Black Rain: A Thriller

by Graham Brown

  Gibbs tapped his pen on the desktop. “You said ‘under normal circumstances.’ Am I to assume we’re firmly in the abnormal realm now?”

  Blundin wiped his brow. “There’s a different type of programming out there,” he said. “In some cases, entering its third and fourth generation. It’s called massive parallel processing. It’s used to link computers together, everything from regular PCs to servers and mainframes. And it can turn those units into the equivalent of a supercomputer … or ten. Aside from NASA and the Defense Department, not too many people even use it, because no one needs that kind of power. But it’s out there and it’s faster than anything you can imagine.”

  “How fast are we talking about?”

  “Exponentially faster. In other words, four linked units aren’t four times faster, they’re sixteen times faster. A hundred linked processors can be ten thousand times faster. Instead of a one-lane highway for your information to roll down, you now have a fifty-lane highway, or a thousand-lane highway or even a million-lane highway. The numbers get checked in parallel, instead of series. A sophisticated program could run a hundred teraflops per second. That is a hundred trillion calculations every second. And like I’ve been trying to tell you, this type of programming makes systems like ours vulnerable.”

  The director appeared shocked. “Our system is the same one used by the FBI, even the CIA. You’re telling me their files are unsecured?”

  Blundin shook his head. “Aside from a few criminals, nobody gives a shit what the FBI has in its files. You can’t make any money off what the FBI has in its files. And the Agency system is a pure standalone. Unless you drill a hole in the wall and plug in, there is no way to link up. But we’re attached to Research Department and they’re hooked up all over the fucking place—universities, member corporations, affiliates. It’s like Grand fucking Central. And if you steal one of their projects—or one of ours—you’ve saved years of research for your company, and hundreds of millions in R and D. What the hell do you think we’re all about? It’s the same thing we do to the other side.”

  Gibbs looked ill and Blundin thought, If he’s sick now he’s going to puke when I tell him the rest. “It gets worse,” he said.

  A look of disbelief covered Gibbs’ face. “Really?” he said. “Well, please tell me. Because I can’t fucking imagine how.”

  Blundin hesitated. This time when he spoke, the words came reluctantly. This was the part he hated, the slap in the face that made it so much harder to bear. “I told you they couldn’t do this from the outside. Well, that leaves only one possibility. The actual grunt work of going through the numbers happened on the inside.”

  “Our own computers?”

  “We have mainframes, stacks of blade servers, and two hundred and seventy-one linked PCs in this building alone. Add in the Research Department and the total network is five times larger, including a pair of brand-new Crays in a climate-controlled room over in Building Three. Link all these units together and you have one unbelievable number-crunching machine.”

  “Some kind of virus,” Gibbs guessed.

  Blundin nodded. “I have no proof yet, but I suspect when we’re done we’ll find that someone introduced a massive parallel program to our system which instructed our machines to work on breaking our own code.”

  Gibbs’ bloodshot eyes looked like they might bug out of his head. “That’s just absurd,” he said. “I mean, I’m waiting for you to tell me that you’re kidding.”

  Blundin pulled at his shirt collar. The button was already open but it still felt tight around the bulge of his neck. “I’m not.”

  Gibbs leaned back in his chair, mumbling a string of expletives, as if enough swearing could purge him of the feeling welling up inside him. Finally, he focused on Blundin once again. “All right,” he said. “I find it hard to believe this shit, but I guess I don’t really have a choice. So now what? How do we find these bastards?”

  Blundin had already begun a counterattack. “Since they probably tapped us from Research’s side, we should start there. Go into Research Division’s back door ourselves. I’m already looking at the programs they were running, to identify candidates for this Trojan. Once we have our list, we investigate the companies that own those programs.”

  The director approved with a nod. “Okay, but I want you to do it personally, and then bring the information directly to me.” He clarified. “Only to me.”

  “What about the boys at the Bureau?”

  Gibbs was adamant. “No one from the outside. Not even anyone in your department. Not until I tell you.”

  That was fine with Blundin. Better to solve the problem before telling the world about it anyway.

  “What else do we know?”

  “Not much,” Blundin said. “They accessed information all over the place, like they didn’t know exactly what they were looking for at first. Their queries covered at least a dozen projects, maybe more. I’m still checking. Their last entry was three weeks ago, on …” He leafed through his copy of the report until he found the right page. “January 4.” He said, “Nothing since then.”

  “Did we change the codes that week?”

  “No, they haven’t been changed yet.”

  Gibbs’ face went red again. “You might want to get around to that.”

  “Actually, I don’t,” Blundin said. “Our best chance of catching them is to have the idiots make another entry. I’ve put a tracer on the system, a slick little runner that they’ll never see coming. If they tap the system again, we’ll follow them home.”

  Gibbs held up a hand, relenting. “All right. It’s your area of expertise, you run the investigation. Do whatever the hell you have to do, but keep it to yourself. I don’t want another soul involved until I know what happened. Do you understand?”

