The Titicaca Effect

by Richard N. Tooker

  “Tyler, are you there? What’s happening?

  “I’m here, Thad,” Freeman answered. “I just heard from the FBI. They found the programmer. She’s in Barbados. They’re patching her though now.”

  A third voice interrupted. “Hello? This is Anna Patrick. Who am I talking to?”

  “Thaddeus Stout, Miss Patrick. I’m on the Island of the Moon in Lake Titicaca, in Bolivia. I need your help to stop a countdown that was initiated by a computer program you wrote.”

  “Yeah, I know,” she answered. “I just talked to the FBI and my boss at the labs. How far have you gotten?”

  “I’m looking at the countdown screen, which says we have an hour and 21 minutes or we’ll all be blown to bits. I checked the admin screen, but it looks encrypted,” Stout said.

  “It is. I can get you in, but I don’t what good it’s going to do. The countdown can’t be stopped. They told me to make it irreversible, so I did.”

  “Let’s take a look anyway, Anna.”

  “Okay. Click on admin. When you see the encrypted code, hold down the control key and hit ‘H’. You should get an input screen asking for a password.”

  “I’m there,” Stout replied. “What’s the password?”

  “It’s case sensitive. Capital R, lower case Y, seven, capital J, two, eight, capital K, lower case A, and hit Enter.”

  As she spoke, Stout had scratched the password in the dust on the floor with a fork that had been lying on the table. Carefully, he pecked out “Ry7J28Ka” on the keyboard and then hit the “Enter” key. The screen blanked, then refreshed. He smiled. “It’s Assembly Language. I can read this.”

  “Yes,” Patrick answered. “But you can’t change it. It’s compiled and read-only, and there’s another encrypted program with no password that controls the properties.”

  “There has to be a way,” Stout said. “Surely you created a back door so you could get back into the code if you needed to.”

  “Nope. They said to lock it down, so I did. There’s no way in.”

  “What happens if I just turn off the PC?”

  “Geez, don’t do that! It will trigger the explosion immediately. And if you interrupt the circuit by trying to disconnect the explosives, it will reset the counter to zero and do the same thing.”

  Stout grimaced. “Anna, did it occur to you that there might be a power failure? We’re running off generators out here, and they’re not foolproof.”

  “They told me the program would be running on a portable PC, so I’d have at least three hours’ battery backup. The program won’t let you enter a countdown greater than two hours 30 minutes, so I figured I’d have a half-hour to spare.”

  “Well, that’s just great,” Stout said.

  “Dr. Stout, I just did what I was told. When something is supposed to be top secret, I could go to jail if I left a back door. What happens now?”

  “The island blows sky-high,” Stout answered, “and the greatest scientific discovery of all time gets blown up with it.”

  “Oh, God,” she said. “I’m so sorry. I had no idea….”

  “Thad?” Freeman interrupted. “Is this as bad as it sounds?”

  “I’m afraid so. I’ve been scanning the code while we’re talking, and it looks like Anna did her job well. A teenage boy might be able to crack this, but I sure don’t see any way that I can stop the damn thing.”

  “Shit!” Freeman muttered. “Doomsday. What the hell was I thinking? What do I say to President Maldonado?”

  “Good question,” Stout said.

  “You want my advice?” Patrick asked. “Get off that island. I’m telling you, there’s no way to change the code.”

  “Okay, that’s it, then,” Freeman said. “The ball game is over. Thad, leave. I don’t want you staying there and getting blown up.”

  “Man, I hate to give it up,” Stout said. “Anna, I really have to hand it to you. You did a good job with this code. Too good. Thanks anyway.”

  “Okay, Dr. Stout,” Anna replied. “Just get off the island. And I’m sorry.” She sounded like she was crying as she hung up.

  “Thad, I have to go talk to Maldonado. Leave the island, and do it now,” Freeman said.

  “I’m going, don’t worry. I have no desire to be here when this thing blows. I guess I’ll see you in a few days. There sure won’t be any point in hanging out in the third world any longer.”

  “Yeah,” Freeman responded. “That’s for damn sure.” Both men disconnected.

  Stout sat there for another three minutes, absent-mindedly scratching his goatee while he continued to scroll through the code. His mind was racing. “No such thing as perfect code,” he muttered. “There has to be a way.” Finally, he stood up, shook his head in resignation, and headed back to the camp.

  He was no more than 50 feet from the tent when it hit him. “Oh, my God!” he yelped. “That’s it!” He raced back into the tent, sat down in front of the computer again, and began to scroll through the code until he found what he was looking for.

  “Well, I’ll be damned! How dumb is that?” he said aloud, then began clicking his way through various dialogue boxes. In less than thirty seconds, he was through. He double-checked the result, smiled broadly, and reached for the cell phone he had put in his pocket. He punched in Freeman’s number again.

  “Tyler, are you still there?”

