Kidd and LuEllen: Novels 1-4

by John Sandford

  “Why forty-five days?” Maggie asked, when I explained the virus to her. We were in the Whitemark computer using the special entry codes I had created for us.

  “The Whitemark programmers will eventually catch on to what we’re doing. We’ve got three or four weeks at the most. If their top systems man is busted on the porno charge, we may get a few more days out of the confusion. Anyway, when the trouble starts, they’ll do the routine system checks. That will take a couple of days. When nothing works, they’ll start sweating. Eventually, they’ll figure it out. They’ll realize they’re under attack, and they’ll shut down outside access. There are some ways around that, but only for a day or two. At that point, we’ll be fifteen or twenty days out, and they’ll call in the FBI, or somebody like that, to look for us. They’ll be worried about sabotage.

  “Once they get everything shut down, there’ll be a couple of weeks of confusion. They’ll be paranoid about the system. They’ll run all kinds of tests. Then they’ll start repairs, bringing in new software. Checking it. That should get us five or six weeks down the road. So then, at six and a half weeks, the bomb explodes. It’ll be the finishing touch. They won’t recover before the contract deadlines.”

  She thought about it for a minute, nibbling on her lower lip. “So what’s the first move after you get the viruses in? The first thing that will affect them? If we don’t hurt them soon, it’ll be too late.”

  “I’ll start on that tonight,” I said. “Most of their design work is done at individual work stations, but all the stations are tied into the central computer. I can get to them when they’re not being used. I’ll start by hacking up the math programs. Engineers run a million numbers through their computers. I’ll stick in a program that will add or subtract various small percentages on certain calculations. It won’t be quite random. Identical calculations will come out the same way every time, so if they check their work, it’ll be confirmed. But it’ll all be wrong.”

  She didn’t understand. “What’s the practical effect?” she asked. “Tell me a practical effect.”

  “Okay. Say you were designing a screw-in gas cap for your Porsche. There’s a male part and a female part. The threading has to be the same on both parts. Say the twist on the male part is altered just slightly—the pitch is changed a few degrees. The cap becomes worthless. You can’t look at the plans and tell that it’s worthless; you can’t tell it’s worthless when you’re making it. It looks fine right up to the time you try to screw the parts together. Then they don’t work. And the whole problem is in a calculation somewhere.

  “Or say that you want to design the kind of round gas-cap cover that goes on the outside of some cars, on the fender. Say you make the round metal cover a quarter inch too big in diameter. It won’t fit; it’s useless. You can’t make it fit any more than you can push a nickel through a pop-bottle top. But it looks fine, right up to the moment you try to put it on the car.”

  She considered it for a moment, staring dead into the eye of an onion bagel.

  “That sounds pretty crude,” she said finally.

  “Those examples are,” I agreed. “But if you do analogous things in electronics, it gets more complicated. You can’t see which parts are wrong; it can take days to figure out a mistake. Every individual part works, and every part is just as specified, but the system won’t work. Anytime you build a complicated electronic machine there are always mistakes, pure accidents. They’re night-mares. Sometimes it takes days to find them. You don’t know if you’re dealing with a basic design flaw, or if there’s a bad electrical connection somewhere. If mistakes are generated on a large scale, by design . . . I don’t know of a cure.”

  She thought that over as she got into the onion bagel. “How do you know that they just won’t check the computer and fix it?” she asked as she chewed.

  “They will, sooner or later. But probably later. Computers are the water engineers swim in. They don’t question the answers they get from computers any more than a fish questions water. They know the computer is correct: the problem must be somewhere else.”

  That seemed to satisfy her, although she was more thoughtful than pleased. Later in the morning, I injected the first of the viruses into the Whitemark system. When it was done, I wandered into the kitchen and heard her talking on an extension phone, relaying what I’d told her. When she got off the phone, she came in and sat down.

