Palm Sunday (30 page)

A moment passed as they considered this, but it appeared that a consensus had been reached.

Kayoko put it into words. “Then we’re agreed? We take a solemn oath to bring down the agency, whatever the cost?”

This time there was no hesitation, and in the living room of Slocum’s apartment, the agency’s worst nightmare was born.

Omnivore was relentless. Not a single byte of data escaped its probing tentacles, and while a clear picture emerged of the current state of the data center’s network, little was revealed about the cause of its present difficulties. Though there were clearly two distinct areas of concern–an infection of various desktop systems, and a loss of Internet connectivity–a common denominator had yet to be found. Initially it appeared that a faulty router was responsible for the cascading failures, but a check of this equipment proved that such was not the case. The hardware passed all diagnostic tests with flying colors. Then the configuration file for the device was examined, and they thought they had their answer.

“This is all messed up.” The network technician shook his head in disbelief. The file responsible for directing the behavior of the router was badly scrambled, and would have to be repaired. “It’s no wonder that we can’t get in or out of the Internet. These entries are gibberish.”

Agent Sharon received the report with a measure of relief, pleased that the cause of at least one of the problems had been isolated. “You have a backup copy of the config file, right?”

The technician nodded. “Yeah. It will take a few minutes to restore the original.”

“Get on it,” said Sharon.

The technician replaced the corrupt file on the router with the good copy. It took less than five minutes. “We can reboot the router now. When it comes up it should have the good configuration loaded.”

The operation was carried out, and as expected the device performed normally. The technician ran a trace route command to one of the other machines on the network, verifying that the path through the router was now intact. The trace successfully reported the address of each point traversed between the two computers, including the router.

“How’s it look?” asked Sharon.

“We’re back in business,” said the technician.

Sharon nodded. “Nice job.”

It was progress, but there were still many other systems to be fixed. Sharon walked over to Justin, who was struggling with the environmental control system.

“How’s it going?”

Justin barely looked up. “Slow. There’s something here, but it’s very cleverly disguised. It’s a process, an executable of some kind. It briefly starts up, does something, and disappears.” He looked at Sharon apologetically. “I’m sorry, sir, but that’s all I have right now.”

“Just stick with it,” said Sharon. “You’ll get it.”

Sharon had been encouraged by the progress with the router, but their inability to quickly restore the other systems had him worried. If Justin didn’t find something soon, he’d be forced to have him start to rebuild from scratch. That would be time consuming. From the other side of the room the technician who had worked on the router called out.

“We lost the Net again.” He immediately rechecked the configuration file. It had reverted to its earlier, confused state. “This is whacko.”

“What is it?” asked Sharon.

“It went back to how it was before. Exactly how it was.”

“Are you sure you saved the config file when you replaced it?”

“Yes, it was working. I had just pinged a few of the other stations, and then I got kicked off. This is really weird.”

A ‘ping’ was a technique for interrogating another device on the network to verify connectivity. The ability to ping a device indicated that the pathway to and from it was intact.

“Maybe there’s something wrong with the hardware that’s not showing up in the diagnostics,” said Sharon. “Do we have a spare router?”

“One. I’ll get started on it.” 

“Are you nuts? How could you two just take off like that, without any notice or anything?” Klugman was not as receptive as Stanley had hoped, but he thought he detected a slight softening in his tone, perhaps a willingness to hear his explanation.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Klugman, but it couldn’t be helped. A close friend of mine was in serious trouble, and there was simply no time to do anything but run and help him.” Stanley held the phone tight against his ear.

“What about Katherine? Did she have a friend in trouble, too?”

“In a way, yes,” said Stanley. “She agreed to help me with my son. As you know, my wife died not so long ago. My son is still pretty sensitive when it comes to unexpected changes.”

Klugman let a silent moment pass. “All right, Whipple. You can come back.”

“Katherine, too?”

