The Fool's Run (13 page)

"Well, he told me that LuEllen might not be your real name, that he doesn't know your last name or where you live, and he doesn't know what you do when you're not working, but that he does know you're good when you are working."

LuEllen relaxed. Her security was sound. Dace shook Maggie's hand and offered to show her around. She looked at the office, tapped on the keyboard of one computer, and glanced through the letters between Whitemark and the generals. "I'd like to look at those administrative formats you worked out. Maybe I could help run through their files," she said in her executive voice.

"Any time you want to see them," Dace said. "We can take you through the sign-on routine tomorrow."

"Thanks," Maggie said. She glanced around the office again, then stepped outside and looked down the hall.

"Where's our room?" she asked. "I want to get out of this suit."

"Uh, right over here." I pointed at the door. "I'll bring your suitcase."

She disappeared into the bedroom, and as I picked up the heavy case in the living room, a grinning LuEllen slapped me on the butt and whispered, "Way to go, Jos‚."

I may have blushed.

Computer programming can be as beautiful and complicated as a tree, as compelling as the best painting. Programmers admire each other's code. They talk like rock climbers: that was a very difficult pitch, and look how he did it-with style.A good programmer uses a computer's potential to create worlds where other people will live. Or, in some cases, where they will fight.

The attack on Whitemark began after breakfast on a beautiful August morning. Maggie and I split a bag of bagels and a pot of coffee, chatted and laughed, cleaned up the kitchen, and went to war. The attack lasted precisely four weeks: twenty-eight days to the hour.

The first moves were invisible to Whitemark. We infested their system with a virus. A virus is a chunk of computer code, compact and deadly. Once a virus has infected a computer's system software, it makes copies of itself and inserts them into the working programs being run through the system. The working program, in turn, infects other operating systems. Unless the virus is detected, it will eventually infect every program that passes through the system. And those programs will infect every other program they encounter.

Besides replicating itself, the virus usually does damage. Not always. There are Christmas card viruses, for example, that insert graphic Christmas cards in every text file they find. When somebody opens the computer file, the first thing that appears is the Christmas card.

The disease viruses are a different story. They are killer bugs. They erase information, jumble it, destroy expensive, one-of-a-kind custom programs. There are some viruses, more complicated than the straight-out bombs, that may change a system's programming in more subtle ways.

Our first virus was not subtle. It was a bomb, pure and simple. Forty-five days after being inserted in the Whitemark computer system (viruses can count), it would explode. Any Whitemark program containing a virus would be thoroughly and irretrievably jumbled. Nothing would come out of the company's computers but garbage.

"Why forty-five days?" Maggie asked, when I explained the virus to her. We were in the Whitemark computer using the special entry codes I had created for us.

"The Whitemark programmers will eventually catch on to what we're doing. We've got three or four weeks at the most. If their top systems man is busted on the porno charge, we may get a few more days out of the confusion. Anyway, when the trouble starts, they'll do the routine system checks. That will take a couple of days. When nothing works, they'll start sweating. Eventually, they'll figure it out. They'll realize they're under attack, and they'll shut down outside access. There are some ways around that, but only for a day or two. At that point, we'll be fifteen or twenty days out, and they'll call in the FBI, or somebody like that, to look for us. They'll be worried about sabotage.

"Once they get everything shut down, there'll be a couple of weeks of confusion. They'll be paranoid about the system. They'll run all kinds of tests. Then they'll start repairs, bringing in new software. Checking it. That should get us five or six weeks down the road. So then, at six and a half weeks, the bomb explodes. It'll be the finishing touch. They won't recover before the contract deadlines."

She thought about it for a minute, nibbling on her lower lip. "So what's the first move after you get the viruses in? The first thing that will affect them? If we don't hurt them soon, it'll be too late."

"I'll start on that tonight," I said. "Most of their design work is done at individual work stations, but all the stations are tied into the central computer. I can get to them when they're not being used. I'll start by hacking up the math programs. Engineers run a million numbers through their computers. I'll stick in a program that will add or subtract various small percentages on certain calculations. It won't be quite random. Identical calculations will come out the same way every time, so if they check their work, it'll be confirmed. But it'll all be wrong."

