The horse reared, snorting, then settled down and waited, fixing its marbled brown eyes on him.
"Stable horse." He struck again, harder, and this time the horse took the lesson and broke away into a run. He watched to make sure that it was running up the ridge, that it had sufficient motivation to head back toward the stable. He had asked when he rented the horse, playing the beginner afraid of getting lost, does it know its way back? Yes, sir, the handler had said, just give him his head.
They might find the horse in the hills, they might even find it nosing the fence along Alpine Road, although Interrupt doubted that the animal would find its way back to the place where he had cut the fence and entered the refuge. No matter; if they found the horse they would find its stable brand, and they would check out the stable on Alpine Road, which was a five-minute walk from the Stanford campus.
They might also find his car, parked on Los Arboles near the Stanford golf driving range.
It was a gamble. If they found the horse or the car, or better, found both, they might draw the conclusion that he was in that area. He thought that they would suspect that he had been drawn back to Stanford. Given that assumption, they would concentrate their resources in that region, when in fact he was at the opposite corner of the refuge.
That, then, would make life a whole lot easier.
He squinted up the ridge. The horse had disappeared.
He pulled the heavy bolt cutters from the bag and cut through the bottom three rows of barbed wire, sufficient to pass underneath with the bag and rifle on his back.
On this side of the fence, the ground dropped to a creek bed. Trees and brush tangled along both banks of the creek. Doubly cautious now, he could hear the traffic of Page Mill Road just beyond this wood, but he could not see the road. The corollary was, he could not be seen from the road. He scrambled down into the V of the creek bed and followed it downstream. The creek was low, little more than water traps where the rocks piled up and patches of seeping mud that stank of decomposition.
He moved slowly, concentrating on any sounds that were not his own.
After about fifty yards, the creek bed angled to the right, just about where he had expected it to, and was channeled into a concrete culvert. From above, road level, the culvert would be hard to find, if indeed someone knew it was there and took the trouble to push in through the scratchy brush and trees to find it.
He had found the culvert only by chance. When he had scouted the perimeter along Page Mill Road early this morning, while he waited for the stable to open, he had seen a dog trotting along the wide dirt shoulder. The dog, a collie with a blue bandana around its neck, had suddenly veered off into the wood and hadn't reappeared, and that had roused his curiosity. He had parked, followed the dog's route, scratching himself on the bushes, and found the collie sniffing around the culvert.
His original plan had been to simply hide in the wood along the road until he felt it was safe, maybe until nightfall, and then get across the road. But this was better.
He would tunnel under Page Mill while up above the big cars cruised the road, binoculars scrutinized the hills, and voices radioed back and forth over the police band.
He waited for two minutes, by his watch, listening to the dull automobile rumble from above. There were no sounds of deceleration.
Slipping the rifle sling off his shoulder, he brought the .22 into position and flicked off the safety. The culvert was foul, the ground slick with algae, and his muddied sneakers picked up a coating of scum.
Halfway through the culvert, he stopped. A possibility existed that the authorities had found the culvert and were waiting up ahead for him to emerge. He didn't really believe that they were there, or he would have retreated, but he saw no reason to proceed rashly.
Crouching, he aimed the .22 at the far entrance to the culvert and yelled "Help!" twice.
No response, verbal or physical. He waited, again an arbitrary two minutes, then continued through the culvert to the creek bed on the far side of Page Mill Road. The traffic sounds were behind him now, but the trees and brush and the ubiquitous noisy jays were the same on this side.
The creek, like the collie in the blue bandana, led him to safety. Here, the rolling hills were home to the Stanford Industrial Park: beige and ocher and gray buildings that harmonized with the hills, oak-studded lawns and parking lots patched into the grass and woodlands so as not to violate the spirit of open space. It was a place where a business suit and running shorts were equally appropriate seven days a week.
He settled in the brushy fringe at the edge of the Syntex parking lot and studied the parked cars. Not too many, but then it was Mother's Day. The breeze dried his shirt but he still felt gritty, sticky, headachy, and he smelled of horse and undergrowth. He removed the sneakers and shoved them beneath the thicket of dead oak leaves, then took his pair of clean hard shoes from the bag and put them on.
When he felt rested, when he felt he knew what belonged in the parking lot and what didn't, he broke down the .22 and stowed it in the bag and pulled out his mobile phone and called the number he'd jotted down for the airport limo service.
While he waited, he brought back what Faulkner had said. Elegant piece of engineering.
The headache had returned. He pressed his thumbs to his temples, trying to kill the pain.
Faulkner's voice. Mr. Narver, that's an elegant piece of engineering. Faulkner's grin, the whiz kid from Stanford smirk. It's a piece of shit.
He pressed, containing the headache.
His code was still in the system. All the telco heroes, sweating bullets, and his code was still in the system.
CHAPTER 28
Joe Faulkner leaned far out over the rail of his bridge, like a man who would jump and is testing his will. It was dawn, and fog filled the valleys between the hills and the river gorge below the bridge.
Everything was fog-wet: the leaf-slicked earth beneath Andy's sneakers, the forest behind him, the black asphalt leading onto the bridge. He shivered. The dawn sun was too feeble to burn through the cold.
