The Enemy Within

CHAPTER 18 DIGITAL WAR

OUROBOROS went active at noon, central standard time.

At 12:01 P.M. Bill Rush, a farmer outside Red Wing, Minnesota, picked up his phone and started punching in the number for his feed supplier. He stopped, three numbers in, when he realised he wasn’t getting a dial tone. He whopped the receiver against the heel of his hand, but it remained silent. Resolving to get a new phone tomorrow, he stomped off to do his chores.

At 12:02 P.M. Fred Wong, a commercial real estate broker near Chicago’s Loop, tried to dial one of his clients to let her know he’d be a little late for their meeting. Instead of a steady tone, the receiver was silent. He tried line two and, when that didn’t work, his cellular phone. Nothing.

“Wonderful,” he fumed, “an outage.” Grabbing his suit coat, the realtor sprinted for the elevator. His client was all the way across town, so he had no time to waste.

Three minutes after OUROBOROS activated, at 1:03 P.M., eastern standard time, Jeri Daniels, a salesclerk in Detroit’s trendy “The Cache,” ran a Visa card through the reader, her first sale since coming back from lunch. The small box didn’t seem to be working. The window displayed “dialing” as always, but then changed to “no connection.”

“Annette?” Jeri called to another salesclerk. “Have you had any problem with the card reader?”

Shaking her head, the other woman came over to help.

One minute later, in Fort Wayne, Indiana, Mrs. Ruby Jeffers shuffled quickly over toward the telephone. That old electric space heater in the back room of her apartment was sparking and smoking, and she hadn’t made it to eighty-three by sitting around. She would call the fire department, if only to have them unplug the thing.

Arthritis forced her to move slowly, and the smoke was a little thicker by the time she made it to the kitchen. She picked up the receiver and frowned. Nothing. No dial tone at all. Not even static. Just silence. She dialed 911 anyway, but there was no response.

“Oh, my Lord,” she breathed.

Dropping the useless telephone, she left the kitchen almost running, ignoring the pain shrieking through her joints. The smoke was thicker, and the front door seemed a hundred miles away.

Precisely at 1:00 P.M., eastern standard time, all of the switching computers for the Midwest Telephone company had suddenly ceased to make connections. Occupied with some internal, mysterious task, they were no longer taking any calls.

Inside a service area that spilled across two time zones, Midwest Telephone was relied on by 40 million Americans living in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois, Michigan, and Indiana for telecommunications service.

1:05 EM, EST Detroit Officer Bob Calvin tried to phone his girlfriend from the fast-food joint he’d stopped at for his lunch break.

Calvin was of medium height, with a very dark complexion, only one shade removed from jet black. He kept his hair cut high and flat on the sides, emphasising his lean, narrow face. He was in his late twenties, a seven-year veteran of Detroit’s police force. Although smaller than some, he kept a lot of energy in his frame, and he could move fast and hard when necessary.

He had the 0800-to-1600-hours shift, driving a police car through one of Detroit’s tougher neighborhoods. Come the afternoon and graveyard shifts, they’d have two men in the car, but in the daytime one cop per vehicle was all the force could spare. Usually, he didn’t mind riding alone in this neighborhood. He’d grown up here. He’d even volunteered for this beat. Now, though, he’d been around long enough to know just how close it was to the edge.

Hell, the whole city was… Calvin realized the phone he was holding wasn’t working and hung up.

He left the restaurant and climbed back into his patrol car. He reached under the seat and pulled out a small cellular phone. Although they were expensive to use, many cops bought them as backups for the car radio, or to make personal calls when phones weren’t available like now.

He pressed the dial and 1 buttons and heard the phone dialing. But the message window displayed “no connection.” He tried again, with the same results. What exactly was going on?

He put the portable away, a scowl on his face. The bum phone meant another long explanation to Linda, he thought irritably. He enjoyed her company and her conversation, but she was not a patient woman. The dangerous aspects of his job also worried her, and she often needed to hear that he was still okay.

“All units on this frequency, all units,” the radio crackled as he settled himself and started the engine. “Repeat, all units. Landline phone service is out. No incoming or outgoing calls from Dispatch can be made. The problem may be citywide.”

“Wonderful,” Calvin muttered sarcastically. The city was on the verge of blowing up, and now the utilities were on the blink. At least that explained his problem.

He often missed having a partner not for backup, but just someone to keep him company and bitch to at times like this. He could share his worries with another cop, but not with Linda.

