Impact

54

Abbey sat cross-legged on the rucked-up bed, laptop in front of her, FireWired to the mysterious hard drive. Stenciled on the side was the information:

#785A56H6T 160Tb

CLASSIFIED: DO NOT DUPLICATE

Property of NPF

California Institute of Technology

National Aeronautics and Space Administration

The five-dollar motel clock, screwed to the Formica night table to prevent it from being stolen, glowed midnight. They had gotten into Washington-Dulles at eight and driven for an hour into the middle of nowhere in suburban Virginia to a hotel that Ford seemed to have once used as some kind of safe house. The Watergate it wasn't and Abbey didn't like it at all. There was no room service, the room smelled of old cigar smoke, and the sheets looked suspiciously dirty. Ford had registered without showing an ID and had paid in cash. The sleazy clerk had leered at them, and Abbey had a pretty good idea of the kind of vile thoughts that were going through his mind.

Ford had ordered her pizza and disappeared, refusing to say where he was going, promising to be back before dawn. He had left her with a laptop and the hard drive and told her to break into it.

Easier said than done. She'd been at it for hours with no success. The hard drive was no brand she recognized or could find on the Web; it looked proprietary, very high density. No normal drive this size could possibly hold 160Tb. An NPF special. And password protected. She'd been running through all the obvious candidates, "password," "letmein," "qwerty," "12345678" and a zillion other common combinations, taken from Web sites that listed common passwords. Then she had started in on combinations of Corso's names, birthdate, his mother's names and birthdate, various street and place names near his house, local bars, names of his high school and college teams, mascots, the top bands and hit songs of his teen years--in short, anything she could guess about him from his age and digging up information on him on the Web. But then she considered that she was going about it all wrong. The password would have been created by the mysterious professor who'd stolen it from NPF. She knew nothing about this man, not even his name. How could she possibly guess his password? Or even worse, it might still have an NPF password, which would be well-nigh uncrackable.

She downloaded several programs from the Web and tried a brute-force attack using hashes and rainbow tables, to no avail. It was starting to look hopeless. For all she knew, the drive was locked up with military-level cryptography.

Still, the drive did ask for a password and that was a good sign. There had to be another way to solve the problem. She cracked her sixth Diet Coke and guzzled it. Feeling the need for further sustenance, she rummaged in the pizza box and pried up the last cold, hard piece from the cardboard, scarfed it down, and chased it with more Coke.

She thought about her own passwords and how she chose them. Most of them were dreamed up on the spot, often curse words mingled with the first digits of p or e, two numbers she had memorized to many digits for no good reason back in junior high. Her favorites were E3a1t4s1h5i9t and F2u7c1k8y2o8u. Simple to remember, impossible to crack. For the hell of it she tried both of those, again with no result.

She sipped the Coke, imagining this professor's last day at work, what it would be like to get fired and told to clear out his desk by five. He was pissed enough to steal a hard drive with classified data. As soon as he got home, he would have changed the password on the drive to prevent anyone from NPF being able to access it.

She sighed and tossed the Coke can toward the wastebasket. It bounced off the rim and rolled across the floor, dribbling liquid on the already stained rug. "Fuck," she said out loud. If only she had a joint to relax her, help her mind drift a little, figure things out.

She picked up her earlier train of thought. He would have changed the password when he got home, first thing. She closed her eyes, trying to visualize the scene: this imaginary professor arriving back at some shabby bungalow in Southern California, stained carpeting, wife upstairs complaining about having no money. The guy pulls the hard drive out of his underwear or wherever he'd put it, plugs it into his laptop. He's furious, he's upset, he can't believe what's happened to him. He's not thinking clearly. But he has to change the password--that's essential. So he pulls a new one out of his head and types it in.

What was going through his head at that very moment?

Abbey typed in fuckNPF. No go.

She recalled the standard rules: a good password should consist of at least eight characters of mixed numbers and letters, lower and uppercase.

She typed in fuckNPF1.

Bingo.