Wormhole (The Rho Agenda #3)(76)
She didn’t need to ask twice. All at once, Heather felt Jen’s mind reacquire its normal cutting edge. That was good. The opportunity stood in front of her right now, but in five minutes it would be gone.
“OK, Jen. In a few seconds I’m going to want you to do your thing, but you’ll need to follow my thoughts and do it through me.”
“Sounds like fun. Let’s go for it.”
Heather relaxed back into the real world, feeling Jen like a hitchhiker in her mind. Dr. Jacobs detached the last of the sticky electrodes from her temples, wound up the cords, and returned them to their case.
As he turned to place the items back on his cart, Heather focused on what she needed, felt Jen pick up the thoughts, and then almost lost consciousness as a wave of vertigo carried her into Dr. Jacobs’s head.
It wasn’t like anything she’d ever experienced. Although she’d touched Jennifer’s memories, she hadn’t wanted to pry into that part of her mind. Certainly this was nothing like the psychic link she shared with Jen and Mark. This was an empathic bond that gave access to the target’s innermost feelings.
On the surface, Dr. Jacobs seemed very happy with his perceived progress, but beneath that lay a raging sexual urge to do things to his patient that would never be sanctioned by his bosses. If only he could be alone with her for an hour without that damned camera.
Like a tick, Jennifer burrowed into that feeling, amplifying the sick urge and feeding it back into Jacobs’s mind. The doctor turned toward Heather, stepping close to where she lay so that his body blocked the camera’s view. Sliding his stethoscope over his ears, he leaned down.
“Take a deep breath and hold it,” he said, sliding the cold end of the device beneath her gown, his hands gently resting against the curve of her breast.
Once again Jennifer amped up the man’s hidden desire.
“Now, let it out slowly.”
Heather complied, feeling his hand move a little farther up the curve of her left breast, a tremor passing through it as he paused.
“Now, once more.”
Again his hand shifted and again Jennifer ratcheted up his excitement. Suddenly, his eyes closed as a shudder passed through his body. When they reopened, he frowned, withdrew the stethoscope, turned, and hurriedly pushed the cart to the door. When he pressed his hand to the biometric reader, the electronic lock opened, then locked behind him again as he backed the cart into the corridor. Then, with the squeak of rubber wheels on concrete, he was gone.
Heather glanced up, then rolled onto her side, away from the camera. As she felt Jennifer slip back into her drug-induced haze, Heather’s fingers stroked the touchpad of Dr. Jacobs’s Android cell phone.
The worm was designed to penetrate security holes in Windows, Linux, Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, Mac OS, OS/2, Android, Palm, and IOS. It mutated using an evolving genetic algorithm, opened multiple root-level back doors, mapped the host system’s routing tables, services, and attached devices, then hid itself to await external commands. It didn’t do much, but what it did, it did well.
It provided one additional service that Heather immediately brought into play: it opened a telnet port that provided remote shell access to every network-accessible infected system. While she lay curled into a fetal position beneath the sheet, Heather’s fingers flew across the tiny cell phone keyboard, scrolling through a list of nearby hosts and routers. One by one she accessed the systems, made a quick check of attached or networked devices, then moved on.
She calculated the odds that Dr. Jacobs would discover his missing cell phone within an extended time window. Jennifer’s subtle manipulation of the man’s suppressed urges had left him with sticky underwear, shocked and embarrassed, so mentally flustered he just wanted to get someplace he could shower himself clean. If he used an on-site shower facility, a 98 percent probability, she might have as little as thirty minutes before he discovered the missing phone. Heather had set her mental clock on a thirty-minute countdown. It now stood at twenty-four minutes, eleven seconds and counting.
Heather knew the facility had been designed with multiple layers of TEMPEST cages, but she knew something else too. Dr. Jacobs collected data from his cell wirelessly. He also used Wi-Fi from his cell phone to network to his office. That meant the TEMPEST integrity of the lower levels was floor by floor, connected with other floors via secure fiber. And she didn’t need to wirelessly connect to the primary control center. She just had to be able to wirelessly access a computer that was linked to that local area network.
Heather stared at the small screen, feeling a sudden burst of exhilaration. She’d found it, a route to the security system that controlled the door locks. As happy as that made her, she had to find one more node before she could override that system. It would do little good to take control of the locks if they could watch her every move through the network of cameras.
The camera in her cell had a coax cable connection. That meant the other security cameras were probably hooked into the monitoring system the same way. You could bet the same contractor installed the whole shooting match. If that were true, they would show up as directly controlled devices on some system. But even if some of the cameras were smarter, network-enabled devices, she could still take control of them. There would still be a central computer that sent out the IP commands that told them what to do and that routed the video streams to the appropriate clients.