Interrupt

by Tony Dwiggins

  "You might be telling the truth. But you're clever, you're an expert, and you brought me a pattern match that no one on my tiger team would have found. You see how it is?"

  Andy saw.

  Feferman smiled gently. "As the lawman always says, don't leave town."

  "FLAME ON *********"

  Andy read the message on his computer again, trying to see it as Feferman would see it.

  "Hey troll have u seen this????? This is hi level secured stuff Im passing on ****** I didnt get it off the bulletin board u cn be sure. Read this NOW!!"

  Andy obeyed, rereading the message that Zot had passed along.

  One switch, two switches.... Two switches down, but I let them back up. What if the next 5ESS to go down doesn't come back up? And the next? And the next? How many will it take to convince you that your fives belong to me? Think about it. 5ESS is your major local-traffic switch. It's your most elegant switch. It took you years to develop and I can bring one down in seconds. Does that make your blood run cold? It should.

  Is 5ESS worth two million dollars to you? Two million in fifty-dollar bills. I'll let you know where to send them.

  One switch, two switches, three switches, four. Five switches, six switches, how many more?

  Yours truly, Interrupt.

  Andy stared at the screen. Interrupt. I have a name for you now, he whispered. He wondered if Feferman would know that an "interrupt" was a facility in ESS processors that stopped a program in progress to run a program more urgently needed.

  Interrupt. It was to the point. Andy thought that even Feferman's blood would run cold.

  He reread the rest of the message.

  "WELL TROLL how do u like that? A flaming sicko huh???? Thot u wld be interested,,,,,,still out of the loop huh? Think the telcos gonna PAY??????? Sincerely, Zot. ********** FLAME OFF"

  Andy wondered briefly how Zot had copied a message sent to top telco officials. No matter; phreaks undoubtedly had their methods. He hit a key and printed a hard copy of the message. He unlocked the desk drawer and put the message in the folder containing the tape of the call records and his program run. As he relocked the drawer, he realized that his security was laughable.

  Two thoughts overloaded his mind.

  One, if Interrupt planned to shut down another number five, shut it down permanently, whose phone number was going to be the trigger?

  Two, if Feferman had ordered all records confiscated, and Robocop had checked Andy's file cabinet at R-TAC, why hadn't he taken the mag tape? And if he had, where had Nell gotten the tape that she brought him?

  CHAPTER 14

  She wore a dress and carried a purse. The dress was yellow, soft-looking, modest—cut just below the collarbone and reaching below the knees. The yellow of the dress burnished her eyes, so that they were more gold than ever. Her hair was loose and wavy, catching in the neck of the dress as she turned her head. She wore white sandals, the ones she had worn in the van. He had expected her to show up in jeans and workshirt, carrying tools. The purse was small; it couldn't hold much more than a tiny screwdriver.

  "Thanks for coming, Nell." He opened the door to her.

  As she moved past him, he saw that her hair was damp. He shut the door, closeting them in the narrow entry hall, and caught the smell of shampoo.

  She smiled and leaned toward him, tentative. The dress, the sandals, the washed hair—he thought this was all for him and he should kiss her. He could remember the press of her lips. But if he kissed her now, it would be impossible to do what he had asked her to come for.

  He said, "The phones...."

  She straightened. "To business, then?"

  "I'm sorry. Would you like something to drink?"

  "No," she said, "let's get to work." She was the lineman then, striding into his living room. She headed straight for the gray Trimline on the corner table.

  His wife had bought this phone, and agonized over the color choice. But she had neglected to take it with her when she left. Nobody remembers a phone when listing community property, he thought.

  "I need a screwdriver," Nell said.

  He got her one from his workroom.

  She followed the phone cord to the wall junction, unscrewed the plate, and inspected the box. "It's clean." She turned to the phone set, disassembled it, studied the insides, and shook her head. He wanted to take the phone from her, tell her he'd already gone over it as thoroughly as she had, and his fingers actually twitched as he watched her work.

