Zero Day

1

“Shhh!”

When the whisper came out of the darkness, the man stopped. A vast panel of glass covered the wall before him, displaying uptown Manhattan in a scene that might have been sold as a poster. Ambient light and the soft glow from a dozen computer monitors was all that spared the room total darkness. The logo of Fischerman, Platt & Cohen floated on each monitor.

In the hallway, the steps faded. A moment later her fingers touched his arm, pressing lightly against the soft skin on the inside of his wrist, her flesh much warmer than his. The thought of her so excited aroused him even more.

She tugged and he followed. “Over here,” she whispered. He tried to make her out in the darkness but all he could see was her form, shapeless as a burka. They stopped and she came into his arms, on him even before he realized she’d moved. Her scent was floral, her mouth wet and also warm, tasting of peppermint and her last cigarette.

After a long moment she pulled back. He heard the whisper of clothing across nylon, the slight sound of her skirt dropping to the carpet. He sensed, more than saw, her form stretch on the couch. He unbuckled his trousers and let them drop around his ankles. He remembered his suit jacket; as he removed it, her hand touched his erection through his undershorts. She tugged them lower, then encircled him with her fingers.

Her grip guided him, and as he entered her, a single computer screen sprang to life behind the groaning couple. Turning blue, it read:

After a few seconds, the screen flickered and read:

The screen turned black.

The flight attendants were clearing breakfast in the passenger compartments as Captain Robert McIntyre scanned the dials of the PFD, the primary flight display, once again. Beside him, copilot Sean Jones sat facing dead forward in that semihypnotic posture so common to commercial pilots on extended flights.

The sound of the twin engines well behind the pilots was distant. Outside, air slipped past the airplane with a comforting hiss. The Boeing 787 Dreamliner, with 289 passengers, all but flew itself. Once the airplane reached a cruising altitude of thirty-seven-thousand feet, the pilots had little to do but monitor the instrumentation and be available should something go wrong.

The airplane could take off, fly itself, and land without human assistance. It was state-of-the-art, fly-by-wire technology, which meant the airplane had the latest in computers. The manual controls, such as the throttle and yoke, were not physically connected to anything, though they were programmed to give the feel that they were. Instead, they emitted electronic signals that moved the parts of the plane needed for control.

Computers had even designed the plane itself. So convincing was the computer construct that the airplane was approved for commercial use and had gone straight to production without a prototype. McIntyre commented from time to time that the 787 was the most beautiful and well-behaved airplane he’d ever flown. “Any plans in New York?” he asked his copilot.

Jones sat motionless for several long seconds. “Excuse me,” he said finally. “Did you say something?”

“Want some coffee? I think you were off somewhere.”

Jones yawned. “No, I’m all right. I get so bored, you know?”

McIntyre glanced at his wristwatch. They were still more than an hour out of New York City. “Better watch it. You’ll be on record in another half hour.”

The cockpit voice recorder functioned on a half-hour loop, constantly recording thirty minutes at a time, again and again. Pilots had long learned to be utterly frank only when they were not within half an hour of approach or for the first half hour after takeoff. These were the times anything unusual occurred, if at all. Once in the air, the airplane was all but unstoppable.

“I know, but thanks. ‘Plans,’ you asked? Nothing much. How about you?”

“Just a walk in the park, I think. I’m too old for the rest.”

“Right. Tell it to your wife.” Jones glanced back outside. “What’s the altitude?”

“Let’s see, right at thirty-seven thousand … Jesus, we’re at forty-two thousand feet.” McIntyre scanned the dials again as if searching for an error. The airplane had climbed so gently neither of the men had noticed. “Do you see anything on the PFD?”

“No. Looks good. We’re on auto, right?” They’d been on autopilot since London. This wasn’t supposed to happen. The plane had just come out of a complete servicing. All of the computer software had been reinstalled, with the latest updates. Everything should have been functioning perfectly. Instead, they were on an all but undetectable gentle incline.

“Right,” McIntyre said. “I’m resetting auto.… Now.” Nothing changed. After a moment he said, “Altitude is 42,400 and climbing. What do you think, Sean?”

Jones pursed his lips. “I think we’ve got a glitch. Shall we go manual?”

Pilots were under enormous pressure from the company never to go manual except at takeoff and on approach for landing. The computer not only flew the airplane in between but did a far superior job, increasing fuel efficiency by as much as 5 percent, a great money saver. If the pilots went manual, the flight data recorder, which kept a record of everything from preflight to postflight, would record it, and they’d have to file a report justifying their action.

“Airspeed’s dropping,” Jones said evenly. The autopilot was not only failing to keep the airplane at the proper altitude, but it hadn’t increased power to the engines to compensate for the steady climb.

“Altitude is 42,900 and climbing,” McIntyre said.

The door opened behind them and the senior flight attendant, Nancy Westmore, entered. “Are we climbing, boys? It feels odd back there.”

The pilots ignored her. “Airspeed is 378 and dropping,” meaning 378 kilometers per hour, well below the standard cruising speed of 945. “Altitude is 43,300 and climbing,” Jones said.

“Have a seat, luv,” McIntyre said. “And strap in. We’re going manual.” Westmore, a pretty blonde, blanched, then dropped into the jump seat and buckled up. The two had carried on an affair for the last three years.

“Bobby,” Jones said, “PFD says we are approaching overspeed limit.” The computer was reporting they had exceeded their normal flight speed and were approaching a critical limit.

McIntyre looked at the controls in amazement. “That’s impossible! Airspeed is 197 and falling.” The yoke-shaker program engaged and the stick began to rattle in front of him. In traditional airplanes, the yoke shook at stall. In the 787, the computer simulated the effect for the pilots.

At that moment the stall warning came on. “We’re nearly at stall! It can’t be both. Going manual … now.”

A soothing woman’s voice spoke. “Warning. You are about to stall. Warning. You are about to stall. Warning…”

But when the autopilot disengaged, nothing happened.

“Are you nosing down?” Jones asked, looking over, seeing for himself that McIntyre had pushed the yoke forward.

“No response,” McIntyre said. “Nothing. Jesus!”

“Airspeed 156, stall. Altitude 43,750, still climbing. Holy shit!”

Then the mighty 787, cruising at over forty-three thousand feet, stalled. All 427,000 pounds of the airplane ceased to fly as the plane nosed up a final moment, then simply fell toward the blue ocean eight miles below. All three experienced a sensation of near weightlessness as the plane plunged toward the earth. Westmore closed her eyes and locked her mouth shut, vowing not to make a sound.

Behind them came a roar of passengers screaming.

As it stalled, the airplane lost its flight characteristics, which depended on forward motion through the air for control. The plane fell as an object, not as an aircraft. Without comment McIntyre pulled the yoke well back, fighting to maintain some control and keep the craft upright. Without air control, the plane could easily roll onto its back. If it did, they were lost.

Under his breath Jones said, “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee…” He scanned the PFD. “Airspeed 280, altitude twenty-nine thousand.”

“Jesus,” McIntyre said. “I’ve got nothing.” The yoke was not giving him any feel. The plane was moving through space absent any control. “Engaging auto!”

Through the closed door came more screams. Neither pilot heard them.

Jones reached over and engaged the autopilot. Both men were trained that in an emergency, the autopilot had a superior solution to any they could come up with. They’d been shown example after example of pilots wrestling with airplanes until they crashed, doing the wrong thing over and over, when the autopilot would effortlessly have saved the craft.

“Patience. Give it time,” McIntyre said as if to himself.

Another long moment passed. Nothing happened. The airplane wobbled to the right, corrected itself as it was designed to do, then wobbled to the left.

“Airspeed 495, increasing; altitude twenty-seven thousand, falling,” Jones said. He resumed the Hail Mary.

“Mother of God,” McIntyre muttered, “hear me. Disengaging auto. Setting throttle to idle!”

The airplane was now in a significant dive, and the crew could feel the buildup of airspeed as it rushed toward the sea. The sound from the passengers was now a steady desperate drone. The plane was well nosed forward. The horizon, which should have lay directly in front of them, was instead high above.

“Airspeed 770, altitude twenty-two thousand!” Jones’s voice had risen an octave.

“Shit!” McIntyre said. “God damn you!” he shouted, cursing the airplane. “Reboot,” he commanded. “Reboot the fucking computer! Hurry up.”

Jones tore his eyes from the PFD. “Rebooting.” They were under strict orders never to reboot in flight. This was a ground-service procedure. Jones fumbled for the switch. “Got it! Not responding, Bobby. It’s not responding! It’s locked!”

“Kill the power.” McIntyre’s face shone from sweat. “Hurry. We haven’t much longer!”

Jones looked to his right, ran his hand and fingers down the display, found the master switch, and flipped it off. The PFD went black.

“Wait!” McIntyre snapped. “Give it a second. Okay. Now!”

Jones flipped the switch. “On!” There was a pause. The dials before them sprang to life.

From behind them came a steady roar of terror punctuated by loud noises, as luggage from the overhead compartments and laptops flew about, striking anything in their own flight path.

“Engaging auto!” McIntyre said. Nothing.

“It’s still rebooting,” Jones said. They couldn’t know for certain either their airspeed or altitude, making reliable decisions impossible. “I estimate fifteen thousand with airspeed in excess of 836.” They were nearly at standard cruising airspeed. “We’re falling fast.”

The nose was now well down as the 787 plummeted toward the earth. The air slipping across the exterior controls of the airplane had restored flight control, but the yoke still denied it to the pilots.

The sensation of falling was palpable. Behind the men now came a high-pitched howl neither could place. It was neither mechanical nor human. McIntyre glanced back, expecting the worst, and realized it was Westmore. He hadn’t thought it possible for a human voice to make such a sound. “Quiet, luv,” he said, trying to calm the terrified woman. “Please!” He turned to the front. “Disengaging auto!” In front of him, filling the entire windshield, was the blue expanse of ocean.

“It’s rebooted now!” Jones shouted.

Without warning, the plane suddenly responded to the yoke.

“Oh, shit,” Jones said, as the captain began to try to raise the nose of the plane. The dials were giving information now. “Airspeed 915, altitude eight thousand! Easy, Bobby, easy. Don’t overdo it.” If they managed to pull the aircraft out of the dive, the danger was that it would rocket uncontrollably into the sky, a situation nearly as deadly as the dive itself.

McIntyre pulled on the yoke steadily. His face was masked in sweat. His breath came out in short, labored puffs. The plane was pulling up in response to his command, but the horizon was still much too high, the space before them nothing but ocean.

“Airspeed 1034, altitude four thousand! Oh, God!”

McIntyre pulled back more forcibly on the yoke. They felt the g-forces as he compelled the airplane out of the dive.

“Airspeed 1107, altitude three thousand!”

“Come on, you bastard, come on.” McIntyre pulled the yoke well back, all but certain one of the wings was going to come off.

“Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit!” Jones said. The g-forces pressed them heavily into their seats.

“Get up, get up, motherfucker.” Behind the men, Westmore screamed again.

“Airspeed 1122! Altitude twenty-three hundred!” Jones said in a high-pitched voice, almost in falsetto.

“Climb, you bastard, climb!”

Suddenly the g-forces vanished as if an invisible hand had been lifted from them.

“We’re climbing!” Jones said with a laugh. “We’re climbing! Airspeed 1103, altitude twenty-six hundred!”

Flight 188 rocketed into the sky like a ballistic missile.

2

“Coffee? A Danish?” she asked with an inviting smile.

“No, thank you. I’m fine,” Jeff Aiken said, considering closing his eyes until summoned for the meeting.

“Mr. Greene will with be with you any moment.”

Jeff, still in a fog from his hasty trip, didn’t take the time to admire what he sensed was an inviting view. The receptionist was not yet thirty, stylishly dressed, trim, obviously fit, but wearing the latest hairstyle, which made her look as if she’d just crawled out of bed and sprayed it in place.

Jeff had received the urgent call Saturday night — Sunday morning, actually — right after falling into a deep sleep, still dressed, splayed atop his bed at the Holiday Inn in Omaha, Nebraska. He’d just finished an exhausting all-night-all-day stint at National Interbank Charge Card Services. Their security system had been so porous that financial crackers, as criminally minded hackers were known, had systematically downloaded the personal accounts of more than 4 million “valued” customers. News accounts reported that the data looting had gone on for two weeks before being discovered. Jeff had tracked the information loss back more than three months and guessed it had been going on even longer.

Once he’d agreed to fly to Manhattan and negotiated a substantial fee for his time, it had taken all day Sunday to finish the security checks he’d installed on the new NICCS system. He doubted it would save the company from the ire of its violated cardholders, or federal regulators. If the company had spent a thousandth of his fee on routine security earlier, none of this would have happened. He never ceased to be amazed at the mind-set of supposedly modern executives. They still conducted business as if this were the twentieth century.

He’d arrived at the Omaha airport just in time to catch a red-eye to New York City. This would be his first trip there since the death of his fiancée, Cynthia, at the World Trade Center on 9/11, and he was almost overwhelmed by a range of unwelcome emotions. For an instant it was as if he were reliving the horror all over again. By the time he’d taken a taxi downtown, checked in and showered, he’d pushed his terrible memories aside and caught exactly ninety minutes sleep before shaving and dressing to arrive for this 9:00 a.m. meeting with Joshua Greene, managing partner of Fischerman, Platt & Cohen.

“Mr. Aiken?”

Jeff opened his eyes and realized he’d fallen asleep. He glanced at his watch: 9:23. “Yes?”

“Mr. Greene and Ms. Tabor will see you now. Are you sure you don’t want some coffee?”

“Thank you. You were right. I’ll take a coffee after all. Black.” He smiled sheepishly. “Better make it a large.”

The receptionist laughed, flashing brilliant white teeth. She showed him through the double door into the managing partner’s office. “I’ll get that coffee right now,” she said.

The reception area had been designed in a 1920s art deco style that Jeff believed was inspired by the original interior design, given the age of the building and the exterior motif. The impression was reinforced as he entered the conference room. Dressed in brown penny loafers and wrinkled tan chinos, a dark blue travel blazer with a matching light blue polo shirt, he was accustomed to looking out of place in most corporate offices. After all, he reasoned, they hired him for what he knew and could do, not for his wardrobe. With short sandy brown hair and dark eyes, he was six feet tall and thirty-six years of age and had mostly kept his athletic build despite his work. Even catalog clothing fit him well, a girlfriend had once commented.

The pair sat at an expanse of glassy mahogany. The lawyer, Greene, was well dressed, to put it mildly, reminding Jeff of Gene Hackman in The Firm. That had been the mob’s law firm, and Hackman had been the bad guy. The other was their IT person; she was almost, but not quite, a fellow traveler with Jeff, though her clothes had a Gap and Banana Republic look.

The well-suited man stood and introduced himself as Joshua Greene. “This is Sue Tabor, our IT manager. I thought it would save time if she sat in.”

“We spoke late Saturday,” Sue said as she rose to shake hands.

“Yes, I recall. Barely.”

They waited as the receptionist returned with a large black coffee and a Danish Jeff had not requested. Greene waved her off before she could ask if anyone else wanted anything.

Sue was slender, of partial Asian heritage, late twenties, with jet-black hair stylishly cut in a bob. Her slender lips were a crimson slash, and she wore more makeup than he was used to seeing in offices. Beneath her shirt he detected modest breasts, but her figure struck him as all angles. Her grip was firm, but there was no denying a certain shine in her eye as she met his gaze.

Greene was perhaps sixty years old and had the look of a man who spent his share of time in the gym. Broad-shouldered, he had graying hair and wore glasses with scarcely any rim, the lenses reflecting as if made of crystal. If someone told that Jeff Greene had once played football, it would have come as no surprise. While Sue was clearly West Coast in her accent, Greene came from somewhere in the Midwest. Jeff had heard a lot of that Johnny Carson talk in Omaha.

“I don’t want to waste your time, Aiken,” the lawyer said, “but I’d like to give you a brief summary before I hand you over to Sue. Saturday morning one of our associates came in earlier than usual and found himself the first in the office. When he attempted to use his computer, he could not. He checked with other computers and discovered that none of them were working. Sue was summoned and … I’ll let her handle that part.”

Greene cleared his throat. “I just want you to understand how critical this is. We billed more than ninety million dollars last year. We’re not a large firm, obviously, but we are highly respected in our field. According to Sue, we cannot access our computer system. This includes our litigation records, both current as well as archived, e-mail, and our billing records. She also suspects that everything may be lost, or lost in part. She tells me that until we identify the source of the problem, we cannot even access our backup records to determine if they’ve been contaminated.”

Greene gave Jeff a withering look that suggested he was at fault for the situation. “In short, we are dead in the water. Our cash flow has been stopped; our attorneys are unable to adequately work on existing cases. Once clients start figuring this out, those in a position to will defect, the others will sue. We need everything back, as soon as possible. The situation is critical.”

Sue spoke, eyeing Jeff steadily. “The server is unbootable. I couldn’t access the system at all.”

That was odd, Jeff thought. In most cases, an infected computer would still boot, even if it didn’t properly operate thereafter. “What are you able to do as an office?” Jeff asked.

“The attorneys are working on e-mail through our Internet provider’s backup system,” she said. “Many had current files in their laptops and are using those. I’ve not touched our backups since I have no idea what I’m dealing with here.”

“How do you handle those?” Jeff asked.

“We have nightly backups of each computer to an in-house master server. Once a week, we make backup tapes that are stored in a fireproof safe. Once a month, we make a second set of backup tapes, and those are stored in another safe, off-site.”

“Good. We’ll have something to work with. How much can you tell me about what happened?”

“Sorry to say, almost nothing. The system simply isn’t accessible. Not to me, at least.” Sue grimaced.

Greene spoke. “Working without computers is a real problem for us. The younger attorneys simply don’t know how to do without them; they’ve always had access to the various legal databases and resources. I had no idea we’d become so dependent on them.” He glanced at Sue, then back to Jeff. “And obviously, being denied access to our work product is a serious problem — one that will prove very costly if you fail to fix this in a timely manner. Serious enough to put us out of business, in fact.

“But my most immediate concern is the prospect of losing our recent billing records. The longer we are down, the worse this is going to get. The system was automated. Now our attorneys are using pen and paper. We need to have our automated program up and running, and we need those billing records. They are vital. As is the case with any company, our income stream is essential.”

Jeff took a long pull of coffee. It was hot and bitter. “Have you considered that your staff may have the virus in their laptops, since they were connecting to their office computers?”

Sue nodded. “I thought of that. Over the weekend I warned them not to boot, but I was too late. Some had already turned on their computers, but they had no problems. I’ve been running virus scans and system checks on their computers and found nothing other than the usual. Fortunately, so far whatever struck us is limited to our main system. Or seems to be.” She smiled wanly.

“Do you have any idea what it is?” Jeff asked.

“None, but that’s not really my area. Our firewall is excellent and up-to-date. We run antivirus software and keep it current. When I say ‘up-to-date,’ I mean daily. I have an assistant whose first job every morning is updating everything, seeing to the patches and running system security scans. He does that before he does anything else, and he comes to work ahead of most of the associates. So you can appreciate that I’m mystified how this could happen, because it should not have.”

“That sounds good. And you’re right: your measures should have been enough.” Faced with the fresh challenge, Jeff felt himself growing suddenly alert and energized. This was very different from the work he’d just been doing, and any solution was going to be demanding, exactly the kind of problem in which he could lose himself.

Greene interrupted Jeff’s thoughts. “I’ve got a meeting with the other partners and need to give them something. How long, Aiken? How long will this take, and how much of our information can we get back?”

