He hoped, in fact, that he hadn’t already been spotted. His tracks were now as indelibly recorded upon the muddy electronic landscape as anyone’s. A few quick checks on Rita Hapgood’s account would instantly look suspicious. The commands he had been initiating simply didn’t belong in the realm of a student account, and certainly not one that had never been used and was supposedly dead anyway.
For a moment his heart rate shifted up into high gear. Had they detected him already? A droplet of sweat tickled his armpits. Just the fact that the huntress was there, waiting for him, gave him pause. He envisioned her sniffing him out on the net and ordering his IP traced.
He rubbed his chin. It had become stubbly. How long would he have before they sniffed him out? Difficult to say. He decided to get on with things and disconnect as quickly as possible. Typing fast, he set up a delayed, anonymous e-mail message and addressed it to HUNTRESS. In the message, he related his leads concerning Justin and the virus. Perhaps if he failed, they might be able to do something with his work. Then he logged off.
He stood there in his underwear, hands on his hips, frowning at his computer. Had they managed to trace him? Were they as on-the-ball as that?
The idea kept growing on him. He knew computer hardware very well, but it was hard to know what special gizmos the FBI had for such situations. Something that he had never read about in Wired Magazine. He decided he couldn’t take any chances. Moving around the room, he disconnected his equipment, dressed and gathered his few belongings together into the Walmart shopping bag that Brenda had left him with. Flipping off the lights on his way out, he left the room keys on the dresser behind him.
As he walked across the parking lot, he realized that eventually he would be caught, or Justin would be dead and then nothing mattered anymore. He had to act quickly on whatever leads he had. The time for action was now. Breathing hard, he climbed into the Honda and revved the engine. Within minutes he was back on I-80. He headed west, toward the University part of town.
… 66 Hours and Counting…
“The connection is gone,” Vasquez said with a sigh. “I’m not sure what the IP trace will give us.”
“What do you think? Was it him, Letti?” asked Johansen.
A frown flickered across Leticia Vasquez’s attractive face. Johansen was her partner, but she didn’t really approve of his using her first name, much less her nickname. It didn’t seem professional for Bureau agents. Especially since she had noted that he only did it when they were alone.
“I don’t know,” she responded. She moved the mouse, double-clicked on an icon to initiate a new utility, then typed a query into the system. They had been watching each arrival into the system for an hour, hoping that one of them would be Vance. There had been an annoyingly heavy level of traffic, six hundred and fifty-seven logins since they started, and she had feared that they couldn’t monitor them all. Even though the internet connection was slow, the University community could still connect with the system and interact with each other, and they did so with gusto. When one of the student accounts had jumped up its own access priorities so smoothly and dramatically, she had all but missed it in the hum of activity on the net. Girlfriends chatted with boyfriends, then with other girlfriends, comparing notes. Instructors entered, fired a flurry of e-mails, probably test results and responses to questions, then popped off almost before she could check them out. Initially, she had expected Vance to come in using another instructor’s account, possibly even Brenda Hasting’s account. The student account ruse had thrown her off until it was almost too late.
Once Vasquez had isolated the rogue student, she had probed the database about her. Rita Hapgood’s address and phone number had flashed up almost instantly, as had the fact that she had dropped out of school entirely in late March. She had never attended the class that entitled her to this account, and, as far as Vasquez could determine, she had never even logged in prior to tonight.
She had pulled up the IP list to get the right provider. She should have him located in minutes, despite the slow response of the net. She hoped Vance would hang around too long for his own good. Assuming, of course, that it was Vance and not just some midnight hacker using Rita’s account.
“I bet it was him,” said Johansen over her shoulder. “I really think he’s our man. The stuff we dug up at his house and office looks too real to me.”
“Too bad he didn’t leave the source code for this frigging virus behind,” she replied, rubbing her eyes briefly. “Is the L.A. team any closer to cracking the binary files that we got?”
“They know the files are those used to build the virus program, but they haven’t been able to come up with a good defense yet. They say it’s very complex. But, it’s enough for a conviction, if you ask me. And that means our end of things will be wrapped up if we can just collar Vance.”
“Call in and check out Rita Hapgood’s address,” said Vasquez, her tone making it a suggestion rather than an order. “For all we know, she’s Vance’s side dish.”
Johansen nodded and pulled out his cell. She glanced at him briefly, then looked away. She did appreciate the way he accepted her leadership and greater experience. She had been worried initially when she had been assigned this hulking Norwegian-blooded young male for a partner that he wouldn’t take to the ideas of a small, bossy Hispanic woman. But, except for his occasional over familiarities, he had comported himself as a professional agent should. He had, in fact, taken on sort of a protective-bulldog attitude around her, which she found endearing. In fact, when all was said and done, he wasn’t a bad-looking guy. She was in her early thirties now, and his late twenties looked very good indeed. But, she told herself, such a relationship would interfere too much with her work.
She straightened in her chair and glared back at the glaring screen. She chided herself for allowing her mind to wander while one of the biggest perps on the loose in the nation was even now escaping her grasp.
Besides, she told herself, he was too tall. Way too tall for her five-foot-one stature. The last thing she needed, even while breaking established Bureau policy concerning such fraternization, would be to appear ridiculous at the same time.
The trace came back moments later. “Vance is at the Motel-8 on I-80, not even five miles from here.”
Vasquez smiled grimly. “Let’s go.”
One of the world-wide-web’s more accomplished spiders, Nog was watching the hunters even as they watched for Vance. A smile, taking the form of an odd, lop-sided leer, flickered across his features. He had gotten hold of a digital image of this Agent Vasquez and her dour partner which some of the local hackers had gotten from one of the university paper stills. They had spread across the school system like wildfire. He had done a bit of cropping and enhancing with La Placian transforms, and ended up with a nice portrait of the FBI’s finest pinned up over his computers with the others. Johansen, of course, had been edited out of his version of the picture. He had also made her image into a “wallpaper” mosaic on the background of two of his computer screens. Vasquez was quite pretty, he thought, in a butch sort of way. She had dark hair and big, almond-shaped brown eyes. The idea that she toted a gun about in her purse aroused him almost as much as her image did.
The other image that haunted his computer screens, of course, was that of Sarah Vance. He worried at his tongue a bit until it twinged, paused, then continued fraying the tip until the stinging sensation grew too intense and forced him to stop. With a giggle that seemed out of place, he tackled the mouse and created a new mosaic, one which contained both Sarah Vance and Agent Vasquez. When he was done, he sat back and admired his artwork, popping open a green tennis-ball-like tube of sour cream and onion chips. He ate the chips, munching on six at a time.