Disc (26 page)

For a moment Cooper wondered how that could be possible; then he remembered that Gettnor had done many things that the spooks at NSA thought were impossible.
No use wondering about it, accept it and move on to the things I do know about.
“What did the message say?”

“He asked me to turn the computer on down in his lab. Your guys turned it off after they copied its memory.”

Cooper had been expecting messages of love or requests to send help.
Turn on my computer?! What the hell kind of message is that?
“You didn’t turn it on, did you?”

“Yes, why not?”

“The North Koreans may be forcing him to try to retrieve the data on it.”

“I thought you said that they’d already destroyed all the data on it?”

“Well, um, yeah, they have.”

“So by denying him access, the only person we could hurt would be Vaz, right? Please tell me you aren’t going to ask me to do that.”

“Um, no Ma’am. Did he give you his location?”

“No,” Lisanne sighed. “He didn’t even reply to my questions about how he and Tiona were doing.”

“What else did he tell you?”

“Nothing,” she said sadly.

“What else did you say to him?”

“I told him that someone had erased the data files on his computer.”

“Nothing else?”

“No.”

Hearing of that terse exchange, Cooper wondered whether the Gettnors had been having marital problems before he’d been kidnapped. Of course, he thought, the guy
is
pretty weird. That might be how their communications
normally
went. He said, “We’ll get some guys over there to look at the computer and see if they can figure out what he wanted.” After a moment, he continued, “If you get another chance to communicate with him, ask him if he can tell you where they’re keeping him and whether he can communicate securely with us. If he indicates his keepers can’t eavesdrop, tell him that anything he can tell us might help us break him and Tiona out.”

***

Khang arrived early the next morning and seated himself in front of Gettnor’s computer. He powered it up and felt a little surprise when it opened the basic displays that came with the operating system when it was new. It kind of looked like no one had used it since it arrived.

Khang grinned to himself.
Making it look like it’s never been used is a pretty good trick. But, I
know
it’s seen heavy use and there’s no way he can hide that from me.
Khang started delving deeper.

Initially with surprise, then with more and more frustration Khang searched directories, looked for hidden files, and finally tried to detect any access or use of the operating system since the day the computer had been delivered. To all intents and purposes it seemed to be a completely virgin system! There hadn’t been any files modified since the delivery date either. Khang not only couldn’t find the CAD/CAM files Gettnor had been working on the day before, he couldn’t even find the CAD/CAM program!

Slowly turning, Khang looked around the lab, wondering if somehow the computer Gettnor had been working on yesterday had been moved and this one put in its place.

The only other computer evident was the one Gettnor’s daughter used.

Khang turned back to the one sitting where Gettnor had been yesterday. He knew how big the basic OS for this computer should be as delivered. He queried the AI to see how much memory was currently occupied. Khang closed his eyes in frustration. The AI reported the install to be almost exactly the size that Khang remembered for this OS!

Over his shoulder Khang heard Gettnor’s voice, “What’re you doing?”

Khang whirled and said, “There’s no record that you’ve used this computer!”

Gettnor shrugged slowly, “No.”

“I watched you using it yesterday!”

Gettnor gave another slow shrug.

“What happened to all the records of yesterday’s usage?!”

Gettnor shrugged again.

Furious, Khang first thought of reporting this to his boss, but then decided that he didn’t want to have to explain that Gettnor had done things on the computer yesterday that Khang, the computer expert, couldn’t find a record of today. After another moment, Khang decided
I’ll watch him like a hawk today. Surely I can figure out how he’s doing it
.

Vaz felt uneasy about Khang hanging around his computer, so he started unpacking some of the equipment that had arrived. Tiona joined him and together they began hooking it up. To his mild distress, Tiona placed several of the instruments in different locations than they had been in his basement lab back in Raleigh. It was bad enough that he was in a different country, in a different building, with new people hanging around and watching him. He really wanted to have his equipment organized like he’d had it before.

Rather than talk to her about it, he simply moved instruments that she had mis-located into what felt to him to be their familiar locations. He felt especially good about a row of four pieces of the equipment that were all arranged the way he’d had them back in his basement. Because everything hadn’t come in, many of the other pieces of equipment sat in gap-toothed locations waiting for their neighbors to join them.

As he moved one of the devices Tiona had unpacked and malpositioned, he saw her watching him with a puzzled look on her face. Then she surveyed the room, looking at each piece. Suddenly, she smiled and picked up a power supply that she’d unpacked. She carried it to a location that matched the position of the similar power supply he’d had back home.

She started setting it up there.

Vaz’s tension eased.

Once they’d unpacked everything, Vaz began to feel an itchy sensation about the equipment which had been replaced by newer models. He wanted to read the manuals on them to know what had changed, but that would mean using the computer and Khang was still standing around watching them. Then, with a mild sense of malicious glee, he remembered how much most people hated reading manuals. He walked over to the computer and sat down.

As he began speaking to the AI resident on the computer, he struck the key combination that would keep the computer from recording anything he did in its normal system records. Instead, as it had done the day before, the AI opened some of Vaz’s programming, hidden through his personal encryption, in files that looked like random noise to anyone not knowing his system. A flicker of the screen signaled the change to the desktop he’d created. A desktop which looked just like the OS the computer had come with, but which carefully hid all the ancillary capabilities Vaz had built into his modified OS.

He turned to Khang, “I need you to hook it up to the internet now. I need to read the manuals for the new equipment.”

