by Bill DeSmedt
“That’s okay,” Knox said. “We get the picture—giant sucking sound, end of story.”
That tore it for her. “Jon, please don’t. That’s ghastly.”
Try as she might, Marianna couldn’t seem to get her hands around this situation. Something that a nuke couldn’t put a dent in, something that could eat the world. No wonder Pete didn’t believe it. What could Grishin—what could anyone—possibly want with such a monstrosity? When she’d called it a doomsday device, had she hit on the literal truth?
Marianna shivered. Five years with CROM had pretty much desensitized her to the prospect of thermonuclear and biochemical terrorism. This was a whole different threat-level. Black holes and global annihilation could not be happening, not on her watch.
She rose and walked to the wall of glass fronting the greatroom, arms hugged tight against her body as if huddling against a freezing wind. She gazed outward, seeking to purge nightmare images with vistas of the gentle, eternal mountains. But the Blue Ridge brought her no peace. The ancient range looked fragile somehow—as though it, and the whole Earth with it, might be swept away, swallowed up in an instant. As though the ground might suddenly open up beneath her feet to reveal the yawning void.
She pressed her forehead against the cool glass, tried to calm down.
Grishin cant be planning to use the thing as a doomsday weapon. That scenario only made sense, if it ever did, when your back was against the wall. His wasn’t, not yet. What did that leave? What else was there?
She turned back to the group. “Okay.” She let out a breath. “I’ll go to the mat with Pete one more time for you. But first there’s something you’ve got to give me.”
Three faces—two in the flesh, one in videoconference—turned to look at her expectantly.
Her gaze came to rest on Jon.
“A reason,” she said. “There’s no way in hell Pete’ll pull the plug on Tsunami if I can’t even tell him what they want this Vurdalak thing for in the first place.”
She nearly succeeded at keeping the shudder out of her voice as she added, “End of the world aside, what’s the worst Grishin could do with it?”
33 | Hackers
WHAT’S THE WORST Grishin could do with it?
Jack put his hands behind his head and tipped his chair back while he considered Marianna’s question. The only answer that came to him was another question. “Why’re we assuming the worst from the get-go here?” he said, half to himself. “Isn’t saving the world enough of a reason?”
“You’ve seen Yuri in action,” Marianna said, “you tell me.”
Jack fell silent, remembering. When he did speak it was to say, “Right. Scratch that theory, then. It’s just you’re talking like they’re going to make some sort of weapon out of it, and I just can’t for the life of me see how.”
“Something so powerful, so destructive,” she prompted him, “there just has to be a way.”
“Don’t get me wrong, it’s plenty dangerous.”
“Dangerous how?”
Jack scratched his head. He wasn’t used to thinking in these terms. “Well, the Hawking radiation alone’d crisp you to a cinder if you got close enough. Closer in still, and the tidal distortion’d pull you apart like saltwater taffy. But it’s all real short-range effects. The thing’s not about to reach out and grab you from miles away. You’d have to move it pretty close to a target to do much damage . . . and there’s no practical way to move it at all.”
Marianna buried her face in her hands. “All that does is rule things out. I’ve got to know what Grishin is planning to do, not what he isn’t.”
Jack shrugged. “Sorry, ma’am, with no hard data to go on, your guess is good as mine. Maybe if I could get a look at what’s going on down in that station—”
“Now there,” said Jon, “I think we may be able to help you.”
Sasha jumped at the slam of the lab’s heavy firedoor. He called out, “Quiet, please!” without looking up, then went back to his consultation with Irina Konstantinovna Kuznetsova, head of GEI’s Raleigh-Durham telecommunications laboratory.
He sensed a presence behind him, and turned to see Yuri standing there in black body armor, glaring down at him.
“Ah, good morning, Yuri. Are we almost ready to go?” Sasha forced a smile. Truth be told, the hulking Georgian made him nervous. Especially out here in the field, with his blood up and no Grishin around to restrain him.
