CYBERKILL

Prologue

The airplane was leaving in a few hours, but Travis Cole still had some unfinished business. One of which was to get his in-law off his back.

“Please, John. We’ve been over this a hundred times,” Cole murmured, leaning forward on his desk to stare down at the computer monitor in front of him. He rested his fingers lightly on the keyboard, his hazel eyes focused on the command prompt on the screen:

DO YOU WANT TO EXECUTE? Y/N

Could he really do it?

Though Cole had made up his mind, it was now formal decision time. Pressing ‘N’ would continue his life as a well-known researcher in eco-biology at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Pressing ‘Y’ would end three years of cutting-edge work and move him and his daughter to a new home in Washington, DC and a lucrative research job with the U.S. Army.

Cole’s finger hovered over the keyboard--he felt sick.

John François was, as usual, sucking on the end of an ornately carved wood and leather pipe. It went along with his academic look elbow-patched sports coat, baggy brown pants, and loafers.

“It’s not right, Travis,” François implored. “It’s not right to take Shannon away from the environment she knows just weeks after her mother’s death. It’s just not right.”

Cole kept his focus on the task at hand. They had been over this a thousand times. Shannon, Cole’s young daughter, was already in the car, waiting. In fact, all of his luggage and many of his important worldly belongings waited there as well. He was going to return later for the rest of his stuff.

For now....

For now, he had to just get away.

Cole’s finger still hovered. He blinked hard. Could he really do this?

Yes, I can do this.

“And what about this?” François said as he opened the cover of a three-ring binder with the title TERRAN PROJECT written in blue across the front. François gently thumbed through the pages and pointed at the different artificial intelligent programs that Cole had cataloged and tracked while at MIT. “You’re just going to throw away years of work?”

Cole ignored François and turned back to the computer terminal with its blinking white cursor awaiting a reply.

He took in some air--and pressed the ‘Y’ key on the keyboard.

He turned to François while the computer executed his command. Cole couldn’t watch. Instead, he looked at his aging in-law with compassion for the man. François had lived alone since his wife died of leukemia ten years before. Cole and Shannon were the closest thing he had to family.

“John--” said Cole gently, but François cut him off.

“Shannon’s only eight years old, Travis. Taking her away from the environment she knew isn’t the answer,” he pleaded. The older man had tears in his eyes.

Damn. Cole gently placed his hand on François’s arm. “John, I don’t know what I would have done without your help after Kathy’s death. But I know what’s best for Shannon. I have to give her a change of environment.” Cole squeezed François’s arm, then looked back to the computer terminal. He watched as file name after file name appeared on the screen, all tagged with the statement:

FILE FOUND. FILE TERMINATED

Cole looked at his watch. “Jeez. We have to go. You’ll see us off?”

François nodded in resignation.

“Thanks. Shannon will like that.” Cole glanced once more at the scrolling text on the computer screen, turned, and hurried out the office with François close behind.

In the darkness of the vacated room, the program reached the end of its routine, and then stopped on the last file. The text that glowed from the LCD screen turned from white to red and blinked repeatedly insisting on an answer.

FILE FOUND. FILE ACTIVE.

ABORT OR CONTINUE?

* One Year Later *

Taishi, China

“I’m sorry to interrupt you, Mr. Supervisor, but we’ve found something--odd.”

Alexi Chenko put down the latest issue of Pravda and frowned at his head lab technician Ho Quan, a little man with dark-rimmed spherical glasses and a stubby bearded chin. His round head sat atop an even rounder body. Quan, normally stoic and reserved, looked agitated, and sweat lined his brow. As always, he spoke crisply in his Mandarin Chinese, the official spoken language of the People’s Republic of China.

Chenko was having a bad morning, and this latest interruption didn’t bode well. Already he’d received numerous infuriating calls from high-level Beijing bureaucrats, wanting to know when various communication devices would be cleared and ready for use. Followed by his wife calling to remind him of a dinner party tonight, a party Chenko had done his best to forget about. And now this. Whatever this is.

