Breakpoint

2 Monday, March 9

“No, don’t go that way. It’s rush hour. Take the Ted and we’ll loop back through the B School,” Susan directed as Jimmy Foley drove the rent-a-car out of the Hertz lot.

“Oh, yeah, forgot. You know your way around here. Went to college here. And graduate school, right?”

“You did your homework,” Susan replied as the car entered the tunnel. “Yeah, I lived in the freezer that was then Boston for seven icy years after growing up in Atlanta. Summer lasted a week up here. It’s better now with global warming kicking in…. Now the real test of your knowledge: Ted Williams, the guy this tunnel is named after, holds a record for a season batting average…”

“Four-oh-six in 1941,” Jimmy snapped back before she could finish the question.

“NYPD — shouldn’t you be a Yankee fan?”

“I am. But Ted Williams was a Marine fighter pilot. World War Two and Korea.” He held up his hand to show off a ring. “Semper Fi.”

Susan silently damned herself for not getting around to reading Foley’s personnel file. Rusty had simply assigned him to her, no questions allowed, but still she should have spent some time learning about the newest of her ten-person team. She wondered how much Foley had read about her.

“It’s amazing to think what guys like Williams did without steroids,” Jimmy added. “Think what they could do now if the league wasn’t so backward in their thinking about PEPs.”

“PEPs?”

“Performance-enhancing pharmaceuticals. Every other occupation is using drugs to make them better — why not baseball, why not athletes?” Jimmy asked. “Why the big fuss that the Chinese did gene-doping in the Beijing Olympics?”

“It’s not natural,” Susan replied.

“Tell me you don’t use Memzax. All the trivia you have at the tip of your tongue, you must. You don’t use Daystend when you have to stay awake for days in a crisis? They’re PEPs.”

“Of course I do, now that our staff doc prescribes them and the government pays for them. I couldn’t afford Memzax on my own, and my health plan sure won’t pay thirty dollars for a single pill,” Susan admitted, “but in my job I need to have instant retrieval of lots of information. Memzax works, Detective.”

“Okay, so in your job you memorize things and drugs are okay,” Jimmy argued while driving. “An athlete’s job is to send a ball sailing out of a park like that one there.” They were passing Fenway on the Mass. Pike. “And they can’t use drugs to do their job?”

“You sound like Margaret Myers,” Susan said, and chuckled.

“Who’s that?”

“So, Sherlock, you haven’t done all of your homework on me. She was my dissertation advisor at Harvard,” she said as they crossed the little bridge into Cambridge.

“Got me there, Bo — I mean, Susan. Damn these fuckin’ drivers up here. I just went for L and S to get us out of this jam. Forgot I’m driving a rental.”

“In fact, we’re seeing her after lunch,” Susan announced. “She’s an expert on technology policy and the interaction between government and science. I thought she might have some thoughts about your theory on the six incidents. She knows somebody on every major research campus around the world. As Jimmy pulled the car up to a police line, she added “Okay, so I’ll bite. L and S?”

“Lights and sirens. It’s why we become cops. To get the lights and sirens.” And then he smiled, again flashing dimples.

The police lines surrounded the charred hulk of what had been a modern, redbrick building. The windows were broken out and the brick singed around them. One section of outer wall had collapsed and bricks were scattered across the side street. The firetrucks were gone by now, but Susan spotted a large van with “State Fire Marshal” on the side. The March wind chilled the few who stood around the fire scene. Ice patches were scattered across the asphalt. Steam rose from a mobile canteen truck dispensing coffee. It was the kind of aggressively gray winter day that Susan associated with Cambridge, with forcing herself down snowy sidewalks to Harvard Square.

“Susan Connor, Intelligence Analysis Center, this is Lieutenant Tommy McDonough, Mass. State Police,” Jimmy said, breaking into her flashback. The state cop actually looked a little like Foley, she thought. The two of them could have been investment bankers, in their black overcoats and red ties.

“Pleased ta meet yah. Let’s go inside or we’ll freeze like them firemen. The New Reactor Diner ovah there is pretty good. Warm anyway,” McDonough said, pointing to a classic silver-sided diner on the other side of the traffic circle.

They squeezed into a tight, fake-red-leather booth and were quickly served coffee in chipped mugs. McDonough pulled out one of the newer PDAs and flipped up its screen to review his notes. “Friday night, after eleven. Initial explosion triggered secondary fires. First unit responding called in three alarms. Building fully involved. Everybody got out okay, but…” His voice dropped in volume. “Some of the staff that works there days arrived and tried to go back in. Kinda loosely wrapped, these MIT types. Digit heads.” He looked around the diner at the patrons, most of whom were hunched over laptops. “Fire marshal got an operating theory, and that’s all it is at this point, that there was an undetected gas leak that really built up a big cloud before static or some other spark set it off. That blast knocked an exterior wall out and severed the water line for the sprinklers. They had sophisticated halon gas suppression in some of the labs, but most of the place went up quick, like a three decka, you know what I mean? Question is how come there was a big, undetected gas leak. Shouldn’ta just happened all on its own.”

Foley, who had been taking notes into his own PDA, looked up. “That’s good, Tommy, thanks. What’d the building do, what’s its purpose?”

“CAIN. Center for Advanced Informatics and Networking. They were the U.S. end of an international project with Japan, France, and Russia involving gridded supercomputers. CAIN was also big in a project involved in reverse engineering the human brain. They’re mainly famous now as the ones there that created the Living Software,” McDonough said matter-of-factly. Susan was learning not to underestimate this clan of Irish cops.

