“But the air traffic control system has nothing to do with it.”
“It may. If this virus is as strong as it appears to be, it must be using a wide variety of attacks. It's like a biological virus that has been born highly resistant to all the factors that could kill it. It's a supervirus.”
He turned unceremoniously and went up the stairs. Simon followed, frowning. After five minutes, the flight took off. After an hour, all flights were grounded until further notice.
PART II
THE SUPERVIRUS
RESEARCH
En route to Fort Tortuga
12 hrs to Birth
The possibility Flannigan was afraid of, the one she had to plan for, was that Nemo was serious about playing “hide-and-go-seek.” In that case, they might find trouble when they arrived on the island.
Research. How can he be hiding, she wondered, if he's busy doing research? She pictured him in a computer room on the base, a room that had been closed for the holiday season. Nemo was sitting at one terminal, his small gaunt face dwarfed by the glow of the massive screen. Typing furiously. Not hiding; working. Or he was in another room, playing with robotics, sitting at the edge of a circular ring, holding a remote control, steering a squat, heavily armored tank in circles.
He's waiting for us. It had been her decision to lead the group down there to get him. Once they arrived, they'd find out what he had decided to do about it.
“Not far from the kingdom of God.”
As a psychology professional, Flannigan didn't make a habit of delving deep into the minds of her subjects. All the geniuses fell into two categories: they wanted company, or they wanted attention. Nemo, Flannigan feared, wanted lots of attention. He had something to prove. Not far from the kingdom of God.
If things went awry, what was the worst that could happen? Standing near the cockpit, she looked down the length of the plane at the team. Everything was going to depend on the operative guy and Sam. Kenny would freeze under pressure, and Preeti would get hysterical. And Gene and Simon would compete. They were already butting heads, ignoring Flannigan. Flannigan herself wasn't listening; she was watching.
Simon: “You told Simpson there were two possible explanations for the slowdown: a virus, or a coordinated attack. But then you seemed to assume that it was a virus.”
Gene: “I don't believe a team of people could conduct so far-reaching and efficient an attack.“
Simon: “It would take a team of hackers to manage all those tactics.”
Gene: “Unless it's new. You must always account for the possibility of something new.”
Simon: “These attacks, wherever they are coming from, must be drawing from an unusually large Playbook. The more a particular exploit gets used, security personnel will patch it. So we're not just talking about a large number of attacks. We're talking about a deep, deep roster of attacks to replace the first ones as they get patched up.”
Sam conserved her energy for the next time it would be needed (and that time was definitely not on a long flight).
Willard slouched in the back of the cabin. He kept his eyes shut but tossed and turned in his seat. After a moment he sat up, cradling one hand in the other. He rooted around for a bottle and administered himself a small handful of painkillers. He's hurt himself bad, she thought. God knows how that happened. From one job straight to the other, with a new injury here and there and no time to fix himself. He probably felt enough pain to whip open the hull door and scream out over the ocean. But he knew that it was no use. Screaming was not helpful. Like Sam, he was trying to save his strength.
A group holds together under stress only out of training, or luck, she thought. And this group didn't have the training and it wouldn't have the luck either. They hadn't been chosen for their ability to cooperate. On the contrary, they had been chosen — Gene and Simon, especially — for what they could do by themselves.
On the aisle seat next to her at the front of the cabin, Flannigan had stacked several thick manila envelopes, each of them bulging with printed material. She had instructed Sam to compile the folders. They were one of Flannigan's old tricks.
“Can I have your attention,” she announced, picking up the stack. She handed each person a folder of reading material. “There's a lot of information that we need and we didn't get time to collect,” she said. “But this is required reading — it directly pertains to how we're going to deal with this kid.”
The files were nothing special. She handed them out only so she could watch everyone read the files. By watching, she could learn a lot.
Sam paged through her folder slowly, with a blank expression. Flannigan's assessment: Sam knew the material, but was rereading it because she had been tasked to do so.
Gene read his file at a superhuman rate. Flannigan didn't know whether he was skimming, or could actually read that fast. Her assessment: he wasn't studying the brief deeply, but he was at least making a point to absorb what was in the folder. It was easy enough for him to cooperate and read the folder and get back to whatever he wanted to think about.
He's sexy, in a geeky way, she thought. Could he be Mr. Right? she asked half-consciously, disliking the phrase Mr. Right. He was brilliant, attractive. He had a lot on his mind that he didn't say.
Simon looked over his folder with disdain. Flannigan's assessment: possibly uncooperative, or a pain in the ass, but at least engaged and honest.
