The Eagle Claw Hack
M. Matheson
Copyright 2014 Michael Matheson
ISBN: 9781310320644
*The Eagle Claw Hack*
Bill relaxed, scotch in hand, on an oversized, overused brown leather sofa, and his life went leaping through his head; if not exactly like a hart, perhaps with the small scurry of a cute little rodent, and he sat with not much else to do besides wait.
Recently retired from teaching high school science after a good thirty-year run, he had been well liked as Mister Tompkins. Now he was just Bill, the nice guy down the street, keeping his yard neat, growing heavier, and losing yet more hair on the crown of his head.
He’d been popular with his students and won several awards; one for Teacher of the Year in the state of California in1998. There had been newspaper articles, at least in his hometown of Sacramento, and a picture with Governor Pete Wilson who he never really liked that much, but at least he was a Republican. Bill was relieved he hadn’t won the award a year later and been forced to bear the shame of being photographed with Pete’s successor, Gray Davis, a real crook if there ever was one.
So, here he sat, six months into retirement. It was September 2014 and he had nothing more pressing than caring for his beloved beagle, Pete. He had reached the end result of the American Dream; his mortgage was near paid and three decent kids were out of college and into professional careers. So, finally, he could spend his time on his dream – writing a novel. Nothing made him happier than sitting at his computer, fingers clicking away as he crafted his first book, which he was sure would be an instant hit.
Up until then, he had written dozens of short stories. His family and one blue-haired old lady in Omaha had given them rave reviews. Dozens of his tales had been submitted to various journals and even the New Yorker without any takers. A few rejection letters had come with a kind note and an apology, but these never got him down; they were proof to him he was working at bringing about his dream. He wished now he hadn’t wasted six precious months sending the manuscript to publishing houses and small imprints. So, after combing through several more drafts of his book, he felt confident enough to send it off to an editor.
If no one else would bite, goddammit, he would go solo. Lots of indie writers sold lots of books, didn’t they? At least, it seemed that way. They all claimed to be bestsellers. He was sure to get in on the action since it was obvious to him from reading all that CRAP within the action/thriller genre that he was a much better writer. He really could care less about making money; he loved to write and wanted people to enjoy his stories. Bill sent a lot of faith riding out on his first novel.
Eagle Claw
by Machine Gun Tompkins
Bill liked his pseudonym. It was in your face and original; he envisioned entire series penned under that name.
The only degree Mister Tompkins ever held was a BA in economics and a teaching credential, but he loved to teach. Teaching was a lot like writing; you put your words, learning, and heart out there and hoped, by God, that someone cared enough to absorb them into their cerebral cortex. If you were blessed or lucky enough, those words and thoughts would make it as far as their heart and soul. The students, who returned holding fat degrees, credited him for instilling novel ways of thought and inspiring them to press on. These had proven his worth as a teacher, but Bill needed more.
Writing and BEING a writer were all he ever wanted to be or do.
He had the manuscript back from the editor; she’d dropped hints at how many errors there were—but it was a cool story. He knew how to take his lumps. The story was smooth now, better than he ever expected it to be. Machine Gun Tompkins was ready. Eagle Claw was ready.
Bill had worked at building a base of people on social media who he was sure would be clamoring to buy his book; they seemed pumped for the release of his book. He had a great cover image. Everyone said so.
Right out of the gate, he had four buyers and he was elated, but the next day the number dwindled to two. That was all right; just a speed-bump. But when the following days produced no sales on either SmashWords or Amazon, his spirit was crushed like an empty beer can. Bill moped around the house for the next few days and watched all the episodes of Breaking Bad again.
As Walter White had morphed from teacher to bad ass, so did Bill Tompkins. They could relate; they were soul-mates. Bill wasn’t about to start cooking meth, not anytime soon anyway, but he did have the hairy framework of a plan to exact a lopsided flip of revenge on those heartless readers that refused to buy his book. He knew he wasn't the next Faulkner or Hemingway, but DAMN THEM; his book was good.
Narwhal Schmidt was Mister Tompkins’ fifteen-year-old neighbor. Nar’s mom was a great Melville and Jules Verne fan, and Dad, well, Dad was just a Schmidt, bland as unsweetened vanilla and would melt into a Navajo White wall if he stood close enough. It was the son people worried about, though.
