Runaway Heart by Stephen J. Cannell Read Free Book Online

received the same
e-mail, but how in the hell did ten or twelve people all send out the
same e-mail, each message worded exactly the same?
          What the fuck is this? Am I getting chewed here?
          Was this whole system he'd accessed just an elaborate shadowbox of some
kind? Had he been tricked? He sat back and scratched his purple hair, all
thoughts of poontang gone. His credentials as "master of the game"
had been severely called into question. Maybe the systems administrator at
Gen-A-Tec wasn't such a Barney after all.
          As Roland scanned through his stolen material he became more convinced
that he'd been scammed. The lousy security, the holes in the version software,
the easy password file—the whole thing was dogwash. Roland Minton, Cyber Hood
of the Internet, had gone down in front of this scam like a broken deck chair.
          The systems administrator was smart, but in the end he'd gotten lazy and
started to fill up his dummy mailboxes with the same memos—and Roland caught
him.
          The shadowbox is a nice little piece of security, Roland thought. But what are they protecting? Whatever it is, they sure don't want anybody
outside the company A-list to see it. Roland decided he would find a way
in, even if it meant forgoing the belly ride in Berkeley.
          As he continued to scan the e-mails, another line popped out at him:
     
    We should put in
a request for additional funding before darpa closes its budget in the fall.
     
          Roland had heard of DARPA. It was a black-ops U.S. government defense
agency that developed advanced weaponry. The acronym stood for Defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency.
          In composing his phony e-mails, Gen-A-Tec's SA had obviously cut up some
real ones and scattered them around in the boxes as filler. This reference to
DARPA was ominous and interesting. Why does DARPA, a weapons research
agency, fund genetically enhanced foods? Damn strange. . .
          Roland sat back, glared at his screen, and tried to devise another way
to gain access to the mainframe of the Gen-A-Tec computer. He needed to get
around the shadowbox that protected it. He sat on the edge of his bed and ran
through his options for almost fifteen minutes.
          In the end, he decided it would be best to go in the way someone at
Gen-A-Tec would go in if they were working from home. Would they go in via
the Net? He decided the security system looked way too slick for that.
Gen-A-Tec would have layers and layers of safeguards to protect them from the
millions of nosey Net users.
          So, how then?
          After a half hour of more brain-drain he decided to use the company's
own phone lines again. Most big companies have lines with some sort of remote
phone access, usually for the bigwigs who want to work at home.
          Roland knew that, no matter how state-of-the-art a Local Area Network
was, Murphy's Law assures that if something can go wrong it will. Roland hooked
up his laptop to the modem jack in his hotel room and brought up a piece of
software called a Tone-Loc. It was also known as a War Dialer, or Demon Dialer.
          Roland then told the Tone-Loc to dial every number, beginning at
555-6000, through 555-6999, and to log the results on his laptop. When his
dialer called each of those lines, one of six things would happen: If it got a live person,
the dialer would immediately hang up, it might also get a no-answer, a fax, an
answering machine, voice mail, or a busy. Roland was looking for busy signals,
and he particularly wanted one on a line that belonged to a high ranking
officer at Gen-A-Tec—someone with A-level systems access.
          He knew this process would take a few hours, but he had gone into killer
mode. He viewed his defeat earlier that day as a personal challenge. Roland
Minton was about to kick some cyber-ass.
          Two hours later, he printed out the results of his demon