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  He took the laundry hamper downstairs and shoved the jeans in the washer. In the kitchen he rinsed out the few dishes in the sink and loaded them in the dishwasher. Preparing a pot of Indonesian coffee, he sat alone at the kitchen table. Idly, he toyed with an orange from the fruit bowl without seeing anything.

  Growing restless with so many unanswered questions, he knew he needed to get back into Ste. Anne’s network to see what had gone on there. David had taught him long ago that coincidences were rare. Chris knew from his preliminary work that the clinic where Abrahms worked was linked into Ste. Anne’s network. He would start there. But fi rst he had to sign Terry’s contract. Only then would he get the access he needed.

  He pulled his Blackberry out and punched in Terry’s number.

  After the initial greetings Chris didn’t waste time. “I want to come in and fi nalize the contract.”

  “Good. When?”

  “How about now.”

  Chris met Terry inside his offi ce. Signing the contract took only a minute. After Chris slid his Mont Blanc pen back into his L.A. BYTES 11

  suit pocket, he stood and shook Terry’s hand. “The only other thing I’ll need is physical and remote access to all your systems.”

  “I can do that.”

  “The sooner the better. I’ll write you up a nightly report so you can see the direction I’m taking. Does that work for you?”

  Chris waited in Terry’s offi ce while Terry collected an electronic badge that gave him access to any place in the hospital.

  Terry provided the necessary passwords; Chris committed them to memory.

  While Terry showed Chris his system, his pager went off. Terry glanced at it. “I gotta go. You’ll be okay here on your own?”

  Chris nodded. After Terry left he sat down at a workstation and logged in to the main hospital system. He quickly navigated his way through fi les and directories, probing for signs of intrusion.

  Streams of information fl ashed across the monitor from the intrusion detection programs he was running.

  Chris glanced through some captured data logs. On the surface he saw nothing unorthodox. But he’d expected that. He’d seen how good this guy was. A quick scan of the outer fi rewall revealed the software gateway that protected the inner network was being hit by a lot of traffi c, but that was standard—the Internet swarmed with packets designed to do nothing but probe for open ports. Nothing seemed to be getting past the perimeter.

  Terry had hardened his network well.

  Before he went any further he stopped and took a deep breath. What he was going to do next wasn’t entirely ethical; it was outside the bounds of his contract but he had to know.

  What had happened to David? As much as he didn’t like Dr.

  Abrahms, he knew the man was too good to make so simple a mistake as dosing David with the wrong medication. Chris knew David was allergic to the whole range of penicillin drugs. Had the hospital somehow delivered that instead of the anti-allergen he should have received?

  12 P.A. Brown

  He sent his probes into the heart of Ste. Anne’s. It took him a while to fi nd Dr. Abrahms’ fi les and even longer to locate David’s but eventually he was inside. He was able to look up past treatments David had received and compared them to the last one. The difference was immediately obvious. Whoever had hacked the system had made no effort to hide what he had done.

  Obviously no one at the pharmacy had checked the script. Why would they? They took what was delivered. He also saw the alert, warning the pharmacy of the allergy, had been removed, so there was nothing to warn anyone of the mistake they were about to make.

  He didn’t have to search much to fi nd out what had replaced the drug David had received: Amoxicillin rather than the anti-allergen. No wonder David had such a violent reaction. But...

  it didn’t make any sense. Why David? Sure he was a cop and a gay man. Both attracted the wrong kind of attention. Could the hacker have had a run in with cops? With David in particular? If he had this power he could have hit the entire hospital pharmacy records.

  Chris scrambled to his feet. He had to warn Terry. If medications were compromised time was vital. He snatched up his Blackberry and punched in the network manager’s cell.

  He answered on the third ring. In the background Chris could hear children yelling. The sound suddenly died; Terry must have moved to another room.

  “What’s up?”

  “You may have a bigger problem than we thought.” Chris told him about David’s compromised medication. There was nothing but silence at the other end.

  “You think other records might have been altered?”

