Springboard

22

The business jet was fairly quiet for a craft its size, and the air was still, so flight was smooth. It was also still daylight, and, this time of summer, probably would be for another hour or so.

It was just the two of them, plus the pilots. Thorn had thought about having an attendant, but thought that might be too much. They could walk to the plane’s bar and get their own drinks.

Marissa shook her head. “I still can’t believe you did this.”

“You said surprise you.”

“Well, I was surprised, I confess. Do you do this a lot?”

“Only once before, after I heard the Elvis story, just to see how it felt.”

“The Elvis story?”

Thorn nodded. “Supposedly, Elvis and his crew were sitting around at Graceland and one of them started talking about this place in Denver that made these great sandwiches. So Elvis says, ‘Let’s go!’ They warmed up his private jet, and flew from Memphis to Denver just to get supper.”

“Really?”

“That’s not the best part. When they got there? They had the sandwiches delivered to the plane. Never got off. Ate, cranked it back up, and flew home.”

She shook her head again. “Sounds just odd enough to be true. So, what is this little trip going to set you back?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. Not enough so the accountants will worry.”

She said, “Ah. The old Cornelius Vanderbilt line about yachts — if you have to ask how much one costs, you can’t afford it?”

He frowned. “Marissa, are you really going to bust my chops for having money? I was lucky enough to come up with some software that people found useful, and it paid real well. I’m not in the same class with Arab sheiks or major rock stars or basketball team owners, but I can live high and not run out in my lifetime. What Sophie Tucker said is true—‘I’ve been rich and I’ve been poor. Rich is better.’ ”

She grinned at him. “Relax, Tommy. I’m just pulling your chain.”

He smiled back. “And I’m defensive about sitting on a fat wallet.”

“Most self-made men are, at least the ones I’ve met. They feel as if they lucked into it, and on some level don’t deserve it.”

“Date a lot of rich guys, do you?”

“A few. Rich, poor, you all look alike in the dark.”

He laughed.

“So, what’s this restaurant you’re taking me to, Mr. Moneybags?”

“Ah, that’s part of the surprise.”

“Okay. You want to get me a beer while you’re up?”

“While I’m up?”

“Have to get up to get me a beer, won’t you?”

He laughed again. “Not much incentive there.”

“Want to join the Mile High Club?”

He stood up quickly. “I’m getting that beer now,” he said.

Locke tapped on the door, smiled at the camera, and waited for Leigh to answer. It was good to be back.

China was not the United States. Locke doubted that there would ever be the degree of personal freedom here as there. Still, it was his home, and he was more comfortable here than anywhere else. Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t…

To look at, this house he was visiting was nothing special. A middle-class bungalow, built in the 1970s or ’80s, on a street with two dozen others just like it. If you knew how to look, though, you’d spot some differences.

The entrance, which looked like imitation wood, was actually a steel fire door in a steel frame, and probably weighed a hundred kilograms. Locke knew that there were three dead-bolt locks, plus a police brace-bar on the inside. You could ram a truck into the door and it wouldn’t go down. The back door was much the same.

The outside walls were brick. The roof was heavy ceramic tile, and there were banks of solar cells that fed enough juice into a dozen heavy-duty marine batteries to run everything in the house for days. The phone antenna on the roof looked like a television satellite dish. There was a gasoline-powered electrical generator in an armored shed in the back, inside a chain-link fence topped with razor wire. Locke also knew that the building’s interior walls were wood slats over steel posts and expanded metal sheets, and you’d have trouble driving a truck through them, too.

Not that you could get a truck up the short but steep hill that was the yard, and past the heavy cast-iron furniture — benches, chairs, a table — all of which were bolted into concrete pilings.

The windows looked innocuous, but hidden behind the shades were hardened steel grills that would resist any casual attempts at burglary — or even a would-be thief with hammers, saws, and determination.

The house’s power supply and phone landline arrived via a buried cable inside a steel conduit, and the electric meter was locked inside a steel box. The water meter’s valve box was welded shut, and the meter reader had been bribed to ignore it.

There were state-of-the-art alarms and automatic CO₂ fire extinguishers installed in every room.

It was about as secure a place as one could have in this city.

The door opened, and Bruce Leigh stuck his head out, looked right and left to make certain Locke was alone, and said, “Come in.”

