Zero Day: A Novel (8 page)

“It’s ‘Super Freak,’” Sue said, dropping her arms.

“‘Super Freak’? The song?”

“I think so.” Sue wrinkled her brow. “How does it go? ‘She’s a very kinky girl, the kind you don’t take home to mother.” Sue’s singing voice was surprising deep and guttural. Now that she had the words and the tune, she was really getting into the song, swinging her hips, raising her voice. “Yeah! I’ve still got it! Our hacker likes Rick James punk funk. He’s not
all
bad.”

“Aren’t you a bit young to know Rick James? ‘Super Freak’ was … what? Sometime in the early ’80s?”

“Rick James is classic.”

Jeff looked back at the screen. “Okay, ‘Super Freak.’ But what does it mean? Is that the name of the virus? Or the cracker’s handle? Someone who’s a Rick James fan?”

“Super Freak” might be significant, then again it might not, Jeff thought. Some virus code changed hands so many times all kinds of leet-speak from script kiddies crept in. It might not be connected to the virus’s author at all.

“It might be his cyber handle,” Sue suggested. “You should be looking for it in any code you find. I’ll see if I can turn anything up in hacker chat rooms later.” She yawned again. “I’m beat.” She gave him a winning smile. “I’m going to lie down for a bit. I haven’t pulled an all-nighter since college.” She turned and walked away toward the couch, stretching as she did.

“No problem,” Jeff murmured. “I’ll probably lie down a bit later myself. I’ve still got some juice, though, and will feel better if I can get something definite before taking a real break. Your boss will ask, I’m certain.” He looked over at Sue; she was already asleep.

10

BROOKLYN, NEW YORK

MERCY HOSPITAL

TUESDAY, AUGUST 15

8:09 A.M.

Daryl Haugen was given full access to the IT center in the basement of Mercy Hospital, where she found the staff cooperative. They’d taken the deaths of patients personally. Winfield had dropped by several times, but she had nothing to give him. Working not far from a furnace at an unused station, it had taken nearly a day of work to unlock the code she detected in the server. Yet, so far, she’d turned up nothing useful.

She felt the adrenaline coursing through her despite the long hours. These crackers were so full of themselves, so certain they could fool everything, she went after them with a vengeance. She’d never been able to tolerate such self-satisfaction. She found it interesting that George Carlton, officially the man responsible for stopping this sort of thing, was no less egocentric. For some time she’d thought he was just pitching his department when he crowed about his accomplishments, but she’d come to realize he actually believed he was doing an effective job.
Contempt
scarcely described her true feelings toward him.

Something had scrambled the hospital medication program; she just couldn’t identify it. Her staff in Virginia was on this, but thus far they’d come up with nothing useful. The more people of talent and skill she had engaged, the sooner they’d have a solution, so she’d been glad Jeff Aiken was available. He was bright, creative, and hardworking. From her experience she knew he had the knack of thinking outside the box.

Daryl had located suspect code from a corrupted registry file and was now running it through a string analyzer, a program that dumped any data values in the file that could be represented with a printable character. Many code values translated to printable characters so there was a lot of garbage, but she also saw strings the programmer had in the code that referenced registry settings and files. Programmers often left debugging code that included messages in place that would be revealed in the string output. It took Daryl a few minutes to go over the strings, which largely looked like this:

rX + %”/

Lep

}ccc

oaaaa_ep

LRI?9\

z_____/VK<-

XRG???

m988m

4TTTTTAWK-

999877766mv.,[email protected]

hRU

8877666.,,,&&&1TU

YRIPPPF

m\.1,,,,,2TW

PPPP

FFEEEDD

As she scanned the text, Daryl spotted a few strings that vaguely resembled words, but weren’t quite English. One grabbed her attention because it looked as if it contained
COM,
the domain of most Internet sites:

ABKCOM

But it was missing a separating dot between
ABK
and
COM
that would show up if the string were actually a universal resource locator, or URL, such as ABK.COM. Had the programmer left out the period for some reason? Perhaps it was a mistake or an attempt to hide that it was a URL. Trying to find clues and vaguely feeling as if there was more to the snippet, she continued examining it, letting her mind take her where it would.

