Dark Zone

85

Johnny Bib admired his boss — William Rubens was, he had to admit, one of the few people in the organization who truly appreciated the worth of a prime number. Still, Johnny had long ago concluded that Rubens was not a “people person.” Johnny was willing to dismiss his rude behavior as a result of the pressure of the present operation. Still, Rubens irked him so much that he lost his entire train of thought. So when Blondie ran into the room waving a computer DVD-R disk in her hand, Johnny Bib had no idea what she was talking about.

“The computer that accessed the library. It’s part of a network in a printing plant. They back up their drives several times a day on RAID-5 disk arrays,” she said.

“What do you mean?” asked Johnny.

“The computer system that was used to access the library: it had a backup system that wrote files to two disks at once. They uploaded the formulas, probably because they had to work them at times the library computers weren’t up. There were copies on the drive. They must have erased the originals, but I have some copies of deleted backups. They didn’t erase them all, Johnny. They did it on some sort of schedule, but they didn’t get parts of the temporary backups. There is a whole set of files they never erased.”

Blondie put the disk into a nearby computer. The drive began to whirl.

“This is the most interesting, this series. Look — it’s another set of formulas, an explosion simulation. It’s almost the whole thing! It’s like the Eiffel Tower, but one of much greater power. Look at all these formulas and the size of these numbers.”

“What’s being modeled?” he asked.

“A three-dimensional area affected by an explosion,” said Blondie. “These values are so high — I think it’s an earthquake of six-point-oh magnitude. Maybe it was to shake down the concept behind the formula, get the process right. They must have started here, figured out how to get the program to work, then revised it for the Eiffel Tower. Can we find somebody to try and re-create what’s missing?”

“Wait,” said Johnny Bib. “I’ve seen this before.”

Johnny Bib stared at his screen. The numbers of some of the equations would produce a Fibonacci series.

No, not precisely; no, he was wrong.

It was a progression, though. And one he’d seen recently.

It was a wave amplification.

He’d seen a similar model on the computer the French had compromised a few months before, the one the terrorists had stopped using.

“Hmmm.”

“Part of this is just like the Eiffel Tower with the modular thing,” added Blondie. “Where they had a routine to add the explosions together. But look, it’s like weird, because there are these waves being focused and stuff? I don’t get it.”

Another equation with waves, but this clearly wasn’t designed to calculate or demonstrate the effects of a tsunami. It looked more like a three-dimensional compression of some sort.

Numbers were strewn across the screen. Johnny Bib’s brain pulled them into a coherent shape — focused wave formulas.

What would you want to compress with an explosion?

“Those variables are a multiple of the values from the explosives that are used in the Eiffel Tower simulation?” asked Johnny, pointing at the screen.

“I think yes,” answered Blondie.

“They wouldn’t yield that large an explosion.”

“No way. I mean, I’d have to work through the math, but I would just about—”

“Bring the team here quickly,” said Johnny Bib, jumping up. “Bring everyone — everyone. And someone from the history department. Two people from history! Someone from special weapons — whoever worked on the French warhead that’s missing from Algeria. Hurry!”