Interrupt

by Tony Dwiggins

  He had.

  He stiffened. No, he hadn't. He had looked for Interrupt's channel, not for Interrupt. Look for Interrupt.

  The first rule was, never panic. Start again.

  Okay. If Interrupt planted a Trojan horse in the compiler, he had to have access to the compiler. Somehow he had to get to the compiler program. Maybe he worked at the software development center and was able to insert his Trojan horse, but that meant he would have shut down the system and reinitialized without anybody ...

  FLAME ON!!! One more shot through his tired brain. On-line with Zot, what was it the phreak had said? He'd been doing this ten years, he'd started when AT&T was implementing D....

  Yeah. Software for the 5ESS switches was written in the programming language D. D was developed ten years ago. And when they developed D, they had to write a compiler to translate the D source code into machine language.

  One way, one very elegant way, to plant a Trojan horse in a compiler would be to do it when the compiler was being written.

  The crosspoint. Ten years ago?

  Andy spun off the bench.

  CHAPTER 19

  His son had been gone eighteen and one-half hours.

  Andy gripped the book and thought about crosspoints. A crosspoint was the place in a switching network where two communications channels intersected. The switching element sat right at the intersection and connected the channels.

  The Faulkner family had been like two communications channels that could never manage to intersect.

  Elaine and Tammy Faulkner, wife and daughter to Joe, mother and sister to Andy, had of necessity formed a unit, one channel. Joe Faulkner, and for a time Andy, had formed the other channel.

  Elaine and Tammy had never been invited to a bridge construction site; they were taken to the opening ceremony and allowed to admire the finished product. They appreciated, as Joe told Andy, the "aesthetics" of it. Bridge as art. If Elaine and Tammy had been aware that women were cracking the male fraternity of engineering, they kept that awareness to themselves. If Joe had thought of his women in connection with engineering, then the image was crystallized in the form of Washington Roebling's wife. After the crippling accident confined Washington to a room overlooking the rising girders of the Brooklyn Bridge, he used his wife as a messenger to convey his blueprints and instructions to the workers below.

  So Elaine and Tammy created their own channel. Art. They studied, they took lessons, they collected on a very modest scale, they talked about Monet and Motherwell when Joe took Andy to his workroom. Tammy revealed a true flair for drawing, but she never, ever took as her subject one of Joe's bridges.

  After Andy fell from Joe's grace, he had more time with his mother and sister. He tagged along on trips to galleries and museums. He made his own discoveries, developed an appreciation for one or two artists, but Elaine and Tammy affectionately dismissed him as a "nuts-and-bolts guy." He had been in Joe's channel too long, had been firmly cast in the Roebling mold. He had an engineer's heart, an engineer's soul. They loved him, they laughed at his jokes, they took him along, but they did not take him seriously.

  Andy had seen a crosspoint in the two channels of his family and he tried to explain it to Elaine and Tammy, to Joe. There was art in engineering and there was engineering in art—the two channels met at a crosspoint. But he was the only Faulkner who saw it. A switching element that could not perform its job, could not connect the channels to form a communications path.

  Now, holding the book, he knew the same frustration, of seeing a crosspoint as clearly as if it were drawn in fine black lines on cross-section ruled graphing paper, and knowing that the lines would not intersect for other eyes. He thought about trying to explain his crosspoint to Feferman. A remark made by a phone phreak. A bus driver's faulty attempts to interpret sign.

  And what is the crosspoint? Feferman would ask.

  Where the language intersects the compiler, Andy would answer. When they developed a new language, they had to develop a new compiler. And Interrupt had to have been there to plant the Trojan horse in the compiler.

  That was ten years ago, Feferman would say. Are you proposing that we look back ten years for the solution? Are you claiming that Interrupt would wait ten years to set off his Trojan horse?

  Remember the story about Mr. Strowger, Andy would say. You wanted to know what Candace meant about Strowger. Here it is: the big picture. Interrupt has built something that will shake the telephone system to its foundation, just as that undertaker shook it. I know him. He's single-minded, he never gives up. He's like John Roebling. Did you ever read the biography of the Roeblings?