  An unfamiliar voice answered. “Dr Stout? This is Mike Kirkham. I’m the president’s personal aide. Mr. Freeman told us you were leaving. He’s gone back into the oval office.”

  “Get him!”

  “Right away, Dr. Stout. I’ll transfer you to the conference phone.” The phone went silent.

  Less than 20 seconds later, Freeman answered.

  “Thad? What’s going on?”

  “Well, I worked on it.”

  “Oh, my God!” Freeman exploded. “You figured it out?”

  “I found it, Tyler. The hole in the code. And I solved the problem.”

  Stout could hear cheering in the background. Evidently, there were now at least a dozen people with Freeman in the White House. “You stopped the countdown?” Freeman yelled over the noise.

  “Nope. Anna was right. The countdown can’t be stopped.” The noise at the other end subsided as everyone began listening to his voice. Stout, never one to miss an opportunity for drama, grinned and said nothing else.

  “Dammit, Thad, tell me what’s going on!”

  “I couldn’t stop it, so I rescheduled it.”

  “Rescheduled it? How?”

  “Tyler, nobody writes perfect code. I was on my way back to the camp when something I had seen in the program clicked in my mind. Anna keyed the countdown to the computer’s manual time setting, rather than to the internal clock itself. When Roger set the countdown for two hours, the program calculated a detonation time that was two hours in the future, and it’s waiting for the computer time setting to get there. So I changed the time on the computer. It’s still counting down, but it will take longer to get there.”

  “How much longer?”

  “Well, the program will only allow a maximum of two-and-a-half hours for the countdown, so I reset it for two hours and 29 minutes. As long as the clock gets reset every couple of hours, we should be able to postpone it indefinitely. We can’t disconnect the explosives without triggering the blast, but this will give us time to dig them out and move the whole setup to the middle of the lake in a boat. Then we can let it explode where it won’t harm the island.”

  Stout could hear cheering again. “Thad, you’re brilliant!” Freeman shouted over the noise.

  “We’re not out of the woods yet, Tyler, and we’ll have to be damn careful how we do this. If a wire comes loose in the process, it’ll all be over. Thank God Roger is here. If anyone can handle this delicate an operation, he can. Right now, we’d better take some steps to make sure nothing goes wrong. I’m by myself here, and I shouldn’t leave this tent until we have backup power and people in place. Can you get in
touch with the camp and tell Roger to bring a crew over here? And tell him to hook up a second generator to the circuit that powers the machinery here. If he has to lose electricity to the camp, they’ll just have to stay in the dark until they can get another generator out here. This system has to be made redundant, and right now.”

  “Consider it done, Thad. I can reach them using the military communications satellite link. Hang on, someone wants to talk to you.”

  “Sure,” Stout said. “I’m not going anywhere for a while.”

  The president took over the conversation. “Dr. Stout? This is Bill Truesdale.”

  “Mr. President,” Stout responded.

  “You’ve done a hell of a job there. President Maldonado and I both congratulate you. Tyler told me you were smartest man on the planet, and now I believe him.”

  “Normally, I’d disagree out of modesty,” Stout said. “But seeing as how I have two Presidents making the judgment, how can I? I think I’ll just take the compliment and say thanks.”

  “The next time you’re in the states, I want you to come to the White House. I want to shake your hand and congratulate you in person.”

  “Thank you, Mr. President. I’ll do that,” Stout said. He could hear voices on the trail. “Looks like the crew is coming, Sir. I’d better get to work.”

  He signed off, stood up and stretched, then ducked out of the tent into the chilly night to greet Roger Malloy and his crew.

  Chapter 15: Encounter

  “Dammit, Tyler, I can’t believe you did that to me!” Thaddeus Stout was seething. “In all the years we’ve worked together, you’ve always trusted me.”

  Stout and Freeman were meeting in the small, Spartan suite of offices in La Paz that the Bolivian government had hastily arranged to serve as headquarters for the development of the spaceport at Lake Titicaca. More than two weeks had passed since Stout and the crew led by Roger Malloy had successfully removed the explosives from the site of the Titicaca Effect and detonated the explosives harmlessly in the middle of the lake. It was also the first time the two old friends had had a chance to meet face-to-face and out of earshot of anyone else involved in the project. Freeman, as usual, was leaning back in his chair, his feet propped up on the old wooden desk.

  “Thad, you’ve taken this the wrong way. I put Roger in charge of the doomsday device because he was in charge of construction at the site. It honestly never occurred to me that you would even care.”

  “You didn’t think I’d care? For Christ’s sake, Tyler! Putting Roger in charge of that device almost cost us the whole ball game. If I had installed that software, I would have made damn sure there was a way to shut it down. And the way the charges were set, there was no way to disconnect them. Didn’t it occur to anyone that over time an installation like that can degrade and become unstable? Do you even know how dangerous it was to go digging all those explosives out? Someone could have been killed!”