“What’s wrong?” Chenko asked in his near-perfect Chinese. He’d always had a penchant for picking up languages, a facility that had served him well as he rose quickly up the Kremlin ranks. But now, semi-exiled and banished from Mother Russia, he filled his days working in a tiny three-man facility outside a small village in southern China.

“May I show you?” asked Quan, and Chenko noted the man was visibly shaken.

Something’s wrong, thought Chenko. Seriously wrong.

The tall Russian followed the much shorter Quan onto the testing floor of their lab, a building that was freezing in the winters and smoldering during the summers. The room itself was large and lined with work tables piled with disassembled electronic equipment. The two men stopped at one table, under a ‘No Smoking’ sign posted on the lab’s wall. Ironically, the first thing that struck Chenko was the smell of cigarette smoke.

“Someone's been smoking,” said Chenko, irritated. He had given his two techs numerous lectures on the necessity for air purity in the lab. He was surprised that one of them had so blatantly dismissed them.

“No sir,” said Quan quickly. “No one’s been smoking here.”

Chenko frowned. He had to admit, there were no tell-tales signs of gray smoke hanging in the air. And now that he thought about it, there had been, of late, the distinct smell of carbon in the air--everywhere.

“Sir, the laptop....”

“Yes, of course.”

The laptop in question, sitting on Quan’s workbench, was from a US manufacturer with an Intel Pentium decal on it. There was another decal on the machine with simple white lettering that read: MCD.

“We were running the usual tests when we found this.” Quan pointed to the screen.

Chenko leaned forward, frowning. “It’s a compiled code.”

The little tech nodded eagerly. “We don’t know what it is or what it does.”

Chenko continued studying the code. Something about the way it was written, the rhythm and nuances of the code....

He gasped, pulled back. This wasn’t good. This wasn’t good at all.

“It’s an Easter Egg,” Chenko said, running his massive Slavic hand through his thinning hair. He rapidly scrolled through the entire text. He hadn’t seen such a code since...

Since working at the KGB’s information warfare center.

Not good.

“Is it dangerous?” Quan asked nervously, clearly sensing his supervisor’s concern.

“Depends,” said Chenko. “An Easter Egg can be an executable program. Like a virus or Trojan horse. Sometimes they’re called logic bombs. If it is indeed an egg, it could cause disruption--even damage--to a computer network.”

Hell, even portions of a country’s entire information infrastructure, thought Chenko, although he did not voice this to Quan.

Chenko pulled absently on his chin. Yes, he’d seen something like this before: the KGB’s cyber-warfare program. Something was going on, and it was big.

Definitely not good, thought Chenko.

“What do we do?” asked Quan. The tech had obviously sensed Chenko’s concern. “Is it safe in here?”

Chenko got hold of himself.

"Yes, of course. Our testing lab is self-contained. There’s no entry to our national information infrastructure. Let’s hook the laptop up to our lab network and run the code first to find out what it's designed to do."

Quan and Chenko’s other technician, Seung Park, a bright young kid fresh out of the military, immediately followed Chenko’s set-up instructions. A minute later, the laptop was ready.

Chenko thought outloud, “First we decompile the code, then run the program through our test network.” He pulled up a stool, sat down at the testing bench, and called up the lab’s list of decompilers. “This one should do it.” He clicked on a file. A few minutes later, the program was decompiled and ready to run.

“OK,” he said. “Let’s see what this program does.”

Yes, he thought. I’m very curious to see what this program does.

And judging by the way his heart was hammering in his chest, Chenko knew he was also nervous as well. Easter Egg were not a mistake or haphazardly placed. They were put in place to execute a specific program--and often the programs were malignant. If the latest rumors he had heard were true, this could prove to be the beginning of something very big.

And the now exiled Chenko was out of the so called loop. What was happening, or what might be happening, was beyond him.

Well, we’ll see, he thought.

