Borderless Deceit (13 page)

Odd, such transitions from moral collapse to a state of near
exaltation.

Of course, I continued to think about Rachel as I poled along, and I grasped then why in Vienna she moved so easily from man to man. She was exploring desire, including her desire to know herself. And who can claim that in this pursuit it was not her right to leave no stone unturned?

When conflict ends in reconciliation it leaves humility and peace. The afternoon's events – my conflict with myself – had that effect and for the remainder of that day, and throughout the next, I reflected calmly on many things.

One was the origin of Irving Heywood's plague. I considered numerous possibilities, rejecting them one by one until a last hypothesis was left. I resolved to test it first thing during the new working week, using the powerful slim laptop from Hugh-S.

Irrespective of the season, the Monday morning atmosphere in the Service complex is relentlessly frigid. The workers, hunched and brooding, make their way to their assigned places. In joyless silence they steel themselves for a new week of struggle with bureaucracy's chilling forces acting against them. The never-ending press backwards – it sucks the ardour out of living.

But on this wintry Monday I was an exception to all this. Hugh-S's laptop, light in my briefcase, elevated my mood and I felt eager to attack the day. An expectation was tingling in my brain; my fingertips were itching to get on with things.

Once through the sliding doors, in the quiet of the watchers' sanctuary, I stamped the last snow off my boots and unfurled my scarf. Arthur Beausejour, in early as always, stood in the common area whistling a tune. With lips puckered up, rocking on his feet to his own notes, he waited for a kettle to come to the boil.

“Got my files back,” he said when he saw me, smiling like a winner and sending me three loud clicks of triumph with his tongue. “No time being wasted now. The Mounties are picking up the Dutchman's flower ring as we speak. And…yeah, you guessed it, Carson…simultaneous arrests of the pseudo-Mennonites in Hamburg. Not sure what's happening in Uruguay. Tough to get them to play ball. Worked on it all weekend.”

“Why the rush?” I said without much interest, unzipping my parka. “Why didn't you take another couple of days to get Montevideo on side?”

“Got my files back, Carson!” Beausejour insisted. “Jaime… Heywood's helper…she did it. Damn it, get off your pedestal. For God's sake. It's a big deal.”

“Your files shouldn't have been lost in the first place.”

“Yeah? Well, it happened. Maybe you were bored to tears by that crisis, but me, I tell you, I stared down a shaft and, yeah, I blinked.”

“Heywood's sidekick. What did she do?”

“Broke the code. Our own code! She called me Saturday. She's got fancy digs in Operations Tower. The equipment sitting around, you ought to see it. All hers. Big lock on the door. I knock. She lets me in. I ask what's happening. Well, she's been busy decrypting our backup tapes. She asked me questions, entered some stuff into a computer, ran a program she said she wrote the night before. Don't know how it worked. Okay, the first hour was a waste. Nothing much happened. She said it took her program a while to get a toe-hold. Then…bingo!…Wish you'd seen it, Carson…incredible. Out of a swirl of symbols you could see bits of words form, real slow, then phrases, and suddenly – I mean, whammo – there were sentences, paragraphs, whole documents. I'm telling you, three hours later, everything I had on my hard drive – 30 gigs at least – it was back. All decoded. Who said our encryption would last to the end of time?”

“Not me,” I sneered. Despite frequent resolutions to try to be more pleasant to Arthur, I felt scorn coming on and was powerless to keep it from my voice. “So Heywood's little helper saved you. Why didn't you fix your problem yourself?” I continued down the corridor.

Beausejour yelled after me, “Give her a call, Carson! Accept some help!”

Inside my cell I hung my parka on a hook, slipped out of overshoes, took out the new laptop, plugged it into an outlet, and fired it up. Waiting for it to load I dropped into my chair, lifted my feet onto a table next to the computer and stared at the wall. I knew the ways of unravelling complex encryptions. They required powerful data crunching hardware and highly classified software. I could only do it remotely using the resources of Hugh-S. How had this Jaime managed
it? Who was she? She had converted Arthur, that was obvious. How many others were indebted to her by now? The way she was inserting herself made me uneasy. I concluded I ought to visit her computers for a look.

