Palm Sunday (39 page)

“Clever bugger,” he mumbled. He ran his program again, with a new set of parameters, and this time he registered another disturbance in the data stream. But this one had a signature that he knew very well.

“FBI data center. Interesting. Then who are you other folks?”

Norbert was so busy trying to trace down the intruders that he didn’t notice when Mason walked up behind him.

“Always chat with yourself like that, Norbert?”

Norbert glanced back. “I didn’t hear you come in.”

“Obviously.”

“Something unusual is happening. A couple of rogue signals are playing footsies in the data stream.”

“FBI?” asked Mason.

“That’s one of them. But it’s the other signal that has me concerned. Where did they come from?”

“You’re asking me?”

Norbert didn’t hear him. He just continued working as Mason looked over his shoulder, but not another word was spoken. Norbert was on the scent, and Mason knew that he would only be a distraction. He left as quietly as he had arrived, and made just as much of an impression. 

Stanley and Katherine let some time pass before making another attempt to access the data stream. This time the palmtop was moved out of harm’s way, and everyone was instructed not to interrupt until the session was over. Again they sat in front of the console.

“Katherine, I have an idea about how we should proceed.”

“I’m listening.”

Stanley turned towards her. “Earlier I had you decrease the frequency until we were barely maintaining our presence in the data stream.”

“Sure. That was right before you bumped the palmtop.”

“Right. But I was thinking that we should try the lower frequency for a while longer.”

“But we probably won’t be able to transmit commands,” said Katherine.

Stanley nodded. “That’s true. But I think we may be able to listen.”

“To what?”

“I don’t know. Maybe nothing. But we might gain useful information about how the data stream functions if we can monitor an agency transmission without them knowing it.”

“It’s a long shot,” said Katherine. “We might have to listen for a long time before we detect anything at all, and then it might not be of any use.”

“Let’s try it for a while–say, an hour–and if nothing is happening, we’ll proceed with our efforts to penetrate the agency’s system.”

Katherine agreed. “Fine by me.”

“Fire up the frequency generator,” said Stanley. “Lowest threshold output.” 

Agent Sharon was certain he was on to something. It had taken some serious digging, but Justin had uncovered interesting information about Digicomm United Technologies, specifically the Philadelphia office. Justin gave him the rundown on what he had learned.

“Digicomm did have a valid contract for construction of some of the underground cabling, but they didn’t have a maintenance contract.”

“So why were they making repairs?” asked Sharon.

Justin frowned. “What do you mean?”

Sharon forgot that he hadn’t told Justin about his experience in the tunnel. “Nothing. What else?”

“The same pattern exists for dozens of projects, going back over ten years. In many cases it was a subsidiary, or even a company several times removed, but still linked to Digicomm, that did the work. And it was all related to various aspects of the Internet infrastructure.”

“Okay, so they wanted to build the infrastructure, or at least a substantial part of it. Anything else?”

Justin nodded. “The mapping, sir.”

“What?”

“The map of the fiber projects they’ve worked on. It’s amazingly symmetrical.” Justin brought up a display that demonstrated what he was talking about. It was as if someone had taken a ruler and drawn a grid over much of the United States. “Peculiar, isn’t it?”

“Do you have an address on this company?”

Justin laughed. “Sure. All the documentation is in perfect order. The only problem is none of it’s real.”

“Why am I not surprised?”

“There’s more,” said Justin. “They haven’t bid on a new contract for over a year.”

“Sounds like they finished building what they wanted.”

“What’s next?”

Sharon thought about it. “Let’s run this by Walthrop.” 

The Professor was more than a little skeptical. “It’s preposterous. It flies in the face of what the Internet is supposed to be–many networks, connected together. Not one huge network.”

“We think it’s been done over at least a ten year period,” said Sharon.

“I’ve never heard of this company,” said Walthrop. “With the kind of involvement you’re talking about, they should be a household name, almost.”

“They may not want that kind of visibility, which is what scares me. This could be an effort to secretly gain control of a substantial portion of our Internet infrastructure.”