She didn't understand. "What's the practical effect?" she asked. "Tell me a practical effect."

"Okay. Say you were designing a screw-in gas cap for your Porsche. There's a male part and a female part. The threading has to be the same on both parts. Say the twist on the male part is altered just slightly-the pitch is changed a few degrees. The cap becomes worthless. You can't look at the plans and tell that it's worthless; you can't tell it's worthless when you're making it. It looks fine right up to the time you try to screw the parts together. Then they don't work. And the whole problem is in a calculation somewhere.

"Or say that you want to design the kind of round gas-cap cover that goes on the outside of some cars, on the fender. Say you make the round metal cover a quarter inch too big in diameter. It won't fit; it's useless. You can't make it fit any more than you can push a nickel through a pop-bottle top. But it looks fine, right up to the moment you try to put it on the car."

She considered it for a moment, staring dead into the eye of an onion bagel.

"That sounds pretty crude," she said finally.

"Those examples are," I agreed. "But if you do analogous things in electronics, it gets more complicated. You can't see which parts are wrong; it can take days to figure out a mistake. Every individual part works, and every part is just as specified, but the system won't work. Anytime you build a complicated electronic machine there are always mistakes, pure accidents. They're nightmares. Sometimes it takes days to find them. You don't know if you're dealing with a basic design flaw, or if there's a bad electrical connection somewhere. If mistakes are generated on a large scale, by design. I don't know of a cure."

She thought that over as she got into the onion bagel. "How do you know that they just won't check the computer and fix it?" she asked as she chewed.

"They will, sooner or later. But probably later. Computers are the water engineers swim in. They don't question the answers they get from computers any more than a fish questions water. They know the computer is correct: the problem must be somewhere else."

That seemed to satisfy her, although she was more thoughtful than pleased. Later in the morning, I injected the first of the viruses into the Whitemark system. When it was done, I wandered into the kitchen and heard her talking on an extension phone, relaying what I'd told her. When she got off the phone, she came in and sat down.

"I was talking to our systems man," she said. "I didn't tell him what we're doing, of course, but I did say that I'd talked to a guy about computer security. He says you're right. But he says the chances of a good enough programmer ever getting into our system are slim and none."

"That's why it could be done."

I was tempted to tell her that Bobby had already been in the Anshiser system, but some things are best left untold. "If I were you, I might have another little chat with him."

"I made a note," she said. She smiled, and the skin crinkled at the corners of her eyes.

While I was working on the attack programs that we'd insert into the Whitemark system, Dace was working on the publicity angle. His first product was a package on the systems director, the pornographer.

"I put it together with words cut out of the Post," he said. He was wearing surgeon's latex gloves and holding the paper by the corners. It was an ugly jumble of clipped-out news type Scotch-taped to a piece of spiral notebook paper.

"The hardest part was getting the words right. Nothing too big, but nothing too small, either. Something just right for a half-bright crackhead." The text was three paragraphs long and explained:

we needed the MONEY from

the Robbery for medicine, so

we Started robbing Houses.

found these Porno magazines

Full of little children, which

was not Cool, which is

a Hundred Times more cruel than

ANYTHING we Ever done.

It specified names, the address, and the day and time of the burglary.

Maybe They HID it BY now.

But If you watch Them you

you catch TheM.

little kids are getting FuCked.

A sample magazine was enclosed, along with the list of subscribers.

"One thing that strikes me as phony is that we're sending it to the right police jurisdiction. A junkie would probably send it to the Washington cops," Dace said as he sealed the envelope. "I don't want to take a chance that the whole thing would get lost in the bureaucracy, so I'm going to send it to the right place, to the chief. Even if they're a little suspicious, they'll check. Especially with the magazine and the subscriber list."

"What do you think they'll do? The cops?" Maggie asked.

"When I was working a police beat years ago, they'd pass it off to the vice squad. The vice cops would go over to the house, see if the door looks like it had been broken in recently. I'm assuming that the break-in wasn't reported. Then they might look in the windows and see if we described the place right. Or knock on the door with some phony excuse, to see if it looks right. If everything jibes, they'll watch the place, see who comes and goes. Maybe have a quiet talk with a neighbor or two. They'll do a computer search and see if these people have ever been involved in a sex thing in the past. If they find anything, they may do a discreet black-bag job themselves, to check the place out. Then, depending on what they find, they'll go to a pet judge and get a search warrant. They won't have a real good case, but it should be enough for a warrant."