The computer prompted him. Hands shaking slightly, Chenko typed: run. The screen paused...and so did Chenko’s heart, seemingly. And when the laptop began running through its routine, the Russian breathed and watched the display, along with his two lab techs. But nothing was happening. Not so far, at least. Chenko’s eyes flicked to a nearby laptop, used for status updates: no computer virus alerts, and no intrusion attempts.

“I guess it was nothing,” Quan mused aloud.

But Chenko, who had turned back to the laptop before him, spotted something in the string of code. Quan, looking over his supervisor’s shoulder, spotted the same sequence.

“It’s designed to send commands to another network,” said Quan. “Doesn’t appear malicious, but I’m not familiar with the code.”

You wouldn’t be, thought Chenko. In fact, few would.

“It’s Cellular Automata,” he explained. “We worked on this in Russia to control and operate....” But he let his voice trail off.

Could they have?

The program was still running, scanning the code rapidly.

“It’s sending commands to a network,” said Quan, confused. “But not our network.”

Chenko said nothing.

“But if not our network,” asked Quan, “then whose?”

The smell of cigarette smoke--or perhaps the smell of burning carbon--was stronger yet.

Something is happening, thought Chenko.

Quan, who had been leaning over Chenko’s shoulder, stood back and started scratching his chest. The smell of carbon was even stronger. Quan was now scratching feverishly at his scalp and face, using both hands, his nails leaving red grooves in his skin.

What the hell?

"Quan--"

But the tech was oblivious to him, scratching so hard and fast that his skin was breaking, blood running free. Chenko’s initial reaction was to reach out and help the man, but he thought better of it and recoiled, standing, knocking over the stool.

“Mr. Supervisor,” said Quan hysterically. “What is happening?"

Don’t touch him.

More movement to his side. The Russian turned his head and saw Seung, his young lab tech, now starting to scratch. The tech, who had been backing away from the scene, was now scratching his neck and arms.

My God.

Chenko backed away. Quan reached out for him. Blood and bits of skin clung ghoulishly to his fingertips and under his nails. Chenko did not help the man, his loyal worker. Instead, the Russian continued to increase his distance until he was pressed up against the far wall. A fire extinguisher pressed against his shoulder. He tore it off the wall and held it between him and the beseeching Quan, whose wide eyes were filled with fear and horror.

But what happened next negated the need for the fire extinguisher. In fact, what happened next would haunt Chenko for the rest of his life.

The Chinese tech had fallen to his knees, and with one last pitiful look at Chenko, he pitched forward onto the concrete floor.

And to Chenko’s utter disbelief and horror, he watched as Quan’s once pleasantly round face now collapsed in on itself, his skull flattening as if an invisible force were pressing down on it.

I’m dreaming, thought Chenko. This isn’t happening. I was reading the newspaper just a few minutes ago, and surely I fell asleep at my desk.

Now Quan’s entire body seemed to implode, sinking into itself. The process was shockingly fast, and before Chenko had time to grasp what was happening, there was nothing left of Quan other than a crumpled bloody mass of clothing and empty skin.

My God!

Chenko averted his eyes and his breakfast came up quickly, splashing over the concrete in front of him. As he turned his face to catch his breath, he caught sight of Seung suffering a similar fate. The young tech had been reduced to a lifeless puddle of blood and loose skin.

Chenko vomited again.

* * *

In his rather non-illustrious career in the KGB, Chenko had seen many disturbing images. But never had he seen the likes of this.

Steadying himself on the workbench, he glanced again at the bloody pulps that had once been his co-workers. He stumbled out of the workroom and into the fresh air of the strikingly clean back alley. Except the air wasn’t so clean. No, not today. Other than the smell of his own sick, he was smelling the stench of something else.

More carbon.

Something was burning, except he couldn’t see any smoke. But the smell of it seemed to be coming from nearby--no, it seemed to be coming from beneath him. Around him. He turned in circles, confused.

It’s coming from everywhere.

And yet....