“And all of that’s gone?” Susan asked.

“Shit no,” the lieutenant shot back. “Pardon my French. No, the Living Software thing wasn’t just here. Others have it, too. The supercomputers here, well…the professors are trying to figure out how to get them outta the building and see if they can clean ’em up. Good fuckin’ luck with that, huh, Jimmy?”

“No leads? Forensics on the gas pipes? Anything on the videotapes? Pissed-off staff been fired or screwed over? Nut-job protest groups got a reason to hate the center?” Jimmy asked.

“’Course we’re runnin’ all that kinda stuff down, Jimmy, but it ain’t lookin’ good, I’ll tell yah. The pipes and all that at the blast scene are atomized. Cambridge cops had video, course, but nuttin’ on it. No one went postal. Apparently, everybody loved to work there. Changin’ the world, they said.” McDonough scanned the diner again, then whispered, “Nut-job groups? Cambridge is nothin’ but nut jobs, you ask me. People’s Republic of Cambridge. But none that had it out for the center, not that we found.”

“Could we put on hard hats and walk through some of it?” Susan asked.

“Sure, but listen, Jimmy, after that, my mother made me promise to take you ovah her place for lunch. Wants ta hear about your dad. And see you, of course,” McDonough said, putting away the PDA.

Foley looked questioningly at his boss. “You should do that, Jimmy,” Susan said firmly. “Besides, I have to meet up with Professor Myers, and that’s likely to go on and on. I’ll hop on the Red Line two stops and we can meet up later at the Charles.” She turned to McDonough. “This has been very helpful, Lieutenant, but there is one thing I do have to ask.” She paused. “Why is it called the New Reactor Diner? Spicy hot food?”

“Hell, no, the food sucks here,” McDonough bellowed, laughing loudly. “The diner’s name’s cuz these MIT nut jobs have a fuckin’ nuclear reactor other side a the alley.” In the nearby booths, a dozen heads briefly popped up from laptops and looked around as if sniffing the air for something. And then they went back down, down into cyberspace.

Susan thought about what could happen if another white van filled with RDX went down the alley. As they walked into the ruin of the building in yellow hard hats, a video-surveillance camera across the street zoomed in on their faces.

“So it’s all very well to say that big government is bad and that big government backing big science projects is worse,” said the woman behind the podium. “I know some of you think the American corporation is the highest achievement of efficiency that humanity has ever produced…but when you say all of that, my dears, remember not only that big bad old government created the internet but that the private sector would never, repeat never, have done so. There was no single company, no group of companies that either would have or could have accomplished it, including the single very large phone company we once had in this country.”

Margaret Myers stepped out, taking the microphone with her, as she spotted Susan in the back row of the amphitheater-style class room. “The private sector found all sorts of things to do with the internet, and that has changed the way we live, but they would never have built it.” Thinking of Susan’s role in the Islamyah crisis, she continued, “The private sector would also have continued producing gas-guzzling cars, paying for overseas oil to make into gasoline, until the last drop of oil was pumped and the last dollar was spent on it. Only because of the government of Islamyah and its research and its investments in companies in the U.S., can we say that half the cars in this country are now powered by either hybrid engines or by ethanol from corn, sugarcane, and switch grasses.

“So your assignment for next week is a short essay, no more than two thousand words, on some technology problem of your choice that only a government can solve in the first instance, thereby creating opportunities for the private sector to build on. See you next week.” Students immediately flocked around the short professor, asking questions, introducing friends, offering things for her to read. Susan thought her friend and one-time advisor looked older, more gray in her curls, her broad shoulders beginning to slouch. Still, she radiated a physical and intellectual strength and presence that lit up the room. Susan knew that some students would hang on, following Myers back to her office, so Susan signaled that she would meet her there.

The lecture hall and the professor’s office were across the river on the Boston side, in Summers Hall, part of Harvard’s new Allston Campus. The picture window in the office offered a stunning view of the old Cambridge campus, causing Susan to be lost in thought until Myers shut the office door behind her. The two embraced. “I hoped you would get a chance to work on the internet bombings when I heard about them,” Myers began. “I can’t help but think that there is something bigger about to happen.”

“Bigger than severing the cyber connection between the Americas and the rest of the world? Bigger than causing communication satellites to disappear? That’s already a big deal to some of us, Margaret,” Susan replied. “We have a theory that China is involved. And now we think that other fires and explosions at scientific institutions over the last few months may be connected.”

“Yes, of course, dear. And I know you know that the internet wasn’t fully severed, just drastically reduced. I’m sure our Pentagon friends are busy even now trying to shift more of the load to their own military satellites.” Myers dropped her lecture notes and papers on a coffee table already covered with other stacks of paper. “I know the theory that they are trying to distract us while they do something else, Taiwan maybe. But I can’t help but wonder if we’re looking at it wrong, if China might be doing it because they know more than we do about our technology, that we are about to leap ahead and leave them in the dust.” Myers swept her arm across her desk, toppling a mound of books and journals, “Oh, no. That was my next book, sitting here in pieces. I’ll pick it up tomorrow.” She plunked down in a large wooden chair. “Susan, I’m afraid of those who want to whip up a war with China. We should share our technology with them, with everyone. That is the nature of scientific inquiry.”

