Breakpoint (12 page)

Across the parking lot, Susan noticed that a surveillance camera on the streetlight had just turned in her direction. At least the fearsome NASA police had installed security cameras.

She had heard of Living Software for three or four years now, but this was the first time the implications were sinking in. It was more than just glitch-free programs, a lot more. And soon some human brains would be connected to a computer network on which Living Software was running. The human interface would be firewalled off, of course, on a sub-net. Right. Megs was right, there was a lot of technology that was about to be sprung on an unsuspecting world. And that was just what was in the open. What about the technology developments that were hidden? How ironic that the Chinese and others knew about the underground research and development, but Washington did not. She had to find the full extent of it, before it, too, was attacked and set back or destroyed. Megs had pointed her in the right direction, but now she needed more help to uncover the partially hidden new world of computer science and genomics, of nano and quantum computing, of reverse-engineering the human brain.

She thumbed through her notes on the PDA, went online to get the number for Jupiter Systems, and connected through to the main number in Menlo Park, five miles away. “Could you put me through to the office of Will Gaudium, please?” Mr. Gaudium, a founder of the information systems giant, was no longer full time in Menlo Park, Susan was told, but she could send an e-mail to his assistant who would consider her request for a meeting. Susan dashed off a message explaining not just that she was a Fed who wanted to interview him on a matter of national security, but also that she wanted his help understanding the security implications of Living Software and the Human Brain Reverse-Engineering Project.

As she drove away from SCAIF back to the main gate, she was distracted, her mind still in a fog, trying to understand what was spinning around her and why she had not seen it before. And why no one else on this case apparently got it yet. She needed to talk to Jimmy, get his reaction…. And then it happened. In her peripheral vision, she caught a flash up ahead, then heard the sound of a thud. At the end of the road, near the gate, over a half mile away, a cloud of dust billowed up, and shooting out of the dust cloud came a truck, a red eighteen-wheeler tractor-trailer, coming fast down the road right toward her.

Suddenly she knew. No processing time was required. The situational understanding was instant. The gatehouse had just been attacked and now SCAIF was about to go the way of CAIN and the beachheads. Where the hell were Jimmy and his guns when she needed them? The truck was probably one giant bomb.

Without stopping for second thoughts, Susan threw the car into park, pulled the belt off her bag, and strapped it around the steering wheel and the seat-belt hook. Then, aiming the car for where the truck would be in a few seconds as it came around the curve, she pushed open the driver's door, threw the gear into drive, set the cruise control for seventy, and leapt from the car as it sped up. Hitting the grass hard, she rolled, and then, her back facing the road, she assumed the fetal position and waited.

And…nothing happened.

Nothing. If the car had missed colliding with the eighteen wheeler, at least the truck should be roaring by her…

The ground shook below her as though a dinosaur had put its foot down next to her. Then the concussive wave pounded her everywhere on her body, like she was being punched by ten men. As the sound overloaded her brain, she was simultaneously aware of pieces of flaming metal landing all around her, setting the grass on fire. It had worked, she thought as the air rushed out of her lungs and she passed out.

The impact of the Nissan hitting the charging truck had set off the detonator. The truck bomb had gone off on the approach road, blowing out windows across the campus, sending a column of smoke and debris thousands of feet in the air, causing a crater thirty feet wide and eight feet deep, throwing the chassis of the truck cab over the fence and off the base. The person or people inside the truck cab would never be found, except for microscopic pieces of flesh that would be analyzed for their DNA signatures.

Inside the windowless SCAIF, the earthquake shock absorbers had adjusted instantly when the blast occurred. The rows of parallel processors did not miss a byte. They continued to hum and to glow blue.

2030 Greenwich Mean Time
The Cabinet Office
Whitehall, London

“Sol, I thought I would just check in before I go home,” Sir Dennis Penning-Smith said into the secure telephone in his London office. “We've seen media reports of a terrorist attack near the Googleplex.”

“You're working too late for a man of your age, Sir Dennis,” Rubenstein teased his old friend.

“As I recall, Sol, you are four months older,” Sir Dennis replied gravely.

“Yes, but it's five hours earlier here.” Rubenstein got down to business. “Yes, we are still getting details on the explosion, but the most important thing is that one of our officers was there and was apparently responsible for preventing the attack from getting to Google or the university research center. That center was linked to Globegrid and was probably the target. Don't know yet who did it, of course.”

