Interrupt

by Tony Dwiggins

  "Women in Science and Engineering." Amin guided them down the stairs.

  "Christ," said Feferman.

  "They are a network, as ATT is a network."

  Andy passed the fax back to Feferman.

  "You recognize Cheney, Faulkner?"

  "No."

  That left Desjardins and Smith.

  Up another hallway and Amin strode out in front to take hold of a doorknob. He turned it once, then twice again, his gold watch flashing.

  "You don't keep a key, Doctor, to Women in Science and Engineering?"

  Andy shoved Amin aside and heaved his weight against the door. He thought it gave, a fraction, and slammed against it a second time. A pain shot through his shoulder, a wire vibrating, so he turned his other shoulder against the door. Now Feferman was beside him, adding his crushing weight. They slammed together and that was enough. The lock gave with a screech of metal abusing wood.

  "Now I know how to pick a lock," Feferman said.

  They passed through the lounge to a room lined with file cabinets and bookcases. They rushed, amateur burglars, yanking open file drawers, tossing brochures and catalogs aside like unplayed cards. Then they slowed, Amin settling into a chair to sort through a stack of files, Feferman on his knees at the bookshelf, his head cocked to read the spines. Copies of theses, yearbooks, reference works.

  Andy found it, an old recruiting brochure, "Meet WISE at Stanford," with captioned pictures of successful graduates, "went to work for Du Pont," "took a post-doc at MIT," "internship at the EPA," "flying high with NASA." And there she was, Judith Smith, "connected with AT&T."

  Andy gazed at her, medium-length brown hair, thin face, but Amin was wrong, her face was remarkable, truly remarkable.

  Resonance.

  What was it Feferman had said? If they've changed their names, that slows things down, takes the FBI a little longer to find them. Judith Smith had changed her name. She had gotten married.

  She was Lloyd Narver's wife.

  There was pain. God, he had thought he was stripped raw, but here was one more layer of insulation and this time it burned away, the heat came from his core, and like a wire carrying too much amperage, it burned.

  He had gone after the wrong man. He had badgered Feferman into locking up Colson, and then he had felt that Wayne had a certain margin of safety, that if he did not know where Wayne was at least Colson could not get at him, and then he had gone ahead and told Feferman to build the virtual machine and stop the clocks and bypass the triggers. He had thought that, confronted with his failure, Colson would crack and give up Wayne, but it wasn't Colson's failure, it was Judith Narver's failure, and she was not in custody and Wayne had absolutely no margin of safety. Ten long years and then failure, how angry would she be, how would she treat the son of the man who had told the telco how to stop her Trojan horse? The way she had treated the woman who came too close to figuring out the Trojan horse and boasted about it into Andy's answering machine. The way she had treated Candace Fuentes.

  A clever fix, an engineered solution. He was a damn good engineer, he might have impressed even Joe Faulkner, but he had gone after the wrong man and left Wayne high and dry.

  He rode in Feferman's Jaguar, smelling of good leather and pine-scented after-shave. Feferman drove fast. Andy gripped the armrest, sending spasms through his sore shoulder. He watched the clock on Feferman's dashboard and calculated. Wayne had been gone just over forty-four hours. He wished Feferman would push the Jag faster.

  He'd seen Judith Narver just once. She'd come to R-TAC to pick up Lloyd when his car was in the shop. He couldn't remember what her voice sounded like. He thought she worked for 3Com.

  The Narvers' street was already roadblocked. Police cars and unmarked dark official cars were stopped at odd angles, converging on a large house. No cars in the driveway, no faces at the windows. The windows were gridded like French doors, decorative, but it made him think of a cage. A Spanish-style stucco house, deep rose with gray slate tiles on the roof, a magnolia tree set in the lawn like a flower in a jacket lapel, everything precise, the way Lloyd wore his tie.

  The fat Sunday paper still lay on the lawn.

  Andy followed Feferman through the knots of cops and agents, uniforms and suits, shifting weight from foot to foot in professional patience. Feferman closed in on a red-haired man in a suit—FBI, Andy figured—his square black sunglasses jutting up as he conferred with the telco's chief special agent. Nobody apparently at home, the FBI man told Feferman, they were waiting for a warrant to search inside.

