Interrupt

by Tony Dwiggins

  Suddenly, the upper right corner of the map lit up with neon-green traffic: Network Operations had gotten a display of the circuits in Canada's Atlantic provinces. In the bottom-most patch of land, Nova Scotia, a black hole was punched into the busy network of green. Two number five electronic switching systems and one GCNS-2000 broadband, dead in the water.

  Damn you, Colson, Andy thought. Didn't even know you were taking down Nova Scotia, did you? What did people do in Nova Scotia, shipping, fishing? What did a fisherman do before going out to sea? Call some weather service and find out how the tides and currents were running, find out if he was going to get caught in a squall. He wouldn't be calling today.

  "Eight-nine, eastern," a tech near Andy said.

  The Trojan horses were set to take down the east coast in four minutes.

  A roar barreled through the room, Feferman on the comm line, circling the table like a maddened bear, bellowing into the handset: "Why didn't you inform me?"

  Andy shot over to his side. "Colson?"

  "Hold on!" Feferman bellowed into the phone, and every person in the room froze.

  Feferman yanked the receiver from his ear and buried it in his chest. "New York informs me, now, that we're going to do a two-minute bypass. Two minutes only, then the clocks start."

  "Jesus!" Andy said. "That'll suit Colson just fine. Feferman, tell them...."

  Feferman clamped a hold on Andy's arm. "Them? You know who them is? Not just our honchos, our honchos have to consult with the honchos from all the operating companies because they own a helluva lot of the switches you want to diddle with. Seems everybody's been arguing about it since yesterday, since they first heard the words 'stop the clocks and the billing' and they couldn't decide whether to shit or get off the pot. When they heard that today was the magic day they apparently decided to get off the pot, they couldn't swallow more than two minutes without billing on Mother's Day."

  "Eight-ten, eastern time," the comm tech said.

  Feferman released Andy's arm and bellowed, "Did anybody in this room know about it?"

  The product manager finally spoke up. "It's a tough call. What do we do, bankrupt ourselves? We know the trigger now, and I think the two-minute bypass is a clean solution."

  "You want to bet the store on it?" Andy said. He pushed up close to Feferman and bored in on the small angry eyes. "Listen. All we know is that eight-thirteen is one trigger, maybe just the first trigger time Colson programmed. Colson's not an amateur, for God's sake. He would have gone for a greater-than trigger. It costs him nothing and he gains everything."

  Feferman's eyes locked on Andy. He jammed the receiver back to his ear and hissed to New York, "My tiger team says it's a greater-than trigger."

  "Eight-eleven, eastern," the tech whispered.

  Feferman smothered the mouthpiece with his hand. "What the hell is a greater-than trigger, Faulkner?"

  "Greater than eight-thirteen. The trigger fires at eight-thirteen or at any time after eight-thirteen. Greater than."

  Feferman seemed to have frozen. Then he targeted one of his tiger team and bellowed, "You buy that? Greater than?"

  "Yup."

  The big head swiveled back to Andy. "Okay, I'm going to bat." Feferman turned his back, hunched over the phone, and lowered his voice to a mutter.

  A chair creaked, then another and another. Someone coughed, muffled it. Someone started to tap a pencil. Heads turned back toward the screen on the wall.

  Andy couldn't tell what Feferman was saying to New York.

  "Eight-twelve, eastern," the comm tech said.

  "Eight-twelve and twenty seconds," someone amended.

  "No, I've got fifteen seconds."

  "Somebody call Time."

  Laughter erupted and the guy who'd said "call Time" and not meant it as a joke joined in, laughter triggering laughter, all of them stretching it, chuckling after the hard laughs ran out. But they kept their eyes pinned to the giant eastern seaboard.

  Andy pressed close to Feferman. Still on the line, Feferman looked at him and mouthed, "They're discussing it."

  "Hurry them up," Andy said.

  "That's it, we've got eight-thirteen eastern, to the tick," the comm tech said, and rapped his knuckles against the table.

