Palm Sunday (16 page)

“I don’t know,” said Katherine. “From what you’ve told me this palmtop doesn’t work like a typical device on the Net, yet it seems to be using the Internet infrastructure; maybe piggybacking somehow.”

They both knew that it all got back to the address. If you used the Internet to move data around, you had to have an IP address. The palmtop didn’t conform to the standard.

“We need to figure out what kind of technology it’s using,” said Stanley. “Any ideas?”

Katherine was the electronics specialist at ScanDat, but beyond just being handy with a soldering iron, she knew electronics. From the basics of atomic theory to the intricacies of fuzzy logic, she was one of those people for whom it was second nature, and translating this into practical application was her specialty.

“Hard to say. I don’t suppose we have a schematic of the palm unit?”

“Dad took it apart. It was cool.” Bobby smiled proudly at his father, and then went back to watching television.

Katherine was not terribly surprised. “You took it apart?”

“It was before I knew how important it was,” said Stanley. “It wasn’t working so I…fiddled.”

Katherine rolled her eyes. “Okay. First step, we take it apart again.”

Stanley pointed at her. “Ha!”

“There’s a difference. I have the tools to run some basic diagnostics, at the component level. We need to see if the parts are okay.” She retrieved a bag from among her belongings and pulled out a small meter. “Let’s see if our little friend here is getting any juice.”

Slocum was peering over her shoulder. “I’ve never even changed the battery.”

Removing the cover from the device, Katherine adjusted her meter and took some readings. “It has two batteries. Rechargeable. One’s probably a backup, but both seem okay. Let’s move on.” She changed settings on her meter and checked for continuity across various components.

Slocum looked at Stanley. “Does she know what she’s doing?”

“Yeah,” said Stanley.

“Hmm…interesting.” Katherine moved the probe back and forth across a black rectangular unit.

Bobby had moved up beside her. “Dad said that’s the transceiver.”

Katherine looked at Stanley. “Is that right?”

He cleared his throat. “Um, well, yes, that was my guess.”

“You might be right. Sort of,” said Katherine. “It seems to be active, or at least it’s trying to activate. I don’t know. It could be damaged.”

“Perhaps when it was thrown from the car,” offered Slocum.

“Maybe,” Katherine said. She looked at Slocum. “What was the procedure when you had to send or receive a communication from the agency?”

“To receive, I would just turn it on and use the appropriate menu. To transmit I had to be near a designated location.”

“Where’s the designated location?” asked Katherine.

“It was someplace different each time,” said Slocum. “But it’s always mentioned in the previous message.”

Katherine nodded. “Great.”

“Is that bad?” asked Slocum.

Katherine didn’t answer right away. She looked at Stanley to see if he was picking up on it.

“The key is the location,” Stanley said. “But that location is mentioned in a previous file, which we can’t decode.” He understood all too well.

“Wait a minute,” said Slocum. “Why can’t we read the incoming files? I used to be able to.”

Stanley offered a possible explanation. “What we’re accessing is different from what you used to see, yet we’re somehow tapping into the same source. Maybe we’re capturing bits and pieces of several different files, unrelated clumps of meaningless chatter.”

Katherine agreed. “Which would explain why you couldn’t decrypt the file. It was mostly nonsense.”

“Except for the few words that I got,” said Stanley.

Katherine added, “If we could find the ‘designated location’, we might be able to access the agency’s data stream.”

“That would be my guess,” said Stanley. “Now we just have to figure out where this magic place is, or why it changes.” He began to pace, arms folded across his chest, chin down.

Slocum looked at Katherine, and gestured towards Stanley. “What’s that all about?”

“Oh, that.” She smiled. “It’s his thinking posture.”

After several trips around the living room Stanley stopped and looked at Katherine. “What do you suppose it was about the location that enabled a connection?”

“Some kind of localized relay, I would imagine. Something wireless, obviously.”

“Maybe we can replicate the conditions right here.”

Katherine considered this. “We could bombard the palmtop with high frequency pulses across increasingly narrow wavelengths, and see if any of them initiate a link. We might get lucky.”

Slocum shook his head. “You guys are way out of my league.”