“I can’t say, in all honesty. Not at this point. I’ll let you know as soon as I can make an assessment.”

“All right,” Greene said grimly. “I’m told you’re the best. I need you to prove it.”

3

Buddy Morgan, balding, fifty-three years old, overweight, returned from his coffee break four minutes early. A twenty-three-year veteran of the United Auto Workers, he had the right to select his own shift; that’s why he was working now. The supervisor, a longtime drinking companion, didn’t give him any grief while the new robots did what they were programmed to do.

Not like the old days, not at all. Buddy had served his time on an air gun, the last eight years of it driving three nuts home to partially mount the right front wheel of the Ford Taurus. God, how he’d hated those never-ending days.

But that was behind him. Now he had seniority. As he told his wife, June, he was nothing more than a grease monkey. The robots did all the work. His job was to make sure they stayed online.

It was a helluva system, he had to admit. His domain was fourteen of the robots, “turkeys” as he called them. Each consisted of a massive arm mounted on a squat pedestal. At the working end of the arm was the “head,” complete with a “beak.” This was the part that did the welding, fast, accurate, untiring. The whole “gaggle”—he was unaware that the proper word was rafter—was run by the master computer. He monitored a dummy terminal at his workstation, but had no control of the system. That was work for the college boys.

Buddy spent most of his shift at his station, glancing at the monitor, then up at the slow-moving assembly line, then at his turkeys, nodding and twisting in their odd dance. The area around the workstation was filled with the smell of electronic welding and a not unpleasant sweet aroma of fine oil that came from the robots. His nearest coworker was a hundred feet away, and that was just fine with Buddy. Most UAW brothers were a pain in the ass.

Buddy’s job was simple enough. He walked behind the turkeys and checked the moving parts for signs of a problem. This rarely happened. Japanese-designed, the things were built in Korea and could really take it, he often said. On a regular schedule, he pulled one off-line for examination. Not pulled, exactly; he pressed a large blue plastic button that caused the robot to retreat from the assembly line five feet. There he lubricated certain points, in all just six; then he wiped the entire machine down, though that really wasn’t his job, but he liked his turkeys looking good; then he pressed the blue button again, and the docile thing slid back in place.

The amazing part was that the other turkeys knew one of them was missing — something to do with the programming — and they simply assumed the job of the one he took off-line. Amazing. Really amazing. If you didn’t get laid off, this automation thing was a wonder.

At first he’d been surprised such high-tech turkeys required manual oiling at all. He’d figured they’d designed that into them. His trainers explained that they had originally been self-oiling, but factory managers, in an excess of cost-mindedness, had put the robots on the floor without adequate supervision. There had been some real problems. They might be twenty-first-century marvels, but a certain number of turkeys required the presence of a human. The solution had been to design them so they had to be serviced regularly.

But for the most part, his fourteen turkeys worked untended and to perfection. They were completely silent, as far as he could tell. The only sound came when they zapped the frame of the SUV moving along its two rails, like a subway car crawling along.

Today, however, Number Eight was giving him fits. He’d pulled it off-line three times already, and his boss, Eddie, told him to quit messing with it. Take it off-line for good and let the techs fix it. The other turkeys could take up the slack for a few hours.

That struck Buddy as pretty sloppy. He would never have told anyone, not even June, but he loved sitting at his station, that monitor frozen in place telling him everything was as it should be, the turkeys, nodding and straightening, twisting this way and that, as they welded the frame of Ford’s new SUV, the first of the really big hybrids. He just loved it.

But Eddie had a point. Sometimes even a turkey acted up. They could work forever, but not without some maintenance. Buddy reached Number Eight and lowered his hand to press the button. Unseen behind him, the dummy monitor at his workstation flickered. The screen reset.

Along the line, the turkeys stopped in place. Then, like soldiers in close-order drill, they pulled themselves back as if standing to attention. Buddy stopped what he was doing and gawked. He’d never seen anything like this. The assembly line was still moving, but the turkeys weren’t zapping the frames. He stepped forward to take a better look.

At that moment, all fourteen turkeys spun in place in a violent, dizzying circle. Number Eight struck Buddy with its beak, sending him flying onto the assembly line, landing with a loud grunt, sprawling across the tracks.

Stunned, he couldn’t move for several vital seconds. Just as he grasped where he was, the frame of a new Monument SUV moved across his neck.

4

After Greene left the conference room, Sue Tabor led Jeff to the IT room, moving with a catlike grace. “Don’t let his manner bother you,” she said. “Josh is a good guy — for a lawyer, I mean — but his neck’s on the line over this. If we don’t recover enough data to save his hide, he’ll be forced into retirement and I may be out of a job.”

“I doubt that it was your fault,” Jeff reassured her. “I’m seeing more and more of this sort of thing. Malware is more easily finding ways into once secure computer systems. Viruses of all kinds are simply getting more sophisticated.”

Sue sighed. “I warned him last year not to go all electronic. He didn’t listen. We had a small accounting department then, run by a blue-haired lady who was the firm’s first hire forty years ago. Though everything was on computers, she insisted on running billing-record hard copies every night. Greene thought the size of her department was a needless expense, and so was all that paper. She was retired, her department was reduced to two, and no more hard copies. I warned him.”

“There’s nothing worse than being right when your boss is wrong.”

Sue looked at Jeff sideways, with a sly smile, and that shine in her eyes. “Sounds like you’ve been there.”

Jeff closed his eyes for a moment and drew a deep breath before turning back to Sue. “It shows, huh? What did you see when you tried to boot? Exactly.”

“Like I told you Saturday night, I couldn’t get into the system and decided immediately not to waste any more time trying. I’m really just a systems manager.” Sue shrugged apologetically. “My primary job is to keep everything running smoothly and make certain there are no hiccups. Security is part of it, of course, but it’s limited to updated antivirus software, patching, and a firewall. Our primary problems have been viruses associates bring in from home on their laptops, or employees opening attachments from spam. Nothing I couldn’t handle until now. To my knowledge, nothing ever made it into the servers.”

“Have you contacted the firm’s bank?” She shook her head. “You need to,” Jeff advised. “You should shut down Internet access to your account until this is solved. It’s possible that’s what this was all about. We can’t know how much information they extracted before the system froze.”

“I’m on it,” she said, her cell phone already out. Near the ladies’ room he watched her speak intensely; then put the phone away and go through the door. As he waited, Jeff geared himself up for what he had to do. A few minutes later Sue returned, makeup freshly applied, her lips repainted that bright crimson. “Thanks,” she said. “I should have thought of that on my own. They’re taking care of it right now.”

“There’s more.” Jeff was never comfortable with this aspect of his job. He hated being the bearer of bad news. “I’m sorry to say that you’re going to have to unplug all the servers and every computer from the network. We have to assume they’re infected, even though you’ve detected nothing — which would mean that at this point they’re serving as a breeding ground, propagating the worm. That means your lawyers will lose their e-mail.”

Sue moaned. “Let me show you to your workstation, then I’ll take care of it.”

The IT Center was located in an undesirable area of the building. Windowless, with monitors, computers, and cables running helter-skelter, a dry static sensation in the still air, it was a copy of hundreds of other such offices Jeff had seen. Sue introduced him to her assistant, Harold, a short, nerdy young man wearing a Yankees baseball cap with the brim backward. He was playing a video game on what looked like a personal laptop. As they entered, he hurriedly put it away.

“What are you playing?” Jeff asked. His secret vice was action video games.

“Uh, Mega Destructor III.”

Jeff nodded approvingly. “I’ve got MD IV in beta. I’ll burn you a copy.”

The young man grinned.

Sue shook her head. “Boys.”

Jeff grinned. “What can I say?”

Standing with one hand on her hip, Sue explained the system, gesturing with her free hand. “Every lawyer has a desktop PC and a laptop. This is the server room with four blade servers. We use one as our Web server, another as a backup domain controller, and so on. The primary one, with our litigation records and accounting, is the one that’s down. We run a standard networking program, Active Directory, and are connected to the office PCs.” What she described appeared identical to other systems on which Jeff had worked. In theory that should make this job a bit easier than it initially sounded, he thought. But in reality? Jeff was too experienced ever to expect a free ride.

“All right. I’ll get started,” he said, looking for a place to set up. “Which one should I use?” Sue pointed as he reached down and opened his work bag, extracting a black CD case filled with a wide range of disks, which he referred to as his Swiss army knife. As he began, Sue left to inform everyone they were now off-line for the duration, at least at the office. Harold moved a chair over so he could watch what Jeff was doing.

“It’s good to get some action,” Harold said with a smile. “I’m pretty bored playing games.”

“Glad to have you. I’m going to need your help if we’re to get this fixed.” Jeff’s CD included the standard diagnostic and recovery tools used by everyone in his profession, but he’d added a collection of utilities he’d picked up over time. This was the disk that would allow him to boot and provide a minimal environment from which he could work, since the computer was no longer making one available.

As he slid the disk into the server’s optical drive, his first thought was that whatever had occurred here was caused by any one of the thousands of new variants of existing viruses that appeared routinely, as many as fifty a month. He hoped that it was a new version of an existing virus, set loose by some student hacker looking for bragging rights. Something like that could have crept under Sue’s radar. Even in that eventuality it could still be a difficult job, but one he could manage. There’d likely be full, or nearly full, recovery because the data the company needed would still be somewhere in the server.

But once his own operating system was running, the first thing Jeff noted was that he couldn’t detect any data on the hard disk. It was as if the disk had never had an operating system installed. Even the standard C: drive icon was missing. He’d never seen this before and he experienced a sudden chill. How can this be? he thought. This wasn’t going to be routine after all, he realized, feeling both exhilarated and apprehensive.

Sitting down at her computer beside him, Sue frowned and said, “Call me Miss Unpopular. They act as if I put the damn virus in myself.” She looked at his screen. “Getting anything?”

Jeff told her what he’d done and seen so far.

“I need me one of those nifty boot CDs you’ve got.”

Jeff smiled, suddenly looking twelve years old. “You’ll have to kill me to get it.” The CD was the result of thousands of hours of hard work, and in many cases it was what made his success on a job possible. He’d once joked he planned to be buried with it. “What will you work on?” he asked her.

Sue pursed her lips. “I’m going to spin my wheels, probably — analyzing the firewall and proxy server logs, if that makes sense to you.” Jeff nodded. That area had to be covered, and it would save time if she did it. “Maybe I’ll stumble onto something useful. This is not my field at all.”

“You might get lucky,” Jeff encouraged her. As Sue set to work, he ran a salvaging tool that could make guesses and ignore what would otherwise look like errors. With this he had more success, since it was able to provide him a view of files and folders previously not visible.

Now able to scan through what was left of the disk’s data, Jeff searched for the files that contained the core configuration of the system. What he found instead were bits and pieces of the original operating system and temporary copies of portions of program data. Though he was disappointed, he was still able to reconstruct a portion of the file system and registry with its database, which stored settings and various options for the computer’s operating system. At least it’s a start, he thought.

Next he skimmed through the corrupted registry entries. It was a bit like scanning the television guide to see what was on, rather than watching an evening of programs. He found that part of the data was overwritten, a standard means of destruction. Random symbols had been written over the existing data, making it difficult, sometimes impossible, to recover the original data. Peculiarly, though, only a portion of the original data had been overwritten. If that had been the purpose of the virus, Jeff thought, the job was incomplete.

Several explanations were possible. The most obvious was the presence of a destructive virus that had its overwriting operation aborted by a bug in the virus itself. The virus might have triggered behavior that resulted in the operating system’s becoming corrupted, which had then stopped the virus and the overwriting dead in its tracks. Not very sophisticated, if that was what had happened.

A truly effective virus would never kill the driver or operating system that served as its host. That would be like a disease killing someone before it could infect anyone else. The most effective viruses were those that existed on computers with the operators never knowing any better. Before the operating system was destroyed, such a worm would be seeking to replicate and spread itself, though slowly, so as to escape detection. But in this case some part of it had nuked the system, in effect committing suicide.

Now Jeff scanned the corrupted registry file settings. Malware commonly created entries so that the operating system activated them each time the computer was turned on, or whenever a user logged in. He examined every entry that looked even remotely suspicious. When he located a reference to a program or piece of code he didn’t recognize, he found the code’s file and examined it further, looking to see if the file provided the product it was associated with and the company that wrote it, since malware typically lacked such information.

Then he performed Web searches to find information about the file’s purpose, to see if anybody had previously flagged it as malware. Tedious and time-consuming, this formed the heart of what he did each day at work when on jobs like this. That initial flash of excitement he’d experienced waned as exhaustion began to overtake him again. Working while exhausted was typical, though. In these situations, time counted for everything. Yet so far, nothing.

Two hours later, Jeff finally got a break when he came upon a reference to a device driver that appeared suspicious. Device drivers were programs that allowed other programs to interact with a bit of hardware, such as a printer, and were attractive to malware authors because they could be leveraged to create spyware, viruses, and adware that hid from standard security protections. Most home PCs had some form of these types of malware without the owner even knowing it.

All device drivers had information that included the path to the file on the disk that contained the driver’s code, so Jeff was able to locate the driver image in question without any trouble. One, ipsecnat.sys, had a name that looked similar to that of a legitimate and standard driver, but he didn’t recognize it. When he examined it, the file’s version information reported itself as being from Microsoft, but a Web search turned up no hits on a driver by that name. Score one for my team, he thought.

Reinvigorated, Jeff loaded the driver into a code analyzer that allowed him to see a human-readable version of the instructions that the computer executed. Analyzing malware at this level was a big part of his job, so he could run through the instructions in his head the same way the computer would. This way he was able to understand its overall purpose.

He read:

When he finished, Jeff was thoroughly alert. The code was obviously encrypted. Viruses often encrypted themselves to make it time-consuming, or even impossible, for virus scanners to unravel the core code. The malware decrypted itself into memory when launched, which could take up to several seconds because of the levels and complexity of the encryption scheme employed. That was why a slowly booting computer was often a sign of infection.

The next three hours flew by as Jeff tried to match the encryption algorithm used by the hacker against those commonly employed by malware authors. Finally, he decided that he was looking at something new. This part of his work was like a puzzle to him, one in which he pitted his own creativity and determination against that of the hacker. In its own way it was not so different from the most difficult computer games he played except that real stakes were involved here. Knowing that kept Jeff’s excitement tamped down, though he couldn’t resist a mental pat on the back before continuing.

As a precaution, he set up what was essentially a “virtual” computer that allowed him to examine the virus in operation, but at a much slower pace. The virtual computer behaved exactly like a real one and, to the user, looked like the screen of a real computer displayed in a window on their desktop. But the virtual computer gave Jeff great control over the process since he was able to control execution of the malware, starting and stopping it as needed. In this way, he hoped to be able to unravel the code.

Next he dropped the code onto the disk as an unencrypted copy of the driver. Completely consumed, he lost all touch with day and night. Even Sue didn’t exist as a person. She vanished from his world, though she sat next to him. He was neither thirsty nor hungry. He felt no discomfort in his body.

It often seemed to him, during a job like this, that he’d been born for this work, such was his capacity to shut out everything else. For him a computer problem was like solving a brain teaser, and he loved games. He also hated being defeated. The real world could be chaotic and violent and frequently felt, at least to him, to be out of his control. But with work he could understand a computer, even the viruses that attacked them. Success here was clearly defined: when he was finished, the computer either worked or it didn’t.

Right now his only world was the one on the screens before him.

5

“I don’t get the connection,” George Carlton said as he leaned back in his chair, eyeing with cautious pleasure the woman seated before him.

Dr. Daryl Haugen, dressed casually in jeans and a snug blouse, paused before responding. Slender and just over average height, with a fair complexion and blond, shoulder-length hair, she was stunningly attractive. The way Carlton eyed her while pretending he was not was a reaction she’d grown accustomed to as a teenager. A computer science graduate of MIT and thirty-five years old that July, she’d worked hard to be taken for what she was, much more than a pretty bauble on a man’s arm. Men such as Carlton, who acted as though they took her seriously when all they really were interested in was her butt, rubbed her the wrong way. But what she had to get across to him was too important for her to waste time getting angry over his juvenile chauvinism.

“We’ve come up with eight incidents so far,” she said, leaning forward to emphasize her point. “The most deadly was at a hospital in New York City. The computer glitch there appears to have caused four deaths from misapplied medications. There are similar reports out of several hospitals in other boroughs.”

“What about these other incidents?” Carlton leafed through the papers as if searching for something specific, then stopped in apparent frustration. “I’ve read your report. Frankly, I don’t see a connection between any of them, and I certainly don’t see a national security issue. As you know, during my tenure here we’ve made significant strides in combating computer viruses, especially when they target government or military computers.”

Daryl sighed to herself. Not that again, she thought. “I can’t be certain, but it looks like more than one virus. It’s odd, striking like this in so many seemingly unrelated places, and being so deadly.” She wrinkled her brow. “The viruses were also in systems that should have excluded them. We need to understand quickly why they didn’t. We have no idea how many of them are out there, or how they spread. If they’re commonly on the Internet — and this assumes we’re dealing with more than one and not a single virus with different manifestations — they’re going to cause a lot of trouble, not just in home and business computers but in government and military ones as well.”

“Well, that’s good,” Carlton said.

“Excuse me?”

“I mean that they are going after computers in which my department has a direct concern,” he said hastily. “Not that the viruses are good as such.”

Daryl bit her tongue. She needed this fool’s help.

“I’m saying that’s the kind of thing we are so effective at interdicting,” Carlton added, dragging his eyes away from her chest. He’d first met Daryl when she’d worked at the National Security Agency in 2000. She’d been assigned to liaison with his Cyberterrorism — Computer Forensics Department at the CIA. She’d been unexpectedly forthcoming, even providing some source data they’d lacked, which proved quite accurate. But the best part of the arrangement had been her drop-dead looks. He’d suggested drinks more than once, but got nowhere. Neither had anyone else in the department.

He’d been more than pleased when he learned that she’d left NSA and was now assistant deputy executive director CISU (Computer Infrastructure Security Unit)/DHS and head of a team at US-CERT (Computer Emergency Readiness Team), which technically reported to him at DHS, where he was now chief of counter cyberterrorism. US-CERT was expected to operate independently, alerting him only when they came upon an issue of national security. This was the first time she’d ever asked to work in the field. He doubted he even had the authority to refuse, but he was damned if he was going to acknowledge any limits to his power.

“Aren’t the hospitals cooperating?” he asked, squaring his shoulders to look more forceful.

“Sure,” Daryl confirmed. “But I don’t know what they’re holding back, thinking it’s not important. The virus or viruses will have left tracks. I can’t trust others to find them. That’s not what they do. They just want to get their systems functioning. We need to educate ourselves quickly. The protections at one of these infected hospitals were much better than those of, say, nuclear power plants.” She met his eye to see if she was making her point. “We need to know, George. We can’t sit on this.”

For a moment Carlton wondered what she knew, and if that was meant to be a veiled threat. “Well, of course you should go. Thanks for keeping me in the loop. Keep me posted.”

He watched her retreating figure with more than a little regret and sighed. These computer types were always getting worked up over nothing. The few attractive women among them were the worst.

6

Barnett Favor scanned the computer screens with a practiced eye, then leaned back in his chair. He’d begun his shift at six that morning and had just finished lunch. On most days he “assumed the position,” as he jokingly called it — closed his eyes and took a catnap. Either of the other two men on the shift, or the computers themselves, would alert him if he was needed. Favor crossed his hands comfortably on his stomach and closed his eyes.