The nationwide, tit-for-tat wave of white racist and black supremacist terrorism was threatening to tear Detroit apart. He’d seen some of the confidential memos circulating through the department. Many in high places were increasingly worried by the prospect of major trouble between the city’s poor, black inner-city neighborhoods and its affluent, white suburban neighborhoods. Far too many of Detroit’s people were already choosing up sides. Plenty of “black spokesmen,” radicalised by the violence or radical to begin with, spoke of “taking the war back to the whites.” And too many of their white counterparts were talking the same kind of garbage. The ugly reality of a race war seemed to lie just around the corner.

Calvin shook his head. He’d broken up a lot of interracial arguments lately. Vandalism and other low-level crimes were way up, and gang activity was at an all-time high. He saw the murderous punks all the time now, in packs on the streets, just hanging or cruising from somewhere to nowhere, just looking for trouble. All they needed was a spark to set them off.

Even as he worried, a small corner of his mind relaxed, imagining the tack he could take with Linda. “I tried to call you, honey, but the phones were out.” Best excuse in the world.

But he knew that the solution for his small problem with his girlfriend had created a much bigger problem for the city as a whole. Well, with luck, the phone company would uncross their wires in short order and bring everything back online.

Resolving to cover as much ground as possible, Officer Bob Calvin pulled out of the hamburger restaurant’s trashlittered parking lot and started his patrol. He still had half his shift to go.

Maggie Kosinski pulled a printout out of the printer so that she could see the data for herself. The traffic counters all read fine. The links to the other Baby Bells throughout the rest of the country were busy too. It was just that no calls were getting through anywhere in the company’s service area.

She temporarily ignored the shift operators clustered around her as they all tried to suggest possible courses of action at once. She was the boss, the person in charge of operations at the center. She’d been summoned only moments after the outage began. Unfortunately, ten minutes of analysis told her nothing.

Kosinski had worked for the phone company for almost twelve years, starting after a tour in the Air Force as a communications technician. She’d paid her dues as a technician and operator before becoming a supervisor and then operations manager.

She was pretty, a little over average height, and had short blond hair. She kept her hair short and dressed down at the office so she wouldn’t be accused of using her looks to get promoted. Today, for instance, she wore a plain black sweater and cream-colored pants, little makeup, and small, gold hoop earrings. Hopefully, they’d pay more attention to her brains than her outfit.

Her second-in-command looked up from his desk. “Maggie, it’s Jim Johnston on the E-phone.”

Jim Johnston was Kosinski’s boss, the man in charge of company operations. She ran to pick up the special line. Midwest Telephone had its own backup system for maintenance and for emergencies like this.

“What have we got, Maggie?” asked Johnston matter-of factly.

She started spelling out the symptoms, using the same straightforward tone. “The whole system’s locked up tight. We’re getting traffic readings, but nothing’s really being passed.”

There was a moment of silence on the other end as Johnston tried to digest news that was worse than anything he’d anticipated. “What have you tried so far?”

“We aren’t getting any hardware faults. So first we tried isolating each of the switching computers from the others. That didn’t help. So we’ve stripped as much of the load as we can. But that still isn’t making any difference.”

Because Johnston had once held her job, she only needed to give him a shorthand picture of the system’s condition and their first attempts to fix it. Kosinski was more worried than she wanted to admit. She’d seen a lot of different problems in her time, but all the standard fixes, plus a few imaginative ones, hadn’t done a thing. There were only a few options left. And none of them were very palatable.

“All the switching computers are down?” Johnston asked.

“All within a minute of each other, all over the region,” she replied. It was hard to believe. This had never happened before, in her experience or in the experience of anyone in the operations center. Still, working with computers, you learned to expect the impossible.

“The system may be corrupted,” Kosinski ventured reluctantly. “Either by a bug or by damage to the code.” “Meaning a virus,” Johnston said flatly. The chance of a bug in mature software was very remote.

“It’s possible,” she admitted. “The code’s clearly been corrupted somehow. I recommend that we shut everything down and reboot from the master backups.”

That wasn’t her decision to make, thank goodness. Shutting the system down and restarting it from scratch would guarantee that all telecommunications services in the Midwest would be off-line for at least another thirty minutes. The company’s own losses and financial liability were probably already running somewhere in the tens of millions of dollars. Another half an hour out of commission might increase that by an order of magnitude.

There was silence on the other end of the E-phone for several seconds.

