Interrupt

by Tony Dwiggins

  Silence from her, noise from a passing car.

  "Why do you hate the place?"

  "Can this wait?" Her head was still bowed over the cable. A hard hat covered her hair.

  "No."

  She straightened. "Bill?" she called to the lineman unloading gear from the Pac Bell truck.

  "Yes, angel?" He was an older man, muscled like a combat veteran, tattoos on both arms.

  "Can you take the line up?"

  "Yes, angel." He winked.

  "I hate that," she said softly.

  "Bill," Andy said.

  The lineman paused, a thick coil of rope slung over one shoulder.

  "Andy." She mouthed "no."

  Andy stared at the man's scarred hands. He didn't care.

  "Nothing, Bill," she said.

  The lineman gave Andy a hard look and walked over to the pole.

  "I have to work with him, Andy."

  "I don't care about him," Andy said. "But don't hold back with me. Tell me what it is you hate."

  The suns darkened. "Stanford."

  "Why?"

  She pulled a pair of wire cutters from her belt and snapped blades through cable.

  "Why?"

  "Because of Ray."

  "Because he taught there?"

  She showed no surprise, at the news that he had taught there or that Andy knew about it. "No."

  "Nell, for God's sake, I need to know."

  "Why?"

  "I'll tell you. But tell me about Stanford first."

  Her hands went to her waist, then slid down until her thumbs looped through her tool belt. Behind her, Bill was starting to climb, with a telephone line lashed to his tool belt.

  "Ray wanted to go to Stanford, he wanted a Stanford degree, he said Stanford was the best engineering school in the country. And Ray had to be the best."

  "He wasn't accepted?" The admissions office.

  "I assumed it was because we couldn't afford it. My mom wasn't working, she was taking care of me, and Stanford cost a lot."

  "Ray couldn't get a scholarship?"

  "I don't know. I guess not. I don't know exactly what happened, I just know that he wanted to be at Stanford and not stuck at some second-rate school with a wife and a kid."

  "He said that?"

  "No. I don't know. Ray never puts things into words like that but you know what he thinks. I knew. I knew he blamed her, blamed me, and I hated him for it and I hated Stanford because that's what he wanted instead of us."

  Ray Colson wanted to study at Stanford and he couldn't. But he made it there, after all, to teach. And teaching in telecom, he knew the phone number of the telecom lab. And then he went pole climbing.

  Andy stared at Bill, halfway up the pole, the line trailing. The man knew how to climb.

  "Is that what you wanted, Andy?"

  "Part of it." He swallowed. He was strung tight, as if he had to climb the pole next. "Where did he learn how to climb poles?"

  "What?"

  "There are two pole farms. One in Bainbridge, Georgia. One in Chester . . , New Jersey."

  "I don't know. I didn't know there were two. Ask Lloyd. He told me about it in the first place."

  "You have no idea?"

  She stepped closer to him, stopped. He could no longer see her eyes; the hard hat shadowed her face.

  "What are you saying about my father?"

  He could barely make out the words above the acceleration of a passing car. "Just one more question."

  "Why are you...."

  "How did you get the call records for me? Did you break into Ray's desk, or did Ray give you the key?"

  "What the hell are you saying?"

  He could see her mouth, compressed. Colson's daughter. "I'm saying that Interrupt wanted me to have the call records. It was a setup, a decoy. He wanted me to find what was there and distract Feferman with it." And he needed a Stanford man to find the Stanford numbers. That was it? Nothing personal, Ray just needed a certain component: Andy. "I'm saying that if your father wanted me to have the call records, he could have left his desk unlocked, or he could have given you the key."

  "Shit, Andy," her voice rising like a triggered alarm, "you're not...."

  He grabbed hold of her wrist, tight. "Nell, you said once that you wanted to impress your father, and I'm asking if you did it, if you...."

  She slapped him with her free hand, and the rough glove scraped like a razor across his cheek.

  "Did you?" His cheek stung, raw.

  She jerked her wrist loose of his grip and whirled away from him.

