Preface Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6

Hunger, thirst, safety, offspring

David Garfunkel, “Garf” to his friends, Barf to his enemies, went to the ATM in the corner.  He typed his PIN and asked for his balance.  He was getting ready to put a big smile on his face.  The number showed on the screen, a [...]]]> Previous Chapters

Preface
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6

Hunger, thirst, safety, offspring

David Garfunkel, “Garf” to his friends, Barf to his enemies, went to the ATM in the corner.  He typed his PIN and asked for his balance.  He was getting ready to put a big smile on his face.  The number showed on the screen, a couple of hundred dollars and change, and the smile disappeared before it even formed.  That son of a bitch, he was thinking.  That Art Lewis had promised him twenty thousands dollars for his work.  He finished the work, but there was no phone call, no email.  Nothing.  And the money was never transferred either.  He looked at the numbers again, and decided that he had enough for junk food and beer for the next few days.  He made up his mind to start worrying about it in a few days when he runs out of money.  In the meantime, he thought, there were things to do.

Garf was a computer whiz from the number one whiz maker – Massachusetts Institute of Technology – MIT.  Like many of his friends, and he had quite a few, he didn’t particularly care for software engineering, testing, quality, and other overhead.  He only cared about getting new problems to solve.  Challenge and livelihood were synonyms for him.  Without the challenge of cracking open problems, solving them not only in theory but in reality as well, he was lost.

It was most unfortunate that the Federal Government, as well as a few other governments around the globe thought that his activities were criminal.  He really didn’t understand what the fuss was all about.  He wasn’t like some of his pals who were doing time.  He didn’t empty out bank accounts, didn’t fake cellular phones.  He didn’t even give himself better grades, not that he needed any.  All he did was helping the government a little.  He started reminiscing about the time when he realized that some NASA probe was going to get in the wrong orbit of some planet.  So he hacked into the server, corrected the really simple calculation, and the probe smoothly went into orbit.  What did he get in return?  A couple of Feds showed up with a white Ford LTD Crown Victoria and scared the living daylights out of his mother.  What ungrateful SOBs.  He was looking for viruses everywhere.  In some places he was asked to do that, and was paid handsomely, and in others he just did it out of good will and patriotism.

Over the years he had developed a signature.  Every server hacked, every website cracked open, was left with a souvenir.  A small souvenir signed by Garfunkel.

He figured, the morons would never figure out that there was a signature in the first place.  He was wrong.  They might not be the best and brightest, but sure enough they were able to open a hidden file in the kernel.  The Limbo dancing snake was a nice touch, he thought back then.  He learned the lesson though.  From that day on, he religiously used a triple anonymous site mechanism, which gave the Feds zero chance of retracing him.  It’s been years since he had any interaction with the Federal Government.  He was scanning his battery of computers every day, he wrote special kernel programs to see if anyone was pinging him, sending him Trojan Horses.  He hasn’t seen any in a couple of years at least.  He felt safe.  Safe enough to meet with this clown Arthur Lewis, or whatever the hell his name was, and work for him.

He didn’t really know what he was doing for Mr. Lewis.  All he knew was that every other day or so, Arthur would show up in his basement, with an envelope containing a few DVDs.  Lewis would hand over the DVDs quietly, and in return take an envelope with a couple of printed documents Garf had prepared for him.  It was an easy enough job.  It didn’t take a whole lot of time, and it left Garf with plenty of time to do other hack jobs, but mainly, he had enough time and plenty of money for his real hobby – drinking.

Garf withdrew eighty dollars, and went back to his car.  He still had some work to do, and payday or no payday, work needed to be completed.

He was contemplating the problems he was working on for this Mr. Lewis guy.  Garf was a genius.  He rarely needed more than a few minutes to understand the problem.  He often took less than an hour to form a solution in his mind, and a couple of hours more to implement it.  Most of the time, he actually improved the algorithm while writing the software to solve the problem.  His algorithms were clean, short, self explanatory, and concise.  Algorithms, a set of instructions given in pseudo code, have a notion of performance; depending on the number of times an instruction is performed to solve the problem.  Finding the largest number in any list of numbers is order of magnitude of the number of elements on the list or O(N).  Common sorting algorithms perform at O(N2), better ones perform at NLogN.  Mr. Garfunkel was notorious for finding algorithms which performed an order of magnitude better than the common algorithms.  He won quite a few prizes for improving test book algorithms.  He thought it was a silly game.