The Skunk River Nuclear Generating Station was a General Electric boiling-water reactor, located on the Skunk River some forty miles east of Des Moines. It provided nearly half of the electricity of the city, while the rest of its output was distributed throughout the eastern rural stretch of the state and into western Illinois. One of the last nuclear power plants completed in the United States, it had undergone an extensive overhaul in 2005 and was now entirely modern.

In the years since the disaster at Three Mile Island, when multiple human errors had caused a partial core meltdown, enhanced reliance had been placed on computers to handle the complex decision-making necessary if something went wrong. As a result, Favor and his team had almost nothing to do with the plant operation.

Since the overhaul the station had run without incident, not that there had been many in the previous two decades of its operation. Favor had been with the company since high school and was just two years from retirement. He’d cut his teeth on an old coal-fired generating plant, discontinued when the Skunk River Nuclear Generating Plant had come on line. In the early days the operation of the two hadn’t been all that different. Water was still heated and turned into steam, which ran turbines, which produced electricity. The only real difference was how that water was heated.

After several minutes Favor shifted in his seat, then accepted that he wasn’t going to nod off. Instead, he decided to get himself a Coke. If he couldn’t take a nap, he’d take in a bit of caffeine.

The control room of the plant looked like something out of Star Trek. A long, curved wall contained a wide range of gauges and dials. At waist level was a shelf the workers used for a desk. Immediately in front of them was a bank of computer screens that told the story. The men used three chairs on wheels to scoot across the floor and along the wall as they monitored the conditions of the plant. In reality, they had little to do.

Just as Favor stepped from the soft-drink machine, every computer screen in the room blinked, twice. “What was that?” he said.

Orin Whistle, who’d worked there nearly as long, looked up from the paperback he’d been reading, a blank expression on his face. “What happened?”

Josh Arnold stood up in place as if he might suddenly need to run. “Something’s going on, Barney.”

At that moment Favor could feel the change. The plant was tens of thousands of moving parts, each performing its specific function. The mix produced a familiar vibration and comforting background hum that changed only when one of the two reactors was taken off-line for maintenance. Otherwise, nothing ever changed.

“The turbines are speeding up,” Whistle said as if to himself. “I’m resetting the control.” He looked at the gauges, the amber lights playing across his face. “No change.”

“Heat’s up, Barney,” Arnold said, touching the temperature gauge in front of him as if to confirm what his eyes told him. “I don’t see why, though.”

The twin nuclear piles were set to run at their standard temperature, allowing the water coursing through them to be superheated to produce the steam that created electricity. A second stream of water ran through the system like coolant from the radiator of an automobile, intended to maintain the core at exactly the right temperature. It was all self-monitoring and self-adjusting. Until this moment, Favor had considered it impossible for the reactor to increase in heat without his ordering the computer to make the change.

“Watch the pressure,” Favor said. Pressure was key to being certain the nuclear core was always covered with water. The crew at Three Mile Island had notoriously failed to ensure that single necessity and, as a result, had brought disgrace on themselves and an end to new nuclear plants in the United States.

“Pressure’s up,” Whistle said, his face paling. “And it’s rising fast.”

The Klaxon sounded, repeating every three seconds. Atop the curved wall, red lights began to blink. The computer had taken them to Code Red.

“Shut it down!” Barney shouted. “Josh, call Central Iowa and inform them we’re going off-line now!”

“Jesus, Barney, they’ll raise hell. Half of Des Moines will go dark.”

“Do it, Orin, shut it down now!”

Orin hesitated. “We’ve got a few minutes to figure this out, Barney. There’ll be hell to pay if we act too fast.”

“We aren’t going to figure this out.” Favor knew there was no point in delay. Trying to outthink a computer, even one making a mistake if that proved the case, was foolhardy. “The computers run things now. Tell them we’re shutting the reactors down now!”

Orin typed commands on his keyboard and punched the ENTER button.

“Didn’t you hear me?” Favor asked when nothing changed.

“Sure thing, Barney,” said Orin, his eyes frantically scanning the gauges. “But there’s no response.”

Josh cupped his hand over the mouth of the telephone. “Central Iowa wants to know why they aren’t getting the standard three-hour notice so they can pull juice from elsewhere.”

“Tell them we’ll call back,” Favor said. “Orin, give it the command again. Josh, check the temperature. And turn off the damn Klaxon and lights!”

Favor had moved so he could monitor the key indicators, his soft drink unopened and unnoticed in his hand. The noise stopped and the red lights were extinguished. Several workers from other sections had filed into the room, but they stood well back, watching nervously.

“The temperature’s spiking, Barney. I’ve never seen it this high,” Josh said. “The turbines are screaming.”

The men heard a high-pitched whistle. “What’s that?” Orin said, his face now chalk white.

“Oh, shit,” Favor muttered. “We’re venting coolant. The water’s turned to steam. Orin, shut the fucker off!”

“I’ve given it the command four times, Barney. Nothing’s happening! Don’t blame me.”

Though a nuclear reactor is complicated, in one aspect it’s quite simple. Left alone, uranium runs into an uncontrolled chain reaction. But it’s not left alone. Control rods are inserted in a regular pattern through it. They absorb neutrons and have the power to turn the core cold. The plant is heated simply by raising the rods. All that is necessary to regulate heat, or shut the plant down, for that matter, is to lower the rods.

But the computers were refusing to do just that.

Favor flashed back to a key meeting held during the overhaul. The systems analyst who’d installed the computers and multiple backups had just explained to the company’s operations director and his deputy that nothing could go wrong. “This system is utterly foolproof.”

The deputy had learned forward and said, “Nothing’s foolproof. We’re dealing with a nuclear power plant. What if all your fancy systems go wrong?”

“That can’t happen, sir. Not if you follow directions and update the software.”

“Of course it can happen. Where’s the fail-safe?”

“I don’t understand.” The systems analyst had looked genuinely perplexed.

“If it all goes to hell and we’re facing a meltdown and don’t want those boys to be stuck telling some computer what to do, how do we pull the plug ourselves?”

“I assure you—”

“There isn’t one, in other words,” the deputy said to his boss. “They want us to trust the computers to do it.” He fixed his gaze on the analyst. “We need a mechanical switch to crash this plant, if it comes to that.”

The director had agreed, and at a cost in excess of $1 million, a fail-safe had been installed. Both the director and his deputy had been forced out the following year for spending too much money on the overhaul, but the safety system had remained in place.

“Josh, Orin, come with me,” Barney said now, before running to the far wall and two large red handles, much like those of a fire alarm. Above them was written MECHANICAL SHUTDOWN. USE ONLY IN AN EMERGENCY.

“Josh, yank that one.” Barney grabbed the first and pulled. The handle refused to budge. Josh tried his, with the same result. “Orin, give me a hand,” Barney shouted. The Klaxon and the pulsating red lights resumed. Some of the workers who’d been watching bolted from the room, making their way to exits.

“We’re in overload, Barney,” Orin shouted as he wrapped his hand around half of the lever while Favor took the other. “On three. One, two, three!” The men pulled. Slowly, the handle moved. It stopped some five inches out. Applying leverage to it, they forced the red handle fully down.

Favor turned to the other. Josh had managed to move the switch an inch from the wall. All three men grabbed a piece of it and pulled. Slowly the handle moved until it too was in the down position. The men stood silently, panting, waiting.

The fail-safe was a direct cable to the control rods. The levers severed the cable holding them aloft. In theory, the control rods would drop into the core by gravity, shutting down the reactors.

“Do you think it worked?” Orin asked in a near whisper.

“I hope to God it did, Orin. I sure hope it did.”

Josh glanced nervously toward the door. “Maybe we should get out of here, just in case.” Nodding their agreement, the others followed.

At the door, Favor turned back and looked at the elaborate control panel one more time. How could this happen? He wiped his bare hand across his face, which was drenched with sweat. A thought chilled him to the bone. What if the thing isn’t dead? What if it is just playing possum?

Favor turned and walked away. Within a few feet, he was running.

7

At Brooklyn’s Mercy Hospital, the fourth hospital Daryl Haugen had visited in the city since arriving early that afternoon, she presented her US-CERT credential to the IT manager. “How many now?” she asked once he’d closed the door to his office.

Willy Winfield was perhaps thirty-five years old, balding, with thick glasses. He understood the question at once. “Still four, so far. We’ve taken all the patients off the computers and are handling medication manually, as we used to.”

“Have you figured out yet what happened?”

“Our medication software was scrambled.” Winfield’s tone was matter-of-fact, but Daryl could hear the heartache behind it. “Patients were given medicines and dosages unrelated to their needs. It’s been a disaster and put us at considerable risk from lawsuits. My people are working on it, but we can use all the help we can get. Would you care to see?”

“Yes, I would. That’s why I’m here.” This was one reason why she’d insisted on getting into the field. Whatever this was, it had already shown itself to be deadly, and she needed to be on the ground to understand its true scope and impact.

They walked along hallways with confusing turns. Modern hospitals had been expanding so rapidly there was often little logic to their layout. Winfield steered right, then right again, then left three times. Some of the hallways turned off at less than right angles. Within a few turns, she was hopelessly lost.

At last he said, “Here.” Winfield took her into ICU, where a young girl lay fighting for her life. She looked perhaps eight years old. The number of wires running from her body were distressing, as was the steady beep of the monitor. A nurse hovered beside the girl poised for immediate action. Daryl was anything but sentimental. As she gazed at the inert form of the helpless child, though, the objective software engineer threatened to give way to the woman who adored children and was devastated to see one in such condition. Pulling herself together, she asked, “What happened?”

“Her medication was mixed, like the others. Her heart stopped — for an undetermined period of time, since she wasn’t on a monitor. There was no need…” The man was near tears.

Not far away a young couple watched the girl through a large window. Seeing where Daryl looked, Winfield said, “Her parents. Very nice people.”

“What’s going to happen?”

“We’re waiting for her signs to improve before we take her off the ventilator.” He touched Daryl’s sleeve and gently led her away. “The doctor believes she suffered severe brain damage. She’s young and strong. He’s hoping she’ll recover, but it’s not looking good. I wanted you to see the human toll this has taken.”

Daryl nodded. “I see it. I’d like to look at your system, if I could, and talk with your IT people.” She forced herself to remain steady. She’d need a clear head to unravel this disaster.

“Of course.” As they walked back through hallways toward the computer room, Winfield asked, “Why would anyone do something like this?”

“I have no idea.”

8

A cold drizzle streaked the cracked window. It was already fall in Moscow. It seemed to Vladimir Koskov as if summer had been the briefest illusion. He reached out and pressed the aging tape back against the pane, but it rolled away almost immediately. He could feel the cold air leaching through the glass onto his hand.

Vladimir sighed, then picked up the butt of his unfiltered Turkish cigarette and used it to light another. He inhaled deeply, then coughed as he jabbed out the old cigarette and laid the fresh one on the edge of the ashtray.

The small apartment was typical of those built during Soviet days. Of shoddy construction, rushed to completion to meet an arbitrary deadline, it was small, less than five hundred square feet, one room with a cramped kitchenette in one corner, and a bathroom with a shower. The tiny kitchen table, with room for just two, the bed, and his computers all but filled the remaining space. A path was kept clear to his workstation, with three keyboards for three computers he’d built himself and which he never turned off. He could roll his wheelchair to the refrigerator, and to the doorway of the bathroom to empty his bladder sack if Ivana was at work or shopping.

This was twenty-nine-year-old Vladimir’s world. At one time the confinement, the limits of his physical existence, had nearly driven him insane. On the brink of life-ending despair he’d discovered a universe, one he could access without ever leaving this room. His portals were there on the desk and at his keyboards, on his screens, where he was the same as everyone else. It was liberating. Empowering. He had thought at one time to be an engineer, but his sudden awakening as a cripple had forced on him a fresh evaluation of life expectations. Instead, he’d taken his computer skills and morphed them into a kind of expertise that had saved him.

The new Russia was brimming with opportunity, but few ways to make any money if you were not a prostitute, mobster, or drug dealer. If it had not been for Ivana, none of this would have been possible. She’d worked one job after another, never complaining. Sometimes he found her endless self-sacrifice to be all but unbearable.

Vladimir tapped the keys and returned to the Web site he’d been browsing. He spent twenty minutes scrolling through the various forums, examining the code posted there. Little of it was fresh or unknown to him. On occasion he’d see something that caught his attention, code he thought he could use, something new and creative. But on examination it was usually rubbish, or pointless.

Code was the essence of any computer, and of the Internet, which was simply a connection of millions of computers. Code was the machination behind the curtain that made everything else work. Code turned keystrokes into words in word processing, code made images, code produced color, code created hyperlinks.

Everything on a computer screen came from code. Those who could write code at a sophisticated level were creators; a handful were, in their way, godlike, for what they wrote produced marvelous manifestations.

But there was code, and there was code. Like a child painting a tiger by the numbers, some hackers, as code writers were generally called, did little more than follow the lines created by others. These script kiddies copied and pasted this from here, added a little of that from there, and counted themselves lucky when it actually produced something that worked.

Code generated in such a way looked as childish to the skilled hacker as that child’s colored picture of a tiger. Other bits were repeatedly written, to the point of being counterproductive. One section might create an action, another would stop it; then it would be created again, then stopped again, sometimes in long, pointless strings. An amazing amount of code could be written to produce almost nothing. Useless code lay everywhere, occupying a cyber universe with its clutter.

Then there were the hackers such as Vladimir. These were artists of the most rare and talented sort. Their code was lean and strong, producing results with the sparest of keystrokes. What they wrote was elegant, masterful.

The Russian had made his cyber reputation by discovering a vulnerability in Windows XP. He’d posted the details in various chat rooms to claim the credit. Several weeks later, Microsoft confirmed the vulnerability when it released a patch to repair it. Vladimir had responded by posting the details of a second vulnerability. This time it took Microsoft three months to release a patch.

In standard computer protocol, Vladimir had no business publishing the vulnerabilities. He should have given the information directly to the company. By taking the approach he had, he’d gained an initial reputation for himself, but he’d also exposed many thousands of Windows XP owners to virus attacks. By posting, he had been able to claim full credit. Had he notified Microsoft, then posted the details only after the security patch was released, he would have been mocked.

Vladimir’s reputation had grown when he posted the first vulnerability in Windows Vista within hours of its being released. In fact, he’d discovered three vulnerabilities while examining the beta version — but by that time he was losing interest in what he considered the juvenile game of claiming credit for finding weaknesses in the software giant’s programs. It was impossible to produce a complex program to serve so many millions of users and not leave something vulnerable. He’d claimed the one, but had quietly informed Microsoft of the other two.

Still, Vladimir’s reputation had been made. He’d had no lasting desire to involve himself daily in the cyber-hacker world and had always been a private person, so with the posting of the first Windows Vista vulnerability, he’d withdrawn from regular active exposure in the hacker chat rooms and forums.

By this time Vladimir had realized he possessed an extraordinary aptitude. It took another two years to turn it into meaningful income. Now his services were much sought after, and he could pick and choose his assignments. He maintained an e-gold account — a digital gold currency created to allow the instant transfer of gold ownership between users — into which his fees were deposited outside Russia. There were over 3 million e-gold accounts and nearly 4 million ounces of gold in storage. But one of the unintended uses of the accounts was to, in essence, allow the laundering of payments.

For his immediate need, Vladimir decided no help was to be found on the Internet. He returned to the code he was writing and tried again. Still … something eluded him. He went back and rewrote a section, then nodded. He copied the sequence and dropped it into his test computer. It worked.

Vladimir smiled. Slick. This last was his best. Even he was impressed.

9

As was his habit when working, Jeff set his digital watch to chirp every two hours. When it went off, he would stand from his station, stretch, then take a walk around the offices to exercise his body and clear his head, though a part of him never let go of the problem he was grappling with. He’d drink a Coke or a cup of black coffee, use the restroom, wash his face, then return to his place.

Respectful of his dedication, Sue didn’t break his concentration with idle chatter or questions about what she was seeing over his shoulder. She took her breaks at different times, always returning with the smell of cigarette smoke about her. He’d sniffed once before realizing it came from her. She’d said, “I know. A disgusting habit. I just have to quit.”

At one point some hours into the process, Harold disappeared. It could have been the middle of the night or broad daylight. Jeff had no idea. But when Harold returned with food from the all-night diner, Jeff realized how hungry he was. He wolfed down a ham-and-cheese sandwich just as the new framework dropped the unencrypted copy of the code onto his disk. He chewed as he analyzed it.

So far, he had discovered mostly negatives. The single most troubling development had been an attempt by the virus to replicate itself. In this case, it had failed, but, he realized, in other environments it might well be succeeding. It didn’t affect what he was doing today, though it could mean disaster for thousands of other businesses. But that was in the future. Right now he had to concentrate on what he was getting paid to do. As he finished the food and wiped his hands on a napkin, Jeff mentally groaned at what he saw. Even the decrypted code he’d labored so long to produce was obtuse. The cracker was using tricks that ran in the low-level environment. That meant that this approach was a dead end.

Jeff didn’t realize that Sue had been gone until she reentered the room. She came up behind him and leaned down at a time when he had his screen filled with the string output. Her proximity reminded him for a moment that she was an attractive woman. But almost as quickly as the sensation came, it vanished. It had happened before when he’d been drawn to a woman. He knew the shutting down of his emotions was related to Cynthia’s death, and the guilt he felt about not having done more to prevent it.

But nothing would ever change what had happened.

His BlackBerry rang, snapping him out of his gloom. “Excuse me,” he muttered to Sue, as he answered.

Sue took the opportunity to examine Jeff much more closely as he listened to his caller. She’d been attracted from the start and, having watched him work, was now even more impressed. Now she could take him in as a man and liked what she saw. She wondered if he mixed business with pleasure. In her experience, most men did, given the chance.

“I’m in Manhattan too, on a system crash. I’ve never seen anything like it. I’m sorry to hear about the deaths.” Jeff paused. “Sure, sure. That sounds good, Daryl. Maybe I’ll know something by then.” Slipping his BlackBerry back in his pocket, he looked up at Sue. “Sorry about that. A colleague. She’s in town working on something similar.”

“She’s obviously dedicated. It’s the middle of the night. Could it be the same virus?”

Jeff considered what Daryl had told him. “It’s possible, except her virus didn’t crash the system. Just caused it to malfunction in a deadly way.”

“I guess we should be thankful no one’s died even with all the problems we’re having. This could be a lot worse. Any luck? You’ve been at this for some time, and I thought I worked long hours.”

Jeff grinned. “It’s why I get the big bucks. I may not solve the problem, but they can’t complain about the time I put in.” Jeff’s smile vanished. “What I’ve found so far isn’t making much sense.”

“Any guesses?”

“Unfortunately, a few.” Leaning back in his chair, Jeff folded his arms across his chest. “So far, whatever you contracted isn’t a known variant of a virus. It doesn’t look very sophisticated, since it killed itself, and in probability is a cut-and-paste job at its core. But it was plenty destructive. It wanted to replicate, which is bad news for other computers. It’s also encrypted and deeply embedded, which is making my job very tough. From how some of the code is written, I can speculate that the author may be Russian. If true, that’s not reassuring at all. The Russian Mafia is heavily involved in financial fraud through malware.”

Jeff stopped and thought about the implications of what he’d just said. In recent years the Russian Mafia had hired the best software engineers in the former Soviet Union to create new viruses and unleashed them on the cyber world. They were making hundreds of millions a year, and the more they made, the more aggressive and creative they’d become.

