Chapter 1: Just a Game

It’s just a game, I reminded myself. Just a game. But my hands were shaking and sweat dripped from my pits. I pulled my Dick Tracy hat down lower as I locked my eyes on the screen. All virtual. No reality.

Lines of code flew by. This was the tipping point. I nearly had her.

Just a game. I had to remind myself often because I wouldn’t be chasing a fifteen-year-old girl down a darkened alley in real life. Hell, I wouldn’t even be in a darkened alley. I spend my time behind a desk with a computer screen in front of me. It’s what I do. I don’t chase criminals through the streets. Not real streets, anyway.

There was a blinding flash and ozone stung my nose. My eyes hadn’t recovered from the lightning before I was deafened by the thunder. That was close. Lights flickered and went out, but my uninterruptable power supply and a surge protector stood between the failing power grid and my computers. The flow of information on my screen was steady. The cellular modem I used kept me connected, but my office was suddenly deathly quiet as everything but the cooling fans in my computers fell silent.

Lightning in Seattle is rare. I was waiting for another clap, but the blast had come at the trailing edge of the storm. As quickly as the lightning bolt hit, the storm had stopped. A few more drops of rain splashed in the standing water on the sidewalks.

I turned away from the window and plunged back into the alternate reality on the screen in front of me.

In the silence of my mind, I could hear her footsteps. I could almost see her, a shadow turning the corner ahead of me. But when I reached that intersection, she was gone.

I waited.

She’d been leaving tracks a noob could follow. It was almost as though she finally wanted to be caught—wanted it to be over. That happened sometimes. They just get tired of running.

There. I snatched a new receipt out of the cyberspace, looking for clues to where she was headed. But she was already gone.

Her fresh tracks led places no ordinary fifteen-year-old would go. In a space of thirty seconds, she bought automatically-renewing memberships in over a dozen different so-called dating sites—known money launderers. She’d been there before and was probably taking a commission on every sale. I was taking names and covering my tracks as fast as my fingers could move. I had user names and passwords as quickly as she created them. Jordan would have a field day with this, and in all likelihood his Federal counterparts would be sitting at his desk by morning. Except that this time, there were real police following my lead to an apartment building in the International District.

I was getting tired. I hadn’t slept in two days. I thought back to college days when pulling all-nighters to write code or party was normal and grimaced. It was a lot easier twenty years ago. Now I fueled my drive with caffeine instead of alcohol. So far I’d managed to stay off the power drinks, but two days on a steady drip of espresso was beginning to wear on me.

I knew she was out there, but I couldn’t get my eyes on her. She knew all the tricks and she was too practiced for a kid her supposed age to be. She jumped from place to place with no apparent connection, but I was beginning to see a pattern.

I rubbed my eyes and almost missed her. Damn! She’d just bought more merchandise at a trendy shop downtown than I figured the shop sold in a normal month. Thousands worth of designer clothes that would never be shipped.

I was exhausted and ready to put an end to this little cat-and-mouse game. Then she changed. I almost didn’t recognize her when she headed straight for the casino. She was disguised as a little old man about to lose his Social Security check playing on-line poker. I had a positive ID now. This was territory I knew and had charted before I started closing in on her. Online gambling is illegal in the State of Washington.

Casinos, in general, are high on security and they are quick to block exits if they believe they are being ripped off. They also hire guys like me to troubleshoot their systems. Of course, they weren’t likely to do anything drastic as long as she was dropping cash at the rate she was. I collected the account information about the guy she was playing against and sent it into the holding tank of info for Jordan. I reported the activity to the casino and they blocked her best avenue of escape with a quick maneuver. I had her cornered. Suddenly, she was a frightened underage girl and the casino ejected her. She had an escape plan and headed for the virtual rooftops of cyberspace. Bingo. As soon as she moved there, I had her physical address and signaled Jordan that it was time to move in.

When an animal is stalked there comes a point when it knows it has become prey. I’ve watched enough nature television in my life to recognize the moment when the prey understands its fate. Its eyes go wide and there is a last panicked search for refuge before the eyes lose their depth. The gaze becomes flat. No matter how it maneuvers, it knows all actions are futile—just a delay of the inevitable.

I sometimes play darts with a local team. They talk about being ‘in the zone’ when they play. It’s a moment when the bullseye seems to expand in front of them and there is no way they can miss it. It’s like throwing a peanut through a basketball hoop. Time slowed as I crept closer to her. My target was going to be hard to miss.