  The room fell silent, the tapping and creaking and coughs stopped. Up on the wall, across the United States floating in its sea of blue, neon-green signals glowed. It was 5:13 a.m. Pacific time and traffic was still sluggish on the west coast. Mountain time at 6:13 showed more activity; traffic at 7:13 Central time was hopping. On the east coast it was 8:13, 8:13 and ten seconds, 8:13 and eleven seconds. Then the neon green flickered; every twelve seconds the circuits were sampled and updated. The flickering stilled, and every man and woman in the room took a breath and held it. The east coast showed a forest of green. Mother's Day, the busiest calling day of the year, and the east coast was still on the line.

  They had bypassed the first trigger.

  A roar surged through the room, people shouting, whooping, pounding each other on the back and yelling their throats raw.

  The comm tech and Feferman were both on the lines, hands pressed against their free ears. Feferman, trying to talk to New York, caught Andy's eye and shrugged.

  Andy watched the roomful of people yelling themselves silly. They had saved the network. In two minutes, when the clocks restarted, they might lose the network, but right now, for two minutes, the network belonged to the good guys. Andy couldn't help it: he grinned and thrust a fist into the air.

  Suddenly, the comm tech was yelling at them, like someone trying to shout through a thunderstorm. "They got the virtual machine running! It's a greater-than trigger. Stop the clocks," he shrieked. "They said to stop the clocks!"

  Feferman blinked, then bellowed into his receiver, a sound that rose above the uproar in the room, a sound that must have blasted them to the walls in New York.

  Andy turned to stare at the screen. They had about a minute to get every control center on the east coast to shut down their clocks. If they stopped the clocks in time, if they saved the network, if they broke Colson and found Wayne, Andy vowed, he would call Sandra and wish her happy Mother's Day.

  "What's the time?" someone yelled.

  "Eight-fourteen and ten."

  Feferman handed his receiver back to the comm tech and let his arm swing loose. The big hand flexed, then slackened.

  "Feferman?" Andy shifted, bringing Feferman into his sight along with the screen on the wall.

  "They bought it." His voice was cracked from the abuse he had given it.

  Lights held steady on the big map, the east a green jewel.

  The room was silent again, a hollow silence after all the shouting, silent as a morgue.

  "Give me a time, dammit!" The product manager.

  "Eight-fourteen and fifty-seven seconds, eastern," the comm tech said.

  Andy caught a glimpse of Feferman's hands; the chief special agent's fingers were crossed.

  "Eight-fifteen, on the tick."

  The green flickered; the circuits were updated. Green, still green. On the east coast, callers continued to chatter and laugh and yell and whine, and at the Network Operations Center techs kept on hustling to reroute the Mother's Day overload.

  "We did it, then?" someone asked.

  One more bellow from Feferman, a full-throated roar. The chief special agent was stamping around the room, his hands locked over his head swiping at the air, the bear who had wrestled down all comers.

  People began to grin and shake hands, but they let Feferman roar on alone.

  Nice work, Andy thought, a damned nice morning's work. He was glad to have Feferman on his side instead of on his tail.

  Feferman circled in on the comm tech and commandeered the line again. "Get some people up to Nova Scotia and fix their phones," he growled into the handset. "I don't care how, I don't care if you have to do it with an operator and a plug-in switchboard, get their telephones working!"

  It wasn't F
eferman's job to get Nova Scotia's telephones up, it was PECC's job, but nobody at the telco, not the Product Engineering Control Center or corporate headquarters, was going to tell the chief special agent to butt out.

  Feferman, still charged, came to Andy and stuck out his hand. "Congratulations, telephone man."

  Andy took his hand and they shook, firmly, quickly. "Nice work, Mr. Feferman. Now, Colson."

  "Let's go."

  Outside, it was not yet dawn, the streetlamps still burned holes in the dark. 5:20 a.m. Pacific time, and Mother's Day had barely begun.

  Andy shivered: damp shirt and cold air.