The voice link was traveling over a military satellite channel, and during the brief pause in their conversation they could both hear the subtle sounds of its transmission and encryption. “So it continues,” Sir Dennis intoned. “Sol, our Beijing station thinks that there is some sort of internal tension in the Chinese leadership. We have a source there who is in a position to know, has access. The source, however, won't give up his subsource, who we think is pretty highly placed. The subsource says he will only meet with a senior official of our Secret Intelligence Service.”

“Could be a lure,” Rubenstein cautioned.

“Funny, that's what Brian Douglas said.”

“So let me guess. The Deputy Director of SIS decided to assign himself the task,” Rubenstein replied.

“Of course. Brian lands in Beijing about now,” Sir Dennis said, looking at the antique clock on the fireplace mantel. “He knows how to sense a setup, how to arrange a meet so he can get out.”

“Indeed, he proved that in Tehran, but I doubt he speaks Mandarin and he is a few years older now than when he did the Iran mission.”

“Aren't we all?” Sir Dennis said, standing up and looking out at the evening traffic coming down from Trafalgar Square and passing below his window on Whitehall toward Parliament. “Sol, the media is full of speculation and leaks that China might be behind the attacks. Senators talking about the need to respond. I hope your President is not feeling the need to—”

“The President is ensuring we are prepared, that we have a spectrum of options if the evidence goes where you and I think it will.” Sol's view from his Executive Office Building suite looked south from the White House complex across the park toward Reagan National Airport. Aircraft taking off veered sharply to avoid the no fly zone over the White House. The huge spotlights were just coming on at the Washington Monument. “My job—no, Dennis,
our
job—is not just to come up with the evidence, but it is then to tell our political masters how to handle it without making a complete mess of things.”

Sir Dennis reached for his battered Peterson pipe. “Or to help the Chinese to figure out how to undo what someone in their government may have done. So bloody minded of them about Taiwan, willing to sacrifice their own economic progress to reclaim something they haven't had in sixty years. The deal they struck with us on Hong Kong worked out nicely. It's still independent for all practical purposes, a Special Autonomous Region.”

“I agree. What kind of capitalists are these Chinese, anyway?” Rubenstein joked.

“Indeed.”

1830 EST
The Dugout
Watertown, Massachusetts

Soxster sat in a room lit by the light from seven flat screens. He was in the Dugout, a computer facility more capable than those run by most information technology companies. The Dugout, however, had been built with devices found in dumpsters in parking lots behind information technology companies—castoffs rebuilt and improved by Soxster, Greenmonsta, Yankeehater, Fenwayfranks, and the rest of the hacker gang that rented the space in the old shoe factory. They all had day jobs at universities and high-tech corporations in the Boston area. By night, they got to their passion, exploring cyberspace, its dark recesses, its faulty glitched-up networks, its unprotected systems around the world.

“When we find an app, a program, that has a glitch, we tell the right people,” Soxster had assured Jimmy Foley. He hadn't said how fast they did the notification.

The first to arrive at the Dugout that afternoon, Soxster had tried to track down Susan and Jimmy. Now that he had succeeded in finding Susan, he was sending a text message to Jimmy.

Jimmy Foley had just pulled into a roadside rest stop in the California desert, to empty his bruised kidneys. When he had found out that he could rent a Harley Heritage Softail near LAX airport, he had leapt at the chance. The bike had a fat front fork like the classic 1949 Hydra Glide, and was made to look original right down to the Fat Bob fuel tank. Now, with most of southern California behind him, he was thinking maybe he should have gone for the car that the office had reserved for him. He felt his PDA vibrate and flipped it open to read the text messages.

1610 PST
The Globe and Anchor Grille and Pool Hall
Twentynine Palms, California

A cue ball smashed against racked balls as Jimmy walked into the dingy poolroom side of the Marine hangout. He scanned the few people in the room, looking for someone who would fit the description Soxster had just sent him. There were no matches. “Gimme a Bud, will yah. I'll be right out. Gotta wash some road off me,” Jimmy Foley called out to the young blond bartender. As he strode by her on his way to the men's room, he judged from the diamond on her finger that she was a Marine's wife. Despite the motorcycle helmet and gloves, the dust and grime from the highway had made it through to his hands, face, and short cropped hair. He made an attempt to clean up, although the word
clean
was not what came to mind in the smelly men's room. Nonetheless, the cold water felt bracing on his face. He put his face in the sink and let the water run over his head. He flashed back to too many nights as Lt. James X. Foley III in Marine bars around the world.