The Second Ship Read online

  “And,” Jennifer continued, “the government, along with major corporations, has gotten pretty darned good at tracking people putting viruses on the Internet. As a matter of fact, they catch almost all of them.”

  “We’re just going to have to be better than those people,” said Heather with a shrug.

  “And,” Jennifer continued, “last but not least, e-mail isn’t secure. When that message gets sent, every major government is going to know what it says, even if it’s addressed to the NSA. And you can bet Dr. Stephenson will find out.”

  “I’ve been thinking hard about that. Let’s talk about the e-mail security first,” Heather said. “Anyway, the virus is going to have to sense when it has hopped around the net enough to send the e-mail. The e-mail needs to include an encrypted computer address containing where the real message is stored. The first one to break the encryption on that message will be the first one to find the computer where the real message is.”

  “What if the NSA doesn’t break the code first?” asked Jennifer.

  “They’re supposed to be the best in the world at that. We’ll just need to hope that the US government isn’t wasting all that money. They will also have one more slight advantage. Anyone else will have had to pick up the e-mail from spying on the net and identify it for analysis. That should put the others a little behind, since the NSA will directly receive the e-mail clue.”

  Jennifer shook her head. “The NSA is supposed to have more PhD mathematicians than anyone else and the best code-cracking super computers. How can our encryption stand up to that?”

  Heather grinned. “That’s the beauty of it. I’ve been reading up on encryption theory. The best schemes are mathematically based. That’s why all those mathematicians work at the NSA.”

  “I feel much better now,” said Jennifer, making Mark chuckle.

  “Don’t you see? Even though the encryption methods I could research were not the classified ones, they were produced by some pretty darn good mathematicians. And I can see the solutions, automatically, easily. I don’t even have to think about it.”

  “Now you’re freaking me out,” said Mark.

  Heather smiled. “And I can do far better.”

  A sudden light dawned in Jennifer’s face. “So you come up with an encryption that is difficult, but not impossible to break. Then we encrypt the e-mail message and count on the NSA to crack it first. What about the back trace they’re going to put on our virus?”

  Heather shrugged. “We’ll launch the virus from some public place. You’re going to have to come up with a way of countering their trace.”

  “I don’t know. The guys hunting us will be the best in the business.”

  “Yeah,” said Mark. “They’re going to be on our asses like pigs on shit.”

  Jennifer frowned. “Lovely image.”

  “We’ll need to be able to see how the back trace is coming,” Heather said.

  Jennifer rubbed her chin. “I guess I could have the virus leave a little agent program on each infected computer before it jumps to the next. That little guy’s job would just be to report on his health by posting a code to some public chat site we could monitor.”

  Heather’s eyes widened. “What a great idea. I could design an algorithm to generate a unique code for each agent. All it would need to contain would be a unique ID, a time stamp, and the address of the computer it was on.”

  Mark rubbed his hands together. “Now we’re getting somewhere. Jen just has to monitor those codes to see when they drop off the net.”

  Jennifer nodded. “But the antivirus companies are going to try to kill off our virus.”

  “That won’t be a big problem,” said Heather. “We don’t need it to last forever, just long enough to send the clue e-mail.”

  “Yes,” said Jennifer. “But as that antivirus starts wiping out our little agents, it will make it hard to tell whether or not they are dying from the trace or just from the antivirus.”

  “Actually I think that will help us,” Heather said. “I’ll be able to spot the difference in the patterns.”

  Mark stood up. “Problem solved then. Sounds like you two have some work to do.”

  “Not yet, buddy boy,” said Heather. “A couple of last details. Our laptops and handheld computers are going to have incriminating data on them. I’ll come up with another encryption algorithm that I think will be unbreakable, and then I need Jen to add that to our virus program.”

  A confused look settled on Jennifer’s face. “Add it to our virus? How does that have anything to do with protecting the data on our systems?”

  A sly smile settled on Heather’s lips. “Look. It won’t work to just have a program on our machines that encrypts any data we don’t want others to know about. If someone looks on our computers and finds a bunch of data with a super sophisticated encryption scheme, they’ll just want to know where we got the encryption. Game over.”

  “Okay?”

  “We let the virus encrypt some data on every machine with the unbreakable code. On our machines it will encrypt important stuff. On everyone else’s computer, it’ll just encrypt random garbage.”

  Jennifer clapped her hands. “Then if anyone snoops around, it just looks like we got an infection like everyone else.”

  “Yes. We’ll just need to make sure we get our computers infected from the Internet after we launch our virus.”

  Jennifer closed her eyes. After several seconds she opened them. “I think it’ll work.”

  Mark walked over and patted each of them on the back. “That’s it then. You two hop right on it and report in to me with your progress.”

  “Not quite,” said Heather with a smile. “I need you to do something for us.”

  Mark shook his head. “Why doesn’t that shock me?”

  Heather continued. “With your enhanced language skills, do you think you could learn some Russian?”

  Mark perked up, looking intrigued. “Russian? That’s a rather odd choice, isn’t it? What have you got up your sleeve?”

