DARK: A Creepy Collection

  “Assassinware,” Faraday said under his breath.

  #

  Faraday shook himself from the memory. He’d walked out of the park and all the way back to his apartment without even noticing how much ground he’d put between himself and the reporter. As he unlocked his door, he angrily muttered once more the words with which he’d left Maxine Miller: better software.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Scott Faraday sat at the sidewalk tables outside eBrew under foreboding gray skies, sheltered by a red-and-white striped umbrella, sipping a fake chocolate diet shake through a straw while he checked his email. He scratched at his stubbly chin – maybe he should’ve shaved today – then ran his hand through his thick dark hair.

  He braced himself against the chilly air. November in Washington D.C. had a way of creeping up on you like a predator. Still, he’d rather be out here alone and chilly than inside with all those . . . people.

  It had been over a year since he’d sat at this café with his old partner, the late Simon Jakes. Since then, he’d caught the programmer behind his death and closed Jakes’ final case, using his own software solution (and a daring single-handed, guns-blazing take-down) to shut down the cybercrime gang that was selling corporate secrets to the highest online bidder. It felt good to finally put them behind bars.

  Not that it would bring back Jakes.

  Now Faraday had become accustomed to working alone, having turned down the opportunity to work with three different partners. He and Jakes had been a good team, and good friends. But Faraday liked how it was now – only responsible for himself and for cleaning up the world one cybercriminal at a time.

  The diet shake he sipped at tasted like carob-infused cardboard, but at least it might help keep the weight off. He’d gained thirty pounds after he’d started at the CIA nine years ago, and managed to lose twenty of them in the last six months, just by drinking the disgusting shakes.

  The wind was starting to pick up, whipping at the ends of the umbrella and scattering abandoned copies of the Washington Post across the sidewalk and into the gutter. Faraday could smell the rain in the air. He glanced up at the darkening canopy and zipped up his black leather jacket.

  Might as well go inside, since the wireless signal out here is nowhere near as good as advertised.

  He slapped his laptop closed, dumped the remains of his nasty chalky shake in the tall wire waste basket by the door, and stepped into the bustling café.

  The smell of fresh ground coffee and baked goods permeated the too-warm air, making his stomach grumble with hunger. Faraday squeezed past a half dozen crowded tables to find an empty seat at the end of the counter. He opened up his laptop and finished looking at his email, then opened an encrypted connection and administered the comments section of his blog, Cybercrime Memoirs.

  Usually it was a simple matter of making sure the comments left behind by readers were not extremely offensive or divulging of national secrets. Click, click, click and done.

  Not today.

  One comment caught Faraday’s eye – from someone with the username NonCredit Romeo.

  There are many ways to kill a man. As many ways as there are pixels on your screen. Watch and learn, Faraday. Look to Turtle Bay for six new ways today.

  Faraday received the odd threatening or psycho-sounding comment every few weeks – usually from those tinfoil hat types who hate any and all government agencies. He was about to delete it when his cell vibrated at his side. He tapped the button on his earpiece to pick up.

  “Faraday, go.”

  “Graham, here. Get your butt in here, Scott. We’ve got six dead U.N. diplomats.”

  Faraday glanced at his screen, at the words of NonCredit Romeo.

  “Did you say six?”

  “Yes, six. And it’s definitely your department – they died sitting at their computers. Just get in here and I’ll brief you.”

  A soft tone sequence indicated Graham had hung up.

  Faraday moved his cursor away from the delete button on screen and logged out, closed his laptop, shoved his way to the front door and burst out onto the street.

  He hopped into a cab that whisked him along the George Washington Memorial Parkway, past mostly-naked trees to the Langley headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency. The rain was just starting to fall as he ducked into the main lobby, then took the stairs to the fourth floor (part of his weight loss program). He passed his ID across a reader at the door to the Directorate of Science and Technology. The guard verified his photo and asked him to place his hand on a scanner, it pinged with a green light and he stepped inside.

  Faraday placed his laptop on his desk and went straight in to see his boss, Henry Graham.