“I’m surprised the virus has been so hard to find,” Sue said, focusing his thoughts.

“They usually aren’t,” Jeff agreed. “Typically, I spend most of my time recovering information and rebuilding systems. But lately I’ve been seeing more and more of this kind of thing. A cracker gets into your system to do damage, not to steal information. Not long ago a guy was caught who hired a cracker to shut down the Web sites of his major competitors. These were Internet businesses; as long as he got away with it, everyone’s customers went to him.”

“That’s terrible!” Sue knew the Internet was used for scams, but she’d never before heard such a story. To her, the Internet should be benign, a resource to make life better, not a destructive force.

Jeff knew what Sue was feeling. He often felt the same way. “I hate to say it, but that’s only one of hundreds of ways to profit from cybercrime. In the good old days, hackers were geeks out to make a name for themselves. Now they can earn money, sometimes big money, with the same skills and malicious intentions. There are even Web sites where you can download malware. You graft on something you’ve cooked up yourself, and you’re off and running. One guy got into a bank’s system and had a tenth of a penny — that’s all, just a tenth of a penny — taken from every transaction over one hundred dollars and wired into an offshore account. The bank’s computer was programmed to round pennies up, so it kept covering the shortage.”

“What’s a tenth of a penny?”

“I have no idea.” Jeff shrugged. “I guess they break currency down as far as they can. He could have asked for a twentieth, or a hundredth.”

“What happened?”

“Within four months he’d made over six hundred thousand dollars. Even then the bank’s computer kept covering for him. I don’t know how long it would have gone on if he hadn’t made the mistake of not deleting all bank-employee accounts from his scam. See, these people knew the system, and a lot of them balanced their checkbooks to the penny. One of them spotted that the accounting system was skewing and checked the programming. He found the virus, and it didn’t take long to find the crook.” Jeff took a sip of coffee. That hadn’t been his case, but he’d cracked one like it, and it had felt very, very good. In some ways the satisfaction he took from his work was more important than the pay.

“I’m surprised our security measures didn’t stop this. They were supposed to,” Sue said.

“All security systems are reactive in nature. That means the virus has a head start in infecting computers before it’s identified and enters the log of the antivirus and firewall programs. There are very sophisticated crooks who have taken to hiring crackers to deliver viruses that steal financial information. Computer security has become much more difficult now that there’s a great deal of money to be made. Russian crackers looted a French bank of more than one million dollars in 2006.”

Sue shook her head in amazement.

“Since your firewall and antivirus software didn’t spot whatever it is, it’s something off the charts,” Jeff said, rubbing his forehead, trying to ease his exhaustion away. “Something new, or something very sneaky — perhaps something targeted specifically at you. Any business makes enemies.”

“I hadn’t considered that.” Sue shifted in her chair and pointed at Jeff’s computer screen.“But you think this is Russian.”

“I can’t really put my finger on it. I’ve been able to read some of the code, and it’s just got a Russian feel to it.”

“Maybe somebody copied some Russian code.”

“Could be, could be. But like I said, the Russians have lots of computer-savvy people, and they lease themselves out to criminal groups.”

“You think something like that happened to us?”

“I can’t say at this point. I see sophisticated along with sloppy work. The virus might have been after your data or bank records, but something went wrong because the code was carelessly written.”

“So you think this is about our financial data?”

Jeff grinned. “I don’t know. I’m just speculating here. It might also be an attack meant to create the destruction it’s causing, or something gone awry. It’s possible it steals information, sends it out, then destroys itself to cover its tracks. I just don’t know enough yet.”

Harold was long gone and no one was working in the outside offices. The building was quiet, almost as if it were asleep. “Let’s get some more coffee,” Sue said. In the break room she emptied the coffee machine, rinsed out the pot, filled it with bottled water, opened a container of coffee, and placed it into a new filter. She turned the machine on, then leaned back against the counter to wait. “So you still play video games,” she said with an amused look.

Jeff smiled. “My secret vice. Actually, it’s all related. At least that’s what I tell myself. I prefer online first-person shooting scenarios. It’s how I deal with stress and it’s something I can do anywhere. I also like brainteasers.”

“That’s where your work comes in.”

“Right. I hate to lose. I’ll stick with a virus until I have it figured out, no matter how long it takes.”

Sue arched an eyebrow. “That must get expensive for the client.”

He shook his head. “No, there’s a point beyond which it makes no sense to keep billing. After I’ve fixed the problem, though, I’ll take the virus home and work on it there until I’ve got it.” He met her eyes. “How long have you been here?”

Sue gave him her nonoffice smile. “Just over four years.” Pouring them each a fresh cup of strong coffee, she motioned to Jeff to sit down at the well-used table. Placing his coffee in front of him, she seated herself, took a sip, and sighed with satisfaction before continuing, “I’m from northern California, went to UC Berkeley for computer science. I worked at Microsoft, then took a job in San Francisco before moving here. I’ve worked at Cohen ever since. Until Saturday, it was a good job. Greene’s a pain sometimes, but as long as the system works, he leaves us alone, and Harold has no life away from work. Sadly, that makes two of us. And so you don’t have to ask, my dad’s white and my mom is third-generation San Francisco Chinese. Big scandal in the family. What about you?”

“I’m from Philly originally. I majored in math, enjoyed computer science, so went to the University of Michigan for my Ph.D.”

Sue flashed that friendly smile again. “I have to say, Jeff, you certainly don’t look like a computer geek.”

He laughed. “Genetics, mostly, though I played rugby in college and football in high school.”

“Then what?”

“I taught at Carnegie Mellon, but like almost everybody who isn’t a suck-up, it became clear I wouldn’t get tenure. I went to work for the Cyber Security Division at the CIA, in 1998.”

Sue lit up. “A spook, huh?”

“Hardly,” Jeff said, eager to discourage any romantic notions about his CIA work. “I worked in a crummy office just like yours, only buried in the basement at Langley. Technically I was head of a three-man team called the Cyberterrorism Unit, but my two assistants were always off doing standard IT work for the division.”

“What’d they have you doing, or can’t you say?”

“No, I can talk about my duties, within reason,” Jeff said. “The only danger is I’d bore you to death.”

“I’m listening.”

“Trust me, it wasn’t glamorous.” He filled her in on his years at the Company, telling her he’d held no illusions when he was recruited for the position. “Government work is government work. But I figured it couldn’t possibly be worse than academia. I was wrong.”

Though the threat to the Internet was real enough, at that time it was considered to be largely abstract. The Company budget was allocated primarily to the traditional physical threats. When it came to computers and the Internet, the threat was generally perceived as the possible physical destruction of facilities.

As their primary mission, Jeff and his truncated team worked on recovering data from computers seized from suspects and known terrorists. But they were also responsible for tracking the use of the Internet for terrorist activities and for potential threats.

During the years of his employment, as the Internet grew and spread its tentacles into every aspect of American life and the world community, the potential for a cyber-terrorist attack rose exponentially. The safety of the Internet, and of those computers connected to it, was dependent solely on the security of each individual computer that formed part of the network.

Jeff had certainly seen the threat. He had reasoned that as more government agencies conducted both external and internal business through the Internet, as more banks came online, as nuclear power plants continued linking to one another, and as the U.S. military came to increasingly rely on the Internet and computers to conduct its operations, his unit would receive greater resources and command more attention. He’d been wrong.

The irony was that the Internet had originally been developed as a national security system. In the 1960s, the Department of Defense had been concerned about the vulnerability of its mainframe computers — back in the days when all computers were mainframes — and of its increasingly computer-linked communications system. Several well-placed ICBMs, or even one at a critical point, could potentially cripple America’s ability to defend itself. The air force was especially concerned about maintaining real-time control over its nuclear missiles.

What then emerged was a government-funded system of interconnected computer redundancy. The idea was that even if several computer hubs at key installations were nuked, the system, the actual Internet, would reroute itself around them. In theory, like the multiheaded Hydra of Greek mythology, it would be impossible to defeat. It might be slow, it might electronically hiccup, but the system would function. Jeff wasn’t so sure. The designers had only considered outside threats. They’d never contemplated the ultimate digital universe they’d created, or that the real threat to the Internet might well come from within.

Although the Internet had proven itself enormously popular with the worldwide community and had become increasingly vital to the lives of individuals and the welfare of Fortune 500 companies, interest in safeguarding it wasn’t as high as it ought to be. Jeff was convinced that it would take a significant failure of the system or a coordinated cyber-attack to awaken everyone. Just as it had been impossible to put the United States on a proper war footing before Pearl Harbor, the same fate seemed to await the future of Internet security. No one liked being Cassandra, but he’d found himself playing that role, seen as an alarmist while his warnings were ignored.

Jeff dragged his thoughts back to the present. “Though my primary concern was cyber-security, I knew the Internet could be used to organize and coordinate terrorist attacks,” he told Sue, taking up where he’d left off. “I wore out my welcome arguing for resources. I finally decided that only a seriously mounted terrorist attack against us with significant damage against a target that mattered was going to shake the lethargy of the intelligence community.”

“I guess we got that on 9/11, didn’t we?” Jeff seemed to wince, and for a moment Sue feared she’d misspoken.

After a pause he said, “You’d think so, but I’m still not sure they got the point.”

Sue freshened their coffee and pushed the container of skim milk closer to Jeff. “Go on,” she encouraged.

Jeff prepared his coffee as he continued, “In those days I spent a lot of nights trolling hacker chat rooms looking for signs of a plot.”

“Not much of a social life.”

Jeff smiled. “No. Probably about as active as yours.”

“I might surprise you.” She pointed her raised cup toward him. “But finish the story. I’m waiting for the part about bosses not listening.”

Jeff looked away. How much did he really want to say? He’d avoided the subject until now. But maybe it would be good to talk about it.

First he told her how for most of 2001, he and his team, when available, worked to retrieve information from the hard-drive disks sent to him. Seized from various terrorists or terrorist suspects by a wide range of agencies throughout the world, the disks, or copies of them, had ended up in the hands of the CIA. If British SAS captured an IRA suspect, the hard drive from his computer, or its clone, would at some point find its way to Jeff’s desk. It was the same for the Mossad. Even the CIA’s own meager foreign-agent force produced disks from time to time.

As is generally the case in intelligence, the individual bits of data he produced from these sources by themselves meant little. Once he plucked them from the disks, though, they were fed into a master program by his unit, where they might, or might not, assume their proper place in the database about the terrorist world. He never knew. In fact, he had no idea if anyone was routinely consulting the growing body of data his unit was compiling on the operations of various worldwide terror groups.

“So what happened?” Sue asked. Jeff saw how eager she was and wondered for a moment how she’d react to the whole story.

“I really can’t go into it. Let’s just say, my boss and I had a disagreement, and I left.”

“There’s a story there you’ll have to trust me with sometime,” she said mischievously. “Is that when you started your own company?”

“Yes,” Jeff said, glad to change the subject. “Turns out all those contacts I made with the Company were good for something. It’s been a bigger success than I ever expected. One job after another. So no complaints there.” He sipped his coffee and turned to the problem at hand. “Let’s get back to you. The bad news is that your records, financial as well as work product, are all but a total loss from what I can see. I keep holding out hope they’ll turn up somewhere, but I don’t think so.”

“Is there anything you can do for us?” She looked hopeful and he hated having to disappoint her.

“I’m trying to identify the virus sufficiently so that we can be certain it’s not in your nightly or weekly backup. With that information we can determine if they’re clean.” He held up a hand of caution at seeing her become crestfallen. “I haven’t found a hint of when you picked this up, so I can’t tell from the time frame which, if any, of your backups are clean. It could have been lurking in there a very long time.”

Sue bit her lower lip. “I was afraid that might be the case.” She thought a moment, then gave him a wan smile. “So the worst-case scenario is that our current computers are fried. Useless. Whether or not we can recover the data from the backups, I’ll still have to install a brand-new system. It will kill me.” She made a face at the very thought of it. “It’s going to take weeks to physically put everything in place, then load and link the software, then at least a month to get all the bugs out. And we have to know how to find this virus before I can activate it with our old data so that someone doesn’t inadvertently reintroduce it. I don’t even want to think about that.” She looked into his eyes. “Save me from it all, will you? I’ll be very grateful.” She drained her coffee, then yawned. “Have you noticed these marathon sessions are getting tougher and tougher, the older you get?”

“Give me a break, Sue. You’re a kid compared to me.”

Sue smiled. “It’s been good talking, though. If I get canned, I might come looking for a job.”

“It won’t come to that, I’m sure,” he said, though it wouldn’t surprise him if she ended up being the scapegoat. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d seen that happen.

“I might come looking anyway.” With that, she gave him a warm smile and left for the IT Center, her short hair bouncing, lean hips swinging.

Back at the office a bit later, Jeff asked if she’d found anything useful.

“Almost nothing.” She grimaced. “I examined the logs. As I’m sure you know, we’re hit thousands of times a day by malware looking for a vulnerability. Some of it’s generated by a living hacker, but most are by automated worms, trolling the Internet. It was a bit daunting, realizing how under assault we constantly are, but I didn’t see any failure in our protection. This obviously got through, but I can’t see when or how. Wish I could be more help.”

“And Harold?”

“I’ve had him reimaging the lawyer workstations and laptop systems in the office with clean system installs of the operating system and necessary applications. He’s also checking the e-mail archives and database for signs of tampering.” She yawned, covering her mouth with the back of a hand. “Last, but not least, I’ve got him screening all the complaint calls we’re getting from associates. They don’t pay me enough to do that.”

She hesitated as if considering something, then said, “I’ve been meaning to mention a string I came across in your printouts, but you were awfully busy. I don’t think it’s anything important, but look at this.” Jeff leaned over and read:

Jeff realized he’d missed the text in his earlier scan. Sometimes the clues to a cracker were in the ego parts, those sections of code about himself he couldn’t resist inserting. “I never saw that. What is it?”

“Don’t laugh, but I think it’s leet-speak,” she said, straightening up.

Leet-speak was hacker language. Malware authors often left their calling cards in their code, even if it was only for them and other hackers to see. Since this one was originally encrypted, it was obviously not meant for the eyes of security investigators.

“It’s ‘Super Freak,’” Sue said, dropping her arms.

“‘Super Freak’? The song?”

“I think so.” Sue wrinkled her brow. “How does it go? ‘She’s a very kinky girl, the kind you don’t take home to mother.” Sue’s singing voice was surprising deep and guttural. Now that she had the words and the tune, she was really getting into the song, swinging her hips, raising her voice. “Yeah! I’ve still got it! Our hacker likes Rick James punk funk. He’s not all bad.”

“Aren’t you a bit young to know Rick James? ‘Super Freak’ was … what? Sometime in the early ’80s?”

“Rick James is classic.”

Jeff looked back at the screen. “Okay, ‘Super Freak.’ But what does it mean? Is that the name of the virus? Or the cracker’s handle? Someone who’s a Rick James fan?”

“Super Freak” might be significant, then again it might not, Jeff thought. Some virus code changed hands so many times all kinds of leet-speak from script kiddies crept in. It might not be connected to the virus’s author at all.

“It might be his cyber handle,” Sue suggested. “You should be looking for it in any code you find. I’ll see if I can turn anything up in hacker chat rooms later.” She yawned again. “I’m beat.” She gave him a winning smile. “I’m going to lie down for a bit. I haven’t pulled an all-nighter since college.” She turned and walked away toward the couch, stretching as she did.

“No problem,” Jeff murmured. “I’ll probably lie down a bit later myself. I’ve still got some juice, though, and will feel better if I can get something definite before taking a real break. Your boss will ask, I’m certain.” He looked over at Sue; she was already asleep.

10

Daryl Haugen was given full access to the IT center in the basement of Mercy Hospital, where she found the staff cooperative. They’d taken the deaths of patients personally. Winfield had dropped by several times, but she had nothing to give him. Working not far from a furnace at an unused station, it had taken nearly a day of work to unlock the code she detected in the server. Yet, so far, she’d turned up nothing useful.

She felt the adrenaline coursing through her despite the long hours. These crackers were so full of themselves, so certain they could fool everything, she went after them with a vengeance. She’d never been able to tolerate such self-satisfaction. She found it interesting that George Carlton, officially the man responsible for stopping this sort of thing, was no less egocentric. For some time she’d thought he was just pitching his department when he crowed about his accomplishments, but she’d come to realize he actually believed he was doing an effective job. Contempt scarcely described her true feelings toward him.

Something had scrambled the hospital medication program; she just couldn’t identify it. Her staff in Virginia was on this, but thus far they’d come up with nothing useful. The more people of talent and skill she had engaged, the sooner they’d have a solution, so she’d been glad Jeff Aiken was available. He was bright, creative, and hardworking. From her experience she knew he had the knack of thinking outside the box.

Daryl had located suspect code from a corrupted registry file and was now running it through a string analyzer, a program that dumped any data values in the file that could be represented with a printable character. Many code values translated to printable characters so there was a lot of garbage, but she also saw strings the programmer had in the code that referenced registry settings and files. Programmers often left debugging code that included messages in place that would be revealed in the string output. It took Daryl a few minutes to go over the strings, which largely looked like this:

As she scanned the text, Daryl spotted a few strings that vaguely resembled words, but weren’t quite English. One grabbed her attention because it looked as if it contained COM, the domain of most Internet sites:

But it was missing a separating dot between ABK and COM that would show up if the string were actually a universal resource locator, or URL, such as ABK.COM. Had the programmer left out the period for some reason? Perhaps it was a mistake or an attempt to hide that it was a URL. Trying to find clues and vaguely feeling as if there was more to the snippet, she continued examining it, letting her mind take her where it would.

Intuition struck. Picking up her pen, she wrote the letters backward in her notebook:

Of course! That was “Moscow,” written in Cyrillic.

Moscow! Why would that be a string? She searched for other clues in the text around it but found nothing. And why would a Russian hacker want to change the medication program in an American hospital?

She shot out of her chair and began to pace. It made no sense.

Of course the hacker could have copied code originally written by a Russian. But if it was Russian, the purpose of the virus should have been financial, since that’s what most Russian malware was about.

Unless this was something else.

Daryl had been a child prodigy, smart as a whip from the first. Her parents, both professors at Stanford University, had encouraged her wide-ranging interests from the time she was a toddler. As their only child, she’d received undivided love and attention. So easily had things come to her, the child Daryl had been surprised to realize how slow her classmates were, even in the accelerated classes she attended. As she moved into her preteens, she finally found her place at a prestigious academy.

Under the tutelage of a teacher from Spain, she’d discovered a natural affinity for language. Before she was twelve years old, she spoke Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian fluently. The transition into Latin and French in her teens was seamless. For a time her parents were convinced she would become a linguist, and they accepted that as her natural vocation.

But Daryl also enjoyed mathematics and computers. As each drew her increasing interest, she found herself more and more in the world of boys. When she began to blossom at age fifteen, even the geeks with whom she spent most of her days noticed, though they were too awkward and shy to do anything, a situation she thought was just as well. The last thing she wanted was a collection of panting admirers getting in the way of her real loves, numbers and the computer.

Daryl had gone to MIT at seventeen, then done her Ph.D. work at Stanford, while living with her parents. That had been nice, seeing them as adults, as equals. She’d come to appreciate the remarkable upbringing they’d given her. As she neared completion of her graduate work, Daryl had considered what to do. She’d always wanted to get the bad guys and briefly considered applying to the FBI. In the end she went with the National Security Agency, which had a greater use for her particular skills. The NSA intercepted foreign communications to develop intelligence information and relied extensively on computers to make it all happen.

