Black Rain: A Thriller (18 page)

It was bigger than her, she knew that, bigger than them all, but she was the one carrying the knowledge and it left her feeling very alone, isolated, back out on that island that Hawker had so accurately described. And though Hawker was still in the dark, he had a sense of what she was going through and in some way had begun to share that weight. It had given them a bond and she had even begun to trust him.

She hated to admit it but she missed his presence,
even his bad jokes. She found herself looking forward to his return, to a degree she would not have expected.

At the moment though, her attention returned to the march and the latest delay in their progress. McCarter had stopped the procession for another Discovery Channel moment, showing the others a huge rubber tree with its smooth, plasterlike wood and a trunk that spread apart like a group of massive vertical blades. A thin black line of ants were crawling along the bark, hundreds of them in single file with little leaves in their mouths.

Ants! He’d stopped the hike to watch some ants!

“Look at them,” he said. “Don’t they remind you of us, carrying their little packs?”

She shook her head. “Not unless you can show me one who keeps stopping the group and holding everyone up.”

His face wrinkled, he’d been as giddy as a schoolboy since the discovery of the Wall, with a demeanor to match. “No,” he said. “But see this little one over here bossing the others around. He reminds me of—”

She gave him
the look
and he stopped midsentence. With a smile he turned from the ants and reengaged in the trek, launching into a whistling chorus of “High Hopes” as he went. This time she couldn’t help but laugh.

By the fifth day, they came across evidence of a small structure. It wasn’t much more than a loose pile of stone covered with plant growth and moss, but it was enough to tell them they were in the right area. A few hours later they stumbled upon a sight Danielle could not explain, even as she gazed at it in wonder.

She stepped from the shadows of the rainforest into a large, circular clearing populated by nothing more than scrubby weeds and pale, dry grasses. The darkness they’d hiked through for the past five days cowered behind her, while the blinding sunlight poured in unchallenged. Here, the forest surrendered a dominion that held sway for hundreds of miles in every direction. But that was the smaller surprise.

Danielle squinted against the sudden brightness, using a hand to shield her eyes. At the center of the clearing a gray stone pyramid towered above the flat, open ground. Its steep walls were smooth and unmarked on three sides, while a single stairway ran up its face to a small, square roof, fifteen stories above the forest floor.

A structure of unmistakably Mayan design, as perfect as could be—and yet, for reasons Danielle, and later McCarter, found hard to explain, it seemed out of place and foreign. Not only shouldn’t it have been there in the greater sense of all they knew about the Mayan race, but it shouldn’t have appeared as it did. It should have been buried in a tangled web of living trees, vines and soil, just as McCarter had been telling the group since day one. It should have been crumbling under the weight of its own stonework, failing and dilapidated as it drowned in the thickening rainforest and its ever-constricting grip.

But it was none of these things. It stood unencumbered and menacing, defiantly unbowed. It unnerved her in a way she could not explain.

At the mere sight of it, the other members of the team began shouting, whooping and hollering in celebration and congratulating one another. Several of them began
running toward the pyramid, racing to the foot of the temple as if the first to touch it would win some unspoken prize.

They sprinted past, pausing briefly to congratulate her, before corralling McCarter and dragging him off with them, victorious.

Danielle let them go, preferring to savor the moment. As she walked farther into the clearing and its blissful daylight, she felt a great sense of accomplishment. At long last, she had something concrete to point to. The temple could not disappear like the other leads had. It could not turn out to be a sham or a hoax or a mistake in translation. It was tangible, concrete and irrefutable. She
would
find what they were looking for and she
would
return to Washington a hero.

M
att Blundin sat in Stuart Gibbs’ office, aggravated and exhausted at the end of a seventeen-hour day. The director sat across from him, leaning back in his chair, head tilted upward, eyes staring blankly at the ceiling.

At 2:00
A.M.
in Washington, Blundin had just finished explaining the nuances of a developing situation: a security breach and data theft that he’d only recently discovered.