  "They trained you to do this?"

  She answered without looking at him, "They train us to check for devices while doing routine installation and repair. Basically, anything that we could find in a phone set or hooked to a line. They also train security people to look for stuff."

  Feferman, he thought.

  "Don't worry," she said, glancing at him, "I know my stuff."

  He nodded.

  She turned back to the phone. "Actually, a wiretap is pretty easy to install because it takes advantage of the basic operation of the phone. You have a microphone," she tapped the mouthpiece, "and a speaker," she tapped the earpiece, "and a wire to transmit your signals. And that's what the eavesdropper wants to do, pick up your conversation and transmit it."

  "Yeah, I know how a telephone works." Having her do this was a mistake, but they were into it now and he was feeling a cold nervous dread.

  Her eyes narrowed, hooded; he saw Colson in her. She abruptly returned to inspecting the phone. "Nothing there."

  "Then this phone isn't tapped."

  She replaced it on the table and faced him, all business. "There's no device on this phone. But all the eavesdropper needs is access somewhere within the phone system to the wires that carry the signals of your telephone. There could be a tap spliced into the wires between here and the central office. The problem then is, obviously, where."

  Andy thought a moment. "But he'd need cable and pair information. He'd need to know which two wires are connected to my phone."

  "Congratulations," she said. "You know how the telephone system works."

  He flinched. "I deserved that."

  "You sure did." Her mouth, taut like Colson's, relaxed into the familiar smile. "Okay, Andy, any more phones?"

  He regretted that he hadn't kissed her when she came in the door, hadn't thanked her for the yellow dress and the damp hair.

  He led the way into his workroom and stopped just behind her as she examined it. He turned his head in unison with hers, seeing the racks of electronics parts, the desk and computer, the brick and board bookshelves, the worn brown chair.

  She traced the cord from the brown desk phone to the wall junction and checked out the box. She paused there, kneeling a moment as if in prayer, then shook her head, and he wondered if she had considered a way to avoid the phone set. But she stood and went to the desk. No, he wanted to say, stop. But he let her disconnect the jack from the phone, take it apart, and look inside. It didn't take long.

  "Andy!" In a quick, expert movement she plucked out the transmitter and whirled around to face him. Her dress flared out like a dancer's. Her eyes sparked, flashes of gold, and she held up the transmitter between thumb and forefinger for him to see.

  He remembered Feferman plucking out the same transmitter with a grunt of success.

  "Andy, it's a drop-in bug!" She held it out to him, forced him to take it. "It's real common. You replace the microphone capsule in the handset with this bug. It looks just about the same as the real transmitter, and it operates off the line voltage. You wouldn't even have known it was there. It doesn't add any noise on the line." Her cheeks flushed. "People sometimes think that a bug or a wiretap is going to make noise. People call us up and report that they're being tapped because they hear clicking noises on the line."

  Andy closed his hand over the transmitter, felt it cold and hard against his skin as he had felt it when Feferman had given it to him.

  "Well," she was saying, "you were bugged."

  He stared at her. Unlike
Feferman, he was not a student of psychology. He hadn't known what to expect: she would be cool and detached, or surprised, or furtive, or excited, as she was now. He didn't know what that meant; maybe she could hide surprise, she could act detached when she was excited, she could pretend to be excited when she wasn't. Or she could be excited for reasons he could only guess at.

  She had brought up wiretaps, in the van before they made love, and a student of psychology might wonder whether she wanted him to take up the idea, look for a wiretap, look for a bug, and find it. It wasn't hard to find if you thought you might be tapped; it was, as she had said, real common.

  Why would she want him to find this bug? He opened his hand, rolled the thing around in his palm. Maybe, the thought coming to him like a nugget uncovered, it was a decoy.

  Andy walked over to the dismembered phone and dropped the bug beside it. "Well, whoever put it there, it's dead now, thanks to you." He didn't look at her.

  She moved closer to him, he could smell her hair. "I'm glad I could help."

