Supervirus

by Andrew W. Mitchell

  Later in the course of Nemo's history, Willard would overhear him say the following words: An important moment in history is like a beam of light. Some people see it and rush to it like moths. Other people just happen to discover that the beam of light is shining upon them. On hearing Nemo, Willard would realize that he was a perfect example of the second kind of person: he had not asked for his involvement in what happened, and he would not apologize for it. I never asked to be a hero.

  But that realization was to come later. At the time, he was driving and going over the bookie's words: We think he's a kid. And then: He may be...weird.

  Many people would have suspected that the bookie was hiding something. They would wonder what the bookie knew that he wasn't saying. They would try to imagine the complete truth.

  Willard was trying to imagine the truth, too, but in a different way. He believed what the bookie had said. He took it at face value. It sounded like the bookie didn't know too much about this kid. He wasn't even sure if he was a kid. And he said, cryptically, that the kid might be weird.

  To Willard, it all implied that the kid was a mystery to his client, but a mystery that evidently was valuable. The kid, whoever he was, was special. As a gambler, Willard had his faults, but one good quality that came along with the bad was an ability to believe.

  HACKERS

  Bethesda, MD

  22 hrs to Birth

  “Thirty seconds,” Simon announced.

  In a terrycloth bathrobe, he leaned forward, intently watching the output on his laptop screen.

  The screen showed only a technical garble, but Simon could interpret what it meant: over on the West Coast, their operative had entered the office of Stram & Rice, and he had thirty seconds to get out of there.

  “What's happening?” a woman's voice demanded. Her hands rested on the chair as she leaned over his shoulder. He tensed imperceptibly. She was known in Agency circles as the Stone Cold Fox. She was disarmingly beautiful and sexual, but coldly professional.

  “We can't see right now,” Simon explained. “We know the operative got into the building and up the elevator to the eleventh floor lobby. We also know that he scanned his retina at the door and got the door open. He's in the office. Now he's got thirty seconds before the Stram & Rice camera system processes the images of his face and figures out that he's not an employee.”

  “What if he doesn't get out in time?”

  “They might seal the office door. That would trap him inside.”

  It was somewhere near 2 a.m. in Simon's apartment, 11 p.m. in the office of Stram & Rice way over on the West Coast. Security at Stram & Rice was tight. Entrance to the 11th floor lobby after hours required not just a standard keycard, but also biometric verification. Those entering had to hunch slightly and allow their retina to be scanned and matched with the retina of an employee in the company database.

  Simon had aided the operative's entrance. He had gained remote access to the computer that controlled the retina scanner:

  Shell request to 310.199.251.103 on port 22

  login as: admin

  admin@310.199.251.103's password:

  Last login: Tues Dec 01 03:51:03 from 309.149.213.112

  admin@server [~]#

  Simon could remotely navigate through the folders of the computer, look at the programs that were running on the computer, and make changes — all from a distance. He could make the retina scanner give a PASS to open the door whenever he wanted.

  Simon had added one little instruction to the machine: if the keycard scanner received one particular magnetic strip code, it would override the normal program and send a PASS to the biometric scanner after four seconds. Simon's operative had that keycard.

  “Their camera system can recognize faces?” the woman asked.

  “Yeah, it's pretty expensive. These cameras record the office and feed the footage into a powerful computer, which scans the video images for suspicious behavior. If the computer finds a suspicious-looking pattern in the images, it alerts security personnel. Face recognition technology has made some big leaps. Computers can see people now.”

  “So is he out yet or what?”

  Simon stared at the laptop screen, which had not changed. “Hard to say. He doesn't scan on the way out. We'll know in a few minutes if he got the hard drive.”

  The operative's mission: find Jared Keller's desk and walk out of the office of Stram & Rice with Keller's computer under his arm.

  Wearing business casual attire, the visitor scanned a card at the 11th floor lobby door. He bent over as if scanning his retina, though in fact the computer system waived the biometric test and gave a PASS result. The door clicked open.

  Once inside, the intruder walked back toward Jared's office. Some of the lights were on in the office and others were off. That was not too unusual for the hour. But that made it difficult for the scanning technology behind the security cameras to see that the visitor had entered Jared's dark office. And the cameras could not effectively record him as he unplugged Jared's computer in the dark, leaving behind the power cord and the accessories.

  He was never too far from the handful of other employees on the floor, though he never quite crossed paths with any of them.