Daryl had always been most comfortable working alone, though consulting with Jeff Aiken had come naturally. In recent years she’d stayed in routine business contact with him, especially when working on a new virus.

They had met at Langley, in the old CIA, the Company, before the 9/11 fiasco and the creation of Homeland Security, back in the days when the CIA thought it knew everything. She’d been sent from NSA as part of a show committee of cooperation. In fact, none of the American intelligence agencies cooperated significantly with one another, not the FBI, DIA, NSA, or CIA. But they were routinely admonished to cooperate, so committees such as hers were created, and meetings such as the one where she’d met Jeff were held from time to time.

“See if you can find anyone there,” her boss had instructed, meaning, see if she could connect with someone useful, willing to share information despite the unofficial policy against such cooperation. Jeff had been a new face so she’d taken the open seat next to him, separated by the corner of the conference table.

Jeff was a handsome man, one who took care of himself, she noticed as she waited for the meeting to start. Not at all like most of the others in the room. He placed a mug of black coffee on the coaster before him, then said, “Could you hand me the Sweet’n Low, please?”

The bowl was to her left. She’d reached over and handed him a pink packet. The moment their fingers touched, an electric shock went through her body. His hand hesitated; she was certain he felt the same thing. She looked at his clear gray eyes. He glanced at hers, then looked away. Clumsily opening the sweetener, he poured it into the mug, spilling almost as much as he put in the coffee. “I’ll need a napkin. I’m all thumbs today,” he’d said without meeting her eye.

During Daryl’s junior year at MIT, when she was 19, she’d been heavily courted by the scion to one of America’s wealthiest and oldest families. With a name embarrassingly long and followed with the number IV, he was considered the most desirable catch on campus. When her dorm sisters first realized that “Four” was interested in their nerdy roommate, they’d been envious.

Daryl had never before been courted, not like that, and found the experience interesting as a form of minor cultural ritual. Four was pleasant when he wanted to be but, she’d told her mother, not really quite smart enough for MIT. She wondered why he’d come.

“Because Dad wanted me to attend Yale,” he’d told her one evening when she asked. “Anyway, I like it here, better since meeting you.”

That night they’d gone to bed for the first, and only, time. In his room Four had stopped her from undressing, telling her he wanted the privilege for himself. She’d stood unmoving as he slowly unbuttoned and unzipped her out of her winter clothing. She’d observed the experience as if it were occurring to someone else, as if she were standing to the side. When at last she was down to her bra and panties, Four had pressed her to the bed, removed his clothes, then lay beside her. Then he slowly removed her bra and panties, breathing heavily as if lost in a trance.

It was January, and from the uncovered window silver moonlight spread across her now nude body. Four stopped as she lay naked and said over and over, “Magnificent. Magnificent.”

The sex was better than she’d expected. Daryl could see why a woman might get excited over it, but afterward Four had been distant, as if wrapped in his own world. He called repeatedly after that night, but she’d never gone out with him again. She understood what was going on and was not flattered.

Throughout their weeks of dating, Four had repeatedly spoken of her beauty. Then he had worshipped at its altar. She had no desire to be any man’s idol. From that night forward she committed herself to her work. No more dating, no more pawing. She wore baggy clothes, no makeup, and buried herself in her studies.

She counted herself the better for the experience. Four, she realized, had been full of himself, certain he was God’s gift to women, to her, to the world, when in fact he was a self-satisfied, egocentric snob. She considered herself well rid of him, and from this had come her utter contempt for egocentrics.

Four had not taken rejection well. He spread stories that Daryl was a slut, that he’d dropped her because she’d cheated on him. His stories only seemed to increase the attention of the other male students, and no hiding beneath oversize clothes could conceal her obvious beauty and latent sexuality.

As a release, and because she’d discovered her aptitude for sport, Daryl played intramural soccer after moving to Stanford for graduate work. She threw herself into the game and, if not the star of the team, was taken seriously as a player. On weekends she backpacked and hiked throughout northern California and parts of Nevada. She skied at every opportunity.

When Daryl first met Jeff, she was working in cyber-security, performing virus analysis, at that time a new field. A rising star in the NSA, she’d played a major role in identifying the hackers of two high-profile viruses. Overall, though, she was bored and generally annoyed by the obvious attention of men to her physical appearance. She’d learned, however, that it could work to her advantage. As for marriage and family, she had her work and found it endlessly fascinating.

After that first meeting, she’d seen Jeff at two others. Following the third a small group had gone for coffee together. It devolved into just the two of them. Their conversation had been on the merits of the Windows operating system versus that of the Macintosh, and in such detail they’d driven the others away. Not once, she realized, had he looked at her breasts, and for the first time since they’d developed, she was disappointed. What was the point of great tits if a man who interested you didn’t notice?

Over the telephone she’d once complained about it to her mom, a woman of considerable beauty herself. “The ones you don’t want to notice, will; the once you’d like to notice usually won’t. Get used to it,” she’d told her daughter.

Daryl and Jeff had reached that point where young couples talk about themselves. She’d gone first. When it was Jeff’s turn, he told her how he’d been raised by two elderly grandparents who had doted on him. “It sounds lonely,” she’d said.

“They were awfully good people, and very loving. They passed before I was graduated from college. I’ve been mostly on my own since, until recently that is.” He’d brightened, then told her about his girlfriend, Cynthia. That had been the end of any thoughts she’d had about the two of them.

After that they worked together from time to time. At one juncture he’d provided her with significant information unofficially. A few months later, she’d done the same. From then on they’d formed a fast and close working relationship, unfettered by his relationship with Cynthia.

She’d learned through a mutual friend of Cynthia’s death and had, in her subsequent contacts with Jeff, noticed the change in him. Where once he’d frequently been lighthearted, now he was somber. She regretted that she’d never found the proper moment to express her condolences at his loss.

She was looking forward to seeing him, especially as she was convinced he was the one person who could help her with this virus. As for the rest, well, time would tell.

11

With a touch of distaste Maria Braga watched the scraggly-haired young man enter.

The Euro Internet Café, just two blocks from Copacabana Beach in Rio, catered largely to the tourists who walked by and to certain Cariocas who didn’t have a computer of their own. She knew both types at a glance. The tourists were dressed in fresh beach attire, while the locals were primarily diligent, well-scrubbed students. With six computers and one booth for international telephone calls crammed into the long, narrow room, Maria made an adequate living for herself and her daughter. In the four years she’d run the café, she’d only been robbed once.

The young man’s name was Nicolau. Maria thought he was weird. She didn’t like the way he looked at her, staring at her modestly covered breasts as if she were naked. She was certain he was some kind of pervert.

And he was a nerd. She could tell this guy knew all about computers. He’d probably built his own at home or, at least, bought the very latest models. From the looks of his expensive watch, he could afford it. He didn’t have to use hers, so why did he?

Nicolau rarely stayed at the station more than three or four minutes. That alone was strange. He was up to something, but she had no idea what. She’d thought about charging him more — maybe he’d go somewhere else — but her fees were posted.

Nineteen-year-old Nicolau da Costa was a hacker. His father was a senior vice president with Banco Central do Brasil, while his mother ran a modest flower shop on Avenida Nossa Senhora de Cobacabana. Nicolau spent his nights at his computer playing video games or online in various chat rooms, exchanging virus code, talking endlessly about creating a virus that everyone in the world would know, but wouldn’t cause enough damage to get him arrested.

He’d found it wasn’t that easy. More than once he’d been on the verge of launching a virus, but had always held back. Brazilian prisons were notorious. He had nightmares about ending up in one. You never knew when the authorities might decide to make an example of someone. Even his father wouldn’t be able to help.

Every once in a while, though, a job came along. This was the fifth in less than a month. He dropped onto the chair and checked to confirm that the computer was connected to the Internet. He looked back at Maria up front, then slipped his floppy into the computer and launched the code. The e-mail had told him to leave the floppy in place for three minutes. As he waited, he browsed two Web sites, then, satisfied, extracted the floppy.

Now he entered his Yahoo e-mail account and sent the following message.

He typed in the address, careful that no one was looking.

At the counter Nicolau smiled as he counted out the coins for his time. Nicolau thought Maria was hot, but wondered if she had been raised in a convent. He and his friends talked about traditional girls like that, though none of them had ever met one who had been. She sure dressed like a nun.

12

Stepping outside the building, Jeff was surprised to see it was midmorning. A slight breeze was coming in off the Atlantic and the air was clear, invigorating after the sterility of the IT Center. He walked around the corner to a deli he’d spotted earlier, where Daryl had agreed to meet him. He was looking forward to seeing her again. Quite apart from her ability to help him in his work, he’d always enjoyed her company.

For the last day the world outside had not existed for him. Nothing mattered but the pixels on the screen, accessing the operating system, the story he discovered as he inched his way toward solving the problem, the bits of information that formed together in time to crack the mystery, and the final recovery of the blocked, stolen, or destroyed data. Though this one was not solved — not yet.

Daryl was due any minute. As he entered, he realized that the deli might have been out of Seinfeld, with a dozen people ensconced in booths or sitting on stools. He took an end booth, placed an order for coffee, then sat drinking as he waited.

He felt bad about leaving Sue with such a mess, but he had to take a break and rest to think clearly. He glanced over at two men and one woman working on laptops with Wi-Fi and wondered how many viruses each had without knowing it. Two other men in business suits were sitting at a small table having an animated conversation. From the few words he picked up they were talking baseball. Apparently the Yankees were losing.

As a barista cleared a table beside him, Daryl Haugen entered, glancing first left, then right. She was wearing her usual garb of jeans, with a tight white blouse. He waved a hand; she spotted him, smiled warmly, and came over. Sitting across from him, she placed a half-empty bottle of water on the table, then flopped her laptop bag onto the floor. She looked stressed, very, very tired — and lovely.

There was no denying her beauty. He’d once sat in a meeting, bored out of his mind, only to realize he’d been staring at her. Her returning look had not been pleasant, and he’d been careful ever since. Still, simply being with her was an appealing experience.

For an instant he couldn’t help comparing her to Sue. Daryl had a freshness, a spontaneous way of behaving, about her that was quite engaging. Sue was more artifice and calculation. The two women could not have been more different, and his response to each was night and day. He felt relaxed and open around Daryl, but on guard with Sue, making sure that he kept within the bounds of professional interaction.

“No coffee?” he asked.

She shook her head. “No. I had plenty earlier. It gets me wired if I’m not careful. How have you been? How’s it going in the cold, cold world of private enterprise?”

In the years since he’d left the CIA the two had run into each other at the occasional conference. But mostly they’d exchanged e-mails and talked over the phone about difficult problems they’d encountered. Jeff was by nature a puzzle solver, while Daryl was the most gifted computer expert he’d ever encountered. Together they made a great team, but their different lines of work didn’t offer many opportunities for collaboration.

“I’m doing fine,” he said. “Business continues to boom. I do it all myself so I don’t have to waste time with employees. It keeps me busy. My main problem is reminding myself to keep increasing my fees. Computer security is a pretty hot topic for many companies. But who am I telling? How do you like CERT?”

“It’s US-CERT, and I like it a lot.” She grinned and for a moment the tension in her face vanished.

In the wake of 9/11 came recognition that cyberspace was vulnerable to attack and that something needed to be done. The new Department of Homeland Security lumped together a number of previously independent and disparate groups in various agencies. Related to that, but also independent of it, in early 2003, the president issued a directive creating the National Cyberspace Security Response System and within it the United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team, labeled in government jargon US-CERT. As the operational arm of the National Cyber Security Division, its primary objective was to create a strategic framework to prevent cyber-attacks against U.S. computer-oriented infrastructure.

A different organization, known as CERT, had been created earlier, in response to the infamous Morris worm, which had brought 10 percent of Internet systems to a halt in 1988. Housed at and part of the development center at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, it held a less audacious mandate. CERT was intended to coordinate communication among the various cyber experts to prevent future virus outbreaks, though with the advent of 9/11, the older CERT’s profile had significantly increased.

But the total effect of so many organizations with overlapping jurisdictions hadn’t improved America’s defenses; instead, it created chaos. Turf wars intensified rather than easing, and obvious measures took months or years of discussion and debate to implement — if at all — because it wasn’t clear which organization was ultimately accountable. In Jeff’s view, it was all tragic and pointless. The threat was self-evident. Only those with the power to do something about it seemed unaware.

How anyone could do nothing in the face of such an obvious threat was something he could never comprehend or accept. The anger he felt whenever he thought of it burned at him, but he could do nothing more than what he’d already done and continued to do, every workday. Sometimes he wanted to scream, but he knew no one would listen. He’d just be defined as a kook and in consequence lose any effectiveness he had. This was, he now realized, one more reason why he’d made a point to stay in contact with Daryl.

“I didn’t know you were a field operative,” Jeff said.

She gave him a quirky smile. “I have a very competent team. Between my laptop, e-mail, and cell phone, we’re in constant contact.” She paused. “And I needed to see this situation for myself.”

“How do you like Homeland Security?” he asked with a knowing smile.

Daryl grimaced. “The bureaucracy can be wearing, but my part’s pretty good and getting better. I’m surprised anyone’s got time to work.”

“You’re with my old friend George?”

“With? We consult one another. I don’t spend any more time with him than I need to.”

“How’s that going?” he asked, though he had no doubt of the answer. She despised the man as much as he did.

“Did I mention bureaucracy?” She made a face. “Don’t get me going, though honestly, when it comes to that group and their maneuvering for power, he’s better than some I could name. It’s just that I feel like I’m talking into an empty oil drum most of the time. All I hear is my own echo back. Commercial attacks are up steeply, but both he and the department don’t really seem to care about that all that much. Lots of people and companies are losing information that costs them money. These high-tech crime groups in Russia are getting fat off of us, and nobody’s made them a priority.”

“I hear the Company ran another simulated attack last summer.” Such information was common knowledge in the elite world of cyber-security Jeff occupied. He’d been waiting to ask someone in the know about it. “What was the outcome?”

She laughed. “It was like all the ones before Silent Horizon in 2005 or Operation Cyber Storms I, II, in 2006 and then Cyber Storm III in 2009. CIA and DHS rigged the tests so completely there was no way they couldn’t defend. They established perimeters no real attacker would ever follow while everyone defending a system against penetration knew the attack was coming, and what the rules of the game were. It was ludicrous, but management took great comfort from the results. They’re back to worrying about terrorists blowing up a computer system. It’s like the old FBI chasing bank robbers while the Mafia was running rampant. DHS does what its component parts have always done. There’s an extraordinary lack of imagination there.” Daryl shook her head, still amazed at the stupidity of it all.

“It’s got, what? More than two hundred thousand employees? That’s enough manpower to do the job right.”

“That’s it,” Daryl confirmed. “Cyber-security is so far down the totem pole we hardly count. If it wasn’t for the work of the private-computer and Internet-security companies, we’d be getting nowhere.” She took a pull of water. “Did you read about the airplane?”

Jeff shook his head. “I’ve been in a cocoon. What happened?”

“As I understand it, a British Airways flight from London to New York had an incident over the Atlantic.”

“Don’t tell me it was a Boeing 787?” Jeff had long anticipated such an event given its heavy dependence on computers.

“Yes, indeed, a fly-by-wire, computer-designed-and-operated aircraft.”

“What happened?”

“Apparently the plane began to climb very slowly, and the airspeed dropped while on autopilot. The crew was not alerted and didn’t recognize their danger until it was nearly too late. As it was, the plane stalled at forty thousand feet.”

“Jesus.” Jeff shook his head in disbelief. “Like the Spanair crash last year they think was caused by malware.”

“Yes. They were lucky they were so high. They needed all but a couple thousand of those feet to recover.”

“What happened?”

“We don’t know, but I understand they were only able to save the airplane by rebooting the controlling computer in flight.”

“That took nerve.” Jeff was impressed. Someone had known what to do when the chips were down and had acted on that knowledge.

“More than you can imagine. They had no command while the computer was off-line. There is no mechanical backup to the controls. That plane fell like a rock.”

Jeff gave a low whistle. “That’s a bright crew to manage something like that, under those conditions.”

Daryl raised an eyebrow. “They deserve a medal. But you haven’t heard the best part. When they tried to reboot, the computer locked up. They had to power off. It’s a miracle they got enough control back in time.”

My God, Jeff thought. He couldn’t imagine anyone having the presence of mind to pull off a stunt like that in such an emergency. Those men really did deserve a medal. Still, those systems should have been secure from infection, and fail-safes should have prevented the need for manual intervention. “What about the redundant systems?”

“They didn’t work.” She paused. “There were eight deaths. They managed to pull out of the dive that followed the stall, but the plane shot up to over fifty thousand feet before nosing down again. The autopilot was handling the roller-coaster ride, but still … No one in back was prepared, and most were unbuckled. Passengers were knocked around like pieces of cordwood. Five of the deaths were small children. They were thrown around like missiles. The adult deaths were from broken necks and internal injuries. One passenger is paralyzed. Many others were seriously injured.”

“Welcome to the twenty-first century.” Jeff ran his hand through his hair, then picked up his coffee. Cold.

Daryl nodded. “So … tell me what you’ve found.”

Jeff filled her in on what he knew so far. US-CERT worked cooperatively with the Cyber Security Industry Alliance, formed by Symantec and McAfee among others, as well as with the Internet-security departments of every major corporation, and computer and software giants such as IBM’s Internet Security Systems and Microsoft. It was in everyone’s interest to cooperate. That was one reason she’d been willing to meet him when he told her he’d run across something unusual. As he spoke, she nodded, taking an occasional sip of water. When he told her about the words to the song “Super Freak,” though, she put her water bottle down.

“I just ran into that same name this morning at Mercy Hospital,” she said when he stopped. “It was spelled S-U-P-E-R-P-H-R-E-A-K.”

It was as if a piece of an especially difficult puzzle had fallen into place. “I haven’t seen the name under any spelling, just the disguised words from the song ‘Super Freak.’”

“I was at Mercy when when you called,” she said, talking more rapidly. “But they didn’t lose some billing or litigation records. Like I told you, four patients were killed. The program modified their medicine records and instruction. Jeff, I think we’re investigating the same virus. Did you hear about the death at a Ford assembly plant?”

He shook his head.

“I can’t be certain, but it appears the plant’s robot software picked up a virus that sat there, waiting. The virus took over without warning, causing the robots to perform in nonscripted ways. We think that’s when the worker was knocked onto the assembly-line railing. In response, the company powered down, then unplugged the robots. Their server was fried. They installed a replacement and are reloading the software. It looks like they’d be all right except for the death, of course, and the loss of about two weeks’ production. The financial cost to them will be in the tens of millions.”

Jeff was puzzled. “I thought industry networks were off-line for security purposes.”

“They mostly are and this one was. I talked to the IT manager again this morning. They traced the original virus to a software engineer’s laptop. He was in the habit of downloading whatever he was working on, then taking it home with him. He picked up the virus there when he used the same laptop to access the Internet. When he hooked it up at work, the worm latched onto the company’s software, planting the virus.”

Jeff thought a moment, then said, “Back to the 787 incident. Is it possible what we’re dealing with could be crafted for avionics software?”

“I don’t know,” she said, looking surprised at the thought. “It seems unlikely, but it highlights one of the problems we’re having. We don’t know what the virus is doing and what it isn’t doing. For that matter there could very well be any number of incidents about which we know nothing. The world is so computer-dependent you can’t always make the connection to one of the viruses when something happens.”

