“All I can ask is that you give it a try.”
The smell of burnt flesh, scorched asphalt, spent jet fuel, melted plastic, and halogen foam was nauseating, but after a few minutes of exposure and some retching, the average person would be able to control the gag reflex. The reason for the HAZMAT suits, however, was the unconfirmed whereabouts of three pounds of dicloromonothoromethane that, if it were in the cargo hold of the now-disintegrated 767, would have boiled into a crude form of nerve gas.
Cute what they allow to fly on planes these days
, Joey Palumbo thought, as he heard nothing but his own breathing inside the helmet of his regulation HM4 plastic disposable contamination unit. As the head of the FBI’s San Francisco office, this was his jurisdiction. Normally, any event at SFO airport would first be NTSB territory, but due to the recent events, any major loss of life was now considered a potential terrorist act. That was fine with the National Transportation Safety Board. If this had been an accident, it was one of the worst ever.
The white foam sprayed from the crash trucks to smother the fire would have given the entire scene the look of a fresh December snow were it not for the twisted, jagged metal struts, charred bodies, and dismembered parts. As he scanned the devastation, there, lying in the “snow,” he spotted something, but couldn’t quite make it out through the HAZMAT plastic face shield. He stepped closer to it. As the shape and texture came into focus, it tugged on a memory string, untying some old recollections.
Gunhill Road provided the perfect sled ride, a quarter-mile straight downhill run. On the morning of the first snow, there was not a car or truck in sight. He was trudging up the steep hill, through the three feet of new snow, his Flexible Flyer skidding along behind him on a frayed rope. The only sounds he heard were the muffled footfalls and squeals of delight coming from kids making forts, having snowball fights, and zooming by him on their sleds and garbage-can covers. Reaching the corner of Decatur Avenue, he turned and saw the great snow-covered way stretching out beneath him. The only mar on the pristine white cover was the dirty brown girders of the Third Avenue El, making a hard left turn south onto Webster Avenue.
Holding the sled up at an angle, he started running as fast as his galoshes-covered feet would carry him. When he reached his maximum velocity, he belly flopped down onto the sled he threw out ahead. Grabbing the steering handles in each hand, he sped down the hill, increasing speed with every second, his body prone on the sled, the cold wind and stinging snow lashing his face. Being an advanced sledder at age ten, he used the more difficult rear-foot-drag method of turning the sled. To do it you had to pull hard on the steering handle while dragging the toe of your foot on that side. The combination of this one-sided braking action and bending the runners in that direction gave the sled the handling control of a Ferrari turning on a lira. As the day progressed, nothing affected him or his friends—not the bitter cold, the runny noses, or the minor cuts and scrapes that were the occupational hazards of belly flopping in the Bronx, 1972.
As the winter sun was setting early in the afternoon, Joey pulled his little sister Gina on his sled while she held her teddy bear, Bobo. Crossing 212th Street, a kid on a sled sped out of nowhere. This kid, not being a master of the toe-drag-turn technique, couldn’t avoid ramming into the sled, sending Gina flying.
Joey ran to his sister as she lay there, still, not breathing. Panic arose within him, but then, almost as suddenly, a new feeling came over him, even stronger—the need for action. He knew he could not just stand there. He immediately scooped her up in his arms and started running back toward Gunhill Road. There he hailed a passing garbage truck and implored the driver to rush him to the hospital. The doctors in the ER resuscitated Gina, everyone involved praising Joey for his fast action and for keeping his head.
The next day, Joey’s mom made him her special, once-a-year, Easter morning blueberry pancakes for breakfast. This was her way of honoring her little hero. Gina was resting now in the hospital, Joey’s mom having spent the night, leaving only to come home to make her breakfast for Joey. She’d be going right back.
After breakfast and more hugs than a guy should get, Joey, all bundled up, left for school. As he crossed 212th Street, there, in the snow, dirty from being run over, lay Gina’s teddy bear Bobo.