But first, keen as a schoolboy, I wanted to test my weekend theory about the plague's origin and why it had been inflicted on us. Possibilities of all kinds had been running through my head, starting with the fact that Hugh-S was having difficulty figuring it out. There had to be a twist, a dimension easily overlooked, something cleverly deceptive that conferred potency and stealth.

My hypothesis required access to the records of the flight paths of Hugh-S's flock of listening satellites orbiting the globe. I punched a button on the direct-line scramble phone. He picked it up on the second ring as if he'd been expecting me. His eternal southern charm came rushing at me through the line. “Cahsun. You're alive. Your number didn't come up on Saturday. We share a time zone, but I hear that don't mean nothing when it comes to climate. You might like to know that Colonel Rickman survived too. He dropped your file off late and kept right on goin'. I mean south. Snatched himself a week of leave in Key West. Wanted to thaw out. You ever thaw out up there, Cahsun?”

“Colonel Rickman was impressed by the weather? It didn't seem to bother him much. I had a feeling he'd seen worse, that he's probably been plunked down in Siberia a few times for a good look around and then shot his way back out. Anyway, the file he brought you, it was helpful?”

“Fine piece of work, Cahsun. Up to your standard. Posse's gone out. Left yesterday. That why you're calling?”

“Not that.” I described to Hugh-S my hypothesis about the virus that destroyed our network. “Because it came in through the pipeline, I'm guessing it could have arrived from the satellites.”

“The Audiles? No way, Cahsun. We checked that out. Over a gig a second passed through the pipeline. The duration was about three minutes. That's a couple of hundred gigabytes more or less. Not one of the Audiles processed anywhere near that amount of data in that short period.”

I pressed Hugh-S. If not the Audiles, what other explanations were there?

“Got us stumped, Cahsun, the way it was there, suddenly gushin' in, wipin' you out. We doan feel good about it.”

“All other potential sources connected to the pipeline checked out negative.”

“‘Fraid so.”

“Suppose someone found a way to use the Audiles without it being obvious?”

“They're our birds up there. We know what they're doing.”

“This is how I see it. All other potential sources are static. Every data dump coming from them can always be traced back to whoever set it moving. The persona behind this virus was smart; he wouldn't set himself up for instant discovery. He wouldn't use a point of origin that's static. But the Audiles are always moving. You can use that motion. Motion creates opportunities to hide.”

“I doan figure it that way, Cahsun. We've gone through the Audile records. No data dump. Not from them, not from anywhere. So far it looks like spontaneous creation.”

“Spontaneous creation?” I laughed. “Inside the pipeline? A great mountain of data without an antecedent?”

“Yup. Sort of a proof of God's existence. Well, until it's figured out.”

I didn't let go. I reasoned that the chances of the plague coming in through the Audiles were higher than via any other route. I reviewed and rejected the other options one by one. “Open the Audiles vault for me,” I urged. “A couple of hours will do it. Some fast checks. If I come up short, nothing's lost. One of your guys can ride along with me the whole time if you want.”

Hugh-S sighed, then became philosophical. “The universe is filled with God's great mysteries and some days I wonder why we want to understand them all.” Whenever Hugh-S used a southern pastor's voice, it was a sign that acquiescence was not far off. “Sometimes I think there's blessedness in not having every explanation,” he continued his preaching. But then, after a pause, I was given the baptismal sprinkling. “Oh, all right, Cahsun. Go forth.”

Thirty minutes later, elaborate secure link-up procedures completed, the laptop was connected to the vault. Occasions like this were rare; in the past I'd been allowed in for only very specific searches. Yet, each time,
once connected, hypnotized by the dazzling world of information unfolding on my monitor, I compared my presence there to being in the middle of a fairy-tale, in a whimsical palace, invisible when the drawbridge is up, but brilliant and inviting once there's leave to enter. And inside! Unbelievable riches stacked away, an astonishing record of human behaviour, a gargantuan archive of accomplishments and failures. Blessed by Hugh-S's baptismal drops, inside, with this cornucopia all around, I had an inkling of what it was like to stand on hallowed ground.

