Palm Sunday (11 page)

Charles Mason looked expectantly at the faces around the conference room. “I hope we’ve all come up with some creative ideas for altering the profile.” He had his own notion of what needed to be done, but was open to input. “Don’t everyone speak at once.” Mason nodded his approval as Tom Snelling raised his hand. “Very good, a volunteer.” He indicated for Snelling to proceed.

“If it doesn’t really matter what the new profile indicates, my feeling was that it should be something non-invasive, perhaps along the lines of a splashy headline.”

“A headline. You mean like a newspaper story?”

“Well, yes,” said Snelling. “But something of national interest. Possibly a sex scandal.”

“Would it be true? I mean, the headline. Or would you simply ruin an innocent person’s life to change the profile?”

“The story would have to be provable, but where events might lead is unpredictable. Look at some of the past scandals at the presidential level. Who could have guessed how all that would play out.”

“Don’t confuse real world spontaneity with what we’re doing,” said Mason. “We’re talking about using agency resources to cause something to occur that normally wouldn’t.”

“It might.”

“That’s different.”

“So you don’t like the idea?” asked Snelling.

“It’s not that. In fact, I think you’re spot on in terms of how we might go about effecting an alteration. I just think we need to be more creative. We need something with greater impact.”

“I’ve got one.” Everyone turned to look at George Pampas, sitting by himself near one end of the table.

“Let’s hear it,” said Mason.

Pampas placed his beefy arms on the table and leaned forward. “Terrorist strike. First a small one, maybe take out an unoccupied building, early in the morning.”

“Probably not enough. The impact would be too small.”

“You follow it with a series of small bombings, in public places. Maybe you have some injuries.”

Mason nodded. “That would definitely get people talking.”

“Finally, an ultimatum is issued to the government–maybe demanding a change in policy towards Israel, or some other country, or the bombings continue. Make it very high profile, with a threat for more serious actions to follow.”

“Nice,” said Mason. “So the population would fear the next bombing, and there would be debate over the policy item, whatever it was.”

“Exactly, as long as it’s a new topic that hits close to home. It involves terrorism, the government, and a controversial decision to be made. People would be thinking about it. They’d be talking about it.” Pampas leaned back, his presentation complete.

“I like that better than the scandal idea. It would be tough to implement, though, and there could be casualties.”

Pampas waved his hand nonchalantly. “I think we could control the situation.”

“We’re making progress here,” said Mason. “Other ideas?”

Norbert sneezed into a handkerchief before speaking. “Mess with the airlines. Take down the reservation systems and watch the airports get bogged down with passengers on overbooked flights. Or better yet, ground the entire fleet, bring air travel to a standstill. Blame it on a computer virus. You want to hear some people raising a fuss, clog the airports.”

Mason slowly turned to Norbert. “Is that possible?”

Norbert blew his nose before answering. “On that scale? I don’t know. The reservation systems, probably, but actually grounding that many flights, that would be tough. I guess it would depend on how much time and money you wanted to invest.”

“Is that a ‘no’?”

“It’s a maybe. But I’ll tell you this. If we spread out the effect to include a variety of transportation nodes–rail, bus, subway–then we might get a blanket effect.”

“But is it possible?” demanded Mason.

“Not one hundred per cent coverage, but enough to get people upset.”

Kayoko slammed her hand on the table. “Why must it be a negative event? Do we have to change the profile by making everyone’s life so miserable that they’re ready to kill each other?”

“Why, no, of course not,” said Mason. “Did you have something else in mind?”

Kayoko nodded. “A positive event. Something that will alter the profile by impacting lives in such a way that people are in awe, not terror.”

“Nice concept, but give me a specific.”

“I don’t know,” said Kayoko. “There must be something.”

“You’ve stumbled on the harsh reality that political leaders have faced for centuries. When internal dissatisfaction grows beyond your ability to control it, nothing brings the masses together like war. It’s perhaps the ultimate negative event, but it gets the people off the streets, and for the politician, likely keeps one’s head attached to one’s body.” Mason smiled at those around the table while he lectured.