Locke did. Leigh shut the door behind him and relocked it, clicking the wrist-thick police bar into place. One end of the bar slid into a plate on the floor, the other angled into a second plate welded to the middle of the door. Such a setup would hold the door in place even without locks or hinges. The bar had to weigh ten kilos, but Leigh, a fitness freak, handled it easily.

Leigh, an ex-pat Brit, was short, broad, muscular, and an expert on security computer systems. And also seriously paranoid, if not to the extent of clinical schizophrenia.

Locke doubted that anybody ever gave him any grief about his name.

“You changed cabs?”

“Three times.” Three was the magic number. Not two, not four, but three.

Leigh nodded. He turned and walked away. Locke followed him.

The house was filled with computers, at least thirty of them, ranging from some ten or fifteen years old to those still warm from the maker.

Leigh led him through the gym, wherein he had installed a treadmill, a rowing machine, a stair climber, a mini-tramp, a stationary bike, and two Bowflex machines, along with half a ton of free weights on various barbells and dumbbells. Locke had never asked Leigh how often he worked out — you didn’t ask the man personal questions — but there was a computer in the room whose screen showed a schedule, and a passing glance once had told Locke that Leigh spent three hours every day in here.

The man worked, and he worked out, and that seemed to be it. If he had women, they came here, as did all his groceries and other supplies. As far as Locke knew, Leigh never went out. He was a serious introvert. And one of the best computer geeks in the world, much less China.

Down the hall, the main computer room had four large-screen monitors and two holoprojectors, arranged in a U-shape.

Leigh sat in a padded leather chair inside the surrounding computers and started waving his hands over various optical sensors.

“I’ve got the building plans, the communication codes, and the alarm system specs — don’t have the codes on all those yet, but I will have them by the end of the week. I have also built the traffic signal program, and the electrical grid system is no problem.

“Do you have a date yet?”

“Not yet.”

“Let me know. There’s a rotating encrypt on the transfer protocols for the bank’s armored trucks, and we’ll have to get that no sooner than a week in advance.

“The police systems are nailed.”

“Everything seems to be in order,” Locke said.

“Yes. Of course.”

“There is a new variable,” Locke said.

Leigh snapped his head around as if Locke had slapped him. “What?”

“Apparently Net Force and CyberNation have come to some kind of agreement regarding their situation.”

Leigh relaxed. “That’s Shing’s problem. Even he should be able to handle that.”

“I just thought you might want to know.”

Leigh shook his head negatively. “All I have to worry about is Chang. Not that he’s any real problem. Besides which, he’s gone to the U.S.”

“To do what?”

“Who cares? Probably trying to score some gear. Chang has a few moves, but no real equipment, and his programs are garbage. He doesn’t even know I’m out here. Nobody in the world knows I’m here.”

Locke nodded. He removed an envelope full of cash from his jacket pocket and handed it to Leigh. The only way the man would accept payment was in small, used bills. He surely had some kind of electronic banking presence, some credit somewhere, to get all the computers he had, but Leigh kept that to himself and Locke didn’t know what or where it was.

Leigh stood and the two men headed for the front door.

“I’ll see you again in a week.”

“Don’t forget to change cabs when you leave,” Leigh said. “Three coming, three going.”

“Of course,” Locke said.

Chang had visited the Smithsonian — the Air and Space Museum, some of the art galleries. He had seen the Hope Diamond, and gone to see the copies of the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights in the dark and quiet room where they were kept in armored glass cases full of inert gas.

He had gone to pray in some of the larger mosques — Masjid Baitullah, the Muhammad, the Ul-Ummah, Ush Shura, as well as some of the newer ones, the Madjid China, and the Sino.

He had enjoyed a stimulating conversation with Imam Jaseem Yusof at the China Mosque, and with the Chinese-speaking teacher at the Sino, Haji Chan Ho. All who dwelled in Islam were connected; those who had made the journey to Mecca even more so.

He was on his way to meet the software seller the Canadian had steered him to, an American by the name of Petrie, at a restaurant not far from the Mall. Well, not far for Chang, who was used to walking a mile or three to get where he wanted to go back home.