  In all the years they had worked together, Freeman had never seen his old friend this agitated. Stout looked like he was about to explode. “I’m sorry, Thad,” he said. “You’re right, of course. It was short-sighted of me, and it won’t happen again.”

  Stout, who had mentally readied his next verbal thrust, was momentarily stalled. He’d never seen Freeman just roll over this easily in an argument. “What?”

  “I said you’re right. I’m sorry and I won’t do it again. Now can we get this behind us?”

  “Sure,” Stout answered, then smiled. “That was easy.”

  “Well, when you’re wrong, you’re wrong. And I was wrong. You should have been in control, and the fact that you weren’t nearly caused us to lose the pipe. Don’t think you’re the first one to point that out to me, Thad. Maldonado almost fired me. Man, was he pissed.”

  “I thought you were his fair-haired boy.”

  “I am. Or at least, I was. The man fully understands how important the Titicaca Spaceport is to the future of Bolivia, and he wasn’t at all pleased that we – or rather I – almost blew it up. Well, I’ll recover. How’s the excavation going?”

  “Fine,” Stout answered. “We’re ahead of schedule. We have the top of the island leveled and they’re going to pour the foundation for the control center tomorrow. The biggest problem is getting the building materials to the site, but General Suarez has taken care of that. The general has some serious clout. I’ve never seen Bolivians move that fast. Did you know Bolivia has a navy?”

  “You’re kidding!”

  “Nope. The country is completely landlocked, but they have a navy patrolling the lake. Just a few boats that mostly serve as water ambulances. Anyway, Suarez has the boats on 24/7 duty shuttling materials back and forth from the mainland at Copacabana, including tons of cement. We’re going to have to mix it onsite, but at least there’s plenty of water.”

  “What about power?”

  “Well, that’s a problem. We’re still using generators because the Bolivians don’t have anything in their fleet – if you can call it that – that can handle the weight of enough cable to reach the island. What are the chances of getting something in here from the States?”

  “Shouldn’t be a problem,” Freeman said. “President Truesdale has been very cooperative ever since we agreed not to talk about the aborted invasion. He doesn’t want to explain that to the electorate. The military has orders from their commander-in-chief to give us whatever we want. We pretty much have a blank check. I’ll ask them to fly something into La Paz that can handle the job. Anything else you need on the island?”

  “Everything else at the site seems to be under control,” Stout replied.

  “Good. You should be aware that the first multinational security force is about to show up. We’re sending a tent for them to stay in until we get some more permanent facilities built.”

  “One tent? How many soldiers will there be?”

  “More than 30, and you wouldn’t believe the bitching. Every country wants their own facilities, probably so they can bring in spy equipment. Putting them all in a single barracks makes that impossible, and they don’t like it.” Freeman grinned. “Actually, it’s fun being able to order heads of state around.”

  A knock at the door interrupted the conversation and the door opened without waiting for Freeman to acknowledge it. Barbara Fontaine poked her head in the room. “Tyler? You busy?”

  Freeman stood up, circled the desk and extended his hand in greeting. “Barbara! I didn’t expect to see you here today. To what do we owe the honor?”

  “Ambassador Previn sent me. He told me to find out if you needed anything from the embassy over the weekend. He’s planning on taking a few days off.” She grinned.

  Freeman, trying to suppress a laugh, opened his mouth to respond but was interrupted by Stout, who said, in the most ponderous tone he could manage, “My God! We’re in deep shit! If the Ambassador takes the weekend off, we might as well repeal the laws of gravity until Monday!”

  All three of them burst out laughing, feeding off each other until they were giggling uncontrollably, Fontaine holding her side in mock pain and leaning against the door frame. Stout, who almost never acted the slightest bit amused, was trying to catch his breath between explosions of laughter. The tension of the last few weeks quickly melted away as the laughter finally subsided, and all three reached for a Kleenex to wipe their eyes.

  “Oh, man, I needed that,” Freeman said, still suppressing a giggle.

  “We all needed that, Tyler,” Fontaine said. “It’s been a tough couple of months.” She looked at Stout. “My dear Doctor, I had no idea you had a sense of humor!”

  “He doesn’t trot it out very often, Barbara,” Freeman said. “But take it from me, Thad’s a hoot once you get him going. Get a couple of beers down him, and watch out!”

  “I’d like that,” Fontaine said. “How about it Dr. Stout? Will you let me buy you a drink sometime?”

  “It’s Thaddeus, Barbara,” Stout replied, “and sure you can.”

&nb
sp; “Tonight?”

  “You’re on. I’ll be through here about seven o’clock. Can I buy you dinner?”

  “Nope. I’m buying, Thaddeus. Your tax dollars at work.” They both laughed again.

  Freeman’s eyebrows arched in surprise, but he said nothing. In all the years he had known Thaddeus Stout, it never occurred to him that the man might have a love life. It had just never come up. And now his best friend was being hit on by the embassy Chief of Staff – and returning the advances.