“We have been ready for half an hour. The delay is you.”
“Yes, well, some things cannot be rushed, as you will appreciate.”
If Yuri did appreciate it, said appreciation failed to register on his implacable features. He stood there like an obsidian statue, motionless, waiting.
“We are very nearly done, Irina Konstantinovna and I,” Sasha said. “Already we have programmed the voice-line overloads for the 5E switch and cell-phone base station serving northern Watauga County. It only remains now to hack Weathertop’s high-speed dataline.”
“How long?”
Sasha’s eyes flitted to the display’s menubar clock: five after eleven. “Perhaps another fifteen minutes. We have determined that Weathertop is connected via a so-called digital subscriber line. Because DSL is essentially independent of the public switched telephone network, our standard denial of service strategies are useless. Instead, we must—I beg your pardon?”
“I said, five minutes,” Yuri repeated.
“You must have patience, Yuri Vissarionovich. It is essential to cut Weathertop’s links to the outside before we close in. It will be difficult enough to spirit our captives out of the country under the noses of the authorities. It becomes impossible if CROM has been forewarned.”
“Five minutes!”
“You do not understand, Yuri Vissarionovich. Such ‘hacking,’ as the Americans call it, is a delicate operation. And it is essential that the outage appear accidental. If we are not careful, we could—”
“It is you who do not understand, Bondarenko. I am in operational command of this mission, and I give you five minutes. If you are not ready by then, we leave without you.”
Knox shifted around to face Adler. “Jack, what if we could tap into the telemetry bitstream from Antipode to Rusalka? Would that do it for you? Give you enough to figure out what Grishin’s up to?”
The talking head in the videoconferencing window nodded warily. “Sounds like.”
Knox turned to Marianna again. “Didn’t you tell me you’d patched a surveillance device into the secret lab’s local area network? A device with remote-access capability?”
“Uh-huh, my LAN-bug. Pete could read it from his desktop in Chantilly, if it came to that.”
“If Pete can, how about us?”
She shook her head. “Nice try, Jon. But it won’t work.”
“Why not?”
“Look around—do you see any satellite tracking facilities? NSA’s birds aren’t geosynchronous like the one that little dish out there is pointed at.” She waved a hand at the commercial satellite receiver off to one side of the deck. “They’re in near-Earth orbit, constantly moving across the sky—the hand-offs” nontrivial. Besides, like I told you, the data stream’s spread-spectrum encrypted. Even if you could intercept the signal, it’d read like random noise.”
“But Aristos could access your bug from the machine in his office? And read the data in the clear?”
“Sure, he could link in over dedicated landlines to the NSA ground station in Bethesda, for all the good that does us—Pete and I aren’t exactly on speaking terms at the moment, remember? And no way he’d do it now anyhow. Not with Tsunami going on radio silence in three hours.”
“Sounds like we’re going to have to hack our way back in, then.”
“That’s just not possible. I know, I know—” She held up a hand. “Your friend here broke in once. But he needed you on the inside to run that scam. Here he’d be up against the frontline defenses. And, like I was saying before,” looking directly at Mycroft now
, “CROM’s got the best communications security in the world.”
Mycroft snorted. She ignored it. “I guess I could try talking Pete around.”
“That’s okay. I think we can leave your boss out of this. That is, if . . .” Knox turned to Mycroft. “Please tell me you didn’t pick the day of your recent CROM infiltration to go straight.”
“Jonathan—” Mycroft began, his complexion darkening a shade further.
“It’s okay, we’re all friends here. Isn’t that right, Marianna?”
She said nothing, just gave a suspicious nod of her head.
“Well, then,” Mycroft said, “what Jonathan is referring to is my penchant for leaving behind a backdoor module on any of the sites I, um, visit.”
“Back door?”
“Technically,” Knox said, “it’s called a Trojan Horse, or just plain Trojan for short. It’s software that hides away inside a machine till it’s time to come out and boogey.”
