Донна Эндрюс - Delete all suspects

Of course, for investigative purposes, Eddies competence was a disadvantage. Much of what passes for hacking these days doesn't require much ingenuity, just a knowledge of tbe latest exploits that work if a sys admin isn't keeping everything patched and configured properly. More of a problem with Windows machines than UNIX, so I was elated, at first, to find that he had several Windows machines on his network. But to my astonishment, he had them in excellent shape.

Not perfect shape. During the first hour I was watching, I spotted a problem. Spam coming through his network. Not constantly — as I watched, someone opened up a relay to allow thousands of spam e-mails through, and when they'd all gone on their way to the luckless recipients, closed the relay again. Either Eddie was allowing someone to route spam through his servers, or someone was taking advantage of him.

But were they taking advantage of his absence, or had they been doing this before his accident? Not something I could tell until we got inside the system.

Maude is about to go upstairs and make another attempt to extract information from Mrs. Stallman. Not that I'm optimistic about her chances. I suppose we should make allowances for the extreme stress Mrs. Stallman is experiencing, but even so, she seems remarkably disorganized, even for a human, to say nothing of singularly unobservant. Maude's previous attempt to find out even basic information about Eddie's interests, activities, and associates reduced his grandmother to tears and produced a flood of apologies and self-recriminations, interspersed with pleas to find his money before someone stole it. I see no reason to expect any better results from this attempt, but I won't say so to Maude.

"Perhaps she's gotten it out of her system andean be more helpful this time," I said instead.

"I'm not holding my breath, " Maude said. "Odds are ill only

MO Donna Andrews

end up passing her another forty or fifty tissues, and drinking another wretched cup of tea."

"But Maude," I said. "I thought you liked tea."

"I do," she said. "As long as it's properly made."

"Hers isn't?"

"What that woman does with a teapot ought to be a felony," Maude said. "Vve never seen a more blatant example of sheer unprovoked cruelty than what she inflicts on those poor, innocent tea leaves. Still, it's all for a good cause, I suppose. And I should make allowances for the stress she's under. I've stopped asking her if there's news about Eddie. There hasn't been, and she's starting to cringe every time the phone rings."

She squared her shoulders and marched up the stairs.

I considered asking KingFischer if he'd had any more luck cracking Eddie's network, then decided against it. For one thing, it was unnecessary. KingFischer knew how impatient I was to get into Eddie's system and would tell me as soon as he got in. For another, it was only ten minutes since the last time Yd asked him. Normally, ten minutes is a long time for an AIP, but I suspected it would seem very short indeed to KingFischer if he hadn't made any progress in the meantime.

So I returned to my own tasks. I could have done the hacking, of course — technically I was still in the UL system and only looking out into Eddie's office through the laptop. But KingFischer was better at this kind of hacking anyway, and I wanted to concentrate on something closer to detective work. I was hoping to dazzle KingFischer by using my social engineering skills and deductive reasoning to guess Eddie's password and gain access to the system from within before he succeeded in cracking it from without. So I had Maude hook up my waldo, or robotic arm, to the laptop — the latest waldo Casey had developed could be easily operated from one of the laptop's standard USB ports.

Using the waldo, I could type on a standard keyboard, and anyone subsequently analyzing the contents of Eddie's computer would have no way of knowing that the commands it received had been typed by something other than human hands. They might no-

Delete All Suspects Ml

tice that the little rubber tip on my pincer polished off fingerprints . but so would someone dusting the keyboard.

A truly sainry computer forensic analyst might see signs that the typist in question was remarkably slow —/ only had the one waldo. and it only had one set of pincers that take the place of the human thumb and forefinger, and I discovered that they weren't designed so I could point them both at the keyboard simultaneously. I was limited to hunt-and-peck typing with a single metal finger, and while I could do this faster and more accurately than a human could perform the same operation, 1 was still considerably slower than even a moderately fast human touch typist. It felt, as Mr. Spock once said on Star Trek, like trying to construct a mnemonic memory circuit using stone knives and bear skins.

Not that I had a lot to type. The trick for guessing a password is to find out as much information as possible about its creator: a large percentage of people use words or numbers that are significant to them as the basis for their passwords. Vd already tried all the bits of data Vd found in Eddie's DMV record — social security number, license plate number, telephone number, birth date, street address, and so on — alone, and in various combinations. When we had more information — if Maude found anything that looked like a list of passwords, for example — Vd have more data to work with. Meanwhile, I watched the almost nonexistent traffic on Eddies network, typed in a command occasionally, in the hope of learning more information, and scanned the room for anything interesting.

I was reading the top document on a stack of papers when something suddenly struck the robot arm holding the camera. The picture veered wildly as the camera bounced off the surface of the disk.

I swiveled the camera around three hundred and sixty Jegrm but saw nothing.

Perhaps some book or other object had fallen from one of the bookshelves above. I craned the camera up but still saw nothing.

The picture shook again as something tapped the camtra. num lightly this time.

This time, when I swiveled the camera, I encountend an t nor-

mous yellow eye with a vertical black pupil. I zoomed out and identified the eye as belonging to a black cat. A very large cat, although perhaps it only appeared large because it was so close to the lens. It crouched next to my laptop, staring into the camera with an unblinking gaze.

It raised its paw again.

"Shoo!" 1 said. "Leave that alone!"

The cat blinked and shifted its gaze to the section of the laptop that housed the speaker. After a few moments, it looked back at the camera and lifted its paw again, as if about to poke at the lens.

I searched my data banks for something more effective.

"GROWRF!"

I repeated the deep, bass bark several times and accompanied it by snapping the pincers of my waldo at the cat. It flattened its ears and jumped off the desk.

I returned to studying the system, but I was worried about the damage the cat could do to my peripherals if it returned, so I had to keep scanning the room for it. I was relieved when Maude finally reappeared.

"Keep it down in here," she said. "I can explain your voice by saying a colleague is teleconferencing in by speaker phone, but the barking's a little over the top. I had to tell her I had a noisy screen saver on my laptop."

"Thank goodness you're back," I said. "You have to do something about that cat."

"Cat?" Maude said. She looked around.

"It was here a minute ago, attacking my waldo."

"Ah," she said. "Probably hid when I came in. I doubt if it will bother you while Vm here."

She walked over to the kitchenette and poured the contents of a teacup down the sink.

"Mrs. Stallman has gone off to run some errands, n she said, setting down the cup. "I could tackle her again when-she gets back, but I think we'11 get faster results hunting through this mess, strange as that seems."