Springboard

29

Jay stood in the middle of the sampan while Chang worked the long oar at the rear, sculling the wooden pole back and forth in a machinelike rhythm. The little boat was twelve or fifteen feet long, weathered wood, with a cloth-and-bamboo-covered hoop that formed an arc-roofed cabin running most of the boat’s length. They were going with the current, and Chang’s efforts were more to keep it lined up with the flow than to drive it.

The water did have a yellow color to it.

“Comes from the Loess Plateau,” Chang said. “The earth there turns this shade when it becomes sediment in the water. Half as big as Texas, that plateau. Haung Ho — the Yellow River — is also called ‘China’s Great Sorrow.’ ”

Jay looked at him, squinting against the bright sunlight.

“From all the misery the river has caused over the years,” Chang said. “Floods, destruction, so many deaths. Chinese civilization began here on its banks, you know. All the major dynasties.”

Jay nodded.

Ahead of them, behind them, other boats floated on the muddy water, small sampans like the one they were in as well as ones that were larger, with sails. A few were so tiny that they seemed like children’s toys, probably made from sheepskins. The smell of fish hung in the damp and warm air. Some of the boats held bamboo cages with big black diving birds in them. Cormorants, Jay knew, used to catch fish.

“We’re not far from the ruins of Banpo Village,” Chang said. “More than six thousand years old. In Xi’an, that’s the capital of this region, there are other ancient wonders — the Goose Pagoda, the Forest of Stone Tablets, the Qin Terra-cotta Warriors and Horses.”

“Very scenic and historical,” Jay said. “And a well-built scenario.”

“You honor me.”

“I call ’em like I see ’em. What’s the time line?”

“About 180 °CE,” Chang said. “There, just ahead, to your right, see the boat with the red eyes?”

Jay saw the one Chang meant. The same sampan-style, a bit bigger than their boat, with a single man in it, in one of those straw coolie hats — unless somebody was hidden in the little cabin.

“Why are we watching him?” Jay asked.

“Because he is watching somebody else,” Chang said. “The junk, ahead and to the left.”

Jay looked at the larger boat. He didn’t see anybody on the decks. The boat had an anchor line out, holding it still against the current.

“Who’s on it?”

Chang shook his head. “I don’t know. They have not revealed themselves. But the man in the red-eyed sampan has kept the junk — one of the old Grand Canal designs — under close observation since I spotted him.”

“What does it mean?”

“Again, I do not know. Before my recent software acquisition, I didn’t know either of these two existed. The man in the sampan — there’s a sexual metaphor in that name, did you know? — is a computer operator of some skill. I did not have the tools to see him before. When I happened across him, I was surprised. As adept as he is, his interest in the other player is by itself most interesting.”

“And you think this something I need to know?”

Chang stopped working the oar. He lifted a heavy anchor tied to a long rope and tossed it over the side. It disappeared in the muddy water and the line sank rapidly, paying out until the anchor hit bottom. The boat drifted a short ways, then slowed to a stop.

“Perhaps this would be a good place to fish,” Chang observed.

“It’s your scenario,” Jay said with a shrug. “But, again, why would I find this particularly interesting?”

“Please pardon me if I offer an observation that is completely incorrect,” Chang said. “But if I had to guess, I’d say you are looking for somebody who has caused something of a stir in military computer circles of late. I also understand that CyberNation has had some difficulties.”

Jay blinked against the glare from the water. Too bad they couldn’t wear polarized sunshades in this scenario. “How did you hear about that?”

“Even China does not exist in a vacuum. Rumors travel. I am not entirely without access to the West.”

“Assuming you’re right, why here?”

“Because I believe you are seeking a Chinese operator. Little things you have said during our acquaintance indicate this. My apologies if I am wrong.”

Jay shook his head. “No apologies necessary. You aren’t wrong.”

Chang said nothing.

Jay said, “Without getting into details, you nailed it. I’ll take all the help I can get.”

“I will give all that I can,” Chang said.