  He thought she was going to climb up the pole, after Bill. His eyes blurred with tears, from the pain of the slap. "Jesus, Nell, did you?"

  Now she whirled back around, but not to him; she was looking at the road and her body went rigid. "Bill!" she screamed.

  Andy stared up at Bill and he saw the lineman twist his upper body to look down at them.

  What the....

  Nell was running and from the poletop Bill gave a shout. Andy saw him fumbling with the line lashed to his belt and suddenly he understood.

  The telephone line was a drop wire running from the pole across the road to connect to a house. From housetop to pole, the line was pulling taut. A trip wire across the road.

  Down the road, a car was coming on fast and if the driver saw the trip wire he didn't have the wit to slow down.

  Bill was lashed to the line like a puppet on a string.

  Andy lunged for the line where it stretched toward the pole. Nell was already at it, her wire cutters in place, but she was rushing, shaking, and the line would not sever.

  Andy pressed his body around Nell and grabbed hold of the cutter's handles, his hands overlapping hers. Channeling all his strength into the hands, like arm wrestling, just pour it on. He felt her hands spasm under his; he was hurting her.

  Bill yelling from up above, and behind them the Doppler sound of the car approaching, its engine mounting to a roar as the distance between them closed.

  And then the car took them, Andy and Nell spun and went down hard to the ground, the line snapped past his face and whipped into the road beneath the wheels of the passing car.

  They had cut it; he could see the severed end.

  He reached for Nell but she was already on her feet, limping, bruised, but headed for the pole.

  The cut-off part of the line, the part between them and Bill, lay on the ground. Andy didn't know if they had cut the line first or if Bill had worked it loose from his belt first, and he didn't care.

  Bill was coming down the pole like a shocked cat.

  Nell, right below him, yanked off her gloves and clutched one hand with the other. "Damned idiot stunt!"

  Andy's own hands were cramping.

  "Damn you, Bill," she screamed, and then she spun to face Andy. "You don't do that, you don't climb with the drop line, you tie a rope to it and haul it up from the ground and then you climb up." She spun back to Bill, still gaffed to the pole. "You should know better, you damned idiot, you've been doing this longer than I have. What were you trying to do, save time? What's the matter with you?"

  She stopped, panting, then said low and fast, "If you ever call me angel again I'll report you for sexual harassment." She stalked away, toward the van.

  Andy caught up with her. "Are you all right?"

  "I should have been paying attention." She turned to stare him full in the face. "Instead of listening to you."

  "You're right," he said. His hands hurt, his arms ached, his cheek still stung. "I still want to know the truth."

  "Go to hell."

  "Nell," he said, his chest tightening. It hurt. "Interrupt has Wayne. Interrupt has kidnapped my son. I'll do anything to find out who Interrupt is."

  Her eyes widened, then narrowed. The suns were shadowed with disbelief.

  He told her about the D language, about the compiler, explaining it the way he would to someone with an engineering background, and he told her how close Chester, New Jersey, was to
Morristown, to the place where they had developed D language.

  "I'm sorry," she finally said, her voice raw from the screaming, choked. "But I don't believe it."

  He was stunned. She must have nerves of steel.

  "I mean I don't believe it was Ray."

  He stood there, close enough to kiss her, waiting until it was clear she had nothing more to say, then turned and walked stiffly toward his car.

  CHAPTER 21

  From beneath the car came the sounds of ratcheting, staccato, demons hammering on the track. Pitched back hard in the seat, Interrupt latched onto the lap bar and stared up the long steely incline. Above, beyond, blue sky stretched to infinity.

  In the cars behind, there were whimpers, giggles, a lone strangled yelp.

  Interrupt released the lap bar. The feeling grew quickly: anticipation, keen as a child's, edged by the promise of terror.

  Ratcheting from below, the chain lift pulling the coaster skyward. Clack clack clack, then a shriek of grinding metal and a double clack, as if the demons were sawing at the chain.

  Interrupt wondered about the designer of this monster, what malicious surprises had been set in store, whether the design engineer dared ride the thing once it had been erected.

