Skyhook (12 page)

The screensaver slide show had dissolved, leaving in its place the final report on the search Ben had launched at 5 a.m., for a line-byline comparison of two versions of the Boomerang Box’s master program. He started to save the message for later, but realized with a start that it, too, would have to be erased.

Once more he glanced at his watch in agitation, shoving an even more disgruntled Schroedinger aside as he plopped back in the desk chair to scan the report before erasing it. There was no reason it should show anything different from the four or five dozen comparison searches he’d made during the night, each of which had turned up nothing.

If there’s anything wrong with this damn program, I can’t find .

. .

Ben felt his mind snap to a halt and change direction as he returned to the top of the screen and realized what he was seeing.

What in the world?

Unlike each of the previous searches, this one had yielded some thing. There were long lists of numbers, each of them representing a specific line of computer code, and each significantly different from any of the code lines on the original completed master program. He knew almost every line of the original version and had instructed the computer to compare the version of the program he’d used aboard the Gulfstream with the original control version.

And now this.

Ben paged down the list, passing a hundred lines before realizing that more than two thousand lines were different, or new, and all in one section. He ordered the computer to show him the raw machine language on several lines he’d selected at random, fully expecting to see something familiar. Perhaps his workstation had gone into some kind of loop and just repeated a rogue line of code several thousand times.

No … it’s all different! he concluded, trying to decipher what kind of program the code represented. There were shorter off-the-shelf sub-routines throughout modern computer programs, but none of what he was seeing corresponded to any of the standard ones, and some of what he was looking at appeared to be written in a machine language he’d never seen, if that were possible.

Ben glanced at his exasperated cat and pointed to the conundrum on the screen.

“What do make of that, Schroedinger?”

The yellow tomcat meowed again and took a few steps toward the kitchen, lowering his already low opinion of human intelligence as he realized that Ben was failing utterly to get his priorities straight.

A slow whisper of trouble worked its way into Ben’s mind, beginning with the realization that someone had purposely inserted unauthorized instructions into a top secret defense program. But who? And why? And what? A virus, perhaps? That was a worrisome thought. In the first few seconds of his mushrooming understanding, the muttered possibility that someone was playing a trick was shouted down by the voice of reason. No, this wasn’t a trick or an accident. Whoever had added the sophisticated lines had obviously been try

ing to fix something, an explanation at once eclipsed by the roar of reality that all legitimate additions had to have his personal approval. That final fact triggered an inescapable shout of alarm in his head.

Oh my God, this is sabotage! And this is the version of the program that nearly killed us the other night!

Ben realized he was shaking, perhaps as much from waking up too fast with too little sleep as from fear. He forced himself to sit back down and concentrate.

This could still be an error. Don’t be too hasty. Stray lines get into programs all the time, and we’ve patched the hell out of this one, and my original comparison copy comes from, what, eight months ago.

Maybe he was overreacting. After all, the new code could be something as mundane as an encrypted recipe for brownies. It wasn’t necessarily responsible for the failed test and the locked system two nights before.

Another horrific thought crossed his mind, and he tried to shake it off. What if one of his own team were some sort of renegade foreign agent?

Impossible. I know my people better than their mothers know them.

The background checks had been witheringly thorough, yielding embarrassing details ranging from youthful sexual exploits to sometimes disgusting personal habits. His own file had shocked him. Apparently, the National Security Agency had employed agents in his preschool and had been inside his 54 Chevy during his first, fumbling attempts at lovemaking in the back. They even had her name right.

No, he knew his people. There were no moles.

Ben felt his pulse slowing as he focused on how little he knew about the puzzle he’d discovered. He couldn’t go off halfcocked, but then again, he couldn’t just erase the evidence and go to work as if he hadn’t found it.

Maybe I can erase it here and just replicate it there. After all, at the lab, all the iles are available and authorized.