  Feferman would look at him blankly.

  Put it this way, Andy would sum up, holding himself steady. Interrupt has killed to protect his Trojan horse. He has kidnapped. You think him incapable of a ten-year wait?

  That's a long time to wait. Feferman, bland and obstinate. Just as Elaine and Tammy had, as Joe had, Feferman would refuse to see the crosspoint.

  So Andy needed data, he needed proof. If Feferman and his team could use the data to thwart Interrupts Trojan horse, fine. But that wasn't Andy's agenda. He was going to discover the identity of Interrupt and prove it to Feferman, and Feferman was going to have Interrupt arrested and forced to reveal where Wayne was. Torn apart if necessary.

  The book in his hands was the first data point. AT&T documented everything, especially a major project like D, the first new switching language since its predecessor C was developed in the early 1970s. The engineers who contributed to D deserved recognition.

  He found it in Appendix iii: a list of seventeen names, seventeen engineers who worked on the D project.

  One of them had to be Interrupt.

  Andy took the book into the library's copier room and photocopied Appendix iii. He replaced the book on the shelf and walked outside.

  It was a perfect May day, with a bright sky clean as if scraped by a knife. He sat on Wayne's favorite bench, favorite because sitting at one end was a statue of a man so lifelike that people hurrying into the Sunnyvale library often mistook him for real. Holding a book in one hand, a sandwich in the other hand, head bent over the book. The book was in Spanish. Andy and Wayne had looked once, snooping over the statue's shoulder. As lifelike as he seemed, the metal man had the kind of stillness that Andy noticed in the deaf.

  Andy read through the appendix list and read it again. He knew nobody on the list, it was as unilluminating as the Spanish text. Several names were familiar, but he couldn't be sure whether he had seen the names on technical papers or heard them at AT&T. Or at Stanford.

  Three of the engineers were women. He had built Interrupt in his mind as a man, but he supposed that Interrupt could be a woman. Nell, her name pierced his mind, but she wasn't an engineer. Was she? I took some engineering. Her voice was clear and amused in his mind. No, not Nell.

  He realized that one of the names on the list could be Zot.

  He folded the paper. There were two things that he was certain of. Number one, that Interrupt had been on the D team, because he must have had access to the compiler as it was being written at the AT&T software development center in Morristown, New Jersey. Number two, that Interrupt had some connection to Stanford. He wouldn't have chosen the phone number of the telecom lab, he wouldn't have known it otherwise.

  He needed to find the crosspoint here, where the channels intersected. Which name, or names, on the list had a Stanford connection?

  "Hoover Tower is two hundred and fifty feet high," the student guide was saying, her hand resting on the control panel. Andy fixed his gaze on her hand, on her fingers splayed beneath the red emergency stop button, and silently counted, counting off the feet, feet rapidly dropping away below them, lost, and feet gained as they were hauled upward.

  "...really safe?"

  Laughter. They were crowded in, close. A student showing his parents the campus, two Japanese in suits and cameras escorted by a third Japanese in jeans and a Hawaiian shirt, and Andy.


  "Sure, Hoo Tow survived the '06 and '89 earthquakes," the guide said, and one of the suited Japanese, misunderstanding, nodded and laughed and shielded his head with both arms.

  His back pressed against the paneled wall, Andy felt the vibration of the motor that was propelling the elevator two hundred and fifty feet into the sky.

  Abruptly, the elevator reached its ceiling and halted, settling a few inches as its cables and counterweights and landing-zone detector found an anchorage in the shaft of air.

  The door sucked open and they pressed forward, out. No one lingers in an elevator, Andy thought.

  Amin was there waiting for him, leaning against the cage that enclosed the giant bells of a carillon. "You are right on time, my chick."

  Andy had thought twice before calling Amin. He had intended to gather his data quietly, quickly, but he hadn't got past the Stanford records office.

  Beyond the carillon, he could see viewpoints, fenced in by wrought-iron grilles embedded in concrete columns. He thought it might be possible to squeeze between the grilles; he thought he remembered a story of some long-ago student who jumped from Hoover Tower.