  “Scott, you’re here. Close the door and take a seat.”

  Faraday pushed the door shut and sat in the black vinyl-covered armchair across from Graham. Faraday could see the dark clouds through the blinds behind Graham, and heard the rain tapping on the glass.

  “Scott, I want you to go to New York. These U.N. people were all killed, somehow, by their computers.”

  “Okay, back up a sec, Hank. First, I need to know exactly when these murders occurred.”

  Graham handed Faraday a file folder. “Look for yourself.”

  Faraday leafed through the file. Photos of dead men and women, slumped over their computers or laying on the floor in tipped back office chairs. Times of death: 9:08, 9:09, 9:11, 9:13, 9:14, and 9:16.

  “Hank, there’s something you need to see.”

  Faraday walked around to Graham’s side of the desk and leaned over his keyboard. He pulled up his blog, logged in, and went to the comments administration interface.

  Hank read the comment by NonCredit Romeo.

  “You see the time that was posted?” Faraday asked.

  “8:43.”

  “Twenty five minutes before the first murder,” said Faraday.

  “Have you tracked the source?”

  “No. I tried to get an IP on the way here in the taxi, but whoever left that comment really covered his tracks. He’s routing his packets through at least eighty DNS servers around the globe, including a few Chinese servers with restricted access. Whoever he is, he’s good.”

  “All right,” said Graham. “Get to Turtle Bay first, examine the evidence, then follow up on this NonCredit Romeo character. There’s got to be a way to trace him.”

  Faraday made his way out of the office at a brisk pace, stopping at his desk to grab two more diet shakes.

  It’s going to be a long day.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Faraday arrived at the U.N. headquarters complex at Turtle Bay, New York, by yellow cab from the airport.

  The tall glass Secretariat Building looked like a giant gravestone as he pulled up under cloudy skies.

  He walked in the front doors in his black raincoat with brown valise, provided his ID and was escorted to the twenty-seventh floor, where the first of the six assassinations had occurred.

  The uniformed guard didn’t have much to say as they rode the fast-moving elevator and stepped out to an office area crowded with various law enforcement officers and detectives from multiple U.S. and international agencies.

  “In here,” said Man of Few Words, rounding the corner into a lobby criss-crossed with the standard yellow crime scene tape.

  “Thanks,” said Faraday, stepping around a forensic expert who was placing something tiny into a baggie with a pair of long tweezers.

  Faraday spent a few moments standing with his hands in his pockets, viewing the computer desk from a few feet away, getting a sense of the scene of the crime.

  This victim was the one who’d been thrust backward and onto the floor. The chair remained in its tipped-over position, but the body was gone, represented by a white-taped outline that started on the chair and continued onto the floor, the arms splayed. A few dark patches on the light gray carpet marked the spilled blood.

  The image before his eyes
made Faraday’s mind flash back to a vision of Simon Jakes sprawled on the floor of the CIA office, convulsing, and then ceasing to move.

  He stepped carefully past some desktop items scattered on the floor near the desk – a handful of paper clips, two pencils, a red pen, a few sheets of paper, and a broken Museum of Fine Arts coffee mug.

  Faraday scratched his head through his thick, dark brown hair and pulled out his PDA. Graham had sent him the case file while he was on the plane from D.C. He tapped at the screen and pulled up the first victim.

  Jean-Michel Lumonde of France. Assistant to Suzette LeFleur, representative on the Security Council. Eighteen years working for the French government.

  Faraday stepped back and bumped into someone. “Excuse me,” he mumbled over his shoulder, not bothering to look at the person.

  “Excuse me,” said the woman, sounding perturbed.

  Faraday brushed it off and stepped in to take a close look at Lumonde’s computer. The tower was fried – blackened casing, melted moulding – but he’d still pull whatever was left of the hard drive to see if there was anything recoverable.

  The interesting thing was the monitor. A standard nineteen inch flat screen – but only the stand and part of the screen frame remained. The rest had been blown out – and into Monsieur Lumonde’s face with deadly force.