Willard didn't even open his file. Flannigan was stunned. As a special operative, this guy was most likely a former marine. He had protocol written into his spine. How could he ignore his brief? He barely recognized it — he continued to slouch and roll every now and then in his seat with his eyes closed. Flannigan's assessment: two possibilities. Either his hand hurt so bad that he couldn't bear to concentrate or — also unlikely — he was an extreme badass who laughed at the rules. Neither made sense. It didn't add up, and men who didn't add up frustrated Flannigan.
She hadn't given Preeti a folder, and Preeti hadn't opened her eyes the whole time. They had a tacit agreement: they would leave each other alone. Flannigan had already made her assessment. Preeti was stubborn, weird as all hell, but easily manipulated if necessary.
Kenny was the most interested in his reading material, and the least able to read it. He looked up at the roof of the cabin and closed his eyes.
That's a guy with something on his mind.
Gene caught her eye. He was writing something on a piece of paper. He put down his pen and stood up and brought a piece of paper up and handed it to her. It said:
I suspect Nemo is interested in a program Kenny wrote at some point in the past. If so, Kenny probably has already guessed which one.
Flannigan knew about only one of Kenny's programs — the stock-picking program he had told her about. But that program had barely worked.
KENNY'S GREAT BIG PROJECT
The folder Kenny was supposed to read was sitting on the airplane seat table in front of him. He was thinking about his stock-picking program. He had given up on it a long time ago, but he had worked hard on that program, for a little while, and now he couldn't stop thinking about it.
Cambridge, MA
August
He had to do something. He could barely sit still. It was the Itch.
Kenny's lanky body, bare except for white undies, was stretched out desperately on the rickety chair in front of his computer. It was 2 a.m., dark outside and sweltering both in and out of his apartment. He couldn't sleep, so he would write another stupid program. Sweaty, hot. The Itch.
He was too impatient for activities such as reading or watching an old movie. They wouldn't help. They weren't doing anything, making anything. He wanted to do something, and the only thing he knew how to do was write computer programs. The only problem was that he didn't know what program to write. He never did.
The cursor blinked on the screen, waiting for him.
A scan of the folders on his computer told a story of a computer programmer with nothing t
o program. ASCII Face: a program that took a photo and converted it into a rough likeness composed of letters and keyboard characters. ASCII Face didn't work well; Kenny had only worked on it for a couple days. Pic Grabber: a program composed after ASCII Face that had lain stale for a week. Pic Grabber would autonomously navigate to a few preselected news sites and download the photos on those pages to Kenny's hard drive. Pic Grabber had been intended to collect pics for the ASCII Face program. It performed its task correctly, but Kenny never put it to use.
Triangle Drawer drew triangles on the computer screen, and then added lines connecting the points of some triangles with those of other triangles. Kenny had spent 43 minutes writing Triangle Drawer.
Number Guesser would guess what number you were thinking of, taking “higher” and “lower” as inputs. It would also choose a number and let you do the guessing, leading you on with a series of taunts. (“Too low. Try again, idiot.”) Number Guesser had been an active project for a grand total of 1 hour and 53 minutes.
What would it be tonight? How about Program Idea Generator, he thought. That would be useful. None of his classes or teachers ever addressed what was worth programming. Everything was an exercise to build skills and tools. Homework. Endless preparation for a Great Big Project that was never named or described or even alluded to, and which he doubted would ever come. There appeared to be no point to what he was learning. Computer science ceased to be something he was interested in. Then it was just something he studied because he had to study something.
Graduating had not solved the problem: he had to do something. Getting a job seemed like a loathsome proposition. So he had looked at graduate school. He was good enough to get recommended into a top graduate program. His professors didn't seem to think he was anything special (they didn't seem to think there was a Great Big Project for him, either, evidently). He just happened to be better than most of his classmates — the ones who hadn't gone off to become bankers, at least. He was a little surprised when he got in and when it dawned on him that the graduate stipend would cover his living expenses. For a few months he was almost excited.
In grad school his adviser had made him choose his own projects. There were no homework assignments. But he kept rejecting Kenny's proposals as not “serious.” That word was in every email from Kenny's adviser. Serious. Apparently programming was pretty serious business. Serious. What a serious idiot. At first Kenny interpreted “not serious” to mean “too easy.” He suspected later that the only “serious” projects were the ones closely in line with his adviser's own research, which Kenny found absurdly esoteric. Kenny didn't care much what he worked on, but he couldn't give up hope that whatever he did might be connected, however faintly, to that mysterious Great Big Project waiting for him out there. Insisting on that point had made it difficult to get along with his adviser and was the main reason he had dropped out of grad school.
That hot summer night was the same problem, same blinking cursor. But it was the night he started the stock-picking program.