  As he walked out, the scanning technology identified a suspicious image: a person walking with a computer; a person walking out the door with computer technology. But suspicious images cropped up with some regularity. The system only triggered an alarm if it noticed a certain number of suspicious images within one time frame. No alert was sent. And if it had been sent, he probably would have gotten away anyway, since he was mostly out the door by that point. Either way, the operation was bigger than he was, and his identity and safety were of negligible importance.

  And either way, the security experts at the company were going to have much bigger security problems to worry about the next day. They wouldn't have time to miss Jared Keller's computer once their whole network crashed, and the managing partner of the firm went missing.

  “There goes our thirty seconds,” she said, looking at her watch.

  Simon pushed back from his computer with a sense of completion. “We'll know for sure in a minute,” he said to the Stone Cold Fox. “Our little friend on the West Coast will be plugging that computer back in shortly. Then we'll be able to look for the information you need.”

  They both relaxed a little. “Finally, I get a chance to see you at work,” she remarked.

  “Finally, I get to see if your department actually does anything,” he quipped. “But you haven't seen much. That's the easy part of hacking,” he said, pointing to the laptop screen.

  “The easy part?”

  “The breaking in part. Any monkey can break into a computer.”

  “Really?”

  “All you need is your Playbook and a little patience.”

  “What's a Playbook?”

  The Playbook, according to Simon, was your list of the various exploits and tactics you could try on a specific computer system to break into it. All you had to do was diligently build your Playbook from technical news sources. Then, when it was time to break into a computer system, you went through the plays in your Playbook until one of them worked.

  “Just your Playbook and a little time,” he summarized.

  “I don't think the Playbook would do much good in my hands,” she said.

  “Using it takes a little practice,” Simon admitted. “But not much. Most hackers are just too lazy.”

  By the look of Simon's place, he was no typical, lazy hacker. His apartment was immaculate, even stylish. Even Zen, she thought. His living room was mostly empty space: a shiny, expansive wood floor, tables with no clutter. A candle or two. No books. Simon disliked clutter so much that he did not have a complete dish set. When he answered the door, the first thing Simon did was lead her into the kitchen, take out the only two mugs he owned, and make some tea, which they were still in the process of sipping. He had been pretty cordial, given the hour and his rath
er blunt nature.

  She did, admittedly, have a way of putting men on their best behavior. She made them uncomfortable. She was too attractive and too capable for them, like a tall girl who had trouble finding guys to date, although the problem had nothing to do with physical height in her case. Men didn't measure up, as much as she would have liked them to.

  It was because of the nature of her relationship with men that the Stone Cold Fox had been suspicious when Rob Rice called her. She and Rob had met at a hotel bar where they had both been on business, in New York City, and after a couple drinks Flannigan had invited him up to her room. It was not a night of romance, but rather a meeting of well-matched adversaries. He was more like a guy who was tall enough to date the tall girl. He wasn't Mr. Right — she knew it, and he understood it. They exchanged numbers with the unspoken agreement that they wouldn't use them.

  So she had been surprised to hear from Rob. He had called her a few hours before she ended up on Simon's doorstep, ringing the bell over and over. He explained that he wanted help with a genius kid.

  Why did you call me? she asked.

  You're a psychologist! Rob explained. And I thought it would be good to see you.

  To Flannigan, an experienced interrogator, both statements were obvious lies. If this kid was so important, Rob would want a good psychologist; but he didn't know if Flannigan was good. He wants my help because he thinks I'll keep my mouth shut, she decided. That meant the kid was something big. The kid needed to be a secret. And that fact had convinced Flannigan to do a little homework on this kid.

  “What is this all about anyway?” Simon asked. “A kid, you said?”

  “Maybe a kid,” said the Stone Cold Fox. “Some kind of numbers genius.”

  They were hackers looking for hackers. The NSA kept its eye out for individuals, of any age, who showed mathematical genius. Many such individuals were recruited by the Agency. But the Stone Cold Fox had a different purpose. Her job was to find threats. She had just one question about the kid Jared Keller had met: was the kid a hacker?

  “Yeah, sure, everyone's a genius these days,” he said. He looked up through his round eyeglasses. He had a neat, exact manner. Miraculously, even at that hour he'd thrown on an unwrinkled dark gray T-shirt and seemed perfectly lucid. Smart, critical, and blunt, he made people nervous. Alongside the Stone Cold Fox, who tended to make people nervous for different reasons, he was almost a kindred spirit.

  He produced a remote control and switched on a monolithic, elegant hi-fi sound system, which bathed the room with Miles Davis. “People aren't geniuses. They do works of genius. Let me know when he does something.”

  “The story is that he could move the stock market.”

