L Sellers - The Suicide Effect

Physically, she and Paul were enough alike that people often thought they were brother and sister. They both had dark hair and eyes, light brown skin, and a slender, slightly taller than average build. Paul was Philippine and German, while she was Irish, Spanish, and Indian. People were often fascinated when they heard she belonged to a local Indian tribe, but Sula considered it an honorary membership that required no active participation. Her mother’s tales of growing up on the reservation had done the opposite of what she’d intended. Sula wanted no part of it. Some cultures had no place in the modern world.

“You’re home on a Saturday night. What’s up with James?” Sula peeled off her sweater. Paul had the heat going, and it was warm enough to strip down to shorts.

“He found a job in Portland, but I don’t want to move. So he’s not talking to me.”

“Do you think he’ll take the job anyway?”

“Hard to say. James is usually more talk than action, but the job is with an ad agency and he’s pretty excited.”

They moved into the living room where Paul kept his computer set up-three hard drives, two monitors, a printer/fax machine, a phone, a sound system, and a tangle of cords that looked like it could power a small city. A love seat and small TV occupied the other half of the room.

“Why don’t you go with him?” Sula asked. “What’s keeping you here in Eugene? I mean, since you don’t have family.”

“I’m comfortable here.” Paul parked in front of a monitor displaying a three dimensional chess board with cartoon rabbits for game pieces. “I hate the thought of starting all over. Friends-people like you-are too important to give up.”

“That’s sweet, but I would ditch you in a heartbeat for a great job in Portland.”

“As you should.” Paul sent an instant message to the guy in Singapore to let him know he would be leaving the game room for a while. He rolled his chair in front of the second monitor. “Prolabs, here we come.” He typed the company’s name into Google and pulled up its website. He turned to Sula and said, “We’re going to try an old fashioned Trojan horse.”

“What’s that?”

“Pretty much like it sounds.” Paul rubbed his hands together and grinned. Sula hadn’t seen him look this happy in a long time. “First, we send an e-mail to someone at the company. The e-mail contains an embedded program that copies itself to the company’s system when the recipient opens it. The program attaches itself to the guest directory and records users’ names and passwords for all the databases. Then we check the guest directory, find the program, and copy the passwords.”

She followed the scheme up to a point. “How do we check the guest directory?”

“That’s the hacker part. Don’t worry, I’ll get in.” Paul turned back to the computer. “Who do you want to send an e-mail to?”

“Is it a real e-mail with a note from me?” Sula had a little guilt about sending a Trojan horse to a friend at Prolabs.

Paul laughed. “Hell no. Nothing traceable. I’ll send it from an anonymous hotmail account. I just need an e-mail address.”

Sula considered her options. “Will the IT people at Prolabs detect the embedded file? Will they be able to track its source?”

Paul shrugged. “Maybe. Eventually. I doubt if they get much activity. They’re probably pretty complacent.”

“Send it to Karl Rudker. That’s K, R, U, D, K, E, R at Prolabs. com.”

“Perfect. He’ll have no one to blame for it.”

Sula watched over Paul’s shoulder as he created a phony e-mail about a vacation resort. In the subject line, he typed: For top. level pharma execs only. Then he accessed a program stored on his hard drive.

“You have such a program on hand?”

“The guys at EFN are compulsive code writers and they like to keep me in the loop. I never, make that rarely, use any of the programs they create.”

“They’re just snoopers, right? They don’t send out worms or viruses over the internet do they?”

“Oh no. They hate that crap as much as everyone else. Maybe more. Ready?”

“Sure.”

Paul pressed Send and Sula felt a shiver of excitement. She wasn’t sure if it was the idea of getting into places where she didn’t belong or using Rudker to sabotage himself.

Paul turned and grinned at her. “That e-mail is now being routed through hundreds of internet providers, so no one will ever trace it back to me. Now, let’s take a look at their mainframe and see if they have any vulnerabilities.”

She watched him type in an ftp:// address, then in rapid-fire motion, click through a Prolabs’ site she’d never seen. The screen changed rapidly and Sula found it hard to keep her eyes on the monitor. It was like watching a speeded-up online computer class.

“I’ll park a port scanner outside the main server to monitor all the VPN activity. Sooner or later, we’ll pick up a password.” Paul tried to sound casual, but she could tell he was psyched. Sula found it hard to stay tuned in. She was not a techie. She’d taken website development classes just to be ready for any workplace, but she used her computer to write, look for information online, read blogs, and send e-mails.

She wandered over to the window. A group of young men gathered in the parking lot behind the apartments. They passed a joint and talked loudly. With their blue jeans, black sweatshirts, and dark hair, only their faces were illuminated under the darkening sky. For a moment, Sula envied their carefree lives. She walked back to where Paul was clicking away.

“Next we try the back door. What other websites or FTPs would Prolabs be linked to?”

“You mean like FDA? For transferring clinical trial data?”

“Exactly.” Paul snapped his fingers and pointed at her. “Except not the Food and Drug Administration. I think they might be a little tough to get into and a little pissed off if they caught me trying.”

Sula gave it some thought. “The company’s websites are linked to a lot of disease management sites and PhRMA of course. But Prolabs doesn’t send data to any site that I know of.” She stopped, realizing that wasn’t true. “Except clinical trial sites and TrialWatch, which gathers data on all clinical studies.”

Paul quickly found the TrialWatch site. The home page was divided into two sides: one for patients looking for trials and one for doctors. “What’s the name of the drug again?”

“Nexapra.”

Paul typed as Sula spelled it for him. He used a scroll bar to select Oregon as a location. Two clinical investigator names and locations appeared onscreen, one in Eugene and one in Portland.

“Print that page, please.” Sula wasn’t sure what she would do with the information, but it pleased her to have it. “Plug in Puerto Rico and see if anything comes up.”

The location wasn’t on the scroll bar, so Paul typed it into the space. As his GE four-in-one printed out the first page, Dr. David Hernandez and all his contact information came into view.

“I’ll be damned.” This information pleased her even more. “Print that too.”

Paul was already on it.

“What now?”

“I’ll play around on this site for a while to see if it has any cracks in its structure. But mostly, we wait. Both of our snoop programs may take a few days to generate a usable password.”

“I thought hacking websites was instant, in and out.”

“I’m using old-school stuff. I’m not current because I don’t do this anymore, remember, except as a favor for a friend.” Paul grinned.

“Thanks, Paul.”

“No problem. This is the most fun I’ve had in weeks.”

“Do you mind if I get out of here? I’m still exhausted from not sleeping last night.”