“Got a telescope on this boat?”

“In the trunk inside the cabin. I’ll fetch it.”

“Good. Then we can get a closer look at this guy.”

Both men smiled.

“General Hadden would like to speak to you,” Thorn’s secretary said over the intercom. She sounded nervous.

“Sure. Which line?” Thorn asked.

“Uh, he’s here, sir. In the office.”

Thorn frowned. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs was here?

“Send him in, please.” Thorn fought to keep his composure. People like that didn’t just go places without letting folks know in advance. What was he doing here?

Four-Star Army General Patrick Lee Hadden stepped into Thorn’s office. He was in uniform, his jacket’s breast covered with ribbons and medals. He was a genuine war hero. Hadden was awarded two Purple Hearts in Vietnam, along with the Bronze and Silver Stars, and served with distinction in Bosnia, First Iraq, and the Syrian campaign. He was a tall man, iron-gray hair that was once black in a brush cut, still fit for a man of sixty-four, his face tanned and creased with laugh lines. His nose, broken at least once and set a hair crooked, gave his face a certain lopsided character.

Thorn stood, feeling as if he needed to come to attention.

“Commander,” Hadden said. He smiled, a high-wattage expression, with natural but nearly perfect teeth.

“General. Please, have a seat.” Thorn gestured at the couch.

Hadden sat, his back straight, but not stiff. Thorn also sat.

“What can I do for you, sir?”

“I, ah, just happened to be in the neighborhood,” he said. He smiled again, to show he was kidding. “I wanted to check and see if you’ve made any more progress on our problem.”

Thorn had told Jay to keep the military liaison posted and up to date, so anything he could offer now wouldn’t be new, but he also had heard that Hadden was a hands-on guy when it came to things he considered important. He wanted to hear what was what from the man running the investigation, and Thorn could understand that. When something reflected on you up the chain of command, when it might eventually be your head on the block for any reason, it was a good idea to track those things.

Still, it irritated Thorn a little. The military was hearing it as soon as Net Force had anything to tell them, Hadden had to know that, so he had to be here for something else as well. To prod them a little? To check out Thorn personally?

Or to put the fear of God into him?

“Our best people are on it,” Thorn said. “We are making progress.”

Hadden leaned forward a little. “And the sun is shining, the birds are singing, and all is normal with the world? That’s a little… nonspecific. The service is bleeding money every time this snafu hits us, Commander. I want to know how close we are to catching this terrorist and stopping his attacks.”

Here was a powerful man, used to command, and accustomed to getting his way. Thorn could feel that radiate from him. He understood it, but he didn’t like being the focus of it. He was used to doing things his way, too, and nothing got his back up faster than somebody who didn’t know what he was talking about telling him how to do his job — or hinting that he didn’t know how to do it.

“Do you think it’s going to rain in Sydney next Thursday, sir?” he asked.

“Excuse me, what does that have to do with—?” Hadden stopped. “Ah.”

Thorn saw that the general had gotten it, he wasn’t slow, but Thorn wanted to make sure. “My crystal ball doesn’t work any better than yours, General,” he said. “You’re getting our best effort. This isn’t like tracking an elephant across damp ground. We’ll find the guy. Could be tomorrow, could be next week, could be a month from now. It takes what it takes.”

Hadden smiled. “You’re not afraid of me, are you, Commander?”

Thorn didn’t hesitate. “No, sir,” he said. “All you can do is fire me. I don’t need the job.”

Hadden’s smile grew bigger. “I could do a lot worse than that, actually, but that wouldn’t help me solve my problem, would it?”

“Not unless you have somebody better to replace me.”

“And you doubt that.”

Thorn shrugged. “Me, maybe. My technical people? You can’t find better.”

Hadden’s smile had gone away. “And they are loyal to you.”

“I can’t speak to that. Fire me and find out.”

The general frowned. “Commander, I don’t think you want to get into a power struggle with me. I could draft your people and keep them right where they are.”