Now it was an Elmo doll. There in the white foam, dirty with soot, lay somebody’s little girl’s Elmo.
Shit!
The FBI agent cursed to himself and the Virgin Mary. He didn’t cry much growing up, but now the man fought back the tightening in his throat and the fluttering in his chest and focused on the next action he needed to take. A shout from behind turned him around.
A crane lifted a mangled motorized luggage conveyor belt, which had been blown into the corner of the ramp area, up against the terminal building wall. He moved cautiously over to the other agents supervising the recovery.
“What do we have, Ned?” he said loudly to overcome his helmet’s muffling effect.
“We found another body. Looks like ground crew. Could be the belt operator.” Joey bent down. The piece of equipment had shielded her upper body from the fire; the lower half, which was not behind the machine, was gone.
Action
, he thought, to steady himself as he blocked out the human horror he now probed. “What’s this?” He waited for the click of the crime scene camera, recording the position of each element before investigators touched it, then moved her hairless head with his gloved hand, revealing a hole in the right side.
“Look at the thorax, more punctures,” Ned said.
Joey called for the forensic pathologist who was piecing together a human remains jigsaw puzzle twenty feet from him.
“WHAT KIND OF DRUGS were you on?” the fuming chief of staff said.
Hiccock avoided the burning stare by taking in the objects on Reynolds’s credenza. There on a wooden pedestal was a baseball autographed by Carl Yastrzemski. “Thirty years ago she predicted exactly what’s happening now.”
“Aw come on, Bill. The woman wrote an anti-technology thesis when the cutting edge of technology was a five-tube table radio … and the Navy canned her ass.”
“The Navy was attempting to secure congressional funding for new ASROC shipboard computers. They didn’t want the doves in Congress using the Admiral’s writing to sink their programs.” He jutted his chin out toward the prized baseball. “Did you ever meet him?”
Reynolds turned his head to see what Bill was talking about. “You mean Yaz? Sure.”
“My father took me to see him when he played against the Yankees.”
“Don’t change the subject, Hiccock.” The telephone rang, and, picking up the receiver, Reynolds listened for a second, then relinquished it to Hiccock.
“Joey? No shit! Are all the forensics in? Can you fax that to me? Okay, as soon as you know. Thanks, buddy.” He hung up.
“Forensics? I guess that means the fuel truck did have a static strap,” Reynolds said wryly. “Is this new event something tied into your investigation?”
“There are two troublesome issues that could point it our way. One, the forensic team thinks they have extracted grenade fragments from the bodies of a guard and baggage handler. Two, the plane had a handful of top computer scientists from Santa Clara onboard.”
“Major brain drain for Silicon Valley.” Reynolds got up and grabbed the ball, rotating it like a pitcher, feeling for the seams behind his back. “Somehow computers are playing heavy into this. I have to admit your theory seems more on the money every day.”
Hiccock was impressed. The man just came as close to contrition as a hooker gets to fashion and he never even flinched.
I guess that’s why he’s the second most powerful man in the White House.
“Yaz was past his prime when I saw him, but my dad said it didn’t matter, ’cause the basics stay the same. That’s why I need people like Admiral Parks on my team. She practically wrote the basics.”
“Just be right about her.” Reynolds tossed and caught the ball with a snap and replaced it on its pedestal. “Oh, Justice called. They sprung that hacker you wanted out of Elmira and have him over at the FBI ECL. Don’t you know any normal people?”
Chivalry and honor having been relegated mostly to the legends of the Knights of the Round Table or the Japanese samurai warriors, anyone would be hard-pressed to argue those values were alive and well today. The exception was in the underground network of cop-to-cop favors. Dennis especially believed this to be so after his phone call from Brooke Burrell, an FBI agent stationed in New York. She would become his contact into the Fed’s lab results and any further threats the bureau received that could affect his new job. He knew that he now owed Jack big-time. This old buddy of his had tapped a favor from the FBI, and that, to him, was a debt of honor.
