Colson said, "What's your point, Feferman?"
"No one can account for Mr. Faulkner's whereabouts for a good fifteen minutes between the time that he left the control room and the time he returned in response to the page."
"I went to the buffet table to..."
"The cutover call was a setup," Feferman said, "but who set it up?"
"Why would he set himself up?" the veep asked.
Andy appealed to the camera. "I didn't."
"Unfortunately, you can't verify that." Feferman strolled behind Andy, trailing his piney scent.
Andy craned to look at Feferman. "It doesn't make sense. Why would I make a fake phone call from my son that could be so easily traced? Why wouldn't I have just told Wayne to call me at the cutover?"
"Because you wanted it to look like someone was setting you up?" Feferman asked in a friendly curious tone.
"Why would I want to do that?"
"Because you were going to make a phone call that would trigger a very costly and distressing failure of a brand-spanking-new 5ESS, and you wanted to have a cover?" Feferman asked, even more deferentially.
Colson was staring at Andy, eyes hooded. Buck and How-land leaned forward, four beefy muscular arms pressing on the table. The veep watched, immobile, as if the camera had caught him in a freeze frame.
"Do you people think I'm an idiot?" Andy said. "If I was purposely triggering switch failures, why, would I do it from my own phone? Why would I do it with a TDD when God knows how many people know I use a TDD? Do you think I'm a fucking idiot?"
Feferman was standing across from Andy, still at last. He slowly shook his head. "No, Mr. Faulkner, I think you're the opposite of an idiot. I think you're smart enough to know that phone calls leave records and that records will be analyzed, and that triggers will be found."
"If I'm so smart, then why didn't I invent a more sophisticated trigger?"
"I think you're smart enough to anticipate that my crack tiger team would eventually find this sophisticated trigger."
"No," said Andy.
"You make it look like you were set up, and then you protest that you wouldn't be stupid enough to set yourself up."
"Then it's him," Buck said.
Feferman extended his two forefingers, then crossed them. "We do have a crosspoint here. He has the skill." Feferman wagged one forefinger. "And he had the opportunity." He wagged the other. "But I have to admit I'm still curious about his motive. Why did he become a telephone man?"
On-screen, the veep said, "Mr. Feferman, are you making a binding accusation against Mr. Faulkner?"
"No," said Feferman. "He might be telling the truth. Anybody could have gone into that phone booth. Somebody from the cutover, somebody from across town, somebody who flew in on United and got a rental car at the airport and drove into town. That person might be a confederate of Mr. Faulkner; then again, he—or she—might not. Or maybe it's 'they,' we might have a conspiracy brewing."
The veep leaned forward in his chair, way forward, his head obscuring the better part of the New York skyline. "Conspiracy to do what?"
"Sabotage switches," Feferman answered, politely puzzled.
"What switches?"
"We have been discussing number five, ESS. Do you have something else in mind?"
The veep filled the screen, obliterating the skyline. "Well yes, goddammit, I have our entire network in mind."
Andy sat bolt upright.
Feferman pirouetted to Colson. "Do we have any indication that our entire network is under attack?"
"We have an unexplained failure mode in the number five." Colson regarded the screen. "To make the leap from this to... a sabotage... of the entire system is unsupported."
Feferman blinked. "You mean just because we have someone robbing an automatic teller machine, we shouldn't worry that the entire banking system is about to be bilked?"
"No." Colson laced his fingers. "The relation of an automatic teller to the machinery of the banking system is not analogous to the relation of five ESS to the rest of the network."
Andy said, "I don't see how a trigger phone call routed through the number five can ..."
"For Christ's sake!" the veep broke in, "I just want to know if what happened to the fives can happen to the rest of the network. What about long distance? Christ, what about broadband, can this happen to the video and data links too? Will somebody just find out if this can happen to our backbone switches?"
Feferman bowed his head in acknowledgement.
"I advise your tiger team to start with the source code in the affected switches," Colson said.
Feferman's huge shoulders bunched in irritation. "Thank you again, Mr. Colson." He sat down beside Buck and How-land, dwarfing them. "So here's what we're going to do. We have a lot of work ahead of us. Day and night, we're going to sleep on cots, we're going to live on sandwiches and coffee, no family time, no days off, we're going to snoop into every corner and hound everyone who so much as coughs at the wrong time. And we're going to live in Mr. Faulkner's back pocket."
Andy's head ached. Feferman was draining him, every word drilling into his skull.
"So what about Mr. Faulkner?" the veep asked.
Feferman braced his elbow on the table and pointed his forefinger at Andy. He cocked his thumb like a trigger, then snapped it down. "Mr. Faulkner and his son have new telephone numbers. He will also receive a brand-spanking-new set of TDDs, courtesy of AT&T."
Andy looked at Feferman in surprise. That was fine, that was perfectly reasonable.
Feferman turned to Colson. "And I recommend—you understand 'recommend' being a courteous way of saying I demand—that you suspend Mr. Faulkner while we find out who is diddling with the telephones."
"No." Andy whipped around to face Colson.
