The Second Ship (15 page)

Chapter 29

The next three weeks passed in a flurry of activity, with one day blending into the next. The Los Alamos Hilltoppers basketball team continued their winning ways, although Mark’s scoring settled down to an average of closer to twenty-five points a game. By the time Christmas break came and went, Mark’s workout program was beginning to bring about a noticeable change in his physique. His arms and shoulders had thickened, and his waist had narrowed. Heather had seen him without his shirt after one of his workout sessions, and his stomach looked like it belonged to a comic book superhero.

Apparently his neural augmentation made him incredibly efficient at training his muscles, and they had responded with a vengeance to his indomitable will. It wasn’t that he looked like a weight lifter, far from it. He just looked extremely buff.

January first arrived with little fanfare. Heather had stayed up late the night before to watch the annual dropping of the New Year’s ball in New York City, but she had been the only late bird in her family. Not that she was a party animal herself; she had just had a hard time sleeping, and the televised party coverage provided a welcome distraction. Now she was tired, but anxious to get on with what they had to do.

Today was the day. Virus Day. They had actually been ready to launch the virus for several days now, but just couldn’t bring themselves to do it over Christmas. So the dawn of the New Year would see the first salvo in a war that began decades earlier in the skies above Aztec, a war between good and evil. At least, that is how Heather thought of it.

Mark, Jennifer, and Heather parked their bikes in a rack some distance from their objective. They had selected a public pay phone in the same Los Alamos shopping center where press reports said Abdul Aziz’s car had been found abandoned all those weeks ago.

Thanks to the ancient, acoustically coupled modem Jennifer had scrounged up, they could access the Internet from Jennifer’s PDA without using a traceable wireless connection. She could just hold it up to the phone mouthpiece. As Mark and Heather watched from a distance, Jennifer made her way to the pay phone. She leaned into it in a way that looked like she could be deep in a private discussion with a boyfriend.

It only took her a few minutes to access the Internet and upload the virus. As soon as Jennifer hung up the handset, pocketing her PDA, Heather and Mark moved from their lookout to meet her by the bikes. While crossing the parking lot, Heather had a moment of déjà vu, feeling as if she was a refugee from some 1950s cold war spy movie. The feeling passed as they got on their bicycles. There was just something about the picture of a band of international espionage agents making their getaway on bicycles that didn’t fit the way she felt.

Heather looked down at her hands. She had not been able to stop them from shaking since Jennifer had walked up to the phone booth. Now, as Heather pedaled hard to keep up with Mark and Jennifer as they sped away from the parking lot, she hoped with all her heart that their plan would work. If not, well, she didn’t care to think about it.

From the corner of her eye she glimpsed a tall, thin man with long, stringy, blond hair standing near the corner of the shopping center, but when she turned her head to look, there was no one there. Easy, Heather, she told herself. Don’t get paranoid now. She upped the pace of her pedaling, moving past Mark into the lead as they raced for home.

Behind her, a gaunt, ragged man stepped out into the open. As he watched them disappear around the bend, his expression was as blank as the mannequin in the nearby store window.

Chapter 30

Deep within the bowels of the massive, black-glass structure affectionately known as Crypto City, Jonathan Riles leaned back in his executive chair, surveying the others assembled around the small conference table. He was a stocky man, ex-navy football star, Rhodes Scholar, number one in his class at the Naval Academy, vice admiral. His friendly face served as an unlikely platform for intense, icy gray eyes. As he looked around at his team, he smiled. They were the National Security Agency’s best of the best.

“So, Dave,” Riles said, “tell me what you’ve got.”

David Kurtz sat immediately to Riles’ left, looking every bit the part of the wild-haired, absent-minded professor. If there was one thing that Kurtz was not, though, it was absent minded.

Kurtz reached for a wireless remote control, clicking a button that brought the flat-screen video monitor to life. The far wall showed a map of the United States covered in clusters of red dots.

“As everyone in this room is aware, what the public is calling the New Year’s Day Virus appeared on a large number of systems on New Year’s Day. But since many companies were closed for the holidays, the true extent of the infection wasn’t known until January third.

“Another reason for the slowness of the response was the apparently benign nature of the infection. The virus just hops from computer to computer, leaving behind a small agent program on each infected system.”

Kurtz aimed a red laser pointer at the flat-screen monitor on the far wall. “This was the estimated extent of infection sites in the US as of the last report, about thirty minutes ago.”