Katherine explained. “It’s not that complicated, really. We’ll simply aim radio waves at the palmtop with narrower and narrower bandwidth. If it’s waiting for a particular frequency, a connection should be established with whatever data source your agency uses.”

“You have the equipment to do that?”

“Not here,” said Katherine. “We’ll have to bring some more stuff back from work.”

“I can run in and get what you need,” said Stanley. “No one will be in the office this late.”

“No, I’ll go,” said Katherine. She didn’t want to be left with Slocum. Not that she feared him, but he wasn’t exactly a master of conversation. It was awkward.

“Make sure you get everything you need,” said Stanley.

Katherine nodded, and left. She was gone for just over an hour, and when she returned, she brought the equipment up to the front porch and knocked.

Slocum opened the door. “Let me help you with that,” he said. Together they hauled everything into the apartment. Slocum glanced quickly up and down the street before closing and locking the door.

Katherine nodded towards Stanley. “Shall we?”

He looked at the gear she had brought back. “I guess you took me seriously about bringing everything.”

An assortment of electronic gizmos sat in a pile in the center of the living room. A portable frequency generator and an amplifier were the critical items. They immediately went to work setting things up, and about a half hour later Stanley took his position in front of the computer.

Katherine looked at Slocum. “Do what you normally would to transmit a file.”

Slocum switched on the palmtop, and navigated through several screens. He nodded when he was finished. Katherine started the frequency generator.

“Stepping through the lower ranges now,” she said. There was no sound, but she could tell from her readout that the signal was slowly changing, the frequency of the bandwidth increasing ever so slightly.

“Nothing so far,” said Stanley. He carefully watched his own screen, and rechecked the cable that ran from the palm unit to his computer.

“Jumping to mid-range,” said Katherine. “I’m going to increase the power a smidge.” She adjusted a small knob.

“Still nothing,” said Stanley. “It seems dead.”

“The palmtop is working though,” said Slocum. “The screens come up as normal.”

Katherine nodded. “I know, Robert, but we’re not triggering a connection.” She looked at Stanley. “Let’s try the ultra-high frequency range.” She turned a knob, changing the scale, and began to step through a band of transmission pulses that would sound like a shrill, steady squeal if they were audible.

Stanley suddenly called out. “Something’s happening. A download! It’s fragmented, though. We’re only getting bits and pieces, but it’s not encoded, or if it is, the palm unit is translating it.”

“Let me play with the amplitude.” Katherine slightly lowered the strength of the signal.

“Other way! We’re losing it!”

She quickly made the adjustment. A few more lines of broken text were downloaded, and then the download ceased.

“Look at this, Katherine,” said Stanley. “It’s plain text. I can read it just the way it came through. It’s doesn’t seem to be important information, but at least we know we’re on the right track.”

“Excellent. All we have to do now is figure out how to reverse the flow.”

“Wait a minute,” said Slocum. “I thought we were trying to do a transmission.”

Katherine smiled. “Welcome to the exciting world of technology, Mr. Slocum. Once again, your palmtop is full of surprises.”

“We’re going to need more equipment to reverse the flow,” said Stanley.

Katherine walked up behind him and started playfully massaging his neck. She whispered into his ear. “Now where do you suppose we might find that?” 

When Norbert saw the unauthorized download, he immediately phoned Mason.

“Yes, Norbert, what is it?”

“You’d better get down here right away,” said Norbert. “There’s been a security breach.”

“Should I notify Pampas?”

“No. It concerns the secure transmissions.”

“I’m on my way.” It was the one thing Mason feared the most, that someone on the outside would detect the agency’s Internet presence. This had to be why Norbert was in a panic, so he rushed down to the computer center.

When Mason arrived Norbert waved for him to hurry over to his console. “Exactly twelve minutes ago I detected an unauthorized activation of a secondary transmit portal.”

“Those are for the palm units,” said Mason.

“Exactly.”

“So what. One of the implementers wandered out of range, or didn’t input the correct access sequence.”

Norbert shook his head. “None of that, sir. This activation wasn’t initiated by any of our currently verified portals, or by any of our authorized palm units.”

“Then what do we have here?”