  “I can’t rule it out.”

  Terry swore.

  “I’ll be right there,” Terry said.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Monday, 4:45 pm Ste. Anne’s Medical Center, Rowena Avenue, Silver Lake, Los Angeles

  “I heard about your troubles a few years ago,” Terry said.

  He had run out to Krispy Kreme and picked up half a dozen donuts along with two coffees. “What did the paper call him?

  The Carpet Killer? It must have been rough.”

  Chris fi gured just about everybody had heard about that terrible time with the Carpet Killer. The press had gone on a feeding frenzy with Chris and the newly outed David at center stage for way too long. The whole mess had nearly derailed David’s career. The police brass had not taken kindly to one of their homicide detectives forming a relationship with a man who had been a murder suspect at one time. Their wedding in Canada eighteen months ago had only solidifi ed his news value.

  Oddly enough, it had all provided a much-needed boost to Chris’s new business. When he’d quit DataTEK, and gone solo, he’d worried about building his new client base. All the publicity had actually brought in new business. He fi gured it was a Hollywood thing—any publicity was good as long as they spelled your name right.

  “It had its moments,” Chris said. “Look, I know you’ve got a good system here. But this is a lot more malicious than I originally thought,” Chris said. “We need to take a look at all the patient records to see if they show signs of tampering.”

  Terry was pale but stoic. They discussed what they were looking for and soon the two of them were seated in front of glowing monitors scanning through directories, looking for what didn’t belong.

  “Watch for odd timestamps,” Chris said. “We’ll have to look at everything that was altered within the last forty-eight hours, 14 P.A. Brown

  compare any suspicious ones against your backups.” David’s fi le had been changed roughly sixteen hours ago. “You realize we’re going to have to let management know what’s going on? You have to comply with the data breach laws. Those with legitimate access to those fi les are going to have to go through them, too.”

  Pain crossed Terry’s face. Disclosure was mandated by law.

  “This is bullshit. How the hell did he get in?”

  Chris hated what he had to say next. “On foot.”

  “You mean he just walked in and hacked my system?”

  “Not quite that simple, but here, look...”

  Chris had been pleased to fi nd Terry had employed a passive protocol analyzer, which operated at the lowest levels of network operation, and was extremely diffi cult to evade. There was no obvious way to transmit packets on a monitored network without it being detected. It still took a trained eye to spot the bad packets from the good ones. At fi rst glance the activity logs seemed innocuous. Terry scrubbed stiff fi ngers through his short hair.

  “I don’t see anything.”

  Chris was looking for tunneling activity or some other TCP/

  IP exploit, since it was the one type of traffi c that couldn’t be blocked without blocking Internet access. Once inside, any savvy cracker could access the rest of the network. Chris often used something similar to run penetration tests of networks he was charged with protecting.

  “It’s probably some damn script kiddy,” Terry muttere
d. “You know as well as I do that most of these guys are kids, barely out of diapers. Makes you feel old. Doesn’t it?”

  “I try not to think about it.” Truth was, Chris did feel old sometimes, trying to keep up with teenagers with no morals, and minds like quicksilver. It was all fair game to them, and it never did any good telling them it was wrong to hack a stranger’s computer. They made heroes out of the ones who got caught.

  Famous crackers and phreaks like Riddle and Mitnick were vilifi ed by the mainstream media, but lived on as cyber-legends, L.A. BYTES 15

  in chat rooms and newsgroups, all over the world. Role models to a disenfranchised generation.

  “How did it happen? I can’t believe you’re saying he just strolled in off the street.”

  “Not quite that simple, but yeah, he did it from inside.” He tried to soften his words. “Face it, would anyone notice a stranger wearing scrubs? Carrying a stethoscope?”

  “It is a big hospital,” Terry admitted. “Lots of staff turnover, what with interns and teaching staff coming and going. Not to mention patients and visitors. I don’t want to think about the uproar if we start refusing them entry.”

  “So you’re not going to catch this guy in the act. All we can do is follow his trail.”