So far, this had been a most interesting trip, most interesting. Jay Gridley, though somewhat preoccupied by his son’s illness, had been very forthcoming about many of his procedures. More so than Chang had expected. Of course, the workers in the trenches did not always share the security concerns of their overlords — computer people spoke a language the way that musicians did, and their common interests bonded them. Already, he had learned more than he thought possible. Techniques he could take back home and apply immediately to his own systems. They were so rich, the Americans, and they didn’t realize just how much they had. They took so much for granted. Gear that he would have given an arm for, they shrugged off and threw away as outmoded. Amazing.

With any luck, this man Petrie would be able to fill some major gaps in Chang’s arsenal. Many of the cutting-edge technologies were proscribed — they simply could not be exported. However, the trade status between China and the United States was, at the moment at least, good, and there were some programs and hardware available now that had not been even in the recent past. Chang did not have an unlimited budget, but a few thousand dollars here would go a long way to help things.

And there was always the possibility of under-the-table deals, for programs that were technically not available, but for which there was no real reason to keep them so. The U.S., like China, had its lists of things forbidden. Often, though, the items put upon these had little or no reason to be there, they were but part of a wide swath that had not been examined against reality.

There was a downloadable anti-viral program, for instance, that was not even as good as the ones Chang already had, that was unavailable simply because of the style of encryption in it. This encryption had been part of Chinese software applications for more than a year, and yet it was still on the list. Nobody had gotten around to updating things, and as soon as they did, this would be changed.

Well. He would do what he could. He was already farther ahead of the game; anything from here on would be a bonus.

Jay reached out and turned the Dyson sphere, rotating it with arms that spanned the inner orbits of a solar system, searching every square inch of the sphere’s quadrillions of square miles looking for the hole from which unauthorized data was coming and going.

It was VR to the max — a distillation of an abstract concept, consciousness magnified to new levels. Yet for all that he was godlike in his omniscience here, he felt more human than ever before.

The image of Mark in the hospital bed with an IV’s stainless-steel needle plugged into his tiny arm kept coming back to him, reminding him how easily joy could be taken from his life.

Sure, the doctor all but said that he would be fine, that Mark’s seizures were just a reaction to the fever he’d had, and he had let the boy go home, but Jay had felt the icy specter of death brush past, coming not for him, but one of his.

Maybe everything was fine today, but — what about tomorrow?

He no longer lived in a world that felt under his control, where he could write off misfortune to himself as experience earned.

Come on, Gridley, focus.

This VR scenario, possibly the most complicated in which he had ever been involved, demanded a very high level of concentration.

He and Bretton had gone back to basics looking for the leak in the military’s computer network. The formula was simple: Pick a VR metaphor, structure it to your strengths, and run it.

It had taken them a while to come up with it. The dataspace used for simulating multiple nuclear explosions in the full-world sim that Bretton had programmed was so huge that finding a relevant metaphor was a challenge in itself.

But then Jay had remembered a science-fiction book he’d read that described a Dyson sphere. First postulated by Freeman Dyson in the middle of the last century, a Dyson sphere was a huge and hollow globe, constructed of the star’s planets, crushed into cosmic cement and somehow glued together. Such a shell then surrounded the sun, to capture all of its radiant energy.

Dyson had proposed the construct as the ultimate answer for the energy needs of an ever-expanding civilizations — a monstrous bubble that would catch everything the star emitted, wasting nothing. It would be useful for millions of years, and by the time the star went nova and burned out, a race sufficiently advanced to have built the sphere in the first place could probably figure out a way to move to a more hospitable neighborhood.

Such a sphere would necessarily be very, very large.

So he and Bretton had remapped the dataspace of all the known infected military computers as a Dyson sphere, locating themselves outside it, looking for the break in the wall that had let the virus inside. Their model wasn’t a long-time scan, that wasn’t possible with the machineries at their command. What they had built represented but two or three seconds that they had calculated when the virus must have been released into the system. They hoped.

The Chinese guy Chang would love this — too bad they couldn’t show it to him, but the military was a little touchy about allowing foreigners this deep into their heart and brain.

That’s just the way it goes…

Focus, Jay!

By checking the entire surface of the sphere during that period, they would examine every possible place their leak could be, and would therefore find it.

In theory, at least. Eventually.

