Palm Sunday (34 page)

“No,” said Mason. “I’m saying that if and when we identify trends that are threatening, if we have the means to reverse those trends, we should do so.” It was the same thing that Snelling had said, but Mason’s words made it seem more reasonable, even compelling.

Norbert found himself daydreaming. He had a feeling that if Kayoko was in the room she would disagree with Mason. He could almost hear her voice raising the arguments of personal privacy and individual free will. Mason would have countered with his ‘good of society speech’, and it might have gone on for quite some time. His thoughts were interrupted as everyone started to gather their things. Apparently Mason had decided the meeting was over. That was fine with Norbert. Short meetings were his favorite kind.

“Congratulations on a job well done,” said Mason. “We still have more work to do as we consider how to best utilize our capabilities for future alterations. For now I want everyone to review your processes from the last profile, verify results, and look for opportunities to increase efficiency. That’s all, except for Norbert–if you would, please remain behind.”

Everyone else filed out of the conference room, leaving Norbert sitting alone with Mason. The door clicked closed and the room went silent. Mason sat across from Norbert, and watched him without saying a word.

Norbert grew uncomfortable. “What is it, sir?”

Mason hesitated yet a moment longer. When he did answer it was in a distant tone. “Now that the profile alteration is a success, I want you to focus on the modifications to the FBI program that we discussed.”

Norbert was relieved. He had thought Mason was displeased with him for some reason. “No problem. I’ve actually started it already.”

“Good,” said Mason. “You understand the importance of this, right? You realize the implications?”

“Of course.” Norbert assumed he meant the need to protect the agency.

Mason smiled. “Pascua is the way back. It’s all up to us. Make us proud, son.”

Norbert nodded, and awkwardly pushed his chair back and quietly left the room. It had been a peculiar and disturbing exchange, but he assumed it was because Mason had a lot of things on his mind.

By the time he arrived in his lab and started working on the program, the incident was long forgotten. 

Agent Sharon could wait no longer. He called John’s office, and was told that he was out, though he was expected back soon. Sharon now felt guilty at having put his friend in harm’s way, and decided to take the rest of the day off to see if he could help. He drove the forty miles to the location of the substation where he had sent John. It was late afternoon when he stood in the same spot from which John had surveyed the manhole earlier that day. With a sinking feeling in his stomach he quickly crossed the street and muscled the heavy metal cover off the manhole. He looked around once before descending into the black opening.

The darkness below only served to reinforce his feeling of impending doom, as he carefully made his way down the ladder. Once at the bottom he drew his pistol and clicked on a flashlight, its beam penetrating the damp shadows ahead. He made his way slowly forward, until a short time later he came to a side tunnel. He knew from his earlier research that this was the way to go, and within minutes had found the scene of the earlier confrontation. The first body he came to was John’s.

Feeling for a pulse, Sharon at first thought there was none, but then he detected a very faint throbbing. John was alive, but just barely, and he didn’t have much time left. An examination of his wounds confirmed this. Sharon propped him up, tried to make him more comfortable, and held him in his arms.

“John …” Sharon softly uttered the man’s name as he looked into his face. John’s eyes fluttered and slowly opened, but it took him a moment to focus, to recognize the face of his friend.

“Jim…” The voice was weak, barely audible.

“Don’t talk, John. I’m going to call for help.”

John struggled enormously. His eyes pleaded for Sharon to listen.

“Di-gi-com…” He never finished the sentence, or phrase, or whatever he wanted to say. He was dead.

Agent Sharon slowly lowered his friend and colleague to the ground. “I’m sorry, John.”

He walked over to the other bodies. Both had clearly been dead for a while. He rolled the agency technician over with his foot, so he could see the back of his coveralls. DigiComm United Technologies. Sharon wondered if that was what John had been trying to tell him. He pulled out his notebook and jotted down the company’s name. Next, he started a careful examination of the premises.

