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Our Paranormal Chernobyl
Scene 27: Linkages
Tuesday, 1:25 pm, Police Evidence Lab

Twenty-five minutes after leaving the sewers, Maggie entered the Chicago PD Evidence lab with a full stomach and a thermos loaded with Starbucks Christmas Blend. It was only November, but the chain was already pushing the stuff. Maggie was in no mood for Christmas, but she was willing to make allowances for coffee.

The accompanying officers led her downstairs to a large room filled with PCs hooked to gas chromatographs, spectrometers, and less-than-state-of-the-art lab equipment; everything you’d expect of a place that had to identify a range of chemicals, materials, and skin samples on a city budget.

A bookish man in shirtsleeves was poised over a microscope. He looked up as they entered, did a classic double-take. "Not again," he mumbled. Then louder: "I’m Marty Wayne. I suppose you want to look at the pellets?"

Maggie was dressed in jeans and T-shirt; she’d taken off the armor and put it under one of the department showers to wash the smell off. "Brilliant deduction, Watson", she told Marty, three-fourths jest, one-fourth sarcasm. She sipped from the Thermos and asked, "What have you got so far?" She looked along the table to see if she could spot the pellets.

Marty gestured toward the microscope. "I was just looking at them. Came back from lunch and one of the narc detectives handed them to me. Two pellets, one silver, made of steel, and one gold—and it’s actually gold plated. Crossfire looked at the silver one. They found out it was a packet radio broadcasting device, sending out an encrypted signal to an IP address. Stokes—the narcotics guy—went to track down the receiver in the Sears Tower. The gold one’s under the scope right now. It’s very weird, very intricate."

"An IP address? You’re trying to make me believe that thing is routing its communications through the Internet? That makes no sense at all..."

Marty’s face closed like a book. "I’m not trying to make you believe anything," he said.

Maggie nodded. "Sorry. Getting whacked around makes me snippy. But I still can’t see how that’s possible. Who figured that out?"

"Ask your friend Crossfire."

My friend. Right. "I will. Okay. Let me have a look at the gold one, maybe I can figure something out..." She moved to approach the microscope.

"You’re on your own, Thorin." Evidently he’d recognized her. "I’ve got fifteen open cases here. Hammersmith may want us to roll out the red carpet for you metas, but I’m not going to spend my day babysitting. Figure it out yourself, Sherlock." And with that, Marty Wayne walked out of his own lab for the second time today.

She watched the lab tech leave. Why you little... She stopped her mental tirade before it started, and chuckled. Of course, no one ever told me to lend my lab to someone else. That’d piss me off good too. She shrugged. Well, no time to lose on his bruised feelings. Got work to do. She moved to the microscope and took a look.

The microscope was on maximum resolution. Marty, or someone, had separated the gold pellet into two halves. They were hollowed out like empty walnut shells. The surface of the pellet was pocked with tiny holes. Off to the side on the microscope plate was a thin circle of milky white plastic that looked like it had lain between the halves.

Looks like a chemical release device, maybe with two different chemicals—inert singly, but together they’d react, a pretty common setup. I wonder if there’s any residue. She checked that the plastic disc’s dimensions would make it fit snugly between the halves.

The disc would fit perfectly.

After rummaging through the drawers in the lab table, she found forceps and silicon swab tiles. There was definitely some kind of substance in each half of the pellet. After coating the tiles, the loaded them into separate gas chromatograph machines. In about a half hour she’d have two profiles to look at, a series of numbers that would be the chemical fingerprints of each substance. Unfortunately, the profiles would be meaningless unless they matched known substances in a database.

Maggie carefully inspected each half under the microscope. The holes were of a uniform size, about a micron in diameter, and regularly spaced. Both halves were of the same diameter.

She paid special attention to the holes, looking for some trigger mechanism that would open them. She didn’t find anything mechanical, but there was biological residue on the rims of the holes. She collected the substance as best she could, smeared it on a microscope plate, and zoomed in.

The microscope didn’t go to a high enough resolution, but she thought she recognized the stuff anyway; she’d studied it one afternoon while suffering what could politely be described as gastro-intestinal discomfort. She’d made the mistake of eating half a bag of WOW potato chips. The chips used long-chain fats that were supposed to slip out of the body without being digested. In some people, ingesting the indigestible caused diarrhea and cramps, and Maggie was one of those people. Who would have thought that a system conditioned to handle gallons of coffee a day could be waylaid by a new fangled artificial fat? It pissed her off, she she’d taken the time to get to know her enemy.

