The Second Ship Read online

  The two of them moved with quiet efficiency as Jack laid the unconscious woman on the couch next to the phone and then moved on, rapidly glancing in each room as he passed. Behind him he could hear Janet pick up the phone and dial familiar tones. 9-1-1.

  “Hello, police? Help me. Please hurry. Someone is trying to get into my house. Aaaah.” She coughed weakly then dropped the telephone handset beside the woman’s body on the sofa.

  Spotting the computer, Jack pulled the power cord from the back and rapidly disconnected all the other cables from the system. Then leaving behind the monitor and all the peripheral equipment, he opened the UPS box and placed the computer inside.

  As he moved out of the small office back into the living room, he saw Janet coming down the stairs giving him the thumbs-up signal. There were no other computers in the house. They had what they were after.

  Picking up the two boxes with which they had entered, Jack and Janet walked out the front door, closed it behind them, stepped into the truck, and drove off. The police would be there shortly, and that was a good thing, not that Jack was worried about the unconscious woman. People rarely died from a single whiff of the gas. But there was going to be unexpected company at that address before long, and those late arrivals needed to see the police already on the scene, or much worse violence was likely to occur.

  Rounding a corner, Jack pulled the UPS truck into a parking lot where he and Janet left it, carried the box around the side of the building, and slipped into the backseat of a gold Honda Accord.

  “Home, James,” Jack said.

  Harold Stevens smiled as he pulled out into traffic.

  32

  “Heather! Have you got the news channel on?” Jennifer’s voice on the phone sounded excited.

  “No.”

  “Turn on CNN now. Hurry up.”

  Heather carried the wireless telephone with her into the living room and picked up the remote control from the coffee table with her left hand, almost knocking over the small pot of poinsettias in the process. The aging television hummed to life, the picture gradually fading in over the course of several seconds.

  “Are you seeing this?” Jennifer breathed into the phone.

  “Hold on a sec.”

  “Well hurry or you’re going to miss it.”

  “Jen, I’m doing the best I can. My TV is coming on now.”

  The announcer was standing in front of what looked like a typical New England–style home in a quiet suburb. The police had established a large cordon around the house and a car that had crashed into a nearby streetlight pole. The car window was bloody, and the camera zoomed in to show several bullet holes in the windshield of the black Ford Explorer.

  Heather turned up the volume.

  “And so the peace and quiet of this little neighborhood in Glen Bernie, Maryland, was shattered earlier today as the home owner was repeatedly victimized in a strange set of circumstances that has left two men dead and three police officers severely wounded.

  “Mrs. Mary Okanian says she was accosted by a man dressed as a UPS delivery man, knocked unconscious, and then robbed. Although she doesn’t remember how, she apparently got in a short nine-one-one call before succumbing to her assailant.

  “Then, in a bizarre twist, as police arrived on the scene, another car pulled up, then tried racing away. When police attempted to stop that car, the men inside opened fire on the officers, wounding three of them, before being shot and killed themselves.

  “Although police are unwilling to comment on the ongoing investigation, an anonymous source in the department tells CNN that the woman was likely a victim of a turf war between rival organized crime syndicates. When asked what was stolen from the house during the first assault, police declined to comment.”

  Heather flipped off the television. “God! Jennifer, that’s the address we selected to drop the final message. I’ll be right over.”

  Jennifer met Heather at the front door of her house, obviously distraught.

  “Is Mark home yet?” Heather asked as she followed Jennifer up to her bedroom.

  “No. He’s not back from basketball practice. Mom and Dad aren’t here either. They had bridge club tonight.”

  Jennifer closed the door behind Heather as she entered her room. “Heather. Those men that got killed. You don’t think they were the NSA people, do you?”

  Heather shook her head. “No way. Our government agents don’t get into shoot-outs with our own police. The NSA must have already been there.”

  “But that poor woman. Someone assaulted her and then people were killed. We got those people killed and those policemen shot.” Tears streamed down Jennifer’s cheeks as she sat down hard on her bed, sending a large, overstuffed floral pillow tumbling across the floor.

