Skyhook

TWELVE WEDNESDAY, DAY 3 ANCHORAGE AROUND 9 A.M.

In the mind of the marginally overfed yellow feline named Schroedinger, the fact that the human with whom he shared his house had yet to feed him had risen to the level of an issue demanding immediate resolution.

Schroedinger made a smooth leap from the floor to the desk where Ben Cole’s laptop computer was blinking dutifully through a procession of pictures, some including the image of Lisa — the long-absent woman who used to be in charge of keeping him fed and relatively content.

Ben’s head was down on the desktop, his hair a mess, his elbows splayed out on both sides where he’d shoved papers and journals aside, some falling to the floor. He was sound asleep, and Schroedinger wasn’t impressed. Ben had a bed, and that’s where he should have been sleeping. When he was in it, he usually arose in time to serve the proper amount of food and water. But when Ben didn’t spend the night in his own bed, Schroedinger knew his breakfast would be seriously delayed.

Carefully, he padded over to Ben’s face, boosting the volume of his purr to its highest intensity. At least this morning there were none of the empty bottles that had occasionally heralded an even deeper unconscious state, and an even later meal.

Schroedinger extended a paw, keeping his claws carefully retracted as he patted Ben’s closed eye with no response. You had to be careful with humans, he’d found. They became unmanageably agitated over the smallest of things, and their eyes were very sensitive.

He patted again, but there was no response — other than the obnoxious, rhythmic buzzing sound that humans made when they slept. Once more he tried, moving closer this time and pushing against Ben’s face with the top of his head before using his move of last resort: a loud, protesting “Meow!” delivered right in his human’s ear.

“Wh… What?”

Ben Cole snapped upright, a look of complete confusion on his face as Shroedinger stepped back and repeated his verbal protest, expecting immediate compliance with the business of feeding the resident feline.

Instead, Ben was up, looking at his watch and making upsetting noises.

“Oh dammit! It’s… jeez! Ten after nine! How in the world?” Ben turned back to the desk and realized where he was, and where he’d been. “I was only going to rest a few minutes!” He’d put his head down just past six, after working through the night, and now this. His team would have arrived back at the lab at seven and well noted the absence of their leader by now. This was deeply embarrassing. Sleeping late was a personal failure.

Ben grabbed for the phone to call the lab, cautioning himself at the same moment that explaining his tardiness by admitting he’d worked all night could spark a major security investigation. After all, he could take nothing home at night but his mind. So if he was working late, what was he working on? The possibility that a midnight-oil session might involve illicitly removed materials was well understood by Uniwave’s security department, especially since they were operating under the incredibly stringent military requirements of a black project.

Ben heard one of his programmers answer the line. “Gene? Yeah, Ben. Hey, I’m really embarrassed, but I took some cold medicine last night and… I guess it must’ve really knocked me out. I just woke up.”

There was a chuckle from the other end and relayed assurance that they understood, but only Ben could forgive Ben, and that wasn’t happening.

“Let me hit the shower and I’ll be there by, ah, ten or so.”

“We’re fine, Ben. Take it easy. You needed the rest.”

Ben replaced the receiver, feeling an overwhelming need for coffee as he touched the laptop’s mousepad with intent to shut it down. The pressure to run to the shower and then dash to his car was intense, but the reality that he’d downloaded forbidden classified information to his hard drive was scaring him. The computer files would have to be fully erased with a special program before he could leave the house.

The screensaver slide show had dissolved, leaving in its place the final report on the search Ben had launched at 5 A.M., for a line-by-line comparison of two versions of the Boomerang Box’s master program. He started to save the message for later, but realized with a start that it, too, would have to be erased.

Once more he glanced at his watch in agitation, shoving an even more disgruntled Schroedinger aside as he plopped back in the desk chair to scan the report before erasing it. There was no reason it should show anything different from the four or five dozen comparison searches he’d made during the night, each of which had turned up nothing.

If there’s anything wrong with this damn program, I can’t find…

Ben felt his mind snap to a halt and change direction as he returned to the top of the screen and realized what he was seeing.

