No Way Out
No Way Out
David Kessler
Copyright © David Kessler 2010
The right of David Kessler to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 and other copyright laws.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
First published in the UK 2010 by Avon (a division of HarperCollins) as No Way Out
This edition published 2012 by House of Solomon
Acknowledgements
A very big thank you is due to Megory Anderson for her advice on San Francisco and to Shelanda Adams for her advice on Oakland. As is often the case with creative writers, I have nevertheless had to take literary license on some points. For example, the San Francisco Giants did not play at home to the LA Dodgers on the evening of 2 September 2009. Rather, on that date, the Giants were playing away to the Philadelphia Phillies. The Giants did play the Dodgers at home some three weeks earlier, but that was an afternoon meeting, at least the last day of the game was. None of this would have suited my intricate plotting and for that reason I had to rearrange the fixtures to suit the exigencies of the storyline.
I feel that if another thriller writer – considerably more famous than myself – can change the timelines of Soviet leaders Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Cherneko, then I am surely permitted to play fast and loose with the baseball calendar. However, Americans – for whom baseball is sacrosanct – may disagree. If so, apologies in advance. No Fatwas please!
To Eran, my brother in all but name
“He who fights with monsters should take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.”
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Aphorism 146
Contents
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
CONTENTS
SATURDAY, 4 JULY 2004 – 23:40
FRIDAY, 5 JUNE 2009 – 7:30
FRIDAY, 5 JUNE 2009 - 8:50
FRIDAY, 5 JUNE 2009 – 9:45
FRIDAY, 5 JUNE 2009 – 10:15
FRIDAY, 5 JUNE 2009 – 11:05
FRIDAY, 5 JUNE 2009 – 14:40
FRIDAY, 5 JUNE 2009 – 15:15
FRIDAY, 5 JUNE 2009 – 15:30
FRIDAY, 5 JUNE 2009 – 16:50
FRIDAY, 5 JUNE 2009 – 19:30
SATURDAY 6 JUNE 2009 – 11:00
FRIDAY 12 JUNE – 9:40
FRIDAY, 12 JUNE 2009 – 10:30
FRIDAY, 12 JUNE 2009 – 13:00
FRIDAY, 12 JUNE 2009 – 14:30
FRIDAY, 12 JUNE 2009 – 15:40
FRIDAY, 12 JUNE 2009 – 16:30
FRIDAY, 12 JUNE 2009 – 18:10
FRIDAY, 12 JUNE 2009 – 19:45
FRIDAY, 12 JUNE 2009 – 21:1500
MONDAY, 15 JUNE 2009 – 10:25
MONDAY, 15 JUNE 2009 – 13:00
MONDAY, 15 JUNE 2009 – 16:35
FRIDAY, 26 JUNE 2009 – 11:20
FRIDAY, 26 JUNE 2009 – 12:05
WEDNESDAY 15 JULY 2009 – 12:40
WEDNESDAY 15 JULY 2009 – 15:15
WEDNESDAY, 15 JULY 2009 – 16:30
WEDNESDAY, 15 JULY 2009 – 18:05
THURSDAY, 16 JULY 2009 – 16:20
MONDAY, 17 AUGUST 2009 – 10:00
MONDAY, 17 AUGUST 2009 – 13:00
MONDAY, 17 AUGUST 2009 – 17:30
MONDAY, 17 AUGUST 2009 – 18:10
MONDAY, 17 AUGUST 2009 – 18:20
TUESDAY, 18 AUGUST 2009 – 12:40
TUESDAY, 18 AUGUST 2009 – 15:40
TUESDAY, 18 AUGUST 2009 – 17:10
WEDNESDAY, 19 AUGUST 2009 – 9:10
WEDNESDAY, 19 AUGUST 2009 – 10:15
WEDNESDAY, 19 AUGUST 2009 – 12:30
WEDNESDAY, 19 AUGUST 2009 – 13:05
WEDNESDAY, 19 AUGUST 2009 – 13:20
WEDNESDAY, 19 AUGUST 2009 – 13:30
WEDNESDAY, 19 AUGUST 2009 – 13:35
WEDNESDAY, 19 AUGUST 2009 – 13:45
WEDNESDAY, 19 AUGUST 2009 – 15:15
THURSDAY, 20 AUGUST 2009 – 10:10
THURSDAY, 20 AUGUST 2009 – 11:00
THURSDAY, 20 AUGUST 2009 – 11:10
THURSDAY, 20 AUGUST 2009 – 11:20
THURSDAY, 20 AUGUST 2009 – 11:30
THURSDAY, 20 AUGUST 2009 – 11:40
