Interrupt

by Tony Dwiggins

  "You taught him instead."

  "No. He already knew how to climb."

  "What?" Had Colson been a lineman?

  "He was at some ATT facility in Connecticut, about ten years ago. He took one of his sabbaticals, you know about those?"

  Andy nodded. Colson had his own way of dealing with whatever stresses devilled him. He simply left. If he had vacation time, he took it; if he didn't, he went without pay. He never told anyone where he was going, he never checked in while he was gone, and he didn't always return when he said he'd return. He'd taken a sabbatical a couple of months after Andy had joined R-TAC; Lloyd had calmly informed Andy when he came in to work that Colson had "gone over the fucking hill." After a six-day absence Colson showed up, unmarked by whatever he had experienced.

  "He turned up at the ATT pole farm and taught himself how to climb."

  "Pole farm?"

  "Yeah, they test telephone poles to see how they withstand weather and animal attacks. Anyway, he knew some guy there who let him climb the poles."

  "Ray told you about it?"

  "Ray doesn't explain." She shrugged, and her breasts disturbed the drape of her shirt. "He brought the equipment when we went up the hill. It was his idea to climb."

  "So you figured out the pole farm?" Andy stopped himself from reaching out to part the edges of her shirt.

  "No. Lloyd Narver told me about it."

  "Lloyd? How did he know about it?"

  "I don't know."

  Did Colson confide in Lloyd? "When did Lloyd tell you?"

  "A couple of days ago. I was waiting for my father." . "Why?"

  "Why what? Why did he tell me?"

  "Yes."

  "We got to talking about Ray and I asked him a few questions and it just came up."

  "Lloyd just happened to tell you that Ray took a sabbatical to a pole farm, how many years ago?"

  "It came up. If you must know, he teased me about you, and I bragged about you climbing the pole. We talked about that for a while, and then I asked if he knew how Ray learned to climb."

  "Why would you ask him that?"

  "Because he seemed to know so much about my father. I mean, no one knows a lot about Ray, but Lloyd knew some stories."

  "He never told me."

  She grinned. "You're jealous."

  "No, I'm not."

  "You think Lloyd was coming on to me."

  "Lloyd's married."

  "So?"

  So Lloyd didn't come on to women, Lloyd never talked about them, never talked about his wife. "What stories did he tell about Ray?"

  She crossed her arms, gave him a hard look. "Maybe I'll tell you sometime."

  "What's wrong?"

  "Nothing. I love being interrogated after sex."

  She was smiling, her eyes glinted gold and warm, but her arms remained crossed tight across her chest.

  "Christ, I'm sorry." Andy kissed her softly on the cheek, and when she turned her head, on the mouth. Through the screen of her hair he gazed at the manila envelope. The bulge in the envelope had the shape of a mag tape.

  CHAPTER 12

  Andy glared at the computer, turned his back on it, strode across the room to the window, shoved it open. Early-morning fog seeped in.

  He paced back to the computer. He had fed it the call records from the mag tape and now it was running his program SORT. But it was taking its own sweet time, plodding through the thousands of calls in a half-assed search for whatever it was that Candace had found in the records.

  If indeed she had found something there. Maybe whatever she found was in the code, somewhere in the programming that told the switch everything from how to send dial tone to how to wipe its nose. Maybe she hadn't found anything, maybe she was just going on a hunch.

  Strowger, he thought. It made no sense.

  Maybe whatever he was looking for existed only in his fevered brainpan.

  His neck was stiff, his eyes ached, and his stomach was acid with coffee.

  He went back to the window and let the fog chill him.

  He could taste a bitterness along with the fog. It wasn't the coffee. He connected the taste with an urge he had not felt since childhood. It was a single-minded schoolyard desire for revenge.

  Andy spun around and paced to the computer.

  The computer continued to sort. Scanning the numbers, searching, looking for multiple calls from/to the same number, calls from/to AT&T prefixes, from/to R-TAC, from/to anyone or any place that Andy could dream up or cast suspicion on in his dead-of-night programming. Patterns.

