The Agent's Daughter (27 page)

She left the room and returned with her
purse. She laid it on one of the chairs, reached in, and pulled out
her phone.

“
I have some photos stored
on an online cloud server that I want you to see,” Angela said as
she punched buttons on the phone’s screen.

After bringing up the server site, she began
to thumb through the photos. She stopped on one of them and handed
the phone to Travis.

“
This is a picture of your
father about five years ago when we were on a mission in Egypt
together. He’s the tall one in front of the pyramid.”

Angela thumbed to another page while Travis
still held onto the phone. “Here is a picture of your father in
Afghanistan, taken about three years ago. I just had to take a
picture of him with that village elder’s ceremonial hat on.”

Travis lowered the phone and looked at
Angela with a blank expression. Angela feared the worst. It is hard
on a child to be told that his folks have lied to him all these
years.

After a few moments of silence, Travis was
the first to speak. “This is awesome! My folks are not dorks!
They’re spies! Do they have the killer gadgets and weapons and
stuff?”

“
That’s the reason we are
in this room,” Angela said as she smiled, relieved that Travis took
the news about his parents so well.

“
We need to find your
mom’s home office,” Alex said, again impatient. “It may have a
piece of equipment that we need.”

Travis looked around the room. “We’re
standing in her home office.”

“
Not quite,” Angela said
as she put her hand on Travis’s shoulder. “You see, your mother
wanted to quit working for the agency and stay home when you and
your sister were born. But the President asked her not to
quit.”

“
The President?” Travis
asked, raising his voice. “Of the United States?”

“
Yes, that one,” Angela
said. “The President authorized your mother to have a satellite
office installed in her house. That way she could work at home. Her
office would have much of the same equipment that she used at work.
The one requirement that the agency had was that the office be able
to be sealed off when anyone else was home. That was not a problem
because your folks were already having a house built. They just
added the office into the plans. It is most likely attached to this
room.”

“
Attached to this room?
You mean that my mom has a secret lair built into this
house?”

“
Well… yes,” Angela said.
“I guess you could call it that. Cool, huh. Kinda like
Batman.”

“
And you are her young
ward,” Alex said, laughing.

Angela gave Alex a stern look, and then she
turned back to Travis. “Here is the situation. Your father, your
sister and Alex’s father are long past overdue to have either
returned home or to have called. It may be nothing, or they could
be in some danger. Either way, we want to do what we can to
investigate it. Your father has a watch given to him by the agency
that can communicate his exact location using GPS coordinates. We
hope that a piece of equipment that can receive the coordinates is
in your mother’s office.”

“
Okay,” Travis said. “Open
the secret door and let’s go into her lair and get it.”

Angela grimaced. “Unfortunately, your mother
never told me how to get into her office.”

“
So what are we going to
do?” Travis asked.

“
There must be a button or
switch somewhere in this room that opens the passageway. This room
isn’t that large, so let’s just start looking around. Look behind
and under everything.”

They all fanned out into the room. Travis
lay on the ground as he looked under one of the chairs. Angela
examined the table and Alex started looking behind the books on the
bookshelf.

“
Nothing under this
chair,” Travis said as he slid over toward the other
chair.

Alex started on the top shelf of the
bookcase and worked his way all the way across to the other side,
taking each book off the shelf and looking behind it.

“
Check out this funky
bookend,” he said as he picked it up. “It’s in the shape of a giant
open hand.”

Travis stood up after finding nothing under
the second chair. He knew the bookend that Alex was holding. It was
one of several bookends on the shelf, but it was his mom’s
favorite. It was up on a shelf that was too high for him to reach.
With good reason.

“
What’s that noise?” Alex
said as he looked at Angela and Travis. A dull, grinding sound
filled the room.

Neither answered him. They were too busy
watching the bookcase behind Alex slowly move into the wall to the
left.

“
I think you found it,”
Angela said.

As the bookcase disappeared into the wall,
it revealed not another room but the top of a staircase.

“
Our house has a
basement?” Travis said.

“
I guess it does,” Angela
said as she moved toward it. “Let’s go.”

Angela flipped the light switch at the top
of the stairs and the three of them headed down. When they reached
the bottom of the stairs, they stopped and surveyed the room. The
stairs led to an open room the size of a large living room. It had
the appearance of a mini version of the tools group laboratory at
the agency. One wall was lined with tall cabinets filled with spare
parts and tools. The opposite wall was lined with a long workbench
that had several pieces of electronic diagnostic equipment on it.
Each piece of equipment was connected to a separate small device
with a tangle of wires and probes. It was clear Evan had not
disturbed the room as it still appeared as though Laura was in the
middle of debugging her latest gadget creation. In the center of
the room, there was a desk with a monitor and keyboard on it
connected to a computer on the floor below. Angela recognized the
computer as the type that they issued to people that did some work
at home. It had an encrypted direct link to the agency.

“
All right,” Angela said.
“The receiver that we are trying to find looks just like a regular
old laptop computer. It is a little thicker because it has a flat
GPS transponder affixed to the bottom. Get to looking. Call out if
you find it.”

Travis walked over to the desk and began
looking in the drawers. Alex and Angela both began searching the
cabinets, starting at opposite ends of the room.

“
What have we here?” Alex
said as he pulled something out of the cabinet.

“
Did you find it?” Travis
said.

“
No, but I found a couple
of shotguns,” Alex said as he held one of them up.