  “I was talking to our systems man,” she said. “I didn’t tell him what we’re doing, of course, but I did say that I’d talked to a guy about computer security. He says you’re right. But he says the chances of a good enough programmer ever getting into our system are slim and none.”

  “That’s why it could be done.”

  I was tempted to tell her that Bobby had already been in the Anshiser system, but some things are best left untold. “If I were you, I might have another little chat with him.”

  “I made a note,” she said. She smiled, and the skin crinkled at the corners of her eyes.

  WHILE I WAS working on the attack programs that we’d insert into the Whitemark system, Dace was working on the publicity angle. His first product was a package on the systems director, the pornographer.

  “I put it together with words cut out of the Post,” he said. He was wearing surgeon’s latex gloves and holding the paper by the corners. It was an ugly jumble of clipped-out news type Scotch-taped to a piece of spiral notebook paper. “The hardest part was getting the words right. Nothing too big, but nothing too small, either. Something just right for a half-bright crackhead.”

  The text was three paragraphs long and explained:

  It specified names, the address, and the day and time of the burglary.

  A sample magazine was enclosed, along with the list of subscribers.

  “One thing that strikes me as phony is that we’re sending it to the right police jurisdiction. A junkie would probably send it to the Washington cops,” Dace said as he sealed the envelope. “I don’t want to take a chance that the whole thing would get lost in the bureaucracy, so I’m going to send it to the right place, to the chief. Even if they’re a little suspicious, they’ll check. Especially with the magazine and the subscriber list.”

  “What do you think they’ll do? The cops?” Maggie asked.

  “When I was working a police beat years ago, they’d pass it off to the vice squad. The vice cops would go over to the house, see if the door looks like it had been broken in recently. I’m assuming that the break-in wasn’t reported. Then they might look in the windows and see if we described the place right. Or knock on the door with some phony excuse, to see if it looks right. If everything jibes, they’ll watch the place, see who comes and goes. Maybe have a quiet talk with a neighbor or two. They’ll do a computer search and see if these people have ever been involved in a sex thing in the past. If they find anything, they may do a discreet black-bag job themselves, to check the place out. Then, depending on what they find, they’ll go to a pet judge and get a search warrant. They won’t have a real good case, but it should be enough for a warrant.”

  “What if they did report the break-in? For insurance?”

  Dace shrugged. “In that case, they probably moved the porn out, at least during the investigation. If they did report it, the cops would have corroboration in their own files that the burglary took place. They’ll still watch the place. Sooner or later, they’ll bust them.”

  “It better be sooner,” Maggie said. “If it happens two months from now, it won’t help.”

  “It’s not a sure thing,” Dace said. “But I’d be willing to bet it’ll happen in a week.”

  “How’ll we know if it happened?”

  “We’ll give the cops a couple of days to work. Then we tip off the papers and the TV stations that they’re about to bust the biggest kiddie-porn ring in the country. It’s hyperbole, but the TV people love that kind of thing. A new record for kiddie porn. They’ll get in touch with the cops, and that’ll goose the cops along. We’
ll see it on the evening news.”

  THE NIGHT AFTER the first attack, Maggie lay on her back in bed, the lights out. The code was still running through my head.

  “It’s weird,” she said, reaching over to pat me on the stomach. “When Rudy and Dillon and I talked about hiring you, I had this picture of somebody climbing a barbwire fence with plastic explosive in his teeth. Instead, we sit in an air-conditioned apartment and eat donuts, and you type on a computer.”

  “You never carry plastic explosive in your teeth,” I said.

  “Have you ever seen the Whitemark building?”

  “Nope. Should I?”

  “I guess not. There’s not much to see. Just a big glass cube with a funny pyramid thing for the roof. I thought you might be curious.”

  “Nah. You can tell more sitting here than you can from looking at the outside of the building.”

  She shook her head. “That doesn’t seem right, somehow. It’s like . . .” She groped for an analogy. “It’s like dropping bombs on Vietnamese peasants. You know, you push a button and people die, but you go home to lunch. If you’re going to have a war, you should have the courtesy to kill your enemies in person. And maybe suffer a little bit.”