  Most coasters were adequate. This one looked promising.

  Most engineers, Interrupt thought, did work that was adequate. A few, if they were lucky, created something that drew gasps, that made them stand back in astonishment before their own creation.

  Wheels sang on the track, and the car jogged gently back and forth.

  What Interrupt had created would shock the entire telecommunications world.

  "Eeeeeeee!" from the cars behind.

  Elegance. Interrupt had waited ten long years to stand back in awe before its implementation.

  Every year of that ten-year wait, in every state in the nation, in towns and cities and metropolises, switching offices were cutting over from their old-fashioned crossbar workhorses to sophisticated electronic switches. Some were even cutting over from the earlier analog electronic switches to digital electronic switches. 5ESS, state-of-the-art.

  Interrupt laughed out loud. The boy in the next seat, hands off the lap bar, ready to thrust them into the air, looked over and grinned.

  Halfway to the summit.

  Good heavens, the telco would be saying, this Interrupt is threatening to destroy our number fives. How many? Dozens, maybe more? How many does Interrupt have access to? We have over fifteen thousand number fives in service across the nation. Good heavens, nearly half the nation's telephone traffic—not just ours, that's bad enough, but other companies' as well—feeds into number fives because they are the major local-traffic switches.

  And the tiger team would be sweating blood to figure out how to save them. How many number fives can possibly go down?

  Interrupt shrugged. How about all of them?

  As the coaster climbed higher, the riders got an angle on the loop-the-loop in the distance. A train of cars hung from the apex; heads and arms dangled down, boneless as dolls, then the coaster tore into the downward sweep of the loop whipping the floppy doll parts along with it.

  Shrieks from behind. "Get me out of here."

  Interrupts pulse quickened; the loop was elegant.

  Elegant. Commanding the number fives would be adequate, more than adequate. But Interrupt had designed elegance.

  With a few lines of code, dazzling, like the blinding steel rails in the sunlight, Interrupt had toyed with the language that was used to write the software that drove the 3B20D superprocessor. And the superprocessor was the star of the telco system, the primary traffic-routing processor.

  Clack clack clack. Shriek. Double clack. Demons at work.

  The superprocessor not only drove the 5ESS, it lived in the 1A ESS, the other main local-traffic switch.

  Ratcheting, vibrating through the car, vibrating the lap bar, sending shivers—little shocks—through the fingertips. Tighten your grip.

  And the superprocessor lived in the 4ESS, the very high capacity toll system that switched long-distance calls. And it drove the autoplex cellular switches and the attached processor system and the inter-switch communications system.

  Sudden silence from behind as the coaster neared the top.

  And it drove the network signaling system, which routed telephone calls along thousands of miles of telephone lines nationwide.

  They reached the summit.

  And it had a successor that spoke the same language, the 3B20E next-generation superprocessor. And, of course, the 20E drove the broadband switches that carried the enlightenment superhighway, that superstar system that wired up America's electronic senses to the telephone network.

  And all of them—the switches and the systems and the superhighway—ran at the will of Interrupt.

  The coaster poised at the summit, and they existed in their own bubble of time and space, hung on a precipice, unable to see ahead or behind.

  Interrupt had designed the failure of every major component in the network.

  The boy in the next seat shot his arms into the air as the coaster vaulted down the slope.

  Interrupt gasped, the boy gasped, and the coaster seemed to fall free and silent straight toward the earth. Heart and stomach trailed. Just before they reached bottom, Interrupt lifted one foot, then another, dropping with the coaster.

  And then the coaster wrenched into a series of turns that threw the riders hard against the lap bars, the only thing between themselves and oblivion.

  The loop was coming up, fast.

  God in heaven, Interrupt thought.

  They hurtled into the loop and the horizon spun and gravity disappeared. For moments at the top they had a respite, hanging like meat on hooks, then they were flung down the back side of the loop and ejected onto a long arrow of track, accelerating toward another loop.