  Faraday started to form some theories about how this attack was perpetrated, and realized the next logical place to look was the point of incursion. He turned and left the office, stopping to ask directions to the server room.

  A U.N. guard at the office door pointed him in the right direction, and he took the stairs down six flights and followed the corridor to the west side of the building to the main IT area. Once among the towers of black rack-mounted hardware under glass, with blinking lights and the steady hum of heavy-duty computing power, he felt the sensation of being “home.” He spoke with the top techie on duty, but was denied access to the traffic logs.

  “Look,” said the IT guy, “I’ll tell you the same thing I told that red-head who was snooping around here. Nobody sees nuthin’ without paper from my boss.”

  Faraday apparently wasn’t the first agent to be asking questions, and not the first to get the door shut in his face. He’d need Graham to pull some strings.

  So he headed up to the twenty-ninth floor to check out the next victim’s desk. The scene was much the same, only the body outline for this one indicated South Africa’s Jendasi Umulo had expired slumped over his desk. The monitor here was intact, but the mouse was melted down and fragmented. A blackened, sticky-looking substance puddled on the desk next to the mouse pad. The room smelled like barbequed dog hair.

  The smell immediately took him back to a year ago, and he pictured Simon Jakes’ violent death once more, imagining it must have been much the same for Mr. Umulo.

  This case was already haunting Faraday, and he’d barely begun the investigation.

  He pushed aside the memory and took a look at the computer. Again, the tower was a complete loss, but Faraday pulled the hard drive anyway.

  The six dead diplomats were spread among four floors of the building. It took half the morning to examine each workstation, and each yielded evidence of a different method of execution. What they all had in common was the use of the computer as a weapon and the destruction of the hard drive.

  Most likely, the damage to the hard drive was by design, rather than a by-product of the assassination.

  Covering their tracks.

  Very clever killer.

  Smarter than the one who’d killed Jakes. That one had left recoverable evidence on the hard drive – a set of codes that Faraday had used to track down the killer.

  Having seen all that was worth his time, Faraday decided to take a look at the bodies, all of which were in cold storage at the nearest morgue.

  He went out to the street and jumped in a yellow cab to find a woman had hopped in from the opposite side at the same time.

  “Uh, this is my cab,” he said.

  “No it’s not,” she said, closing her door. “I was here first.”

  “You two loveboyds wanna let me know when you sorts this out?” said the cabbie over his shoulder. “I gets a fare either way.”

  “I’m headed to East 49th,” said the woman. “Maybe we can share?”

  Faraday forced a rigid smile. “That happens to be where I’m going. Maybe we can make this work.”

  “East 49th,” they told the cabbie in unison.

  The woman wore a black suit and shiny black pumps. Her redwood colored hair was up in a twist and she wore designer eyeglasses. Pretty attractive – until she bit into a hotdog she’d purchased from a vendor across the street from where the cab had stopped. Faraday could smell the juicy dog with all its spicy toppings, and the aroma was nauseating, yet at the same time made his stomach growl. A good New York street dog would sure beat another diet shake.

  He watched her out of the corner of his eye, then tried to distract himself by starting to organize the notes in his PDA. He was interrupted when a call came in from Graham.

  “Scott, you’ve been assigned a partner to help work the human angle. C. Blaine from IOC/AG. They’re bringing in Information Operations, as these hits could be of foreign origin since they’re web-based.”

  “Great,” Faraday rolled his eyes. “You know I prefer to work alone.”

  “Look, I don’t know anything about this Agent Blaine, but make sure and give him a fair shake. I understand how you feel about partners, but we need to pull out all the stops on this one and can’t afford any in-fighting.”

  “Fighting? You give me too much credit, boss.”

  “You know what I mean, Scott. You fly solo and like it that way – you’ve told me that enough times. I just want you to be nice to this guy and make it work, all right?”

  “Fine. I’ll check in later after I’ve seen the corpses.”