Joe turned his head, his body still stretched over the rail, and called to him. "Come! Andrew! You have to see this!"
Andy didn't move. He was a man now, not a boy, and he did not have to follow his father onto the bridge.
From where he stood, the bridge seemed to float on fog. Fog licked all the way up to the stiffening trusses of the span, and the suspender cables that soared skyward looked as though they were coated in diamonds, but it was just a layer of ice crystallizing in the sunlight.
"Andrew! Look!" Joe's voice was a tenor, pitched higher in his excitement.
Trembling from the cold and a building wrath, Andy shouted back, "You're not real!"
And indeed, fog had already been drawn up from the river gorge to veil his father.
"Faulkner. Faulkner. They're nearly ready to load the tape."
Andy lost it.
"Andy?"
"Yeah. Just trying to remember a dream I had last night."
Feferman hunched his bulky shoulders in disgust, Amin smiled, Colson simply glanced away, and Nell gave him a look that he could not read.
He wanted to smile at her, but he didn't know how she would take it.'
He shook off the dream and started across the huge switch room, excitement budding in his gut. He shoved his hands in his pockets and crossed his fingers. Like Feferman. Like Joe Faulkner courting luck with his bag of steel shavings to toss in the river.
The rows of baby-blue and white cabinets looked just as they had the night of the cutover, only then he had left them brain dead and now he found them alive, swiftly and silently processing calls, and he was satisfied.
He wasn't the only one to feel excitement. He saw it in the men and women pressed around monitors in the control center, in the taut faces of passing techs, and heard it in footsteps rapping across the floor.
The supervisor, more anxious than excited, met them at the administrative module processor. They shook hand
s all around.
Technically, none of them but the supervisor had to be here. Feferman had come because he was seeing his job through to the end, because he was a bear that didn't let go of his catch until he had flogged it into total submission and consumed it. Amin had come because he was the advisor who had overseen the development of Andy's program, because it would have been impossible to keep him away when something was about to shake the network. Colson was here because he had worked with Andy on the program. And Nell? He supposed Nell was here because she was Colson's daughter and they had both been used poorly. They were owed a certain measure of satisfaction.
And I am here, he thought, because it's my program and because I want to feel and taste the execution of revenge.
Two tape cartridges lay on the workstation table. One tape contained the rewritten switching software; the software development people in Lisle had labored over it for nearly two weeks while everyone waited and stewed.
If this test run went smoothly, the new software would be installed in contaminated superprocessors across the nation, and in two towns in Nova Scotia, and there would no longer be a Trojan horse in the entire communications system.
The second tape cartridge on the workstation table contained Andy's program, and if its test run went smoothly, it would be installed in every ESS across the nation, from small-capacity switches in rural towns to the very high capacity switches that processed long-distance traffic.
Nell linked her arm through Colson's and' regarded Andy. "Ray says you program like a bat out of hell."
"That's about what I felt like." He glanced at Amin, then at Colson, and saw a flicker in Colson's shadowed eyes, an acknowledgment.
The program had been Andy's idea, approved by Feferman and all the way up the bureaucratic chain, but it was Amin with his reputation and connections who had successfully lobbied the telco to develop the program out of line in Sunnyvale rather than in Lisle. The engineers at Lisle had their plates full rewriting the switch software, with New York breathing down their necks hot to restart the clocks. So it was Amin who acted as consultant, as mother hen to his chick, it was Amin who checked his code and made suggestions, who caught more than one error.
But it was Colson who had done the dog work with him. Colson knew less than Andy or Amin about the subject, but he knew that he wanted in on it, and Andy welcomed his sharp mind and single-minded attention. They had damn near worked as equals for the first time in his R-TAC career. At first it had been awkward, for his prolonged apology had annoyed Colson, but then it became pure work and the tensions eased.
He had wanted to ask Colson about Nell, but that would have been a breach of their tacit working contract. She had finally called, to inquire about Wayne, and he had told her that Wayne was fine, that the only danger Wayne was in now was the danger of becoming a huge pain in the butt wanting to learn rock climbing. Andy had done his best to apologize, but he still hadn't figured out how to express his feelings to her satisfaction, so they talked for a few more painfully polite minutes, then broke the connection. She had not dropped by R-TAC to see her father, at least while Andy was there, and tonight was the first time he'd seen her since he'd accused her father, accused her, and she'd slapped his face.
She looked changed. Maybe it was just her clothes. She wore a dark dress, plain, tailored like a suit. They had all dressed soberly tonight, businesslike. It was not a casual occasion.
But her hair still made him think of the sun.
* * *
The fog was retreating, and he finally stopped shivering. He could see his father again clearly, hands gripping the rail, elbows jabbed out at right angles, his body a cocked arrow ready to let fly.
"Look! Come look, boy!"
I'm not a boy, Andy said, but he wasn't saying it out loud, he didn't dare yell it to Joe Faulkner.
Still, something about the way his father leaned out over the rail, the tight-strung arrow tension of it, aroused him. What did Joe Faulkner see down there, what was so compelling?