“No way.” Marianna sounded indignant now. “Pete had his machine purged down to the bare silicon after you pulled that little stunt. If this Trojan of yours was ever there, it’s long gone.”
“I seriously doubt that,” Mycroft said. “Most antivirals look for malicious activity: file deletions, disk erasures, what have you. My Trojan Horses would never give themselves away like that; they burrow deep and lie quiet. And open a channel to the outside world once every ten minutes, of course, to see if I want to come back in.”
He glanced at the timestamp in the upper right corner of the screen. “We’re coming up on a check-in window in, um, three minutes forty-five seconds. Jonathan?”
“Go ahead. You never needed my permission before.”
With Marianna peering over his shoulder, Mycroft busied himself at his console. The seconds ticked by. Stretched into a minute. Then two. Three.
A final clatter of keys and, somewhere in the depths of CROM headquarters, in the darkened lair of the Director, Reacquisition Working Group, a monitor sprang to life.
“We’re in,” Mycroft breathed.
Marianna watched with mixed feelings as a new window popped open on the screen. On one level, she knew they really, really needed this to work. On another, well, who on earth would want to see their organization’s best defenses fall to some . . . some hacker?
She was concentrating so intently on what the hacker in question was doing that she didn’t notice Jon standing behind her until he spoke.
“If this is the Trojan I think it is,” he said, “then once it wakes up, it deploys as a telnet server.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning Mycroft can slave the Chantilly machine to this one here. As if he were sitting at Pete’s desk, typing in commands on his keyboard.” Sure enough, the new window was displaying her boss’s favorite screensaver.
She got a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach. Twice! That made twice this odd little man had simply thumbed his nose at the best comm security in the world.
As if reading her thoughts, Mycroft muttered, “If this is CROM’s idea of world-class communications security, no wonder they’re losing magnetohydrodynamicists right and left!”
“What did you say?”
“Um, I apologize, Marianna.” Mycroft looked flustered. “It’s not your fault, really—CROM’s, that is. It’s just that government bureaucracies are no different from any other large organization: it’s not in their best interest to nurture excellence of any stripe.”
“And what’s that supposed to mean—,” she began.
“Whoa, whoa!” Jon held up his hands. “He’s on our side, remember? Come on, let’s leave the man to do his work.” He took her by the arm and steered her off toward the kitchen alcove.
He looked back over his shoulder: “Mycroft, we’re going to make coffee. You want some?”
Knox scanned a kitchen sparsely furnished even by Mycroft’s spartan standards. Refrigerator-freezer, yes. Convection/microwave oven and electric range, yes. A pantry stocked with spices and coffees and other comestibles, of course. But no pans or dishes; nothing to prepare food in, or eat it on. The L-shaped butcherblock countertop that divided the alcove from the greatroom proper sported only an inset stainless steel sink and a rather elaborate console. Nor was there any of the usual cabinetry beneath the counter, mostly just blank black panels. “Hey, Mycroft! Where’s the coffee maker?”
“Gone,” Mycroft’s voice came from the far end of the greatroom. “Gone along with the rest of the kitchen paraphernalia. Nowadays I make my cookware on the spot, with a Replicator solids-prototyper.”
“I know those,” Marianna said. “3-D copy machines, right? That’s it down there, Jon. And the computer up topside must run the CAD software and the template database.”
“Replicator, huh?” Knox bent to inspect the unit he’d mistaken for a dishwasher, set flush with the paneling in the space directly below the countertop console. “Like in Star Trek?”
“Not really.” Mycroft had risen by now, and stuck his head around the corner. “Brand name aside, solids prototyping is old technology; the early experimental models go back to the mid-nineties. This production version is nothing more than a computer-assisted design system, as Marianna said, married up to a polymer-extrusion device. The end-result is a three-dimensional casting of whatever is imaged on the screen. Simple.”
“Still, it’s kind of cutting-edge for a kitchen appliance, wouldn’t you say?