There was a moment of silence.

“What now?” asked Walthrop.

“I want your opinion of how this squares with your monitoring approach,” said Sharon. “Will you be able to pinpoint the source–the control point, or whatever you want to call it? Would such a place exist?”

Walthrop rubbed his chin and examined the display of the grid. “If it were just the existence of the grid, I would say not necessarily. But we know for a fact that it’s been activated on a regular basis. We also know that it’s somehow intermingled with the regular Internet infrastructure, possibly even facilitating its functionality in some measure. That would require significant computing power, which to me says that control must be centralized. Somewhere.”

“So how can we isolate the source?” asked Sharon. No one replied. “Come on people. Give me some ideas.”

“Why don’t we flood them? Hit them with a denial of service?” said Justin.

Walthrop shook his head. “We’d need an IP address for that.”

“I don’t mean in the traditional sense,” said Justin. “What if we used your system,” he nodded towards Walthrop, “and reconfigured it for transmitting. We could send out a flood of data packets, focusing on the areas where we’ve been monitoring their activity.”

Sharon looked at Walthrop. “Would that work?”

“It might.” He seemed to consider it further. “Yes, I think it would. Of course, it would also affect anyone else using that part of the Internet. But we might flush out the bad guys.”

Sharon pointed at Justin. “Work with the Professor. I want this thing running as soon as possible.” 

Something was there; Norbert couldn’t isolate it, but there was definitely a faint signal emanating from somewhere within his data stream. He knew, because like his own transmissions, it contained none of the usual characteristics of a standard Internet data packet. But there was more to it than that. The strength of the signal was so low that he couldn’t get any measurements to determine its source. And some kind of interference kept scrambling the little feedback he did get. He needed more information. A few more kilohertz and whoever it was would be into the optical channel, and then he would have them. Norbert smiled to himself. He was going to nail them, if only they would show themselves. 

Stanley had said he would maintain the signal at a low level for an hour. It had now been ninety minutes and he showed no sign of moving on.

“We’re stable,” he reported.

“Yeah, we’re stable,” said Katherine. “But we aren’t detecting anything.”

“We have to be patient. The transmissions might be few and far between.”

“I doubt that,” said Slocum. “With the number of people the agency has in the field, there should be messages flying back and forth all the time.”

“That’s true, I’m sure,” said Stanley. “But we’re only monitoring one small piece of what may be a very large network.”

“Then it could take days,” said Katherine.

Stanley nodded. “Theoretically, yes. Let’s give it another twenty minutes.” 

Professor Walthrop’s system was quickly modified to transmit a flood of data over the suspect fiber pathway. Sharon made sure everyone knew what to do before giving the order to initiate the flow.

“Justin, I want to know the moment anything peculiar happens. If you see a traceable signal emerge, don’t wait for orders–nail it down. I want to know where these people are.” Justin nodded and took his place in front of his console.

Sharon gestured towards Walthrop. “Professor, whenever you’re ready.”

Walthrop, seated at a console next to Justin, nodded, and entered a command to redirect output from the primary router into the network that made up his system. Over the east-west and north-south fiber backbones, a cascading rush of meaningless data would quickly gobble up most available bandwidth. Any other signals that shared this particular physical space would quickly be squeezed out.

For the honest Internet traveler, it would be a simple nuisance, manifested primarily in a delay as their packets were rerouted. Anyone else would have to find his or her own way to deal with the tightening pipeline. It was Sharon’s hope that if this occurred, Justin would be able to trace any commands that were sent by the bad guys. It depended on a lot of things going right.

Walthrop reported his progress. “The router is ready to accept input, and the random data generator is running. Here we go.”

As the final command was issued, a torrent of data streamed through the router and into the fiber. The flow continued unabated for three minutes.

“Nothing yet,” said Justin.

Sharon stood nearby, his arms crossed. “Stay alert.” He looked at Walthrop. “Still churning away?”