Thirty-three satellites, delicately choreographed, swirl around the globe in a silent dance. Celestial puffs of technology. Up there they listen with unimaginable sensitivity to humanity, that is, to its every electronic signal. The Audiles pick up lovers whispering into cell phones and turn their murmuring into high-decibel songs. Mundane daily acts, the opening or closing of garage doors using hand-held remotes, are permanently inscribed into the Audiles records. When did Mafiosi Leonardo in Napoli depart his hillside mansion that morning? 9:34. That's when his garage door shut. Even children chattering into walky-talkies (part of the unwanted clutter in the great catacombs of data storage) obtain their place. Yes, the kiddies' world is there, next to the recorded yappings of terrorists, and the sighs of drug dealers renewing their murderous vows.

The vault's galleries and recesses call for lingering, exploring, discovering. Interesting curiosities of every kind abound. But as before, I had no time for distractions. I proceeded directly to the niche where Audiles admin data is kept to begin a methodical manipulation.

First, I chose the day the Service was vandalised by the plague. I asked for – and in seconds there appeared on my screen – the transmission charts for each of the thirty operating satellites (three had been out of action that day for reprogramming and maintenance). At first glance the jumble of numbers didn't add up to much. With a click, the numbers turned into graphs, allowing me to study maxima, the peaks of data transmission. I took a few minutes to program a cut-off number below which I believed nothing was of interest. Six of the satellites had been fairly busy and were candidates for closer study. Each showed that at different times that day there had been peaks of transmission intensity of up to four, even five hundred megabytes per second. The bursts lasted different lengths of time, thirty seconds, a minute, or a
minute fifteen seconds. As Hugh-S had claimed, the data was not unusual, nothing in it was big enough to have constituted the program that triggered the plague. I superimposed the graphs, using a standard time line and noticed that two of the data surges, from Audiles AB3Z and CY9P, were separated by a mere fifty seconds. This small delay between data bursts was consistent with my hypothesis. I put another question to the database. Where were these two satellites when the transmission peaks occurred? The co-ordinates of longitude and latitude appeared. I clicked to a map of the world and entered the co-ordinates to obtain a geographic picture. I saw that AB3Z had been passing directly above Andorra and CY9P straight over the Aral Sea.

My excitement began growing.

The next step took some time. I programmed in the movements of these two Audiles over time, including the outer boundaries of their listening zones. Within fifteen minutes I had it. On the same map of that region – stretching west-east from Spain to Kazakstan and north-south from Ukraine to Chad – the zones covered by each Audile during that fateful hour were sketched in. I was looking at two great discs, each tracing a broad swath over the surface of the Earth. I narrowed the AB3Z band down to the period of its transmission peak, and did the same for CY9P. The screen now showed two slightly bulging elliptical areas separated by an empty space which had the shape of a narrow hour glass. I focussed on the western edge of the area covered by CY9P above the Aral Sea and the eastern line of AB3Z over Andorra. My hypothesis was that someone situated in that hour-glass shaped piece of space had beamed half of the virus program to one satellite for about a minute before losing the connection as the satellite moved out of range. He then had fifty seconds to re-direct his antenna, and sent the second half of the program on its destructive journey as soon as the next satellite rising over the horizon was coming into range. Two separate but complementary doses of the killer program could have made their way into the vault. Part of the complex program must have been devoted to stunning camouflage, because neither the first half of the virus, already sitting in Hugh-S's vault waiting for the second to arrive, nor that of the second one coming in, and then the two halves combining, had been picked up. The only evidence left behind by this complex manoeuvring – entering the vault
by stealth and combining into a destructive force – was the final reassembled virus rushing down the pipeline. That short and final journey was all that anyone picked up. No other trace of it remained in the vault. As Hugh-S put it, its appearance was like a spontaneous creation, God's own work. Once embedded in a defenceless Service server – which happened to be ours, the watchers, the end point for the pipeline – the virus had sent out its pestilential tentacles in all directions and in the end, to destroy all evidence, had obliterated itself.