His survey of the crime scene indicated that the technicians had been working near the cable, and must have been surprised by John and his partner. Sharon knew there was at least one other man, because he found the spot where the missing device had been. Clearly someone had departed with it, and the extra set of footprints clinched it. He carefully examined the severed ends of the fiber cables. It was not a tidy job; whoever had removed the equipment was obviously in a hurry.

As he played his light along the floor of the tunnel, Sharon discovered several bits and pieces of electrical equipment, mostly very small pieces. He gathered these up and placed them in his handkerchief. After twenty minutes, he felt he had done all he could, and prepared to leave. He looked at the bodies. What to do about that?

That his own career was over was, in Sharon’s mind, a given. He didn’t consider that the verbal authorization he had obtained to inspect the substation would cut much mustard with Roberts. In fact, it would probably only help Roberts get rid of him, maybe even prosecute him. But Sharon didn’t care about that. His friend and another agent were dead, and only because he had asked for their help. He was determined that their sacrifice would not be in vain. He also was more convinced than ever that something very sinister was happening with the American Internet infrastructure, and he resolved to get to the bottom of it before Roberts had him removed.

“Sorry, John, to leave you like this. But someone will be here for you real soon.”

Sharon made sure he had left nothing behind, then quickly left the tunnel and returned to his car. He stopped at the first pay phone he came to and placed an anonymous call to John’s office. It would have been safer to simply call the local police and let things filter up, but there was a code, and this was a Bureau matter. 

The team sent to monitor the test of the device being built by ScanDat quickly took charge of everything, and everyone. Naomi Johnstone, the slim brunette who headed the delegation, made it clear that she was the boss not only of her own company, but of ScanDat as well. This didn’t sit well with Klugman.

“Now look,” he said, his diminutive frame dwarfed by her six-foot height. “I’m sure we can work together just fine, but these are my people, and this is my shop.”

“Mr. Klugman, I find your loyalty to your people and equipment very touching, but let’s not forget that both were purchased with my company’s money. Now let’s get on with the demo, shall we?” Without waiting for an answer she motioned to two technicians, both young men, to start setting up their monitoring equipment.

One of them looked at Klugman. “Where can we plug in?”

Klugman looked at Boyd. “Would you show these two gentlemen where they can attach their probes.”

Boyd suppressed a smile. He didn’t know if Klugman was trying to be funny. “You mean the hardware interface connectors?” The technicians nodded. “Sure. Come with me.” Boyd led the way to the device.

Meanwhile, Johnstone grilled Klugman. “Where will you run the demo from?” she asked.

“I won’t be running it,” said Klugman. “Two of my engineers will handle that. In fact here they come now.” As Stanley and Katherine approached, Klugman made the introductions. “This is Stanley Whipple, our lead software engineer, and Katherine Ritaglio, who handles the electronics.”

“A pleasure. My name is Naomi Johnstone, and for the duration of the test you should consider me your boss. Any problem with that?”

Stanley and Katherine looked at each other, then at Johnstone. They answered in unison.

“No.”

“Good; then let’s get started. Where’s your operations center?”

“We’ve arranged to run everything from the conference room,” said Klugman. “Katherine, are we ready?”

“Yes, sir. We’ll be inputting commands from a terminal set up there, and all operations will be monitored on the big screen. The only thing you won’t be able to see is the device itself.”

Johnstone smiled. “That’s okay–my boys will be keeping an eye on it with their direct links.”

She didn’t miss a trick. She wasn’t going to have someone manually feeding anything into the device without her knowledge. The laptops that her technicians were connecting would reveal any tampering with the signal to the hardware interface, and would also flag any suspicious software activity for later analysis. Her boys signaled that they were ready.

Johnstone looked at Klugman. “It’s your show.”

Klugman nodded once at Stanley. “Let her rip.”

Stanley had already opened a link to the Alpha, and now entered the command to start the test. As soon as he hit the Enter key, the ScanDat device came to life, and cycled through a diagnostic routine. As the results were displayed on the large screen set up at the front of the room, Stanley explained their meaning.