  “You’re rambling,” I said.

  “I know. I don’t even know what I’m trying to say. But it seems . . . wrong . . . to be able to attack somebody you’ve never seen, don’t know, and probably won’t ever meet.”

  “You mean I should find the president of Whitemark and personally rip his heart out.”

  “Oh, bullshit, Kidd. You know what I’m getting at. This seems so . . . sterile. I mean, it’s scary. It’s little electronic lights ruining a huge company.”

  “Welcome to the big city,” I said.

  “That’s an ugly attitude,” she said.

  “Yeah, but that’s the way it is. You wanted this done, and I can do it. We’re both consenting adults. It’s the new reality. The little electronic lights are more real than that glass building with the pyramid on top.”

  She shivered.

  THE LETTER ABOUT the porn merchants went in the mail the first day. Over the next two days, as I jimmied the Whitemark computer system, Dace and Maggie worked and reworked the approaches to the media on the public attack.

  Dace suggested that the Whitemark letters to the generals be leaked first, anonymously, to a weekly defense newsletter called From the Turret.

  “A lot of people read it, a lot of reporters. Turret’snot too scrupulous about what they use or where they get it. If we drop them a note, say we have been unfairly demoted in the company, and send along the letters, they’ll use them,” he said.

  “It doesn’t sound public enough,” Maggie said with a frown. “I mean, frankly, every company in the defense industry hires retired generals to lobby for them. We do. You put that story in a defense newsletter, there might be a few raised eyebrows, but nothing much will happen.”

  “Ah. But this isn’t hiring a few generals. This involves a quid pro quo. They’re saying, ‘If our airplane is picked, there’ll be jobs in procurement for those who helped us.’ That’s not recruiting, that’s bribery. As soon as Turret publishes, we call the Post, The New York Times, and Knight-Ridder bureau, and so on, and tip them off. Just being in print gives the story cachet. They’ll be interested, because it’s the kind of thing they expect to find in a newsletter. Then the next day, we send along copies of the letters to the papers’ defense specialist writers.”

  “Think that will break it out?”

  “I think so. It won’t be the biggest story of the year, but it will be a nice one. The front pages of the Post, probably a good inside spot in the Times.”

  “After we get that going,” Maggie said, “we should get in touch with the business magazines about the problems they’re having meeting the Hellwolf schedules. That will have a nasty effect on their stock prices.”

  DACE AND LUELLEN usually went out at night, and often spent the night at his apartment. I worked evenings. Maggie talked with Chicago or worked with the other computer terminal, via telephone, with her Chicago office. One night, simultaneously overcome with office fatigue and horniness, we staggered into our bedroom, pulling off clothes, and fell on the bed in a frenzy. Afterward, Maggie showered and dropped into the bed, naked, and was instantly asleep.

  The next morning, I woke first, yawned, slid out of bed, and half-opened the narrow venetian blinds that covered the bedroom window. Light flooded across the bed, illuminating the long valley of her spine and the turn of her hip and shoulders. Her face was turned away, her blond hair spread over the pillow. She was still sleeping soundly. I looked at her a moment, then tiptoed out and got the big pad of parchment paper I use for sketching. When she woke, I’d done a half dozen preliminaries.

  “What are you doing?” she said sleepily.

  “Drawing.”

  She was suddenly awake, alarmed. “Let me see those.” She crawled across the bed and I showed her the pad. She looked at the drawings, and lay back. “Can’t see my face,” she said.

  “I can always put it in,” I joked.

  “Just what I need. A nude picture of myself hanging over the bar. What are you going to do with them?”

  “Probably do a painting—if I can convince you to lie in the light for a few mornings, so I can get your skin.”

  “I don’t know; I’d feel silly. I’m no model,” she said, and seemed genuinely shy.