"Andrew!"
Without deciding, he was already walking, stepping from the rough earth onto the road that led out to the bridge. The recently poured asphalt had been rolled beautifully flat and level, and a fine layer of grit rasped under his sneakers. It was warmer out here on the asphalt, the black reflecting the sun's mounting heat up his body, while all around him the water slick steamed off the roadbed.
His father watched. Then, satisfied that Andy was coming, he turned back to the rail. Andy could not see his face, only his hair, and it was thick, brown well-streaked with silver; it would turn fully silver as he aged but stay thick as an animal pelt until the day he died. Andy saw his father's head move softly from side to side. He was following something down below, or he was shaking his head in wonder.
Andy began to hurry. Everything was moving rapidly, the fog sizzling away, the river crashing headlong under the bridge. He was not close enough to see the river yet, but he heard it and saw bits of foam sent spinning through the air.
"Hurry, son!"
He ran, tracking the white line that blazed so bright and clean along the center of the road that he could almost see the paint flowing down off the brush.
And then he was on the bridge roadway itself, passing beneath the first tower, solid, strong, well engineered.
He reached his father and Joe Faulkner turned, beaming his delight. "Good boy! Come look!"
Andy tried to step forward. He could smell the river below, water running so fast it was cleansed of all impurities, oxygenated as it whipped over the boulders in its path. The river smell cleared his head with a shocking chill and he dared not move to the rail and look down. "I can't," he whispered.
Joe Faulkner turned his back on Andy and thrust his chest hard up against the rail. "Now! Don't miss this!"
His father's command resounded in the gorge, as if he had engineered the river as well as the bridge.
A heavy hand squeezed his shoulder. "Faulkner will."
The bridge and the river and Joe evaporated like the fog. Was that all, had he waked up then? Andy blinked. It was Feferman's hand, and he squeezed again. "What?"
"Good grief, Faulkner, either pay attention or go take a nap."
Amin frowned. "He has earned a nap, Mr. Feferman."
"I'll what?" Andy said.
"Draw us a map. With your program." Feferman finally released him and turned a scowl on Amin. "Then he can go sleep until the cows come home."
"Sounds just fine," Andy said.
Feferman was thinner, he noticed. His suit jacket puckered as if the shoulder pads had been removed, and the padding under his cheekbones was gone. He had fumed during the past days, "waiting for the other shoe to drop," keeping the entire security force ready to pounce the moment a switch went down. But no switches failed. Feferman complained that the channel was like a bomb that had not been defused; it could still take down enough switches to give him nightmares and if it didn't this minute then you had to sweat through the next minute.
Maybe that was the idea, Andy thought. Lloyd knows we'll be more worried about a trigger that doesn't fire than about one that does. Maybe Lloyd was just playing it safe, because if he triggered a failure the toll records would show where he had been, and that was the kind of data the FBI liked to exercise. The FBI already had a few data points; Feferman said that several marked bills had surfaced, but that told them only where Lloyd had been, not where he was now.
As long as he did not leave the country.
"Time," Colson said.
The supervisor had the panel open on the processor, fussing, then picked up one of the tapes, carefully checked the label, and loaded it into the tape drive. He typed a command into the terminal. "Reading the tape."
Lights blinked on the tape drive and the motor whirred in short bursts: confirmation from the machine half of the human-machine interface.
The supervisor smiled back.
The five-E was cleansing itself, feeding in healthy code, dumping contam
inated software.
Andy wanted Lloyd to feel the excision of his Trojan horse, the way that an amputee was said to feel the ache of a missing limb.
He listened to the tape drive.
This was like a cutover. Sometimes, you cut over to a new switch bit by bit, always having a backup ready to take the cut lines in case of a screwup. Engineers called that a chicken cut. But it wasn't always workable to cut over that way. So, with most cutovers, you simply cut the life out of the old machine and hoped to hell that the new machine would work. They called that a flash cut.
Cut, and trust.
They pressed in closer, attention riveted on the blinking light, and Andy wanted them to feel what he was feeling. Trust, the restoration of trust in the five-E.
The tape drive stopped. It was done.
"Now," the supervisor said, "I understand you've got a new task for our diagnostics processor." He picked up the remaining tape cartridge.
Now, Andy thought fiercely.
"Yup," said Colson, "we're gonna do a little digital signal processing."
The supervisor chuckled and loaded the tape into the second drive.
Amin bent slightly toward Nell and spoke, voice low, his words like an underground current, blurring. Colson and Feferman stood side by side, immobile, the oscilloscope and the bear.
Andy jammed his hand deep into his pocket, feeling for the quarter. It was the coin that had given him the idea for the program, and he trapped it between his knuckles and compressed his hand into a fist.
The tape reader lit up and started to hum.
How did it feel, Lloyd? When you crept into the Carolina Hotel and stuck the coins in the phone and dialed into the switch? Did your heartbeat ramp up, did you feel it in your eardrums? Did your mouth go dry?
The tape advanced and the 5ESS drank in the code.
Andy withdrew the quarter from his pocket. He rotated the coin, so that the ridged edge ground his fingertip.
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