“It was the missing palmtop. The one assigned to Mr. Slocum.”

Mason dismissed the explanation with a wave of his hand. “That’s not possible. He couldn’t know where his next portal would be, and his authorization was cancelled.”

“It would be difficult, but not impossible,” said Norbert. “It would, however, be well beyond the technical capabilities of Mr. Slocum.”

Mason knew better than to argue technology with Norbert. “Then he is working with someone else.”

“It would seem that way.”

“Are we vulnerable?”

Norbert wasn’t sure, and his answer didn’t inspire confidence. “It depends. If they can read our traffic, which is almost a certainty, then they’re more than half way to being able to find us. Whether they can take the next step,” Norbert shrugged. “I wouldn’t bet against them. They’re pretty good to have gotten this far.”

“Are we talking about the big boys?” He referred to the major spy agencies–FBI, NSA, even the CIA, although they only worked through surrogates. Technically the CIA wasn’t supposed to collect domestic intelligence. In some ways, though, they worried Mason the most, because the people they employed to get around this restriction were good; they were very good.

“I don’t know,” said Norbert.

It was the one answer that Mason couldn’t tolerate. “We have to know where that palm unit is, and we need to get it back. Everything else is on hold. This Slocum thing could turn out to be our Achilles heel, and that palmtop is the key. Do what you can to track it down–throw out an occasional bone if you have to, but get me some information. I don’t need to tell you how to do your job. Use your imagination, but find that palmtop.”

“Yes, sir.”

Mason stormed out of the computer center and made his way to George Pampas’s office. His secretary looked up as he walked in.

“Hello, Mr. Mason. Mr. Pampas is in his office, shall I…”

Before she could finish he brushed past her and barged in. Pampas looked up from his computer.

“Come on in.”

Mason got right to the point. “George, where are you with the Slocum case?”

“Did we have a meeting scheduled?”

“George, listen. The palm unit that was assigned to Slocum is being used to access our communications. This could be the most serious security problem we’ve ever faced. What progress are you making in finding Slocum?”

“We don’t know where he is. He contacted us once, but it was a fishing expedition. He said he wanted to know why we were trying to bring him in.”

“That was a ruse,” said Mason. “Had to be. He’s working with someone–probably an organization–with pretty serious technical capabilities. Slocum couldn’t be doing this on his own.”

Pampas leaned forward on his desk. “This just doesn’t stack up. I would have bet that Slocum was clean.”

“Well, he’s not. So we need to redouble our efforts. I want you to find him, and this time don’t let him slip away.”

Mason’s comment reminded Pampas of the incident at the Whipple house. “You know, it’s odd the way that Whipple character disappeared. Him and his kid haven’t been back to their house since the night we tried to bring Slocum in.”

“They’re probably terrified,” said Mason.

“Yeah.” Pampas picked up a pencil and started tapping on his desk. “I wonder what he was doing there.”

“Who?”

“Slocum. At Whipple’s house.”

Mason shrugged. “Following a lead?”

“For what? If he were a traitor, why would he be looking for his own palmtop? He’d already have it.”

“Maybe Whipple was his contact.”

“Possibly,” said Pampas. “Or maybe Slocum picked a house at random to draw us in. It could even be that whoever he’s working with helped with that.”

Mason slowly shook his head. “That makes even less sense.” He stared at Pampas for a moment. “You know what? I want you to find Whipple and bring him in. We need to have a chat.”

“You want him to feel at home, or what?”

“Find him and bring him in,” said Mason. “I don’t care how you do it.”

“I’ll get right on it.” 

The tension between Kayoko and Tom Snelling was palpable, and neither was willing to be the first to make a move towards reconciliation. For Tom this was no problem, as he already had access to whatever information he needed to prepare for phase two. Kayoko, though, needed certain files that Tom had secured, compelling her to practically beg him for the tools to do her job. This she would not do.

Tapping on her desk with her fingernail, she considered her options. Snelling was a jerk, and she refused to give him the satisfaction he would derive from her request for the files. On the other hand, there was someone who would be able to get her what she needed, and he was no more enamored of Snelling than she was. She picked up the phone and dialed.