“Can you salvage the accounting data?” Johnston asked finally. The system’s RAM held a significant fraction of the day’s billing records in temporary storage. Shutting the machines down would wipe all of that information, adding millions more to the company’s losses.

“I don’t know, Jim. We’ve already dumped all that we can, but it looks pretty bad.”

Another silence. This one lasted longer.

“Well, go ahead. The quicker we start, the quicker we’ll be back in business. I’ll call public relations.” She could hear the frustration in his voice. “Christ, they’re gonna love this.”

Maggie hung up, turned back to the shift crew, and started snapping out orders. She was determined to bring the system back on-line in record time, if only to shorten Jim Johnston’s discomfort.

The Chicago Mercantile Exchange sat quiet, almost as silent as a tomb.

Jill Kastner, one of the hundreds of commodities traders milling around in confusion, wished they’d kill the power as well and make the effect complete. She had never seen the brightly lit trading floor so still. It made the whole vast room seem alien and utterly unfamiliar.

Ordinarily, the exchange handled millions of dollars of business a minute. Pork bellies, gold, stock market indices, foreign currencies, and hundreds of other commodities. They all moved from seller to buyer amid the shouting, yelling, and waving chaos of the separate pits. Ultimately, though, the traders and their customers relied on near-instantaneous communications and information retrieval. The exchange’s computer terminals were linked by phone lines to a sophisticated net that spanned the globe. Without those phone lines, the exchange was just another large, paper-littered room.

Jill Kastner frowned. They had been out of business for fifteen minutes so far. Fifteen minutes that had cost her and her partners tens of thousands of dollars of potential profit.

Some of the traders scattered around her were trying to catch up on their paperwork. Others read the paper or tried the telephones over and over, hoping to be the first back on the electronic web that made their business possible. A few had already left the building for a quick drink or a walk to blow off steam.

Jill was too competitive to walk away from a problem like that. She simply tapped a pencil on the counter in front of her, tried to clear her mind, and waited. Whenever the phone company fixed the problem, she’d get back to work. The problem was, with the phones out, she couldn’t even prepare for the god-awful mess she knew would appear when they came back on.

The Napoli was a small Italian restaurant on Detroit’s West Side. It wasn’t a four-star or even a three-star restaurant, but it served a good lunch and had a regular dinner clientele.

Joe Millunzi, the owner, spotted trouble as soon as it came in off the street. Three black kids in their teens, dressed in dark, dirty, loose-fitting clothes. They all wore Detroit Pistons hats or shirts gang colors, probably. They glided in the front door in a carefully studied strut, hard looks on their faces. He knew his customers, and these people were not here to buy lunch.

One hung back by the door while the others headed for the cash register and his daughter, Carla. Millunzi shivered. Carla was busy with a customer. She hadn’t noticed the boys.

He had been standing a few yards away at the entrance to the dining room, going over the reservations book. Moving as quickly as he could without running outright, he managed to get to the register before the two gangbangers. Whispering “Get Mama and everyone out the back!” he shooed her toward the kitchen.

They saw Millunzi come up and watched the girl leave, but they didn’t seem to care. They just stopped in front of the register, coldly regarding him. He was a big man, over six feet and a little overweight. The two teenagers were both shorter, possibly not even fully grown.

Millunzi felt like a slab of meat being inspected.

His hands were hidden as he desperately pressed a small button on the underside of the register stand. The alarm system was linked via a dedicated phone line to an alarm service and from there to the police. In a few minutes the cops would know there was a robbery in progress. And Millunzi knew there were usually two police cars in this area at this time of day. He’d made it his business to know. With luck, the police could be outside in five minutes. Ten tops. just keep cool, Joe, he thought nervously.

The two teens looked around to make sure no one else was paying much attention. The shortest pulled his hand out of his jacket pocket, showing Millunzi a silver-grey automatic pistol. It looked-immense in the boy’s hand.

“Give us the money, man,” the teenager demanded in a small, even voice. Having shown his weapon, he then folded his other hand over it and stood quietly, waiting arrogantly for his chosen victim to comply.

Millunzi nodded hastily, swallowed hard, and rang up “No Sale” on the register. It beeped and spat the cash drawer out at him. He carefully scooped up the twenties, tens, and fives, and offered the wad of cash to the one with the gun.

“All of it, fool!” the taller, older teen said in a harsh voice. He savagely grabbed the bills out of Millunzi’s hand and stabbed a hand down at the register again.