Out in nature, a narwhal is an ugly single-tusked whale, and the name unfortunately fit this boy. Six-foot-four in his stocking feet, he wore a black trench coat that seemed stitched to his back. If you ever caught him eyeball to eyeball, it’d make you wince, but Mom loved him. Maybe. His cheeks were bloated like a chipmunk hoarding nuts, only all the cute had been stomped out of that face. A bulbous nose hooked slightly to the side, and his teeth were yellowed from a 24-7 infusion of energy drinks. One tooth was missing – a canine – and the empty hole winked at you when he spoke. The kids called him “Frankenstein,” and it fit, but he needed no defenders. He could take care of himself. Oddly enough, all that ugliness was contradicted and nearly cancelled out by an amiable voice; he had a great face for radio. And, once you got past his appearance, he had a charismatic presence.
Nar was the sharpest knife in the drawer with or without grading on a curve. He could make an ancient computer do headstands, run around the block, and hack into NSA servers, all without breaking a sweat. He once fired up a broken-down-boat-anchor PC belonging to Mister Tompkins after only five minutes tinkering in its antique BIOS.
No one talked much about it, afraid it might somehow set a doomsday scenario into motion, but they believed Nar would be the most likely candidate to shoot up their school or blow up the world, if the time ever came. The school authorities were so terrified, they placed him in a continuation school where, compared to Nar, the teachers were idiots. They made a few passes at dumbing him down to the level of the rest of the students, which ended with them asking him just to stop answering all the questions because “You're making all the other kids feel bad.”
Being in that school was not much different for Nar than Siberian exile for a feared political dissident, and all over a silly incident of a virus – actually a worm – that infected the school district’s computers. Every time the keys N-A-R were struck, CD drives would pop open and continue to fly in and out until the proper key was struck. Any time anyone in the district typed words such as NARROW, ANARCHIST, NARRATIVE, CULINARY, DICTIONARY, RUNAROUND, or NAR Schmidt, their CD drive would snap open and shut like a hungry snapping turtle. Of course, this was frustrating for everyone; the only remedy was the keystroke Q, which is the least common letter in the English language. Nar volunteered and permanently fixed it for them. There was a trial in the principal’s office, just Nar and the principal, and he was banished to continuation school without any evidence against him.
In a leisurely afternoon talk over root beers, Mister Tompkins presented his hypothetical question to Nar. “Hypothetically speaking, what would it take to get someone to buy my book?”
“It’s a great book, Mister Tompkins. I read it cover to cover and couldn’t put it down. Why wouldn’t people want to buy it?”
“Hmmm... It’s not exactly flying off the shelves, Nar.”
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Nar picked up on the teacher’s meaning. “Hypothetically, of course—” Nar winked twice. “—it would be fairly easy to write a program that would help. The harder part, but not impossible, would be to feed it into Amazon’s mainframe as an undetectable worm, so whenever someone... say, just clicked on the link to look at it, it would sell them the book. Ninety-nine cents, who would notice and, if they did, who would care, but you would rack up the sales.”
Bill grinned and tapped two fingers on his right temple. “Selling at gunpoint...” He paused, pursed his lips, and, with his index finger pointed like a gun out the kitchen window, he closed one eye and used his thumb for a sight. With his middle finger, he pulled the trigger. “POW!” The room filled with a heavy silence until Mister Tompkins drained the last sip of his boutique root beer and slammed the bottle on the table.
“But, what about the book showing up on people’s Kindle?”
Nar chuckled inside his large, fleshy throat, the way someone does when they know you don’t have a clue. “I write it not to deliver it; just take their money and record the sale.”
Bill nodded. A gutsy feeling rose in his insides, the same as when he imagined the action scenes in his book. His eyes, normally a light gray, lit up with an aqua tint. He sat up straighter and his skin flushed, turning it bronze.
Nar picked up on the change. “Mister Tompkins, you aren’t really thinking of doing this, are you? We were just talking about ‘what if's,’ right?"
“Of course...not, Nar. It is illegal, isn’t it?” Bill shook himself as if waking from a dream and wiped his face with both his hands.
Nar, with the cadence of a drill instructor, snapped out an answer. “The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act 1030(a)(4) says Accessing to Defraud and Obtain Value is a Federal Crime, a felony punishable by five years in prison.”
“How the hell can you know this stuff?”
“I read a lot.”
“I wouldn’t even think of asking you to do it anyway. Add contributing to the delinquency of a minor and probably conspiracy too. Hell, it would ruin your life and mine too if we got caught.” They both laughed, as if watching a sitcom. “I don’t have much life left ahead of me, but you have another sixty years at least—if someone doesn’t shoot you first—and besides, I really should be the adult here; responsible member of the community and all that stuff.” Nar could sense Mister Tompkins wasn't much of a believer in all that stuff right now.
“Yeah, Bill.”
“You never called me anything but Mister Tompkins. I wasn’t sure you even knew my first name.”
“Do co-conspirators go around calling each other ‘Mister’?”
“They did in Reservoir Dogs: Mr. Pink, Mister White, and so on.”