“Depends on the technology.” Susan smiled and bent down to pick the books and paper off the floor. “What’s this next book on?”

“Transhumanism,” Myers said, rescuing a loose-leaf binder from the floor.

“What?” Susan felt a pang of disappointment. She had sought out Professor Myers for her understanding on the attacks, but she’d just been reminded that Margaret was often into some academic theory not necessarily related to the real world.

“I’m sorry, Susan. I know you spend all your time now running around the Middle East and saving us from bad guys. No time to keep up with things here.” Myers dug out a journal and handed it across the desk. “I did a piece for Sociology and Science last fall. Transhumanism is the philosophy that espouses using genomics, robotics, informatics, nanotech, new pharma…to change humanity into a new species.”

“New species? Or just one with the mistakes corrected?” Susan asked, flipping through the journal to be polite. “What’s the concept?”

Myers sketched a graph on her whiteboard. Across the middle of the chart she drew a line. Below the line she wrote “Corrections,” and above it she wrote “Enhancements.” The arc on the graph passed through the line at a point indicating 2008, four years before.

“Something very big happened around 2008. We crossed over from just doing genetic corrections to creating genetic enhancements. That’s where we are going now, to a human so enhanced, so improved, that some would say it is no longer human. Part carbon-based life-form, as you and I are, and part silicon-based, as this thing is.” Myers whacked the computer console by her desk. “And the poor old carbon part will have been so transformed that it will be as far superior to us as we are to Neanderthals. You should catch up on the technological changes.”

Susan unfolded a chart from the journal, showing the advances in several sciences and their convergence into a Transhuman over the next two decades. “Margaret, I have China blowing things up in the U.S. I don’t have time anymore to keep up on all this crazy stuff, with what the Transwhatevers fear might happen someday.”

Myers smiled her motherly look, then spoke softly and slowly, as if explaining about boys to an innocent young daughter. “Susan, this ‘crazy stuff,’ as you call it, is happening. Of course, the fundamentalists, Christian and Muslim, really hate it.”

“That’s not the only thing they have in common,” Susan said, and laughed.

“True, but because of the political power of the fundamentalists in this country, stem-cell research was delayed and all sorts of rules imposed on federally funded research that prohibited work in genetics to enhance humans.” Myers lifted a big publication from the National Institutes of Health. “Nonetheless, it is happening quietly in labs all across the country and overseas. Private research money, people skating around federal rules. A lot of it is now done in secret, or offshore.”

Susan Connor was intently studying the large foldout chart, the arrows showing milestones of progress in genetics, nanocomputing, robotics, pharmaceuticals, information science, brain studies.

“That chart you have there is already out of date. Many of the key breakthroughs have taken place experimentally. Now it’s a matter of scaling and integration. It’s just that most people don’t know how far the technologies have come, or don’t see their implications.” Professor Myers seemed almost weary. “Most people are focusing on the latest Hollywood murder scandal or on what’s going on in Iran. Most Americans may know only about one or two scientific fields and don’t see the combined effects of the several sciences that are now racing through advances.”

“Racing?” Susan asked skeptically.

Myers seemed to get renewed strength when challenged. She rose quickly and went to the whiteboard and began sketching lines that were at first parallel, then intertwining, then spinning out in all directions. “This is what you have to internalize. Knowledge builds on itself, always has. Now armed with cheap, highly capable computers, the rate of progress in all of these fields is accelerating, building on itself, speeding ahead. And these fields are merging, reinforcing, enabling each other. The rate of acceleration today is five times what it was forty years ago when the internet was creeping out of the BBN labs up the street. In three years, 2015, scientific engineering will be blindingly fast, and in eight years, humans may not be able to keep up with it.”

Susan’s head was spinning; there were details, concepts that Myers was assuming she knew. “Okay, okay…there’s a lot of catching up I have to do. But let me bring you back to the internet bombings. Any thoughts on them? Who actually did them? What will they go after next?”

Myers sat back down. “The attacks will slow things down enormously. China may be able to catch up. We have been moving out faster than China in the last few years. They can’t invent well, it seems. They can copy and understand theory, but that’s not enough anymore. Labs in other countries around the world are collaborating, sending huge chunks of data back and forth, petabytes, on fiber-optic cables under the sea. Just look at the Globegrid Project. How, Susan, can you merge the three biggest civilian supercomputer farms in the U.S., with ones in France, Russia, and Japan to create into one virtual machine, as was planned, if there is now no big pipe to connect them? Note, please, that we left China out of the project because of U.S. paranoia.”

“Wait, Globegrid. Was the U.S. end of that network going to be in CAIN, the building over at MIT that burned down Friday night?” Susan asked, looking at the soot on her shoes.

“The penny drops? Globegrid was to go online this month. Think what could have been done with all of those huge parallel processors working as one. Then Friday night, CAIN catches fire, and Sunday morning truck bombs take out the fiber-optic beachheads. Had you all really not put that together yet?” Myers asked incredulously. “The other two U.S. computers are at Stanford and UC San Diego.”

Folding her hands together under her nose, Susan framed her question carefully. “What was Globegrid really going to do?”

Again, Myers pushed herself up out of the chair and began sketching on the whiteboard behind her. “Once the supercomputers were linked, a special version of the new Living Software would be added to them as the control program. It would be given the task of making the three supercomputers into one virtual machine. Living Software would then be proliferated throughout cyberspace to prevent another cyber crash like the one in 2009. A grid with that power could also solve the remaining problems in genomics and brain science. And that’s what they intended to use it for. Their first task was to test the results of the consortium’s work on reverse-engineering the human brain.” Myers looked at her former student, who sat in front of her silently, glumly, with a facial expression that cried out, “I still don’t get it!”