THURSDAY, 20 AUGUST 2009 – 11:45
THURSDAY, 20 AUGUST 2009 – 11:50
THURSDAY, 20 AUGUST 2009 – 11:55
THURSDAY, 20 AUGUST 2009 – 12:10
THURSDAY, 20 AUGUST 2009 – 12:15
THURSDAY, 20 AUGUST 2009 – 12:50
THURSDAY, 20 AUGUST 2009 – 13:05
THURSDAY, 20 AUGUST 2009 – 13:30
FRIDAY, 21 AUGUST 2009 – 10:20
FRIDAY, 21 AUGUST 2009 – 12:30
FRIDAY, 21 AUGUST 2009 – 14: 50
FRIDAY, 21 AUGUST 2009 – 22:15
SATURDAY, 22 AUGUST 2009 – 09:00
SATURDAY, 22 AUGUST 2009 – 09:20
SATURDAY, 22 AUGUST 2009 – 09:30
SATURDAY, 22 AUGUST 2009 – 10:20
MONDAY, 24 AUGUST 2009 – 10:15
MONDAY, 24 AUGUST 2009 – 11:50
MONDAY, 24 AUGUST 2009 – 21:30
TUESDAY, 25 AUGUST 2009 – 10:30
WEDNESDAY, 26 JULY 2009 – 11:40
WEDNESDAY, 26 JULY 2009 – 11:55
WEDNESDAY, 26 JULY 2009 – 12:05
WEDNESDAY, 26 JULY 2009 – 12:10
WEDNESDAY, 26 AUGUST 2009 – 14:45
WEDNESDAY, 26 AUGUST 2009 – 14:50
WEDNESDAY, 26 AUGUST 2009 – 14:55
WEDNESDAY, 26 AUGUST 2009 – 15:00
WEDNESDAY, 26 AUGUST 2009 – 15:05
WEDNESDAY, 26 AUGUST, 2009 – 18:00
WEDNESDAY, 26 AUGUST 2009 – 20:30
WEDNESDAY, 26 AUGUST 2009 – 21:05
WEDNESDAY, 26 AUGUST 2009 – 21:30
WEDNESDAY, 26 AUGUST 2009 – 21:35
WEDNESDAY, 26 AUGUST 2009 – 21:40
WEDNESDAY, 26 AUGUST 2009 – 22:30
THURSDAY, 27 AUGUST 2009 – 01:20
THURSDAY, 27 AUGUST 2009 – 10:50
SATURDAY, 29 AUGUST 2009 – 11:25
SUNDAY, 30 AUGUST 2009 – 13:50
SUNDAY, 30 SEPTEMBER 2009 – 22:15
MONDAY, 31 AUGUST 2009 – 10:15
MONDAY, 31 AUGUST 2009 – 10:40
TUESDAY, 1 SEPTEMBER 2009 – 6:45
TUESDAY, 1 SEPTEMBER 2009 – 10:35
TUESDAY, 1 SEPTEMBER 2009 – 11:05
WEDNESDAY, 2 SEPTEMBER 2009 – 9:20
WEDNESDAY, 2 SEPTEMBER 2009 – 10:05
WEDNESDAY, 2 SEPTEMBER 2009 – 10:35
WEDNESDAY, 2 SEPTEMBER 2009 – 10:45
WEDNESDAY, 2 SEPTEMBER 2009 – 11:20
WEDNESDAY, 2 SEPTEMBER 2009 – 11:35
WEDNESDAY, 2 SEPTEMBER 2009 – 11:45
WEDNESDAY, 2 SEPTEMBER 2009 – 13:05
WEDNESDAY, 2 SEPTEMBER 2009 – 13:20
WEDNESDAY, 2 SEPTEMBER 2009 – 13:40
WEDNESDAY, 2 SEPTEMBER 2009 – 14:25
WEDNESDAY, 2 SEPTEMBER 2009 – 15:10
WEDNESDAY, 2 SEPTEMBER 2009 – 16:30
WEDNESDAY, 2 SEPTEMBER 2009 – 16:55
WEDNESDAY, 2 SEPTEMBER 2009 – 17:20
WEDNESDAY, 2 SEPTEMBER 2009 – 17:30
WEDNESD
AY, 2 SEPTEMBER 2009 – 17:45 PDT (20:45 EDT)
WEDNESDAY, 2 SEPTEMBER 2009 – 18:00
WEDNESDAY, 2 SEPTEMBER 2009 – 18:20
WEDNESDAY, 2 SEPTEMBER 2009 – 18:30
WEDNESDAY, 2 SEPTEMBER 2009 – 18:35
WEDNESDAY, 2 SEPTEMBER 2009 – 18:40
WEDNESDAY, 2 SEPTEMBER 2009 – 18:45
WEDNESDAY, 2 SEPTEMBER 2009 – 18:50
WEDNESDAY, 2 SEPTEMBER 2009 – 18:55
WEDNESDAY, 2 SEPTEMBER 2009 – 19:00
WEDNESDAY, 2 SEPTEMBER 2009 – 19:05
WEDNESDAY, 2 SEPTEMBER 2009 – 19:10
WEDNESDAY, 2 SEPTEMBER 2009 – 19:15
WEDNESDAY, 2 SEPTEMBER 2009 – 19:20
WEDNESDAY, 2 SEPTEMBER 2009 – 19:25
WEDNESDAY, 2 SEPTEMBER 2009 – 19:30
WEDNESDAY, 2 SEPTEMBER 2009 – 19:35
WEDNESDAY, 2 SEPTEMBER 2009 – 19:38
WEDNESDAY, 2 SEPTEMBER 2009 – 19:41
WEDNESDAY, 2 SEPTEMBER 2009 – 19:44
WEDNESDAY, 2 SEPTEMBER 2009 – 19:47
WEDNESDAY, 2 SEPTEMBER 2009 – 19:50
WEDNESDAY, 2 SEPTEMBER 2009 – 19:53
WEDNESDAY, 2 SEPTEMBER 2009 – 19:55
WEDNESDAY, 2 SEPTEMBER 2009 – 22:00
AFTERWORD
EXTRACT FROM HELLO DARKNESS MY OLD FRIEND
Saturday, 4 July 2004 – 23:40
It was only a set of fingers flying across a keyboard, yet they could work so much malice.