“Still,” said Kayoko. “There are exceptions. When we put a man on the moon, for example. That was a positive event that everyone focused on.”

“Indeed. You could no doubt point to any number of events that had a similar positive impact, and had we been doing societal profiles at the time, they would have reflected dramatic alterations. However, most such cases are the culmination of years of effort, research, even failures, before the final ‘glorious’ event. We don’t have years, or the resources, for that kind of project.”

“So we do it quick and dirty,” said Kayoko.

“Quick and not too dirty, hopefully.” Mason looked at Pampas. “George, your idea would work, and would probably be the most effective. But I’m just not willing to accept the possibility of casualties.”

“I understand.”

“My inclination is to go with some variation of Norbert’s suggestion. We’ll cause a major snarl in the transportation network, enough to inconvenience a lot of people for a short period of time. A few days, maybe as much as a week.”

“When will we profile?” asked Snelling.

“We’ll have to watch events unfold, and profile at the peak of impact,” said Mason. “We’ll do a follow up, perhaps a week later. I don’t expect the profile to be long lasting, but we do want to see it change, if briefly. George, your people will have to coordinate with Norbert’s group on implementation, once we determine precise methodology. Tom, Kayoko–this project has priority.”

Both nodded. Kayoko wasn’t exactly pleased, but at least they weren’t going to be blowing up buildings.

“That’s it folks,” said Mason. “Back to work.” 

When Kayoko got back to her office, she sat and stared at her blank computer screen for a full two minutes. Something was bothering her, beyond the new direction that the agency was taking. She’d had this feeling before, an awareness that something was wrong, something was out of place, but was unable to articulate or define what it was. She placed her hand on the mouse and aimlessly moved the cursor around the screen, drawing invisible boxes and circles. What was wrong, why this unease?

Perhaps it was subconscious, or just a coincidence. But as she focused on her display, the cursor had stopped and was positioned over an icon titled ‘SP Analysis’, one of the complex programs used for making sense out of the mountain of data culled from the agency’s repositories. She sat up straight. That was it! The files she had ‘borrowed’ from Snelling’s computer. She’d only had a brief opportunity to examine the raw data, but even her preliminary examination had left her somewhat baffled. Now she knew why, or at least thought she did. The numbers didn’t support Snelling’s analysis of the profile.

Kayoko was a scientist, and first and foremost had to consider the facts. She knew something was wrong with the analysis, or rather, strongly suspected it. Now she had two problems to solve. How exactly had the data been altered, and why would Snelling give Mason false information? The first issue was pure science, and that she could deal with pretty easily, given time. The second was a mystery, and would perhaps take even greater skill to unravel. She would have to be very careful.

Justin looked up from his console at the FBI regional data center. Sharon was watching him, hoping for something new, something they could work with. “I saw it again,” said Justin, “but it wasn’t there long enough to analyze.” This was the third time they had detected the Internet anomaly, but still they couldn’t pin it down. “Maybe it’s something innocent, like construction, or equipment failure.”

Sharon shook his head. “No. There’s no way some klutz with a backhoe is doing this. We’d know if a line was dinged.” ‘Dinged’ meant dug up, or otherwise damaged. Such things were not uncommon. Almost always, though, the result of such an accident was a noticeable break in communications, and usually the company that maintained the line detected and repaired the trouble fairly quickly.

“I don’t know what else to do,” said Justin. “It’s going to be tough to isolate this.”

“We’re just going to have to find a way,” said Sharon. He paced the floor, alternating between walking away from Justin, and turning back. Suddenly he stopped. “We need a spread of taps across that fiber bundle.”

Justin seemed skeptical. “I don’t know. That’s a pretty long segment. Would Roberts go for it?” Dave Roberts was Sharon’s boss, and he was a stickler for following regulations when it suited him. He was generally disinclined to go out on a limb without good reason.

Sharon shrugged. “I don’t know. Internet taps are a sticky issue, but we’re at a dead end.”

“Maybe we just need a new perspective,” said Justin.

“What do you mean?”