“Susan, Susan, Susan…don’t worry. I didn’t understand much of this either until the last year or so. You have to master so many disciplines simultaneously to get it, and even then you can’t know everything that is going on in the labs now. Much of it has gone underground.”

Susan stacked the last of the fallen books back on Myers’s desk. “Underground? What about your principles of open scientific inquiry, about sharing information?”

“Some of the work on genomics and the human-machine interface activity have raised so much of a political stink that its gone quiet. We really should not have laws telling scientists what they can and cannot do.” Myers moved the mouse to access a database on her screen. “There are two people here in Cambridge whom you need to see in order to understand the computer science part of this. Let’s start there, while I put together a reading package for you on the other technologies, genomics, pharma. First, go see the boys up the river at Kamaiki Technologies, while I set you up on a date with a young man named Soxster, the best hacker in town.”

“A date? Oh, no, no! Socks who?” Susan tried to stop Myers from calling the hacker. “Really, my social life is great. There’s this doctor in Baltimore, a brain surgeon. I don’t need any dates, expecially with geeks…”

Myers let her glassess lip down her nose so that she could look over them at Susan. “Do you really know who blew up the internet nodes for the Chinese? No. Do you have any real leads? I doubt it. Do you think they are going to stop there? I know you don’t. Have you figured out where they will attack next? No because you don’t understand the technology, either open or hidden. So you will go to Kamaiki and then you will have a beer with Soxster and be nice to him. Then, maybe, just maybe, he will tell you what you need to know.”

“So…what you see below us is a live reflection of cyberspace, a multidimensional model of it. We’re currently showing it geospatially, so you can see physical nodes in the same relationship to each other that they would be on the Earth’s surface or on a map. You’re standing over Virginia, Mr. Foley.”

Susan Connor and Jimmy Foley were on a catwalk almost twenty feet above a surface in a cavernous, windowless room at Kamaiki headquarters in Cambridge. Below them, green and yellow lights shot horizontally to nodes, then shot up vertically, some almost reaching the catwalk. Thick, glowing green lights converged on northern Virginia, New York, and Boston. Tom Sanders, the chief technology officer at Kamaiki, hit a touch screen on the guardrail and said, “So. Now let’s zoom back so we see most of North America.” The surface below seemed to drop off quickly. “Sorry about that. Hope I didn’t do that too quickly — some people get vertigo.”

“If I understand you and all these lights, the internet seems to be really busy despite the bombings yesterday?” Jimmy asked.

“Yes. Much more so than during the ’09 Cyber Crash. So that day, when we had Zero Day hacker attacks on Sytho Routers and SofTrust servers, almost nothing moved. The monoculture of their software being used by almost everyone cost the economy hundreds of billions. That’s why the Living Software project got started, to generate error-free code. It’s almost ready to deploy in the wild.

“Today, traffic within the Americas is normal, except for traffic trying to get to Europe and Asia, which just keeps trying and failing, for the most part. The packets that can’t get through send messages back saying they’re lost. That adds to the traffic load. But on a normal day there would be much more traffic. A lot of traffic from one point in Eurasia to another point in Eurasia normally goes through the U.S. Not now. So you know the old joke about the guy in Maine that says, ‘You can’t get there from here’? Well, we’re trying to map where those places are that now can’t get through and where it is they can’t get through to.” Sanders hit the touch pad and red dots starting blinking at locations on the surface below. “The trouble is that our sensors, Kamaiki’s own servers on networks around the globe, are cut off. We have twelve thousand servers in Eurasia that we can’t get to.”

Susan stared down into the pulsing, blinking representation of cyberspace. “Kamaiki has sensors?”

“Well, you could call them that,” Sanders replied. “So. We monitor the traffic loadings on the various internet companies’ fiber lines from city to city, so we can help route our customers’ traffic most rapidly and cheaply. Then we cache or store our customers’ data on our servers around the world so that when somebody wants it, they just go to the nearest Kamaiki server to get it, instead of sending a packet all the way from, say, Yahoo in California to a user in Germany.”

“I’m not sure I followed all of that, “Susan admitted, “but would you monitor traffic for MIT — are they a customer?”

“So, we’re all from MIT originally. We give them a price break. I still teach there, in Course Six. Why?” Sanders asked.

“Well, I see one of the red lights is labeled CAIN. I guess that’s because they’re offline now, huh?” Susan said pointing below.

“Terrible tragedy. Sent Globegrid back years.”

“Would you have been watching the traffic load going into CAIN just before it caught fire?” Susan asked.

“That’s what they paid us to do for them, sure. So, we made sure that people trying to reach CAIN from anywhere in the world found the fastest, most reliable path through cyberspace,” Sanders boasted.

Susan was understanding the importance of Kamaiki. Getting excited, she asked, “Can you run this thing backwards? Could we look at what was happening with CAIN just before it blew?” Susan asked.

“Well, sure, but I don’t think…” Sanders started typing into the console. “So, about sixty-five hours ago, zoom in on Boston, zoom in on MIT…” The world below them seemed to spin. Streets and buildings appeared, with the internet coursing through and below them. “Other side of Kendall Square…here’s CAIN…”

Susan, dizzy with vertigo, grabbed on to the catwalk’s guardrail. “Can you tell us anything about the traffic going into CAIN?”