Whatever was happening wasn’t affecting him. The thought of Quan and Seung melting before his eyes turned his stomach again, and he dry-heaved into the alley.

And then he had a horrible thought: Mei Ling.

His wife!

* * *

He’d met Mei Ling shortly after arriving in China, and she had made his exile more bearable. In time, he was even fairly certain that he had come to love her, although ‘love’ was certainly not a word the ex-Russian computer engineer used often.

Still, she was all he had, and fear gripped his heart.

And now he was running, dashing through the alley, turning a corner, and racing into the small plaza. There, he was confronted by more carnage. He paused and struggled to comprehend what he was seeing. Dead Chinese everywhere.

Men, women, children...their bodies all reduced to bloody, pulpy masses.

Mei! he thought. Find Mei.

He covered his mouth, averted his eyes, willed his convulsing stomach to be still, and rushed through the plaza, dodging the hundreds of bodies. Occasionally he would hear someone cry out for help, and occasionally one of the bloody piles would reach for him, but they were beyond hope.

God, let this be a dream....

The town was small. Chenko often walked to work, and soon, out of breath and nearly hysterical, he rushed through the surrounding iron gates, up the lush, ornate path that Lei tended to daily, and into his home.

The door slammed open, the handle puncturing the wall. He didn’t care about the damage.

“Mei!” he cried out. “Mei!”

There was no response. The house was oddly devoid of sound. Hell, the whole town and country side seemed suddenly devoid of sound.

And the smell...carbon...it was here, too.

Oh, no!

He was moving quickly now, from room to room, his heart slamming in his chest. Sick dread filling his whole being.

He reached the kitchen--and there she was, lying on the shining ceramic floor, her blood oozing between the tiles. She was little more than a pile of bloody clothes and loose skin. And the pile of tiny clothes where her hand had once been was his baby girl.

The entire room smelled of carbon.

* * *

Back in his testing lab, sick and grieving, the Russian sat down at his desk, opened a locked drawer, and found a small red notebook. He opened to a page with a series of passwords on it, chose one, and brought up a log-in screen on his computer. Hands shaking, he typed in his username and password and waited for the application to come up. A series of computer security screens appeared and each accepted his commands to proceed.

Within a few moments he was typing a message.

------

Information Warfare Laboratory

Fort Belvoir, Maryland

Seventy feet below the INSCOM building at Ft. Belvoir, Virginia in the Information Warfare Laboratory, Morgan Dallas was munching on his burrito. “It was all just a test,” he groaned, through the masticated meal in his mouth. “Why the hell did they pick five in the morning? I could have been sleeping.”

“Probably to simulate a real-time attack,” said Taylor Chin without looking up, her nose in her laptop computer. “I doubt cyber-terrorists are going to wait until you’ve had your coffee and morning piss.”

“Such language,” said Dallas, grinning. He liked Taylor. A lot. Except the 24-year-old graduate of MIT didn’t know how to show it. There were limitations to being a computer nerd, and being smooth with the ladies was certainly one of them. And Taylor was looking especially cute this morning, with an aqua-colored turtle neck sweater and tight jeans. She was Asian-American, twenty-one, and a specialist in artificial intelligence. Dallas thought that was hot. She also had a boyfriend.

Dallas didn’t think that was so hot.

He sighed silently and poured some more Ass Blaster Hot Sauce over his massive breakfast burrito as the two sat together in their cramped IWL office.

“I heard Senator Howe of the Senate Arms Services Committee ripped him a new asshole,” Taylor said, absently reaching for her iced latte.

“Just wild speculation,” said Dallas. “No one knows for sure. Bartley’s never left his office. Probably in there crying.”

Taylor shrugged. She took another sip from her iced drink.

“How the hell can you drink iced coffee in the morning? Isn’t that a sacrilege?”

“No worse than you eating a burrito for breakfast.”

“It’s called a breakfast burrito.”

“It looks disgusting.”

Dallas grinned, took a huge bite, and with food still in his mouth, said, “I hope they fire his ass. I never liked that overgrown boy scout, anyway.”