“Yes.” His voice became sterner. “But you’re going to have to work twice as hard to make up for lost time. Boyd is just about worn to a frazzle from trying to pick up the slack.”

“If I know Boyd, he enjoyed every second,” said Stanley.

Klugman didn’t disagree. “Yeah, well, I’ll expect to see you and Katherine first thing in the morning.”

“Thank you, sir.” Stanley hung up the pay phone and looked at Katherine. “We’re in!”

“Good. Let’s go back and tell the others.”

The use of the pay phone had been Slocum’s idea, to minimize the risk of the call being intercepted. As they started to walk back, Katherine pulled up short. She grabbed hold of Stanley’s arm, forcing him to stop.

“What is it?” he asked.

“What are we doing, Stanley?”

“Are you having second thoughts about our agreement with Kayoko?”

“No, it’s not that.” She hesitated. “It’s about…us.” She gazed uncertainly into his eyes.

“Katherine–we really need to talk.”

“Uh oh. You’re giving me the ‘we need to talk’ routine.”

She should have expected the blank look on his face. It was typical that either he didn’t know what she meant, or didn’t know how to respond. He was so logical, yet so considerate, and the two traits were often at odds with each other. The result was the head-lighted deer look that faced her now. She couldn’t help but laugh.

“What?” he said.

“You’re such a sweetheart,” said Katherine. “And you don’t even know it.”

He shifted his weight uncomfortably from one foot to the other, the awkward schoolboy without a romantic line. He said nothing.

“So what do we need to talk about?” asked Katherine.

“Huh?”

“You said we needed to talk.”

“Oh, right,” said Stanley. “There’s a lot of uncertainty. You and I seem to be headed in a direction that’s…”

“Intimate?”

His eyebrow lifted momentarily. “Yes, I suppose.”

“And how do you feel about that?” asked Katherine.

“It’s good. We get along well, Bobby likes you, and we have a lot in common.”

Katherine nodded. “But you think we should put things on hold until the situation with the agency is resolved, right?”

“That, yes, and the ScanDat project. Not to mention that we are living with a bunch of other people right now.”

“It does sort of cramp our style, doesn’t it?”

Stanley felt like he was letting her down. It bothered him that she might think he didn’t care.

“Honestly, I do have feelings for you. It’s just that there’s so much going on right now.”

“I don’t want you to feel pressured over our relationship.”

“I just want to do it right,” he said.

Katherine took his arm and started walking back. “Come on. Tomorrow’s a big day.” 

Agent Sharon’s people spent several hours trapped in a frustrating sequence of repeating events. The main router’s configuration file would be replaced, the router would work fine for about ten minutes, and then the file would become corrupted again, and they would start all over.  Agent Sharon had long since pulled Justin off the environmental control system and ordered him to find out what was happening. He didn’t simply assign him the job, he ordered him. This, Justin knew, was serious stuff.

“Whatever is causing this,” said Justin, “is clearly resident somewhere in the network.”

“Could it be in the router itself?” asked Sharon.

“Not likely, since the replacement router acted the same way. More likely it’s hidden in one of the devices attached to the network. Could be a PC, or even in the memory of a printer. Since all the printers are off, I’m voting for one of the half dozen computers that are still turned on.”

Sharon nodded. “One at a time, turn off each PC, then recopy the configuration file. Reboot the router and see if it stabilizes. If it does, we’ll know which computer is the source of the problem.”

Justin did as instructed, eliminating potentially offending units from the network. In each case he got the same result–the router reverted back to its bad state. His own computer was now the only remaining PC attached to the network that was still turned on.

“Looks like it must be mine,” said Justin, although it was clear from his expression that he did not believe this could be the case. Then he recalled how his computer had recently crashed, and wondered if there might be a connection. He related the incident to Sharon.

“Let’s run Omnivore again,” said Sharon, his voice lowered. “But this time we’ll focus on your computer. I want to see everything that goes over the wire to that router.”