  The talk of procedures was cut-and-dried like a diagnostics run-through—we'll do this, then we'll do that—and Andy registered the words but there was no more resonance.

  Wayne wasn't in the rose stucco house; Interrupt would not have brought him there.

  Andy glanced around at the other houses, the Narvers' neighbors. There were faces at some of those windows, staying inside on this sunny Mother's Day afternoon.

  Now Feferman pressed close to him, growling into his ear, "Agent Dicker says they've released Colson."

  He'd gone after the wrong man. The wrong person. He'd got it all wrong, even the sex. He'd assumed Interrupt was a man, and that was a stupid assumption. Oh, he'd certainly suspected Nell, but only in connection with her father. He remembered telling Nell that "guys" included women engineers, he'd thought himself superior to Joe Faulkner, who never even connected women with engineering, he'd considered Candace as good an engineer as he was. Then he'd gone ahead and made the stupid assumption that Interrupt was not a woman, that a woman would not try to sabotage the telephone system. That a woman would not kidnap his son. That a woman would not kill a woman.

  Still, he made one more assumption. That a woman would not harm his boy. He clung to it fiercely.

  CHAPTER 26

  An immense slab of mirrored glass slanted over the entry, shooting upward from the doors to the open spaces above, and from the angled ceiling far above dangled dozens of light fixtures, spinning off beams to reflect in the overhead mirror, in the highly polished walls and the vast floor, in the glass tabletops of the lobby bar, in the octagonal pool of water where the floor abruptly turned liquid, beneath crossed angles of the escalator and the mezzanine balcony.

  Feferman glared up at the glass slab. "Californians don't take their earthquakes seriously."

  Andy had to blink, his tired eyes straining against the lights, and he thought that this was a far cry from the shabby Carolina Hotel, or from the gas station phone booth. But the toll records did not lie, the call had originated here. Interrupt liked to call from anonymous places, and the Doubletree Hotel was anonymous as hell.

  The Doubletree Hotel promoted itself as sited in the heart of Silicon Valley; at one end it branched into the Santa Clara Convention Center and at the other it butted up against Tech-mart, where the valley's premier companies rented showplace suites and staged meetings, seminars, conferences, and multi-vendor expos.

  Even today, even on a sunny Mother's Day afternoon, executives, vendors, and convention-goers prowled the lobby, many of them wearing name tags and dressed for business.

  Suddenly, heads turned and voices lowered as agents of the FBI and AT&T Security and officers of the Santa Clara County Sheriff Department fanned out through the lobby. The galaxy of lights caught on badges, sunglasses, polished black shoes, gun metal.

  "Where'd they put the front desk?" Feferman complained, charging ahead into the lobby. Feferman was taking the lead now, telco security had been breached again. Andy and FBI Agent Dicker followed in his wake.

  They passed a man in a Doubletree jumpsuit reassuring a clump of guests, "It's because of the phones."

  Andy stared at the faces, the men as well as the women, but he recognized no one in the jumble of anonymous faces. How long did Interrupt hang around after making a call? Long enough to enjoy the disruption firsthand?

  The call had originated here, had been switched through the Santa Clara office to Andy's home phone, had
been picked up by his answering machine, and had triggered the failure of the 5ESS that was in the act of processing the call. Just one failure, just one machine down, just many thousands of lines dead, just like the first time.

  They had stopped the clocks in the processors, had neutralized the Trojan horses, but they hadn't plugged Interrupts old channel; indeed, in the face of a total network failure, Interrupt's one-at-a-time shutdown channel had seemed insignificant, noise in the system.

  When they had gotten word of the failure, all of them still milling outside the Narvers' house, Andy had had the thought that Interrupt communicated with switch failures the way normal people communicated with telephone calls.

  They'd taken Feferman's Jag to the Santa Clara office, gotten the mag tape on which the processor's temporary memory had recorded the calling data, and found a working machine to dump and filter the tape. Familiar now, there was the three-call cluster to the Stanford telecom lab and Time opening up the channel into the switch and then the call to Andy's number triggering the failure. Just like a recurring nightmare, he thought, that comes back when you'd almost forgotten it.