  With that comment, the woman sitting next to Faraday looked over at him with a perplexed frown.

  “That’s where Blaine’s headed,” said Graham. “Guess you’ll meet him there.”

  “Fine. Later.”

  A partner. Not what Faraday needed at this juncture. With thoughts of Jakes creeping into his mind, the last thing Faraday wanted was a partner. Whatever – maybe he’d be able to ditch this guy after the first day.

  The cab pulled up to the morgue.

  “This is my stop,” said Faraday.

  “Huh, mine too,” said the woman.

  They split the fare, and Faraday took a minute to dig in his pockets for some paper money to tip the cabbie. After a minute, he entered the sandstone-colored building. Just as he entered the lobby area, someone was passing through a security door into the back.

  “Hold up,” Faraday called. “I need to go back there and see the six bodies that were brought in to you this morning from the U.N.”

  The door opened and the woman from the cab stared at him. He held out his ID. “Faraday, CIA.”

  “Blaine, CIA,” she said, extending her own badge.

  “Blaine. ‘C’ Blaine?”

  “Catherine. You can call me Cat, since we’ll be working together.” She held out her hand without a smile.

  Faraday took it hesitantly and gave it a slow, single shake, looking directly into her green eyes. “I’ll stick with Blaine. So, you get anything from the crime scenes?” he asked as they stepped into the back room where the pathologist was waiting for them.

  “Yeah. A nice bruise on my shoulder – you’re that guy who slammed into me in one of the offices,” she said, recognizing him from the Secretariat Building. “You get anything?”

  “Just a half-dozen fried hard drives and a couple dozen questions. And sorry about the nudge.”

  “Mr. Faraday,” said the black-haired man in the white coat, gold-rimmed glasses and trim salt-and-pepper goatee. “Your supervisor called and said you were coming, and explained th
e confidential nature of your investigation.”

  “And you are?” asked Faraday.

  “James Pinchley, I’m the chief pathologist here.”

  “And I’m Agent Blaine,” said Cat, stepping nearer and offering her hand.

  “Pleased to meet you. Well, follow me,” said Pinchley.

  The three walked through a steel door into a bright, chilly room that resembled a surgery but smelled of formaldehyde. Dr. Pinchley disappeared into a vault, leaving Faraday and Blaine standing in place, peering around the room in silence like curious lab rats.

  Pinchley returned after a few moments, pushing a black body bag atop a wheeled table. He unzipped the bag to reveal a pasty white woman with incisions under her chin and speckled across her face in a blast pattern accented by burn marks. Once upon a time she’d been pretty.

  “We pulled all the little chunks of the keyboard out of her face,” said Pinchley. “Except for the ones embedded in her eyeballs. I have the pieces in storage if you need them.”

  “Thanks,” said Faraday, leaning in to take a close look at the woman. He stood up straight again and tapped at his PDA. “So, this was Andrea Rendal of Sweden,” he said. “Floor twenty-seven, the exploding keyboard. Right.”

  Pinchley had two more bodies brought in. “This is Kenya and France,” said Pinchley, as if hosting a morbid Miss World pageant.

  The bags were unzipped and Faraday and Blaine stepped alongside the deceased. The odor reached Faraday’s nose and he caught his breath – then tried to exhale slowly to delay the next whiff. “Maybe you shouldn’t have had that hot dog, Blaine.” His eyes ran down the arm to the hand of one of the victims. He looked over at the other one, who looked like she’d been in a car accident without a seatbelt.

  “This one’s fingers were fried by a mouse,” said Faraday, pointing to the blackened hand of the Kenyan one, “and this one here got an exploding monitor in the face.”

  “How could a hand injury kill someone?” asked Agent Blaine.

  “Correct me if I’m wrong, Dr. Pinchley,” said Faraday, “But the hand injury was more than just a burn.”

  “That’s right, Agent Faraday,” said Pinchley. “The object that came in contact with the deceased’s hand – a computer mouse, I take it – was composed of a highly toxic compound. The burn was a side effect of the fatality, not the cause.”