Sharon made sure that everyone else was occupied, and Omnivore was activated in local mode, tracing everything that went into or out of Justin’s computer. High expectations gradually turned to disappointment, however, as ten minutes passed and nothing happened. The router continued to function normally.

Then suddenly, just as had happened previously, it stopped working. Only now they knew why.

It was Justin who first narrowed down the cause of the attack, then identified it positively. A cleverly designed copy of a seemingly harmless system file had been pushed into his system–no one yet knew how that had happened–which then triggered the chaos that followed. Omnivore was taken off line as soon as the problem was isolated, but the mess that was left behind still had to be cleaned up. Operating systems had to be rebuilt on the affected machines, and software had to be reloaded. All in all the data center would be down for the better part of the day.

Agent Sharon had to do quite a tap dance in front of his supervisor to diffuse the situation, but he got off with merely a warning. He knew that if he told Roberts about his use of Omnivore he would have gotten more than a slap on the wrist, and said so to Justin.

“What I did with Omnivore, well, you’d best forget about that.”

“What we did,” said Justin. “I was there, too. Besides, we didn’t enable it for external scrutiny; we only aimed it at ourselves. How could that be wrong?”

“Just don’t mention it to anyone.”

Justin nodded. “Who do you suppose was responsible for the attack?”

“I had hoped that Omnivore would give us some indication.”

“It did help narrow things down.”

“True,” said Sharon, though he was obviously not satisfied. “We need to locate the source of the intrusion. After the computers are all back on line, I want you to re-activate Walthrop’s system.”

“Aren’t we supposed to be taking it down?” asked Justin.

“We are. This is part of the post operational shakedown.” Sharon had a hard time suppressing a grin.

“Of course, sir. I’ll keep a close watch for any anomalies.”

Justin understood Sharon’s hunch. Perhaps the attack was related to the Internet anomaly they had been watching. If they could show this to be the case, it would bolster Sharon’s claim that the system Walthrop had developed was still needed, and at the very least would give them more data to work with.

“Let me know when you’re finished here,” said Sharon.

Justin nodded and returned to his work, pleased at the bond that was forming between he and Agent Sharon. 

While the FBI data center was effectively shut down by Norbert’s program, the agency took the opportunity to switch on their new hardware. Their original equipment was strictly one way, from the Internet into the agency’s system, but the new gear gave them an enhanced ability to intercept and modify data packets en route to their destinations outside of the agency. Though not as widely distributed as the agency’s existing network of profile-based devices, the upgraded hardware would greatly facilitate the agency’s next undertaking.

Despite repeated warnings from Tom Snelling that his department needed more time, Mason was adamant; the attempt to alter the societal profile would proceed. The agency’s hardware improvements allowed Norbert to link to a number of networks utilized by airline and ground transport systems. He had prepared a huge surprise for major sectors of the travel industry, and all that was needed was the order to begin.

Mason phoned him just after nine in the morning. “Norbert, it’s time to stop the trains.”

“I’m on it.” He already had the activation programs in place, neatly lined up like so many cyber soldiers. He only had to enter one command to launch the entire process, which he did now. He informed Mason when it was done.

“Good. When do you think we’ll start to get results?”

“The first failures will be at the airports,” said Norbert. “The reservation systems and some communication centers will go down. Most of the airlines, at least the major ones, will be unable to do any transaction processing.”

“You hit the banks?” asked Mason.

“No, just the mechanism that let’s the airlines do online transactions. It won’t be long before the lines start to run out the doors.”

“Then what?”

“The airlines will try to route as many people as possible to other airlines, but they’ll be having the same problems, and the backlog will escalate. Once it becomes clear that the problem is widespread and not easily corrected, people will seek alternate transportation. Trains and buses will be their first choice, but they’ll be hit, too. It doesn’t really matter though, because they wouldn’t be able to handle the overflow even if they weren’t affected.”

“Nationwide?”