The restaurant owner nervously gathered up the ones and rolls of coins and started to offer it to them, but the triggerman snarled, and showed him the gun again. “Not that shit! Give us what’s under the drawer!” Millunzi sighed and lifted the cash drawer, showing three bundles of twenties in bank wrappers. He pulled them out, fighting the urge to look at the clock or check his watch. It had been at least a minute. Maybe two. Probably not three. Were Carla and Rosa out the back? His brain seemed to be spinning, overheated with fear. Where were the police?

The two robbers smiled triumphantly as the older one took the bundled cash. They both turned away toward the door, but the one holding the gun suddenly swung around, whipped the gun up to point at Millunzi, and fired.

The first round caught him in the stomach and slammed him back against the wall. He instinctively clutched at his belly and groaned aloud gasping as a wave of sharp, piercing agony struck him.

The triggerman fired twice more, this time into Millunzi’s chest. As the restaurant owner’s consciousness faded, he noticed that’ the teenager still wore the same, small, triumphant smile.

The patrons in the restaurant reacted to the noise by turning startled faces toward the cash register. They saw foe Millunzi sliding down the blood-smeared wall behind the cash register and the young black men in dark-colored Pistons jackets walking quickly outside.

Three blocks away, Officer Bob Calvin continued his patrol. He never saw the three robbers, who escaped without a trace. There would be many clean getaways that afternoon.

Bob Calvin’s radio pulled his attention away from the heavy traffic building up on the neighborhood streets.

“All units, this is the watch commander. This phone out age is a big one. We’re getting radio calls from neighboring jurisdictions. Their land links are out too.

“Latest word from the phone company is that it’s going to be some time before they fix the problem, so the commissioner has decided to mobilize the force. We’re also coordinating with the hospitals and the fire department. Ambulances and fire engines will be dispersed throughout the city. Everyone look sharp, and we’ll let you know when things get back to normal.”

Calvin whistled sharply. This situation must be even more serious than he’d first thought. Mobilizing the force meant pulling all shifts in and keeping everyone on duty until the emergency was declared over. It also meant calling up the city’s police reserves. The reserves had only limited arrest powers, but they were armed.

Mobilizing the force and its reserves would put a lot more needed manpower on the streets although at the cost of overtime pay. On the other hand, Calvin realised, under the present circumstances, ordering a mobilisation was a lot simpler than carrying it out. Without phone service the department would have to send someone to knock on the door of every officer or reservist being summoned to duty.

Still, that was the smart move to make, even if it meant he had to stay on for a second shift. The city was ready to blow, and it was their job to keep the lid on.

Of course, Calvin thought to himself with a tinge of regret, his date with Linda for tonight was now in jeopardy. A citywide emergency was not an excuse, not in her eyes, and she’d be worried sick. He was scheduled to get off at four, and their date was set for eight. Surely, Midwest Telephone would have its technical glitches sorted out by then.

The piece was third, after an update on the continuing and fruitless FBI counterterrorist investigation and the equally fruitless Balkan negotiations.

“Midwest Telephone technicians are scrambling to deal with a major telecommunications outage affecting the company’s entire service area.”

A map flashed into view behind the anchorman’s head showing the six affected states. Together they formed an irregularly shaped red blob in the heart of the country.

“For more than half an hour, the outage has paralysed industries, businesses, stock markets, and commodities exchanges across a vast area. Phone company spokesmen reached by emergency satellite downlink are unable to explain the cause or offer a firm estimate for the resumption of service…”

“You’re sure the masters were clean?”

It was a stupid question, even if Johnston did have to ask it, and Maggie Kosinski shot him a hard look. “They’re only three months old, Jim. We made a new set after the last software revision.”

Johnston had come down from his upper-floor office to watch them bring the system back on-line. First the switching computers were powered down and all the operating disks and tapes were removed. When the computers were brought back up, Kosinski’s technicians reloaded master copies of the system software and rebooted.

It was an exacting, step-by-step procedure, one as carefully planned as a satellite launch. It also hadn’t worked. No calls came in, no connections were made.

The two of them stood intently studying the operations center’s main control console. Banks of CRT screens offered them a visual representation of the telephone system’s cybernetic organism. They shook their heads simultaneously, utterly baffled. By rights, the machines should be fine.

“Taylor’s gonna be pissed,” was Kosinski’s only comment.

John F. Taylor was the president and CEO of Midwest Telephone. He was not an easy man to bring bad news to.