  Amin laid a hand on Andy's shoulder and directed him toward one of the viewpoints.

  Andy swallowed hard. He would have agreed to meet Amin on the tower of one of Joe Faulkner's bridges if it helped him find out who Interrupt was.

  Amin gazed down from the summit, his body inclined like a high-diver about to take flight, his hands clasped loosely behind his back. "I enjoy watching the Terman building from here. I can see the window of my own little office, I can locate myself in the faculty hierarchy. I have not yet achieved a corner office. I once wondered whether Stanford harbored a certain prejudice, whether a Jordanian could reach the top here. What do you think?"

  Andy stood well back from the grillwork, focusing hard on Amin's clasped hands, on the thin gold watch circling his wrist. "Sure."

  Amin turned and smiled. "I have three names for you."

  Three names out of seventeen. "Who?"

  "Desjardins, Smith, and Cheney. Their Stanford careers are summarized here." Amin extracted a paper from his pocket, then moved over to Andy to place it in his hand. "Desjardins had graduated before I arrived, but Smith and Cheney, according to their files, did quite well in my classes."

  Andy scanned the printout. A cold sweat broke out along his spine; it was the height. "Tell me about them."

  "Andy, I have taught a multitude of bright young men and women but I could not make them all my chicks. All that I remember about Ms. Smith and Mr. Cheney is in your hands."

  "This doesn't say where they are now."

  "I'm afraid I do not know. Engineers, as a rule, are inactive alumni."

  Desjardins, Smith, and Cheney. One of them had to be Interrupt. Somewhere, somehow, he had crossed paths with Desjardins, Smith, or Cheney, but it couldn't have been at Stanford because they had left before he came. They had all gone on to AT&T and come together on the D project, and then—where? Maybe still at AT&T, but AT&T guarded its personnel records at least as fiercely as did Stanford.

  "You might ask Mr. Colson."

  "Colson?"

  "Your supervisor at R-TAC." Amin smiled. "I take it that you were unaware that I am acquainted with Ray Colson."

  Dizziness, like gentle strokings of a feather, was settling down on him. He shouldn't have been unaware that Amin knew Colson; it would have been surprising that two people like Amin and Colson were both working in this valley, in telecom, and did not know each other.

  "Why would Ray know where they are? Even if they stayed at the telco, AT&T has sites all over the map."

  Amin steepled his hands, regarding Andy over the tips of his fingers. "Perhaps one of them, or more, were Ray's chicks."

  Dizziness, or Amin's gesture, made him feel like a student who had missed a week of class. "Ray's chicks? Where?"

  "At Stanford."

  "Who, Amin? Who was at Stanford?"

  "Desjardins, Smith, Cheney, and Ray Colson, among the several thousands of others who are beside the immediate point."

  "Ray Colson was at Stanford?"

  Amin looked disappointed, a slight wilting of his youthful face. "Andy, my friend, you take me aback. I had thought that ....well ....people work closely together, they both have connections to a nearby school, connections that many would brag about, and they naturally discuss what they have in common."

  "What was Ray's connection to Stanford?" He suddenly thought of Nell, ruffled at every mention of the place. He had assumed she considered him one of the braggarts.

  "He came as a visiting lecturer, stayed a year, then left. Of course he was brilliant, ninety-ninth percentile, but I don't believe he succeeded in the role of teacher. Still, he was at Stanford when Smith and Cheney were students, and they may have attended his class. Aha!" Amin smiled like a Cheshire. "You see, we have already ruled out Desjardins in connection with Ray, since Desjardins had graduated well before Ray's unfortunate academic career."

