"Yes?" Jack Sasson's voice was
thick with sleep.
"Dr. Sasson," Lincoln said, trying to keep the anger out of
his voice.
"Who is this? It's two in the goddamn morning."
"This is Lincoln Fellows, the night systems administrator at
Gen-A-Tec. I need to advise you, Doctor, that you are in violation of our
security mandates right now."
"What the fuck are you talking about?" More awake now, and
really pissed.
"We, Doctor—you, that is, have clearance to work from home, sir,
but you cannot copy secure files off-site to your home computer."
"I'm not working. I'm sleeping. I've got to be on the damn six-A.M.
flight to L.A. today for that silly butterfly trial, so leave me alone, you
idiot!"
"You're not at your computer right now?"
"No, dammit. Stop bothering me!" And Jack Sasson hung up.
In his hotel room Roland now had the
Ten-Eyck Chimera file up on the screen. The entire fifty-two-page program was
completely encrypted.
Roland knew that if the Gen-A-Tec systems administrator was on his toes
he'd certainly be aware of the security breach by now and would be trying to
run a back-finger search program to trace Roland to this computer site. He had
to get out of the system pretty soon. He downloaded the fifty-two-page
encrypted file, wondering what could be so important that the file would be in
code inside an already secure system. . . secure that is, to anybody but Roland
Minton.
Once the file was downloaded Roland logged off the Gen-A-Tec system. He
knew he hadn't been back-fingered, because the alarm in his hard drive, set to
detect such nastiness, hadn't gone off. He shut down his laptop and lay back
again, lacing his fingers behind his head. "Chew me, dickhead," he
said to his opposite number in the control room back at Gen-A-Tec. But he
had
developed some respect for the guy. Whoever it was, he was pretty good. He
just wasn't the best. He wasn't the "master of the game."
Lincoln Fellows knew he had been
breached and knew he was about to get toasted for it. He launched a back-finger
program to try and trace the cracker, but, as he feared, the guy was already a
ghost.
Lincoln knew he couldn't call Vincent Valdez at DARPA with a bag full of
apologies. His only chance of saving his job was to come up with some
counterintelligence to give to Mr. Valdez, some critical piece of the puzzle.
He turned to the Gen-A-Tec exterior security cameras and accessed the video
tape decks, starting with the late-afternoon shift change. He ran the four
camera platforms high-speed, fast-forward, scanning all four screens. There
were three cameras on each platform: one regular, one light-enhanced, one
infrared. There were also two front gate camera positions. Lincoln figured that
in order to phreak the system so effectively the cracker must have, at some
time, been working from the telephone company junction box up the street. He
watched as cars and trucks zipped past the gate in fast-forward. After twenty
minutes he saw him—a figure moving past the front gate, a telephone repairman
with a white hat and tool belt. Lincoln froze the tape with the man in
midstride.
"Is that you, Clarence?" he said to the dark image of the man
whom he had frozen, left heel down, right toe pointed up.
In the shot the sun had just disappeared behind the hills, throwing the
street into shadow. The picture was too dark to get a good look. He switched to
the infrared camera. It
didn't improve the shot much, so he went for the light-enhanced.
Instantly, the shadowy shot lightened. Lincoln could now see what the guy
looked like—rail-thin, with wisps of hair escaping from under the brim of the
white hard hat.
A geek-a-thon.
Lincoln released the tape and
fast-forwarded. He saw the guy driving away in a white Camry, hat off, purple
hair blazing. Lincoln froze the shot with the car still in frame. He looked
hard at the rear license plate, couldn't quite read it, but he figured this was
all he was going to get. His security command sheet said any breach on DARPA
projects had to be communicated first to the DARPA A.D. in Washington.
With a shaking hand he called the emergency number. It was 2:45
a.m.
here, which meant 5:45
a.m.
in Washington, D.C., but he had
been told that Mr. Valdez always got in before sunup.
"Agency," a voice said after two rings.
"I need to speak with the
assistant director. This is Lincoln Fellows," he said.
"Is this an emergency?" the secure operator replied. Line
could hear a beeping sound indicating that his call was being taped.
"I'm afraid so. Tell him it's the Night SA at Gen-A-Tec in San
Francisco and that the secure computer has been breached. We have
downloads."
While he waited for Valdez, Line made a digital transfer of the
cracker's image and drive-away, copying from the security tape to a backup,
then loaded it on the sat-link to send to DARPA in D.C. He knew it was the
first thing Mr. Valdez would ask for.
The assistant director came on the line. Line had only met him once, a
swarthy, dark-haired spook with black eyes and the cold disposition of a desert
reptile.
"This is Valdez."
"Sir, our secure computer has been compromised. A cracker
penetrated our shadow system and completed some downloads."
"What did he get?" Valdez's voice was calm. That was
the thing about
Mr. Valdez, he never seemed to be alarmed, as if he always had a tight rein on
himself and the situation. It was his one overriding personality trait; that,
and a reputation for utter ruthlessness.
"He got the program on engineered food. Corn mostly, some test results,
some e-mail. . ." Lincoln's heart was beating harder against his chest,
"and the entire encryption for the Ten-Eyck Chimera project."
There was a long silence on the other end of the line. "You're
joking," was all Valdez said.