The slide changed to a map of the world. “Here is a map showing the estimated extent of the worldwide infection.”

Riles leaned forward. “Hell, Dave, that thing looks like it has spread everywhere but North Korea. At least their computer systems seem well protected.”

Laughter rippled around the table. A satellite view of Asia at night showed lights everywhere except for a dark outline of North Korea. The country was so backward it didn’t even have a developed electricity delivery system so, of course, it had no notable computer network.

A serious look returned to Riles’ face. “So what are all these agent programs doing?”

“We aren’t quite sure yet,” Kurtz said. “One thing they are doing is encrypting data on each computer.”

“What kind of data?” Riles asked.

“From what we can tell, nothing significant. It looks like it picks a few temporary files on each computer and encrypts them. The files it picks don’t really cause any damage because they are temporary.”

“Why is it encrypting trash?”

Kurtz shrugged. “Sounds harmless, doesn’t it? The problem is the encryption algorithm.”

“Yes?”

“We haven’t been able to break it.”

“What?” Kurtz now had Riles’ full attention.

“The little agent programs are encrypting the data in a way that we haven’t even begun to scratch. Once we saw we had a problem breaking the code, I put our best systems and people on it. That was two days ago. No progress.”

For several seconds Riles sat speechless as a babble of voices from around the table echoed in the room.

“Okay. Everyone hold it down!” Riles said, and then stared at Kurtz. “I didn’t think that was possible.”

“Anything’s possible. It is just not probable.”

“Why would anyone go to the trouble to come up with an unbreakable code and then use it to encrypt garbage everywhere?”

“Our people think it’s a calling card. Someone put it out there to say, I am very, very good. Come find me.”

“Damned right we are going to find them. Then we are either going to throw their asses in prison or hire them.”

“Which brings us to the reason I asked you to assemble the core team for this briefing,” Kurtz said. “The virus did something new two hours ago. It sent the NSA an e-mail.”

Kurtz pressed another button on the remote and the text of a short e-mail message appeared on the screen.

NSA. You are supposed to be the best. Let’s hope you are. The clock is ticking…

Jonathan Riles moved along the side of the table toward the video screen. “What is that garbage down at the end of the message?”

Kurtz waved the laser pointer so that it drew a little circle around a bunch of strange-looking characters that formed the end of the message. “That, gentlemen, is another encrypted message. It looks like they want us to break this one, although it is taking us some time. You can bet your ass that every other spy agency in the world is trying their best to beat us to it right now.”

A light dawned in Riles’ eyes. “It’s an address.”

Kurtz nodded. “Very likely. The real message probably exists on only one computer out there somewhere, and this code tells us how to find it.”

“Then let’s make damned sure that we are the first ones to get there. How long until we crack it?”

“I would say we will have the answer within the hour,” said Kurtz.

Riles turned to the others sitting around the table. It wasn’t the NSA’s job to meddle directly in special operations. But thanks to a Presidential Finding, the special directive signed by the president of the United States himself after 9/11, Jonathan had acquired the services of a very special “cleanup team.”

The actual wording of the directive had been vague enough that Riles had been able to use it to gather a team of his choosing without the president being aware of any of the details. It was always important to let the old man maintain legitimate deniability when things bordered this closely upon unconstitutional action.

“Jack.”

A lean man, whose curly brown hair framed a face that looked like it had been freshly chiseled from Potomac granite, leaned forward.

“Yes, sir?”

“Get your team ready. As soon as our people crack that code, I want that system physically removed from wherever it is. Don’t take any chances on this one.”

“How about a warrant?”

“I’ll get the special request started, but if it is late getting here, don’t wait. I want that system, whatever it takes. If we have to get dirty, we’ll clean up later. Now get going.”

Jack Gregory stood up and strode from the room, followed closely by Janet Price and Harold Stevens, two more of the finest special field operatives in the world. As the door closed behind them, Riles had the sudden impression that the room felt a lot less…deadly.

Chapter 31

The brown UPS uniform fit Jack as if it had been made for him. As he walked from the truck toward the house, he adjusted the box he was carrying so it hid the small aerosol can in his right hand. He had expected the address to be close to Ft. Meade, and indeed, once the code was broken, it led to a computer inside a house in Glen Bernie, Maryland, just a few miles from the NSA headquarters.