  More significantly, the computer was trying to find a match: a pattern that occurred before both switch failures. Whatever Candace had found had to be connected to both failures.

  Andy went back to the window. It was gray outside, the gray before dawn, cold weak light that wearied him to the bone. Too damn cold. He slammed the window shut.

  Suddenly, the printer clattered. Andy turned and watched, gripped, as if he had never seen a job run before. He tore off the printout.

  Behind him was Joe Faulkner's chair, its mahogany arm jutting into the back of his knee, nearly forcing him to sit. The chair had been brown suede once, but had been worn shiny and smooth as the scarred hide of an animal. He let himself down into his father's chair, braced a foot against the wall, and flipped to the last page of the printout.

  NUMBER PATTERNS FOUND, 458; NUMBER PATTERNS MATCHED, 0.

  Zero.

  The rule was, never panic. You crawl through the list and look at the patterns until you find something that means something. Four hundred and fifty-eight patterns. Columns of numbers, the number of the calling party, the number of the called party, the time, the duration of the call.

  His eyes were dry, scratchy, burning. He got a red pencil and began to work through the numbers.

  When the computer bell rang, it took him moments to surface. On-screen, a window had flipped up with a communication coming in through the modem: "Dialog requested."

  Who was calling him at dawn?

  As he stared, the communication changed to: "Will reinitiate dialog request at eleven." Whoever it was, was leaving a message. Andy sprang to the computer, hit the hot key, and logged a reply: "Accept dialog. Who's calling?"

  The answer rolled across his screen.

  "FLAME ON ********** u dont know me but I know u. Congratulations!!!!! Ive agreed to beam into yr system and set u straight, u may address me as Zot."

  The phreak, Andy thought. My God. He quickly typed, "Did Amin al-Masri ask you to contact me?"

  "Conceivably."

  "Are you the phone phreak who's been listening in on R-TAC?"

  "Ive told u my address is Zot and if u insist on a label it is COMMUNICATIONS HOBBYIST."

  Andy froze. This was going to be like trying to hold a weak signal on a scope: if you moved the wrong way, you lost it. He finally typed, "I apologize. Communications hobbyist. You must know a lot about the telephone system."

  "I know everything. More than u."

  Amin had told him about phreaks' egos. This one clearly was voracious. Andy thought a moment. Challenge him. He typed, "How could you? I have a Ph.D. in telecommunications and experience in design, research, and troubleshooting. What do you have?"

  "Consummate skill."

  "You also need information."

  "Yr bell telephone journal is available in any tech library. I cn call any switch office and get anyone to tell me ANYTHING cuz I cn use phone company jargon and sound just like one of u ***** they think anybody who talks like that is authentic. I cn get passwords. I cn call an operator and she thinks shes talking to a lineman and she will verify a line for me—patch me into a test loop—tell me anything. Im in yr system WHENEVER I want to be in it!"

  He was bragging, exaggerating. Andy didn't know a lot about the phreaking world, but he did share the common knowledge. Phreaking had begun in the sixties, when someone figured out that he could build a device that would produce the same tone signals as those that controlled
the telephone switching network. All he had to do was put the device against the mouthpiece and produce the frequencies needed to route his calls and turn off the toll-charge accounting. Soon there was a network of phreaks using these "blue boxes" to make free calls. Then they figured out how to build other spoofing devices, like red boxes that simulated the sounds of coins dropping into pay phones.

  The phone phreaks had finally ticked off AT&T. The phone company installed detection equipment on its circuits and began to catch the phreaks. These days, phreaks had expanded their territory to take in the broadband links. They were building beige boxes now, Andy had heard, moving pirated software around the Internet. What the hell else were they into?

  Zot might have consummate skill and every issue of the Bell Journal ever printed, but he couldn't have the kind of total access he was bragging about. That was the kind of access, Andy thought with a chill, that could get you into the processor of a 5ESS.

  Andy typed, "How long have you been a communications hobbyist?"