Gibbs brought himself forward and exhaled loudly. “What else do you have?”

“That’s it,” Blundin said. “All we know right now is what happened.”

“I don’t give a shit about
what happened,”
Gibbs cursed. “I want to know how it happened, why it happened and who the fuck made it happen.” With the last phrase, Gibbs threw the report across the desk, where it fanned out and crashed into Blundin’s prominent gut.

Blundin rubbed his neck. He was sweaty and grimy after such a long day and ready to lash out. But that would just make for a longer night. He plucked the report from his lap and placed it back on the desk, out of
Gibbs’ reach, then pulled a dented pack of Marlboros from his breast pocket.

He drew one out and stuck it between his lips. Two flicks of the lighter and the tip was glowing red. Only after a long drag on the cigarette did he begin to reply.

“Look,” he said, white smoke billowing from his mouth. “I can tell you
how
it was probably done. I can even tell you
when
it was probably done, but that doesn’t help us with the who, because it could have been anybody on the network, either inside this building or out.”

Gibbs leaned back, looking pleased for the first time all night. “Let’s start with how.”

“Fine,” Blundin said. “We can start there, but we’re going to end up right back where we are now.” He exhaled another cloud of carcinogens and reached for an ashtray to lay the cigarette on. “It all starts with the codes. Our system uses a matrix code generated from a set of prime numbers and then exercised through a complex algorithm.”

Gibbs seemed lost already, which came as no surprise to Blundin. Maybe this was why he hadn’t listened in the first place.

Blundin leaned forward, demonstrating with his hands. “Just think of it like a combination lock. If you don’t know the combination you can eventually figure it out by checking every number against every other possible combination of numbers. You know, one, one, one, then one, one, two, then one, one, three—until eventually you get to thirty-six, twenty-six, thirty-six and it finally opens. Only in our case, we’re not talking about
forty numbers or whatever you have on one of those locks, we’re talking about a massive set of possibilities.”

“How massive?”

“Try a one with seventeen zeroes after it,” Blundin said. “So many numbers that if you counted a thousand a second it would take you a hundred years just to count that high.”

Blundin eased back in his chair. “And that’s just to count them. To crack the code, each number would have to be checked against every other number, and then tested to see if it worked.”

By the look on his face, Gibbs seemed to understand. “What about the vendor, the manufacturer who sold us this encryption?”

“No,” Blundin said. “The illegal entries were made using an inactive master code reserved by the computer in case the system locks up.”

“What about an ex-employee?” Gibbs asked. “Someone who might know the system, but quit or got fired.”

“I already checked. No one higher than a receptionist has left Atlantic Safecom since we installed the system.”

“And here?”

“Every time one of our employees leaves, their code and profile are scrubbed from the system—and like I already said, it wasn’t an employee code, it was a master code.”

Gibbs pounded a fist on the desk. “Well, goddamnit, how the hell did they get the master code? That’s what I’m asking you. I mean, they didn’t fucking guess it, did they?”

“Actually,” Blundin said, “in a way, they did.”

Gibbs’ eyes narrowed, which Blundin took as a veiled
threat that if he didn’t become more forthright, there would be repercussions.

“They made a lot of guesses,” Blundin said. “Over three hundred and fifty quadrillion.”

Gibbs’ face went blank. “That doesn’t even sound like a real fucking number.”

“It is,” Blundin assured him. “That’s what it takes to crack the code. That’s what I’ve been warning you about for the past year.”

Gibbs was silent, no doubt recalling Blundin’s requests to de-link from Research Division and his claims that the code could be vulnerable to a special type of computer-assisted probing. “The hacker problem,” Gibbs said finally. “Using a supercomputer or something. Is that how this was done?”

Blundin shifted in his chair. “Under normal circumstances, I would say no. Because even a supercomputer basically does things in series, checking one number against another, raising them by a single exponent and running them through a single algorithm. Even at the speed of your average Cray or Big Blue you’re still talking too many numbers and too much time.” Blundin paused and did some calculations in his head. “Might take a year or two of continuous, uninterrupted operation.”