  “No, we didn’t,” said Heather, trying to convince herself of the truth of the statement. “Those men were bad people, and they caused the situation, not us.”

  “But we were the instigators,” Jennifer sobbed. “I’m the one who had the virus pick that machine. I caused all of this.”

  Heather sat down beside Jennifer on the bed, hugging her friend tightly, fighting the sinking feeling that continued to assault her.

  “Hey, Jen, you in your room?” Mark’s voice echoed down the hallway.

  “Just a sec,” Jennifer replied, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand.

  Mark stuck his head in the door. “What’s up?”

  “Did you hear what I said?” Jennifer said angrily. “I said to give me a second.”

  Mark started to pull back, then, seeing her face, came into the room. “What is it, Sis? What’s the matter?”

  Heather repeated the news story they had just heard.

  “You’re kidding,” Mark said, slumping into Jennifer’s chair.

  “I wish I was. It looks like we probably caused all this. 98.32 percent probability.” Realizing what she had just said, Heather flushed a bright red, although for once, neither Mark nor Jennifer appeared to notice her savant lapse.

  “Holy shit!” Mark leaned back in the chair, his hands clasped behind his head. “Jen, I know you’re upset. But how are you coming on the virus that is supposed to hide our trail from the trace?” he asked.

  “I’m just about done with it,” she sniffed. “How’s your Russian?”

  Mark shrugged. “Passable. I’ve been reading everything I can get to on the web with no problem. Unless it’s some strange local slang, I can probably handle it.”

  Jennifer moved toward her computer. “Here. Let me have my chair, and I’ll keep working.”

  Mark stood up. “Good girl. I hate to push you, but now that we see what these people are capable of doing, we damned sure don’t want them finding us.”

  Heather nodded. “Jen, I’m going to go get my laptop. We probably won’t have longer than about forty-eight hours to get your new virus uploaded and working before they trace the old one back to Los Alamos.”

  “I should be able to finish it by tomorrow morning. I’ll just need to run some tests after school. Then we’ll be ready.”

  “Okay,” said Heather. “In the meantime, we both have the monitor program on our handhelds and laptops. We can watch the progress of the trace on them. By the way, how’s it looking?”

  Jennifer’s fingers blurred across her laptop keyboard. “Fine. Some antiviruses have started nibbling away at the agents, but they’re regenerating. I’d say we have the antivirus companies guessing.”

  “Great. I’ll be right back.”

  By the time Heather retrieved her laptop and made her way back to Jennifer’s room, trouble had surfaced.

  “I lied to you,” Jennifer said, without glancing up from the keyboard. “Someone has a trace on us. I started seeing indications right after you left.”

  Heather glanced over Jennifer’s shoulder at the readout on the computer screen, a cascade of equations flashing through her mind.

  “Crap. We don’t have forty-eight hours. At this rate they’ll track down the s
ource by this time tomorrow night.”

  Mark leaned over Jennifer’s other shoulder. “Looks like tomorrow morning it is, Sis.”

  Jennifer switched back to her compiler but did not respond, her mind already locked away in a world of bits and bytes. Heather glanced once more at her friend's face, features tight with concentration and worry, then turned to carry her own laptop to Mark’s room. The pounding of her heart echoed the pounding worry in her head. For the sake of her friends, for the sake of their families, for the sake of their very lives, she hoped she chose better this time.

  By midnight, Heather and Mark found a computer location Jennifer could use as a false source to lead the trace back to. Since the best thing they could do to help Jennifer was to leave her undisturbed, Heather went home and, after letting her parents know she was back from the long homework session, went to bed.

  Although she was exhausted, Heather found that sleep evaded her. About the best she could manage was a fitful doze. Her dreams were so disturbing that she awoke feeling more tired than when she had gone to bed.