“It’s gotta be hardware, then,” Johnston insisted.

There were only two things that could go wrong with a computer. The complex set of instructions, the software, could be bad in any one of a hundred different ways. Alternatively, the hardware, made up of thousands of complex components, could fail. It had to be one or the other. There was no third alternative.

“We isolated and tested each of the CPUs, remember?” Kosinski was adamant. “The equipment is fine. Besides, what conceivable fault could create this kind of problem?”

Johnston spread his hands. “If it’s not the CPUs, then the problem has to be in the hookup somewhere in the system how they interact.”

“Could be.” Kosinski frowned. “Geez, that could be either a hardware or a software screw up… or some weird combination of both.” Part of her mind groaned at the thought. Debugging the intricate interactions of the machines and code as they communicated with each other would be a brain-burning exertion.

She shrugged. It was necessary. Then she brightened. If she was the one who brought the phone system back into operation, she would get the glory. Of course, she was also the one who would take the fall if the system stayed down.

Kosinski got to work.

“Our top story this hour is the continuing phone outage in the Midwest.

“Phone service in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois, Michigan, and Indiana remains at a complete standstill. While some attempts to place calls have been successful, Midwest Telephone spokesmen estimate that only one in a thousand or even one in ten thousand calls are being connected.

“The outage remains confined to the six-state region, but the rest of the nation’s telecommunications companies are reported to be closely monitoring the situation.

“In an exclusive radio interview with CNN, an assistant to John F. Taylor, Midwest Telephone’s CEO, hinted that the company suspects outside interference with its operations. Apparently, Midwest Telephone has requested emergency assistance from both the FBI and the Federal Communications Commission…”

Randy Newcomb stood with the rest of the crowd watching the fire gutting old Mr. Romano’s house. The fire department was nowhere in sight.

He felt strangely detached. Neither the sight of the fire nor the old geezer’s loss meant anything to him.

Randy lived on the corner with an older brother and an alcoholic mother. Just eighteen, he’d been drifting in and out of high school for more than a year. He was a bright kid, and his brains had earned him leadership of the F Street posse. But they hadn’t been enough to keep him off crack.

The fire was just one more unimportant event in his drab existence. The only color was provided by small vials of crack. Getting the money for the next vial and the one after that occupied his entire being. Nothing else was worth much thought or worry.

Newcomb heard the neighbors talking about the phones being out, and complaining about not being able to call a fire truck or an ambulance. That struck a sudden spark in his brain. If people couldn’t reach the fire or emergency services, they also couldn’t alert the police to any trouble, he slowly realized, smiling.

Drifting away from the crowd, he trotted back to his own house and grabbed the car keys. He had to collect a few of his friends. If they moved fast before the phones came back on, they could really score.

He turned the key, and the old Ford turned over. Reaching under the seat, he pulled out a 9mm automatic. He checked the magazine and patted the weapon affectionately. This was going to be fun. After all, the police couldn’t possibly be everywhere at once.

Newcomb wasn’t alone.

Ninety minutes after the phones went dead, Officer Bob Calvin had the frustrating feeling of knowing there might be crimes going on all around him, but of being unable to do more than sweep up. He’d found out about the Napoli restaurant robbery only when someone flagged down his car and told him about the shooting.

By then, it was far too late for Joe Millunzi. All Calvin had been able to do was summon the detectives and the coroner. Even that took extra time, because the coroner’s office was not normally on the radio circuit. Someone had finally passed them a walkie-talkie, but until then Dispatch had to send a runner over to their office. Calvin had the sinking feeling that Detroit’s medical examiners would be busy today.

He scrambled back into his patrol car still trying to think of a way to increase his chances of stopping the bad guys before they struck again. It was the old story. Walking a beat instead of driving would make him more accessible to the community but it would also cut the ground he could cover by a factor of ten. Using a motorcycle or bicycle instead of an enclosed car would have been a compromise, but just looking at the freezing weather outside made him shiver at the thought. Bike patrols were practical in the Sun Belt not here.

Detroit’s police force had operated with radio dispatch for years, and before that they’d used a call box system for the beat cops. But both those communications systems depended on people phoning the police when they spotted trouble. You just couldn’t protect a large city any other way.

Now the city’s officials were scrambling to patch together a makeshift replacement for the telephone system. Neighborhood watch patrols and citizens with CB radios were already taking to the streets, but they were sometimes more of a hindrance than a help. He’d already heard of an incident where one officious idiot thought a radio in his car gave him arrest powers and tried to stop a liquor store holdup on his own. The man had paid for his overzealousness with his life.