Gibbs tapped his pen on the desktop. “You said ‘under normal circumstances.’ Am I to assume we’re firmly in the
abnormal
realm now?”

Blundin wiped his brow. “There’s a different type of programming out there,” he said. “In some cases, entering its third and fourth generation. It’s called massive parallel processing. It’s used to link computers together,
everything from regular PCs to servers and mainframes. And it can turn those units into the equivalent of a supercomputer … or ten. Aside from NASA and the Defense Department, not too many people even use it, because no one needs that kind of power. But it’s out there and it’s faster than anything you can imagine.”

“How fast are we talking about?”

“Exponentially faster. In other words, four linked units aren’t four times faster, they’re sixteen times faster. A hundred linked processors can be ten thousand times faster. Instead of a one-lane highway for your information to roll down, you now have a fifty-lane highway, or a thousand-lane highway or even a million-lane highway. The numbers get checked in parallel, instead of series. A sophisticated program could run a hundred teraflops per second. That is a hundred trillion calculations every second. And like I’ve been trying to tell you, this type of programming makes systems like ours vulnerable.”

The director appeared shocked. “Our system is the same one used by the FBI, even the CIA. You’re telling me their files are unsecured?”

Blundin shook his head. “Aside from a few criminals, nobody gives a shit what the FBI has in its files. You can’t make any money off what the FBI has in its files. And the Agency system is a pure standalone. Unless you drill a hole in the wall and plug in, there is no way to link up. But we’re attached to Research Department and they’re hooked up all over the fucking place—universities, member corporations, affiliates. It’s like Grand fucking Central. And if you steal one of their
projects—or one of ours—you’ve saved years of research for your company, and hundreds of millions in R and D. What the hell do you think we’re all about? It’s the same thing we do to the other side.”

Gibbs looked ill and Blundin thought,
If he’s sick now he’s going to puke when I tell him the rest
. “It gets worse,” he said.

A look of disbelief covered Gibbs’ face. “Really?” he said. “Well, please tell me. Because I can’t fucking imagine how.”

Blundin hesitated. This time when he spoke, the words came reluctantly. This was the part he hated, the slap in the face that made it so much harder to bear. “I told you they couldn’t do this from the outside. Well, that leaves only one possibility. The actual grunt work of going through the numbers happened on the inside.”

“Our own computers?”

“We have mainframes, stacks of blade servers, and two hundred and seventy-one linked PCs in this building alone. Add in the Research Department and the total network is five times larger, including a pair of brand-new Crays in a climate-controlled room over in Building Three. Link all these units together and you have one unbelievable number-crunching machine.”

“Some kind of virus,” Gibbs guessed.

Blundin nodded. “I have no proof yet, but I suspect when we’re done we’ll find that someone introduced a massive parallel program to our system which instructed our machines to work on breaking our own code.”

Gibbs’ bloodshot eyes looked like they might bug out of his head. “That’s just absurd,” he said. “I mean, I’m waiting for you to tell me that you’re kidding.”

Blundin pulled at his shirt collar. The button was already open but it still felt tight around the bulge of his neck. “I’m not.”

Gibbs leaned back in his chair, mumbling a string of expletives, as if enough swearing could purge him of the feeling welling up inside him. Finally, he focused on Blundin once again. “All right,” he said. “I find it hard to believe this shit, but I guess I don’t really have a choice. So now what? How do we find these bastards?”

Blundin had already begun a counterattack. “Since they probably tapped us from Research’s side, we should start there. Go into Research Division’s back door ourselves. I’m already looking at the programs they were running, to identify candidates for this Trojan. Once we have our list, we investigate the companies that own those programs.”

The director approved with a nod. “Okay, but I want you to do it personally, and then bring the information directly to me.” He clarified. “Only to me.”

“What about the boys at the Bureau?”

Gibbs was adamant. “No one from the outside. Not even anyone in your department. Not until I tell you.”