“You really know your movies, MISTER Tompkins.”
“What else I got to do besides write and watch TV?”
Nar rotated slowly in the kitchen chair and gave BILL a look that fell somewhere between “let’s stick it to ‘em” and “I just might stick a knife between YOUR ribs if you don’t follow through.” SILENCE.
Nar broke the tension. “Ya know, it might not be that bad... Kevin Mitnick started hacking at my age, didn’t end up in prison till he was thirty-two, and then only got five years. He owns a security company, has written multiple books, and is one of the top tier go-to experts on mobile phone defense and computer security.” He paused to take a breath, a sip of root beer and... then, in a low voice as if someone might hear, he leaned towards Bill and said, “Might be worth it.”
Mister Tompkins shoved a playful finger into Nar’s big, soft chest and his chair creaked and spun. “Now YOU are thinking about it?”
“Nah, just messing around...” And Nar sat up in his chair as he picked out another bottle of the boutique root beer from its cardboard carton.
The mood in the room whooshed by like a Ford Cobra careening around the hairpin curves of Pacific Coast Highway a thousand feet above the rocks and waves.
Each of them knew they were not playing around.
Bill would later remember that he tried to make it stop, like pumping a limp brake pedal that fell to the floor.
“I don’t think it will work anyway, Nar."
“Yeah, Bill, you might be—” Nar cut his own answer short and looked off into the far corner of the room, suddenly absorbed in thought. His eyes were half closed as his chin fell to his chest, appearing to go to sleep. After fifteen minutes of uncomfortable silence, Nar abruptly stood, collected his stuff, and without a word, went out the way he had come.
That night, Mister Tompkins fell asleep, but only after two very long, tortured hours of twisting and turning, and then his dreams overflowed with disturbing voices from his past.
"You'll never amount to nothing! You're a spineless little boy. Get your nose out of those stupid books and get out on a ball field where REAL boys your age belong." His father could spew an endless stream of epithets, and the more he drank, the more fluid they became. After Dad was good and drunk, Bill knew from experience to stay at least one arm’s length away; that was when the punches came. To this day, he wondered if the old man was merely taunting him to get him to fight, like a REAL boy. In the end, though, he knew the horrible truth; if he ever swung back, he might—no, scratch that—he WOULD end up buried in the backyard; his remains left to be discovered decades later by someone digging a hole for a swimming pool. His pool. The one he always wanted but never got.
He rolled over just as his cell lit up; it was 2:15 AM, and the phone buzzed and scooted around the table top. It was a text message from Nar.
I GOT IT
Bill smiled, rolled over, and drifted off to a pleasant sleep. The old buzzer on the ancient plastic clock radio went off at 5:30 AM, but Bill lay in bed with no rush to get up for the first time in months. If it had been any other day, he would have bounded from bed with a Cheshire grin pasted across his face; he was one of those despicable morning people. Today would be different, much different, than any that went before; even Pete the beagle sensed the shift in his master’s character, as if there had been a change of roles in the current production.
Bill's arm hung off the edge of the bed like an uncooked, oversized piece of elbow macaroni; the little dog gave it a desperate nudge. Pete had a frantic need to sniff a tree and take a piss; so did Bill. He held his own urge long enough to let Pete out. Then, as he stood over the toilet relieving himself, the resolve hit him and hit him hard, like Dad's bony fist to the side of his face.
His mind was made up, but first, he'd give those Constant Readers one more chance, a chance to really show their love for his book by pushing the buy button. He wanted sales figures; valid ones would be best, and if that didn't work, then he'd make it work, goddammit. He'd print them off, roll 'em up, and shove them in that stupid metal vase inserted over his father's grave; hoping it was right over his chest, the second best orifice in which to jam the proof, proof that he was a REAL boy who had become a man. He would bury his worth like a wooden stake in his father's heart.
TAP TAP CLICK and instantly, his sales dashboard popped up. Overnight, he'd made a hundred sales even. He was so excited, he danced around the room, pumped his fist, and became slightly aroused. Then it hit him and he remembered. Of course!! Nar’s text message:
I GOT IT
Those weren’t HIS sales; Nar had tweaked something, and that was when Mister Tompkins tossed his last shred of honor out of the speeding train’s window, watching it flutter away like a fast-food wrapper. He rubbed his hands together, stretched, yawned, and told himself, Well! A sale is a sale is a sale.
Bill was sitting at the kitchen table, his hands curled around a reheated cup of strong, black coffee. He stared at the screen on his laptop, alternately sipped from his mug, and clicked the button on his phone to illuminate Nar’s message.
I GOT IT
Mister Tompkins replied at 6:37 AM:
Bring your laptop as soon as you can.
Nar replied instantly:
K