“As to that, cutting edges are one of the things it cant do. Bread knives, carving knives, blades of any kind are still beyond reach of the current top-of-the-line. This model can manage pots and pans and dishes, but nothing that has to slice or dice.”
“Kind of limited, then.”
“You’re missing the point, Jonathan: when you’re done cooking and eating there’s no clean-up. Just throw the dirty dishes in the intake hopper, and they’re rendered back to raw material for whatever you want to fabricate next time.”
“Wow! Just what every bachelor pad needs,” Knox said. He spied Marianna’s frown out of the corner of his eye and switched tacks. “I’m holding off getting one till they can do lawnmowers.”
“You might as well get onboard now, Jonathan; this is where we’re all headed. Buy the pattern and you own the thing. In the long run, intellectual property will be the only property. Bits over atoms.” Mycroft shrugged and turned back to his work.
After several false starts, Knox and Marianna persuaded the modeler to fabricate three mugs and a coffee pot with a heating element. The actual replication process went quickly enough—perhaps forty-five seconds all told—once they’d gotten past finding the right design-templates. Even with its limitations, the unit’s repertoire of possible objects was enormous.
Marianna really got into it, perusing the catalog of CAD patterns as if off on some virtual shopping spree. Women! They’re all alike.
Or not. Glancing over her shoulder, Knox could see she’d hacked her way past the childproof lockouts and into the armaments templates. The Replicator could no more do swords than it could carving knives, but wireframe schematics for a surprisingly wide variety of bludgeons, garrotes, and other non-edged lethalities scrolled across its display.
Knox shook his head and went back to making the coffee.
“Um, Jonathan?” Knox looked up to see Mycroft standing just outside the kitchen alcove. “I’m about ready to try accessing the datastream from Rusalka,” he said. “I’ve located the satellite-communications facility via Pete’s machine. It’s tracking over a hundred devices worldwide, including one out in the mid-Atlantic that I take to be our LAN-bug. Their activation routines are all passworded, though. Uh, Marianna, I don’t suppose you—”
“Why, Dr. Laurence, I would have thought a hacker of your world-class abilities would have punched through our flimsy password protections without even pausing for breath.”
“Now, Marianna, I never meant to imply—”
“Evil bitch queen!”
Mycroft blinked at h
er. “I beg your pardon?”
Marianna sighed and repeated it. “Evilbitchqueen. I thought you wanted my password. That’s it. Do I have to spell it out? Capital E, lower case v-i-l-b-i-t-c-h-q-u-e-e-n. No spaces.”
Knox coughed in an effort to cover his laugh.
“It wasn’t my idea,” she said, glaring at him. “Pete’s the one who assigns them.”
Sasha let out his harness and wriggled around trying to get comfortable, only to discover his seat did not recline. He was sweating buckets in the body armor Yuri had made him wear, and the EH101 Merlin wasn’t even air-conditioned. The big helicopter was roomy enough—especially with only the seven-member strikeforce occupying a cabin intended for thirty—but otherwise its amenities left much to be desired. Well, and what did one expect of a troop transport?
Think about something else. Sasha glanced down at the mission chronometer integrated into his Kevlar sleeve. Quarter to noon. Twenty-five minutes out from the target. And in just fifteen of those minutes, his own virtual attack would begin, a precursor to the physical one.
He tried to get his mind off the raid. Why had he volunteered for this? He possessed no expertise applicable to what was about to happen. He doubted if any such expertise existed, or if combat wasn’t simply a chaos phenomenon, its outcome uncertain until the event itself.
And his friend’s life hinged on that indeterminate outcome. He had done all he could do to ensure Dzhon, and Marianna too, would come out of this alive. But persuading Arkasha was one thing; forcing the random evolution of events themselves into a desired course, quite another.
Especially with that wild card, Yuri, in charge of the operation. Sasha glanced across the cabin to where the big Georgian sat hunched over opposite the hatch, caressing his Glock-18 machine pistol. What thoughts were going through his mind in these last moments before the action?