The FBI lab results cross-correlated the letter to Taggert with ones received by a few high-tech companies throughout the New York area, seven on Long Island, four in New York, three in New Jersey. Although they didn’t have the name of the writer yet, they had deciphered a pattern. That news gave Dennis a little comfort in their numbers. It meant his protectee, Miles Taggert, was one of fourteen. In those numbers there was a little security. He asked Brooke if he could be alerted if any moves were made on any of the other thirteen.
She repeated the wishes of her boss, “‘Whatever he wants,’ he said.” She did not have to add
so long as it doesn’t violate agency or federal guidelines
. It was enough for Dennis to know that his juice, and that of Jack and whomever else he had tapped, was still fresh and had some kick left in it.
Hiccock arrived at the FBI electronics lab and immediately spotted and approached a longhaired, geeky-looking guy. “You must be Vincent DeMayo.”
“No, I am Special Agent Foster. I think you are looking for him.” He pointed in the direction of Brooklyn, New York, or so it seemed to Hiccock, as he followed the finger to a man who could’ve been right out of the mob movie
Goodfellas
. Black shirt, black tie, black, black, black. He was thirty-something and, obviously, still cocky after three years in Club Fed. He was seated in front of Krummel’s computer.
“Vincent DeMayo?”
“The name’s Kronos, man. It’s my online persona. Kronos, the keeper of time.” He made a clockwise motion with his right index finger as if he were tracing the second hand of his watch.
“William Hiccock. I am your bailee, the one keeping you from doing time.” Hiccock made a counterclockwise motion around his watch. For an instant, Hiccock thought he might have made a mistake pulling the strings with the president to get this mob-nerd freed from prison. But his research showed Vinny DeMayo had beat the best encryption software and blasted through firewalls guaranteed impenetrable by the world’s largest banks and governments, all in the name of organized crime. Hiccock was counting on the fact that all a computer whiz like “Kronos” cared about was cracking code—the bigger the better—and using cool equipment. Hiccock’s mob, the U.S. government, could probably lure him with bigger machines and harder codes to crack than that other mob.
Their eyes locked in a kind of macho stare down. After a few seconds, Hiccock nodded toward the computer. “Anything unusual?”
“There are no obvious hack or chop marks in any of this freakin’ code.”
“What about the not-too-obvious?”
“That is my specialty. And I don’t see anything at my level of genius in this pile of crap here either.”
“Modesty becomes you.”
“Mr. Hiccock,” Hansen said, interrupting, “I think this is something you’ll want to see.”
Hiccock and Kronos followed him into another room that contained the equipment Hiccock had purchased at the auction. Somehow, the equipment, older than the FBI techs themselves, was working, albeit with wires and cords everywhere. Duct tape and wire ties seemed to be holding it all together.
“Whoa!” Kronos said, “look at all this crap.”
“Crap is a relative word. You can’t use a computer to find out what’s happening inside a computer if you don’t know what you are looking for. This old collection of analog equipment works on the output, not the insides.”
“So you’re looking for something that is happening between the digital clicks of a computer’s internal clock?”
“Exactly. And you can’t see that with something that’s ticking the same way, but an analog device, working like the human eye, which is …”
“Accumualtes how much of something, not how many of something.”
“Essentially yes, and also because it’s running at a much slower scan rate.”
“So we can see the interstitial data between the digital blanking rate,” Kronos said.
“What do you have?” Hiccock asked Hansen.
“After a lot of tweaking, we pointed the camera at the screen and ran a copy of Mrs. Krummel’s cookies through their paces.” He pushed the button on the huge two-inch Ampex videotape recorder. The giant reels turned at a very fast speed, almost fast forward. “We essentially visited every page she had and recorded it at high speed. We didn’t see anything while scanning it. But when we played it back …” He hit “Stop,” rewound, and hit “Play.” Now the tape reels were spinning ever so slowly. “… under slow-speed playback, we found this.”
