Zero Day_ A Novel - Mark Russinovich [47]
Jeff Aiken had been born the youngest of two sons. His memories of his parents dimmed with each year as they and his brother were killed in a two-car accident when Jeff was six years old. He’d been spending the weekend with his paternal grandparents and remained with them thereafter in their Philadelphia home.
Joe and Wilma Aiken were adoring surrogate parents, though they were already quite old when they assumed the obligation of raising their surviving grandson. Wilma tended to the house while Joe was active in the Elks and his Masonic lodge. Jeff’s grandfather died when Jeff was a sophomore in high school, and his grandmother passed when he was an undergraduate. Since then he’d been largely alone.
His shoes struck the soft earth with a steady, nearly hypnotic rhythm he found comforting. Perhaps the only aspect of his work he disliked was how it tended to keep him shut up in offices and away from his time in nature, running alone.
Jeff didn’t find it odd that he was drawn to running. Loving though his grandparents had been, he’d had little in common with them. Feeling alone, he buried himself in books, then in mathematics, and finally in computers. Embarrassed by the elderly couple with whom he lived, pained to discuss the tragic death of his family, he’d made few friends during his teens, fewer in college. He’d long since resigned himself to a solitary life. His world with computers added a satisfying, though sterile, dimension to it.
Meeting Cynthia had changed everything. For a brief time he’d seen himself as part of a larger family, with a future that included children of his own. The pain of her loss had been almost more than he could bear, piled as it was on top of the loss of his parents and brother, then of his grandparents. The survivor’s guilt he felt from not being in the car with them when his immediate family had been killed—added to his guilt at failing to embrace the unconditional love of his grandparents, and at failing to save Cynthia—was nearly overwhelming. But he saw no alternative to the course his life was taking, to carry on alone, to do his best, to make sure he did what he could so that others never had to go through what he had, even if his ability to help was limited to the world of computers.
His shoes slapped the dirt as he sank into the pleasant nothingness of the run.
19
MANHATTAN, NYC
IT CENTER
FISCHERMAN, PLATT & COHEN
WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 17
11:08 P.M.
Sue Tabor entered the office, then glanced at Jeff Aiken asleep on the couch, exhausted after a long stretch of work combined with his run. Should she go ahead and do it? Shrugging, she went to her computer and opened Google. She could no longer really contribute anything to his search, and she’d decided to follow the only specific clue they had. She typed into the box Super Freak. Time to learn what the name meant to the Internet.
“Do you mean: superfreak?” the Web site asked.
Sue glanced at the count. Just over 4 million hits. This wasn’t going to work. Still, she scrolled through three pages of entries just to be certain. It was all Rick James in one form or another.
She deleted the space between the words and hit ENTER for superfreak. Now she was down to 195,000 hits, but it was just more of the same. Rick James.
She entered super freak code, followed by super freak virus. She spent an hour going through the various hits with no results.
Undeterred, she sought out hacker groups and began scanning entries for the name Superfreak or Super Freak. Nothing. But what else did she have