  This is what it was going to be like, Interrupt thought, grinning into the wind, the telephone system plunging into silence and the engineers who designed and serviced the network riding it down, with no more control than the coaster riders catapulting into the next twist and turn. The stars would fall and ...

  The coaster jerked them through the loop, and Interrupt clutched the lap bar and screamed along with the boy as they somersaulted through space.

  When they finally shuttled back into the station, the coaster now sedate, the boy "turned to Interrupt and with a survivor's fervor shouted, "You should try The Edge next!"

  He looked to be the same age as Faulkner's boy.

  There was a story, Interrupt remembered, of a man who had been mute for years, who rode the hellacious coaster on Coney Island and was shocked into speech.

  Faulkner's boy was beyond such help. Interrupt wondered if Faulkner ever resented the boy, resented the burden.

  The attendant released the lap bar and Interrupt climbed out of the coaster, refreshed, a little shaky. The coaster designer had done a more than adequate job.

  CHAPTER 22

  Feferman ate with fastidious attention. He had ordered the "magic eggplant casserole" after interrogating the waiter about the ingredients and being assured that it contained only eggplant, mushrooms, tomatoes, water chestnuts, topped with cheese and a Spanish sauce. "No meat?" Feferman had pressed, and the waiter had said, "Certainly not." Andy had ordered the Mediterranean sandwich; he didn't care what was in it.

  It was five-thirty, early for dinner, and the Good Earth was not crowded. They had a corner booth and a view of the Alameda Expressway; Buck and Howland shared a table across the room, and they, like their chief special agent, ate as if they had not had a meal in days.

  Andy had asked Feferman to meet him alone. He supposed this was as alone as it was likely to get.

  Feferman listened without comment, working his way through the eggplant casserole, while Andy laid out the cross-points: Colson and Stanford, Colson and the pole farm, Chester and Morristown, New Jersey. Feferman glanced once at the list of names from the D pro
ject, once at the printout of Desjardins, Smith, and Cheney at Stanford, but he did not lay down his knife and fork to examine the hard data.

  "What happened to your face?" Feferman finally said.

  Andy touched his cheek. Rough, scratched, like serrations on a knife. "It doesn't matter. Colson matters."

  "Kidnapping's not my field." Feferman shifted his attention to the bread plate. "You were a fool not to call the FBI immediately, and you're wasting my time bringing it to me."

  Andy lunged across the table and grabbed Feferman by the right arm. The chief special agent's bread knife dropped to the table. "Damn you to hell, Feferman, Colson's got my son. The hell with your time."

  Buck and Howland froze, flatware in their hands.

  Feferman shook his head at the agents, then glared at Andy. "Let go of me, Mr. Faulkner."

  Andy tightened his grip. "I wasn't about to call anyone until I knew who Interrupt was. And I came to you because I didn't have time to give the FBI a primer in software development."

  "Let go, Mr. Faulkner."

  "Cause and effect, you son of a bitch. Now you know what he did and how he did it, you know who he is, so go get him. Get the FBI to get him, I don't care who, just get him!"

  The muscles in Feferman's arm tensed, released, and tensed.

  "Feferman. He killed Candace."

  Howland was on his feet, a street thug poised to strike.

  "Let go," Feferman said, a soft growl coming from the back of his throat.

  Andy leaned closer, breathing in the after-shave, holding onto the thick bones of Feferman's wrist. "Arrest Colson."

  Feferman made a face, a snarl, at his agents, and Howland with Buck at his heels pounded over to the booth.

  Voices and movements stopped in the restaurant.

  Buck clamped his hands onto Andy's shoulders and forced him down into the booth, pinning him there, his fingers digging painfully close to Andy's neck.

  Feferman rubbed his right wrist, then picked up the bread knife and pointed it at Andy. "You do that again, I'll have you in jail until you rot."

  Andy could not move under Buck's grasp. "That's real bright, chief special agent, throw me in jail while Colson shuts down the whole network." The hell with the network, he thought, but Feferman's eyes finally sparked with interest in something besides his meal.