  At breakfast her mother fretted over the dark circles under Heather’s eyes. “I don’t think these late-night cram sessions are effective. If you three can’t get an early start on homework, then your grades and your health will suffer.”

  “Mom, I know that. We’ll try to get on top of things earlier next time. Believe me, I think we learned our lesson.”

  Her father chuckled as he sipped his coffee. “I seem to recall making that same statement myself. At least a couple hundred times.”

  Heather rose from the table, kissed her mom and dad, and then headed for the door, grabbing her backpack on the way.

  “See you after school,” she yelled as the door slammed behind her.

  If she looked bad, Jennifer looked terrible. “I see you didn’t sleep either,” Heather said as she walked up to the twins.

  “Sure I did,” said Mark, who indeed looked disgustingly bright-eyed and cheery.

  Jennifer rolled her eyes. “No, I didn’t. I just got finished a half hour ago. I barely had time to shower and grab a bagel on my way out the door. I got the virus copied to my PDA, but the thing is completely untested.”

  “You can test it after school,” said Heather.

  At that moment the bright yellow school bus arrived amidst a squeal of brakes. Only after they were on board and the doors snicked closed behind them did Heather realize how cold the wind outside had been. She had been so distracted that she had forgotten to put her headband over her ears. Now, the heat inside the bus started her ears tingling so violently it felt like a horde of biting insects had descended on them, intent on gnawing the appendages from the sides of her head.

  An itch was also building inside her nostrils. One thing she could always count on. Having acquired a critical mass of young passengers, the odors within the school bus became capable of reaching inside her nostrils and tugging on her nose hairs until her eyes watered.

  From a loving mother’s carefully packed roast beef sandwich, complete with horseradish, to the partially burned gasoline fumes, to the young men, generously splashed with TAG Body Spray, this morning's odiferous warriors were engaged in an all-out charge into Heather’s sinuses.

  While some people howled out a hurricane-force sneeze and were done, Heather’s came out as tiny little “chi” sounds that seemed to go on forever. Although she tried desperately to hold it back, when the sneezes started, they kept coming until everyone around her was laughing.

  Fortunately the bus pulled to a halt in front of the high school before Heather had to endure a second attack. By the time she, Mark, and Jennifer had made their way to Ms. Gorsky’s first-period history class, Heather’s sinuses actually felt clear again.

  As she pulled out her history book, Heather’s PDA spilled out, hitting the floor hard enough that Heather grabbed for it in a panic, turning it over in her hands to see if it had broken. She pressed the tiny “on” switch, holding her breath as she waited to see if it would respond.

  If it was broken, she wouldn’t get another for the rest of the year. Five hundred dollars was a lot of money, and this little handheld computer had been a highly anticipated birthday present from her dad.

  To her relief, the screen came to life, responding normally as she cycled through the program screens. Just as she was about to switch it off, Heather stopped, a sudden constriction clamping her chest. The PDA had made a wireless connection to the school's WIFI network and the trace-tracking program finished updating.

  As Heather’s eyes scanned the data, it was clear that the NSA had drastically accelerated their progress since the last time Heather had checked. Entire branches of their network of agent programs had ceased reporting. The new trace rate leaped into her head with the force of a charging buffalo.

  Heather signaled to Jennifer across the room, catching her eye and pointing to the PDA.

  “Two hours!” Heather mouthed the words with increasing desperation, holding up two fingers, pointing to the PDA and then making a slashing motion across her own throat.

  Jennifer looked confused, but then pulled out her own PDA computer. After several seconds, a look of horror crept onto her face.

  Thank God, Heather thought as Jennifer began typing on her own PDA. At least Jennifer could send the launch command that would go across the network and uplink the Counter Trace Virus. Once that was complete, she could activate it. It hadn’t been tested, but it would have to do. They were out of time.

  “You two!” Ms. Gorsky’s voice brayed like a kicked mule. “Heather McFarland and Jennifer Smythe. Bring those devices to my desk. Now! You know cell phones and PDAs are not allowed in the classroom.