It was a beautiful molecule, though; a complicated chain of amino acids cohesive enough to resist the body’s natural enzymes for a time. But what was it doing in these holes?

She took a cup of coffee, and started pacing, but her first hypothesis—so simple—came to her quickly, right after her first circuit. "Time released", she said out loud. She sipped at her cup, and continued her explanation for the benefit of an imaginary student. "The fat will block the holes until the host’s body metabolizes them, uncovering the holes and letting the chemicals escape. A biological closing mechanism. Really simple, when you think about it."

She was flush with the kind of thrill she got when she had nailed the answer. It must have been how Mozart felt when symphonies popped into his head, whole and complete and beautiful. She didn’t always know how her mind worked, but she knew when to trust it. "Too easy", she said happily. "That’s my specialty, after all. I need a challenge."

She continued to study the halves of the sphere. The outside surface was coated in an ultra-thin layer of gold, but the rest of the pellet was surgical grade steel. There were no tiny serial numbers or other identifiers anywhere on them—too much to hope for, she supposed. But perhaps there was more information she could glean from the pellet.

She went back to the holes and the fat molecules left around them, trying to deduce how long the fatty barrier would have taken to break down. For almost twenty minutes she measured as best she could with the simple equipment, wishing she was back at her own lab with its full battery of instruments. But since she didn’t know the initial thickness of the coating, even with state-of-the-art tools it would have been impossible to tell for how long the "timer" had been set. And because the pellets had been injected at the shoulder and in the arm, areas of the body notably low on enzymes that could break down the stuff, the fatty barrier might be able to stay in place for days. Compared to the enzymatic killing grounds of the stomach and intestines, muscle tissue was a penthouse suite.

She did notice an interesting imbalance in the amount of fat left in the rims of the holes. The rim residue on one side was four to eight times thicker than on the other side.

"Interesting", Maggie mused. "Either one of the chemicals will decompose the fat—unlikely, since it might affect its effects—or the two payloads were on different time fuses." She resumed pacing. "One to release the mutagenic agent, and the other to kill the victim? After all, most of these died... Or the product requires two doses?" She quickly scanned the numbers she’d grabbed from her earlier analysis. Maybe she couldn’t identify the chemicals, but seeing if they were the same or not would be pretty easy.

She went to the PCs connected to the GC machines. The analyses had finished, so she printed the reports and began to quickly scan the numbers. Maybe she couldn’t identify the chemicals, but seeing if they were the same or not would be pretty easy.

In each sample, several substances were present. For each substance, the software output a long string of numbers, then a series of graphs that showed the relative amount of each substance and where they scored on a variety of chemical scales, and finally a list of known substances that fell within the 95% confidence interval for matching the tested material.

In both reports, the computer was able to match several substances with nearly 100% certainty: trace amounts of blood, trace amounts of a variety of airborne contaminants (to be expected, considering she didn’t obtain the samples in a vacuum), trace amounts of gold and steel, and stronger amounts of the long-chain fatty acid she’d recognized in the microscope.

There were also strong amounts of a human enzyme that was usually only found in the digestive tract. Interestingly, the amount of enzyme in one half of the pellet was more than twice that found in other half. Interestingly, it was just the opposite: the side with the most enzymes had the least fat residue. As she was pondering that, she was interrupted by a voice.

But in each report, there was one item in the list that was by far the largest amount in each sample, marked UNKNOWN. Maggie compared the profiles in the two reports. The two unknown substances had similar atomic weights, they both were biological agents, but were otherwise very different from each other.

Well, first step would be to ask Goran if he recognizes these. And second step will be to try and replicate them. She frowned at the reports of human digestive enzymes. To get rid of the covering? But why would one be thicker than the other and have different quantities? She checked whether the half with the most enzymes was also the one with the most long-chain fat.

"Excuse me," a voice said. Maggie looked up. The man wore a ripped sweat-shirt and dirt-encrusted jeans. His face was weathered in a way usually only achieved by seventy-year-old heroin addicts. In one hand he held a sheaf of papers, and in the other a rectangle of metal that looked like a hard drive ripped from a PC case. "You haven’t seen, like, a guy with a bow in here, have you?"

"Crossfire? Not in a while, no. I think he was here earlier. Do you have some data for him? I’m working on the same case."