It certainly looked like someone was doing everything they could to make sure the NSA was the first on the scene. But doing something like using an address near the NSA headquarters indicated a lack of sophistication, maybe even naiveté, that would have the organization’s profilers going nuts. If you wanted to put the message in a bigger nest of foreign spies than were located close to the Puzzle Palace, you would have to put it inside the UN.

Jack rang the bell, and a woman opened it with a smile. “Hi. I wasn’t expecting a—”

The knockout gas hit her full in the face, the surprised intake of air that followed finishing the job as her legs lost their rigidity. Jack continued his momentum, catching the woman’s slumping body as he stepped across the threshold. Immediately behind him, Janet Price, also in UPS attire, walked calmly up to the house carrying another package.

The two of them moved with quiet efficiency as Jack laid the unconscious woman on the couch next to the phone and then moved on, rapidly glancing in each room as he passed. Behind him he could hear Janet pick up the phone and dial familiar tones. 9-1-1.

“Hello, police? Help me. Please hurry. Someone is trying to get into my house. Aaaah.” She coughed weakly then dropped the telephone handset beside the woman’s body on the sofa.

Spotting the computer, Jack pulled the power cord from the back and rapidly disconnected all the other cables from the system. Then leaving behind the monitor and all the peripheral equipment, he opened the UPS box and placed the computer inside.

As he moved out of the small office back into the living room, he saw Janet coming down the stairs giving him the thumbs-up signal. There were no other computers in the house. They had what they were after.

Picking up the two boxes with which they had entered, Jack and Janet walked out the front door, closed it behind them, stepped into the truck, and drove off. The police would be there shortly, and that was a good thing, not that Jack was worried about the unconscious woman. People rarely died from a single whiff of the gas. But there was going to be unexpected company at that address before long, and those late arrivals needed to see the police already on the scene, or much worse violence was likely to occur.

Rounding a corner, Jack pulled the UPS truck into a parking lot where he and Janet left it, carried the box around the side of the building, and slipped into the backseat of a gold Honda Accord.

“Home, James,” Jack said.

Harold Stevens smiled as he pulled out into traffic.

Chapter 32

“Heather! Have you got the news channel on?” Jennifer’s voice on the phone sounded excited.

“No.”

“Turn on CNN now. Hurry up.”

Heather carried the wireless telephone with her into the living room and picked up the remote control from the coffee table with her left hand, almost knocking over the small pot of poinsettias in the process. The aging television hummed to life, the picture gradually fading in over the course of several seconds.

“Are you seeing this?” Jennifer breathed into the phone.

“Hold on a sec.”

“Well hurry or you’re going to miss it.”

“Jen, I’m doing the best I can. My TV is coming on now.”

The announcer was standing in front of what looked like a typical New England–style home in a quiet suburb. The police had established a large cordon around the house and a car that had crashed into a nearby streetlight pole. The car window was bloody, and the camera zoomed in to show several bullet holes in the windshield of the black Ford Explorer.

Heather turned up the volume.

“And so the peace and quiet of this little neighborhood in Glen Bernie, Maryland, was shattered earlier today as the home owner was repeatedly victimized in a strange set of circumstances that has left two men dead and three police officers severely wounded.

“Mrs. Mary Okanian says she was accosted by a man dressed as a UPS delivery man, knocked unconscious, and then robbed. Although she doesn’t remember how, she apparently got in a short nine-one-one call before succumbing to her assailant.

“Then, in a bizarre twist, as police arrived on the scene, another car pulled up, then tried racing away. When police attempted to stop that car, the men inside opened fire on the officers, wounding three of them, before being shot and killed themselves.

“Although police are unwilling to comment on the ongoing investigation, an anonymous source in the department tells CNN that the woman was likely a victim of a turf war between rival organized crime syndicates. When asked what was stolen from the house during the first assault, police declined to comment.”

Heather flipped off the television. “God! Jennifer, that’s the address we selected to drop the final message. I’ll be right over.”

Jennifer met Heather at the front door of her house, obviously distraught.

“Is Mark home yet?” Heather asked as she followed Jennifer up to her bedroom.

“No. He’s not back from basketball practice. Mom and Dad aren’t here either. They had bridge club tonight.”

Jennifer closed the door behind Heather as she entered her room. “Heather. Those men that got killed. You don’t think they were the NSA people, do you?”

Heather shook her head. “No way. Our government agents don’t get into shoot-outs with our own police. The NSA must have already been there.”