“So what’s Superphreak? Do you have any idea?”

“Not yet. I’ve got my team working on it. It could be almost anything. It could be a word left by a script kitty. It could even be the cracker’s name.” Daryl pushed away her water bottle and started drumming her fingers on the table. “It looks to me as if whoever wrote this used old code, copied and pasted to create this one. I don’t think he realized the word was there. I found parts of Superphreak in three places.”

“I think he’s Russian,” Jeff speculated. “I can’t put my finger on it, but the way some of the code is written just has that look. And, given their track record, this could well be an economic attack of some kind by Russians.”

Daryl stared at Jeff, impressed. “Good guess, Mr. Holmes. I found the word Moscow written in Cyrillic in the code not long before I ran into Superphreak.”

“So that’s it then.” Jeff experienced a moment of elation. Russians. Just as he’d thought. It felt good to have been right. “Do you have any idea how widespread this is?” He wasn’t in a position to know, but Daryl was.

“When I left for the office Monday, we had seven reports that looked suspicious. We’ve picked up more than fifty since then.”

Jeff was astounded. “It’s spreading pretty fast. Who’s working on detection and a fix?”

“I think I can safely say none of the private security companies are at this point, though they’ve been alerted and we’ve given them all the code we have. They report a higher-than-usual flood of former viruses and variants that require their attention. Superphreak hasn’t appeared in any of their honeypots and we can’t prove a connection, so they think we’re overreacting. It’s very frustrating. We’re assuming we won’t be able to figure out the vulnerabilities these things use to spread right away, or get the software companies responsible for them to release fixes anytime soon. So we were hoping to get them onto the problem immediately, but no luck.” Daryl shrugged. “But even if they did respond, the problem is, as you know, that it would take weeks to come up with signatures and patches. And that’s the best case. How long it takes for users to download and install them is another matter altogether.”

“You should push the process,” Jeff said. “You can’t just leave it to agency inertia.” He could have bit his tongue. He knew Daryl was doing everything she could.

“I’m trying.” She looked annoyed.

“Why so pessimistic?”

Daryl glanced around the room, then leaned forward. When she spoke, her voice was subdued but firm. “Because so far we’ve spotted at least ten variations of the code and we aren’t talking knockoffs. These were written with entirely different code, as if by a different cracker, but in the end they all do something very destructive. I have no idea how many variations there are. And not knowing gives me the willies.”

Jeff thought of the airliner falling out of the sky, the hospital deaths, the man killed on the assembly line. Were these just the tip of the iceberg? Mentally, he ran through a list of other dangers: nuclear-power stations, traffic-control systems, defense networks, Wall Street. The list was limitless and suddenly he felt overwhelmed. “What else?”

“It seems to be composed of three functions. The first is the exploit code that gets the virus into the system without detection. The second is the trigger. The third is the payload itself, which causes all the damage. We’ve got three variants of the exploit, five of the virus, and we’ve just started. I have no idea how many others there are.” She sighed. “Two hospitals outside of New York report their medicine distribution systems were also jumbled. We know of eleven deaths nationally so far. A small power station in Connecticut had its sluice gate turned wide open and it couldn’t be closed. By the time they figured out the problem was the computer they use to control their water release and the electricity they produce, they’d lost a significant amount of reserve capacity. It will take them two years to restore it. They didn’t have backup software and are running manually now. It’s almost laughable, but they had to recall a retired worker to show them how the system works without a computer. A nuclear power plant in Iowa had to do a mechanical shutdown to prevent a meltdown. This next one’s been kept out of the news so far, but Tucson International Airport lost its air traffic control system. Fortunately, it was during a slow period and there were no incidents. More and more is coming in every hour, but you can see why I’m not sleeping well.”

Until now, Jeff realized, he’d been focused on his client’s narrow problem. He’d not seen it as part of an expanding, and dangerous, reality. Daryl was scaring the hell out of him, and he experienced a surge of anxiety and fear he’d not felt since those last days before 9/11. “What’s the potential?”

She paused, then said, “Anything’s possible. It looks as if we’re just seeing the surface. Here’s what’s frightening me.” Jeff felt another chill shoot through his body. If Daryl was frightened, then this was even bigger than he feared. “First, we can’t detect the virus coming in, and that’s going to be a tough egg to crack. We’ve got to get the signatures written, the patches prepared, then out there, and I don’t think there’s enough time. Second, a single signature isn’t going to work. The variants are too different.”

Jeff nodded, took a sip of coffee, then explained what he’d learned, and what he didn’t yet know. When he finished Daryl groaned. “This Superphreak, if that’s the cracker’s cyber handle, could be a Chechen. Or he could be a gun for hire and working for almost anyone. The Russian mob, to name just one.” Neither of them said anything for several minutes as they absorbed what they had learned. “I’ve got more,” she finally said. “There are other propagation methods besides, or in addition to, the worms. My team is reporting they’ve found three of the variants that spread through the address book of each computer they touched, and several of the ones we’ve looked at are polymorphic or metamorphic, so they look different each time they replicate. That’s what I was getting at before.”

“One I found wanted to replicate,” Jeff confirmed. “The system went down so fast I doubt any of it got out, but that was its intention.”

“What if every variant is self-replicating?”

Jeff sat back in his chair. “I hate to bring up more bad news, but have you considered this? Whoever is spreading this virus might be still at it. They could be sending new variants out every day. I’m sorry to add to your misery, but you need to get CERT and DHS serious about this.”

Daryl threw up her hands. “I’m only one person with a small team. We’ve had six directors heading up DHS cyber-security since it was created. Almost none of them have lasted so much as a year, most only a few months. They have no clout in DHS, and if they’re in the driver’s seat when the attack comes, it could end their career.”

“This is all very familiar, isn’t it?” Jeff asked. He’d worked long enough in the government system to know what she was up against.

“I’m afraid so.” Daryl’s beautiful face was creased with worry. “We’re trying to get the industry interested. But we’re way behind the curve on this. We have no idea how many variants there are, or how many others are coming out. I lay awake last night imagining the harm that will come if we’re only seeing a small portion of the Superphreak viruses.”

“Take it easy. We’re probably overevaluating, and it’s not as bad as we fear.”

Daryl wasn’t buying it. “Look at the body count already! Superphreak, if that’s what’s causing this, is already the most deadly virus ever unleashed, and it’s just starting. That’s why I’m in Manhattan. There are dead people here because of this thing. We have no idea of the long-term harm Superphreak can cause.” She paused, then leaned across the table, her blond hair falling forward. “Let me tell you what I think. What we need to do is to stop this at the source.”

“How?” Despite himself, Jeff knew she was right. He’d had the same thought late the night before, but hadn’t wanted to admit it until she’d said it aloud.

“Find the cracker in his home, get distribution stopped at the wellspring, then learn from him or his computers exactly how many variants there are. If we had that information, I could rush through the fix and the antivirus changes, and we could stop this thing in its tracks.”

Jeff smiled. “You have a black-ops team that does that?”

“Hell, no,” Daryl said grimly, “but we sure as hell need one.”

13

Exhausted as he was, Jeff wanted nothing so much as to go straight to his hotel room, but there was no denying this. It had to be done.

Two blocks to the west he located a subway, bought a MetroCard, then rode the train downtown. The car was clean, cleaner than he recalled from his summer of weekend trips here that ill-fated year.

For two years, Jeff had been in a serious relationship with Cynthia Wheel. They’d lived in the same complex just outside Richmond, Virginia, and had met at the gym they shared. Petite with raven hair, she’d been a vivacious and bright young woman. It had been easy to settle into the life of an old married couple with her, without ever actually “doing the deed,” as she was fond of saying, especially when naked and about to suggest another bout of sexual play.

Jeff felt a real sense of loss when, in May of 2001, Cynthia’s company, ARM — Account Resources Management — of Richmond, Virginia, had transferred her to Manhattan. Jeff helped her pack, then drove her to her new apartment. “We won’t let this be the end of us,” she assured him just as he prepared to leave. “I promise.” She’d kissed him sweetly on the mouth, stepped back, flashed her winning smile, and said, “Wish me luck.”

In the months that followed, his routine was consistent. He began recording the long hours he normally gave the CIA gratis and left the office at 1:00 p.m. every Friday, to take the shuttle flight to New York City. After spending the weekend with Cynthia, he’d return home late Sunday. In August, she’d flown to see him twice, complaining of the sweltering heat in Manhattan, but by September she was thrilled as the days turned cooler with the prospect of autumn.

That August Jeff had received a disk originally seized from the ruling Taliban by one of the rival Afghan groups. He’d cracked into the disk within minutes of receiving it and saw at once that, despite its provenance, it was not Taliban. It had been prepared by a group called Al Qaeda, “the base.”

Dredging up a vague memory of Al Qaeda, Jeff remembered it was one of a number of terrorist groups on the radar screen of the Company, though it held no significance to him. He checked the terrorist database to which he routinely contributed and was brought up cold. Led by an enormously rich and shadowy figure, Osama bin Laden, Al Qaeda might not be the biggest or best-known terrorist group, but it tended to target Americans with deadly results.

For the next three days Jeff gleaned information from the disk, then carefully analyzed its contents, a role beyond his purview. Checking the master database several times, he found a dozen recent entries that seemed connected.

Next, he drafted a time line. On one side of the program he listed information by date, to analyze the data flow. On the other, he listed events in the order they were to occur. He could scarcely believe what he was seeing. He printed the program, sketched an analysis, then buzzed his boss’s secretary and asked for a meeting as soon as possible.

For the next two hours Jeff reviewed his information, tearing it apart as a critic might. The stark facts remained. Only an idiot, someone too blind to see the obvious, could fail to see what he’d uncovered. With dismay, he realized that was a good description of his boss.

George Carlton was a burly man of average height, turned soft by two decades in government bureaucracy. His sallow skin had become excessively sensitive to daylight over the years and he now burned quite easily. When he came into the office after a weekend in the country or at sea, his face would shine a bright red.

Carlton had begun his career as an FBI desk agent, moving into middle management from there. Then, for reasons never fully explained, he took a position with the CIA as manager of the Cyberterrorism — Computer Forensics Department. The move was unusual, but on paper, at least, it seemed a good fit. At that time computers and their use for terrorism was not a high priority, since there’d been no documented case of a foreign terrorist act within the continental United States, either against the supporting computers of the Internet or by using its resources. With the additions of other functions, including the Computer Science Group and its obscure Cyberterrorism Unit, Carlton’s area of power and presumed expertise steadily grew.

He was a born bureaucrat, adept at evading responsibility for errors while garnering praise for work he’d not performed. He made few enemies over the years, which served him well. But the lack of attention his department received was the greatest boon to his career. Prior to 2001, little was expected of him in the twilight world of counterterrorism in which he’d found a niche. Though he would have preferred an airy corner office on the second or third floor, he was content with his location, far from any window and deep within the center of the ground floor.

Shortly after 4:00 that afternoon Jeff was ushered in, carrying with him the proof he hoped his supervisor would find persuasive. Carlton didn’t rise as he gestured for Jeff to take a seat in front of his desk. “What have you got?” A bad boss is typically characterized as hostile, rude, and dim. Carlton was never, or at least rarely, rude; he’d been in government service too many years to be overtly hostile; and he was not stupid. For the next ten minutes Jeff laid out what he believed was going to take place on September 11, less than two weeks away.

Carlton listened with diminishing enthusiasm, then asked to see the time line. He spent a full minute examining it before commenting, “I’m confused about something. Just where do these supposed targets come from? The Statue of Liberty, the Pentagon, the World Trade Center, the White House, the Capitol, the Sears Tower, the Golden Gate Bridge, the Washington Monument.” He looked up. “Mount Rushmore? I suppose I can see the logic of the Pentagon, the other government buildings even, but Mount Rushmore? I don’t get it.”

“I admit listing all of them as possible targets is speculative, but it’s speculation based on text,” Jeff said. “Those names came from various communiqués. They’re not only after what could be called hard targets, structures connected to our government and military, but also after our economic infrastructure and landmarks.” Jeff’s mouth was dry and he found the words difficult to form. “They’re very into symbolism. And Al Qaeda’s targeted the World Trade Center previously. Their purpose with those truck explosives was to topple one of the buildings into the other, taking them both down like dominoes.”

Carlton snickered. “They were wrong, weren’t they? In fact, Al Qaeda isn’t all that effective, if you look at their track record. And they certainly seem to prefer the Horn of Africa. It’s difficult to see them posing a genuine threat to us from … where are they? Afghanistan, of all places.”

“It’s all there,” Jeff insisted, pointing at the documents he’d assembled. “Most of it, at least. Enough.” Though he was struggling to contain himself his voice rose a bit as he said, “We need to do something.”

Carlton looked at him sharply. “Have you any idea how many threats a day are processed by the Company? Each one is given a score. If I pass this one higher up, it will receive, I’m telling you categorically, the lowest-priority score that exists.”

Jeff’s heart sank. “You can’t just sit on it,” he said in near desperation.

Carlton paused. “I’m not going to sit on it, as you put it. But we need more information or no one will act. I’m going to hold on to this for a few days. Don’t be concerned. There’s plenty of time yet. In the meanwhile, see if you can get me something with meat on the bones. But be assured that either way I’ll pass it along in time.”

Driven by a mix of frustration and fear, Jeff skipped his trip to New York City that weekend, and the one after, each time telling Cynthia that as much as he wanted to see her, he was buried by a pile of work and wouldn’t be able to relax even if he did come. With a passion born of desperation he worked eighteen hours a day, every day, pulling his two assistants from their IT assignments and instilling in them his own sense of urgency as he put them to work on the project. Accessing real-time chat rooms and other sources previously identified as Al Qaeda communication channels, what emerged was a terrorist plan on the fast track. Collecting intelligence wasn’t his job and shouldn’t be necessary: what he’d already done should have unleashed the enormous resources of the Company.

By Tuesday, September 4, after preparing a far more comprehensive presentation of what he considered to be a highly credible threat to America, Jeff went directly to Carlton’s secretary. “This is urgent. Will you see to it George gets this at once? He’s expecting it.” She’d smiled stiffly and taken the file.

He didn’t like leaving it that way, but given the nature of his relationship with his boss and the bureaucracy of the Company, his hands were tied. It wasn’t how he wanted to handle it; it was how he had to handle it if he wanted anything positive to happen.

Back in his office Jeff continued with his relentless schedule, sleeping on his couch, washing up and shaving in the restroom. Carlton e-mailed him that he’d forwarded the file to the appropriate teams, but despite his effort and long hours, nothing more of consequence emerged. Beside himself with anger and frustration, he called Cynthia in Manhattan on Friday, September 7. ARM’s offices were at the World Financial Center, just across the street from the World Trade Center.

“I need you to do something for me without my going into detail,” he said, knowing Cynthia would instantly grasp the time for questions was later. “I want you not to go into work next week. Stay home, or better yet, leave the city.” The target date might get moved a day or two, so he didn’t specify Tuesday. “Can you work from home or, better yet, visit your folks?”

“Wow. Pretty short notice.” Her voice was steady and he felt reassured she’d do as he asked.

“It’s not just important. It’s vital.”

“Vital, huh?” From the beginning Cynthia had been impressed with Jeff’s serious and sober nature. Only when she finally grasped the full extent of it had she seriously begun to consider him for a husband. Her confidence in him and his judgment had continued to grow as they’d dated. “As in ‘life and death’?”

“You could say that.” Jeff fought off the sudden urge to tell her everything. He’d kept it inside for so long he was about to burst. But he couldn’t. He just couldn’t. It wasn’t so much that he was worried that he was wrong, but scared of the panic he could set off. She had to act on his warning and he was considering what he’d do next if she didn’t, but his serious answer seemed to sober her. “Okay. I’ll visit my folks. Won’t they be surprised?”

Jeff breathed a sigh of relief. “Thank you. Thank you. Make it all week, please. I want your promise that you’re leaving the city tomorrow morning. And no matter what, you won’t go to work next week.”

“Okay, I promise. Cross my heart, hope to die.” Cynthia was perplexed by the entire exchange. Was there a threat he couldn’t mention? Clearly that was his message. It couldn’t have been at her personally or he’d have said so. Given what he did for a living, that meant the threat was of a broader nature. The only thing that came to mind was a terrorist attack. Jeff was in a position to know about such things. And she also knew, from what little he’d told her over their time together, that most threats came to nothing. She had confidence in her country. Jeff was just being cautious and she loved him all the more for it. The worst part was, she could say nothing to her coworkers, not without getting Jeff fired or even indicted.

Jeff was a sober man, not given to extremes. If he told her that she needed to leave town, she was prepared to take his word for it. She considered her alternatives. None were appealing. She wasn’t about to drive to Albany and check into a motel for the week. Still, she’d promised, and a promise made was one to be kept. She decided to work from her home all week and arranged to have what she needed brought to her, claiming she was deathly ill and highly contagious.

Shortly after speaking with her, Jeff made a mental note to call Cynthia on Sunday, then attempted to meet with Carlton again, but was told he had no opening until the following week. Frantically, Jeff took to prowling the hallways near Carlton’s office and intercepted him on his way to a meeting. “Do you have any word yet on my report?” Jeff asked, keeping pace with his superior.

“Yes,” Carlton said, giving him a pointed look. “They’re giving it due consideration.”

“There’s more information that seems to nail next Tuesday down as a date and confirms a number of the targets including the Capitol, the White House, and the Pentagon.”

“I told you, I passed it along.” Carlton all but rolled his eyes. “Now I’ve got a meeting, Jeff. It’s been taken care of. Move on. You know these Arabs. They couldn’t organize a conga line.” With that, Carlton ducked into a conference room.

Jeff knew it was pointless going over Carlton’s head but he tried anyway. He knew he was making enemies, understood that he was effectively ending his government career, but he didn’t care. This was too important.

When everyone of consequence had gone home on Friday, he was left with nothing else to do but continue working throughout the weekend and into Monday with his team. Following a thirty-six-hour stretch, vainly searching for another bit of concrete proof, totally consumed by his work, Jeff lost track of time and never called Cynthia.

And so it went uneventfully all day Monday when, out of the blue, one of Cynthia’s college roommates called and suggested breakfast at Windows on the World at the World Trade Center the next morning. She knew Cynthia was about to become engaged and wanted to hear all the details. Cynthia left her apartment that morning to meet her, excited at the prospect of sharing her private hopes and dreams with the woman who had once been her best friend.

In Langley, Jeff was distracted by his cell phone, which rang, rang, rang. Digging around in his clothing, he pressed a button.

“Something terrible’s happened.” Cynthia’s voice was strained, as if she was about to cry. “I stayed home, like I promised. I did. Then Karen came to town and we went to breakfast then … then…”

In the background Jeff could hear pandemonium. “Where are you?”

“Windows on the World, the restaurant at the top of one of the Towers.”

For a moment Jeff heard and felt nothing. His body turned numb. When her voice returned, it was from far away.

“… felt something a little bit ago. The whole building just shuddered, and I thought we were going to fall over.” Her voice was quivering. He could tell she was struggling for control.

“Get out, Cynthia. Get out now!”

“I already tried!” Now she sounded panicked. “Everyone says a plane hit us! I can’t get out, Jeff. There’s fire all below us. There’s no way out. No way. I’m really scared.” She paused. When she resumed, her voice was strangely calm. “I called to tell you that I love you, just in case.”