“So…country of origin. Red is Russia, old habit. Blue is France. Green is Japan,” Sanders said as a hologram appeared hovering over the surface, with long lists of numbers spiraling down. “Those colors were from the other points in the Globegrid. They were doing test runs. The orange traffic is from within the U.S., other universities mainly. Some administrative, not sent to the Grid part of CAIN. Payroll, SCADA, and other things.”

“SCADA?” Jimmy asked.

“Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition. It’s the software program that runs digital controls for things like lights, heat, elevators. The devices communicate back to their SCADA system software manufacturer to tell it how they are,” Sanders explained. “Here, I’ll pull it out. So here are all the messages from MIT’s central SCADA system in orange, turning the exterior lighting on, dropping the heat after hours, monitoring the video-surveillance cameras.”

“What was that purple traffic a second ago?” Susan asked. “There’s another one now.”

“Well, it’s hard to say without knowing the codes they were using and what system in the building that was going to, but it was going to an Internet Protocol, or IP, address. MIT is unique for a school. It has its own class A range. So 18, that’s MIT, 280, that’s CAIN, 090, that’s probably the SCADA system’s subnet, and then 113. Maybe the elevator or something,” Sanders offered.

“The internet address of an elevator is 18.280.090.113?” Jimmy asked.

“Could be, or an air conditioner. Everything that is remotely monitored or serviced or controlled has an IP address. So the manufacturer can see how it’s doing, diagnostics, fix it, whatever. This one is something that was probably made in China,” Sanders said, hitting away at the console.

“Why do you say that?” Susan asked.

“Purple. On this program, traffic originating in China is shown in purple. And let’s see here, I will switch into MIT’s network…I can do that because I am faculty…so 090 was in fact the SCADA system and 113 was…a Siemens pump and a Westinghouse valve connected to the Boston Gas line…Oh, my God!” Sanders cried.

“Can you run a trace route, Dr. Sanders?” Susan asked.

“Ah yes. I can reverse the path that one of the packets took last Friday, check the Border Gateway Protocal updates…”

The world below them pulled back from the close-up on CAIN, showing what had happened five days earlier. The purple line ran from the MIT router to the Horizon Communications router in downtown Boston, across the United States paralleling Interstate 90, jumping through repeaters, to the Horizon Communications router in Seattle. Susan grabbed on to the railing, her head swimming at the speed of the changing landscapes below her. From Horizon Seattle, the packets ran across town to the PacWest Sytho router in a windowless telecoms hotel, out to the PacWest fiber beachhead repeater on the Washington coast that would later blow up, then under the Pacific, up onto a beach in Japan, through an internet peering point building in downtown Tokyo, through a Sprucenet router to a Chinatel owned router, back out underwater to China, up again to a beachhead, then through a Sytho router to Dilan city, to an internet peering point building, and on to the Dilan University system, and finally to an address on the university campus.

“We’re gonna need to take that information with us, Dr. Sanders,” Jimmy said as he pulled out his PDA. “It’s evidence, and I’ll need to establish chain of custody.”

“Ambassador Rubenstein, it is an honor to welcome you to the Residence,” Lee Wang enthused. “I don’t believe you have been to this historic house before.”

“Thank you, Ambassador Wang for receiving me in your home on such short notice.” Sol Rubenstein gave his overcoat to the waiting butler. “And you’re right, I haven’t been here before. I had no idea there was a property with this much land in Woodley Park.”

“Over seventeen acres, originally owned by a general in your revolutionary war, General Uriah Forrest. My children have a lot of fun with that name. They say, ‘No, you are a forest.’” Wang led his guest out of the foyer. “The Republic of China’s ambassador has lived here since 1937. Please come into the drawing room.”

Seated in the large and bright yellow-walled room, Sol Rubenstein began somewhat sheepishly: “Mr. Ambassador, as you know, under the terms of the Taiwan Relations Act, we recognize you as the head of the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office in the United States and not as ambassador of Taiwan. I am compelled to say this so that my friends at the State Department will not get mad at me.”

“I understand. And yet you address me as Ambassador Wang?”

“I believe you were ambassador to Costa Rica, which recognized the Republic of China at the time. So I believe, sir, you are due that title on a personal basis,” Sol suggested.

“Very good. And you were formerly ambassador to Turkey and Thailand, so that is why I call you Ambassador Rubenstein. Once one, always one.” The butler reappeared with a tea service. “Please, would you like green tea or black?”

“Black. If I may, sir, dispense with the formalities, since I have never been very diplomatic. Most Americans aren’t, as I’m sure you’ve noticed. We are, as you will have noticed in the media, in a tender period with Beijing and we cannot afford any mistakes right now.” Rubenstein raised the fine china tea cup.

“I understand. We do not want to be a problem,” Wang said emphatically.

“And we appreciate that very much,” Rubenstein said, sitting back in the chair. “Now, what I really came here for: I know your government has very good sources in Beijing and in the PLA. I don’t. And right now my President needs to know what is going on in their heads, without any spin. I would hope we could count on you for that.”

Ambassador Wang seemed genuinely pleased. “Of course, Sol, of course. I will see what we can do. And you have my word it will be without spin, as you call it. ‘No political influence in intelligence reporting.’ Isn’t that what you promised the Senate in your confirmation hearings?”