  That afternoon, by chance, I saw an old-fashioned red-white-and-blue-checked comforter in a shop window, and went in and bought it. Dace and LuEllen were gone again the next morning, and I got her to lie on it, nude, face down, her head turned away, the light streaming in over her shoulders and butt. I spent an hour doing color studies before she put a stop to it.

  “How much do models get paid?” she asked.

  “Depends on how good they are,” I said. “Anything between nine and fifteen dollars an hour.”

  “You owe me fifteen bucks,” she said, pulling up her underpants.

  “‘Fraid not. You’re awful. Five bucks at the most. You kept scratching your back, and you’d move around on that checked background. Drove me nuts.”

  “Awful, huh? So it’s not a fallback if I get fired?”

  DACE SAW THE beginnings of the painting that afternoon and whistled.

  “Nice ass, huh?” Maggie said.

  “Nice painting,” he said seriously.

  Maggie looked at me as if she had never seen me before.

  THE CHANGES I sneaked into the Whitemark computers were worked out on editing programs at the apartment. I wrote the code on our machines, tested it, developed the sequence for inserting it at Whitemark, and put it in. I was on-line with Whitemark for only a few minutes—sometimes a matter of seconds.

  As the work progressed I drifted into the traditional programming schedule. The programming and debugging were done at night, and I slept late. Once I even ordered out for a pizza with everything, the only official programmer food.

  The attack programs were inserted into the Whitemark software during the heavy computer-working hours in the morning, when we’d be less likely to be noticed.

  In the afternoons, I’d paint. I’d never worked in Washington, but it was an exceptional place, with its heavy subtropical flora, the water, the varied stone and brick buildings going back two hundred years. The light was almost Italianate, but bluer and clearer. When I went out to paint, often along the Mall, Maggie would come along, bring a book and a blanket, and lie in the sun and read and doze.

  Dace and LuEllen were making plans for Mexico. With the burglaries done, LuEllen had almost nothing to do, and spent the days touring Washington. Scouting possible burglary targets, I suspected. Twice she flew back to Duluth, alone, to make arrangements for a longer absence. Dace had decided on the west coast of Mexico, a semi-modern fishing village in Baja with American-owned villas on the hillside. “Just the right combination of ambience and convenience,” he said. His first novel would inv
olve Pentagon power politics with a dash of sexual intrigue. “Like it really is.”

  Maggie and Dace sent the material on the generals off to Turret. Dace, playing the part of a demoted and treacherous executive, called the newsletter to make sure they had gotten the package, and that they understood it. They had, and they did. The television stations were tipped on the pornographers and promised to make inquiries. Dace also spent some time hanging around the Pentagon, talking with reporter friends, listening for rumors about Whitemark. There was nothing at first. Then, slowly, they began to come. . . . Trouble with plans; trouble with production; disputes between lower-level managers over a series of brutal snafus . . .

  On the ninth day of the attack, I found something interesting in the Whitemark system. I had noticed a data-exchange line that ran out of the main computer to a satellite computer elsewhere. I paid no attention to it, until one day I saw an exchange that involved a remote terminal beyond the satellite. That meant that somebody was telephoning the satellite computer, and from there, was getting into the main computer. If I could learn how to access the satellite from the outside, I could avoid the phone lines that went directly into the main computers. For practical purposes, I would be working from inside the Whitemark building. Toward the end of the attack, it might buy me a few more days of work.

  Unfortunately, the computers accessed each other with special codes, and I couldn’t find the code listings inside the main system. It was all done inside the satellite.

  What I could see were incoming codes. Each five-numeral code group was unique—the same one was never used twice. All the codes were handtyped, so they weren’t coming off a master list on a disk. Eventually I fed a list of once-used codes to Bobby, explained the problem, and asked if he had an analysis. He called back three hours later.

  The code is the 17th Mersenne Prime, 13,395 digits in 2,679 groups of five, starting with 85450. Your code sample starts 875 groups in and continues in sequence. I am sending you the next 500 sequence groups. Enough?