“I’ve just turned it on, and it’s running through a series of electronic tests, basically to make sure that its circuitry is intact and that no software flaws are detected.”

“What happens if there are flaws?” asked Johnstone.

“It would depend on the severity. Sometimes errors occur for relatively minor reasons, and the software can handle these automatically. Right now our error tolerance threshold is quite low, so anything that isn’t normal is flagged and reported. It would require manual confirmation of the suggested course of action.”

“Isn’t that very time consuming?” she asked.

“In the beginning that’s always the case. We need the empirical data before we can let it run fully automatic. That will come with time.”

“How much time?”

“Gathering sufficient samples would take three to six months, assuming a normal machine load.”

Johnstone nodded, apparently satisfied. Klugman looked at Stanley and winked. He was too busy to notice, as a series of messages flashed across the screen.

Stanley continued. “The device has completed its diagnostic phase, with no errors reported. The initialization sequence will now commence, as the device energizes its internal matrix and aligns the optical input.”

Johnstone interrupted again. “Is that the connection with the outside world?”

“That’s right,” said Stanley. “Typically the fiber from the telecomm provider would feed directly into the device, while the opposite end would provide your sanitized data.”

“Other devices filter garbage from the Net. What’s different about this one?”

“It taps directly into the fiber stream. There’s no conversion to an electrical signal required, because the device is an optical network. Or more accurately, an intelligent optical matrix.”

“Interesting.”

“In addition, there’s never a need to update. It dynamically learns the host system, so the matrix is always current.” Stanley turned back to his console. “The initialization is complete. We can now sync up the interface with the fiber input.”

He typed in the command to create the link, although the mechanism that did so was actually removing a barrier, rather than creating anything.

He went on. “The optical interface is active and operating at nominal levels. The simulated data stream is now being generated.”

As Stanley monitored this activity in the conference room, Boyd looked over the shoulders of the technicians next to the actual device. “How’s it looking, guys?”

Neither took their eyes off their display. “The flow is commencing now,” said one of the technicians. “Looks like the OI came on line correctly. Let’s see how the software performs.”

Boyd swallowed hard. With the optical interface running smoothly, the only hurdles that remained were the software itself, and his test data. Of the two, he knew which was the most likely to fail.

The technician continued. “The data stream is flowing normally. We should see the first hiccup just about…now.”

Right on cue a warning light came on, indicating that a suspicious element had been isolated in the data stream. The technicians, and Boyd, knew that it would contain the signature of the infamous ‘nimda’ virus. The suspect file was caught and routed to a holding area for future evaluation, while the rest of the stream continued unabated. The process literally took no time at all.

“First event successfully managed,” said the technician next to Boyd. He made a note on a pad, and turned back to his screen. “Event two in ten seconds.”

Back in the conference room Johnstone was impressed. “So, Klugman, you actually have a functioning unit.”

“You seem surprised.”

Johnstone shrugged. “I’ve seen many promising technologies flop when you switch them on. Let’s just say I’m a show-me kind of girl.”

“Here comes the next one,” announced Stanley. “This should simulate an attempt to violate our access control list.”

The moments passed without incident. Finally a full minute had lapsed.

“What happened?” asked Johnstone.

“Nothing,” said Stanley. “At least not that you would notice. The attempt was detected and a trace route was automatically started to determine the source of the intrusion. The results were logged off line, and the normal data stream continues to flow, uninterrupted. Again, that’s the whole point–to evaluate the data stream while it’s still an optical channel.

Johnstone leaned forward in her chair. “So far I’m impressed. What’s next?”

“Trojan horse virus. This particular strain is nasty. It’s delivered as an attachment to an email message, but once inside the system it emerges in a very different form. Next event should start now.”

Stanley watched his monitor, and could see that the Alpha had injected the next element into the data stream. He knew it would take only seconds for the intruder to be trapped and the event logged. He watched with concern as the time for interception passed, and nothing happened. Seconds later a warning light went off, indicating that the intruder had successfully infected its target computer.