  "Nell, could there be another one?"

  "What?"

  "Maybe this is a decoy." He kept his eyes on the cleverly designed little bug.

  "What do you mean?"

  "Maybe someone wanted me to find this. If I found it, I would feel that I had cleared my phones and I was secure. Then if there was another device, I wouldn't be likely to look for it." Bait and switch, he thought. He sounded like Feferman.

  "Andy, a couple of days ago you didn't even believe that you could be bugged." She lowered her voice, mimicking his. "No one is going to bug a telephone engineer."

  " You believed my phones might be tapped. A good guess."

  She crossed her arms over her chest. "What are you getting at?"

  "I'm wondering if you missed something."

  "Well, then, maybe you better hire an expert." Her voice was pitched low, but no longer mimicking. "If you have several hundred dollars to spare. Or buy a wiretap detector. Or build one yourself; you're the Ph.D. engineer from Stanford."

  "Stanford didn't offer a course in hunting down wiretaps."

  "Then what do you want from me?"

  He wanted her to say that there were some things she wouldn't do to impress her father. He wanted her to say that she had found the call records tape in his file cabinet and that's all she knew about it. He wanted her to say that as far as she knew, her father had nothing to do with any of this, and if he did have something to do with it, that she would not help him. And he wanted to believe her.

  He said, "I'd like you to finish checking for taps. There's a phone in Wayne's room."

  She glanced down and plucked at her dress, as if regretting the choice. "Let's go, then."

  He led her across the hall into Wayne's bedroom. She looked around curiously, at the computer, the printer, the TDD, the shelf full of disks. He thought, expensive gear for an eleven-year-old.

  "Like father like son," she said.

  He glanced, like a guilty man, at Wayne's bookshelf and saw the biography of the Roeblings shoved in between a C. S. Lewis fantasy and an Ameslan handbook.

  "Where is he?" she asked.

  "At a friend's."

  She inspected Wayne's phone and wall jack. "It's clean."

  "So no more taps? Or bugs?"

  "Andy, I don't know. Yeah, sure, there could be something. I mean this stuff gets really weird, sophisticated." She brushed past him to the wall, snatched down a framed photo of the space shuttle, and peered at the picture hook fastened into the Sheetrock. "I heard about a bug that's hidden in a picture hook, in the spike that goes into the wall. I don't know what it looks like, this looks okay to me, you want to check it out? Maybe you'd better check out all your picture hooks."

  He stared at the picture hook. It was perfectly normal as far as he could tell.

  She said, "Andy, why do you think I'm checking out your phones? Why do you think I got you the tape?"

  "You said you wanted to help me."

  "And?"

  "Why did you?"

  She crossed her arms. "Are engineers physically unable to describe their feelings?"

  "Oh."

  "Oh?"

  His heartbeat ramped up. How many engineers would constitute a fair sample? On the basis of Ray Colson and himself, she had a good case.

  He took her hand, pulling her out of Wayne's room into the hallway, and faced her squarely. "I'll give it a shot," he said. "I really like you."

  "That's nice." She sounded amused.

  It was a fair description, he thought. Was liking somehow devalued because people could like both their neighbors and their lovers? How did you calibrate the degrees of difference? She was right: engineers were probably innately unable to describe their feelings because they were always striving for accuracy. He suddenly thought that the only feeling that he could describe accurately was love for his son.

  He felt the warmth of her hand in his. "I'm very attracted to you," he said.

  "Do you trust me?"

  His stomach clenched. "Yes," he said, because it was what they both wanted to hear.

  "You don't act like it."

  "I trust you."

  "Then tell me if you found anything on that tape I brought you."

  "Yes," he said. "Some interesting calls."

  "Tell me."

  "Just some interesting patterns of calls."

  "Well, what does that mean?"

  He had just told her that he trusted her. The lying came more and more easily.

  She looked at him coolly. "Forget it."

  He let go of her hand. "The calls could give someone access to the switch. A way of triggering the failures."