  “Yeah, I get it,” Blundin said. “I pretty much got it the first time.” He reached for his cigarette, and saw that it had burned down to a stub. He looked at it sadly, wondering if he could get one more drag off the thing, before giving up and crushing it out. He reached into his pocket for a new one, only to find the pack empty. Another aggravation. “I’m too tired for any more of this shit tonight,” he said, standing up and grabbing his jacket off the back of the chair. “We can have another bitch session in the morning, if you want. But I’m going home.”

  Gibbs looked at the clock, then nodded his permission.

  Blundin walked toward the exit, stopping in the doorway and turning around, remembering another discrepancy. “There is one other thing,” he said.

  “What’s that?” Gibbs asked, looking down at the report again.

  “We don’t know for sure,” Blundin began, “but we’re pretty much assuming this has something to do with the Brazil project, right? So I took the liberty to check those files. Sure enough, they were all accessed. Every single one of them.” Gibbs looked up, and Blundin pulled on his coat as he continued speaking. “The thing is, in checking them, I noticed the file sets didn’t have any project codes attached. And the funding codes belonged to a completely different project.”

  Gibbs looked surprised. “Whose entries were they?”

  “Your junior achiever down there in Brazil, Laidlaw.”

  Gibbs waited. “And …”

  “Well, does she know what the fuck she’s doing?”

  Gibbs’ face relaxed a bit. “Don’t worry about that,” he said. “It’s accounting’s fault. They’ve screwed that up before, because she’s outside of her sector. Let me guess: the funding codes belonged to one of her other projects.”

  “Yep.”

  “See,” Gibbs said, “accounting. I’ll chew their asses for it tomorrow. You just find the son of a bitch who hacked us.”

  “All right,” Blundin said. “I figured it was something like that. I’ll give you the file numbers in the morning.”

  Gibbs nodded and Blundin gave a half-assed wave as he ducked out through the door.

  With Blundin gone, Gibbs was left alone to ponder the situ
ation. He sat quietly for several minutes, silently rejoicing at the limits he’d placed on Moore and Laidlaw, limits that had saved him from dumping the most important information into the database, including the location of the recently discovered temple. That was good news, and it eased his mind considerably, but other news was less pleasant. He stared hard at the doorway through which Blundin had just departed, his eyes burning from anger and lack of sleep. In some ways, things had just gone from bad to worse.

  CHAPTER 20

  Danielle stood atop the roof of the newly discovered Mayan temple, gazing out over the clearing around her. She could see the remnants of a procession of small buildings aligned directly with the temple’s stairs and a causeway that ran between them and off into the jungle to the west. She could see outcroppings of stone and sunken areas that had once been buildings and plazas. The clearing covered at least ten acres, but the temple was the center. In her heart she believed the source of the crystals would be found here, but they needed to hurry.

  There were many reasons to push; openly, she worried about the rains. They would only hold off for so long, and when they did come, work would have to cease for several months. But the real problem was their as yet unknown competitor.

  Gibbs’ latest satellite call had informed her of the computer breach, and though he insisted that the temple’s location remained secret, Danielle could not shake the feeling of an enemy growing closer with each passing moment.

  She glanced over at Professor McCarter, who was working with Susan and the porters. Their lives were in danger, and they didn’t know it in the least. Certainly, they watched Verhoven and his men patrol, listened as Hawker flew in with a load of defensive equipment, including motion sensors, computerized tracking devices, lights, flares and boxes of ammunition—and the pack of trained dogs Verhoven had insisted upon—and in all likelihood they considered it only a precaution. A little bit of the government’s heavy hand when a lighter touch would have been fine.

  Danielle knew better. Somewhere out there an enemy sought them, and despite the time they’d bought by racing up the river, eventually that enemy would find them. She wanted the civilians long gone when it happened. To make sure that happened, she had to keep pushing.

  She looked to Professor McCarter, crouched on the rooftop, running his finger down a seam in the stonework and explaining to the group what he’d found.

  “Tell me again what this means,” she said.

  “You see how precise the fit is?” he said, pointing. He waved the others closer and then used his knife to scrape at the moss. The stonework was so tight that the moss hadn’t grown into it, just covered it over like a tarp. “You couldn’t get cigarette paper between these stones. All the great sites that have stood the test of time show this type of craftsmanship. In the Yucatan, in Egypt, in Mongolia.

  “This structure must be remarkably stable to look like this, perhaps built onto some bedrock like the skyscrapers of Midtown Manhattan. I have seen some damage on the north side,” he admitted. “But the foundation itself can’t have subsided too much or these seams would be loose and jumbled. I’m quite excited about that.”

  “You said you might have found a way inside,” she reminded him. “Can we skip ahead to that part? That’s what I’m excited about.”

  “You’re not one for slow cooking,” McCarter replied, only slightly bothered.

  “Microwave,” she replied. “Or faster.”

  He smiled and moved to another section of the roof, waving the group over. “This stone tells us another story. The connection here is less precise, the workmanship less exacting.” He dug at the moss, pulling it loose where it had burrowed into the cracks, clearing the seam all the way to its corner. The exposed edge was gouged and chipped, dozens of hairline fractures revealing damage yet to come. He looked up. “Of all the stones on this roof, only this one appears in such condition. That can mean only one thing—this stone has been moved … repeatedly.”

