Chemical Burn Read Online Free PDF Page B

asked.
    “No thank you. Where am I going?”
    “Down that hall,” I indicated the one on the far side of the main room past the dining area. “Do you prefer regular, foam, or waterbed?” I asked.
    “Foam. Why?”
    “Last door on the right. All the doors have locks on them,” I said and smiled.
    “Good night, Justin.”
    “Good night.”
    She walked towards the bedroom, and I headed down an opposite hallway that bordered the open-air kitchen. I entered my bedroom and locked the door behind me, reveling in the blast of 100-degree air that washed over me. Reaching into my pocket, I pulled out my cell phone and typed in “safe—don’t worry—everything under control.” I hit SEND, and the cryptic message shot off to Rachel’s phone. I was too tired to give her the whole story, and besides, the story wasn’t over yet. I lay down flat on my back on top of the covers, closed my eyes and didn’t move for six hours.
    O O O
    I woke up at three-thirty a.m., totally alert. There were no more sirens at Xen’s house, but I could see the red and white flicker of emergency vehicle lights reflecting off the houses. The helicopters were gone as well, the neighborhood finally quiet. I rolled out of bed and went over to the large, sliding glass doors that opened onto my patio and pool. Flipping the latch, I slid them open and stood naked in the moonlight, letting the cool air slide over my body. The sound of the fountain outside the door soothed me.
    “Terminal,” I said over my shoulder. A panel folded out of the wall opposite my bed, revealing a pair of large computer screens and a small keyboard that I almost never used. I turned back into the room, leaving the doors open, and walked over to the panel. It sat at a perfect height to allow me to stand and work. I reached into a slim, tall nook between the two screens and pulled out a thin, silver circlet of metal. It slipped on easily, resting gently around my forehead.
    “Power.” Both screens came to life, revealing images of a green logo surrounded by symbols in my own language. As it was a client terminal, the system automatically connected to my mainframe. “Search: keyword SolCon,” I said.
    Boxes of data appeared, instantly filling the screens. On the left SolCon’s corporate Internet website appeared: on the right, a listing of connect points that included usernames, IP addresses and the geographic areas where they were registered. The perimeter of each box had strings of characters in the same language as the logo.
    “Scroll right, use left,” I said, and the listing on the right began scrolling upwards quickly, faster than a human eye could follow. My eyes flickered back and forth between the two screens. When I blinked on a word or symbol on either screen, it would flash red and transition to the data behind the link.
    Images, articles, reports, user data, and financials flashed across both screens as I absorbed data at an inhuman rate. My eyes bounced back and forth, digging into various facets of SolCon’s business, employees, and corporate partners. If the data was out there and connected to a system, I could get at it, and my mainframe could hack through most of the puny human security protocols it encountered.
    The system did run into several more resilient security barriers, but it’s smart enough to stop at government networks locked down with newer encryption protocols. The system would also stop at networks capable of identifying the subtle intrusions and violations it could inflict upon digital victims. There are ways to hack through those without raising alarms, but it wasn’t necessary to get what I was after. The biggest challenge I usually faced was when the data wasn’t on a machine connected to a network. Most people don’t know this, but the only really safe computer is the one that’s powered down. There are ways around that, too, but it’s a lot more complicated. As I dug into SolCon, I found links back to DiMarco, so I dug into