She watched in awe as her words appeared before her, the letters on the screen keeping pace with her fingers. What was so amazing was how little she had to change to wreak so much damage. All she had to do to alter the behavior of an entire computer program was make minor alterations to just two of the lines of the coding and then switch two of the other lines around. Hackers and “midnight programmers” would laugh at the absurd simplicity of it. Some of them might even have been mildly amused by the sheer audacity of it. But few of them would have condoned her objectives. Most hackers tended to be free-wheeling libertarians, not embittered racists. And she wasn’t even trained as a computer programmer, apart from one short online course she had taken recently.
But the irony went deeper than that.
Everyone knew the old cliché that you can radically change the interpretation of a contract by an ambiguous pronoun or the meaning of a statute by a harmless-looking punctuation mark. In England a diplomat and humanitarian called Roger Casement was said to have been “hanged by a comma” after he was found guilty of treason under a medieval statute. But who would have believed that the same was true of a computer program? And the biggest irony of all was that she couldn’t tell anyone – like the criminal who commits the perfect crime and wants to brag about it to others, but can’t, because if he tells other people, then the crime would no longer be perfect!
But so what?
She wasn’t doing it for fame or glory. She was doing it for justice – plain, old-fashioned justice.
As she continued her work, she glanced up and looked out through the window. In the distance she could see the flickering lights of the nocturnal city. It reminded her that there was a world out there beyond her private world of vengeance. But she forced herself to ignore the distraction. Her fingers continued to dance across the keyboard in the small pool of halogen light that fell upon the desk. The rest of the room was in darkness.
After a few more seconds of work, she paused, satisfied with the results of her labors. Then, with a couple of clicks on the left button of the mouse, she selected a menu item called “build.” This action inaugurated a two-stage process known to computer programmers as “compiling” and “linking.” It was this process that actually created the finished computer program. By the time forty eight seconds had elapsed, she had created a new version of the program.
And what a new version!
She thought about it now, almost wistfully. Getting the original source code had been rather tricky. She’d had to use some of her old contacts to break down the bureaucratic barriers. But many States had public records or freedom of information laws. She wished that she could infiltrate the altered program everywhere. That would be something of a coup! But she had to be realistic.
When she first started out, she had no idea that she would even be able to do it. It was more idle curiosity than a firm agenda that had prompted her to explore the possibility. But when she studied the documentation and asked a few questions of a professor to understand how the software worked, it suddenly dawned on her just how easy it would be.
Of course, slipping it in undetected would be the hardest part. There were various ways she could do it. One way was to hack into the server computers and upload the new program. But that was risky. The fact that an organization maintained a server that was accessible from outside did not necessarily mean that it was vulnerable. Interactive websites were usually protected by strong firewalls.