By now she could tell something wasn’t right. She knew the moment was near. I had a lock on her.

“Funny, but from here you don’t look like a fifteen-year-old girl,” I muttered. “More like a middle-aged cross-dresser with a two-day beard.” I was delaying. Everything had to be perfect. There was no room for error. I needed her in exactly the right position. I watched her typing in the codes that would wipe her computer.

The rest of the team was in place. I raised my hand.

It was only a game, but this was when the game turned to reality—when somebody goes down. The red haze a gamer sees when victory is imminent settled across my eyes. She heard the knock at the door.

I took a deep breath.

And pulled the trigger.

She could have been a fifteen-year-old girl partying with her parent’s credit cards, I suppose. Stupid, but essentially innocent. In reality, the perp was a thirty-year-old identity thief whose latest victim was still in high school and had no idea her credit had just been trashed. He was a thief.

I hate thieves. And I’m a badass in cyberspace.

When the police pounded on his door he started the sequence to format his hard drive. Before he could execute the command I pulled the trigger and blue-screened the machine. I could practically hear him scream. Who gets a blue screen these days?

The truth is that if he had executed the command, he’d have succeeded in wiping the drive. I breathed a sigh of relief when Jordan called.

“CyberTalon, we have the perp in custody,” he said. I wished I was there to see it unfolding, but Jordan was the only person on his team who knew my identity. Legally speaking, I didn’t exist.

Police can’t tamper with the evidence, so I didn’t touch the drive. While we were playing our game of cat and mouse I took control of his monitor in the background. When the perp tried to erase the disk, I uploaded a blue screen image. The first key he hit was “ESC.” That served to cancel his format command. It was beautiful. As soon as Jordan told me a cybercop and witness were in place, I released the screen and the computer mysteriously cured itself. They had immediate access to a fully logged-in computer. It only took a few minutes, with a warrant in hand, to back up the entire drive to an unencrypted device, and then change the password so they could maintain full access.

It was a nice, coordinated operation.

Detective Jordan Grant, who got me into this business in the first place, put together the strategy with me as a class exercise in our Criminal Justice course. Everything worked flawlessly.

Jordan and I have been studying together under Lars Anderson at Olympic University pretty much since the day Jordan arrested me a little over a year ago. That was the day I found out my boss had gutted the employee-owned company and stolen every dime out of our stock and retirement plans. The son-of-a-bitch! After he’d already taken my girlfriend, Hope ... I hate thieves. Jordan led the cybercrimes unit that came in to seize the evidence. They were going about it all wrong and all their surprise raid was going to net was more time for our precious CEO to cover his tracks. As Director of Information Technology and an employee who had just had my life savings ripped off, I offered my services to the police. The arrest was to get me out of the building without spooking the CEO before a warrant could be issued for his arrest. I was released in the parking garage.

I decrypted the entire office system backup files and nailed my boss’s ass to a wall. There were still appeals to come, of course, and right now he was sitting in a luxury condo under house arrest with an ankle bracelet. But I’m not done with him yet.

Jordan and I have been working together ever since. He took me to class with him one day, where my former Navy C.O. walked into the class to stand at the front. Lars Anderson took one look at me and said, “I’ve been waiting for you, Hamar.”

I’m not going into police work like Jordan, though. I have my own business and it’s no way related to the Police Department. Sometimes they hire me to do forensic analysis of a computer. Occasionally, after hours, I’m happy to assist with a tricky sting. Pro bono. No official capacity. No paper trail. Usually legal. Mostly.

I slept most of the day on Friday. I’d been working on cracking that guy’s computer for two days and wanted nothing more than a hot shower and sleep. Afterward, I’d think about eating something other than cold pizza. That opportunity would be my usual Friday night meet-up at the faculty lounge. I showered and put on a clean pair of jeans and a fresh t-shirt then set off for the Blue Bastion on Capitol Hill.

For several years before pulling the plug on my former employer, I’d taught a couple of classes at the Community College. There was a big push a few years ago to get professionals in a field to teach certain classes instead of academicians. I had one of those late Friday afternoon Computer Theory classes that only the desperate and determined ever took. It was easy to tell one from the other. After one grueling class trying to explain why the latest, trendy scripting language was not the same as writing real computer code, I stumbled out of the classroom and practically collided with an attractive young English professor.