But Mr. Lewis asked him to look at a different kind of problem.  He was asked to crack a code.  The more he thought about it, the more it seemed that he was looking at an Enigma.  The mechanism the Nazis had used in WWII to encode and decode messages from Central Command to their operatives in the field.  He was looking at combinations of letters, four letters, trying to find patterns, trying to make sense of them.

He was making progress, but not knowing what he was looking at, he was at a disadvantage.  He mentioned it to Mr. Lewis a few times, but Mr. Lewis always found a way to dodge the questions.  Lewis promised him that he was better off not knowing the source of the data.  He didn’t buy that, but he didn’t know of a way to get the missing information.

He opened the car door, but just before going in, he turned around and into the convenience store at the corner.  He bought a six pack of Heineken and the Daily News and went into the car.  An unmarked police car was parked across the street, with two cops in plain clothes.  Amazing, he thought, they really think they are undercover.  Garf never thought much of the police, but this was outstanding, even for them.  He started the car and drove home.

The unmarked police car was two cars behind.  His mind was already elsewhere, he was crunching numbers, or rather patterns of letters.  His mind was barely noticing the traffic lights and signals.  He was thinking about algorithms and beer.

He stopped at a traffic light and took a quick look at the paper’s headline.  He swallowed hard when he realized that the photo on the front page was Arthur Lewis’.  He almost lost it when he realized that the guy was dead.  His mind started to race.  What the hell?  Who was Arthur Lewis?  The light turned green, and the driver behind him blew the horn impatiently.  Instinctively he looked in the rear view mirror, and knew he was in trouble.  That undercover Crown Victoria was in pursuit.  The subject seemed to have been no other than him.

Well, he thought, here’s a puzzle to solve.  His sharp mind, now assisted by a full blown adrenaline rush started to think.  First, he though, he had to shake the tail.  He started driving, and at the same time turned off his cellular phone and took the SIM card out.  A minute later, a new SIM came out of his wallet and found its way into the old Nokia.  This SIM, he well knew, would never surrender his location.  Eavesdropping would be anywhere between extremely difficult to impossible. The technology was relatively simple, yet few owned it.  Garf was an expert in cellular technology.  Not the cumbersome devices, but rather the technology of taking communication packets, as shipped by the device to the nearest cell, and then most likely to the underground cable, heading in the direction of the target device – whether a land line or another cellular phone.  Garf planted a Trojan horse virus in all of the national carriers that were serving his area.  The Trojan was dormant, waiting for a single event to wake it up.  That event was about to occur.

Garfunkel dialed a sequence of numbers, sixteen digits long, and waited.  “Welcome” said the voice, a synthesized voice of Start Trek Seven – the dissimilated Borg, and Homer Simpson, the famous cartoon character, “please enter a number and then the pound sign”.  He thought it would be a nice touch.  He dialed a number and a groggy voice said “what the hell?”.  Garfunkel said to the person on the other end of the line that he needed help, and the person said: “one hour, usual place”.  Garf was thinking how easy this was.  All that needed to be done is for the Trojan to identify his call, to strip his identity off the packets coming in, and directing them forward.  If someone was to trace the call, they would be very surprised to learn that the call came from within the White House.  A further investigation would lead to a Federal Government communication switch somewhere in Avenue K, and after that a very large variety of airphones, traveling back and forth in 30,000 feet altitude.  There was really no way to trace the calls and he knew it very well.  Plus, he thought, it was a really neat puzzle to all those nine-to-five people working for the Government, most likely in Virginia…

He had an hour to shake the tail.  He made a right, and an immediate left.  Then he made a quick U turn and another left.  He was speeding away, when he realized that the tail was gone, but another one showed up.  Now he knew, he was in deep shit.  If the new one was Fed, then it must mean that they really want to talk to him.  If it wasn’t, then that would spell a completely different order of magnitude of trouble…
Looked like plan B was up next.  Garf made a few quick turns, ran a couple of red lights, went up the wrong way in a one way street, and then, next to Cleveland Circle, he parked the car nicely in a parking lot, paid for a week in advance and went down the stairs to the subway.  He took the Green Line to Park Street.  Before he switched to the Red Line, he walked around, went to the bathroom, bought a piece of candy.  He kept his eyes open for unfamiliar people trying to blend in, who was miraculously everywhere he went.  When he realized that there were none, he boarded the Red Line and went all the way Braintree.