“But that poor woman. Someone assaulted her and then people were killed. We got those people killed and those policemen shot.” Tears streamed down Jennifer’s cheeks as she sat down hard on her bed, sending a large, overstuffed floral pillow tumbling across the floor.

“No, we didn’t,” said Heather, trying to convince herself of the truth of the statement. “Those men were bad people, and they caused the situation, not us.”

“But we were the instigators,” Jennifer sobbed. “I’m the one who had the virus pick that machine. I caused all of this.”

Heather sat down beside Jennifer on the bed, hugging her friend tightly, fighting the sinking feeling that continued to assault her.

“Hey, Jen, you in your room?” Mark’s voice echoed down the hallway.

“Just a sec,” Jennifer replied, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand.

Mark stuck his head in the door. “What’s up?”

“Did you hear what I said?” Jennifer said angrily. “I said to give me a second.”

Mark started to pull back, then, seeing her face, came into the room. “What is it, Sis? What’s the matter?”

Heather repeated the news story they had just heard.

“You’re kidding,” Mark said, slumping into Jennifer’s chair.

“I wish I was. It looks like we probably caused all this. 98.32 percent probability.” Realizing what she had just said, Heather flushed a bright red, although for once, neither Mark nor Jennifer appeared to notice her savant lapse.

“Holy shit!” Mark leaned back in the chair, his hands clasped behind his head. “Jen, I know you’re upset. But how are you coming on the virus that is supposed to hide our trail from the trace?” he asked.

“I’m just about done with it,” she sniffed. “How’s your Russian?”

Mark shrugged. “Passable. I’ve been reading everything I can get to on the web with no problem. Unless it’s some strange local slang, I can probably handle it.”

Jennifer moved toward her computer. “Here. Let me have my chair, and I’ll keep working.”

Mark stood up. “Good girl. I hate to push you, but now that we see what these people are capable of doing, we damned sure don’t want them finding us.”

Heather nodded. “Jen, I’m going to go get my laptop. We probably won’t have longer than about forty-eight hours to get your new virus uploaded and working before they trace the old one back to Los Alamos.”

“I should be able to finish it by tomorrow morning. I’ll just need to run some tests after school. Then we’ll be ready.”

“Okay,” said Heather. “In the meantime, we both have the monitor program on our handhelds and laptops. We can watch the progress of the trace on them. By the way, how’s it looking?”

Jennifer’s fingers blurred across her laptop keyboard. “Fine. Some antiviruses have started nibbling away at the agents, but they’re regenerating. I’d say we have the antivirus companies guessing.”

“Great. I’ll be right back.”

By the time Heather retrieved her laptop and made her way back to Jennifer’s room, trouble had surfaced.

“I lied to you,” Jennifer said, without glancing up from the keyboard. “Someone has a trace on us. I started seeing indications right after you left.”

Heather glanced over Jennifer’s shoulder at the readout on the computer screen, a cascade of equations flashing through her mind.

“Crap. We don’t have forty-eight hours. At this rate they’ll track down the source by this time tomorrow night.”

Mark leaned over Jennifer’s other shoulder. “Looks like tomorrow morning it is, Sis.”

Jennifer switched back to her compiler but did not respond, her mind already locked away in a world of bits and bytes. Heather glanced once more at her friend's face, features tight with concentration and worry, then turned to carry her own laptop to Mark’s room. The pounding of her heart echoed the pounding worry in her head. For the sake of her friends, for the sake of their families, for the sake of their very lives, she hoped she chose better this time.

By midnight, Heather and Mark found a computer location Jennifer could use as a false source to lead the trace back to. Since the best thing they could do to help Jennifer was to leave her undisturbed, Heather went home and, after letting her parents know she was back from the long homework session, went to bed.

Although she was exhausted, Heather found that sleep evaded her. About the best she could manage was a fitful doze. Her dreams were so disturbing that she awoke feeling more tired than when she had gone to bed.

At breakfast her mother fretted over the dark circles under Heather’s eyes. “I don’t think these late-night cram sessions are effective. If you three can’t get an early start on homework, then your grades and your health will suffer.”

“Mom, I know that. We’ll try to get on top of things earlier next time. Believe me, I think we learned our lesson.”

Her father chuckled as he sipped his coffee. “I seem to recall making that same statement myself. At least a couple hundred times.”

Heather rose from the table, kissed her mom and dad, and then headed for the door, grabbing her backpack on the way.

“See you after school,” she yelled as the door slammed behind her.