“You are a careful follower of what’s going on in Washington, Lee.” Rubenstein snickered.

“Before you go, I, too, have to say some formulaic diplomatic niceties. Please forgive me.” Ambassador Wang picked up a piece of paper to read from it. “‘It is the policy of the United States to make clear that the United States’ decision to establish diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China rests upon the expectation that the future of Taiwan will be determined by peaceful means; to consider any effort to determine the future of Taiwan by other than peaceful means, including by boycotts or embargoes, is a threat to the peace and security of the Western Pacific area and of grave concern to the United States; to provide Taiwan with arms of a defensive character; and…’”

Sol Rubenstein leaned forward and waved his hand toward his host. “May I? ‘And to maintain the capacity of the United States to resist any resort to force…that would jeopardize the security…of the people on Taiwan.’ I am familiar with the Taiwan Relations Act. As a very young foreign service officer, I worked on the drafting group that agreed on the wording of our law.”

“I know, but I am required to remind our guests here at Twin Oaks,” Wang said, folding the paper and putting it in his pocket. “May I see you to your car, Sol?”

Back in the foyer, Wang opened a large, red-leather-covered volume on a side stand. “Will you be so kind as to sign our guest book?”

Rubenstein shot forth his hand to shake good-bye. “I’m afraid I can’t, Mr. Ambassador. Since we do not formally recognize the Republic of China or your embassy, I was never here.”

“Can I get you another?” the bartender at Red House asked.

“Not yet,” Susan answered, and looked at her watch. Almost eleven. It had been a long day and she wanted nothing more than to walk down the alley and across the Square to her hotel room in the Charles. Rusty had been ecstatic with the results of their investigation so far. The indication that somebody in China had caused the gas leak in Cambridge had startled her, but Rusty seemed to accept right away that such an attack could occur.

Rusty had presented Jimmy’s theory about the six earlier events at other research labs at the interagency wrap-up meeting that day. FBI and NSA were tasked to investigate whether there had been an unnoticed sabotage campaign by China against American high-tech facilities. We don’t even get to follow up our own leads, Susan thought, sipping the chardonnay and staring across the room into the roaring fire. By the end of the week, the FBI would prove that China was behind the attacks that the FBI had not even noticed, and the President would have to act. Lovely.

“Did they tell you the foundation of this house dates back to the 1630s?”

Susan frowned at the barkeep.

He tried again. “You know that Dutton vineyard you have there is the best of Dumol’s chardonnay, at least for me,” the bartender offered. “But then, I like my chardonnays a little malolactic.”

“What’s that mean?” Susan asked.

“Buttery tasting. You ask me, Dumol is as good as Kistler, but about half the price.”

“Dumol and Kistler, are they from France?” Susan asked, really noticing the young bartender for the first time. He was thin, long haired, with thick glasses. Susan guessed he was a graduate student in literature or art.

“The part of France west of Napa. They’re Californian. Sonoma Coast, Russian River.” He laughed. “Not big into wines, I see.”

“No. When I was a student here, I drank beer — Sam Adams mainly. Now that I’ve been working the last few years, I don’t drink much anymore.” Susan smiled at the bartender and thought of one other alcoholic drink she had started drinking, “Except I was forced to acquire a taste for single-malt Scotch, the Balvenie,” Susan admitted.

“Forced? Pushy boyfriend?” the bartender suggested.

“No.” Susan laughed. “My boss. It’s kind of a rite of passage with him.”

“Hope you don’t mind me talkin’,” he said. “Looks like you’re getting stood up or something, although why anyone want to stand up such a—”

“Thanks.” She cut him off. “Yes, looks like I’m stood up. The guy was supposed to be here at ten and it’s past ten thirty. So maybe I will take just a little taste of the Balvenie and go. By the way, my name is Susan,” she said extending her hand across the bar, “and I don’t mind you talking at all. And I learned about a decent chardonnay.”

“Kistler is the best,” the bartender said, shaking her hand. “And they call me Soxster.”

“You son of a bitch!” Susan shot back. “What were you doing, checking me out before you’d introduce yourself? You bastard!” She quickly gathered up her coat and bag to leave.

“Hang on, please don’t go,” Soxster said, backing away. “You’re like a cop or something. ’Course I wanted to check out what was goin’ on first.”

“I’m wasting my time. Maybe Margaret was wrong about you,” Susan said, moving toward the door.

“No, really. I’m sorry. Listen, let’s just go up to one of the dining rooms upstairs. Here, we can bring the Balvenie,” he said, grabbing a bottle off the rack. “I’ll tell you what Margaret wants me to explain.” He headed up to the second floor. Susan thought following this weird guy upstairs was not something she should do, but Red House was still filled with late diners and Megs was usually right about people. Besides, she thought, I did take all of that self-protection training; I could probably throw this guy right out a window if I had to.

They climbed up the rickety, narrow stair to the second floor. In one of the three small dining rooms graduate students were still drinking their professor’s wine and arguing with him about Kant. The fireplace still burned in the next dining room, although all that was left of the dinners was their debris. Soxster pulled two chairs up near the fire.

“I just have to be careful, you know. There are all sorts of weirdos and spies and shit. Not that I don’t trust Megs, and she did say I could trust you and all, but gotta be careful. She said you were with a government research thing. Sounded spooky.”