Land, hot, fight, safety.

Michael and Barbara were driving north on Interstate Highway 95.  At first they had no idea where they were going.  They knew they had to get away from the city, but they had no idea where to go.  A close friend and a colleague was dead under [...]]]> Preface
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5

Land, hot, fight, safety.

Michael and Barbara were driving north on Interstate Highway 95.  At first they had no idea where they were going.  They knew they had to get away from the city, but they had no idea where to go.  A close friend and a colleague was dead under suspicious circumstances.  A successful experiment might have had something to do with it.  The scent of uncertainty was in the air.  Michael knew it was time to come clean.  Softly and confidently, not waiting for the questions, he started to tell her.

He was choosing his words carefully, and she was listening attentively.  Before he even started, he knew that he was driving with the single person whom he could trust.

He described his first experiment, in which Roger’s aged DNA was proven to be just as effective in synthesizing protein as his brand new DNA.  He told her about the anomaly he found with the junk DNA changing overtime, and how he really didn’t think much of it.  But her eyes widened when he was describing the later experiment.

The experiment was really simple, he told her.  Michael made an effort to use laymen’s terms.  He knew it was no easy task with Barbara.  She was extremely sensitive when she felt she was being patronized.  She did have scientific training, of course; after all they did meet in that lab.  But his training was way beyond.  He had to use scientific language to avoid the sensitivity, and at the same time use laymen’s terms so she could really get a grasp.

Michael went through the experiment.  He described how he took frozen sperm cells from good old Roger, and created a rabbit embryo in the lab.  He also took newer frozen sperm cells from that liquid nitrogen tank named Roger and created another embryo.  Lastly, he took sperm cells from the living organism named Roger, which didn’t seem to mind, and created yet another rabbit embryo.  Two weeks later, when the three embryos were a few thousand cells strong, Michael harvested some cells and compared the DNA.

Barbara paid full attention.  It was still dark outside, and she was driving over the speed limit.  He made a comment about it, and she slowed down.  Then she made that little motion with her index finger, which he correctly interpreted as please, go on.

Michael said that the results of the experiment showed clearly that there was a pattern.  The first embryo was used as the bench mark.  The second, made of younger DNA, had an addition to the junk DNA, right where the pattern ended in embryo number one.  The third embryo’s junk DNA had all that the first two had, and an addition.  The addition was right where the previous one ended.

Michael had repeated that experiment on numerous organisms, multiple times and multiple embryos.  The results were always the same.  There was a clear junk DNA progress over time.  It looked as if something was getting written on the organism’s DNA over the course of its life.

Barbara pulled over.  Michael, she knew, was brilliant.  But he was very naïve.  She concluded that he was conducting the experiments correctly, like the scientist he was.  She knew that he was meticulous, and made no mistakes.  She figured that he repeated the experiments many times over, documented them all, and looked time after time for errors, in the process and in the interpretation.  She knew that his statement was error free.  She knew that he made an extraordinary discovery.  She suspected that he had no idea what he just stepped on.  She thought that he was so innocent, that he really was finding it hard to figure that the connection was clear.  He made a discovery, his friend was murdered, and in her mind it became very simple: whoever killed Art was coming after Michael.

She didn’t know why exactly, she didn’t know who.  She did know, however, that the people who were after them were not the negotiating type.  She also knew that they were vulnerable.  Going back home at this time would have been too dangerous.  When she considered it further, she realized that they had to go home.  They had to retrieve their passports, some cash, and other things.  Otherwise, she knew, they would be cornered and caught.  She had no idea what was at stake at this point.  She hadn’t had a clue what they were after, and whether they would leave them alone if they get what they want.  There were many questions, few answers, and the morning was around the corner.