The traces of history on Kenny's hard drive gave no indication as to why he would tackle picking stocks. He had never shown any interest in the subject, and he knew almost nothing about it. He had only a dim idea of what a stock was.
A car drove by outside, past the peeling white paint and dark screen of the open window by the street. Kenny clicked open a few web pages describing the basics of the stock market. You can trade stocks online, right? And you could look up stock prices online. But the market closed, right? You can buy stocks at other times, can't you?
The stock picker was doomed from the outset. Kenny might have possessed the ability to make it work, but he lacked the commitment, and he knew it.
Serious. Maybe the stock-picking program was serious. Making money was serious. Providing for his girlfriend, or impressing her, would be serious.
But where could he begin? He reviewed some programs he had written recently. Word Quiz consulted a dictionary and gave you a word and four possible definitions, one of which was correct and three of which were selected randomly from other words in the dictionary. The quiz ended up being too easy, even for Kenny's modest vocabulary. Word Guesser navigated itself to a news page and tried to extract definitions from the page by snipping out text. Word Guesser didn't work at all, but it used a lot of the same code as the Pic Grabber, so Kenny had written it quickly. It would take a page with the sentence, Britney Spears is a complete disaster, and output the definition, Britney Spears: n. A complete disaster. That kind of program is called a “scraper,” because it scrapes words and images from a web page.
Kenny reflected on the fact that he liked writing scrapers. There was instant gratification to scraping. That, and reusing programming code that other people had already written.
He clapped his hands. “Yes!” He leaned back. He had an idea. He would write his stock picker with the mother of all his scraper programs: Pats Suck. The stock picker still wouldn't work, probably. But he was pleased with his idea. It would provide a couple hours of something interesting to do.
He put on The Beatles (the White Album) and stood up to think. For a moment, the Itch was gone.
SIMON'S SECRET SPAM
While he was going through the folder Flannigan had provided, Simon looked out the cabin window and reflected on something he hadn't told Flannigan about.
In the middle of the night, after he'd gotten the phone call from Flannigan and before she had arrived, he did something that he had been avoiding for a couple days: he checked his work email. He figured that if Flannigan was going to disrupt his vacation in the middle of the night, he might as well humor that work-related impulse.
He discovered, to his great surprise, that he had a piece of spam mail. For someone else, spam was not so unusual. Spam abounded in the world. Billions of messages were sent annually informing email users of opportunities to buy products to improve their sexual performance, sleep better, buy specific stocks, and acquire watches and jewelry at discount prices. It was a numbers game. The vast majority of the messages were unopened. But enough messages were opened, and enough links clicked inside them, to make certain people rich.
The unusual part was that this spam message had been received at Simon's work email address. The Agency had the best spam filter technology on the planet. He had never received a piece of spam mail at work.
The mail's subject read, “RE: Stock surprise.” It was from the previous day.
Stock explosion expected today! GOOG — look for 542.33 by day end.
Reply for details.
“Reply for details?” he sneered aloud. That was weird. Spammers didn't want replies — spam messages were sent from unmanned mailboxes. They wanted clicks. Clicks to places to buy Viagra or porn or to fall for some credit card scam.
He looked at the email's header information. You could often identify a piece of spam mail by poorly constructed headers, but these looked pretty good.
What he saw raised both his eyebrows. Judging by the headers, the mail had been sent from an ISP within the Agency. That helped explain how the mail had gotten through. But it meant one of two things. Either, one, the mail had actually been sent by someone located over at that Agency building. Or, two, an email virus had penetrated to one of the innermost portions of the Agency computer network.
Either case was too much to believe. In Simon's experience, whenever something magical seemed to have happened, there always surfaced a different, less magical, explanation eventually.
On a whim, he replied to the mail, as it had asked.
thanks for your advice. may I have more details?
He clicked Send and went and put on his bathrobe in anticipation of Flannigan's arrival.
He returned to his computer.
“No way,” he said to the screen. He had received a reply:
Simon-
Thanks for your email. I buy and sell a lot and I'd love to discuss with you.
Which companies are you looking at these days? What news
stories interest you?
You can reply to this email. But it's faster to IM with me at alex4443 at Hotmail. I also have some other IM's if you use a different network.
It didn't add up. Who the hell would be sitting in an Agency facility at two in the morning chatting and sending emails about stocks?
The bell rang. Flannigan. He closed his email and went to get the door. He didn't mention the spam mail.
Forget it, he thought, snapping back to the present in the aircraft. He looked out of the plane's tiny window at the vast ocean below. The spam mail fell into the category of things he should have mentioned to Flannigan and the group. It was a relevant detail. Nevertheless, he was certain that this little anecdote would fuel Gene's intolerable, impassioned ramblings about superviruses.
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