“You don’t like anyone in authority,” said Taylor, “And you shouldn’t say that about Bartley. What if someone overhears you?”

“So what?” Dallas blurted out. “Bartley can’t do anything to me. Or us. We’re civilians.”

“Look. You get Bartley pissed and he goes straight to Travis, who then bitches at us.”

That stopped Dallas. They both liked Travis Cole. The young grad chewed his breakfast burrito silently. Dallas was a self-proclaimed techno-pagan. After college, he studied and worked at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab before joining the IWL team a year ago. Now he worked as a private contractor for the United States government.

Staring at his one remaining bite of burrito and licking the sauce off his fingers, he sputtered, “Why the hell does Bartley always run to Travis, anyway?”

“Because Travis is the closest we have to a boss,” said Taylor, without looking up from her keyboard. “I’m going up top to the grid and get my mail. I’ll be back when you finish what you call ‘breakfast’.” She picked up her backpack and swept out of the office.

Dallas watched her go, admiring her tight jeans.

* * *

Travis Cole was sitting alone in one of the smaller rooms at the IWL, a room reserved just for his team. A room where, in fact, no real work was completed, a room dubbed by some in his team as the Stress-Free Zone. Indeed, the floor of the chrome and concrete room was littered with what looked like remote controlled cars on steroids. Battle bots. At least, that’s what Dallas called them. The kid built them in his spare time. Which, at the IWL, was an oxymoron. No one here had much spare time, which was why Dallas could often be found up at all hours of the night, tinkering with those...battle bots.

Cole almost laughed, but they were quite clever, and he was currently idly operating one of them. It was shaped roughly like a dragon, with massive black wheels, and a chainsaw in place of its snout. Oh, every now and then a burst of fire shot from its snout. Cole wasn’t sure how and when that happened, so he decided to keep it away from anything flammable.

He pressed a button, and the thing rose up on its hind legs and turned to look at him. Positively evil, as if alive.

Okay, some of these mechanical critters gave him the creeps. Morgan Dallas was obviously an amazing engineer. Who the hell knew what sort of AI intelligence he had given these things.

This one continued to look at him. Cole shuddered and pressed another button. Almost reluctantly, it lowered itself down to both feet which were, in fact, rubber tires and rolled off at Cole’s command.

At least, he thought it was at his command.

His laptop was open in front of him. Cole set aside the big remote control that operated the seemingly sentient dragon, and reviewed the small executable code he had embedded into his Cellular Automata program. The code was called a fix, and it was a shortcut that proved that Cole could deliver the goods. Just another day at the job.

Cole took chances. He knew that about himself, and accepted it. He was a risk taker and he got off on that. Sometimes it bit him in the ass, true, but more often than not he got a high that lasted for days. And this morning’s high at the successful DoD no-notice exercise was no exception, simulated or not.

And his personal life was no exception. He often jumped headfirst into relationships, trusting his gut instincts. Granted, it was often something else that guided his instincts.

Kathy had been different. The light of his life. The love of his life, and all his instincts - gut and otherwise - told him she was his soul mate. True to nature, he had snatched her up without a moment’s thought, and had lived a life happily ever after.

Until the day he got the call from the state trooper.

Cole turned away from his laptop and fired up the battlebot again. The dragon was game. It seemed to growl from within and charged headfirst toward the door...which suddenly opened.

Standing in the doorway, crying, was Taylor.

------

Information Warfare Laboratory

Fort Belvoir, Maryland

Taylor stumbled over, pulled up a wobbly wooden stool, and collapsed at the workbench next to him.

Cole, who had always felt more fatherly toward Taylor than anything, opened his mouth to speak, but Taylor had found another remote control and held it in front of him.

“How does this work?” she asked.

Cole was taken aback. He wasn’t sure what to say or how to react to her tears. He decided to let her set the pace, knowing Taylor rarely opened up to anyone. She was certainly unlike any girl he had ever seen or met.