He entered the preliminary keystrokes to destroy the entire series of files, and paused with his finger over the “enter”

button. He had

the evidence in front of him. What if something happened to his data at the lab and he couldn’t duplicate it? The urge was strong to punch the button and remove all possibility of prosecution for what had, after all, been the criminal act of breaching a top secret project. But he had a responsibility to find out what this was all about.

Ben pulled his finger away and carefully hit the escape key to cancel the process. Regardless of the enormous personal risk, he had to keep the files until he could duplicate them legitimately at the lab.

A dozen ideas on where to store the thousands of lines of the anomalous code marched through his thinking, and he settled on the least probable, entering the appropriate commands before erasing all traces of the downloaded program files.

One single number remained, and he memorized it before removing it from his laptop. He headed for the shower, pausing to dump some food out for his unhappy cat and wondering if he could hide his agitation when he walked in the door in a half hour.

April hated the airport security procedures that kept friends and family from going to the gates. She’d always loved being the first to catch the eye of someone she’d come to meet as the passengers rounded the corner of the jetway. Now she was forced to join the throng of hopefuls waiting for inbound passengers outside the security perimeter, and it seemed an indignity.

Still, she managed to spot Dean as he came into view down the concourse, pouncing on him the second he emerged from the security portal.

“Hey, bro!”

“Hey, sis!” He hugged her, a weary look on his face. “How’re they doing?”

“They’re doing okay, considering what they went through. You know the Albatross was destroyed?”

“You told me on the phone last night, remember?”

She nodded. “I’m not sure what I’ve told anyone.”

“Any physical problems?”

“Bumps, a few contusions, and a mild concussion for Dad, but overall, they’re okay.”

“That’s a huge relief.”

“It’s just hard to picture their airplane sitting on the bottom of the ocean.”

He pointed the way toward the front of the airport and they began walking in that direction. “You said last night there were other problems and you’d tell me when I got here,” Dean prompted.

She gave him a detailed rundown of the encounter with the FAA and NTSB as they walked to her rental car in the airport garage.

Dean sat in silence for a while in the right front seat as his sister wheeled them out of the airport drive for the trip across town to the hospital. She waited for him to break the silence.

“April, you said you’ve got Grade looking for a lawyer for Dad, right?”

She nodded.

“Which means you think he’s going to need one.”

“If you’d seen the hate in the eyes of that FAA inspector, Dean, you’d have no doubt. I don’t understand what the man’s problem was. I mean, most FAA people I’ve met, including inspectors, are just good, hardworking folks, but this guy …”

“He was giving you attitude?”

She grimaced and shook her head. “Not you, too?”

“What?”

“I hate the misuse of that word, Dean!”

“What are you talking about?”

“What you just said. He’s giving me attitude,” that’s nonsense.

Gracie and I go around about this all the time. Attitude, attitude. Everyone has an attitude at any given moment, but that sort of stupid misuse makes it sound like just having one is bad.

Talk about the bastardization of English!”

Dean had a hand up, laughing. “Okay, okay. I will refrain from colloquial usage in the future.”

“That’s not even colloquial. It’s just plain guttural.”

“But your point was,” Dean continued, “that this FAA inspector had an agenda, and the destruction of Arlie Rosen’s license to fly airplanes was on it?”

“Something’s up with him, that’s certain.”

“And that’s one of the phrases I hate,” Dean chuckled. “‘Up with,” as in whazzup wid yew?””

April turned the car into the hospital entrance.

“Touche. Point well taken. And we’re talking obliquely about a certain nephew of mine, right? Little runt who pretends to like rap and answers to the name of David?”

“Ah, yes,” Dean said. “The teen monster of Bellevue. Night of the living bored. Now six feet tall, by the way, and his linguistics are atrocious.”

“Like, you do realize, like, don’t you, that he’s, like, just trying to irritate his, like, dad?”

Dean smiled as she braked smoothly to a halt in front of the main entrance. “I seem to recall, little sis, that you were the unchallenged champion in that department in our family.”