Colson laced his fingers together and regarded Feferman. Finally, he nodded. "I'm sorry, Andy," Colson said, still looking at Feferman, "but I'm going to have to suspend you."
High and dry, Andy thought wildly, high and dry. It was a telco term for when a phone went dead. You were just hanging out there, high and dry.
"With pay," Colson said to Feferman. "The man has a son."
CHAPTER 6
"Hello? I don't hear you. Hello?"
"Hello, Lloyd."
"Andy-man!"
"Yeah."
"How you doing?"
"Just great."
"We're all great here. Having a wine and cheese party to celebrate your abrupt departure. Except with you taking a vacation and Candace on a top-secret mission, we have to do your share of the work."
"It'll make you better engineers."
"Hard to get any engineering done with all the security around here."
"Security's tight?"
"Fuck security. I hope they're listening."
A long pause.
* * *
Interrupt flicked the switch, shutting off the tape. Faulkner's voice was strung tight. Joking, just like everything was normal, but he sounded like a man who was sinking.
The tautness in Faulkner's voice made Interrupt relax.
This was a good room to relax in. Cramped, but neat. Spotless as a lab. Electronics parts were stored in see-through plastic boxes, each type of component to its own box. Interrupt had, as a child, played with a tin box filled with electronics parts. Transistors, capacitors, resistors, diodes, fuses, plugs—scoop a handful from the box and rain them down onto a tabletop. They were like tiny multicolored insects with hard exoskeletons. Then one day, Interrupt couldn't remember exactly how or when, the realization came that one could use the little insects, make them perform stunning little feats. Mastery of the insects gave one control over things that made the world work. And the silly child, who had spent so much time playing aimlessly with the components of power, began to study them seriously.
Little insects, Interrupt thought, flicking the tape recorder back on.
"....and fuck Colson."
"It wasn't Colson's fault. He had no choice." But F
aulkner sounded ticked off.
"Just following orders. The Nuremberg defense."
"He saved my paycheck."
"Well, he hasn't been crying over your absence here."
"He only cries at beautiful sunsets." Laughter on both ends.
Then Faulkner, hesitant. "Lloyd, I need a little help."
"That you do."
* * *
Interrupt punched the pause button. Andy Faulkner, telecom star, needs a little help.
A little help from his friends.
So be it.
Interrupt did a short rewind, to be sure not to miss the next part, then hit "play."
"....a little help."
"That you do."
"I need a look at the code."
"If there's anything in the code, Andy, the tiger team's going to find it."
"Maybe. But I'm the one who's high and dry out here. Maybe whoever trashed the switches left fingerprints in the code. Something. Some record of how he got into the switch."
"You already looked. We all looked."
"We got started. Come on, Lloyd, we had how many million lines of programming code to wade through? I want to look again, I want into that code." A long pause, then Faulkner cleared his throat. "Can you get me the password, get me access?"
No answer, just even breathing.
"I'll say I forced you at gunpoint."
"It's not that, Andy-man. They've gone security mad here. They're redoing the memory protect, they're squeezing data access and program access. We can't debug without a fucking license. You gotta be able to translate Russian into Swahili to figure out the password. We don't even have access to the toilet without a hall pass."
"Can you at least get me a printout of the source code? There must have been five or six copies floating around."
"Security owns them now."
"Then how about the call records?"
"Security."
"Look, I ordered a mag tape of the call records after the cutover, I never got a chance to do anything with it, but it should be in my file cabinet."
"Your file cabinet is in the DMZ. I know. I watched some guy who looked like Robocop slap locks on your cabinet and your desk, and I just managed to stop him before he poured cement into your workstation."
"Shit."
"Don't swear. Colson has a key. Colson glowered and insisted he had to have access to all records in his kingdom."
"Security and Colson are the only ones who have the key?"
"They didn't give me a key. You want me to transfer you to Colson and you can ask him for it?"
"I'm off the team, man. Colson's code of ethics is binary, on or off. When you're on the team, it's total loyalty, and when you're off the team you're dead."
"Good point, Andy-man. You're fucking dead."
"Maybe. Where does Colson keep the key? In his desk?"
"We all lock our desks now, Andy. We tear up our phone messages and eat them. We wear chastity belts. You can thank Security."
"How hard is it to open a locked desk? Or a locked file cabinet?"
Interrupt stopped the tape again. What expression was on Faulkner's face when he suggested.... well, it was burglary, wasn't it? Did his face show pain? Fear? Disgust? Something, something gut-wrenching, because Faulkner, too, clearly had a binary code of ethics—right or wrong. It was there in his face.
So do I, thought Interrupt. Right or wrong.
Interrupt let the tape continue.
* * *
"....a locked file cabinet?"
Another pause. The line hissed faintly.
Finally, "You want me to ask around, Andy?"
"I want... I want you to do whatever you're willing to do. Whatever's right. It's my file cabinet, my records."
"What's fucking right isn't always what's fucking smart."
"Lloyd, I need to see those records."
"Why don't you ask your girlfriend?"
"What?"
"Nell Colson. The daughter of the man with the key to the call records."
"What do you mean, my girlfriend?"
"You still brain-damaged? What do you think I mean?"