Now Thorn was really getting angry. “You don’t really believe that, do you? Face it, General, the most you could do is to keep their butts in the chair. That’s all. And you know as well as I do that if you did that with threats, you could kiss any chance of solving your problem — or your next problem, or the one after that — good-bye. These are creative and independent people. Push some of them too far and hell will freeze over before they give you squat. They will look real busy, but they won’t be doing anything useful.”

Hadden leaned back a little. “You’re part Native American, aren’t you?”

“I don’t mind the term ‘Indian.’ Yes, sir, I am.”

“You know, I had a great-great-grandfather who served with Custer. An ordinary trooper. He died at the Little Bighorn.”

“None of my relatives were there,” Thorn said. “Different tribe. But Custer got what he deserved. And if your grandfather was part of what he did to the innocent women and children along the way, then he got what he deserved, too.”

Hadden laughed. That puzzled Thorn, overriding his anger.

“If a man doesn’t have balls, I don’t need him working for me,” Hadden said. He stood and extended his hand. “Keep giving me your best efforts, son, and I’ll stay out of your hair. But if I think you’re dogging it, you’ll be rejoining the private sector PDQ.”

Thorn stood, surprised. “Fair enough.” He extended his own hand.

The two men shook. Hadden said, “I’ll talk to you later.”

And with that, he turned and left. Not quite a march, but not too far from it.

After he was gone, Thorn shook his head. Well. That had been… unexpected. And he wasn’t sure of what he had heard. It sounded as if the man was giving him slack, but that he’d shown up here and pushed him to see how he’d react was a little irritating. Thorn would just have to see how it went. If this was all Hadden was going to do, fine. If he decided to come back and apply pressure again? That wasn’t going to work. Thorn didn’t have to put up with that.

As he ate, Jay pondered his realization. It was the middle of the night — actually closer to two A.M., and Saji and the boy were asleep. Chang had packed up and gone back to his hotel a couple hours ago. Jay hadn’t stopped for supper, and it was early for breakfast. What was the nighttime equivalent of brunch? Dinfast? Supbreak?

The meal, whatever it might be called, was simple: a couple of boiled eggs he’d found in the fridge, an apple, and some cashews. Not the most exciting food, but at least it was something.

He sat at the kitchen table and went over it again, checking his reasoning.

He had gone at the problem every way he knew how, and it was the dog not barking in the night, he was sure.

Sherlock Holmes’s dictum once again — everything else had been eliminated, and there wasn’t anything left — at least not that Jay could figure out. He had run down every possibility except one:

There was a back door in the basic software — one that had been there since before the military — or CyberNation — ever got their hands on the programs. Put there by somebody looking far ahead.

In an interlinked multiple-affect synergistic software system this big, with its layers upon layers and wheels within wheels, figuring out where the hidden door was made looking for a needle in a haystack seem like a walk in the park on a nice spring day. It was more akin to finding a particular grain of sand on a big honkin’ beach. It could be done, if you knew exactly what you were looking for — and you had lots and lots and lots of time to spend on it…

Many million lines of code would have to be searched, and even with a dedicated Super-Cray or a Blue whale running full-blast looking, if you didn’t have a pretty specific idea of how to frame your search, you could still miss it. Like putting the word “the” into a big Internet search engine — you came up with more than five and a half billion hits, and it only took two tenths of a second to get those, but reading all those for content? You wouldn’t live long enough to do it.

There was another way to maybe get to the “who,” and he was pretty sure that Chang’s help had already put him on that track. Amazing what the guy could do even when he had almost nothing to work with. Chang said he would identify the man in the sampan, the one they had seen in the joint scenario. Jay had a gut feeling that this guy was involved, though he didn’t know how.

Jay had already done the obvious — he had run a search for Chinese programmers on the original software crew, then the revision crews, even the marketing team, anybody who might have been able to embed a few clever lines of code where they’d leave unauthorized access to the system. Along the way, hundreds of programmers had worked on the beast, some extensively, some for only a few loops and lines. The score of Sino-sounding names still in the U.S. that had come up would be on a visit-now list for the FBI, but none of them looked like promising candidates. Jay’s instincts, which had no basis in any kind of logic, told him that the guy had gone home.

