Skyhook

TEN TUESDAY, DAY 2 UNIWAVE FIELD OFFICES ELMENDORF AFB, ALASKA AROUND 8 P.M.

The computer screensaver appearance of Lisa Cole was momentarily unnerving. The emotions instantly triggered in Ben Cole by his deceased wife’s beautiful face bordered on the uncontrollable, which was why he normally approached the act of looking at her picture with great care and preparation.

But suddenly Lisa’s image was there on the screen, his favorite shot of her, hair blowing happily in the stiff wind of the Pali, the historic pass in the saddle of Oahu’s volcanic ridgeline separating Honolulu from the Kailua area on the northeast shore. That had been a wonderful day, he recalled, and she’d delighted in having the forty-knot wind threatening to scandalize him by billowing her skirt to indiscreet places as he tried to take her picture. She’d loved the resulting shot. Her “Marilyn” imitation, she’d called it.

His mind started down the same, dark path, reliving the news two years before that his beautiful wife had been broadsided in traffic and killed by a drunk driver. Ben forced himself back to the question of how her picture had suddenly appeared.

And just as quickly he realized the mistake, if it was a mistake. He’d inadvertently triggered a long-dormant little program he’d created — a “macro” in geek-speak, he used to say — that randomly looked for pictures on his hard drive and displayed them without warning as the screensaver of the day.

“Keeps you from downloading porn, I promise you that!” he’d joked with the other engineers.

Somehow he’d reactivated the program, and the first shot it found was Lisa’s.

He left her image on the screen, taking a bit of comfort in the idea that in a strange way she was watching over him, and he could certainly use the support.

Ben sat back and debated the merits of making a new pot of coffee or continuing to work. The welcome cancellation of the scheduled meeting with General MacAdams had helped defuse a little of the killing pressure they were under, but when word came that MacAdams had slipped the final test another twenty-four hours — giving them two whole days to find the problem — he’d sent his exhausted software team home for a much-needed rest.

“Are you coming, too, Ben?” one of them had asked.

“Yeah. Absolutely,” he’d fibbed. “Be right behind you.”

He had little choice but to stay and work into the night. Taking top secret work home in any form was a massive violation with potential jail time attached.

Ben stood and moved to study the half dozen electrical relays his team had hastily wired together in imitation of the prototype system in the Gulfstream. He checked the connections, then moved to an adjacent computer that had an exact copy of the program that had almost killed him the night before. Ben entered the “start” command from memory, watching the various messages on the screen reporting the progress of the program as it went through the sequence of closing the relays to physically take control, exactly as it would happen in the real airplane.

There were a series of snapping sounds, and Ben nodded to himself after glancing toward the table.

Okay, that’s right, he thought. He entered a new series of commands, and still more clicking and snapping resulted, again precisely in accordance with the way the program was supposed to work.

All right. Let’s see if you can obey the command to sit and roll over, he thought, loosing another string of keyboard commands. The appropriate response after a few seconds would be the snapping of four relays indicating the system had let go of the flight controls.

Instead, the lights in the lab went out.

What the hell? Ben thought. The computers were still running on backup power, but all of the overhead lights and individual workstation lamps had gone dark, and there had been no snapping noises.

Ben grabbed a small flashlight and moved to the relay table, confirming that they had not released.

The room lights go out but the relays won’t let go? This makes no sense.

There was a noise at the door to the lab and he looked up, trying to make out who was standing in the darkness of the doorway.

“Hello?”

“Ben, go home,” Lindsey White’s voice said.

“Lindsey! I’ve just had a partial power failure in here.”

She was moving toward him, carefully negotiating the spaces between the desks and workstations until she was standing next to him. There was a sudden burst of light as she triggered a large flashlight beam directed upward at her face, like a camper in a tent telling ghost stories.

“Go ho-o-ome, Doc-tor Cole!” she said, adopting a comically spooky voice.

“Okay, Lindsey,” he chuckled.

“Here thar be software beasties!” She snapped the light off, chuckling as well, her normal voice returning. “And circuit breakers for the ceiling lights.”

“You did that?”

She nodded, and he could see her smiling in the dim light. “Yep. If I can’t get you out of here one way, I’ll do it another. Go home and get some sleep.”

“Scared the heck out of me, Lindsey. I was just running a system test.”

“Well, if I have your word that you’ll get out of here in the next ten minutes, I’ll give you your one-hundred-ten-volt alternating current back to play with.”

“Spoken like a true electrical engineer.”