“Go to the roof!” Jeff insisted. “They’ll bring helicopters to evacuate you.” He gripped the telephone fiercely in his sweaty hand, trying with his voice to will her into action.

“It’s jammed up there. You can’t get on top. We tried earlier.” Her voice was desperate. “Oh, Jeff. This is what you mea—”

They were cut off. Jeff tried to call back, but her cell phone had no service. He snapped on the television set in his office and saw the burning Towers. His team crept in a few minutes later. “We didn’t want to disturb you. You’d know soon enough,” one said.

The other stared at the screen, transfixed. “Nobody listened to us.”

Jeff kept calling Cynthia without connecting. The three were watching as each Tower in turn fell in a great white, billowing cloud of pulverized concrete. There had been no helicopter evacuation.

Jeff sat motionless. The cell phone snapped in his hand, the battery flying out and clattering onto the floor. His rage was almost more than he could stand. He wanted to kill Carlton and, in a flash, saw himself killing the director and all of senior CIA management too.

He shot to his feet and glared at his team, wanting with all his power to strike at them, as if they were the cause. Managing to control himself, he slumped back into his seat, the rage turning on himself, for not calling Cynthia, for not saving her, for not doing enough to save anyone. He should have made someone pay attention.

His assistant was right. No one had listened.

14

Captain Vandana Shiva lifted the binoculars to see if he could spot the offshore facility at Nagasaki as yet. He knew it was early, but he never entirely trusted computers and the Global Positioning System on which they relied. He’d begun his forty-one-year career as a seaman aboard a traditional Indian dhoni. In his mind that had been real seamanship, just the crew and the small boat against the ocean and wind. It had required skill and courage, and it was nothing like what he did now.

An uncle had liked the young Shiva and, lacking a son, financed his education. He’d done well and subsequently risen steadily in the merchant service until reaching the culmination of his career three years earlier when he’d been given command of The Illustrious Goddess, the largest supertanker ever built.

With a crude-oil cargo capacity of six hundred thousand DWT, or deadweight tongue, there had never been a ship of this size in history. More than a quarter of a mile long and nearly the width of a football field, it plied the oceans at a respectable eighteen knots. Because it drew more than twenty-six feet, few harbors in the world could accommodate the vessel, so it nearly always docked at an offshore oil facility where its enormous load of 4.5 million barrels was pumped by undersea pipe to an onshore storage facility and refining plant. This single ship contained enough energy to support a small city for one year.

Managed with a spare crew of just forty Filipino seamen, The Illustrious Goddess was only possible because of computers and modern technology. Both were needed to design and build her, both were essential to allow her to operate at sea. The ship had been controversial from the start, but her Hong Kong owner had insisted that she be the largest supertanker ever built. So huge was the vessel that it could not steam in the English Channel nor could it pass through either the Suez or Panama canals. But she was entirely suited to load her cargo off the coast of Saudi Arabia at Ras Tanura, the largest such offshore oil facility in the world, then make the passage to Japan and back, at great profit to her owner.

A ship of this size had had problems from the first. Initially she’d had an unplanned vibration that was finally identified as coming from improperly designed gears. At some expense that had been repaired. Then there’d been problems with the sides of the vessel when the ship wasn’t fully loaded. They’d found it essential to maintain a proper balance of crude oil and sea pressure to prevent dangerous cracks from appearing in the structure. Next came a problem with navigation. So immense was the vessel that it had been necessary to include the earth’s rotation when calculating its route.

The primary problem, though, had been control. She was pushed through the seas with just a single enormous screw, also the largest ever built. On most major ships two screws were considered essential to allow the ship to be properly steered and stopped in an emergency. But for reasons of cost, this ship was fitted with just one. During test trials it had proven extremely difficult to turn the ship from its course once it was at speed. Even worse, at slow speeds it couldn’t be turned at all. Nor could tugboats budge the ship when it was fully loaded.

On top of that, the ship just wouldn’t stop.

That was an exaggeration cited by critics of the owner for pushing the envelope to this extent, but in truth the ship was hard to stop indeed. Even with the propeller in full reverse, with the ship’s inertia it took twenty minutes and many miles to bring it to a halt.

All of this caused Shiva great concern. It meant every move of the ship had to be carefully scripted. It meant always thinking far ahead. It meant that smaller vessels had to get out of its course because he had no way to keep the ship from striking them. He was certain that The Illustrious Goddess had sunk small fishing vessels more than once when steaming near a coastline.

To perform his duty meant depending entirely on the computers to get it right. No expense had been spared in creating the finest software system a British company could design.

It also meant worrying all the time, which was why he was scanning the horizon for a glimpse of the Nagasaki offshore facility. The engines should go to “dead slow” any minute as The Illustrious Goddess began to reduce speed for the docking, but the ship had to be maneuvered into exact position before he lost much headway. Once the vessel slowed to a crawl, he wouldn’t be able to dock her if she wasn’t properly aligned.

But what bothered Shiva most of all was that technically even major storms were supposed to be of little concern as the loaded ship unnaturally rode the heaviest waves with scarcely any effect. To Shiva, that was wrong. The sea was the master, always. A ship of this size was arrogance; it showed a contempt for the ocean, and from that could only come a great harm.

“Sonny,” Shiva said. “Do you have it on radar?”

Sonny Olivera glanced up. “Yes, Captain. I’ve got it.”

“Well, I don’t. There’s a haze blocking it from view. Renato, shouldn’t the engines be at dead slow?”

The helmsman, Renato Arroyo, scanned the dials. “I think so, Captain. Any second now.”

Three minutes passed with no change. “This is cutting it close,” Shiva said. “What does the GPS show?”

“There’s no alert, sir. All’s normal,” Olivera said.

The ship continued plowing through the choppy seas as if in the middle of the Indian Ocean. “This isn’t right,” Shiva said finally, his seaman’s instincts telling him something was wrong. “We should be slowing by now. How far are we out?”

“Fifteen clicks, sir,” Olivera answered, his voice no longer unconcerned.

Shiva considered the situation. The engines should have gone to reduced speed at eighteen kilometers. “Check the computers.”

After a moment: “Normal readings, sir.”

Shiva began to sweat. They were well overdue to reduce speed. Aimed straight at Nagasaki harbor and land, they were going at eighteen knots. But if he went to manual, could he pull this off? He could slow the ship, but he doubted very much he could make the turn and bring it to a halt within the prescribed circle for the offshore facility to do its job. He’d never done it before and was certain he couldn’t do it without a computer. But what choice did he have?

“Take the computer off-line. We’re going manual. Helmsman, dead slow.”

“Yes, sir,” Olivera answered, glancing nervously at his captain.

Shiva felt no change in the ship. “Sonny? Are we manual yet? Hurry!”

“Captain, the computer is locked.” Olivera looked up in a panic. “It won’t take a command!”

“Try again.”

“No change, sir.” Olivera’s voice rose. “It won’t accept a command!”

Shiva could see the offshore facility now, shimmering in the distance. Behind it was the mainland and the city itself. He began to sweat profusely. If he turned off the computer, he wasn’t certain he could command the ship. Even on manual the commands were sent electronically. Nothing was connected directly by wire or cable as in the old days. There was an override system, he knew, but he’d never used it before.

“Captain?” Arroyo’s voice was urgent.

Being in command meant Shiva had to command. That was the single truth he’d been taught over the years. Right or wrong, the captain gave orders. “Turn off the computer.”

“Sir?” Olivera said in disbelief.

“Hurry! Turn it off. We have to go manual.”

A moment later Sonny said, “It’s off. It wouldn’t take the shut-down command, so I had to kill the power.”

“Dead stop, Renato,” Shiva ordered.

“Dead stop, sir.” Arroyo took the control in his sweaty palm and rang the command.

The engines continued throbbing unchanged.

“Do it again,” Shiva ordered, fighting to remain calm. The offshore facility was looming far too close on the horizon.

Arroyo sent the order again. Nothing.

“How far are we out?” Shiva asked, willing himself to remain calm. The captain must never panic.

“GPS is down with the computer off, sir,” Olivera answered.

“Hard to port!” Shiva ordered. If he couldn’t slow the ship, he needed to head it in a safe direction.

“Hard to port, Captain,” Arroyo repeated as he spun the wheel. “Sir! Nothing. I’ve got no control. It’s just spinning in place!”

The Illustrious Goddess continued at 18 knots like an arrow straight at the offshore facility and the port beyond. Shiva estimated the distance at under ten kilometers. Even if he had control, he couldn’t stop the ship in time.

“Full reverse!” Shiva ordered.

Arroyo moved the control. “Full reverse, sir.”

Nothing. The engines continued as before. The ship plunged ahead without alteration.

“Turn the computer back on. Reboot. Hurry, Sonny, hurry!”

A long minute passed. “The computer’s frozen, sir. It’s locked.”

“Do it again and keep doing it until we have control.”

“Captain, we’re almost there!” Arroyo screamed.

Desperate, Shiva radioed the offshore facility and the port that he had no control over the ship. A small Japanese naval ship came out and signaled frantically for him to stop, but he could do nothing.

One mile out the computer was still locked and steering was unresponsive. Shiva sounded the horn as warning, over and over. The deep, resonant blast reverberated like the voice of God as the ship moved across the ocean, but it did no good except to draw a crowd of workers on the facility to the rail and members of his own crew to the deck.

The massive ship passed the floating facility with fifty feet to spare, though they cut several oil lines and crushed at least one small tender tied to a moorage.

Shiva could now see the port. “My God,” he muttered. “Sonny, you still can’t get the computer up?”

“No, sir. It just locks, over and over.” Olivera looked up from his screen at the reality beyond the windshield. His face was dripping in sweat. “What’s going to happen?”

Four minutes after rushing by the offshore facility, The Illustrious Goddess roared into Nagasaki harbor, smaller ships scattering in every direction. The enormous ship made the sound of an onrushing locomotive until it struck bottom more than one hundred yards out, but with its mass plus the surge of the engines continuing without respite, the ship plowed ahead as if nothing had happened. Like a mammoth battering ram it streaked across the harbor, then struck land, continuing almost without letup until two-thirds of the ship was out of the water. The sounds of twisted and torn metal were horrifying.

Crossing the port, the massive ship killed six men who’d been too slow to move.

Shiva and his disbelieving crew were knocked to the deck by the force of the impact. A deep moan came from within the ship. The ship’s screw continued to turn and turn, the water behind it boiling into a chocolate-colored froth. Out of water, without the pressure of the ocean, the sides of the ship ruptured, and 4.5 million barrels of oil began surging out.

15

Jeff’s decision to form his own computer-security company when he left the government had been logical and, for the most part, satisfying. His involvement in the events leading up to 9/11 were known to only a few within the Company, who certainly had reason not to brag about his discoveries. The veil of secrecy over his work at the CIA also prevented him from going public with the details, though he’d come to accept that it would have done no good if he had.

Instead he plunged into the world of cyber-security, where he believed he could do some good. He knew the government was where he belonged, but it was too mired in bureaucracy for him to be effective. Perhaps he could attack the problem from the private sector and make a good living at the same time. From his experience, the level of security for most computers, even those for otherwise quite sophisticated businesses, was paper-thin. Their security programs weren’t updated routinely or even activated, and patches released for vulnerabilities were often not installed.

In the worst-case scenarios, viruses propagated at an alarming rate. SQL Slammer, a virus released in early 2003, doubled every 8.5 seconds and infected 90 percent of vulnerable hosts within ten minutes. It was responsible, directly and indirectly, for shutting down thirteen thousand Bank of America ATMs.

A more recent high-profile example was the Conficker worm. It was originally launched by as-yet-unidentified hackers in late 2008 to serve as a general-purpose platform for malicious activity ranging from spamming to denial of service attacks. By constantly updating to use increasingly more sophisticated update, propagation, and rootkit techniques, it had managed to infect an unknown number of computers with estimates as high as 15 million.

Every year, every few weeks in fact, more and more viruses were unleashed, and increasingly they were searching for ways to steal money. One-third of the U.S. workforce was online, while millions more banked in cyberspace. Internet crime had outgrown illegal drug sales, netting more than $120 billion annually. There’d been nearly two hundred major intrusions into corporate computers, exposing more than 70 million Americans to financial fraud. This included everything from dates of birth and Social Security numbers to credit-card numbers and passwords. Ford Motor Company had had the records of eighty thousand employees stolen online.

Worse, the numbers were likely far greater, since so many individuals and companies had no idea their systems had been hacked. The government was largely unconcerned, or unknowing, for the DHS research budget for cyber-security had been cut to just $16 million.

Basically, it is so damn simple, Jeff thought. Viruses found their path into computers in two ways. They could enter through a vulnerability in an application or within the operating system itself, or they could inadvertently be downloaded by the computer user, who was tricked into manually running the virus, believing it was something it was not.

Regardless of the method for contamination, the virus would make its way freely into thousands of computers undetected before one of the security companies’ honeypots, computers left online with no protection, attracted the virus. Thereafter, it could take several hours to several days for an antivirus company to create a signature and deliver it, known as a rollout, to their customers. Once loaded, antivirus software prevented the virus from executing, so the user with the program installed was safe against the virus, no matter how the contamination occurred. The antivirus software on customer systems usually checked for the updates once per day, though automatic updates were often never turned on by owners.

When a virus that exploited a new vulnerability was discovered, the antivirus company also notified the software vendor whose product contained the vulnerability so it could prepare a fix, known as a patch. To create, test, and make the patch available, the vendor would take anywhere from a few days, in the most critical cases, to weeks or even months, for vulnerabilities that were less critical.

In both cases the patch was rolled out to customers over a period of days. It could be months before most customers installed the patch, and many companies or individuals never installed it at all. When a particularly risky vulnerability was identified, vendors sent security bulletins to customers advising them to manually download and apply the patch rather than wait for the automated update.

The security companies were always playing catch-up. A new risk existed for a minimum of a few days to weeks. The system, if that’s what it could be called, left a surprisingly large number of computers susceptible, even to viruses that had long been identified.

The situation was magnified because most home users didn’t possess a security system, and if they did, they let its license expire, leaving the system exposed. Government computers were no less vulnerable. It was well known that the Chinese had obtained an enormous amount of U.S. national security data by entering computers believed to be secure. Other governments were doing the same thing. It was cheaper, and more effective, to hire hackers to work the Internet than to recruit, train, and support spies or to pay traitors.

Because of all this Jeff had no lack of work, particularly since his reputation preceded him into the market. Increasingly, however, he was seeing malware that traveled under the radar, destructive code that insinuated itself into computers without detection. It wasn’t necessary to open an e-mail or even to neglect your antivirus software. All you had to do was connect to the Internet and the malware found you, if you had a vulnerability.

The truly destructive viruses, those that stole financial records, destroyed systems, and such, were more often like subterranean trolls. They were unleashed by their creators, or by someone working with them, and flashed across the core of the Internet, seeking a way to enter a computer by exploiting a vulnerability, an error or pathway inadvertently left open in one of its programs.

The viruses were always there, permanent, relentless. They never tired, never became frustrated, required no fresh direction. As they pressed their electronic nose to the security wall of each computer, they probed for that little mistake written into a program that allowed them to gain entry, undetected, undeflected by firewalls or antivirus programs.

These worms descended to the depths of the computer, burrowing down and existing like a living parasite, planting themselves within the operating system. They were designed to resist detection. To mask themselves further, they worked slowly at replicating clones, sending out new versions of themselves to seek new computers at an all but undetectable rate. They were a cancer on the Internet and on every computer they entered. They grew, spreading their electronic web into every space they could find. This was the future of all serious malware, one increasingly concealed from detection by a cloaking technology known as rootkits.

Yet years after the tragedy of 9/11, the FBI was claiming that Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups lacked the ability to attack America’s cyber infrastructure. They didn’t say the system was safe. No, they said that the terrorists didn’t have the ability to exploit it — yet.

Bringing his thoughts back to the present, Jeff stepped from the subway station onto the sidewalk and stopped.

He blinked his eyes at the sudden light, trying to take it all in. The sight of nothingness where the World Trade Center had once stood, dominating the landscape, stunned him.

To his right, still erect and fully functioning, was the World Financial Center. Except for broken windows and some concern about foundations in the weeks after the attack, it had emerged unscathed. Account Resources Management was up and running after a six-month hiatus in upper Manhattan.

The company lost three employees that day: Cynthia and another coworker attending a meeting near the top of the North Tower, plus one who was arriving late for work and was struck by debris from United Flight 175 when it hit the South Tower. There had been a memorial service, but Jeff had been too overwhelmed with grief, loss, and culpability to attend. For the same reason, he’d not gone to the service the family held in Cookeville, Tennessee. Now, though, his anger was all on himself, and his burden of guilt was almost more than he could bear. He simply could not face it.

He walked at a steady pace around the enclosed site. With each step he found the enormity of the devastation overwhelming. To see it on television and in pictures was one thing. To be here, to see it like this, was something else entirely.

From time to time he came upon memorials, some official, most impromptu, commemorating the loss of one group or another. At the poster of three Brooklyn firefighters raising the American flag over the rubble that terrible morning, Jeff stopped.

What was the point in walking? What did he think he was accomplishing?

Jeff gazed into the gaping chasm. Cynthia’s body was never recovered. Whatever there had been of her lay there, before him. He closed his eyes and wept.

16

Like most of the other students, Mesut Elaltuntas worked on his own laptop at the university computer-science center. The university had an excellent computer program, which was why he went there. They provided this room on campus where students could access the Internet with their own computers, since many of them didn’t have Internet access at home. The room might have been on any college campus anywhere in Europe or America, except here in Turkey the air was thick with the fog of cigarette smoke.

Elaltuntas scrolled down the list of Web sites produced by his Google search. He was already familiar with several of them and knew they were of no use to him. Others weren’t related to the code he was searching for. He’d already used one that suited his purpose; now he wanted another very like it. He pursed his lips and continued to scroll.

At first the idea of constructing new viruses had seemed simple enough. He’d designed a few himself and considered releasing them, but the arrest here in Istanbul of the cracker with the screen name Coder had made him cautious. Coder had bragged to everyone in various chat rooms how easy writing virus code was and how you could make money at it. Now he was in jail. Sure, his real name had appeared in newspapers and on television around the world, but that wasn’t the kind of fame Elaltuntas sought.

But right now he needed a new base virus code. He already had the code for turning systems off and on. When he’d been given it, he’d had no idea what it did, but he’d spent some time studying the code and was now certain. At first it had scared the hell out of him, but once he realized that he was covering his tracks in ways that hadn’t occurred to Coder, he’d been thrilled at the possibilities. Someone was up to something big and he was a part of it.

Elaltuntas needed to place that code into a virus with a proven record of exploitation. His employer paid a flat one hundred euros for each new virus Elaltuntas produced, but added another hundred if it had a larger than average degree of exploitation. Elaltuntas didn’t know how his employer made that determination, but he’d been paid the extra hundred often enough these past weeks to figure his employer knew how to do it.

There! StopHackers.com. Crackers posted their virus codes in many places, but Elaltuntas had learned that Web sites that claimed to be fighting malware were actually a great source for the code. He suspected they actually existed for the purpose of disseminating it. It was posted right there on the Web site. Anyone could help himself.

Now that he’d copped the most obvious viruses and knew the remaining common viruses and their variants, he’d already used the best. Finding something for which a security patch didn’t yet exist was his dream, but he’d settle for a new virus or variant of an old standby that looked to have fresh access.