“This lever here controls the bot’s mobility. This one controls the diamond-tipped drill bit.”

“Drill bit?” she asked, wiping away her tears.

“Yeah. These are called ‘battle bots’ for a reason.” He laughed, but she didn’t. Cole shrugged. Wasn’t that funny, away.

Her face set in grim determination, her red eyes nearly glowing in the lab’s bright lights, she worked the controls a bit, getting a feel for them. As she did so, another battlebot, this one across the room, came to life, reacting to her commands. The drill bit whirred menacingly from the creature’s forehead. Indeed, this one was called The Unicorn, although it didn’t look like any unicorn Cole had ever seen.

Dallas is a twisted man, he thought.

“So what do you do with these battlebots?” she asked.

“They battle,” said Cole.

“Battle what?”

“Each other.”

“Which one is yours?” she asked, and Cole didn’t like the menacing tone in her voice.

“The dragon,” he said slowly.

And then her bot was moving...crossing the room, heading toward his.

“Oh, shit!” said Cole, nearly toppling off his stool. He fumbled with his controls. “Taylor, what are you doing?”

But she didn’t answer, and somehow she had grasped the use of the controls already, thanks, Cole figured, to a new generation raised on Nintendo and X-Box.

Cole had just managed to right his stool and the remote control in his hand at the same time narrowly avoiding The Unicorn’s whirring drill bit.

“Taylor....”

The Unicorn whipped around, spinning easily, rotating its entire body on some pivot axis that Dallas had designed. She came at him again.

Cole, not so versed in the ways of video gaming, and still very much a novice at controlling these bots, moved his fire breathing dragon out of harm’s way again.

“I understand you might be upset,” he said, pressing the wrong lever and causing his bot to rise slowly on its hind legs. “But I don’t think Dallas would appreciate--”

“Screw Dallas!” she said, and came at him again, hard and fast, the unicorn’s demented head lowered, the drill bit whirring.

Despite himself, Cole pressed another button, and a lick of flame shot out, momentarily engulfing the unicorn bot. A second later, it plunged through the smoke and fire and rammed into Cole’s dragon. The machines, each weighing over a hundred pounds, collided, and the cacophony and smashing and grinding metal filled the small lab.

“Taylor!”

She said nothing. He looked over at her. Her eyes were dull and passionless.

The Unicorn’s drill bit drove straight through the mouth and neck of the dragon. His poor bot twitched, fighting to free itself from the possessed unicorn. But she had it pinned against the leg of a workbench. Both bots groaned and whirred and convulsed. The circular saw attached to his own bot appeared as if on its own, and dropped down on the head of the unicorn. Sparks flew as metal was shorn away.

“Dear God!” said Cole.

His bot randomly spat fire, and one of the bursts of flame ignited one of its own rubber tires. The thing smoked and burned and twitched, and still Taylor’s bot drilled determinedly into it.

The fire from the tire soon engulfed the entire undercarriage of Cole’s bot, a bot that was now dead in his hands, and a moment later the black smoke triggered a fire alarm, which rang frighteningly loud in the confines of the lab.

And then the sprinklers turned on, drenching them, drenching the room, drenching all the scattered, unmoving robotic bots, even as black smoke continued to curl up from the dragon bot.

Cole looked at Taylor. She sat unmoving, unblinking. Water poured down her face, soaking her clothing.

* * *

They were sitting in Cole’s cramped office. Cole had changed into an old pair of shorts and a wrinkled tee shirt he’d found shoved in his locker. Taylor had elected to stay in her sopping wet clothing. “So what the hell was that all about?” asked Cole.

At the sound of the fire alarms, Bartley had finally emerged from his office, looking shell-shocked. Perhaps he’d thought it was another simulated cyber attack. The on-call firemen checked the lab out, proclaimed it safe, and finally permitted a distraught Dallas back into the lab, where he went immediately to his destroyed battle bots. Although Cole did his best to explain, he wasn’t entirely sure what had happened himself.