Intuition struck. Picking up her pen, she wrote the letters backward in her notebook:

MOCKBA

Of course! That was “Moscow,” written in Cyrillic.

Moscow! Why would that be a string? She searched for other clues in the text around it but found nothing. And why would a Russian hacker want to change the medication program in an American hospital?

She shot out of her chair and began to pace. It made no sense.

Of course the hacker could have copied code originally written by a Russian. But if it was Russian, the purpose of the virus should have been financial, since that’s what most Russian malware was about.

Unless this was something else.

Daryl had been a child prodigy, smart as a whip from the first. Her parents, both professors at Stanford University, had encouraged her wide-ranging interests from the time she was a toddler. As their only child, she’d received undivided love and attention. So easily had things come to her, the child Daryl had been surprised to realize how slow her classmates were, even in the accelerated classes she attended. As she moved into her preteens, she finally found her place at a prestigious academy.

Under the tutelage of a teacher from Spain, she’d discovered a natural affinity for language. Before she was twelve years old, she spoke Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian fluently. The transition into Latin and French in her teens was seamless. For a time her parents were convinced she would become a linguist, and they accepted that as her natural vocation.

But Daryl also enjoyed mathematics and computers. As each drew her increasing interest, she found herself more and more in the world of boys. When she began to blossom at age fifteen, even the geeks with whom she spent most of her days noticed, though they were too awkward and shy to do anything, a situation she thought was just as well. The last thing she wanted was a collection of panting admirers getting in the way of her real loves, numbers and the computer.

Daryl had gone to MIT at seventeen, then done her Ph.D. work at Stanford, while living with her parents. That had been nice, seeing them as adults, as equals. She’d come to appreciate the remarkable upbringing they’d given her. As she neared completion of her graduate work, Daryl had considered what to do. She’d always wanted to get the bad guys and briefly considered applying to the FBI. In the end she went with the National Security Agency, which had a greater use for her particular skills. The NSA intercepted foreign communications to develop intelligence information and relied extensively on computers to make it all happen.

Daryl had always been most comfortable working alone, though consulting with Jeff Aiken had come naturally. In recent years she’d stayed in routine business contact with him, especially when working on a new virus.

They had met at Langley, in the old CIA, the Company, before the 9/11 fiasco and the creation of Homeland Security, back in the days when the CIA thought it knew everything. She’d been sent from NSA as part of a show committee of cooperation. In fact, none of the American intelligence agencies cooperated significantly with one another, not the FBI, DIA, NSA, or CIA. But they were routinely admonished to cooperate, so committees such as hers were created, and meetings such as the one where she’d met Jeff were held from time to time.

“See if you can find anyone there,” her boss had instructed, meaning, see if she could connect with someone useful, willing to share information despite the unofficial policy against such cooperation. Jeff had been a new face so she’d taken the open seat next to him, separated by the corner of the conference table.

Jeff was a handsome man, one who took care of himself, she noticed as she waited for the meeting to start. Not at all like most of the others in the room. He placed a mug of black coffee on the coaster before him, then said, “Could you hand me the Sweet’n Low, please?”

The bowl was to her left. She’d reached over and handed him a pink packet. The moment their fingers touched, an electric shock went through her body. His hand hesitated; she was certain he felt the same thing. She looked at his clear gray eyes. He glanced at hers, then looked away. Clumsily opening the sweetener, he poured it into the mug, spilling almost as much as he put in the coffee. “I’ll need a napkin. I’m all thumbs today,” he’d said without meeting her eye.

During Daryl’s junior year at MIT, when she was 19, she’d been heavily courted by the scion to one of America’s wealthiest and oldest families. With a name embarrassingly long and followed with the number IV, he was considered the most desirable catch on campus. When her dorm sisters first realized that “Four” was interested in their nerdy roommate, they’d been envious.