Susan calmed down and had to laugh at Soxster’s attempt at security. “Fine, whatever. I work at the Analysis Center in Washington. We do research into things that the government needs to know about, threats mainly. I wanted some help. We’re working on the internet attacks and wondering about the CAIN explosion, too. Margaret somehow thought that you would know something that—”

“Yeah, man, the internet attacks. Surprised me, too. Kinetic kills. I thought it was going to be cyber,” Soxster said nervously as he poured two shots of the Scotch.

“So you expected attacks on the beachhead routers and switches?” Susan asked, taking the glass.

“Expected something. Not that. The way they’ve been hiring black hats and gray hats the last year or so, something was up.” He sipped the whiskey and rasped, “Coulda made me some real money, but I don’t break the law and I like to know who I’m working for, you know?”

“Somebody’s been hiring hackers?”

“Yeah. Half a million bucks a year and more, plus five-star room and board somewheres nice. Problem is you don’t know where,” Soxster said, parting the curtain and looking out on the cold night.

“How did you hear about this?” Susan pressed.

“IRC, hacker chat rooms, e-mails. At first just rumors from some of my more interesting contacts and friends. Then some other folks and I started to be approached over SILC, IRC, some closely guarded private mailing lists. You know, encrypted e-mails through anonymous relays. They seemed to know all the usual suspects, everybody that can get in places, slice and dice code.”

“You know anyone who joined up?” Susan asked.

“Hell yeah, one guy used to hang with us, but we didn’t trust him. He was breaking the law. Haven’t heard from him or seen any of those guys on the Net for months. It’s getting a little lonely out there,” Soxster said, and laughed.

“Think you could help us find some of the hackers who’ve been hired?” Susan asked.

“Yeah. We could try, but what was it you said a little while ago about CAIN? Megs just mentioned you were working on the truck bombs, the beachheads. Sign me up if I can help you on CAIN — that was such a disaster. I’d love to get the guys did that.”

“Why? Was CAIN so much more of a loss than the beachheads?”

“CAIN made the Living Software. It can fix everything. Look, since the internet began, earlier even, man has been writing code. And a few chicks, okay. But humans suck at coding after a million lines or so. Errors, sloppy drafting, stupidity. You get up to fifty million lines like in the Sytho routers and SofTrust operating system, they’re like Swiss cheese or a colander. The code hangs up, breaks down, anybody can hack it, nothing can work seamlessly with it. Problem was almost all the PCs were running SofTrust and almost all the routers were Sytho. There was a monoculture. So somebody figured out two Zero Day worms, surprise attack hacks, and we got the Cyber Crash of 2009.”

“And why isn’t Living Software going to be just like that? Won’t everybody use that and make it a monoculture? I don’t know much about it,” Susan was chagrined to confess.

“Shit, no. The Living Software kernel generates flawless code to do whatever it is you ask it to do. It’s software that writes software, flawlessly. None of the millions of mistakes like in SofTrust. And the kernel clones itself. So all the kernels talk to one another on the Net, so that they learn what has already been done. They learn, like in Open Software, and fix past mistakes. They know how to plug and play with each other’s work like its like one big organic code.” Soxster was definitely excited. He took another gulp of the Balvenie.

“So when Globegrid was connected, it would have been the smartest thing that ever existed. All that incredible processing power, working in parallel, with Living Software writing new code, monitoring what it wrote. Even if ninety percent of the Globegrid was working on studying reverse-engineering the human brain and the genome, with just ten percent running on the world’s software problems, they’d all have been fixed. All anyone has to do to be part of it is just buy a Living Software kernel. So we’ll still get there. Just take longer without Globegrid.”

Susan rose and stepped closer to the fire, feeling its heat on her back. “Living Software, when paired with the Globegrid, would have put hackers out of business. You’re a hacker.”

“Yeah, it’s my hobby. Hacking means slicing and dicing computer code, not doing things that are illegal. The media uses hacker to mean cybercriminal, but few of us are. With flawless software available, I wouldn’t have to go ’round finding stupid mistakes in programs. I could ask the Living Software for new software to do all sorts of shit. Make the world a lot better place.” He looked out the window again. “Not only put hackers out of work. Woulda put a lot of government types out of work, too. How do you think all the electronic spy agencies around the world get in to systems? Through glitches in the software, mistaken or intentional. The same way I…” Soxster turned from Susan and looked to the window.

Susan was taking notes on her PDA. “The world was about to change in a big way, and suddenly the computers that were going to do it, at least some of them, burn up. The fiber-optic connections that would have linked the supercomputers globally get cut. Then, just for extra measure, the satellites that might have been used as a backup disappear. Would China want to do that?” Susan asked.

“Maybe. China has been trying to lace our computer networks with back doors for years, but they can’t keep up with some of it. Could have felt left out. Maybe they didn’t want a U.S. software monster taking over the world, again. But maybe it was NSA. Your own spy agency might not have wanted the world to have flawless software. How would they hack into places?” Soxster said, putting his glass down on the mantel. “Look, so why don’t we invite him in? He’s going to freeze to death out there.”

“Who?” Susan asked.

“The big guy in the doorway across the alley. He’s with you, isn’t he?” Soxster said, parting the curtain. Susan stood next to him and saw Jimmy hovering across the narrow alley in the doorway of a dress shop.

She bent over and cracked open the old window, shoving it up about a foot. “Foley, come on up. You’ll be frozen into a statue out there.”

