Runaway Heart by Stephen J. Cannell Read Free Book Online Page A

dialer:
     
    5556000.........ANSWERING    MACHINE    1734 HRS
    5556001.........DISCONNECT                   1734 HRS
    5556191.........VOICE      1840 HRS
    5556198.........VOICE MAIL        1842 HRS
    5556195.........BUSY        1842 HRS
    5556309.........BUSY        1915 HRS
    5556419..........V. 39    FAX        1915 HRS
     
          It went on like that for twenty pages. Now Roland concentrated on the
busy lines. He noted who was talking, or if they were talking at all. Often a
busy meant somebody was working from home on a computer. Roland needed to
phreak the phone system and eavesdrop on each of these busy connections.
          Feeding a specific sequence of paired tones much like touch tones down
the phone line, Roland was able to get a behind-the-scenes look at the local
system. A little more phreaking and his computer was acting as a terminal to
the phone company System-7 switch-operating software. In essence, he now had
the same access and capabilities as a
          611 Repair Operator. Next, he brought up the Gen-A-Tec numbers that were
busy and sampled them one at a time. Several were conversations, but then he
got one with the distinctive sound of a modem hiss, indicating that the person
was hooked to the mainframe computer inside Gen-A-Tec from his home computer.
One by one, Roland went down his list of busies, accessing each, checking
against his management list, looking for the right password, searching for a
Mahogany Row guy with total access.
          After an hour of sampling lines, Roland finally hit upon exactly what he
was hoping for. It was his old bud, Jack Sasson. He was working on-line from
home.
          Roland set a monitor on Sasson's phone line to steal any data that
crossed that port, then kicked Mr. Sasson off the system.
          Roland smiled. He could imagine the CFO at home, cursing the computer
system that had just fed him a line error and unceremoniously logged him off.
Now Sasson would have to go through the complicated relog-on process with all
the damned security checks just to get back in, and Roland Minton, master of
the game, would vacuum up the entire security code.
          Roland waited patiently in his hotel room for Sasson to log back in.
Within seconds, the CFO was coming back online. Now, Roland's little sniffer
captured all of Sasson's secure data, line by line. The access and security
code would give Roland a red-carpet ride right past the shadow system, straight
into the main data bank at Gen-A-Tec.
          Once he had the code, Roland turned off his computer and looked at his
watch. It was 7:40 in the evening. He picked up the hotel phone and requested a
wakeup call for 2:30 a.m. He
figured by then Mr. Sasson would long be off the system and Roland could jump
on and take his place.
          He lay back and laced his bony fingers behind his neck. He couldn't help
but smile, because he knew he had assed-out the systems administrator, big
time. The Robin Hood of cyberspace was back in charge, about to jack some
serious shit.
     
     
     
     
     
SIX
     
    S usan watched through the window in the
cardio unit as her father was placed on the bed next to the defib machine. The
nurses removed his shirt and had him lie back on the table, then smeared gel on
his furry chest. Herman looked up and saw her worried expression through the
glass. He stuck his tongue out at her. She couldn't help herself—she laughed.
Then she put her thumbs in her ears and wiggled her fingers back at him. She
was scared out of her mind, but as she'd predicted when she suggested the more
intrusive operations to him twenty minutes ago, he had just listened with a sad
expression and shook his head no.
          Now Dr. Lance Shiller and two nurses manned an electro-shock machine.
They hooked Herman to a negative ground and placed a rubber plug between his
teeth to prevent him from biting his tongue. Dr. Shiller picked up the