“I reformed,” she replied, looking hurt. “It was a brief rebellion.”

“Yeah, such as the time in high school you flew to Europe during a school break without telling anyone.”

“Amsterdam.”

“That’s still in Europe, last time I checked.”

“Dean,” April said, her hand up to stop him. “Something about Mom and Dad’s memory of yesterday is bothering me.”

“What do you mean? You’re not suggesting they’re coloring the truth?”

She shook her head vigorously. “No, no, no! But something about the way they both remember the beginning of the accident sequence doesn’t make sense.”

“So, what are you thinking? Something else happened? You said that he said a propeller broke.”

“I’m thinking that I want to ask you a favor.”

“Sure.”

“Let me just drop you off here to go take care of Mom and Dad while I … do a little research. Find out when they’re going to be released and call me.”

“I can, but why don’t you just come back here when you’re through? I’ll need to arrange a hotel—”

“Dean, they’ll be released this afternoon. Didn’t I mention that?”

“No. Today?”

“Yeah. Isn’t that great?”

“Well… of course, but…”

“Unless something’s changed in the last hour.”

He looked off balance.

“I’ll be on my cell phone,” she added. “When we’re sure of the release time, I’ll arrange the flight home.”

“I hate to say this, April, but if they’re okay and they’re getting out of here in a few hours and flying home, why am I here?”

“In other words, why did the extremely busy Boeing executive have to cancel some really important appointments when little April could drop everything and take care of it?”

He nodded. “Okay, that did sound pretty selfish.”

“They’re really shaken up, Dean, and they need our support. They need to see you here. They can understand why between you and Sam, only one of you might be able to race up here—”

Dean held his hand up to stop her. “I’m sorry. I make this mistake more often than you know, thinking of you as still being in school, not the vice-president of a corporation.”

“Times change, bro.”

“Imagine that! My little sister a corporate officer.”

“Yeah. Strange, isn’t it? Look, call me when you know the projected release time, okay?”

He opened the door and hesitated, turning back to search her eyes. “What are you concerned about, April? Is this something to do with the broken propeller?”

dc. I don’t want to go into it yet. I just need to know more.”

‘Maybe

“All right.”

“And please, Dean. Don’t say anything to Dad. He’s upset enough.”

“So … where are you if they ask?”

“Tell them I’m using the opportunity of being in Anchorage to check up on one of my company’s cruise ships. That way, Empress pays for my airline ticket.”

Dean smiled. “You’ve always known how to speak Dad’s language.”

“Don’t start with the airline pilots are cheap’ thing again.”

“No, no. Not cheap. Just… cost-conscious.”

“And generous to a fault. Dad’s living proof of that.” She waved goodbye as he closed the door.

frpril turned the car north toward the downtown area, her mind on the city’s relatively small port facilities and the Coast Guard’s Marine Safety Office. She’d had difficulty locating anyone to talk to when she’d called them an hour before. A Lieutenant Hobbs had finally agreed to meet with her, and she found him in his office now, receptive but slightly suspicious.

“What, exactly, do you want to know, Ms. Rosen?” Hobbs asked.

April explained the loss of her parents’ plane and her need to find a radar site that might have seen what happened. She passed him the crash-site coordinates.

“Why do you need to see radar tapes?” he asked.

“Because I think my father’s airplane may have hit something on the water two nights ago, like the superstructure of a passing ship. If the fog was thick enough, the crew might not even be aware of it. Propeller blades are relatively fragile compared to nautical structures. Just a tiny touch could break a blade off and leave almost no marks on the structure below.”

“If he clipped a ship because of flying too low, isn’t that negligence?”

She shook her head and explained the difference. “It’s not a violation to accidentally fly into fog. It’s what you do in response that counts.”

She could see Lieutenant Hobbs glance around carefully before coming forward in his chair to pull out a small pad of paper. He opened an ornate Mont Blanc fountain pen, noting April’s curious expression. He glanced at the pen, then back at her.