  “Come on. Switch them off and drop them right up here on my desk, young ladies. Then you can just waddle your little fannies down to Principal Zumwalt’s waiting room until I get a chance to get down there.”

  Heather felt as if she had been slapped across the face. A glance at Jennifer’s terrified eyes gave her all the answer she needed. Jennifer wasn’t done.

  Ms. Gorsky smacked her hand down on her desk. “I didn’t say for you to come up here when you got around to it. I said now.”

  Heather and Jennifer scrambled to respond. Ms. Gorsky’s meaty hand reached out and snatched the PDA from Heather and then from Jennifer before either had a chance to lay them on her desk. She dropped them unceremoniously into a lime green bag bulging with homework papers.

  “Now move it.”

  As they made their way out into the hallway and the door closed behind them, Jennifer mumbled something that Heather couldn’t quite make out. Before she could ask Jennifer what she had said, though, Jennifer repeated it, then repeated it again, then again, all the way to the office. A single, three-word phrase.

  “We are dead.”

  33

  Mrs. O’Reilly’s desk sat at a right angle to the entrance to Principal Zumwalt’s office, facing directly out toward the door that opened into the hallway. Most days, as students waited for their respective turns to see the principal, they stared directly across at the spot where Mrs. O’Reilly pecked at the keys of her keyboard, occasionally peering out at them over the narrow rims of her spectacles, her wispy red hair making her head look like it was on fire.

  For the moment, that spot was vacant, as was the office of the principal. The space was deathly silent except for their breathing, which, in stark contrast, seemed preternaturally loud, like the huffing of a dinosaur sniffing around for some hidden animal to eat. Unfortunately, it seemed Jennifer and Heather were the animals about to be eaten.

  Inside Heather’s head, she had a clear mental image of a digital display counting rapidly down toward zero. How had the NSA made such a big jump in tracking down the source? There must have been something that Heather had overlooked, some hidden pattern in the virus that the supercomputers at Ft. Meade had spotted, enabling them to accelerate the trace.

  That was the problem with not being a computer expert herself.
She could only make accurate estimates of things she thoroughly understood. While Jennifer understood the computer world very well, Heather must have missed something in what her friend had described to her about the network configuration of the Internet.

  She glanced over at Jennifer, who sat beside her with her head in her hands. There must be something they could do besides give up. Think, Heather. Think.

  The mental countdown in her mind stood at one hour, thirty-two minutes, fourteen seconds, and counting, accounting for the nonlinear acceleration she observed in the trace data.

  “Jen, you hanging in there?” Heather asked, although her own desperation had her near hyperventilation.

  Jennifer looked up at her numbly. “Heather, I was so close. I had started uplinking the virus when Ms. Gorsky caught us. I barely had time to throw the PDA into screen saver lock before she grabbed it from me.”

  Heather’s heart sank even further. “So you didn’t get it uplinked?”

  Jennifer shrugged hopelessly. “I don’t know. I left the uplink going when I locked the screen saver. If she didn’t turn it off, then the uplink would go ahead and finish, but that doesn’t do us any good. I have to get on the Internet to activate it.”

  Their chances of activating the Counter Trace Virus, or CTV, in the remaining amount of time did not look good. They needed to activate it as soon as possible to give the virus a chance to work its magic before the NSA got so close that there would be no masking the trail.

  If they could just get the CTV going, it would act like antivirus software, but with one huge advantage. It knew the original virus pattern and could hop around rapidly eliminating all traces of the agents, even slightly modifying information in the appropriate Internet routing tables.

  Actually it would leave behind a subtle trace, designed to lead the NSA to a false source, on selected routers.

  One hour, twenty-nine minutes, forty-six seconds.

  Heather glanced around desperately. Suddenly the nucleus of a plan formed in her brain. Standing up, she walked to the doorway and peered out into the hall. Except for an occasional passerby, it was empty. There was no sign of Mrs. O’Reilly, Principal Zumwalt, or Ms. Gorsky.