  Something flickered in her eyes: interest. Like Colson abruptly homing in on a piece of data he found provocative. "Pattern," she said softly. Then she grinned. "Well, why didn't you say so? Doesn't that clear you?"

  "No. It's just part of the puzzle. There's something missing. I need to look...."

  "Andy."

  "What? You know something?"

  "Are there any more wall jacks in your house?"

  He shook his head. Wiretaps again. "Just the three phones."

  "Wall jacks, Andy. Is there a wall jack anywhere that you didn't hook up your phones to?"

  "Could be, I don't know."

  "How about in the master bedroom? People always want to have a phone in the master bedroom."

  He didn't. If the phone rang while he was asleep, he liked to get out of bed and wake up before he answered it.

  "This is your bedroom?" She was already moving across the hallway.

  His bedroom, more than any other room in the house, looked like a rental, as if the occupant had just arrived or was about to vacate the premises. The only piece of furniture that was his was the bedside table, a slab of birch from the Adirondacks, mounted on wrought-iron tripod legs and stacked with books and journals. The walls were bare but for a print, a birthday present from Wayne: a close-up drawing of a printed circuit board with the capacitors and resistors sticking up like buildings and the soldered joints like roads winding through the miniature city. The focal point was a train chugging along silvery soldered railroad tracks. It was a joke: a reference to the fact that many people thought that what engineers did was drive trains.

  He had heard it said that a room reflects the person who lives there. If he could have afforded it, he would have bought a Seurat and hung it on one of the bare walls. Seurat's pointillist style appealed to him. The pictures were made entirely of tiny dots, done with a technician's skill, but when the viewer looked at the picture all the dots merged into a whole that became an image of life.

  "Andy, is there a jack behind the bed?" She tugged at one edge of his double bed.

  "I don't know. The bed was here when I came. I haven't moved it." He took hold of the other side of the bed and helped her pull it away from the wall.

  She crouched onto the bed, her dress pooling like sunlight on the spread, and peered down at the wall. Seurat ha
d painted a girl in a yellow dress, a circus bareback rider in a yellow dress flying up as the horse galloped. Thousands of yellow dots.

  "Andy, look."

  Her voice was quiet; this time, she was controlling her excitement. He leaned forward on the bed, taking his weight on his knees, and looked where she was looking.

  There was a wall jack behind the bed. A telephone cord was plugged into the jack, and it led under the bed.

  He reached down, took hold of the cord, and gently pulled. A small rectangular box slid into view. Andy reeled in the box like a fish on a line and let it down on the bed between them.

  The box was thin, made of beige plastic. There was a switch, which could be moved to positions marked A and B. There was a dial, which could be turned to number 1, 2, 3, or 4, and below the dial it said Area Selection. The dial was set on number 1. Andy touched a fingertip to the switch, then withdrew it. "Do you know what it is?"

  Nell didn't touch it. "It would have a microphone inside, and use the phone line as a carrier."

  "Nell, what the hell is it?"

  "It looks like an infinity transmitter."

  It sounded like Wayne's science fiction.

  "The idea's simple. The eavesdropper hooks it up, calls your number from another phone, and presses a button on the phone dial that activates the transmitter. Then the microphone picks up whatever is said here and transmits it."

  "For how long?"

  "For however long someone leaves it on."

  Jesus.

  "This isn't like the bug," she said. "That just picks up what you say on the phone. This picks up what you say... anytime."

  He asked, tight, "Why is it called an infinity transmitter?"

  "Because the eavesdropper can call from just about any phone anywhere in the world. Infinite."

  Andy stared at the box. A microphone and a transmitter: a crude telephone. But this wasn't a telephone lying on his bed, it was a perversion of a telephone.

  What was Interrupt trying to pick up, bedroom talk? An icy fury coursed through him. "What's the range?"

  She glanced down at the bed, then back at him, her face suddenly flushed. "That depends. On how sensitive the microphone is."