  “Could,” he emphasized. “Let me know when he does something.”

  “I'm working on it,” she said dryly. “Now, about this hard drive. Jared Keller's hard drive. Jared used it to chat with the kid. Can you get me the kid's chat name?”

  “That should be no problem,” Simon replied. “As soon as our operative over there gets the hard drive somewhere safe.” He leaned his slightly pudgy frame over the keyboard and forwarded the request to his partner on the West Coast.

  “Thank heavens we don't have to talk to Google,” Simon sighed. “They're strict about protecting everyone's data. And they're immune to your charms. A lot of hotties work there.”

  No one is immune to my charms, she thought, with an internal smile. Well, maybe there were some exceptions. But she was pretty good.

  While she waited, the Stone Cold Fox took out a bunch of yellow index-sized cards held together by a rubber band. She removed the rubber band and flipped through the cards.

  Each card had a puzzle on it — a math problem, or a mathematical brain-teaser. She carried them for instances like these, when she wanted to test the mathematical ability of a subject. Together, the cards were like an I.Q. test, but an I.Q. test designed to identify true mathematical geniuses.

  “First we test for Ability,” she explained to Simon. “The ability to be a hacker. Then we test for Intent — his intent to cause damage. If we have Ability and Intent, then we have a Highly Probable Threat.” That is, a highly probable hacker.

  21 hrs 30 min to Birth

  Simon straightened up. “We have a hard drive. We have a chat name.”

  “Great,” she said, touching the chair. “Let me at the computer.”

  She pulled up another chair as Simon scooted to the side, staying close enough to see the laptop screen properly. She brushed her skirt down the backs of her thighs and then crossed her legs as she sat, brushing Simon slightly and sending him into a silent rush of tension.

  After placing the stack of yellow cards to the side of the keyboard, her perfectly manicured fingers tapped at the keys.

  She opened a window for Gmail and logged in. She sent a chat request to him.

  You have invited Nemo to a chat.

  Nemo: Hello. I'm pleased to make your acquaintance.

  “That was fast,” she declared.

  SCF: Hi Nemo! Am I bothering you?

  SCF: What time is it for you right now?

  Maybe we can get a time zone, a hint at his location.

  Nemo: The time is at hand.

  Nemo: The hour is come.

  The two looked at each other quizzically.

  SCF: The hour for what, Nemo?

  Nemo: As I have been given power over all flesh, I should give eternal life to many, as has been given me by my father.

  The gears in her head were turning with her training as a psychologist: Psychosis. Delusional beliefs. Lack of insight into his own condition. Just hints at this point.

  Let's see if he can function.

  SCF: A friend of mine told me about you. Jared Keller. He said you're talented with the market. He told me about a stock market game you played.

  Nemo: Yes.

  SCF: Do you like playing games?

  Nemo: Yes.

  SCF: How about math games?

  Nemo: I'm not sure what you mean by “math games.” But I'm happy to try.

  SCF: Great! Let me give you a math puzzle then.

  Simon watched quietly as her fingers moved from the keyboard and picked up the stack of yellow index cards.

  It was usually easy to steer a conversation with a subject in the direction of the yellow cards. Most subjects had a competitive nature and a fondness for math. Those traits made them computer hackers in the first place. And those traits meant they were open to doing the puzzles on the yellow cards.

  The Stone Cold Fox selected a card to start with.

  SCF: Ok. Here's one.

  SCF: How many different 7 card hands are there in a deck of cards?

  Nemo: You mean, how many distinct combinations of 7 elements are there in a set of 52 elements?

  SCF: Yes.

  Nemo: 133784560.

  She flipped the card over and checked the answer: 133,784,560. Correct.

  She frowned. It was not the most difficult question she had, by any stretch. But Nemo had answered it so quickly, too quickly. That took about one second, she thought.

  On the back of the yellow card, under the answer to the puzzle, was a table. The table indicated how long the average subject of different abilities took to answer the question on that particular card.

  The table was based on the subject's Age and his Ability Level. The fastest time in the table was for a subject aged “Over 18 years” and with “Highest Ability.” The average time to answer the question for a such a person, according to the table, was 6.5 seconds. And that was really, really fast. Plenty of math geniuses couldn't do it that quickly.

  Nemo's answer was coming in about five seconds too quickly. And it was even more implausible if he was a kid. How old is he? she wondered.

  “He must have used a computer,” Simon judged.

  “It was too fast even for that,” she said. And that was a problem. He was too smart, implausibly smart.

  SCF: Very good! Impressive.
>
  Nemo: Okay, my turn...