Two minutes later, Jimmy was warming himself by the fire. Soxster offered him three fingers of the Balvenie, which Foley quickly gulped down. “I was just passing by…,” he tried.

“Yeah, whatever. What’s that you’re packing, dude? Looks like a Sig,” Soxster said, pointing under Foley’s jacket. “Those things are mean mothers.”

Foley gave him a questioning look.

“Jimmy, Soxster was being very helpful. He was telling me about how the world would have changed if CAIN and the other nodes on Globegrid had propagated the Living Software,” Susan interjected, getting the subject off Jimmy’s gun.

“The whole world would have changed, huh? Isn’t that just a touch melodramatic there, buddy?” Jimmy asked, reaching for the Balvenie bottle.

“Hell no, man. The Singularity might have actually happened. The Borg, the Terminator, the Matrix!” Soxster gestured wildly, half mockingly.

“Okay, okay,” Jimmy started waving his hands, too. “The Borg, Terminator, Matrix. Got all that. What’s the Singularity?”

“Kurzweil. Brilliant local guy.” Soxster was on a roll. “The Age of Spiritual Machines was seminal. Back in ’99, he theorized about what would happen when computers became smarter than humans, in like five years from now. Then he wrote The Singularity Is Near. His theory, seven years ago, was that the only way mankind would be able to compete with smarter computers was to merge with them and that this would set off a period in human history where change would happen so fast and be so profound that we would not even be able to comprehend it — where humanity would be altered to the point at which we would not be able to understand the present in terms of the past. So far, the only thing Kurzweil was wrong about was the timing. With Globegrid we could get there tomorrow.”

“Science fiction,” Jimmy sneered. “I read all those plots, saw the movies. Machine versus man and man loses. Matrix, Terminator. Bullshit.”

“Maybe, maybe not. But it certainly sounds like everything was coming into place to find out,” Susan suggested. “The Globegrid spreading Living Software sure sounds like the thing that this Kurzweil guy was afraid of.”

“He wasn’t afraid of it,” Soxster answered. “He wanted it. Thought it was the next step in evolution. But, an odd coalition of right-wing nutbags, evangelicals, and spiritual humanists did get pretty worked up about it.”

“And Megs Myers thinks that there is another whole layer of technological advance that the public can’t see, gone underground, modifying the human genome,” Susan interjected.

“Whatever. The fact that the Globegrid was going to go live sounds like motive to me. Blow up the computers, cut the connections. Slow the acceleration of technology. Give China time to catch up,” Jimmy insisted.

“Save China or save the human race?” Susan interjected.

“Or keep it sick and stupid,” Soxster shot back. “Look, even if the Singularity did not happen in one flash when Globegrid went live, the point is that the things that Globegrid is going to do in genomics and brain study will change the world,” Soxster asserted. “They are into reverse-engineering the human brain, downloading the brain, adding memory boards to the brain with nano, altering the genome to create a self-diagnostics and healing system in our bodies. They’re going to change the world, dude.”

“Who are the ‘they’?” Jimmy asked.

“You guys. The government, man, all those letter agencies. DARPA, NIH, and NSF giving billions to all the profs in Cambridge and California to do this shit,” Soxster smirked. “It’s the guys that run those federal agencies that are moving technology fast while the politicians and the clergy and all have no clue.”

“And I’ll bet we’re leaving China in the dust with some of that research, just when they thought they were catching up. Motive,” Susan thought out loud.

“I know some of the stuff that DARPA’s doing will definitely leave China, Iran, everybody in the dust,” Jimmy interjected. “Guy I knew from when I was in the Marines is in this program at Twentynine Palms where you wear a spacesuit-like thing that makes a grunt infantryman into Superman.”

“Twentynine Palms. That’s a place?” Soxster asked.

“Yeah, California desert,” Jimmy replied. “Why?”

“I thought it was a program. One of the hackers I know from the Dugout, TTeeLer, before he disappeared last year, said he was going to keep an eye on the ‘two niner palm program’ for whoever it was hired him.”

“Keep an eye on, not be part of?” Susan asked. “So we may know where one of the hackers disappeared to? We need to find him.” She stretched and yawned, looking suddenly like an eight-year-old past her bedtime. “It’s possible, then, that China hired American hackers, maybe without them knowing they were working for China? We’re making progress today, boys. We have leads on who did it and ideas about what they might hit next.”

“Yeah, we may be making progress, but the Bureau ain’t. Tommy McDonough told me that the FBI can’t get anywhere with the Vehicle Identification Numbers on the truck bombs,” Jimmy said, smiling. “VINs are supposed to be a unique number on every vehicle, seared into the chasis frame by lasers. Turns out all the bomb trucks had the same number and so do a lot of other trucks.”

“So we’ve got somebody at Dilan University in China fooling around with Boston gas lines and blowing up a node on Globegrid. Hackers hired for big bucks and then disappearing. This stuff on the VINs. Not a bad start for one day’s work,” Susan said, picking up her coat and heading for the door. “But its not going to be enough for Rusty. Not enough until we stop whoever it is that’s smashing our crown jewels. Hopefully, before they smash some more…”

As Susan walked down the warped stairs in Red House, the cop turned to the hacker. “Sox, there’s almost half a bottle of whiskey left there, man, and I still don’t understand how a bunch of different trucks can end up with the same VIN.”

The hacker’s smile looked evil in the light and shadows from the fireplace. His hand went out for the bottle, “So let me tell you how you hack VINs, flatfoot….”