  People worked closely together and they naturally discussed what they had in common. Certainly, Colson knew that Andy had gone to Stanford. The whole team knew, because that was one of the things you just found out about coworkers. Where did you work last, where did you go to school, do you know so-and-so? He knew that Speedy had gone to Rice, Lloyd had made some joke about white rice and black engineers, and Lloyd had gone to the University of Illinois, and Candace to U.C. Berkeley. More jokes, about the Stanford-Berkeley rivalry. But they didn't know where Colson had gone, what he had done out of grad school, and, surprising now, it hadn't seemed strange because that was the essence of Colson. They knew next to nothing about the man, and what they thought they knew was sometimes proved wrong. They thought Colson had no family, and then Nell showed up.

  Colson had been at Stanford.

  All right, but he hadn't been a member of the D programming team ten years ago.

  Like Amin. Amin was at Stanford, but he hadn't been on the D programming team.

  And that was the crosspoint that counted.

  Where the hell had Colson been ten years ago?

  The Japanese were edging around them, knotting together at the grillwork and blocking the view. The dizziness receded, and Andy's head began to clear. He gave the Japanese a silent thanks.

  He remembered where Colson had been ten years ago.

  Amin took him by the arm, heading for an unobstructed viewpoint. "I consider this place part of the engineering complex, although slightly removed from it geographically. Did you know that Hoover Tower is named for Herbert Hoover, who was a president of the United States, but more importantly was a mining engineer trained at Stanford? And the tower itself, naturally, is a feat of engineering. Never forget, my chick, that towers and bridges are engineering just as much as computers and integrated systems are engineering."

  Crosspoints, Andy thought. He pulled his arm away from Amin, before Amin could lead him to the edge.

  He pushed out of the elevator as it touched back to earth and went straight to a pay phone. These days, he kept a heavy supply of coins in his pocket.

  Nell had told him that Colson was at an AT&T facility in Connecticut about ten years ago. But "about" could have meant nine years ago, or eleven years ago.

  He got the number of the Connecticut facility from Information and called. Then he lied. I'm trying to locate Ray Colson and all I have is this number for him and does anybody remember him? Somebody did, and within a few minutes he learned that Colson had worked there nearly three years. He had come from Stanford, eleven years ago, and he had been there while the D language was being developed in Morris-town, New Jersey.

  Andy hung up.

  Nell had told him that Colson was at AT&T Connecticut when he took off on one of his sabbaticals and turned up at the pole farm. Didn't you know? she had asked, wearing the unbuttoned blue workshirt. He remembered everything about that day, everything they did, everything they said.

  Andy ran out of the
Hoover Institution and ran next door into Stanford's world-class reference library.

  It was a piece of data that should be easy to locate. Nontechnical, of no proprietary value, not protected by layers of passwords and access codes. .

  Where was the AT&T pole farm?

  He had read once that you could find information on just about any subject published somewhere in a book. The third book he pulled off the library shelf supported that observation; the index had an entry for "telephone poles." He paged through the book to find the citation, fingers leaving damp marks on the paper.

  AT&T documented everything. According to this book, it ran two telephone pole farms, one in Bainbridge, Georgia, and one in Chester, New Jersey.

  Andy slammed the book shut. He needed a map.

  The reference librarian, busy and tolerant, handed him a how-to-use-your-library pamphlet and found him an atlas.

  Chester, New Jersey, was less than fifteen miles from Morristown, New Jersey.

  Andy must have made a sound, for the other patrons at the table looked hard at him.

  He didn't buy coincidences; it had become an article of faith that he shared with Feferman. If Ray Colson was climbing telephone poles in Chester and the D team was writing a compiler fifteen miles away in Morristown, Andy knew with a mounting rage that there had to be a crosspoint. Colson intersecting with Smith or Cheney. Or maybe Colson alone, climbing in a window like a thief in the night.

  Then he reminded himself that Colson might have taken his sabbatical at the pole farm in Bainbridge, Georgia.

  Bainbridge or Chester?

  Nell would know.

  CHAPTER 20

  "How did you find me out here?" Her eyes, two captured suns, flashed merrily.

  "I asked around Pac Bell. I told them I was your boyfriend."

  "Are you, then?"

  "I told them it was urgent that I talk to you."

  "Okay." She looked down, to her work, grasping a length of cable in heavily gloved hands.

  "Nell. Tell me about Stanford."