Payback

58

Robert Gallo got up from his workstation in the Desk Three subbasement and began walking around the NSA computer lab. His eyes had started to water and blur from staring at the LCD computer screens. He’d run out of eyedrops earlier and struggled not to rub them — he knew from experience that would only make them worse. He had another bottle of the drops in the lounge, but that was a staircase and a security checkpoint away. Better to tough it out for a bit, if possible.

But not to itch! Gallo lay down in the middle of the floor and shut his eyes. The tears had just stopped streaming out when he heard someone come into the room.

“Ah,” said Johnny Bib above him. “There you are.”

“Hey,” said Gallo. “Did Angie find the source of the guerrillas’ communiqué?”

“No,” said Johnny Bib.

“They must not have used a landline to transmit the message. Otherwise Shark Siphon would have found it already, right?”

“Maybe yes, maybe no,” said Johnny.

Shark Siphon was an automated program that snagged communications on the Internet. It had taken all of the communications from Peru over the past twenty-four hours, examining them as possible sources of the communique by applying a variety of decrypting techniques. Unlike the smart viruses and worms that Gallo specialized in, it was a brute-force tool, made possible only by the agency’s massive computer capacity.

“Another possibility is Peru’s cell phone network,” said Johnny Bib.

Gallo sat up, eyes still closed. “We could hit the wireless companies’ databases, look for some transmission that would be long enough to send the message. I bet we could narrow it down to maybe a hundred phones or so. Even a thousand — we could check the names on the list against Peruvian intelligence files.”

“Yes,” said Johnny Bib in the singsongy way he used when someone had shared a good idea with him. “Ye-es. Very good thinking.”

“Want me to get in?”

“Ye-es. Ye-es.”

“On it.” Gallo opened his eyes gingerly. They felt a little better; once he launched the attack on the cell phone network, he’d run up and put the drops in.

“Are you having a vision?” asked Johnny Bib as he got up.

“Huh?”

“You were on the floor.”

“Oh.” Gallo laughed sheepishly. “My eyes just got teary with the screen.”

“Too bad,” said his supervisor, leaving the lab.