  Feferman stopped in the visitors' lot beside a powder-blue Jaguar, same color as the AT&T flag. "Here's how it's going to be. You're going to get in your car and follow me. We're going to pick up some oranges and donuts at the 7-Eleven and then we're driving down to San Jose, 280 South First, you'll see the big FBI sign. You're going to wait in the waiting room, the chairs are okay, I don't know about the magazines. Get some sleep if you can. I'm going to join the conference with Mr. Colson and I'm going to add a little psychological pressure. I will come out and tell you the moment he utters your son's name."

  Good enough, Andy thought. He stuck out his hand and Feferman took it.

  CHAPTER 25

  The horsewhip was mounted on the wall like a trophy. Fine-grained white leather, braided into tight spirals, sheathed the handle of the whip. Two gold silk tassels, also braided, hung from the knobbed grip end. The actual whip was a slender thong, of the same white leather, knotted at the bottom and curled back around the handle in gentle loops.

  Seated at his desk beneath the whip, Amin studied Feferman as if he were an unwelcome quals candidate.

  Feferman's huge body had taken on a weary slump. He eyed the whip and Amin with the same leaden expression.

  Amin addressed himself to Andy. "I congratulate you on your very clever fix."

  Andy started; Amin knew already? Fix. He hadn't fixed the system, he'd massaged it, and he watched Feferman rear up in his chair, also surprised that Amin knew.

  Feferman shoved a hand into his coat pocket. "Who told you about that, Dr. Masri?"

  "I have a network."

  "A what?"

  Amin steepled his hands. "An interconnected system of people with common interests, in this case telecommunications."

  "Is Ray Colson in your network?"

  "I am sorry, no."

  "How about...." Feferman pulled a notebook from his pocket and consulted it. "Judith Smith, Marc Desjardins, Mark Cheney?"

  "No, I am sorry."

  "They were your students."

  "Judith Smith and Mark Cheney attended my classes, Mr. Feferman. They are not part of my network, and I have no conception where they are today."

  "Today, Mark Cheney is parked in a field office of the FBI in Houston, Texas." Feferman tossed his notebook onto Amin's desk. "Ten other names on this list are also in conference with the FBI. But right now, we have no conception of where the remaining six are. Your students Marc Desjardins and Judith Smith are among the missing. Please read the list, Dr. Masri, and tell me how you are going to be of help with these names."

  Amin bowed his head over the list, then stood and reached across his desk to deliver the notebook back to Feferman. "I am sorry."

  Their hands nearly met over the notebook, their shirt cuffs shot back on extended arms, revealing Amin's thin gold watch and one nearly like it on Feferman's blockish wrist.

  "Did Zot tell you?" Andy asked, and they both turned to him.

  He had waited two and a half hours for answers in a hard-backed FBI chair, beyond sleep, buzzed on strong FBI coffee and functioning on 7-Eleven oranges and donuts. By the time Feferman came out and grimly reported that they had nothing from Colson, he felt stripped raw. Stripped of dread, worry, suspicions, stripped clean as though someone had taken a pair of wire strippers to him and peeled off every layer of insulation. A raw wire ready to make a connection. When Feferman, frustrated, grumpy from lack of sleep, lack of answers, had said let's go see your teacher, he had experienced a resonance, Feferman's stimulus causing a vibration that matched the natural vibration in his own stripped-to-the-wire system.

  "Who is Zot?" Feferman demanded.

  "Zot is irrelevant to this discussion," Amin said.

  "Who is Zot?"

  Both of them were looking at Andy, Feferman impatient, Amin tapping a finger to his lips. A light tap of the horsewhip.

  Resonance.

  The horsewhip.

  When Andy had been a student, Amin's office in the old electronic research labs building had chipped linoleum on the floor, oxidized paint on the walls, and an ungainly steel desk that took up too much space; but the fine leather horsewhip had hung on the wall, and everyone who set foot in the room identified Amin with the elegant whip rather than with the shabby junior faculty office.

  The joke was, of course, that Amin kept his students' noses to the grindstone with a flick of the whip. In reality, of course, Amin's "chicks" were self-governing and kept their own noses to the grindstone; Amin did not attract the kind of student who needed goading.

