Stolen Prey

somebody to call in from the outside and take control of a computer. When he comes in, he’s automatically got root, so he can start moving money around. There are lots of alarms, and when he started messing with money, they should have gone off. So I think they were turned off for this one account.”
    “You keep saying ‘I think.’ Is this for sure?”
    She shook her head. “I’m pretty sure, but the only way to know for sure is to run the program and see what happens…. And there’s some other stuff in here that looks like it might be parts of a booby trap. That’s why I called it a programmer’sdoily—you pull on the wrong string, and the whole doily unravels, and you’ll never figure it out.”
    From behind Lucas, Bone said, “The important points are, he had administrator’s privileges, and he had to know enough about the security system to turn off the alarm.”
    Lucas swiveled around and, with a question mark in his voice, asked, “Pruess?”
    “Not unless he took some serious programming classes somewhere, and then figured out how to get in from a remote terminal. I don’t believe it—there’s nothing on his record that would suggest that he knew anything about programming. He was a sales guy,” Bone said.
    “The programming here isn’t particularly hard,” ICE said. “There’s a lot
of
it—finding this little knot was essentially a problem of finding a needle in a haystack—but the knot itself is pretty simple.”
    “To simplify all the techie bullshit,” Lucas said, “you’re telling me that somebody here set up this … doily … and then he could call in from the outside and loot the account.”
    “You’re smarter than you look,” ICE said.
    “Thank you,” Lucas said. “But what you’ve given us here, I could have figured out myself, eventually, even though I don’t know anything about computers. We need you to give us some details, not this sort of, excuse me, generalized bullshit.”
    ICE turned her palms up and said, “We might need a warrant for that. The Bonester is seriously unhappy. He’s dragging his feet.”
    Bone said, “Look, we’ll get it done—but I can’t have you setting off some logic bomb that’s going to blow up the bank’s accounts.I’ve got three hundred billion dollars in assets floating around in there. I need to know what’s going to blow if you touch the wrong wire.”
    “You’ve got multiple redundancies—” ICE began.
    “But there might be multiple bombs,” Bone said. “What’s the point of taking us down, if we go back online in ten minutes? If there’s one bomb, there could be lots of them.”
    ICE stuck out a lip and tilted her head: “It’s a thought.”
    Lucas asked ICE, “How long would it take you to evaluate the situation? In detail?”
    “A day, maybe,” she said. “Depends on how tangled up the knitting gets.”
    “Too long, too long,” Lucas said. “They’re killing people every day. You have to move faster.”
    Bone said to ICE, “No. No. If you gotta go slow, go slow. And I want my computer security people looking over your shoulder while you’re doing it. I’m not bullshitting you two—”
    Lucas interrupted: “Jim. People are being killed—”
    Bone said, “Look. Lucas. Ol’ buddy. If she touches off a string of bombs and brings down the bank, Wall Street dumps two thousand points and the economy goes into recession. You’d kill more people than a whole bunch of Mexican gangbangers.”
    Lucas grunted, a short laugh, and ICE put on her mildly amused look, but Bone wasn’t laughing. He was snarling: “You think I’m joking? I’m not. This bank crashes, and the first thing everybody thinks is, ‘Terrorists. Gotta get out.’ And they run for the doors. Lucas, I’m not fucking you around here. Miz ICE is wearing a suicide vest, she just doesn’t know it.”
    Lucas said, “All right.” To ICE, “Fast as you can, without blowinganything up. These guys, they’re crazy, and they’re going to kill again.”
    “Gonna take a lot of high-priced speed,” ICE said.
    “I don’t want to hear about it,” Lucas said. “I just want to get it done.”

10
    T hat night, Weather and Letty sat around and talked about the murder of Rivera, and Lucas worried that he’d messed things up.
    “I knew something was up with him. I knew he was running around talking to the Latino community, and I might have figured he’d go hunting them on his own…. I just couldn’t imagine that he’d actually