Justin swiveled in his chair so he was facing Sharon. “When I was in college I saw an engineering professor demonstrate a data intercept. He isolated one of a series of randomly scrambled transmissions by only monitoring a specific frequency range on a public switched network–a regular telephone line. All he got was a tape of part of a modem signal, but it was data, and it was ahead of its time.”

“Interesting,” said Sharon. “What was this professor’s name?”

“Walthrop. Professor Harold Walthrop, but he’s retired now.”

“Maybe we can track him down and pick his brain.”

“That’s what I was thinking,” said Justin.

Sharon had been absently rubbing his chin. He regarded Justin with a hint of a smile. “Shut down all the analyzers except for the one on trunk four.”

“But if the anomaly occurs on one of the other lines we’ll miss it.”

“Yes,” said Sharon,  “but if we detect it, we’ll know it’s coming from somewhere on trunk four.”

Justin wasn’t convinced. “It’s a long shot. There are five other primary trunks, and the anomaly could feed in on any of those. We’ll miss the opportunity to analyze the signal further if you’re wrong.”

“One hour on trunk four,” said Sharon. “Then we rotate. With luck, we’ll catch a break and narrow it down quickly.”

Justin suddenly saw the connection between his professor’s demonstration and Sharon’s orders. “Very clever, sir. By shutting down everything except one line, we in effect repeat Professor Walthrop’s experiment.”

“It’s even more crude, and it won’t actually get us any data, but it might help us narrow the range of possibilities.” As ordered, all lines except number four were disengaged. Sharon hated to lose the extra input, but he had to find out what was happening out there.

“All set,” reported Justin.

“Keep a sharp eye out. If that thing so much as hiccups I want to know about it.” 

Sitting alone in his cubicle, staring at his computer screen, Stanley was at a loss. The data was feeding properly, the interface was detecting the presence of bit flow, and the optical converter was functioning normally. So far, so good. But when the threat analysis software was activated, everything froze up. The words ‘System Error’ and a black screen were the only constants. He had run the test five times, always with some adjustment, and each time the result was the same.

He looked up from his display and reluctantly called out. “Hey, Boyd.”

“Yeah, just a minute. I’m in the middle of something. You people think these links just compile automatically? If even one library routine fails to attach then you can forget syncing up.”

“Take your time and get it right,” said Stanley. “We can wait.”

Katherine had walked into Stanley’s cubicle, and rolled her eyes. Boyd’s antics were the stuff of legend, but they were wearing thin. No one needed a crybaby in the middle of a crisis.

“He’s putting on quite a show today,” she whispered.

Stanley lowered his voice. “He’s in his element. He thinks he gets to be the hero.”

“Maybe he’s right. Here he comes.”

Boyd’s head was just visible over the top of the cubicles as he rounded the corner and joined Stanley and Katherine. It was crowded in Stanley’s small work area.

“Okay, now I’m free. What’s the problem?” Boyd sighed, as if carrying the world’s problems on his shoulders.

“It’s your firewall,” said Stanley. “I think it’s preventing the interface from establishing the final link.”

Boyd stood with his arms folded. “Did you configure the correct password?”

“I asked you for that information last week. You said I didn’t need it, that the firewall was set to pass our file through.”

Boyd took on the aspect of superiority that he liked to employ when he had been shown to be wrong about something. “You clearly misunderstood my instructions. I’ll make it as simple as I can. The password, in encrypted format, has to be included in the level three configuration file, which is itself encrypted and hidden.”

Stanley shook his head. “Boyd, we never talked about the level three configuration.”

“I didn’t think I had to spell everything out to the smallest detail.”

Katherine’s mouth hung open. “Are you kidding? How was he supposed to guess all that?”

Boyd eyed her coolly. “I don’t recall that you were present for the conversation.”

“Maybe not, but come on...”

Stanley held up his hand. “Okay, okay. It doesn’t matter. Just give me the information and show me where you’re keeping the level three config file these days.”

“I’ll take care of it myself,” said Boyd.

“We need backup,” said Stanley. “Information this critical can’t be entrusted to just one person.”