  “And play catch-up,” Terry muttered. “Not good enough.”

  Chris shrugged. “We may not fi gure out who he is, but we can head him off. Damage control.”

  Terry sucked at his coffee. He dug through the box and nibbled a donut.

  Chris grabbed one too and went back to scanning fi les. It was tedious work. He had set up a simple script that would show only those fi les which had been changed in forty-eight hours. It was still a load of fi les. Thousands at least.

  He copied each fi le that fi t the criteria and put it in a temporary folder for examination later. Time crept by and before either of them knew it was six in the morning and the hospital was coming to life.

  Chris blinked and leapt up. “Jesus, David—” Under Terry’s puzzled gaze, he pulled out his BlackBerry and dialed home.

  A groggy sounding David answered on the fi fth ring. When he realized who was calling he growled, “I told you I was fi ne.

  I’ve already told Martinez I won’t be in today. Happy?”

  Chris was, and wasn’t afraid to show it. “Sleep then. I’ll bring something special for dinner, okay?”

  16 P.A. Brown

  “Fine, good. I’ll see you then.”

  Chris put his phone away, pulled his pen out, and skimmed it across a line of text on the screen. “A MAC address.” A MAC

  address was hard-coded into every piece of network hardware and was unique to that piece of equipment. “Recognize it?”

  Chris asked.

  “That’s a 3COM card,” Terry said. “Makes it a workstation.”

  “This is internal, then. Where is it?” They may have just found their point of entry.

  At a DOS prompt Chris tapped out an nslookup command.

  It would give him the computer name that was linked to the MAC

  address. The name that came back was THD028.

  “That’s on the third fl oor.” Terry scribbled in a dog-eared notebook. Like most system administrators, Terry wrote liberal notes to himself. He shared an uneasy look with Chris. “There’s maybe a dozen workstations on that fl oor. It should be easy to fi nd.”

  At one point Terry spent a heated fi fteen minutes on the phone with his boss and Chris didn’t need to hear the other end of the conversation to know it wasn’t good. A second call confi rmed that. They’d found more damning evidence of fi le damage. Terry looked at Chris with haunted eyes.

  “Several patients on the third fl oor have had their medications compromised.” Terry closed his eyes. “One of them just died.”

  Chris felt something inside him contract. He couldn’t breathe for the lump in his throat. The next words out of Terry’s mouth were even more chilling.

  “And to make matters worse, the press is here.”

  Chris had far too much experience with the fi fth estate. He knew too damn well how they were masters of manipulation, and how the worst of them practiced an in-your-face frontal assault.

  He had been badly burned by zealous reporters when David had been outed and Chris had found himself the cops’ number one suspect in a series of gruesome murders.

  L.A. BYTES 17

  David’s career as an LAPD homicide detective had nearly been sabotaged. Chris had lost the job he’d worked years to secure and both of them survived by sheer, stubborn persistence. It had taken them months to recover from the disaster. The only good that had come of it was David. Now someone had invaded their lives, threatening David’s life.

  A red-hot rage threatened his thin hold on his composure.

  How dare they.

  Chris scrubbed the grit and sleep out of his eyes. His hands rasped over his unshaven face and his mouth felt like a landfi ll site. Even a mug of Terry’s free trade coffee hadn’t helped.

  Finally at eight o’clock Terry collapsed in a chair, nearly spilling onto the fl oor. Around him the deadening glow of the monitors cast a baleful light.

  Chris sank into a chair beside him. He felt numb.

  “We have to take a break,” he said. “Is there anyone you can call in to take over—?”

  Terry’s cell rang again. Another heated conversation followed.

  Terry disconnected and sagged in the chair. “That was Hugh Denton, the hospital administrator. Major dickhead, but he insists on being in the middle of this. ‘Keeping his hand on the pulse.’” Terry buried his head in his hands. “I am so fucked.”

  Finally he met Chris’s gaze. “I can call Yuri. He’s done work for us before.”

  Chris glanced at his watch. “Call him then. We’ll meet back here in four hours.”