If she looked bad, Jennifer looked terrible. “I see you didn’t sleep either,” Heather said as she walked up to the twins.

“Sure I did,” said Mark, who indeed looked disgustingly bright-eyed and cheery.

Jennifer rolled her eyes. “No, I didn’t. I just got finished a half hour ago. I barely had time to shower and grab a bagel on my way out the door. I got the virus copied to my PDA, but the thing is completely untested.”

“You can test it after school,” said Heather.

At that moment the bright yellow school bus arrived amidst a squeal of brakes. Only after they were on board and the doors snicked closed behind them did Heather realize how cold the wind outside had been. She had been so distracted that she had forgotten to put her headband over her ears. Now, the heat inside the bus started her ears tingling so violently it felt like a horde of biting insects had descended on them, intent on gnawing the appendages from the sides of her head.

An itch was also building inside her nostrils. One thing she could always count on. Having acquired a critical mass of young passengers, the odors within the school bus became capable of reaching inside her nostrils and tugging on her nose hairs until her eyes watered.

From a loving mother’s carefully packed roast beef sandwich, complete with horseradish, to the partially burned gasoline fumes, to the young men, generously splashed with TAG Body Spray, this morning's odiferous warriors were engaged in an all-out charge into Heather’s sinuses.

While some people howled out a hurricane-force sneeze and were done, Heather’s came out as tiny little “chi” sounds that seemed to go on forever. Although she tried desperately to hold it back, when the sneezes started, they kept coming until everyone around her was laughing.

Fortunately the bus pulled to a halt in front of the high school before Heather had to endure a second attack. By the time she, Mark, and Jennifer had made their way to Ms. Gorsky’s first-period history class, Heather’s sinuses actually felt clear again.

As she pulled out her history book, Heather’s PDA spilled out, hitting the floor hard enough that Heather grabbed for it in a panic, turning it over in her hands to see if it had broken. She pressed the tiny “on” switch, holding her breath as she waited to see if it would respond.

If it was broken, she wouldn’t get another for the rest of the year. Five hundred dollars was a lot of money, and this little handheld computer had been a highly anticipated birthday present from her dad.

To her relief, the screen came to life, responding normally as she cycled through the program screens. Just as she was about to switch it off, Heather stopped, a sudden constriction clamping her chest. The PDA had made a wireless connection to the school's WIFI network and the trace-tracking program finished updating.

As Heather’s eyes scanned the data, it was clear that the NSA had drastically accelerated their progress since the last time Heather had checked. Entire branches of their network of agent programs had ceased reporting. The new trace rate leaped into her head with the force of a charging buffalo.

Heather signaled to Jennifer across the room, catching her eye and pointing to the PDA.

“Two hours!” Heather mouthed the words with increasing desperation, holding up two fingers, pointing to the PDA and then making a slashing motion across her own throat.

Jennifer looked confused, but then pulled out her own PDA computer. After several seconds, a look of horror crept onto her face.

Thank God, Heather thought as Jennifer began typing on her own PDA. At least Jennifer could send the launch command that would go across the network and uplink the Counter Trace Virus. Once that was complete, she could activate it. It hadn’t been tested, but it would have to do. They were out of time.

“You two!” Ms. Gorsky’s voice brayed like a kicked mule. “Heather McFarland and Jennifer Smythe. Bring those devices to my desk. Now! You know cell phones and PDAs are not allowed in the classroom.

“Come on. Switch them off and drop them right up here on my desk, young ladies. Then you can just waddle your little fannies down to Principal Zumwalt’s waiting room until I get a chance to get down there.”

Heather felt as if she had been slapped across the face. A glance at Jennifer’s terrified eyes gave her all the answer she needed. Jennifer wasn’t done.

Ms. Gorsky smacked her hand down on her desk. “I didn’t say for you to come up here when you got around to it. I said now.”

Heather and Jennifer scrambled to respond. Ms. Gorsky’s meaty hand reached out and snatched the PDA from Heather and then from Jennifer before either had a chance to lay them on her desk. She dropped them unceremoniously into a lime green bag bulging with homework papers.

“Now move it.”

As they made their way out into the hallway and the door closed behind them, Jennifer mumbled something that Heather couldn’t quite make out. Before she could ask Jennifer what she had said, though, Jennifer repeated it, then repeated it again, then again, all the way to the office. A single, three-word phrase.

“We are dead.”