The Conrac TV before them displayed an electronic image of Martha Krummel’s computer monitor screen. It was blinking with black flashes. The web page looked normal but after a few black flashes, a message popped onto the entire screen. After the next black flash, it was gone. “Those flashes are the refresh rate of the computer and happen approximately seventy or so times a second, too fast for the human eye to catch. To see this, we have to play back at a speed one hundred times slower.”
“Persistence of vision,” Hiccock said. “It’s how movies, TVs, and computers show images. It happens so fast that we don’t see the blinking. Unless you do something like this.” Hiccock waved his hand in front of the monitor causing the image to strobe.
“That’s the between the clicks that another computer could never see,” Kronos said.
“Let’s see that one message frame.”
The tech now turned to a computer. “Once your contraption caught the image, it was easy for us to capture it as standard NTSC video and freeze it on the screen.” On the computer screen the now-frozen message appeared.
Hiccock read the screen aloud: “The time has come, Martha. Derail the Train at 8:30 PM.”
“So far we’ve found 200 others. All big type, all one sentence, some diagrams.”
“Diagrams of what?”
“Train track wiring, signal and switch circuits …”
Hiccock felt a surge of adrenaline.
“And then there’s this.”
As the pages flipped, images of a gun in someone’s hand, having been downloaded from a web site, flashed across the screen. Next, a scene from some HBO gore-fest movie came into view, showing an older woman lifting a pistol to her temple and shooting herself in the head. Hiccock read aloud another message on the screen.
“After you have done your task, Martha, place the gun to your temple and fire.”
“Whoa, the shit they put on the net nowadays!” Kronos declared in disgust.
“Absolutely. Behavior and even hypnosis can readily be achieved at interstitial rates of less than one-fortieth of a second.” Tyler said this as if she had written the paper herself. Seated in the FBI cafeteria across from Hiccock, Hansen, and Kronos, she sipped her third coffee of the morning.
“So the president is now fully aware that each homegrown act of terror—including Martha Krummel’s—was predetermined, suggested, and induced by their computers?” Hansen said.
“Yes, I briefed him just before I came here,” Hiccock said. “But that’s not the question. The question is …”
“Who programmed the computer to ‘program’ Martha?” Tyler said, completing his sentence.
“Kronos?” Hiccock turned in time to see him downing half a sugar donut in one bite, a dash of white powder on his nose. It was times like this that renewed his doubts over getting Kronos sprung from prison.
“Well, once we knew what the hell we were looking for it got a little easier. Me and the head geek here ran a few virus scans and interpolated file arrays. We dug up the line of code in the worm that calls for the messages and even the switcher routine to flash them.” Kronos said this while licking the powdered sugar from his fingertips.
“There’s a high-tech ‘but’ coming,” Tyler said.
Hansen provided it. “When Kronos here tried to trace it back to the source, he hit a firewall.”
“Sounds serious.”
“Can’t breach it. Ain’t never seen nothing like it and neither has number one geek here.”
“Hey, c’mon with that,” Hiccock said in protest.
“It’s okay,” Hansen said. “I
am
the number one geek because I de-tangled his algorithm and nailed his URL to the wall.”
“Is
that
how they caught you, Kronos?” Janice asked as innocently as she could manage.
“Ahh, so!” Hiccock said, borrowing from a famous stereotype. “Number one geek smarter than you, Mr. Number One Genius Ego.”
“Eat crap and die. I was sleepwalking when I wrote that friggin’ code!” Kronos stuffed the last of the donut into his mouth.
Hiccock turned to Hansen. “You ever see a firewall like this?”
“No. I create them for the bureau and every other gov.net function, but it’s beyond me.”
“Is there anyone else who might know more?”
“Hey, you got the best in the country right here,” Kronos said, then patted Hansen’s shoulder, “and the geek that caught him. Ain’t no one else.”
Hiccock rolled his eyes and then held his finger up. “There might be one other person.”