  However, the whip was a working horsewhip. In Jordan, Amin had ridden dressage and won the white leather whip in a horse show. At Stanford, he went along with the joke and claimed to use it on candidates in quals and orals "to command attention and demand obedience."

  Now Amin had a tenured third-floor-view office in the Terman building with weekly cleaning of the carpet and yearly painting of the walls. But the whip still hung on the wall, defining the office and the man.

  The creamy white leather, the gold silk tassels, the soft braiding were all for show, to mask the whip's purpose.

  The whip was for control.

  "Who the hell is Zot?" Feferman repeated.

  Andy felt neither surprise nor excitement, just the resonance of a connection made.

  In a switching network, the processor was for control.

  Amin was the processor in his own communications network. The network, always the network, and in place of going home to Jordan to build a real telecommunications network Amin had assembled a virtual network in Stanford and Silicon Valley, with trunk lines to London and Rangoon and Los Angeles and New York, and he could not possibly have resisted adding a tantalizing peripheral to his network, the community of phone phreaks. But phreaks were at heart self-governing and to bring them into the network required control that did not look like control. The showy disguise that masked the working horsewhip. And so Amin had created Zot.

  Zot was Amin; Amin was Zot.

  "Zot is a communications hobbyist who runs an electronic bulletin board," Amin told Feferman. "No, it was not Zot, and I assume that I am not required to reveal the source of my information unless you initiate some sort of legal action against me." Amin's eyes narrowed, a slivering of polished brown almonds.

  "If your source of information has breached AT&T security, then you can bet your professorship that I'll require an answer."

  "I have nothing to do with a security breach, Mr. Feferman."

  "Head of Security Feferman, Dr. Masri."

  They watched each other's face, taking measure.

  Andy shivered. Completing the circuit. Zot the ghost on Andy's screen. The only reason Amin could masquerade as Zot was that he did not have to show his face. A phreak was just electronic signals, faceless. Like Interrupt. The only reason Colson could masquerade as Interrupt was that he did not have to show his face. Substitute X for Colson. The only reason X could masquerade as Interrupt... Give X the value of Desjardins, Smith, or Cheney. He had thought Amin had given him all the available data on them, but he was wrong.

  "Amin," Andy said, his voice, too, stripped raw, "what do Desjardins, Smith, and Cheney look like?"

  "Look like?" said Feferman, a growling echo.

  "Andy, my chick, it has been years. I never saw Mr. Desjardins, and I can't recall Cheney to mind...."

  Feferman lunged to the desk
and clamped a hand on Amin's telephone. "Give me your fax number."

  Amin rolled his chair back from the desk, away from Feferman's hulk.

  "Faulkner wants to know what Cheney looks like, and I'm going to have Houston fax him to us if that suits you, Doctor."

  Amin reached to the table behind him to switch on his fax machine. "Help yourself."

  The fax hummed.

  "There may be a photo of them in some yearbook...." Amin began.

  Feferman hissed into the mouthpiece, trying to keep his voice down.

  "Perhaps in their files, but it's Sunday and the records office is closed."

  "I can get the records office opened," Feferman said, listening to Houston and staring down at Amin.

  "What about Smith?" Andy said.

  "Judith Smith." Amin laced his fingers and brought them to his forehead. "Brown hair, I think, medium-length brown hair, a thin figure, perhaps tall."

  "Her face."

  "Thin. Not remarkable, Andy, I simply do not see it."

  "We'll get her from records." Feferman had hung up and had his back to them, hunched over the fax machine.

  "They may not keep photographs."

  "Then think, Doctor." The fax was coming in; Feferman hunched closer to look.

  Amin stood. Beside Feferman, he looked like a delicate boy, but then he stepped around Feferman in one fluid movement, as he might have moved around a big horse, easy with the whip in his hand. "I know where to find her, Andy. WISE."

  "Yeah." Andy beat Amin to the door.

  A ripping of paper and Feferman pushed out the door behind them. He shoved the fax of Mark Cheney into Andy's hands.

  "What's wise?" Feferman said.

  They moved fast down the hallway, shoulders, arms bumping.