  “My mind stopped working two hours ago.”

  Chris crawled out of his chair, joints creaking in protest. He arched backward, feeling his spine crackle, barely suppressing a groan.

  “Now how the hell do we get out of here?” he asked. “Without running the gauntlet of reporters?”

  ■ □ ■ □

  18 P.A. Brown

  The elevator glided open onto the back ward. Chris poked his head out to an empty corridor. So far so good.

  A few feet from the back exit, he heard his name and a voice he had never wanted to hear again. “Chris! Is it true computer hackers attacked the hospital?”

  Roz Parnell was a reporter for the L.A. Times. Years ago, when Chris and David found infamy clinging to them like a bad smell, Roz had pursued them with a single-minded purpose.

  The publicity might have helped his new business, but it left a bad taste in his mouth for the press.

  How had she heard about the attack? He knew damn well neither Terry nor Denton would have told her. The hospital administrator would be having kittens if he knew Roz was here.

  “How serious was it, Chris?” Roz was a red-haired brazen woman with a penchant for pink jackets and Prada heels. She also had a surprisingly dulcet voice. That voice, he was sure, had fooled more than one person into revealing things they hadn’t intended. “Did you know the man who died?”

  He wasn’t going to play in her sandbox. He ducked away from her and muttered, “No comment.”

  “Do you think this was a deliberate act of sabotage?” Roz persisted. “How vulnerable are our hospitals? Will they strike again?” She shoved her perfumed cleavage into his face. “Is this the work of terrorists, Chris? Do you expect more deaths as a result of this? Or do you think it’s teenage hackers?”

  “Crackers,” Chris said, then his curiosity got the better of him. “How did you even fi nd out?”

  Roz smiled. “Some people believe the public has a right to know this kind of thing. We were alerted—”

  “You got a phone call,” Chris said. “It ever occur to you the guy who broke into the hospital made the call? You like feeding the ego of a killer?”

&n
bsp; Roz was writing furiously. “So you admit there was an attack?

  Is the hospital going to hire you to fi nd out who did it?”

  L.A. BYTES 19

  “No comment—”

  He shoved past her. She followed him to the parking lot, trotting to keep up with his long strides.

  “Is it true David was impacted by this? How serious was he affected—?”

  He slammed the car door and cranked the engine. Grabbing a U2 CD he put it on and turned it up loud before rolling down the car window. “No comment,” he shouted over the thunder of Bono’s voice. “Now leave both of us the hell alone.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Tuesday 8:45 am, Cove Avenue, Silver Lake, Los Angeles Chris pulled into the driveway and shut the engine off. David’s Chevy ‘56 two-tone sport coupe was still parked in the driveway.

  He had done what he said and stayed home. Unmoving, Chris sat watching a squirrel make short dashes across the lawn, fi nally bolting for a eucalyptus when Chris’s neighbor walked by with their black lab.

  Chris climbed out of the car, waved hello to the neighbor and entered the cool foyer. Sergeant rushed the door to greet him. Absently he patted the animal’s blocky head. The house was quiet. David must still be in bed. A frisson of alarm skittered across his nerves. David wasn’t the type to sleep in even if he was home sick.

  Dumping his keys on the foyer table, he slipped his shoes off.

  In stocking feet he padded up the stairs. The dog followed.

  The bed was empty. In fact there was no sign it had even been slept in. A quick look in the bathroom confi rmed it. David was not in the house.

  “Where’d he go, boy? Where’s David?”

  With growing alarm, Chris hurried back down the stairs into the kitchen. No sign the coffee pot had been used. An empty cup in the sink held the dregs of orange juice. His alarm faded, replaced by a growing annoyance.

  Growing more pissed by the minute, Chris looked for a note he knew wasn’t there. He even checked the answering machine in case David had called after leaving. Nothing. Chris knew where David was. Martinez had called or he had called Martinez. This time, David had answered his siren call. He’d gone back to work just a few hours after having a dangerous anaphylactic reaction.