“I love it when you talk dirty,” she said, moving back toward the door. “Seriously, Ben.”

“Okay. Promise.”

“Good. We’ve got two days and a new T-handle. Good night.”

“Good night, Lindsey,” he said, thankful she hadn’t asked for a progress report.

The lights came back on and Ben moved to the test computer screen to reset the program, remembering the absence of snapping noises.

Wait a minute, he thought. They never disconnected. The program has paused with the problem clearly apparent.

His excitement was mounting by the moment. If he could freeze the program with specific knowledge of which line of code had caused the program to freeze and be unresponsive, and copy it precisely that way, he could zero in on the problem within an hour or two.

He stood back from the table, his heart beating faster as he considered the options. He knew Lindsey was serious. Undoubtedly she would check back with security inside an hour to make sure he’d processed out.

But he couldn’t leave the search until morning. A thousand things could happen to the uncounted electrons zapping around the interior of the computer’s silicon memory. The key to the solution was in his hands, and he had to act now.

Ben pulled out a notepad and scribbled down the computer commands that would copy precisely what he needed from the stopped prototype program. He double-checked it to make sure there was nothing apparent that might crash the program or garble the files, then triggered the process.

The sound of hard drives whirring to life reached his ears as he monitored the information on the screen. The download continued for two very long minutes before the final confirmation blinked on-screen. Ben transferred the downloaded files to a CD and sat down at his computer desk in deep thought. It would be professional suicide to leave the building with the CD or any computer-storage medium. But Ben had always known about an uncovered hole in the system. He’d monitored it carefully to prevent anyone else from finding or using it, but there was a way to get the master hard drive to send anything to one particular serial port on one solitary computer in the lab. He pulled out his cell phone now and looked at it, trying to recall whether its “system” might be actively intercepted by counterintelligence security apparatus.

No, he concluded. Highly unlikely.

He pulled out a cable from his briefcase and connected it first to the serial port of the computer, then to the bottom of his cell phone, dialing the special number to his home desktop computer. He entered the appropriate commands until he had a clear channel to a restricted area of his hard drive’s memory, and triggered the transfer. He sat in rising apprehension as the computer began the process of sending the top secret program digitally over his cell phone to his personal machine at home.

“Dr. Cole?” a male voice asked without warning.

A cold fear gripped him as he jumped involuntarily. “What? Who’s that?”

The voice had come from the doorway, and Ben looked up to see a security guard he knew strolling in, immediately destroying his glib confidence that he was doing something no one could detect. Ben was sure sweat was visible on his forehead. He tried not to swallow or sound as guilty as he felt.

“Ms. White asked me to come make sure you kept your word and went home, Doctor,” the guard said with a grin.

Ben sighed audibly. “You scared me, Jerry!”

“Sorry about that. You do look a bit shaken.”

“I thought I was alone.”

“Nope. You got us rent-a-cops here, too.”

“Give me a second and I’ll be ready,” Ben said, deftly cancelling the return message on the computer screen that the upload was complete. He secured and shut down the computers one by one, feeling a predictable pang as he dumped Lisa’s image before grabbing his overstuffed briefcase and turning toward the guard with a smile.

“Okay. That’s it.”

“Haven’t you forgotten something, Doc?” the man said, an expression on his face Ben instantly read as accusatory.

“I… I don’t think so.”

The guard walked toward the computer Ben had used for the download and picked up the cell phone. The download modem cord dangled from the bottom.

“Well, well, well. What have we here?”

A wave of nausea consumed him as he watched the guard hold out the cell phone with the cord still attached and shake his head in smiling disapproval, like a cat playing with his doomed mouse.

“I… ah…” Ben began.

“It’s one thing to get the battery all charged up, but if you forget to take it home, you still can’t use it,” the guard said with a smile. “It’s always the obvious things that get you engineering types.”

Ben took the phone from his hand and quickly disconnected the download cord, stuffing them both in his briefcase. “You’re so right, Jerry. Thanks! I was expecting an important call in a little while and I didn’t want my battery to die in the middle of talking to her. You know.”

The guard put a fatherly hand on his shoulder, guiding him to the door.

“Ms. White’s instructions were specific. Remove Dr. Cole’s fatigued body from the premises no matter how much he protests. I always follow a lady’s requests. Well, almost always.”

Ben swiped his badge at the security entrance and cleared his handprint and retinal scans before waving goodbye to Jerry and climbing into his car, the guard’s words echoing in his head. It’s always the obvious things that get you, Jerry had said.

But what could he be missing that was obvious?