Now, smelling vaguely of moldy clothing, Cole was about to ask the question again when Taylor did something completely unexpected.

She burst into tears, crying hard, and Cole did the only thing he could think of. He got up from behind his desk and put his arm around her. Taylor buried her face into his side and cried even harder and Cole patted her shoulder awkwardly.

When she had gotten control of herself, Cole finally learned what he had already suspected. Something bad had happened. Very bad. Taylor’s sister had been killed just the day before. A freak accident in China.

Cole had murmured all the right soothing words, and soon they were sitting in silence. Taylor was shivering, but had refused Cole’s towel.

“I’m so sorry,” he said again.

“You already said that.”

“I know. I’m sorry.” And they both laughed at that, although Taylor’s laughter turned to tears again.

A moment later, when she had gotten control of herself, Cole said, “I didn’t know you had a sister.”

She didn’t immediately answer, and when she did, it was with many pauses and lapses, seemingly, from memory. “She’s my half sister....My father remarried a Chinese citizen here in this country after my mom died....My sister’s name is....I mean her name was, Mei. She moved to China several years ago and eventually married a Russian there.”

“A Russian? In China?”

“Yes. Alexi Chenko. Apparently Alexi had been a computer security specialist with the KGB, but was unceremoniously ‘relieved’ of his duties and reduced to working in menial jobs under the new economic system.”

“Did you say KGB?”

“Yes, but according to Mei he had been one of the good guys. From all that I could tell, the two of them truly loved each other, and loved their child, as well.”

Taylor took a long breath, and was shivering even harder. Despite her previous protests, Cole got up and wrapped his towel around her shoulders. She didn’t move or thank him, but the shivering stopped.

“How did your sister die, Taylor, if I may ask?”

She seemed not to hear him at first, but then the words finally registered, and she reached down and dug into her pocket. She removed her PDA, which had managed to stay dry within the confines of her tight jeans and turned it on. She manipulated the small scroll ball, and then handed it over to Cole.

Cole took it from her and saw that she had brought up an email message. The email was, miraculously, from Mei’s Russian husband, the ex-KGB Alexi.

“How did he get this message through the security filters in China?” asked Cole.

“KGB, remember?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Please, Travis, read the message.”

He noted the hurt and pain and urgency in her voice, and so he turned back to the email and read it, barely believing what he was reading.

In fact, he didn’t.

“I know you’re hurting, Taylor, and I know this is a shitty day for you, but I need to be honest with you. This email, this business of which Alexi writes is...utter nonsense. Computer software can’t kill people.”

“I know, Travis.

Cole read the email again. He could feel his jaw literally dropping.

A whole village dead?

People...melting?

A virus of unknown scope and size....activated by a computer program?

A program he, Alexi, accidentally set into motion?

My God....

“Cole,” said Taylor urgently, leaning forward, wrapping the towel tighter around her narrow shoulders. “Alexi says the program has something to do with an MCD chip. You’re the Artificial Intelligence expert. Theoretically, can this happen?”

“No,” said Cole. “It can’t.” But then he stopped cold and re-read the last line of the message. “What’s this at the end?” he asked, and handed her back the PDA so she could read it, too.

“Some gibberish,” she said, shrugging. “About CA code driving a network. I don’t know. The message is pretty garbled at the end.”

Cole was puzzled. He was quite aware of CA code--hell, up until now, he had believed that he was the only one who could make such codes work on a micro scale.

Taylor reached out across the desk and took Cole’s hand. Her own was corpse cold. Cole shivered.

“Please, Travis. I need to know what the hell happened to my sister. I’m just looking for answers. Is there any way you can help me?”

Travis and Taylor had a good friendship. Perhaps even a great friendship, despite the age difference. It was damn hard to look into her big brown, pleading eyes and tell her no. So he said, “I’ll look into this MCD business.”

“You know about the MCD chip?”

Cole shook his head. “No. But I know someone who does.”