Kill Process by William Hertling Page A

motionless, lying on its back.
    After a half hour of this, I risk turning on the screen for a second to throw off a little light for the camera to see by. I’m staring at something tan, with a piece of wood running across the screen. I tilt my head from side to side trying to puzzle it out. If I were to guess, I’d say I’m looking at the underside of a desk. Like maybe the phone is in a drawer. This whole exercise will be fruitless if the phone is stuck in a drawer.
    I sit back and settle in for the long haul. I never know what might turn up. A few minutes later my speakers erupt in a roar of sound. The accelerator says the phone jiggled back and forth. There’s a bloom of light, and the drawer is open, and the front camera is aimed at a woman staring at the phone.
    I see her grow frustrated, and realize she must be trying to unlock the phone.
    I leap forward and bend over my keyboard, desperate to remember the code to unlock the screen without the password.
    “What are you doing?” A man’s voice.
    “Nothing.” A woman’s voice as the camera image shifts. I glimpse her backside as she puts the phone back in the drawer.
    “You’re trying to use the phone again,” he says. “You know it’s not good for you. Those people are trying to make you think you’re unhappy. They don’t understand you the way I do.”
    “No, I wasn’t.”
    “Don’t lie!” he yells.
    My stomach clenches at those words and I’m going to be sick. I’ve made a terrible, terrible mistake. I can’t handle this. I try to reach for the keyboard, to cut the sound, but my hand is frozen and I can’t breathe.
    More crying. A scream.
    Todd yells, “Don’t fucking raise your hand against me.”
    A release valve inside me lets loose and vomit spews from my mouth, covering the laptop. I hit my head on the table, and my vision goes gray and fades away.
    *     *     *
    I wake up and everything is wrong. My face is in a pool of vomit and I retch again, dry-heaving with disgust.
    I pry my body off the floor, putting my hand in the vomit. I climb to my knees, weak, so very weak. I wipe my hand on my pants, and realize I’ve pissed myself.
    I’m still on the floor, leaning against the wall of the van, covered in piss, tears, and puke, when I notice dozens of blinking lights on the screen above me on the tabletop.
    I’ve passed out, this much is clear. Maybe from pure fright. During my recovery, after the amputation, they warned me this could happen. When the body undergoes something so traumatic, the mind can’t cope, and it blacks out to protect itself. I find a napkin to wipe my face. When I touch my forehead, pain blossoms as I encounter a swollen bump. I must have hit my head. Maybe that’s why I was out.
    I glance at the clock, try to remember what time it was before. I’ve been out for an hour. That’s not why my screen is full of blinking alarms. Something happened to my onion routing network. I grab another napkin and wipe away the worst of the vomit on the keyboard, then type a few commands.
    Four nodes have dropped off the Internet because the underlying latency suddenly changed, tripping my counter-surveillance triggers.
    If someone discovered the onion network and wanted to backtrace the connection to me, they’d subvert an individual node, like I did with Todd’s network router, and make all the traffic flow through them.
    Even with the connection intercepted, they couldn’t read the payload data since I’m using three-layer encryption, stacking AES, Serpent and Twofish. Even the NSA’s new datacenter shouldn’t be able to crack that combination anytime soon.
    Whoever is monitoring would instead look to see where the node received traffic from, and node by node, they’d try to trace each connection until they reached all the way to me. If it is the NSA, and if their capabilities are as powerful as I’ve heard, they might use the pattern formed by the size and speed of my network packets, then see where those