Angela looked over at him. “Those are not
shotguns. They are LREDs. Be careful.”

“
They’re what?” Alex
replied.

“
Just put it back and keep
looking.”

Alex closed that cabinet and moved on to the
next one. Travis had searched the desk and was now looking on the
shelves below the workbenches. He spotted a small metal case on top
of some boxes near the back of one of the shelves. He grabbed it,
pulled it out from underneath the workbench, and opened it.

“
I think I may have
something here,” he said.

Angela crossed the room and looked over
Travis’s shoulder into the case.

“
Way to go, Travis! That’s
the receiver that we were searching for,” she said as she reached
in and pulled it out of the case.

She reached into the case again, grabbed the
power cord, and then rushed over to the desk, setting the receiver
down on it. She plugged it into the power strip below the desk and
flipped open the monitor. Then she sat down in the desk chair and
pushed the power button. The receiver whirred to life.

“
This will take a while to
boot up,” she said, leaning back in the chair.

After a few moments, an operating system
logo flashed onto the screen.

“
Hey,” Travis said. “I
thought that this was a GPS receiver? This thing boots up just like
a computer.”

“
Like I said before, the
machine is a laptop computer,” Angela said. “The receiver is run as
an application program that accesses the GPS transponder strapped
to the bottom.”

Travis nodded acknowledgement, and the three
of them continued to stare at the receiver’s screen as it went
through the familiar, long boot sequence. When it finished, Angela
located the launch icon for the receiver on the desktop and
double-clicked on it. A window sprang open and filled the screen.
Angela moved closer to it to read the small text. After a moment,
she let out a sigh and sat back in the chair.

“
What’s the matter?” Alex
said.

“
This receiver program is
password protected,” she said. “Probably because the receiver is
located in a house and not locked up at the agency. And I don’t
know Laura’s password, so we are kinda out of luck.”

Alex grimaced as if he had been hit in the
stomach.

Angela leaned back in toward the receiver.
“Let me shut this thing down, so we can go back upstairs.”

“
Don’t shut it off yet,”
Travis said.

Angela stood up and faced Travis. “Do you
know the password?”

“
No. But I might be able
to figure out what it is. Is the computer connected to the
internet?”

“
It’s got a wireless
connection just like any other computer, but your mother had a
direct wireline to the agency, so it wouldn’t be configured for
your home wireless network. Why do you ask?”

Travis paused. He was not sure he should
continue. “Well… I have been working with some of the people in my
hacker club on a password prediction algorithm. You know, to help
me to break into other people’s computers. If I can connect to the
internet, I can try it out on the receiver.”

Angela gave him a puzzled look. “Hacker
club?”

“
Well … It’s not a real
club. We do not have a secret handshake or anything. In fact, none
of us even lives in the same country. We just get together once
every week on video chat and plot to take over the world. Don’t
tell my dad, he would freak.”

Angela mulled over the genius in front of
her. She hoped he was kidding about taking over the world.

“
The agency has pretty
good security,” Angela said. “You do realize that it would take a
computer trying all possible passwords into the next century to
figure it out.”

“
That’s why I want to try
out my new algorithm. I based it on a 32-variable operations
research Zed equation that uses the frequency of letters and
combinations of letters as inputs. Instead of trying random values
for the potential password, the Zed equation will work toward the
most probable answer.”

Angela and Alex nodded their heads as if
they understood what he was saying.

“
And who said anything
about using one computer?” Travis continued. “I will have my botnet
army work on it.”

Angela gave him that look again. “Botnet
army?”

“
It’s a collection of
computers that I have already broken into. I put a virus in each
one of them that allows me access whenever I want them to do
something for me. Some people use their armies to generate spam,
but I use mine to process some of my more complex physics problems.
I break the problems up into several pieces and let each of the
computers work on a small part of the problem. The password
prediction program is the perfect program to farm out to the
botnet. I’ll give each one of the computers a copy of the
prediction program along with a range of the parameters for it to
work on. Then I will give each computer this computer’s IP address.
As each of the botnet computers comes up with a potential password
candidate, it will try it out on the receiver program.”

Alex still looked unconvinced. “So, how
extensive is this ‘army’?”

Travis thought for a moment. “I don’t have
what you would consider a sizeable army. It only has about fifty
thousand computers.”

Angela’s eyes widened. “Did you say fifty
thousand computers?”

“
Yeah. Spread all over the
world,” Travis said. “A couple of my hacker buddies have over five
times that many in their armies. But this is a hobby for me. I just
have enough computers to do my quark simulations.”

Angela paused for a moment and let her head
catch up with all he had said.

“
Okay, what do you do
now?” she said.

“
Let me sit down,” Travis
said. “I’ll set up the wireless card in the laptop to find the home
network and then I’ll upload the password prediction program into
my botnet control website. I have the program right here on a flash
drive.”

Travis took a flash drive from his pocket
and connected it to the laptop. He opened a web browser and typed
in the botnet control website URL. After a moment, a simple page
with a skull and crossbones appeared. Travis continued to enter
keystrokes, but now the characters did not appear on the
screen.

“
What are you typing?”
Alex said, leaning in to look closer at the monitor. “I can’t see
any words.”

“
I’m entering this
computer’s IP address and some other information to direct the
army,” he said as he continued to type. “I have the words masked,
so they don’t show up. You cannot be too careful in public with a
site of this type. Can’t make any typos though.”

After a few more moments of frenzied typing,
Travis sat back in the chair.