Silken Prey

Google and a few other programs; and he’d once owned a software company, though he had nothing to do with coding the software.
    But he had no idea what Kidd was doing, other than whistling while he worked. Kidd started by plugging ICE’s hard drive into an unbranded desktop computer. He brought the system up, poked at some keys, looked at some numbers, then wandered across the workshop to a bin full of DVDs, flipped through them, chose one, brought it back, and loaded it into the computer.
    “What’s that?” Lucas asked.
    “It’s an inventory program. It searches for certain kinds of apps and . . . whoops. There we are.”
    “What?”
    “I don’t know. Let’s look at it.”
    Kidd’s fingers rattled on his keyboard, and a program popped up in reader form. Lauren came in, looked at Lucas, and raised an eyebrow, and he shrugged. Lucas knew nothing about the program, except that it wasn’t very long.
    After reading through it, Kidd said, “If this is what it looks like, you’re right—Smalls didn’t do it.”
    It was too fast. Lucas was astonished: “What is it?”
    “Watch.” Kidd pulled the DVD out of the computer, restarted the machine, and when it was up, rattled his fingers across the keyboard again. The screen instantly went blank.
    “Good work,” Lauren said.
    They looked at the blank screen for a moment, then Kidd reached out, picked up a computer manual, and dropped it on the keyboard. A pornographic picture popped up.
    “Aw, that’s rotten,” Lauren said. “Kids.”
    “That’s the file,” Lucas said. “How’d you do that?”
    “Somebody wrote a little script—”
    “A script?”
    “Not even a program,” Kidd said. “Just a few lines of shell commands.” He paused. “How technical do you want this?”
    “Just tell me what it does,” Lucas said.
    “What it does is, it tells the computer, ‘If someone presses these keys all at the same time, show these photos.’ It’s more complicated than that, but it’s not . . . mmm . . . complex.”
    “Show me.”
    “Well, first, you have to get the script and the porn file—it’s actually a bunch of files, but they’re stored in a wrapper format—on the computer. That’s the tricky bit. You have to run the script once—just type the name or double-click it—and it installs itself so it starts on bootup.”
    “Like a virus,” said Lucas.
    “Not really. You have to do it intentionally. A virus would do it by itself. Anyway, if the script is running, it’s just waiting for you to press four keys: QW with one hand, and OP with the other. If you do that, it sends the porn file to the default photo viewer—that’s actually
called
Photo Viewer in this case. It also activates the screensaver. The next person who touches the keyboard or the mouse cancels the screensaver and,
presto
. Porn right in your face.”
    Kidd held the four keys and the screen blacked out. “The porn is floating under there. If I hit anything to cancel it, the porn’s right there. But. If I hit the escape key, and only the escape key . . .”
    He did it, and they were back at the Windows home screen. He tapped on the keyboard, and nothing more happened.
    “What you have is a script that will take you right to the porn, blank the screen, and set it up for instant retrieval,” Kidd said. “But if you need to ditch the program, you hit the escape key—specifically the escape key and nothing else. I can think of no earthly reason to set that up, if you were just looking at the porn. The only reason to do it . . .”
    “Would be to set up a booby trap,” Lucas finished. “But—wouldn’t any computer investigator find that? The script? I mean, as soon as that turned up . . .”
    Kidd looked at him and said, “No.”
    “No?”
    “No, they wouldn’t find it. My tool here chased it down. The script itself is actually fairly well hidden. My tool found it because it’s not part of any standard Windows boot protocol,” he said. “Here’s another thought. Whoever did this, whoever wrote and installed this script, knows his or
her
way around coding. This is a very tight little piece of work. I don’t think it’s something a politician would write, unless he came out of the computer industry.”
    “You said his or
her
. You italicized the
her
.”
    “ICE could do it—she could write this in four minutes,” Kidd said.
    Lucas thought about it for a second, then said, “Nah.”
    “Okay.”
    •   •   •
    L AUREN