  "TEN YEARS!!!!!! ******* I came online when art was switching over to D so rite off the bat I had to learn the language."

  Andy could picture it, the whole phreaking underground scrambling to learn AT&T's new programming language, D.

  "I played around for a while," Zot was typing. "At first it was just enuf to be in the system. The communications switching system is the BIGGEST COMPUTER NETWORK IN THE WORLD and I was HUMBLE but then I learned the ropes. ******** HEY telephone man u shld take better care of those switches!"

  Andy searched the screen for the phreak behind the words, the guy who called himself Zot, who with his anonymity and arrogance assumed he had total control. He was a ghost, faceless, no more than an on-screen flicker. Andy typed, "Nobody knows what happened to those switches."

  "Nobody."

  "You don't know?"

  "Even I dont know."

  "I thought you knew everything."

  "About the system not about sicko *****hackers*****"

  "Was it a hacker?"

  "I dont know."

  "Why did you bring up hackers?"

  "Hackers give us a bad name!!!!"

  "Hackers or phreaks, what's the difference?"

  "Yr a troll. Listen up troll!!! The communications hobbyist is NOT in the business of sabotaging the system."

  "You're certainly into ripping it off."

  "Troll, its there for the taking if u have the skill. Troll if u picked up a pay phone and found an open line u wd use it. If u surfed the broadband without an account u'd order free movies till u zoned, u want me to educate u about credit card verifications and E-fund transfers????? u want me to show u what kind of pickings there r on the highway? BUT THAT'S NOT THE POINT!!!!! Im really not into that stuff."

  "What are you into?"

  "Purity. Im into the pure beauty and elegance of the system."

  Well, so am I, thought Andy. He typed, "Then you wouldn't want to see it damaged. You'd tell us if you knew anything about a...." Andy searched the keyboard, "*****hacker***** who's screwing with the switches."

  "Tell who? I wouldnt tell the cops I wouldnt tell the federal bureau of idiots and I wouldnt tell yr security goons."

  "Me. Tell me."

  "WHY shld I?"

  Flatter him. "Because you have access that I don't have. Because I need your help." Andy imagined the phreak, stretching and purring like a cat.

  "Yr not a communications hobbyist why shd I trust u?"

  "I work with a communications hobbyist," Andy typed. "She goes by the name Lady." He was getting good at this. Lying. The saying was right, he thought; Candace would roll over in her grave. "Do you know her?"

  "Lady. A cipher to me."

  Andy grimaced. Let it go. "Will you contact me if you learn something?"

  "Well well well troll we will see. U cn contact me thru yr friend or I might contact u. WE WILL SEE. ***** FLAME OFF."

  The window went blank. Zot was gone.

  Nothing. The phreak had given him nothing. He turned back to the printout. He tried to focus, but his eyes blurred.

  God, he was tired.

  He went into the kitchen. A black sludge was left in the coffeepot, so he drank tinny orange juice from the open can in the refrigerator. The thought struck him that he had become a phreak himself, angling to get into the system, to get access, a ghost who wouldn't go away.

  I know you, Zot had said, but you don't know me.

  Did the phreak mean that he knew about Andy because Amin had passed him a message to contact this poor sucker Faulkner, or did he mean that he knew all about Andy and his son and the TDDs, the way someone who was setting him up knew him?

  Sunlight suddenly breached the oleanders outside the kitchen window, slivering inside to shine the green counter tiles. Andy leaned into the counter and let the rays warm him.

  He closed his eyes.

  Sunlight and redwood tables and oaks and worn grass and the smell of frying grease. Rossotti's Alpine Beer Garden, up the road in the hills above Stanford. There were other hangouts: the burgers were better at the Oasis, chili came with the burgers at the Dutch Goose, but on a bright gold California day you wanted to eat charred meat outside with the sun on your back and the air smelling like trees instead of cars, so you went to Rossotti's. Sooner or later, almost every Stanford student made his way to "Zot's."

  Even a phone phreak named Zot?

  The phreak could have taken the name from a comic strip or a science fiction paperback or a hacker bulletin board. Or it could be that he called himself Zot because he liked the hamburgers at Zot's.