The CB nets were confused too. Most of the people using them lacked the discipline and training needed to manage a communications net efficiently. Multiple callers on a limited number of channels often turned the airwaves into a static laden Towel of Babel. There were even some jokers actually putting out false alarms sending an already strained police force off on wild-goose chases across the city.

But then again, maybe they weren’t just pranksters, Calvin suddenly thought. The street gangs and other criminals infesting Detroit’s poorer neighborhoods knew what was happening around them. Maybe some of the smarter bastards just wanted to make sure they were left to run wild unmolested.

He slowed as a knot of people on the sidewalk ahead drew his attention and his concern. What he saw was unusual, and today anything unusual was bad.

Storefront shops and rundown apartments lined both sides of this two-way street. As he drove closer, he saw that the crowd he’d spotted was clustered around an appliance store. People were moving quickly in and out of the store, and even from this distance he could see a shattered window.

Wonderful.

He picked up the microphone. “Dispatch, this is Unit FiveThree-Two. I’ve got looting at Concord and St. Paul. I need some backup.”

The dispatcher’s voice came back through the radio speaker, relaying his request to the closest patrol cars. “Any units to assist FiveThree-Two at Concord and St. Paul?”

The responses were not reassuring.

“Unit Five-Two-One, I’m stuck here for at least fifteen more minutes.”

“Dispatch, this is Two-Four-Four. Negative on that. I’m tied up with two in custody.”

“Unit Two-Three-Two, I can clear and go. But I’m ten out.”

Shit. Ten minutes was way too long. Calvin thumbed his mike again.

“Roger, Dispatch. I’ll do it myself. Out.”

He shook his head. Trying to break up a crowd alone violated not only standing department policy but common sense. Handling a mob this size ordinarily required half a dozen men. But the times were not ordinary and he’d studied the crowd’s behavior while the dispatcher made her futile calls. He had a glimmering of an approach that might pay off.

He was facing about twenty or thirty people, most of them adults. They seemed more intent on getting into the store and getting out with boxes or items in their arms than in physical violence. He didn’t see any gang members nearby with bloodier ideas on their tiny minds.

Calvin parked the car half a block up from the store and hopped out, taking the riot gun with him. He stood behind the driver’s side door for half a moment, surveying the situation one last time. No one in the crowd paid much attention to the lone cop car and the lone cop.

“Time to restore the peace and earn my pay,” he muttered under his breath. He pumped a round into the riot gun and trotted toward the appliance store. His heart started to pound.

A few people at the edges of the crowd saw him coming and faded away, some pulling friends with them, the others just hightailing it up the street. The rest were still trying to force their way inside. The looting must be just starting, Calvin concluded. Good. Now was the time to stop it.

He pulled the trigger on the shotgun, firing it into the air. The weapon bucked in his hands, and the roar easily drowned out the mob’s confused babble. “Everyone on the ground now!” he shouted.

More of the crowd, maybe half, broke and ran. The rest stood their ground, apparently trying to gauge their chances. After all, they were many, and he was only one.

Calvin sensed their mood and fired the shotgun again, closer this time but still over their heads. Most of the rest took flight. He pumped another round into the riot gun and levered it at the few who were left.

“Go on, get out of here!”

Needing no further instruction, they fled.

Even as they disappeared into alleys and doorways, Calvin suddenly realized he wasn’t breathing. Letting the air held in his lungs out with a whoosh, he took a breath and felt the tightness leave his body. He took off his cap and wiped the sweat off his forehead. “Shit, maybe that was stupid, but it worked.”

Trotting toward the shattered storefront, he sighed. With enough backup, he could have arrested them all, but the jails would already be full tonight. Anyway those weren’t the kind of people he wanted to lock up. He’d seen their worn out winter coats, and lean, careworn faces. They were just taking advantage of something started by someone else some thief or gangbanger who’d broken in the store’s windows.

Calvin reached the store and stepped inside, picking his way through the jumble of boxes and broken glass. Almost immediately, he spotted the bodies. One lay by the front door, while another sprawled behind the counter.

He knelt by the closest, a Korean man in his forties who had been shot at least twice. He checked the man’s pulse quickly, but it was obvious from the head wound that he was stone-dead. Damn it.