What in the world?

Unlike each of the previous searches, this one had yielded something. There were long lists of numbers, each of them representing a specific line of computer code, and each significantly different from any of the code lines on the original completed master program. He knew almost every line of the original version and had instructed the computer to compare the version of the program he’d used aboard the Gulfstream with the original control version.

And now this.

Ben paged down the list, passing a hundred lines before realizing that more than two thousand lines were different, or new, and all in one section. He ordered the computer to show him the raw machine language on several lines he’d selected at random, fully expecting to see something familiar. Perhaps his workstation had gone into some kind of loop and just repeated a rogue line of code several thousand times.

No… it’s all different! he concluded, trying to decipher what kind of program the code represented. There were shorter off-the-shelf sub-routines throughout modern computer programs, but none of what he was seeing corresponded to any of the standard ones, and some of what he was looking at appeared to be written in a machine language he’d never seen, if that were possible.

Ben glanced at his exasperated cat and pointed to the conundrum on the screen.

“What do make of that, Schroedinger?”

The yellow tomcat meowed again and took a few steps toward the kitchen, lowering his already low opinion of human intelligence as he realized that Ben was failing utterly to get his priorities straight.

A slow whisper of trouble worked its way into Ben’s mind, beginning with the realization that someone had purposely inserted unauthorized instructions into a top secret defense program. But who? And why? And what? A virus, perhaps? That was a worrisome thought. In the first few seconds of his mushrooming understanding, the muttered possibility that someone was playing a trick was shouted down by the voice of reason. No, this wasn’t a trick or an accident. Whoever had added the sophisticated lines had obviously been trying to fix something, an explanation at once eclipsed by the roar of reality that all legitimate additions had to have his personal approval. That final fact triggered an inescapable shout of alarm in his head.

Oh my God, this is sabotage! And this is the version of the program that nearly killed us the other night!

Ben realized he was shaking, perhaps as much from waking up too fast with too little sleep as from fear. He forced himself to sit back down and concentrate.

This could still be an error. Don’t be too hasty. Stray lines get into programs all the time, and we’ve patched the hell out of this one, and my original comparison copy comes from, what, eight months ago.

Maybe he was overreacting. After all, the new code could be something as mundane as an encrypted recipe for brownies. It wasn’t necessarily responsible for the failed test and the locked system two nights before.

Another horrific thought crossed his mind, and he tried to shake it off. What if one of his own team were some sort of renegade foreign agent?

Impossible. I know my people better than their mothers know them.

The background checks had been witheringly thorough, yielding embarrassing details ranging from youthful sexual exploits to sometimes disgusting personal habits. His own file had shocked him. Apparently, the National Security Agency had employed agents in his preschool and had been inside his ’54 Chevy during his first, fumbling attempts at lovemaking in the back. They even had her name right.

No, he knew his people. There were no moles.

Ben felt his pulse slowing as he focused on how little he knew about the puzzle he’d discovered. He couldn’t go off half-cocked, but then again, he couldn’t just erase the evidence and go to work as if he hadn’t found it.

Maybe I can erase it here and just replicate it there. After all, at the lab, all the files are available and authorized.

He entered the preliminary keystrokes to destroy the entire series of files, and paused with his finger over the “enter” button. He had the evidence in front of him. What if something happened to his data at the lab and he couldn’t duplicate it? The urge was strong to punch the button and remove all possibility of prosecution for what had, after all, been the criminal act of breaching a top secret project. But he had a responsibility to find out what this was all about.

Ben pulled his finger away and carefully hit the escape key to cancel the process. Regardless of the enormous personal risk, he had to keep the files until he could duplicate them legitimately at the lab.

A dozen ideas on where to store the thousands of lines of the anomalous code marched through his thinking, and he settled on the least probable, entering the appropriate commands before erasing all traces of the downloaded program files.

One single number remained, and he memorized it before removing it from his laptop. He headed for the shower, pausing to dump some food out for his unhappy cat and wondering if he could hide his agitation when he walked in the door in a half hour.