"Just the world’s shortest e-mail message," the man said. "Actually, about a hundred of ‘em." He set the papers and the square of metal on the desk she was working on. There was something about the man that was familiar. "You’re Maggie Thorin. I’m Stokes."

The name clicked it for her. He’d been on that trashy Fox show, Most Amazing Meta Videos. Last spring they’d aired an old video of Gazelle, one of Chicago’s few superheroes before she died mysteriously a couple years ago. The video, recorded a dozen hidden police cameras, showed the speedster interrupting a drug shipment. The dozen buyers and sellers opened up with full automatics. Gazelle became a blur, taking them out by ones and twos with her thunderous kicks. But then she fell to the floor—tripped up by the debris, perhaps, or knocked down by a lucky shot. A dealer leveled his gun at the prone woman to blow her away, and at that moment one of the dealer’s own gang members swiveled his aim and shot his colleague. The traitor, face blurred by computer took out several more of dealers.

Unfortunately, the unedited video made it to the internet. Thousands downloaded it to see the unexpurgated violence—and as a bonus they got the undisguised face of the "traitor." On camera, he looked a lot like Keith Richards. He was a covert narcotics cop, and after the internet, Richard Stokel’s undercover days were over.

Maggie nodded. Metahumans weren’t the only ones who could get their secret IDs blown. She wondered what he’d been up to since. "Pleased to meet you, Stokes. You’re working on a that metahuman rash case?"

"Yup. Crossfire found out that one of the pellets was broadcasting using packet radio. I don’t know if you’ve ever played with it, but PR can use a couple different protocols. This one was using TCP/IP—you know, the same stuff as the internet? The message was encrypted, but we read the packet header, and found out the message was addressed to the Sears Tower repeating station. Crossfire and Waters and this kid Ed had to leave, so I went and had a look around. Turned out to be the office of an ISP—they were running the repeater as a public service. Everything with a valid TCP/IP header was being translated into e-mail and pushed out." He gestured toward the hunk of metal. "All the messages for the past coupla days are on that hard drive. And I printed out the messages for the last hour—a new message every ten seconds."

"Aaah. So that explains this sending radio to an IP address business. That made no sense without a repeater." She realized she was getting distracted from Stokes and went back to him. "Great work, detective." She waved towards the pages. "Can I have a look? I suppose it’s also encrypted."

"Looks like." He handed her the sheaf of pages and she flipped through them. The message in each was one line long, the same string of characters: j67p34h56112i5in0v0p2794oan5dungffa87y3b402lk398

The headers were slightly more informative. They were addressed to z@12.4.255.8, from PR_TNC67@mail.windy.net. The subject line was the same as the "to" address: z@12.4.255.8. The Time stamp showed what Stokes had mentioned: they’d all been sent out within 10 or 11 seconds of each other.

Maggie turned on the lab’s computer. "I hope this is connected to the ‘Net. We can use the DNS system or a traceroute to figure out where this server is."

Maggie opened a DOS window and typed "Tracert 12.4.255.8" and pressed Enter. The computer was indeed connected, and fortunately it wasn’t behind a firewall that prevented pings and traceroutes. She watched the packet hop from router to router across the country, until suddenly it jumped the ocean and started moving through Europe. The final server, named iBorg2, looked to be somewhere near Helsingborg, Sweden.

Stokes looked over her shoulder. "Sweden, huh? Try traceroute.org and see who owns that IP."

Maggie opened a web browser, went to www.traceroute.org, and searched the Sweden database. The IP was assigned to an organization called "Whitewash"—in English, not Swedish.

Maggie had run across the name before. It was an anonymizer service, run by some far-left whackos with vaguely racist leanings—very un-Swedish. They offered free, encrypted re-mailing and anonymous web browsing.

"Saint-Câline." She frowned at the apparent dead-end. "I don’t suppose these people will be amenable to telling us who they’re remailing this too. At least", she chuckled, "not willingly." Her mind raced. Perhaps it was possible to try to access the Whitewash server remotely and find the automated script that did the remailing—it was probably an automated script, as otherwise sending mail every 10 minutes would be rather fruitless—but this was not something she could do from a police terminal. Furthermore, it wasn’t unlikely that the next destination would prove to be another anonymizer. Maybe it was still worth a try.

"I wonder what those mails are for. If they were monitoring something then they it’s some value that hasn’t changed throughout this period. Unless they’re really after whether the radio’s active or not."