  No more assumptions, Andy decided. Don't assume that any switch is safe. Don't assume anything about Interrupt; Interrupt is sexless, faceless, a collection of electronic signals.

  Assume only that Wayne is safe.

  The front desk was tucked away under the mezzanine balcony. Feferman got the clerk to get the manager, and she led them into her office. It was small, comfortable, with muted lighting, and Andy gratefully took a seat and rubbed his eyes.

  Feferman lined up photographs on the manager's desk: pictures of Judith and Lloyd Narver taken from frames on their bedside table, the fax of Cheney, another fax, just come in, of Desjardins, an FBI mug shot of Colson.

  Andy looked at Feferman in surprise. Cheney and Desjardins were in FBI custody, neither one could have made the call, and Colson had just been cleared and released. Feferman wasn't making any assumptions, either.

  "We believe that one, possibly more, of these people made a telephone call from a pay phone in the lobby of this hotel shortly before your phone service was interrupted," Feferman said. "What we're going to ask you to do is this. You're going to have one of your people make copies of these photographs, if you will, and circulate them among your staff. We haven't had the time to make copies, so I hope that you have duplicating facilities here."

  "Of course," she said. Her manner, her clothes, her voice, her neat graying hair were all tailored to Doubletree business, but Andy couldn't help noticing the silver-framed photo beside her telephone and wondering if she'd gotten her Mother's Day call before the phones went dead. "Might any of them have been registered guests?"

  "Let's find out," Feferman said.

  The manager picked up the phone, started to punch a button, then smiled ruefully. "I'll have to send someone up to our data center. I'm cut off." She went to the door and spoke to the desk clerk.

  "How many rooms do you have here?" asked Dicker.

  "Five hundred."

  Anonymous as hell, Andy thought. If Interrupt had a room here—but why?—it wouldn't be registered under Narver.

  A room.

  Surely, there was bus service to a major hotel and convention center in the heart of Silicon Valley; surely, you could transfer to one of those buses from Carelli's bus. In a dead-calm voice he said, "Can you find out if there's a deaf boy staying in this hotel?" He pulled out his wallet, found Wayne's picture, and placed it on top of the photos and faxes on the manager's desk.

  Feferman's eyebrows shot up.

  "That's a thought," Dicker said.

  The manager glanced down at the picture and frowned. "I don't understand the connection. I thought you were interested in these people who made the phone call."

  "Is he here?"

  Feferman held up a hand, ready to clamp onto Andy's arm. "We're interested in the boy, too. Is he here?"

  "This is an official request?"

  "Official as you need."

  "Yes," she said. "Room 810."

  Simple as that. Ten miles, maybe less, from home, in a hotel in the heart of Silicon Valley. He could probably see his home or see the treetops on his street from the upper floors of the Doubletree Hotel, and he could undoubtedly see the AT&T building. He was practically next door to Great America; he could see the Ferris wheel and the roller coaster and what was that god-awful ride he had tried to drag Andy onto? The Edge. He would be able to see the San Jose Airport, would have a fine view of the planes taking off and landing.

  Feferman was pulling him up, saying gently, "Come on."

  The elevators were directly across from the front desk. They rode up without talking, crowded in with a group in swimsuits and soggy towels. A pool, Andy thought, and probably a gym, and laundry, and restaurants, and room service. A hotel was self-contained, everything you need.

  They stepped off the elevator into an atrium area, big plants and a wide window, then the manager led them down a hallway, dark in contrast, dilating the eyes. They passed a lot of rooms and finally came to the end of the hall. Room 810 was an end unit. She knocked, calling out, "Manager."

  "He won't hear you," Andy said.

  She nodded, then unlocked the door and stood aside.

  He couldn't go in. He was like Sandra: he didn't want to know or see anything that would shock him.

  Assume that Wayne is safe, assume it. But he let Feferman and Dicker go in first.

  "Faulkner!" Feferman's voice boomed out.

  Andy took a breath and went inside.

  It was a damn nice room, spacious, south-facing, light poured in from the balcony. Feferman stood at the far side of the room, gazing at the bedside table. "This look familiar?"