  At last. “You think this is the way in,” she guessed.

  “If there is one,” he said. “Most Mayan temples have nothing inside except an earlier temple.”

  Puzzled looks came his way.

  “The kings and Ahau of Maya wanted monuments to themselves like all the other leaders of the ancient world. But in a surprisingly pragmatic twist, they would often commission a new structure to be built over the existing ones, a sort of pre-Colombian municipal rehabilitation project, one that enabled them to leave behind a greater temple than their predecessor. The result is something like those Russian nesting dolls, where each larger doll covers the smaller one. At places in the Yucatan some temples have half a dozen underlying layers.”

  He returned to his original thought. “But other Mayan temples are stand-alone structures, some of which contain inner chambers, rooms for the kings and the priests to meditate and communicate with their long-passed ancestors. A process usually accompanied by the letting of blood, as they passed barbed ropes and stingray spines through their lips and their earlobes and, um … through other parts considered more sensitive.”

  Hawker winced. “Kind of puts a damper on that whole being a king thing.”

  Danielle laughed and looked back at McCarter. “So you think this is one of the latter types?”

  “It looks that way,” he said. “And that could help us determine if this place is Tulan Zuyua or not.”

  “How?” she asked.

  “Remember how Tulan Zuyua had other names,” he said. “The stone Blackjack Martin found contained one of those names. Seven Caves. Other Mayan writings refer to it as the Place of Bitter Water.”

  “Seven Caves,” she said, running the scenario through her mind. “So you think there might be a cave under here or a group of them?”

  “Possibly,” McCarter said. “But I’m thinking on a less dramatic level. Other Mayan sites linked to the word ‘cave’ have been found to contain inner chambers. And why not? After all, what is a cave? A dark place with walls of stone. It’s only semantics that differentiate a stone-walled chamber from an actual stone cave. Spelunkers even call the open chambers of a cave a room. The Mayan description probably follows a similar line of thought. And if this temple was to have a set of inner chambers, seven of them, then that would support our theory that it is Tulan Zuyua.”

  “Our theory?” Danielle said.

  “I’m co-opting it,” McCarter said, smiling. “Besides, there’s another reason to go inside as well, a more important one perhaps. Anything that’s inside will have been protected from the sun and rain for all these years. The walls out here have been worn smooth by the environment, but in there, we might find writings, murals or pottery. Even ritual objects with information on them. The best and quickest way to gather information is to get inside, and that means we start here.”

  It would take the better part of four hours, a rash of strained muscles and one broken pulley, but eventually the slab was dislodged and forced upward by the leverage of the pry bars. A nylon rope was passed beneath it, and with a jerry-rigged tripod they managed to raise the stone and move it backward an inch at a time. It had traveled almost two feet before the contraption collapsed and the stone ground to a halt.

  As McCarter got down on his stomach to peer through the slot, he began coughing and then turned away. Danielle could smell acrid fumes in the air escaping from the temple’s innards. A sulfurous and wretched stench.

  McCarter looked up, his eyes watering. “That’ll clear your head.”

  As he moved back toward the entrance, Danielle took a deep breath and got down beside him, the beams of their flashlights playing across a flight of wide steps that dropped into the darkness beyond.

  “Let’s get in there,” she said.

  McCarter caught her eye and seemed to realize there would be no point in arguing. He took a fluorescent lantern from her hand.

  “Anyone else?” he asked.

  As a few of the others backed away to unvolunteer, Hawker stepped up. “What the hell, a
nother hole in the ground. At least this one has stairs.”

  McCarter nodded then looked at his student. “Susan?”

  Susan had backed away from the entrance, coughing and wheezing from the sulfur smell. “I can’t,” she said. “I won’t be able to breathe.”

  McCarter nodded. “I’ll give you a full report.” He turned to Danielle. “Okay, boss, let’s go.” With that McCarter squeezed through the gap, disappearing from view. Danielle followed, with Hawker right behind her.

  Once inside, they were soon able to stand, descending a flight of stairs while pungent sulfur fumes assaulted them, stinging their eyes and burning their throats. The thick stone walls deadened the place to outside noise and distorted their voices with strange reverberating echoes. When the others spoke too loudly or too quickly, Danielle noticed that their words became unintelligible.

  She stopped next to McCarter at the bottom of the stairs, pointing her flashlight in various directions. Despite their lights it was hard to see any details. The sulfur in the air had condensed into a yellowish fog and was scattering the light from their torches.

  Hawker spoke. “Twenty steps. Mean anything to you, Doc?”

  “Not particularly,” McCarter replied. “But there are twenty named days in the Mayan Short Calendar. Then again, that might have been how many stairs they needed to reach the top.”

  Danielle shined her light along the floor. It was made of the same gray stone as the exterior, cut and laid in precise blocks. “Amazing,” she said. As she stepped past McCarter and into the darkness beyond, her foot hit something and sent it rolling across the floor. The object came to a stop near the far wall and one of the flashlight beams soon found it: a skull, weathered and discolored with time, now laying beside a large pile of similar skulls. There were dozens of them, perhaps fifty or more, some intact, others smashed and broken.