“Increasing by a factor of point three per second. If something’s going to happen, it should be soon.”

“Patience…” 

“Stanley, really,” said Katherine. “We can’t wait much longer.”

He looked at his watch. He had once again violated his own deadline. “Okay. Let’s start…holy cow! What is that?” He watched as his signal was suddenly dwarfed by a powerful and growing series of data transmissions. “We’re getting pushed out. Increase the frequency by thirty kilohertz. Let’s see if we can keep our heads above water.”

Katherine made the adjustment, but it wasn’t enough. The opposing signal was too strong.

“How’s that?” she asked.

Stanley shook his head. “It’s no good. We’re getting squeezed out. Give it all you’ve got!”

She increased the frequency generator’s output to its full capacity, and for a few seconds they entered the data stream. But then they were forced out for good by the mysterious and ever-growing transmission. Unexpectedly, Slocum’s phone rang once, a single, shrill, half tone. Stanley told Katherine to shut down her equipment.

“What was that?” she asked.

“A surge of some kind.”

“Could it have something to do with Slocum’s phone line?” asked Katherine.

Stanley called out to Slocum. “Check your phone.”

He picked it up and listened for a dial tone. “It’s fine. But I don’t understand why you have to use the phone line. It’s risky.”

Stanley explained. “We need the phone line to transfer a program I wrote to the agency’s data stream. It’s only a brief connection; shouldn’t be a problem.”

Katherine was still pondering the strange burst of activity in the data stream. “Do you think it was intentional?” she asked.

Stanley shrugged. “I don’t know. The real question is: what do we do now?” 

“I got something!” Justin had a trace program ready, and his finger hovered over the Enter key. It took only a second to launch the program, but even at that it was only partially successful.

“Did you get it?” asked Sharon, hopefully.

“I got something, but it’s a little strange. It’s part of a number, but not an IP address. Looks like something else.”

“What?”

Justin stared at his display. “If I’m not mistaken, it’s part of a phone number.”

“That’s odd,” said Sharon. “Can you get an exact location?”

Justin shook his head. “No. I’m guessing we’ll have a list of about ten thousand addresses.”

“We’ll have to narrow it down somehow.”

“It’s going to take me a while to put the list together,” said Justin.

Sharon nodded. “Get on it.” 

Norbert watched in astonishment as a major segment of his data stream suddenly degraded to ten per cent of normal following a barrage of–something. His amazement increased when he saw a second signal briefly appear, and then vanish. Two entities were again in his data stream, and he was at a loss to explain how or why. His standard monitoring tools had thus far proven unable to penetrate the interference generated by at least one of the intruders, and now he was being forced out of his own data stream by the flood of packets that ate up all the bandwidth.

At least no one had got close enough to threaten the agency. 

A debate was under way in Slocum’s apartment. The question was whether they should try to immediately attack the agency, using what information they had, or continue to monitor the data stream. Katherine was in a fighting mood.

“I think we should go right back in,” she said. “They obviously know what we’re doing, and the longer they have to prepare, the poorer our chances.”

Stanley wasn’t so sure. “I don’t know, Katherine. There was something peculiar about that pulse. The agency has been notoriously consistent in their methods. This doesn’t fit.”

“What do you mean?” asked Katherine.

“The secrecy. Everything’s been hidden, kept in the dark. Why suddenly risk exposure?”

Kayoko agreed with Stanley. “He has a point, Katherine. There are few things the agency rates higher than security.”

Katherine looked at Kayoko. “You don’t think we should try again?”

“I don’t know. I’m only saying that it’s out of character for the agency to advertise its presence.”

“The signal probably wasn’t detected by anyone besides us,” said Stanley, “because we have the palmtop.”

“True,” said Katherine. “Either way, I still say we should get back in. It’s after five.” She turned to Kayoko. “Would it make a difference in staff complement? Would they be less alert later in the day?”

Kayoko shook her head. “I don’t think so. Computer security is up to Norbert, and he never lets down his guard.”