  Did Zot mean that he knew Andy because he had been at Stanford with Andy? Maybe he was one of Amin's chicks. If so, did Amin know that his chick was the phone phreak called Zot, or was Zot a ghost to Amin too?

  Somebody had set up Andy, and Andy had been a Stanford student.

  Stanford.

  Prefix 725.

  Andy bolted into his workroom. He was already pouring over the printout before he touched down into Joe Faulkner's chair. There were a good number of calls to or from Stanford numbers, especially on the night of the cutover at the Palo Alto office.

  He should write a new program, isolating all the numbers with Stanford prefixes, checking for patterns. But it took time to write a program and run it.

  He couldn't put down the pages.

  Something was there. He knew it the way he knew when he had a bug cornered in 5ESS, and he knew he would find it. His eyes were sharp and his head was clear as he ran through the printout.

  Most people could recall, if pressed, every phone number they'd ever had.

  725-6652.

  It stopped him cold.

  Oh yeah. He knew that number.

  The computer had printed it out as a two-call pattern. Two calls to that number, separated by fifteen seconds. The calls had been made about fifteen minutes before the switch failed at the cutover.

  Okay, he told himself, don't jump it. This meant nothing unless he could find the same pattern before the first switch failure. Hands shaking, he turned to the printout for that night, the night of the storm.

  Almost immediately, he found the pattern, two calls to 725-6652, less than an hour before Wayne's TDD call and the switch failure.

  His chest tightened. The time interval between these calls was over a minute. The time interval between the calls on the cutover night was fifteen seconds. The patterns didn't match. Just like the computer had said. NUMBER PATTERNS MATCHED, 0.

  He rubbed his hand across his eyes. But this was it; he felt it in his gut.

  He looked again, and his eye caught on another pattern woven in with the Stanford number. Two calls, about a minute apart, to 767-2676.

  He flipped back to the printout for the cutover and there it was again. Two calls to 767-2676, twenty seconds apart.

  Again, the same number, but the patterns didn't match.

  Oh, you idiot, he hissed.

  He grabbed his pencil and rapidly jotted the times of
the two patterns before each failure, subtracting to work out the time intervals. The pencil lead snapped and he cursed.

  Finally, he had it. Identical patterns before each switch failure. A match.

  The computer hadn't found it because he had told the computer to look for a matched pattern of phone numbers.

  This was a matched pattern of time intervals between calls.

  The night of the cutover, the guy called 725-6652. Then he waited fifteen seconds. Then he called the number again. Forty seconds passed. Then he called the other number, 767-2676. Twenty seconds passed, and he called that number again.

  The night before the storm, the guy called the numbers in a different order, but the times between the calls were the same.

  There it was. Sweet Jesus, there it was. But what? What the hell was it, other than a pattern of calls, one set to a Stanford number?

  He knew the Stanford number cold. 725-6652 was the phone number of Stanford's telecom lab. Anybody who had been an E.E. student in telecom had lived days and nights in that lab, and knew that phone number. He didn't recognize the other number.

  Candace had gone to Berkeley. Was the other number a Berkeley number, is that why she had found it?

  Andy snapped up the printout. First things first: where had the guy called from?

  Andy circled the originating numbers in red and carried the printout over to the phone. He dialed the number from the night of the storm. He listened through ten ring-backs, then hung up. Come on, he told himself, you didn't really expect the guy to answer the phone and offer to turn himself in. Maybe throw in an apology as well?

  He had better luck with the second number. Three ring-backs, and a peevish male voice answered, "Carolina Hotel."

  Andy's heart raced. "Uh ... is this, uh, which Carolina Hotel is this .. ." Come on. "Where are you located, please?"

  "Palo Alto." The voice wasn't offering any more.

  Keep him on the line. "Do you have any rooms available?"

  "How should I know, fella? You gotta call the front desk."

  He could picture a crabbed old man to match the voice. "I thought I was calling the front desk. Did I get your room by mistake?"