The second part of developing the scenario was tailoring it to their strengths. Jay was an expert at looking for system weaknesses. If anyone could figure out where the break was, it was him. The only problem was that it could take years, even in an accelerated time frame, to search the sphere.

The solution, they figured, would require both of them.

Bretton, the military VR jock, was a master of AI programming. In his warfare simulations, he created large-scale interactions of software systems to represent the entire world at war. His complex systems interacted at both a macro and a micro level, representing a repeatable reality.

In this case, Bretton had created a huge army of robots. Each one was over a mile long, with thousands of magnetic millipedelike legs. Each was loaded with full spectrum sensors that could read every kind of radiation, chemical, sound, and texture that mankind had ever encountered. Millions and millions of these snakelike creations crawled across the sphere, sampling, testing, looking.

Bretton had made them, but the robots were under Jay’s control.

Jay’s normal VR sensors had been rerouted through the robots, each machine giving him data, millions of points of information combining into his senses.

He hung in space, an immense figure, the sphere appearing to him about the size of a large beach ball. He reached out and rotated it, running his hands over its surface, feeling for imperfections, looking for the place that wasn’t like the other places, the spot that was weaker.

As he did so, huge arrays of robots fanned out on the sphere covering every spot that his fingers touched, using their sensitive legs to send information to his tactile sensors. He felt a uniform pattern on the sphere, a pattern that fit with the geodesic nature of the construct.

Every location that his fingers passed changed color after it had been scanned, a bright red that seemed to seep from his nails like blood. The marker helped track his progress and would let him know when he’d completed this stage of the search.

He closed his eyes to focus on the tactile sensors — and for a moment he saw Mark in the hospital bed. He remembered standing there with Saji after the doctor had finally come. Mark had been asleep by this point, far more relaxed than his parents.

Oh, my God, Jay, I was so scared, he remembered Saji saying, and the squeeze of her hand.

He opened his eyes and saw that he had covered most of the globe in red. He carefully brushed his fingers over the rest.

Nothing.

He pulled his hands back, and traced a sign in the air.

The stars blanked out, leaving the sphere darker than before. The scene was almost black now, only a faint metallic gleam on the sphere, barely enough to still see it. His eyes shifted slightly, and the globe became blacker as the radiation sensors in the robots came on-line.

He reached for the sphere again, this time checking it for any light leaks. Such a leak would indicate the data hole he was searching for, whether it was in any part of the emittable spectrum or not.

It was larger now, about the size of a hot-air balloon, representing the scale change necessary for this test. He worked slowly, feeling the massiveness of the sphere as he turned it, carefully staring at each piece on the macro level while legions of robotic sensors scanned it at the micro.

His eyes had adjusted to the darker light, and now the segment of the sphere he looked at appeared brighter, almost silver…

Like the needle in Mark’s arm…

No. Focus.

Jay blinked twice to shake the image, and continued to turn the globe. He had to be sure to hold it in each position for three seconds so that he could see all of the surface within the three-second window that the sphere represented. A tiny turquoise bar-graph at the edge of his vision constantly counted off the time, filling up with gold and then reverting to blue at the end of each interval.

A wire-frame model below the bar showed his progress. Two segments left.

Jay completed the search.

Nothing.

He started his next check, a chemical examination of the sphere, using his olfactory sensors. The globe had shrunk now, to a basketball. He pulled it close to his face and started to sniff.

As he did this, the robot armies, now germ-sized on his scale, deployed spectral analyzers, checking the atomic makeup of the sphere, looking for variations that could not be explained. There was a slightly pinelike smell, almost antiseptic.

Like the hospital.

This wouldn’t do.

Jay activated a control and the smell shifted to a more pleasant cedar, taking him away from thoughts of Mark.

He turned the ball, sniffing, a bloodhound looking for something that didn’t smell right.

A bell chimed, and he realized that he’d completed the search.

Nothing.

Nothing at all.

He hadn’t found anything. But he should have. The interface had been tested, the robots’ AI performed flawlessly, and the metaphor was good. There was the tiniest chance that they’d gotten the time frame wrong for the sphere, but it seemed unlikely.

Which left him as the weak link.

It’s me.

Jay let out a long breath. He’d been distracted, thinking about Mark. He must have missed something, some factor.

He was going to have to try something else.