Rick Acker - When the Devil Whistles

Rick Acker has done it again! Hes become one of my favorite suspense novelists by the simple expedient of delivering the goods in every book. This time, a federal whistle-blower may have blown her whistle one time too many. Is she in too deep this time? This book kept screaming my name every time I tried to put it down.

RANDY INGERMANSON, Christy award-winning author of Oxygen

Gripping, edge-of-your-seat fiction. When the Devil Whistles is a fast mix of suspense, compelling characters, and legal intrigue as only Acker can write it. I dare you to try to put this book down.

TOSCA LEE, author of Demon: A Memoir

WHEN THE DEVIL
WHISTLES

Rick Acker

When the Devil Whistles

Copyright 2010 by Rick Acker

ISBN-13: 978-1-4267-0767-4

Published by Abingdon Press, P.O. Box 801, Nashville, TN 37202

www.abingdonpress.com

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form, stored in
any retrieval system, posted on any website, or transmitted in any form
or by any meansdigital, electronic, scanning, photocopy, recording,
or otherwisewithout written permission from the publisher,
except for brief quotations in printed reviews and articles.

The persons and events portrayed in this work of fiction are the
creations of the author, and any resemblance to persons
living or dead is purely coincidental.

Published in association with the literary agency of
Alive Communications, Inc., 7680 Goddard Street, Suite 200,
Colorado Springs, Colorado, 80920, www.alivecommunications.com

Cover design by Anderson Design Group, Nashville, TN

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Acker, Rick, 1966

When the devil whistles / Rick Acker.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-1-4267-0767-4 (book - pbk./trade pbk., adhesive - perfect binding : alk. paper)

1. Whistle blowingFiction. 2. Corporations--Corrupt practicesFiction. I. Title.

PS3601.C545W47 2010

813.6dc22

2010024817

Printed in the United States of America

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 / 15 14 13 12 11 10

For the men and women of the False Claims Unit
at the California Department of Justice.
I am honored to call you my colleagues
and my friends.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Books are rarely solo projects, and mine never are. Without the help of experts, test readers, paid and volunteer editors, and countless others, this book would never have been written. Ive been assisted by more people than I can name, but the contributions of a few stand above the crowd. I would like to express my deepest gratitude and appreciation to:

Anette (wife)for unceasing encouragement, exacting edits, and boundless love.

Lee Hough (agent)for believing in this book, championing it, and landing it with the perfect publisher.

Barbara Scott (wearer of many hats, including acquisition editor and developmental editor)for taking a chance on this novel and making it the best book it could be.

Maegan Roper and the Abingdon sales teamfor your enthusiasm, creativity, and tireless efforts to get this book into the hands of readers.

John Olson (author)for the seed of an idea and for the brainstorming sessions that made it grow into the book youre reading now.

Camy Tang (author)for staying up all night (though you deny it) to help a suspense author write his first real romantic story line.

Randy Ingermanson (author and computer expert)for being an early and constant supporter and providing invaluable feedback.

Mark Talkovic (Chief ROV Pilot)for reviewing and fixing the ROV scenes.

Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institutefor generously letting the public have access to your ROVs, staff, and research.

Megan Sato and Marc Riera (IT gurus)for debugging the computer-related scenes.

Jim Thomas (P-51 pilot)for letting me climb around on your P-51 and answering all my questions about it.

Nick Akers (Captain, California Military Reserve)for giving me all the unclassified help you could on nuclear weapons, Port of Oakland security procedures, and air raids.

Amy Akers (neurologist)for giving Allie a neurology consult and correcting my medical mistakes.

David Dodson (Lt. Col, ret., USAF)for lending a fighter pilots eye to the scenes in the air.

Mo Park and Esther La (Korean-American colleagues) for helping track down a crucialbut very hard to research detail about South Korean culture circa 1990.

Sylvia Keller, Susan Palazzo, Charlotte Spink, Lucy Wang, and Maretta Ward (test readers)for your candid comments and for catching an embarrassing number of typos.

Rel Mollet, Nora St. Laurent, Susan Sleeman, Christy Lockstein, Janna Ryan, Laurel Wreath, Carolyn Scheidies, and many others (bloggers and reviewers)for all you have done to support and encourage me and other Christian authors.

Readers everywherefor investing your hard-earned money in books and making it possible for authors to tell you our stories.

Contents

Prologue

Something Wicked This Way Came

S AMUEL STIMSON MADE HIS LAST TWO MISTAKES ON MARCH 23. BOREDOM caused the first. He had run the last network diagnostic on his task list, the servers were all up and running, and none of the marketing staff had crashed their computers or forgotten their passwords all day. So Samuel played solitaire and Minesweeper for a while. He IMed his gaming buddies, but none of them had time to talk. And then he did what he had always done when sitting in front of a computer with nothing to do: go looking for trouble.

He didnt have to look far. Two floors above him in a secure room sat his employers secure server, the S-4. Samuel didnt have access to it. In fact, the only person in the IT department authorized to work on S-4 was Franklin Roh, an ex-Microsoft drone who had half of Samuels skill, but double his salary. Not even Franklins little toady, Rajiv, knew what was on it.

Guessing what the mystery server held was a favorite pastime for the IT staff, particularly when Franklin and Rajiv were in the room. Speculation ran the gamut from classified government contracts to evidence of executive tax fraud, but Franklin never reacted to any of their theories, no matter how serious or outrageous. He just sat there watching them with cool arrogance. Maybe he learned that look growing up in Korea. Maybe they taught it at Microsoft. Whateverit bugged Samuel.

The image of Franklin Rohs impassive Asian face gave Samuel the final little push he needed to act. He had been an accomplished hacker in college and grad schoolso accomplished that he had never been caught. He didnt vandalize systems or steal data files like some other hackers but always left the phrase Something wicked this way came buried in some unobtrusive spot to unnerve whatever systems engineer later found it. Four years had passed since his last foray into forbidden cyberspace, but he had kept up on recent developments in computer security, and he was pretty sure he could beat anything that Franklin could create.

He went to work. As he expected, the server was well protected by top-of-the-line commercial security software, which had been configured with perfect competence but no creativity. Just what he expected from a Microsoft guy.

He didnt even bother with a direct assault on the server. Conventional firewalls were good at spotting and stopping those kinds of attacks. Careless users were easy targets, and careless senior executives were easiest of all. He did a couple of discreet searches and found a list of the six senior executives with access to the S-4 server. Then he ran a user log and found that four of them were on the system. One, Richard Addison, had been logged in for seventeen days and fourteen hours, but his computer had been inactive for almost two days.