  Andy started toward Feferman, but there was a resistance in his leg muscles, as in a dream when you walk and walk and don't get anywhere, and he could have sworn it took minutes to travel around the two double beds to where Feferman stood.

  On the table were a lamp, a Trimline telephone, and a portable TDD. The telephone had been disconnected and the TDD plugged directly into the wall jack.

  "Is it his?"

  "It's the same model as his."

  Dicker came in from the balcony and stopped by the sliding glass door to inspect a writing desk on which books had been stacked and magazines fanned out. "Maid's been here."

  Feferman brushed past Andy to the line of dressers and opened a drawer. He pulled out a tee-shirt, held it up. On the chest was a dog wearing sunglasses and lime-green trunks, riding a yellow surfboard through shocking orange waves that spelled out the words "Rude Dog."

  "This belong to your kid?"

  Andy took the tee-shirt and held it against his own chest. Too big for Wayne, but a boy's size nevertheless. He looked into the open drawer: two more tee-shirts, the same print, a pair of black jeans, three pairs of socks, and three pairs of jockey shorts, everything folded. Wayne didn't fold his socks; he balled them. But Dicker said the maid had been here. "It's all new."

  "Is it his size?"

  "Close enough."

  Interrupt had bought him clothes. If Interrupt intended to harm Wayne, Interrupt would not have bought him clothes.

  Andy slammed the drawer shut and moved to the television. Beside it was a telecaption decoder, with a "Property of Doubletree" metal plate screwed onto the panel.

  Dicker called out from the bathroom, "Pair of swim trunks on the towel rack. They're dry, but stiff. You know, chlorine."

  Wayne had gone swimming. Andy thought, you didn't go swimming if you thought you were in danger, you tried to get away.

  "Two toothbrushes, toothpaste, Crest, a shaving kit, no medications...." Dicker reported.

  "Faulkner."

  Feferman had another dresser drawer open. Andy leaned over to look. More underwear, socks, plain white tee-shirts. Feferman pulled out one of the shirts and unfurled it like a flag. Andy froze.

  "Yours?"

  "No."

  "It's a man's s
ize."

  Toothbrushes, plural, and a shaving kit.

  Feferman had the closet door open. Two small suitcases on the floor, a man's white shirt and slacks on hangers.

  "Ma'am!" Feferman called out.

  The manager came in. "Can I be of help?" As though she had come in response to a guest's complaint.

  "You neglected to mention that the boy was sharing this room." Feferman smiled.

  "I promised discretion."

  "You're going to break that promise. Your hotel has been misused."

  She glanced around the room, at Feferman and Dicker, then looked hard at Andy.

  He'd pulled on his clothes at four-fifteen in the morning, the first things that came to hand, jeans and a wrinkled white dress shirt and loafers. He'd shivered and sweated in these clothes and torn a hole in his sleeve on a splintered doorjamb. His eyes were red and he hadn't shaved and his cheek was scabbed and his voice was worn to gravel. He knew he didn't look as if he belonged to Dicker or Feferman, to the Federal Bureau of Investigation or to AT&T Security. He swallowed, trying to moisten his throat, and said, "I'm the boy's father."

  "Mr. Bell? You?"

  "Bell? Mr. Bell, oh, that is cute." Feferman began his slow pacing, keeping eye contact with the manager. "Now you're going to explain to us the precise chain of events that brought the deaf boy and Mr. Bell to this hotel."

  She nodded briskly and addressed herself solely to Feferman. "It was an out-of-the-ordinary reservation, so I handled it personally. This was a couple of days ago. Mr. Bell said he was coming to town on business, some kind of government business, well, the implication was, very secret business, I assumed with one of the defense contractors in the valley."

  "This was on the phone?"

  "On the phone. He had to bring his son along, he didn't say why, but he was going to be very busy, in and out at odd hours, and he wanted to make certain that his son was taken care of. He explained that the boy was deaf, what he would need, the decoder for the television, room service meals, I think that's about it. He was very specific about it He said his son wouldn't be leaving the hotel, that he was very shy and would want to be left alone, that he could find his own way to the pool and things." She gestured out toward the balcony. "We normally don't guarantee specific rooms, but I thought if the boy was going to be stuck in the hotel that he might enjoy one of our balcony units."