Calvin turned to the other victim. This one was a Korean woman probably the dead man’s wife since they were almost the same age. She lay on her back near the smashed open cash register, almost spread-eagle, and with a single wound in the chest. The bullet must have gone all the way through, he realized, looking at the pool of dark blood all around her.

She was still alive, but she wouldn’t be for much longer not in the cold and not after losing that much blood…

He sprinted back to his patrol car and pulled up next to the shop. As he drove the short distance, he reported to Dispatch, asked for an ambulance, and checked again on his backup.

“Backup is still five minutes out, FiveThree-Two. Ambulance delay is currently twenty minutes or more.”

Calvin swore. Without adequate communications, the city was losing its ability to deliver emergency care with the necessary speed. Another link to civilisation had broken.

After quickly applying field dressings from the first-aid kit in his car, he loaded the wounded woman into the backseat and sped off for Mercy Hospital, fifteen minutes away. He knew the looters would come back as soon as he left the scene, but there was nothing else he could do.

Mercy Hospital was a mess. The emergency room was crammed, of course, nothing new about that, but the injured were coming in so fast that a triage team had been set up in a nearby meeting room.

Detroit was falling apart. The drugged-out thugs and drunken punks who perpetrated Devil’s Night every Halloween were taking full advantage of the developing crisis. The fire department had been swamped by hundreds of small fires, any of which could flare out of control if not contained in time. Besides the fires, a wave of looting, robbery, and revenge killing was spreading through the city as police response times lagged further and further behind.

After leaving the wounded Korean woman in the hands of a haggard surgical team, Calvin reported in.

“Roger, FiveThree-Two,” the dispatcher acknowledged urgently. “Code Three to the commercial district. Report to the mobile CP at Michigan and Woodward.”

Calvin sprinted back to his car and tore out of the hospital driveway at high speed. Code Three meant move it, lights and siren. Something big and bad was going down.

Detroit’s biggest tourist attraction was the Renaissance Center, a glittering, high-rise collection of shops and offices right on the water. Part of an extensive redevelopment plan by the city, it had become a symbol of Detroit’s hope for better economic times.

Now the Renaissance Center was on fire, and Calvin could see the smoke billowing skyward as he raced up Michigan Avenue. He pulled up to the command post, a cluster of police cars, vans, and ambulances parked a few blocks from the complex. As he drove up, an ambulance pulled away, screaming back down the avenue.

The command post was close to the Center, but far enough to be out of immediate danger. Calvin could hear the dull roar of a crowd out of control just a few blocks away. He could also smell smoke and tear gas. The streets had been blocked off.

The commander-on-scene was a middle-aged, harriedlooking lieutenant hurriedly briefing and assigning policemen as fast as they reported in. His name tag read “Haskins.” He grabbed Calvin by the arm and pointed to a street map spread in front of him. “Set up a roadblock at this intersection. Nothing goes south toward the Renaissance Center. You’re part of a cordon around the area. Got it?”

Calvin nodded and drove off to take up his position.

Beneath an overcast sky, it was already twilight. Off to the east, the blazing towers of the Renaissance Center glowed orange against a black horizon.

Despite the cold, deepening as the sky darkened, Bob Calvin waited outside his police car. So far he hadn’t had much to do beyond waving off those few idiotic motorists who somehow hadn’t heard the news.

To Calvin that seemed almost impossible. He’d been listening to the radio transmissions describing the disaster overtaking Detroit’s city center for more than an hour.

Someone, nobody seemed exactly sure who, had firebombed two of the Center’s towers, trapping hundreds of workers inside. The arsonists hadn’t fled when the fire department arrived on scene. Instead, they’d begun sniping at the firemen and rescue workers, forcing them to fall back until a police SWAT team showed up.

But then, in turn, the SWAT team was driven back by a new wave of angry, young black men pouring out of the rundown row houses only a few blocks from the Renaissance Center. Word of the arson and looting attracted many who seemed determined to burn the soaring towers to the ground, along with anyone, black or white, still inside. More police units were fed in to regain control.

For the first few minutes, despite the increasing furor, Detroit’s law enforcement units had seemed to have the upper hand over the rioters. To Calvin’s trained ear, the reports of arrests, disturbances, and requests for ambulances had been rushed and excited but indicated that the officers were still in control.

Then, almost as soon as true darkness began falling, the radio transmissions changed. Now there was real trouble.

Calvin heard someone, a sergeant he knew only by voice, suddenly transmit, “Jesus, Tactical! We’ve got more bad guys swarming us! Too many! We need immediate assistance!”