There was, however, another way to infiltrate the new version of the software that didn’t involve direct use of the internet at all – social engineering. The trick was to get the systems administrators to install it themselves. The key to this method was to make it seem as if it were a modification of a current program that they were already using. By packaging the program complete with forged letterhead, printing on the DVD surface, throwing in some fancy multicolor process-printed documentation and then sending it out by special courier, she could trick their Systems Administrators into installing the new version under the erroneous assumption that they were getting an upgrade from the software company.
It would be the ultimate software hack followed by the ultimate in social engineering.
But what was the new program? It was not one of those so-called “Trojan horses.” Neither was it a virus that could replicate itself. Nor yet was it a trap-door that would enable her to get into the system later. Indeed, once inserted into the system it would simply do its work.
And now she was going to make the niggers pay!
JUNE
Friday, 5 June 2009 – 7:30
Bethel was nineteen – too young to remember the Sixties and too bored to care about her grandparents’ reminiscences – like how her mother was conceived at the Woodstock festival.
Pathetic!
But the sound of Buffalo Springfield’s For What it’s Worth was ringing through her head, via the earphones of her iPod, as she stood by the roadside, waiting for help.
She knew little of the context of the song and nothing about the closing of the Pandora’s Box nightclub or the Sunset Strip Curfew Riots. But the voice of Neil Young was haunting. It was easy to sleep through high school civics classes – even to sleepwalk through the assignments and exams. She knew a bit about the Vietnam war and the civil rights struggles of the Sixties. But it was all superficial academic knowledge, of the kind she picked up almost by default while daydreaming about the proverbial football team quarterback.
It stayed in her mind not as a coherent picture, but as a collection of sound bites: “We shall overcome,” “I have a dream,” “Power to the People,” “Burn baby Burn!” The voice of anger still echoed across the decades. But it echoed faintly. A time-gulf separated Bethel from the turbulence that had almost ripped her country apart. And the time-gulf was ever widening, so all that was left of the ringing timbre of history’s voices were the fading reverberations of barely-remembered heroes. Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, the Chicago Eight. Names and slogans to Bethel, but no substance… except, perhaps, the occasional substances she used to take her mind off the boredom of academic learning.
But she liked the song.
It had a pleasant hook to it that made it stick in her mind. What really sent shivers up her spine was that haunting phrase at the end of chorus, urging the young listeners to pause and assess the situation. She had no more than the merest inkling of what it meant. Whatever it was, had “gone down” long ago.
It doesn’t really matter, she told herself. It be
longed to her grandparents’ generation anyway. She belonged to another generation, the one that was more concerned with finding a job than changing the world. Bethel had known her own personal share of hardship in life, but it had been an exceptional episode and not something that affected others of her generation.
Her full name was Bethel Georgia Newton and she was a mixed bag of human elements. In the looks department she was all bleached blonde and classic cheerleader figure: a carefully cultivated complexion and polished-tooth smile. Neither svelte, nor-buxom, a kind of perfect “in-between” for her 5’6”, athletic, but in that soft, not-overdone sort of way, with well-toned leg muscles, but not rippling ones. On the socio-economic side she was middle class and far removed from the culture of the street, the stoop or the ‘hood. Yet when it came to experience of life she wasn’t entirely naïve. She might not exactly have been streetwise, but she had tasted the bitter taste of life.
She stood by the roadside in her white tight-fitting T-shirt and shorts that showed every curve of her firm body, holding out her thumb every time a car went by. She thought it would be easy hitching a ride, with her breasts thrusting out in front, straining against her T-shirt, and the perfect ripe complexion of her thighs showing like white silk in the California sunshine. But people were paranoid, she realized now.
A few yards away, her car had broken down and she couldn’t even call for help because the battery of her cell phone was flat. She had made a half-hearted effort to fix the car herself, but she didn’t really have a clue when it came to car engines. So all she could do was flag down a Good Samaritan and ask them to take her to a garage where she could get proper help.
Secretly she was hoping that some good-looking man with technical skills and a cool family fortune would stop and rescue her, not just from the roadside but from the aimless drifting boredom that seemed to have engulfed her life lately. But she would settle for an elderly couple taking her down the road to a pay phone if necessary. Only she wasn’t even getting that.
Life was unfair.
And then her luck changed.
An aquamarine Mercedes slowed down as it approached her. A recent model and from the up-market end of the European car industry. The owner was clearly affluent… and probably young. By the time it had pulled over by the roadside, she could see that the driver, in his late twenties, was a black man.