Stokes shrugged. "You got me. Crossfire thought the pellets were tracking devices. But I don’t know why you’d send the same message over and over, then route it through the internet. Though that does let them bounce a message around the globe from a low power transmitter. And they know that it would be a bitch to subpoena Sweden and how many other servers they’re hopping to."

Maggie sighed. "They’ve also made themselves very hard to track. For all we know they might still be in Chicago." She stood and started pacing. "The only thing I can see is that whatever they’re monitoring hasn’t changed since we started getting this record. I hope we had another to see what it does and whether the message it sends is different." Pacing still, she mused, "a time-delayed release system with two chemicals, and a packet radio monitoring... something. It really sounds like our victims have been used as guinea pigs."

Stokes’ nodded, a little hesitantly. Maggie realized that he probably didn’t know anything about the chemicals in the gold pellet. "This is weird stuff all right. Listen, can I leave the hard drive and printouts with you? I’ve gotta take care of some stuff back at the office." He dug a pen out of his jeans and wrote a telephone number on the top printout. "Tell Crossfire to give me a call if he needs anything else. Or you too, if you want."

"Great. I’ll let him know as soon as I track him down." She looked at the clock, then back at her work. "Back to analysis, I suppose. Have to see if I can identify these things...."

Stokes left, whistling something that sounded like a whaling tune. Maggie spent a frustrating fifteen minutes rummaging through the supply cabinets in the room. The police lab was woefully inadequate for the kinds of testing she wanted to do. Without better equipment, a toxin-containment room, and a big collection of biological materials she’d could test these two substances against, she’d never be able to tell what these substances were supposed to do. Unfortunately, the nearest Thorin Lab was 400 miles away in St. Louis, and the next best lab she knew of in Chicago was owned by Freya Sontag.

Of course, she wouldn’t need a lab at all if the numbers from the gas chromatograph machines matched up to some profile. They weren’t in the police database, and they probably weren’t in any commercial database either. These were definitely exotics.

There was another option. She could test the two substances against each other.

Maggie paced around the room, musing that option. Nah. I’d want biohazard protections if I was going to try that stunt. More than this place has. And I should show these samples to Goran, maybe he can identify them. She reached for the phone. Maybe I should call him, get news. She picked up the phone and dialed Hammersmith’s number.

The phone was answered after one ring. "This is Hammersmith."

"Detective, this is Maggie Thorin. I found out what the other pellet is for—it is a time-released mechanism for two chemicals I have yet to identify. Stokes also found the destination of the messages sent by the first pellet—unfortunately, we lost the trace at an anonymous repeater in Sweden."

"Stokes? How did he get involved in this? Never mind—tell me again about the pellets. One of them sends messages?"

Maggie filled him in about what Crossfire had discovered about the silver pellet, and what Stokes had brought back from the repeater station. Then she brought him up to speed about breaking open the gold pellet and the two chemicals it had contained.

"Have you found Goran? I want to see if he can identify the two chemicals I gathered from the second pellet."

"I haven’t found Dr. Vrlick yet. We sent a unit to his house, but he wasn’t there. And everybody else is missing too—Stranger hasn’t popped up again, Waters turned off his phone, and Q-Ball—well, Q-Ball answered a few questions at Miegs Field, refused to get out of that vehicle, and then disappeared—he dropped straight into Lake Michigan and didn’t come up." He sighed. "What a day. And I haven’t even had lunch. Right now I’m sitting in a judge’s chambers, wearing somebody else’s pants and the sneakers from my gym bag, waiting for a search warrant to be signed. We should be going into Sontag’s lab within the hour."

"Great. I don’t suppose I can attend because of conflict of interests?"

"Actually, I want you there. We don’t know what we’re looking for, so our usual tactic is to impound everything and sift through it later. But you could tell us what to take and what to ignore. Those profiles, for example. Point them out and we’ll grab them. One thing, though. You shouldn’t touch any of the evidence yourself, just in case this goes to trial and they try to Furhman you. Sound good?"

"Very well. Just pick me up when you’re ready. Make sure your warrant includes computer files—we’ll want to sift through them."

"Got it. You’re still at the Evidence Lab, right? I’ll be there in a half hour to an hour, depending on how fast the judge gets here. You ever had a gyro?" He pronounced the word like year-o. "I’ll bring one for you."

"A gyro? What’s that?"

"You’re going to love it. Though you’re going to need napkins. I’ll swing by soon."

"I’ll be here. Talk to you later."

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