  “I haven’t got it all worked out yet. Can you just do it?”

  Mark grinned. “Sounds mysterious. I’ll give it a shot.”

  “Good,” said Heather. “Jen, I’ll try to have the algorithms ready for you tomorrow.”

  Jennifer nodded. “In the meantime, I’ll make sure I know everything I can about computer worms and viruses. I want to feel comfortable before I write a single line of code.”

  Mark paused at the door and glanced back at his sister.

  “Doc, don’t wait until you’re comfortable. By that time the sun will be a red giant. We need something by the time Christmas vacation is over.”

  The eraser she threw bounced harmlessly off the door as Mark ducked out of the room.

  29

  The next three weeks passed in a flurry of activity, with one day blending into the next. The Los Alamos Hilltoppers basketball team continued their winning ways, although Mark’s scoring settled down to an average of closer to twenty-five points a game. By the time Christmas break came and went, Mark’s workout program was beginning to bring about a noticeable change in his physique. His arms and shoulders had thickened, and his waist had narrowed. Heather had seen him without his shirt after one of his workout sessions, and his stomach looked like it belonged to a comic book superhero.

  Apparently his neural augmentation made him incredibly efficient at training his muscles, and they had responded with a vengeance to his indomitable will. It wasn’t that he looked like a weight lifter, far from it. He just looked extremely buff.

  January first arrived with little fanfare. Heather had stayed up late the night before to watch the annual dropping of the New Year’s ball in New York City, but she had been the only late bird in her family. Not that she was a party animal herself; she had just had a hard time sleeping, and the televised party coverage provided a welcome distraction. Now she was tired, but anxious to get on with what they had to do.

  Today was the day. Vir
us Day. They had actually been ready to launch the virus for several days now, but just couldn’t bring themselves to do it over Christmas. So the dawn of the New Year would see the first salvo in a war that began decades earlier in the skies above Aztec, a war between good and evil. At least, that is how Heather thought of it.

  Mark, Jennifer, and Heather parked their bikes in a rack some distance from their objective. They had selected a public pay phone in the same Los Alamos shopping center where press reports said Abdul Aziz’s car had been found abandoned all those weeks ago.

  Thanks to the ancient, acoustically coupled modem Jennifer had scrounged up, they could access the Internet from Jennifer’s PDA without using a traceable wireless connection. She could just hold it up to the phone mouthpiece. As Mark and Heather watched from a distance, Jennifer made her way to the pay phone. She leaned into it in a way that looked like she could be deep in a private discussion with a boyfriend.

  It only took her a few minutes to access the Internet and upload the virus. As soon as Jennifer hung up the handset, pocketing her PDA, Heather and Mark moved from their lookout to meet her by the bikes. While crossing the parking lot, Heather had a moment of déjà vu, feeling as if she was a refugee from some 1950s cold war spy movie. The feeling passed as they got on their bicycles. There was just something about the picture of a band of international espionage agents making their getaway on bicycles that didn’t fit the way she felt.

  Heather looked down at her hands. She had not been able to stop them from shaking since Jennifer had walked up to the phone booth. Now, as Heather pedaled hard to keep up with Mark and Jennifer as they sped away from the parking lot, she hoped with all her heart that their plan would work. If not, well, she didn’t care to think about it.

  From the corner of her eye she glimpsed a tall, thin man with long, stringy, blond hair standing near the corner of the shopping center, but when she turned her head to look, there was no one there. Easy, Heather, she told herself. Don’t get paranoid now. She upped the pace of her pedaling, moving past Mark into the lead as they raced for home.

  Behind her, a gaunt, ragged man stepped out into the open. As he watched them disappear around the bend, his expression was as blank as the mannequin in the nearby store window.

  30

  Deep within the bowels of the massive, black-glass structure affectionately known as Crypto City, Jonathan Riles leaned back in his executive chair, surveying the others assembled around the small conference table. He was a stocky man, ex-navy football star, Rhodes Scholar, number one in his class at the Naval Academy, vice admiral. His friendly face served as an unlikely platform for intense, icy gray eyes. As he looked around at his team, he smiled. They were the National Security Agency’s best of the best.

  “So, Dave,” Riles said, “tell me what you’ve got.”

  David Kurtz sat immediately to Riles’ left, looking every bit the part of the wild-haired, absent-minded professor. If there was one thing that Kurtz was not, though, it was absent minded.

  Kurtz reached for a wireless remote control, clicking a button that brought the flat-screen video monitor to life. The far wall showed a map of the United States covered in clusters of red dots.

  “As everyone in this room is aware, what the public is calling the New Year’s Day Virus appeared on a large number of systems on New Year’s Day. But since many companies were closed for the holidays, the true extent of the infection wasn’t known until January third.

  “Another reason for the slowness of the response was the apparently benign nature of the infection. The virus just hops from computer to computer, leaving behind a small agent program on each infected system.”

  Kurtz aimed a red laser pointer at the flat-screen monitor on the far wall. “This was the estimated extent of infection sites in the US as of the last report, about thirty minutes ago.”