"What if they did report the break-in? For insurance?"

Dace shrugged. "In that case, they probably moved the porn out, at least during the investigation. If they did report it, the cops would have corroboration in their own files that the burglary took place. They'll still watch the place. Sooner or later, they'll bust them."

"It better be sooner," Maggie said. "If it happens two months from now, it won't help."

"It's not a sure thing," Dace said. "But I'd be willing to bet it'll happen in a week."

"How'll we know if it happened?"

"We'll give the cops a couple of days to work. Then we tip off the papers and the TV stations that they're about to bust the biggest kiddie-porn ring in the country. It's hyperbole, but the TV people love that kind of thing. A new record for kiddie porn. They'll get in touch with the cops, and that'll goose the cops along. We'll see it on the evening news."

The night after the first attack, Maggie lay on her back in bed, the lights out. The code was still running through my head.

"It's weird," she said, reaching over to pat me on the stomach. "When Rudy and Dillon and I talked about hiring you, I had this picture of somebody climbing a barbwire fence with plastic explosive in his teeth. Instead, we sit in an air-conditioned apartment and eat donuts, and you type on a computer."

"You never carry plastic explosive in your teeth," I said.

"Have you ever seen the Whitemark building?"

"Nope. Should I?"

"I guess not. There's not much to see. Just a big glass cube with a funny pyramid thing for the roof. I thought you might be curious."

"Nah. You can tell more sitting here than you can from looking at the outside of the building."

She shook her head. "That doesn't seem right, somehow. It's like. " She groped for an analogy. "It's like dropping bombs on Vietnamese peasants. You know, you push a button and people die, but you go home to lunch. If you're going to have a war, you should have the courtesy to kill your enemies in person. And maybe suffer a little bit."

"You're rambling," I said.

"I know. I don't even know what I'm trying to say. But it seems. wrong. to be able to attack somebody you've never seen, don't know, and probably won't ever meet."

"You mean I should find the president of Whitemark and personally rip his heart out."

"Oh, bullshit, Kidd. You know what I'm getting at. This seems so. sterile. I mean, it's scary. It's little electronic lights ruining a huge company."

"Welcome to the big city," I said.

"That's an ugly attitude," she said.

"Yeah, but that's the way it is. You wanted this done, and I can do it. We're both consenting adults. It's the new reality. The little electronic lights are more real than that glass building with the pyramid on top."

She shivered.

The letter about the porn merchants went in the mail the first day. Over the next two days, as I jimmied the Whitemark computer system, Dace and Maggie worked and reworked the approaches to the media on the public attack.

Dace suggested that the Whitemark letters to the generals be leaked first, anonymously, to a weekly defense newsletter called From the Turret.

"A lot of people read it, a lot of reporters. Turret's not too scrupulous about what they use or where they get it. If we drop them a note, say we have been unfairly demoted in the company, and send along the letters, they'll use them," he said.

"It doesn't sound public enough," Maggie said with a frown. "I mean, frankly, every company in the defense industry hires retired generals to lobby for them. We do. You put that story in a defense newsletter, there might be a few raised eyebrows, but nothing much will happen."

"Ah. But this isn't hiring a few generals. This involves a quid pro quo. They're saying, 'If our airplane is picked, there'll be jobs in procurement for those who helped us.' That's not recruiting, that's bribery. As soon as Turret publishes, we call the Post, The New York Times, and Knight-Ridder bureau, and so on, and tip them off. Just being in print gives the story cachet. They'll be interested, because it's the kind of thing they expect to find in a newsletter. Then the next day, we send along copies of the letters to the papers' defense specialist writers."

"Think that will break it out?"

"I think so. It won't be the biggest story of the year, but it will be a nice one. The front pages of the Post, probably a good inside spot in the Times."

"After we get that going," Maggie said, "we should get in touch with the business magazines about the problems they're having meeting the Hellwolf schedules. That will have a nasty effect on their stock prices."