Dale Brown - Puppet Master

Chelsea followed her down the hall to an intensive-care room. Johnny lay sandwiched in the high-tech bed, only his arms visible on the side. His body floated on a mattress of air currents, which bathed him top and bottom with medicated vapor designed to quickly heal his burned skin as well as lessen the pain. Tubes and wires ran from the top of this metal sandwich to an array of machines on both sides of the room.

“We’ll have him up by the end of the week,” said Sister Rose.

“That soon?”

“He’s responded well to the new heart. And we’re using an experimental therapy — it is very promising, though it does rely on some nanocompounds. If he hadn’t been close to death…”

Chelsea did not work on the medical side of the company, and she knew very little about its prosthetics, let alone the more exotic and experimental devices like the artificial heart. But she was well aware of how important those devices were, as well as the huge advances they represented. The heart machine was a perfect example. Made of a proprietary carbon-strand-fiber and microlattice nickel phosphorus, it weighed just under a pound. That was still a little heavier than Johnny’s actual heart had weighed, but it was less than half what the leading fully artificial heart weighed.

His new heart was only the headline. Some of his nerve damage had already been repaired by grafts that used a synthetic growth system — the doctor who had pioneered it described it as something like a cancer bath, a miniature tube inside which actual nerve cells were propagated to replace the damaged ones. And Johnny had already been measured for two artificial legs, which were being fashioned to his exact specifications.

Sister Rose stopped Chelsea as she stepped closer to the bed.

“This is as close as we should get,” said the Sister. Despite her diminutive size, her grip on Chelsea’s arm was remarkably tight. A doctor had warned Chelsea never to arm-wrestle the nun. “You never know what germs we carry.”

Chelsea glanced to the floor. Their toes were edging a red line.

“I’m sorry, Sister. I just wanted to see his face.”

“Still intact,” said Sister Rose. “Barely a blemish. Tell me — is this interest more than professional?”

“No, professional only.”

“A white lie is still a lie,” said the Sister tartly. “Especially if you tell it to a nun.”

Two hours later, Chelsea stood in front of a large glass screen in Smart Metal’s Number 3 conference room, summarizing the situation for the group Massina had put together to help the FBI on the bank card fraud case. Jenkins, the FBI agent, sat at the far end of the table. Massina was next to him.

“It wasn’t a software problem at all that caused the computer in the FBI surveillance van to freeze,” she told them. “The operator hit a succession of keys as he tried to clean up the coffee he’d spilled. Two of the keys were shorted, and to the program, this looked like a series of command inputs that overflowed the error buffer. In layman’s terms,” she added, noticing the perplexed look on Jenkins’s face, “the coffee fried the keyboard, so the computer hung. The program did not trap for that kind of error.”

“No spilled coffee algorithm?” asked Terrence Sharpe.

Sharpe was the head of the company’s programming unit. He was trying to make a joke. As usual, his timing and tact were out of whack.

“I feel terrible about it,” said Chelsea.

“We all do,” said Sharpe. “But the freeze had nothing to do with what happened to Agent Givens.”

“No,” agreed Jenkins. “Not at all.”

“So, getting back to your situation here, your case,” said Sharpe. “Maybe it’s not a skimmer.”

“How else do they get the data off the ATMs?” asked Jenkins.

“Maybe the ATMs are a red herring. It’s just a coincidence that there are transactions being made there with those accounts.”

“I think it’s way too much coincidence to rule them out.”

Chelsea had spent much of the night studying ATM systems and bank security. Even before she started, she knew security on the terminals was a joke. The machines’ security features, with four-digit passwords and early DES encryption might have been state of the art when first introduced in the late 1960s, but they were now child’s play to crack. Card skimmers could be built and programmed by preteens handy with a screwdriver and willing to spend a few hours searching on the Internet.

“Track the code from the banks,” suggested Massina. “There must be a clue there.”

“We’ve been working on that,” said Jenkins, “but we’ve run into a number of technical problems and, frankly, a lack of cooperation from the banks and the processing houses in between.”

“Mr. Sharpe and his people will help you,” said Massina. “In the meantime, we’ll give you hardened laptops. No more worries about spilled anything. You’ll use our equipment for your surveillance.”

“Nobody is spilling coffee again,” said Jenkins. “There will be no coffee in the van. Period.”

“I just don’t see this as a skimmer operation,” said Sharpe. “None have been found at any of the banks. And nobody takes cash from them. You should look in a different direction.”

“I have a theory,” said Chelsea. “I can’t prove it yet, but maybe the coding is on the card.”

She suggested — this time solely in layman’s terms — that the automated teller machines were being infected by a virus. There wasn’t enough “room” on the card’s magnetic strip for an actual virus, though; what she proposed was a little more clever. The card directed the machine to go to a bank account where the virus was actually stored; it downloaded instructions to the ATM, then erased itself after a certain period of time.

“Clever, but in that case, all of the machines would have accessed the same account before they were attacked,” suggested Jenkins. “And that sort of pattern would have jumped out at us.”

“Not if they kept switching those accounts,” said Chelsea. “Or if they did use the same account, they could set it up so that it would only activate after a certain period of time or transactions.”

“We’ll have to look deeper at the pattern,” conceded Jenkins.

“Then let’s get it done,” said Massina, standing to signal that the meeting was over.

Johnny Givens ran for all he was worth. He ran and he ran and he ran. His lungs banged at the side of his chest, but still he ran.

The night was deep black, so dark that the landscape had no features. He was in a field or a city or even the woods, it was impossible to tell; he saw only blackness.

Then ahead, on the horizon, a bar of light.

He ran toward it. It gradually grew as he approached, rising up at a slow pace. It was as if a curtain were being lifted, black giving way to pure white.

Run! Run!

Chelsea stared out the window as her Uber driver pulled up across the street from a small, one-story mall on Arsenal Street. It was the address Jenkins had given her for the FBI task force’s technical crew; it looked like the back side of a 1950s gas station; she’d been expecting something a little more governmental.

“We’re here?”

“This is the place,” said the driver, reaching for the screen on the iPhone perched on the dashboard holder.

“Thanks,” said Chelsea. She got out of the car and rechecked the address against her phone’s GPS. It wouldn’t have been the first time Uber delivered her to the wrong address.

But the address was right.