  The slide changed to a map of the world. “Here is a map showing the estimated extent of the worldwide infection.”

  Riles leaned forward. “Hell, Dave, that thing looks like it has spread everywhere but North Korea. At least their computer systems seem well protected.”

  Laughter rippled around the table. A satellite view of Asia at night showed lights everywhere except for a dark outline of North Korea. The country was so backward it didn’t even have a developed electricity delivery system so, of course, it had no notable computer network.

  A serious look returned to Riles’ face. “So what are all these agent programs doing?”

  “We aren’t quite sure yet,” Kurtz said. “One thing they are doing is encrypting data on each computer.”

  “What kind of data?” Riles asked.

  “From what we can tell, nothing significant. It looks like it picks a few temporary files on each computer and encrypts them. The files it picks don’t really cause any damage because they are temporary.”

  “Why is it encrypting trash?”

  Kurtz shrugged. “Sounds harmless, doesn’t it? The problem is the encryption algorithm.”

  “Yes?”

  “We haven’t been able to break it.”

  “What?” Kurtz now had Riles’ full attention.

  “The little agent programs are encrypting the data in a way that we haven’t even begun to scratch. Once we saw we had a problem breaking the code, I put our best systems and people on it. That was two days ago. No progress.”

  For several seconds Riles sat speechless as a babble of voices from around the table echoed in the room.

  “Okay. Everyone hold it down!” Riles said, and then stared at Kurtz. “I didn’t think that was possible.”

  “Anything’s possible. It is just not probable.”

  “Why would anyone go to the trouble to come up with an unbreakable code and then use it to encrypt garbage everywhere?”

  “Our people think it’s a calling card. Someone put it out there to say, I am very, very good. Come find me.”

  “Damned right we are going to find them. Then we are either going to throw their asses in prison or hire them.”

  “Which brings us to the reason I asked you to assemble the core team for this briefing,” Kurtz said. “The virus did something new two hours ago. It sent the NSA an e-mail.”

  Kurtz pressed another button on the remote and the text of a short e-mail message appeared on the screen.

  NSA. You are supposed to be the best. Let’s hope you are. The clock is ticking…

  Jonathan Riles moved along the side of the table toward the video screen. “What is that garbage down at the end of the message?”

  Kurtz waved the laser pointer so that it drew a little circle around a bunch of strange-looking characters that formed the end of the message. “That, gentlemen, is another encrypted message. It looks like they want us to break this one, although it is taking us some time. You can bet your ass that every other spy agency in the world is trying their best to beat us to it right now.”

  A light dawned in Riles’ eyes. “It’s an address.”

  Kurtz nodded. “Very likely. The real message probably exists on only one computer out there somewhere, and this code tells us how to find it.”

  “Then let’s make damned sure that we are the first ones to get there. How long until we crack it?”

  “I would say we will have the answer within the hour,” said Kurtz.

  Riles turned to the others sitting around the table. It wasn’t the NSA’s job to meddle directly in special operations. But thanks to a Presidential Finding, the special directive signed by the president of the United States himself after 9/11, Jonathan had acquired the services of a very special “cleanup team.”

  The actual wording of the directive had been vague enough that Riles had been able to use it to gather a team of his choosing without the president being aware of any of the details. It was always important to let the old man maintain legitimate deniability when things bordered this closely upon unconstitutional action.

  “Jack.”

  A lean man, whose curly brown h
air framed a face that looked like it had been freshly chiseled from Potomac granite, leaned forward.

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Get your team ready. As soon as our people crack that code, I want that system physically removed from wherever it is. Don’t take any chances on this one.”

  “How about a warrant?”

  “I’ll get the special request started, but if it is late getting here, don’t wait. I want that system, whatever it takes. If we have to get dirty, we’ll clean up later. Now get going.”

  Jack Gregory stood up and strode from the room, followed closely by Janet Price and Harold Stevens, two more of the finest special field operatives in the world. As the door closed behind them, Riles had the sudden impression that the room felt a lot less…deadly.

  31

  The brown UPS uniform fit Jack as if it had been made for him. As he walked from the truck toward the house, he adjusted the box he was carrying so it hid the small aerosol can in his right hand. He had expected the address to be close to Ft. Meade, and indeed, once the code was broken, it led to a computer inside a house in Glen Bernie, Maryland, just a few miles from the NSA headquarters.

  It certainly looked like someone was doing everything they could to make sure the NSA was the first on the scene. But doing something like using an address near the NSA headquarters indicated a lack of sophistication, maybe even naiveté, that would have the organization’s profilers going nuts. If you wanted to put the message in a bigger nest of foreign spies than were located close to the Puzzle Palace, you would have to put it inside the UN.

  Jack rang the bell, and a woman opened it with a smile. “Hi. I wasn’t expecting a—”

  The knockout gas hit her full in the face, the surprised intake of air that followed finishing the job as her legs lost their rigidity. Jack continued his momentum, catching the woman’s slumping body as he stepped across the threshold. Immediately behind him, Janet Price, also in UPS attire, walked calmly up to the house carrying another package.