She spoke clearly and chose her words carefully.  Barbara told her husband that she was forgiving him for his behavior in the last few months.  She said that she would have expected that he would have shared his discoveries with her, but that was irrelevant now.  She pointed out to him that there’s a good chance that they were being sought by some very powerful people or organization which will most likely stop at nothing until they get what they want.  First order of business, she explained, is to get mother and the girls to safety.  Second order of business is to get cash, passports, and make a few phone calls to people she could trust.  When he frowned, she said that her godfather, a person who owed his life to her dead father, was a person she was ready to trust with her life.  He accepted.  For the first time in their marriage, he accepted the fact that the events required someone that he simply wasn’t.  He was grateful that Barbara was there with him.

Michael and Barbara went out a few more time before she understood that if she didn’t make some kind of move, the relationship would simply remain mental, and the physical part would never arrive.  She put together a plan.  One night, when they were walking back to her place, she said that she took the liberty to book a hotel room in Vermont for the weekend.  Michael was flabbergasted.  She thought he was going to choke.  After some time he pointed out to her that he had a lab watch shift over the weekend.  She told him that she took care of it.  One of the other Ph.D. students would replace him.  He was looking lost, and she assured him that they would have a good time.  She knew a small French Bistro in Montpelier where they could have dinner and listen to some live music.  They could sail in the lake, and they could take walks.  Michael accepted.

They left for Vermont on Friday afternoon.  The drive was spectacular.  It was that time of year when the leaves get dyed in all shades of red, orange, yellow and green, to form this amazing crazy artist mixture of colors.  It was autumn.  They checked in, and as they entered the colonial large room, Michael understood that there was only one bed.  Indeed, it was huge, but still, one bed.  Barbara turned to him, and started a conversation.  He was obviously tense, and as they both knew, tension doesn’t add a whole lot to a relationship about to move to the next phase.

She boiled water and made some tea.  He was obviously calming down.  Barbara excused herself and went to the bathroom.  When she emerged from the bathroom, Michael’s eyes went wide.  She was beautiful.  She was wearing a short negligee; and her long legs were showing through, the shape of her nice firm breasts showing through.  But she was wearing something else.  She was wearing something that was not made of fabric.  It was made in heaven.  She was wearing a new look.  She looked at him with a look that brought him back thousands of years.  He was experiencing the very fundamental feeling of a man about to know a woman in the biblical way.  The effect on his body was obvious, in an embarrassing way.  He excused himself and went to the bathroom.  The stream of hot water, and the impression of the woman he just saw, made him climax.  He was devastated.  He took his time in the shower, and when he was done, he came out wearing a bathrobe.  Barbara was sleeping on the bed.  She wasn’t covered.  Her robe was half open.  She was breathing slowly.  He took a few steps closer.  He could smell her scent.  The scent of cleanliness mixed with sexuality.  He was aroused in a minute.  He stepped back and tripped on her shoe.  The noise woke her up, and all she did was smile and open her hands to him.  He didn’t need a more explicit invitation.  The robe went in a second, and in another second he was in her hands.

They started exploring each other.  They were touching, feeling, learning.  They were kissing gently and hard.  He made her feel like a queen.  She made him feel like a man.  When he entered her, she gasped and looked him straight in the eyes.  He kept his eyes open while he was moving inside here.  It didn’t take long, but neither he nor she ever flinched.  When climax came, they were looking each other straight in the eyes.  The look that surrenders everything was shared between them from then on.  Later in their relationship, one could always know that something was wrong with the other by that look.  They realized what Barbara had already known: they were a couple, and they are going to make a long lasting commitment to each other.

Michael Moore eased himself out and rolled over.  His eyes were wet with tears.  He finally found something he never knew he was looking for.  He guessed correctly that it was love.

“Mike”, she said, “stop dreaming and give me your Blackberry”.  She turned the device around, shut it off, and took out the battery.  She did the same with her phone.  Curious, Michael asked her what she was doing, to which she answered “we must get off the grid for a while”.  “Do not put the battery back in until I tell you to do so”.  They both knew that he wouldn’t think of it.

Barbara started the engine and they kept going for a while, until they hit a motel on one of the side roads.  The kind that asks no questions when they see a couple of adults paying cash.  She asked for a room away from the elevator, and near the emergency exit.  It seemed that the attendant, apparently a university student working the night shift, couldn’t care less where this couple would be staying or what they came to do.  For as long as they pay in advance, they could stay in the basement.

When Barbara asked, the clerk pointed at a Denny’s just a few hundred yards down the road.  Neither of them was hungry, yet eating was clearly the right thing to do.