Of course, it might be — was likely, in fact — that the Chinese op hadn’t done the deed himself, but had socially engineered a programmer with a name as far away from China as Iceland…

More, just being able to get into the system wasn’t the whole answer: Once there, the guy doing the rascal had to manage it in such a way that it wouldn’t be spotted, and it wouldn’t point straight back at the hidden door even if it was picked up. Since none of the program’s built-in virus-, worm-, or trojanware had caught the attacking sequence, the slashware either had to be piggybacked on something where nobody had thought to look, or so smooth that it looked harmless on its own.

Jay would bet that the slashware had been installed at the same time as the back door, and in such a way that the program didn’t see it as anything but part of its normal OS. It wasn’t a foreign invader, it was part of the body. Whatever it did, the program would think it was merely doing what it was supposed to do. And even so, it still had to be convoluted enough that the diagnostic safeware couldn’t see it.

The sucker could even be on a timer…

Jay himself could do something like this, assuming he’d been one of the original code-writers with access early on. There was more than one way to go about it, though, and how Jay would manage it could be far different than the way it had been done.

This guy was good, no question, but now, at least, Jay had a handle on him.

He hoped.

Jay had four options, as he saw the situation.

One, he could find the door and close it, then find the built-in disguised slashware and deep-six it.

That could take slightly less than forever.

Two, somebody — and it wasn’t going to be Jay — would have to go over every line of code and verify it. That would take forever — and then some.

Three, the military — and CyberNation — would have to junk their infected programs and any other programs that interfaced with them, and start over with new software. Neither one of them was likely to do that, since that would cost a king’s ransom, and take major systems off-line for a long time. The cure would be nearly as bad as the disease — worse, even, like cutting off your hand to get rid of a wart on your little finger. And the wart’s virus could still be in your system…

Or four, Jay could find the guy responsible and then have somebody lean on him hard enough so he’d give up the door and slashware. Somehow, Chang’s guy on the boat was in it. Maybe he was the player, maybe not, but he was in it. Somehow. Chang had a better handle on his country’s system, even though Jay was worlds better generally.

Of the options, the only one that made any sense to Jay was the last. The best way to find a well-hidden body was to get the man who buried it to take you there.

The military program had, fortunately, been entirely written in the U.S., no outsourcing allowed for this level of sophistication. So whoever had screwed with it had been in the States during the creation of the program. It had taken three years and some to build and vet, and since Jay couldn’t be sure that the Chinese op had actually laid his own hands on it, he was going to have to take the long road to find him from this end. The guy had to be a player — even if he bribed another programmer, he’d have to know what to tell him to do, and in great detail. And Jay was sure by now that the guy was Chinese, so the way was apparent, if not easy:

Jay would have to run down every computer expert from China who had been in the U.S. during the years that it had taken to build the infected program. Chang could help, and he would — it would go a long way to building a bridge between his organization and Net Force, and Chang would also know that Net Force would certainly be grateful. Such gratitude could manifest in a lot of hardware and software for Chang, and the military would happily foot that bill if Chang helped them solve their problem, no question at all. They’d bury the guy in gold dust if he pulled their fat out of the fire.

Meanwhile, on this end, Jay could start by finding all the Chinese students in computer science programs, as well as any Chinese visitors who listed anything connected with computers on their passports or border entry logs. That alone could be tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of people, he had no idea. It wouldn’t be as hard as verifying multiple millions of lines of computer code, though. Even so, he was going to need major processing time. If they could track the guy down from Chang’s end, Jay didn’t have a problem with that, no, sir, not at all. He’d rather do it himself, of course, but the point was to catch the bad guy, to win. Everything else came second.

He chewed on a mouthful of boiled egg. With enough pepper, it wasn’t so bad…