Daryl had never before been courted, not like that, and found the experience interesting as a form of minor cultural ritual. Four was pleasant when he wanted to be but, she’d told her mother, not really quite smart enough for MIT. She wondered why he’d come.

“Because Dad wanted me to attend Yale,” he’d told her one evening when she asked. “Anyway, I like it here, better since meeting you.”

That night they’d gone to bed for the first, and only, time. In his room Four had stopped her from undressing, telling her he wanted the privilege for himself. She’d stood unmoving as he slowly unbuttoned and unzipped her out of her winter clothing. She’d observed the experience as if it were occurring to someone else, as if she were standing to the side. When at last she was down to her bra and panties, Four had pressed her to the bed, removed his clothes, then lay beside her. Then he slowly removed her bra and panties, breathing heavily as if lost in a trance.

It was January, and from the uncovered window silver moonlight spread across her now nude body. Four stopped as she lay naked and said over and over, “Magnificent. Magnificent.”

The sex was better than she’d expected. Daryl could see why a woman might get excited over it, but afterward Four had been distant, as if wrapped in his own world. He called repeatedly after that night, but she’d never gone out with him again. She understood what was going on and was not flattered.

Throughout their weeks of dating, Four had repeatedly spoken of her beauty. Then he had worshipped at its altar. She had no desire to be any man’s idol. From that night forward she committed herself to her work. No more dating, no more pawing. She wore baggy clothes, no makeup, and buried herself in her studies.

She counted herself the better for the experience. Four, she realized, had been full of himself, certain he was God’s gift to women, to her, to the world, when in fact he was a self-satisfied, egocentric snob. She considered herself well rid of him, and from this had come her utter contempt for egocentrics.

Four had not taken rejection well. He spread stories that Daryl was a slut, that he’d dropped her because she’d cheated on him. His stories only seemed to increase the attention of the other male students, and no hiding beneath oversize clothes could conceal her obvious beauty and latent sexuality.

As a release, and because she’d discovered her aptitude for sport, Daryl played intramural soccer after moving to Stanford for graduate work. She threw herself into the game and, if not the star of the team, was taken seriously as a player. On weekends she backpacked and hiked throughout northern California and parts of Nevada. She skied at every opportunity.

When Daryl first met Jeff, she was working in cyber-security, performing virus analysis, at that time a new field. A rising star in the NSA, she’d played a major role in identifying the hackers of two high-profile viruses. Overall, though, she was bored and generally annoyed by the obvious attention of men to her physical appearance. She’d learned, however, that it could work to her advantage. As for marriage and family, she had her work and found it endlessly fascinating.

After that first meeting, she’d seen Jeff at two others. Following the third a small group had gone for coffee together. It devolved into just the two of them. Their conversation had been on the merits of the Windows operating system versus that of the Macintosh, and in such detail they’d driven the others away. Not once, she realized, had he looked at her breasts, and for the first time since they’d developed, she was disappointed. What was the point of great tits if a man who interested you didn’t notice?

Over the telephone she’d once complained about it to her mom, a woman of considerable beauty herself. “The ones you don’t want to notice, will; the once you’d like to notice usually won’t. Get used to it,” she’d told her daughter.

Daryl and Jeff had reached that point where young couples talk about themselves. She’d gone first. When it was Jeff’s turn, he told her how he’d been raised by two elderly grandparents who had doted on him. “It sounds lonely,” she’d said.

“They were awfully good people, and very loving. They passed before I was graduated from college. I’ve been mostly on my own since, until recently that is.” He’d brightened, then told her about his girlfriend, Cynthia. That had been the end of any thoughts she’d had about the two of them.

After that they worked together from time to time. At one juncture he’d provided her with significant information unofficially. A few months later, she’d done the same. From then on they’d formed a fast and close working relationship, unfettered by his relationship with Cynthia.