree to a job here so I could update old computer data. I thought this remailer might be more challenging, so I'm free-lancing it. Don't burn me, okay?"
"How you doing?" Lockwood asked, not really caring but looking for friendly ground.
"I can't get through password security. I'm trying to crack in, but they've got some kind of three-try limit on passwords. At this rate, it's gonna take me fifty years."
Lockwood didn't know much about computers, but that wasn't something he shared with many people. In the new age of law enforcement, computers were a growing tool. Computer illiteracy all but disqualified you from the hunt. He had picked up some rudimentary stuff, but it was mostly camouflage. He was still what the chipheads called a bagbiter-somebody who created problems on the system. So he left the hacking and cracking to other people, while he stood on the sidelines and tried to look wise. He pulled out his handbook of limited knowledge and asked a few ground-level questions.
"Are you using your own username?" he asked.
"No… I'm Redwitch, but I'm not using it. For this, I'm DarkStar-it's a name of one of our informants-and I'm using the U. S. Customs host computer."
"What cracking program are you using?" he added.
"I downloaded Crack off the Internet. But I'm a hacker, not a cracker, and this stuff is tougher to break through than I thought."
"Crack is a dictionary of computer passwords or something, right?" he asked.
"Right. The way it's supposed to work is, you dial into the computer you're trying to penetrate, and this little program starts jabbering passwords at it. You're supposed to just leave it on. I'm using a dictionary of over ten thousand common passwords. Crack runs through the whole dictionary until it hits one that the other computer accepts. It's supposed to be eighty percent reliable, but I'm S. O. L. so far."
"What's the problem?"
"I don't know. I log in, I do the opening dance, then my Crack program shoots three passwords in, and I get this 'login incorrect' shit from Pennet in Oslo, and I'm out."
"Lemme see…"
She turned, typed li and hit Enter. The li command told the UNIX operating system on the host computer to repeat the last command issued:
telnet ring2Ice. Anon. Pennet. No Trying 172.24.168. 10…
They waited. The room was very small and windowless, and he could smell her perfume. One detail intrigued him: She wasn't wearing any jewelry, not even earrings. Claire never wore jewelry, except for her wedding ring, until she threw it at him. After a second, the hookup was complete and the screen read:
Connected to ring2ice. Anon. Pennet. No Escape character is 'AF
SunOS UNIX (ring2ice)
login:
She typed in "darkstar." They waited. After a few seconds, Pennet responded with:
password:
She then activated Crack on her computer and it made three password attempts. After the third attempt the screen read:
login Incorrect
Connection closed by foreign host.
Then some line noise put some garbage on the screen:
*R#W8c^41%
"What's all that jabberwocky?" John said, leaning in. "It's pissed. I think it's swearing at me."
Then the screen shouted:
DARKSTAR, you have excessive invalid logins. You are locked out for fifteen minutes.
NOTIFYING SYSTEMS ADMINISTRATOR.
And the screen went black.
"Cheese it, the cops!" Lockwood said, grinning.
"Look, you may think this is funny. I don't. Why don't you just go get some coffee?"
"You gonna keep trying with the Systems Administrator watching?" "What's he gonna do, jump on a plane from Oslo, come over here, and knock me in the dirt?"
"Good point."
They waited fifteen minutes. It was a strange lull, because she seemed to have nothing to say to him and he couldn't think of anything to say to her. So they waited in silence, with their eyes on the wall clock. The basement room was cramped and underlit. The ornate Customs building had once been Washington's Department of Labor building. It was a stone-faced edifice with Corinthian columns and a brass front door. But the decorating scheme ended below the first floor. The basement would have made a good set for a Bela Lugosi film. There were exposed pipes running along hard concrete hallways.
The last minute clicked off the clock and, without saying anything to him, she telnetted to Pennet, again. They were back in the good graces of the remailer computer. The screen said amicably:
Connected to ring2Ice. Anonspennet. No Escape character Is ',V
SunOS UNIX (rIng2Ice)
login:
She went through the same sequence and basically the same thing happened, only this time the Systems Administrator had a surprise waiting for them:
REDWITCH U. S. CUSTOMS GOV. OPERATOR YOU ARE LOCKED OUT FROM THIS HOST FOR 90 DAYS. ALL FUTURE PACKETS FROM YOUR SITE*WILL*BE*REFUSED*.
Suddenly, she was dumped back to her own system prompt. "Busted," Lockwood blurted.
"Shit," Awesome Dawson said.
Chapter 5
The Cellar was a brick-faced bar-restaurant on the first floor of an office building on Constitution Avenue. The interior was a cross between a fifteenth-century Dominican monastery and an Irish pub. Some fool had further complicated the mix by hanging a model of a Grumman Sky-hawk with a ten-foot wingspan from wires in the middle of the main room. But it didn't matter, because most of the people in the Cellar were serious drinkers and seldom looked up.