Khang stared at him for a few moments, then said, “Step away from the computer. You’re not to use it while I’m not here watching you.” He turned to Lim and Ko, the scientists who’d been assigned to watch the Gettnors build their thrusters so they could duplicate the technology. He spoke to them in Korean for a moment, telling them to keep Gettnor from using the computer. Then he went to the door and pressed a button for the guards to let him out so that he could hook up the fiber.

As soon as Khang left the room, Tiona called Vaz over, “Tell me about this pH meter.” Leaning close, she said quietly, “Dad, what are you planning to do? It looks like you’re setting up a lab just like the one back home.”

At first, Vaz was puzzled why she’d called him over about the pH meter, then started talking about something else. Abruptly, he realized it was so Jiao wouldn’t be able to hear. Responding to her question, he said, “Uh-huh.”

“Why? Surely we don’t need
all
this stuff.”

Vaz shrugged. Quietly, he said, “I
like
having it the way it is back home. Makes me feel… better.” He looked at her out of the corner of his eye and gave her a sly smile, “Besides, it’s costing them a fortune.”

“But… What are we doing to get ourselves back home? If I distract Khang can you send a message back home?”

“I did that yesterday.”

Tiona got an odd look on her face, Vaz thought it might be surprise. She said, “Who did you send it to?”

“Your mother.”

“Did you tell her we’re okay? And did you tell her where we are?”

Vaz tried not to frown as he realized he
should
have told Lisanne those things without her having to ask him. After Khang left yesterday and he’d opened the messages containing very similar questions from Lisanne, he’d set up responses to be sent out today without giving it much thought. Now he realized that if Tiona had sent a message to her mother, her mother wouldn’t have had to ask those questions. “Okay,” he responded.

Tiona closed her eyes and snorted, “You haven’t told her yet, but you will, right?”

Vaz nodded.

“Tell her to tell Nolan we’re okay too. Oh, and she should tell General Cooper where we are. Maybe he can do something to help us.”

Khang came back in, “Okay, internet hooked up.”

Vaz sat down at his computer and flicked a couple of keys. With satisfaction, he saw the pixel in the lower left corner turn blue indicating his responses to Lisanne’s questions were going out. He started surfing a site that sold neodymium magnets.

He’d just found some magnets that he thought would meet his needs when he saw the pixel turn red indicating that Lisanne was replying again. He hoped it wasn’t a bunch more questions about things that he should have thought to tell her already.

He wondered if he could send Tiona’s messages to Nolan and General Cooper without Khang noticing.

He decided it would be best to program them later and send them tomorrow.

Time to read some manuals,
he thought with some excitement.

Tiona was setting up the computer they’d gotten for her. She’d demanded it when they’d given Vaz one. She was installing CAD/CAM software in order to appear to be keeping busy, but mostly wondering what she could be doing to win their freedom. Her mind kept turning to the saucers.

If her dad could communicate with her mother, he could probably communicate with the AIs in the saucers. If so, it would be trivial to have a saucer fly around the world to North Korea. Then if they could escape, they could fly home.

The problem was that she didn’t even know what city in North Korea they were
near
, much less the exact GPS coordinates of their location that the saucer would require if it were going to find them. Another issue was that the saucers were far from radar stealthy. If they descended into a paranoid country like North Korea they would be noticed and attacked very quickly.

Tiona wondered if perhaps the big saucer could land so it knocked down one wall of the building they were being held in. Maybe then she and her dad could board and the saucer could take back off faster than the North Koreans could scramble fighter jets. She thought she remembered that the SR-71 used to fly over countries at altitudes close to 100,000 feet (nineteen miles), so presumably they wouldn’t get excited until the saucer got below that height. Descending at 600 miles an hour to keep from breaking the sound barrier, the saucer would be traveling ten miles per minute. It would only take two minutes to get down and another two minutes to get back up.

Unfortunately there were always guards inside and outside the building. She couldn’t think of a way to get past the soldiers to the saucer.

And, of course, there remained the problem of how to tell the saucer which building to break into.
Maybe dad would have some ideas about how to determine our location. I just need to figure out how to get him to do it.

Suddenly, Jiao and Khang both jerked and put a finger to the earpieces of their AIs, obviously getting an urgent message. Their eyes darted back and forth in alarm. They shouted at the guards in Korean. Two of the guards who’d been sitting down bolted to their feet and all six of them rearranged themselves in the room. For a moment, Tiona dared hope that someone might be coming to break her and Vaz free. But then the guards started checking their uniforms, tucking their shirts and otherwise looking more like they were expecting an inspection than preparing to repel raiders.

The door buzzed and a couple of deadly looking men stepped into the room. Their eyes scanned around and then they walked around the room sweeping it as if they thought there might be a murderer hiding somewhere. One of them had Vaz stand up and then patted him down, apparently to check for weapons. Tiona worried that her dad might punch the guy. Eventually the two new men glanced at one another and nodded. One spoke in a mumble to his AI and the door buzzed again.

An overweight Korean entered the room and Tiona recognized North Korea’s leader Kim Sung-Jong.
If this guy’s taking enough interest to come visit us himself, we were probably kidnapped on his direct order,
Tiona thought. She saw all the other men in the room bowing and noticed that none of them were looking anywhere near Kim’s face. For a moment, she considered keeping her eyes downcast as well but then decided to hell with it. She looked the man in the eye.