"She's not my girlfriend." Faulkner sounded embarrassed, like an adolescent.
"She was in here this morning, to see Daddy, but she wanted to talk about you. Were you okay? Were you very unhappy? I told her they were going to shoot you at dawn."
"Great idea, Lloyd. I'll just ask Nell to break into her father's locked desk. Maybe I should get to know her first, what do you think, ask her out to a movie?"
"I think she'd do it."
"But you wouldn't?"
"It's different. A difference in opportunity. She's his daughter, she can get a look in his desk. If she gets caught, she can say she broke a fingernail and she was trying to find a file. A woman can get away with things that a man can't."
"Jesus, Lloyd, you let Candace hear you talking like that, she'll nail you to the wall."
"You disagree?"
"I agree she has a unique opportunity. That's it."
"So ask her."
"Sure."
"Will you forget the fucking Stanford ethics code? Ask."
"Honor code."
"Whatever."
"Thanks, Lloyd, I..."
Interrupt cut it. The Stanford honor code. The big-deal Stanford honor code.
The first time Interrupt had seen the word "Stanford" was in Telephony. Reading the magazine the way Mother read the Bible, fervently, but always impatient for the next issue while she was content to reread verses she knew by heart.
But this article, this one Interrupt had read again and again.
The article had been titled "Filling the Gaps on Transatlantic Cable." The cables that ran beneath the Atlantic connecting telephone traffic between North America and Europe were vastly inefficient, the article began. Because of the way signals were transmitted, each cable was in use less than half the time. During any given telephone conversation, there were pauses, and these pauses ate up valuable transmission time. But a new technique, called Time Assignment Speech Interpolation, or TASI, promised to double the capacity of the costly submarine cables. The new circuitry could detect the instant that a speech element began, locate an inactive portion of the transmission channel, and assign the unused space to the speech element. What TASI did was wedge portions of one conversation into the pauses that were occurring in another conversation.
Interrupt had sat on a tree stump in the yard, rough and uneven, and admired the beauty of TASI.
But there was more. The article had quoted one of the engineers who contributed to TASI, a research associate at Stanford University's innovative Center for Telecommunications. "At Stanford," the engineer boasted, "we design elegance." The article had described the Stanford engineers as "stars."
In the following days and weeks, reading the article again and again, Interrupt had begun to say it out loud. "At Stanford we design elegance." And, saying it out loud, Interrupt had set a course: to study at Stanford and become a Stanford engineer, one of the stars. That was a promise.
Interrupt stared at the tape recorder. Faulkner was one of the stars.
Suddenly, Interrupt struck out, hitting a row of plastic boxes, and components exploded throughout the room, clattering against the walls and raining to the floor.
Hard little insects scattered and mixed up on the floor. Inelegant.
A scratch bloodied one finger. Interrupt sucked the wound and thought again, there is right and there is wrong.
CHAPTER 7
Nell was climbing in front of him, picking her way up the trail with the ease of a browsing deer. This time she wasn't wearing the jeans and blue workshirt; her short white blouse skimmed her waist and her pink corduroy pants were rolled up to her knees, rolled far enough to show how tanned and finely shaped her legs were. The bulky pack on her back rode smoothly.
"You want to rest?" Nell called, not looking back.
The pack he carried dug into his shoulders. He turned to ch
eck Wayne, hiking too close behind him in the rutted trail. The kid wasn't even sweating.
Beyond Wayne, the hill swept downward in a wide slope and knee-high golden grasses softened its contours. He took a deep breath. But there was no real sense of height. He let it out.
They had come well over halfway up. He could see a long way: there wasn't much on the hillside but stands of oak and scattered poppies. Down below the hills were the red tile roofs of the Stanford campus.
He turned. "We don't need to stop," he said to Nell's back.
This was not the way he wanted it. He had wanted the two of them, without Wayne, in some uncomplicated place—a coffee shop, a park. He would have preferred to just do it over the phone. He had called her, every telephone call now made with a touch of dread. When he stumbled like a teenager, she had spoken up and invited him and Wayne on a picnic. He could think of no way to refuse her invitation.
Up ahead, Nell disappeared into a fringe of oaks. Andy and Wayne followed up the trail, through the trees, and emerged onto the spine of a ridge.
The first thing that caught his eye was a line of telephone poles sticking up along the ridge. They led toward a concrete-block building in the distance. He remembered that Stanford's engineering departments maintained some labs up here.
Nell was under a large oak, tramping down the grass. They dropped the packs and she opened the one he'd carried, pulling out a blanket. He grabbed a corner and helped her lay it out on the flattened grass.
They sat in a triangle on the blanket, and she pulled containers out of the pack and dished up plates of food. Falafels, tabbouleh salad, Greek olives, pears, cans of juice, a box of gingersnaps.
"This looks great," said Andy, accepting a paper plate. There was no way he was going to be able to ask her about the call records.
She handed Wayne a plate, then turned to Andy and whispered, "How did he get to be deaf?"
"He was born deaf." Andy faced Nell. "But he lip-reads. Whispering won't help."
"It can't be fixed?"
Interrupt Page 6
