Quantum

30

‘That ought to about do it,’ Grin said hopefully as he saved the program file he was working on. ‘Now maybe I can get a clearer picture of how Lobo works.’

Shortly after diving into Kilkenny’s decryption project, Grin decided that a mathematical algorithm as intricate as Wolff’s cipher deserved a name, so he christened it Lobo. The program he had just created was designed to test his assumptions on how Wolff’s cipher operated.

Once he finished loading his program into Stan, he switched machines to see how many new pages the Preservation Lab had scanned into their computer. As soon as the window containing the page icons appeared, the individual icons began vanishing. The files were disappearing at a rate of one every three seconds. No doubt, someone was moving the files off the server. But who, and why?

Grin moved to the Wolff directory — which held the six separate subdirectories for each of the notebooks — and selected everything to be downloaded to his machine.

He stared at the monitor in disbelief. ‘What the hell is going on!’

Grin grabbed the phone. ‘Please, somebody, still be there,’ he pleaded as the line rang.

He got a fast busy signal and slammed the handset in the cradle. Seven more files were now gone.

Suddenly, the window displaying his link to the Preservation Lab server closed — the connection cut.

‘Red alert! Red alert! All hands to battle stations!’ a voice clip of Patrick Stewart from Star Trek shouted out from Grin’s workstation. Whoever was erasing files down on campus was now attacking Grin’s machines.

Grin swiveled to view the large monitor just as the screen went blank and a new window appeared. In the upper-left corner was a white square that held a black spider graphic.

‘All right, Spyder, sic ’em,’ Grin commanded, as if the computer were listening to him.

Nested deep within the MARC network was a Spyder, a black chunk of artificial intelligence that a year earlier had nearly cost Nolan and Kelsey their lives. The device was the offspring of a similar piece of computer hardware designed by Moy Electronics to defend computer networks against hacker attacks. The Spyder carried all the tools of its parent, the Gatekeeper, and several offensive weapons designed by the CIA for use in gathering intelligence. Following the Spyder incident, Nolan and Grin worked out a deal with the CIA that allowed them to retain the device and work with Moy on improvements.

Grin watched as a graphical depiction of the affected computers appeared on his screen. From MARC, the trail led back to the Preservation Lab server on campus, through the university’s central server, and then out into the world.

‘You may be good,’ Grin said with grudging admiration, ‘but your ass is mine.’

System by system, Spyder followed the hacker’s electronic trail, identifying each step along the way. The hacker had covered his tracks well, snaking his way through dozens of Internet servers to create a labyrinthine trail that was nearly impossible to follow.

Grin reset the window view from a schematic line drawing of the hacker’s route to one superimposed over a map of the earth. The hacker blazed an impressive path across the globe, even managing to penetrate a Web server at a research station in Antarctica. Ten minutes later the trail reached Moscow.

‘Say cheese, you asshole,’ Grin said, knowing he’d nailed the malevolent intruder.

The map of the world faded and was replaced by the image of a black IBM server tower. Just as the window containing the machine’s schematics and serial numbers started to appear, the window went blank.

‘What the fuck do you mean the connection has been lost?’ Grin screamed as the Spyder reported its status.

Grin instructed the Spyder to show him a network diagnostic. A graphic depiction of the MARC network appeared, followed by one of the university’s network. The Spyder showed him every machine it could touch. Both networks appeared fine, except for the hole in the picture where Grin knew the Preservation Lab server should be. The server was physically in the basement of the Harlan Hatcher Graduate Library on main campus but, from Grin’s point of view, it was gone.