"I think I have him on a security camera," the trembling SA
inserted quickly. "A shot of him and his car pulling past the gate. I'm
going to sat-link it to you right now."
"While I'm dealing with that, I want you to look through the entire
hack and see if he left any electronic clutter behind."
"I will, but I don't think so, sir. He was pretty damned
sharp."
"Right. Of course he was. But I thought
you
were sharp.
That's what you said when we hired you. Obviously, we were both wrong."
Before Line could present his alibi, Valdez hung up. Line hurried across
the room and hit the satellite
send
button.
A secure channel on a scrambled frequency shot the digital image into space,
where it bounced off a platform a mile up, then streaked down to the windowless
DARPA headquarters inside the Beltway in Washington, D.C. Elapsed time: fifteen
seconds.
Vincent Valdez quickly scanned the tape when it arrived, then sent it
down to Video Enhancement with instructions to digitally enhance the license
plate.
Fifteen minutes later he had a hard copy printout in his hand. It was a
blowup of the back bumper on a white Camry, with California plate
igi
378.
"And?" Valdez said softly to his assistant, Paul Talbot, who
had just handed him the photo.
"The car came from the
concierge at the new Fairview Hotel in San Francisco," Talbot said.
"It was rented to a
guest there. A Mr. Roland Minton, Room 3015." Talbot survived
in close proximity to Valdez because, like the male black widow spider, he had
learned to interact with his poisonous mate by appearing innocuous, moving
fast, and staying out of range. Talbot's bland personality masked a shrewd mind
that was always scheming.
Vincent Valdez stared at the photo. He hated screwups. But, he reasoned,
at least the ball was still in play. He looked at his watch. It was currently
3:07
a.m.
in San Francisco.
"How fast can we put a response-retrieval team in play?" he
asked Talbot.
"We can scramble a team from Ten-Eyck and have them ready in less
than an hour."
"That puts 'em there before five
a.m.
Daylight Savings out there gives us an extra hour of dark. So do
it." Victor leaned back. A second thought crossed his mind. . . dangerous,
ironic, but maybe exactly right. They were ready for a field test on one of the
D-units, so why not now? He spun around and stopped Paul Talbot before he left
the office.
"Tell Captain Silver
to send a DU along with the team."
"You sure you want to do that?" his assistant asked, turning
and wrinkling his pale brow.
"Let's see if what we've been building is really worth all this
trouble," Victor Valdez said, thinking that at least this would add some
excitement to a monumental cluster-fuck. "Tell Silver to put a chip vest
on the unit with full abort-destroy capabilities. I don't want to leave any DNA
behind if it goes bad."
Talbot nodded and left the room.
Twenty minutes later, a helicopter was
touching down in the desert north of Palm Springs. Its landing lights
illuminated the sagebrush and sand that blew under the chopper, tattooing the
side of an old weathered barn. The pilot was from a DOD scramble flight group
in L.A., but he'd never been out in this part of the desert before. The area
was
restricted by a
Code 61, which prohibited flyovers without special DOD clearance. When he
landed, the chopper captain was puzzled because the place looked deserted—just
barren miles of fenced, open desert. He watched as four men ran out of the old
barn dressed in black government assault gear, flak-jacketed with body armor,
and packing fully automatic MP-5s with thirty-round clips. Two of them were
wheeling a metal cage. They slid the heavy box into the bay of the helicopter
and piled in after it. The pilot looked back. There was Something alive in the box.
For a second he saw unearthly fingers come out and grasp the metal bars, but
then they disappeared inside the cage.
What the hell?
Then he heard
heavy breathing and a very strange noise, unlike anything he'd ever heard
before, high-pitched and angry. Suddenly, a dank, fetid odor clogged his
nostrils.
"Shhh, Pan," one of the soldiers said.
"Let's go. Get it up," Ranger Captain Dave Silver ordered as
he jumped into the helicopter.
The pilot pulled back the collective and the Bell Jet Ranger lifted off
the desert floor, heading toward the landing pad on top of the Federal Building
in San Francisco.
Roland was still hunched over his
computer working offline an hour after he had finished the download from
Gen-A-Tec.
He was in the zone.
It happened like that sometimes—you just lost track of everything. He
couldn't get Herman on the cell phone, and the overweight attorney wasn't at
Streisand's house, so Roland finished composing an e-mail to Strockmire and
sent it off to Herman's computer.
FROM:
[email protected]
SUBJECT:
no subject
CC:
DEAR STROCK . . .
I want a raise . . . I'm too fucking good
. . . I have again
saved your dumpy white ass & am expecting some big bucks in
return. No more of your empty promises. Send $$$!!! (heh-heh-heh)
I am e-mailing some downloads I got from
the Gen-A-Tec computer. I was magnificent, by the way. I wrecked the SA they
had on night duty out there. Stole all this shit right out from under his bony
ass.
Enc. include the RESH file on corn, e-m,
& some skeevy looking encryptions that were filed under DARPA (Defense
Advanced Research Projects Agency). DARPA is a secret gov't weapons research
org I've heard some evil shit about . . . I think we found some bodacious
bogosity. Why would gov't spooks be investing in food research? What evil
lurks? Gen-A-Tec had this program coded in a secure data bank so this is
DEFINITELY something they don't want seen.