StopHackers.com was a new Web site to Elaltuntas. He scrolled through the boilerplate that the Web master had lifted from similar sites, then entered a chat room discussing various viruses at length. He found a lot of chatter about a new one out of Manila, home of the Lovebug, called Doomer. It was a network worm, which meant no attachment had to be opened for it to enter a computer, and gained access by exploiting a vulnerability in Windows XP. Excellent. But the best news was that Microsoft had yet to announce a patch. That meant he would likely have at least a month of smooth sailing, and an extra hundred Euros in his account.

None of this bothered him in the least. Since he’d been a small child, he’d enjoyed breaking things. Too often he’d been caught and punished. Now, on the Internet, he could smash the biggest of things and never be caught. He found it thrilling.

Elaltuntas copied the code, then dropped it into his own cracker file. He studied the new virus for a few minutes, but didn’t understand it. The inventor had been clever. Mentally shrugging, he searched for the point where he could insert his new code so that it rode piggyback into computers along with the virus. Shit! He went back to the Web site and read the entries in the chat room carefully. Thirty minutes later he found what he was looking for. Stupid! I should have spotted that on my own! Back into his own file, he pasted his own code into the location — tailor-made, it seemed, for just such an addition.

Let’s see. He customized the code he’d copied to infect an unattended computer, then downloaded the virus. The girl who owned it, Melek, had asked him to keep an eye on her laptop while she went out for lunch. He’d smiled and agreed. A few seconds later the worm announced it had successfully dropped itself on the target. It had taken. Excellent.

Back at his own computer he sent an e-mail from his Yahoo account.

He typed in the address.

Elaltuntas attached the new file and watched the Yahoo e-mail account go through its virus scan with some amusement. He hit RETURN TO MESSAGE and sent the virus. He’d check back later that day for his answer. Then he spent the next twenty minutes searching for another virus for his new code to piggyback on, certain he’d have a use for it.

Melek returned to her computer. “Saðol,” she told Elaltuntas with a smile. He smiled back. She’d never know how she’d just thanked him for what he’d placed into her computer, not unless she was secretly controlling a nuclear power plant.

17

Jeff walked to the law firm’s building from his hotel, enjoying Manhattan in the early-evening hours of a late summer day. He passed joggers, restaurant owners setting up chairs and tables outside, office workers rushing for home or to join someone for a drink and conversation. Picking up a double latte and toasted bagel, he crossed the marbled lobby, then took the elevator to the law firm’s offices on the twenty-second floor.

He entered the IT Center quietly in the event Sue was asleep but found himself alone. Jeff took his place and inserted the driver in the virtual machine. To see what the driver was doing, however, Jeff needed to use a kernel debugger. He set break points so that the machine would stop when it reached points where Jeff believed he might be able to study the driver’s operation.

Going this far was both good and bad. Good in the sense he hoped to produce something useful; bad in that he was forced to go so far searching for answers. But something important was eluding him, perhaps more than a single something. The only truly good thing about all this he could point to was that Daryl was at least as fully engaged and she had far greater resources than he did.

The system ran a moment; then Windows hit a break point and the debugger stopped the virtual machine, putting it in a form of electronic suspended animation. Jeff read the script, then entered a g for “go” to allow the driver to continue. A few minutes later he reached his fourth break point. Examining the standard Windows-system data structures on the screen, Jeff noticed that the driver had made modifications to the control flow of several functions used by applications to list the drivers loaded on a system. He launched a device-driver listing diagnostic tool, but saw no sign of the driver he was studying. The driver had intercepted the utility’s query and stripped the driver from the list before returning the data.

“Shit,” he muttered under his breath. The bastard’s using a rootkit.

Once rare, rootkits were becoming increasingly common in malware, since they allowed malware to be hidden from security tools. With a sinking heart he understood now what he was up against. Part of the virus, or another one altogether, was hidden from him.

Rootkits weren’t limited to malware. In 2005, Sony had released a range of CDs that were designed to prevent excessive duplication. The End User License Agreement accompanying them was not complete in that it failed to inform customers that the CD was installing a rootkit onto their personal computer. More than 2 million CDs were shipped with the rootkit, promptly dubbed malware by computer experts who detected its presence. More than half a million customers innocently placed the hidden code deep within their computer’s operating system.

The affair turned into a fiasco for Sony. Early attempts to delete the rootkit disabled the computer’s ability to play any CD and, worse, caused the computer to crash. The rootkit was also not very well written. Hackers soon found they could attach viruses to it, using Sony’s own software to cloak them from detection. Sony was forced by a public uproar to recall the CDs and make a removal patch available, but the harm to the company’s reputation was done. A major international corporation had publicly been branded with employing hacker code. The long-term consequences were incalculable.

Jeff ran a rootkit detection program, then cursed again. There on the screen was unmistakable evidence of the rootkit. He’d seen the behavior, now he had confirmation. As a cloaking technology, rootkits worked by hiding files, registry keys, and other objects in the system in the kernel mode of Windows. When a user ran a standard detection program to see what programs were operating, the rootkit had many ways to remove the program it was concealing from the list being generated. In this case, the program being cloaked was the virus.

The next step was to run a number of advanced security tools, searching for evidence of code that would activate the rootkit at each booting. It came up empty. Then Jeff dumped the service-table contents, studying them carefully. Each should point at addresses within the Windows kernel, but within minutes he found two that did not. One of the intercepting functions was part of the ipsecnat.sys device driver that he had been studying. Now he knew which driver implemented cloaking. At least now I can see if I can disable the cloak and expose whatever it’s hiding, Jeff thought. Opening a command prompt, Jeff entered the hidden directory.

The sophistication of this rootkit was troubling, he realized, especially when compared to what appeared to be the cut-and-paste construction of the part of the actual virus he’d examined so far. The rootkit was lean and cleverly fabricated. Jeff paused for a moment to reflect. What the malware was suggesting to him was at least two creators. That might be significant; then again, it might not. A basic cracker might have created the virus, then found the slick rootkit to hide it. He couldn’t imagine anyone skilled enough to build this rootkit unleashing such a hack job of a virus. He wouldn’t be able to resist cleansing the code. What if they’re working together? he thought, wondering what the implications of that might be.

Jeff took a moment to text Daryl, informing her of the rootkit. A few minutes later she responded with a single word: “Shit!” No kidding, Jeff thought, before turning back to his work.

Next he stepped instruction by instruction through the driver, trying to discern the goal of the virus, without luck. Then it occurred to him there might be more than one, so he examined the assembly language he’d generated earlier. This was extraordinarily time-consuming. Long, exhausting hours dragged by as he threw himself into the brain-taxing exercise. When he could go on no longer, he slept on the couch rather than return to his hotel. At some point Sue returned. Harold appeared and began bringing them food at regular intervals, though Jeff couldn’t have told anyone what he ate if his life depended on it.

One of the major problems he was up against, Jeff realized, was that he couldn’t tell what kind of external influences were normally involved in this suspect driver’s operation. Perhaps the driver had a helper program or some other external stimuli that caused its payload to trigger. Or it might have been something within the virus code itself, even a standard mechanism in the computer’s operating system. So far he’d found nothing to tell him why the virus had been unleashed nor anything to hint at what the purpose had been beyond simple destruction.

Was this a financial operation launched by Russians? Or had it been a simple shotgun attack meant to cause immediate widespread destruction? He simply couldn’t tell. He was burrowing deeper and deeper into decrypting the driver, but still lacked the answers he sought to tell him how the virus actually ran when it was “live.”

Just when he thought he wouldn’t be able to restrain himself from picking up the computer and throwing it across the room, Jeff came across something that promised to be interesting. Even though the driver had decrypted much of itself, when it launched, it still left pieces of itself encrypted. With some effort he coaxed the driver into executing certain code sequences that decrypted more of itself.

The newly decrypted code sequence referred to another driver with a more sinister name, bioswipe.sys, that it expected to be able to extract from itself and execute. However, the second driver wasn’t in the driver file he had, nor in the corrupted installation when he went back to look for it.

BIOS, or the Basic Input/Output System, was the code programmed into the computer itself that started the computer and was responsible for reading the initial part of the operating system code from the first sector of the hard disk into memory and executing it. Modern computers had BIOS that could be “flashed” or reprogrammed with new instructions. Computer manufacturers sometimes made BIOS updates available that fixed bugs or improved the computer’s start-up performance.

But a virus that knew how to reprogram the BIOS could erase its contents, making the computer unbootable. Repairing such a computer was tedious and sometimes even impossible. Part of this virus was missing, he realized, either because it had already been deleted or because it wasn’t part of the variant installed on the law firm computer. Still, the sheer scope of this attack on a system with all the standard safeguards in place was astounding and underlined the enormity of the problem he faced.

Sue took a break, then returned, freshly scrubbed, munching on a candy bar. “Still at it, I see? Did you read about that ship in Japan?”

“No. What happened?”

“Its computer guidance and navigation systems failed. The ship slammed into Nagasaki, killing some people. I saw a video. The harbor is just filled with crude oil. There’s speculation it was a virus of some kind. What do you think?”

“It’s possible, but there’s no way of telling if it’s what we have here.”

“Okay, expert. What can you tell me?”

Matter-of-factly, Jeff walked her through what he’d uncovered.

“I’m confused,” she said, wadding up the candy-bar wrapper and pitching it toward the trash basket, missing by a foot. “Does it want to steal our financial information? Destroy our records? Or destroy our computers?”

“Good questions all. The answer is, I don’t know.” Jeff frowned. “I’ve seen no evidence of stealing information, but it both destroyed records and destroyed computers. It’s malicious and destructive but, from what I can see, it’s got no clear purpose.”

“What triggered it?” Sue looked every bit as confused as Jeff felt.

He shook his head. “I don’t know.”

“Can you find it in our backup? I’m under a great deal of pressure here. Clients have figured out we’ve got a problem and are threatening to leave.” Her face was creased with concern.

Jeff hesitated. “I should be able to locate what I’ve found here. But it’s like proving a negative. If I find it, then the backup records are tainted and of no use. But if I don’t find what I’ve got here, that doesn’t necessarily mean something else isn’t buried somewhere. I have no sense of how much I’ve discovered, and I’m almost certain to have missed something. I’m beginning to think there’re at least two viruses here. And I’m dealing with cloaking. A great deal could still be concealed from me.”

“But if you find nothing, that’s a good sign?”

Jeff understood Sue’s need to get this problem solved. Her job likely depended on it. He wanted to sound encouraging, but experience taught him otherwise. Cautiously he said, “Yes, as far as it goes. You could make a copy of the backup, I’ll check it for what I’ve learned. If it seems clean, or if I delete the evidence of what I’ve learned here, I might disable the viruses, allowing you to boot up and see what you’ve got.”

Sue brightened. “I like the sound of that.”

“Don’t get your hopes up too far. That’s going to eat up a lot of time with no guarantee. I’d feel better if I knew more.”

“If you crack this too late to do us any good, what’s the point?”

Jeff hesitated. “There may be clues in the calling cards the cracker’s left in his code. If we know more, maybe we can determine if the backup is secure before putting in all that time.”

Sue stared at him a moment, then seemed to reach a conclusion. “‘Super Freak.’ My guess is, that’s our key.”

18

Jeff placed his foot on the cement bench and methodically began his stretching routine. Beside him passed a steady stream of runners, circling the Central Park Reservoir, one of several jogging paths in the park. When ready, he set out along the Lower Track, which followed the old Bridle Path. This was the course he ran many years ago when in Manhattan because of its forgiving soft dirt and its sheer beauty. He ran steadily, passing a few slower runners, yielding to others. His course took him beneath three lovely cast-iron bridges, and from time to time he caught a commanding view of the park in its late-summer glory.

Jeff Aiken had been born the youngest of two sons. His memories of his parents dimmed with each year as they and his brother were killed in a two-car accident when Jeff was six years old. He’d been spending the weekend with his paternal grandparents and remained with them thereafter in their Philadelphia home.

Joe and Wilma Aiken were adoring surrogate parents, though they were already quite old when they assumed the obligation of raising their surviving grandson. Wilma tended to the house while Joe was active in the Elks and his Masonic lodge. Jeff’s grandfather died when Jeff was a sophomore in high school, and his grandmother passed when he was an undergraduate. Since then he’d been largely alone.

His shoes struck the soft earth with a steady, nearly hypnotic rhythm he found comforting. Perhaps the only aspect of his work he disliked was how it tended to keep him shut up in offices and away from his time in nature, running alone.

Jeff didn’t find it odd that he was drawn to running. Loving though his grandparents had been, he’d had little in common with them. Feeling alone, he buried himself in books, then in mathematics, and finally in computers. Embarrassed by the elderly couple with whom he lived, pained to discuss the tragic death of his family, he’d made few friends during his teens, fewer in college. He’d long since resigned himself to a solitary life. His world with computers added a satisfying, though sterile, dimension to it.

Meeting Cynthia had changed everything. For a brief time he’d seen himself as part of a larger family, with a future that included children of his own. The pain of her loss had been almost more than he could bear, piled as it was on top of the loss of his parents and brother, then of his grandparents. The survivor’s guilt he felt from not being in the car with them when his immediate family had been killed — added to his guilt at failing to embrace the unconditional love of his grandparents, and at failing to save Cynthia — was nearly overwhelming. But he saw no alternative to the course his life was taking, to carry on alone, to do his best, to make sure he did what he could so that others never had to go through what he had, even if his ability to help was limited to the world of computers.

His shoes slapped the dirt as he sank into the pleasant nothingness of the run.

19

Sue Tabor entered the office, then glanced at Jeff Aiken asleep on the couch, exhausted after a long stretch of work combined with his run. Should she go ahead and do it? Shrugging, she went to her computer and opened Google. She could no longer really contribute anything to his search, and she’d decided to follow the only specific clue they had. She typed into the box Super Freak. Time to learn what the name meant to the Internet.

“Do you mean: superfreak?” the Web site asked.

Sue glanced at the count. Just over 4 million hits. This wasn’t going to work. Still, she scrolled through three pages of entries just to be certain. It was all Rick James in one form or another.

She deleted the space between the words and hit ENTER for superfreak. Now she was down to 195,000 hits, but it was just more of the same. Rick James.

She entered super freak code, followed by super freak virus. She spent an hour going through the various hits with no results.

Undeterred, she sought out hacker groups and began scanning entries for the name Superfreak or Super Freak. Nothing. But what else did she have to do? Two hours into her search, in her third hacker forum, she spotted the word Superphreak. Yes!

Sue backtracked on the thread, but the name didn’t appear again. Someone using the name Dante had mentioned Superphreak in a discussion about security code in the e-mail program Outlook Express. But there was no information about this Superphreak, no hint of who he was or what he was up to.

Checking, she found that the site had an open chat room, so she entered under the handle Dragon Lady. As luck had it, Dante was in the thread. She typed:

Sue waited, biting her lower lip. Was Dante still in the thread? Maybe he’d gone on to something else. It might be days, weeks even, before he returned to this chat room. Five posts appeared over the next fifteen minutes, then:

Sue’s heart was pounding. For an instant she considered waking Jeff up, then decided against it. She forced herself to concentrate, then typed:

She gave the Yahoo e-mail address she used when she was forced to register one on Web sites. She watched the chat room for another half hour, but Dante didn’t make another entry.

Just in case, she went to each of the forums she’d visited earlier and posted this message:

Again she listed the Yahoo address, then sat back in her chair.

Without giving it any thought, she crossed her fingers. Okay, fat’s in the fire. On the couch Jeff stirred, then lay motionless. The sound of his deep sleep overwhelmed the all-but-silent-whir of her hard drive kicking in.

20

Oddvar Thorsen lit a cigarette, blew smoke toward the ceiling, then stared back down at his screen and read again:

Someone was looking for Superphreak. That was interesting. For a moment he wondered if the poster was even a woman, let alone an Asian woman. He thought about Lucy Liu in that movie with Mel Gibson, Payback. Now that would be hot!

He considered for a moment if the query was of any value to him, then copied the e-mail address and dropped it into his Thunderbird e-mail “To:” box.

Superphreak was peculiar. Kind of surly and more than a bit arrogant, he acted as if he were the only one who knew anything about code. Thorsen might hear back, or he might not. He wondered once again what this was about, not that it mattered to him. But since he did work with Superphreak from time to time, and it was always best to stay on someone’s good side, he’d sent him the heads-up.

Thorsen turned back to his specific problem. He was being paid to speed up the load time of certain encrypted codes. Even with newer and faster machines, start-up times were noticeably slower once a computer was infected. He’d been instructed to fix the problem, but was making little progress. He took another pull on his cigarette and turned to the work.

Two hours later his computer pinged. Thorsen opened Thunderbird.

21

Trying not to nod off, Jeff focused on Sue. Since midafternoon, she’d been working on an untainted stand-alone server. With her work CDs, she’d rebuilt the firm’s standard operating system, then made a copy of the last nightly backup, before installing it into the server.

Jeff had spent fourteen hours searching through the copy of the nightly backup, seeking out the same signs he’d found in the melted-down server with the virus. He’d found no sign of a rootkit, no indication of a virus. The backup had appeared free of any malware, but he’d reminded Sue that not finding a virus didn’t mean it wasn’t there.

Harold watched them both with keen interest. He’d been responsible for seeing to the creation of the backups, so had decided to stick around to watch what happened. He’d called home to tell his mother that he’d be late and was standing just behind Sue as she said, “Jeff? It’s ready.” When Jeff didn’t respond, she nudged his shoulder. “We’re ready. Unless you’d rather get your beauty sleep.”

Jeff blinked, then rubbed his eyes. “What time is it?”

“Almost midnight. It’s Thursday, in case you’ve lost track.”

“Right. Give me a minute and I’ll be right with you.” In the restroom, Jeff scrubbed his face hard with a dampened paper towel. He looked up at the mirror and for an instant was startled by what he saw. Strain and exhaustion were written all over him. He laughed to himself as he realized he felt just as bad as he looked.

When he returned, Sue pointed to the coffeepot. “It’s fresh. Harold went out for sandwiches earlier, if you’re hungry.” She watched as Jeff poured himself a cup of coffee. “We’re set to go.”

Jeff picked up half of a chicken sandwich, then walked to her screen. He was impressed with all the work she’d put into this and with her effort to get the law firm up and running. He wondered if Greene appreciated her dedication. “Cross your fingers. I’ve been searching for elusive code almost from the start, and the bastard’s used at least one rootkit that I know of.”

“What else can I do? At worse we risk the new server and some of my not so valuable time. It’s not connected to anything. No harm, no foul.”

Harold stood beside Jeff, looking on with concern, and Jeff gave his fleshy shoulder a light squeeze. Sue glanced up and gave them a wan smile. “Here goes.” She clicked the mouse to boot the restored system and held her breath. When it came up, she logged in. Nothing happened for a moment. The screen seemed to hiccup, turned blue, and read:

After a few seconds, the screen flickered and read:

Then the screen turned black.

“Shit!” she said. “Shit! Shit! Shit!” She stood up and glanced around the room as if looking for something to throw. Finally, she slumped back in the chair.

It was as bad as Jeff and Daryl had feared. This virus was one of the toughest he’d come across. His standard approach wasn’t going to work. He and Sue might get lucky — it was still possible — but with a sinking heart he realized this was all a small part of something much bigger. They were far more likely to sink into an electronic abyss than find their way to success.

“I guess…,” Sue said finally, “I guess we could try a copy of the monthly backup next.”

“Like that’ll do any good,” Harold said, before he slunk out of the room.