There were sporadic gunshots audible over the radio now.

“Say again! Shit! Tactical, we’re getting fucking overrun ”

And that was it. Nothing more.

Calvin listened to the static hiss for a moment more before scrambling back inside his patrol cruiser. He reversed away from the barrier he’d been manning and headed east toward the Renaissance Center. He considered calling the CP to ask for permission-to leave his post and then scratched the idea. There wasn’t enough time. His buddies on the police line needed him now.

He skidded to a stop at a line of black and yellow traffic barriers blocking off the wide, divided boulevard that ran past the Renaissance Center.

The Center’s landscaped grounds were filled with a tangled mass of people, overturned cars, and burning emergency vehicles. Flickering light from the flames and from spotlights showed him a huge crowd, more than a thousand strong, on the rampage. Shots rang out from time to time, but it was impossible to tell who was firing at whom.

The mob had a small group of police and firemen at bay more than a block away from the Center itself. Officers were loading and firing tear-gas canisters into the crowds, most of whom now seemed intent on rolling and torching a couple of fire trucks.

There were bodies littering the ground behind the police line, some motionless, others writhing in pain. They were being rushed into ambulances as the riot police fell back, giving ground slowly to win time for the medics to load up and escape. It was clear that the police had not only lost control of the Renaissance Center Plaza, they were actually fighting for bare survival.

Calvin abandoned his vehicle and sprinted toward the retreating police line. He was careful to hug the sides of buildings and duck behind cars or any other available cover whenever possible. Right now the mob was an aimless, angry animal, searching for prey. He did not want to draw its attention.

He spotted a figure behind the line issuing orders and hurried over. There was enough light to see that it was Lieutenant Haskins. Blood ran down the lieutenant’s face from a cut on his forehead, and he had one arm hanging limply at his side splinted with a riot baton.

Haskins didn’t bother asking why he’d abandoned his position. Instead, he yelled, “Get on the radio and pull in the rest of the cordon! They’re about all the help we’re going to get!”

That would only give them about ten more officers to reinforce the line. Stunned, Calvin exclaimed, “Isn’t the department going to send anyone else?”

Haskins shook his head, then winced at the motion. “The department’s got other problems besides us. The whole god damned city’s going up tonight!”

Still shocked, Calvin found the nearest intact police car and relayed the lieutenant’s orders. As he headed back, another shot cracked out from the mob. He saw a cop fall, clutching his leg. Another of fleer fired back.

Calvin hoped the man had a clear target.

He ran toward the injured policeman, but two paramedics beat him there. They dropped to the ground beside the groaning man, feverishly stripping off his riot gear as they tried to treat his wound.

Calvin knelt close by, putting the riot cop’s helmet, gas mask, and bulletproof vest on as fast as they came off. He snatched up the fallen officer’s baton and clear Plexiglas shield, and took his place in the shrinking police line.

He could see the crowd more clearly now. They were only a hundred yards away close enough to make out individuals. Somehow, though, the rioters all looked the same. Young men in dark clothing ran, shouted, and taunted the police. All were black or Hispanic. Bottles and other missiles flew out of the darkness toward the police line. Most fell short. A few clattered off their upraised shields.

Calvin slid into position and immediately felt a little more secure, although he knew that was illusory. He was part of a disciplined line of trained men, but the chaos they were facing made him feel like an island of sand facing the raging ocean.

He stiffened, readying himself, as a band of screaming young toughs suddenly shoved their way forward out of the crowd. Some were waving baseball bats or tire irons.

THUMMP. A tear-gas canister sailed over his head and landed in the middle of the advancing teens. They scattered.

A ball of flame blossomed skyward in the middle of the plaza. Calvin guessed that was a car’s fuel tank cooking off.

The command came for them to step back, and he backed up in line with the others.

Now Calvin could hear a bullhorn blaring somewhere out in front. Somewhere out in the middle of the mob. He couldn’t hear the words, but he could hear their rhythm and pitch. Did this beast have a brain? The thought frightened him, and only his training steadied him. They stepped back again.

The crowd actually drew away from him and the other riot police, and for a moment he hoped they had grown bored or were more interested in easier prey. Then he saw that they were clustering around the bonfire the burning car. The voice shouting through the bullhorn was still indistinct, but he could hear cheers and answering shouts from the throng.

Suddenly, almost as one, they turned to face the police, and Calvin knew what the man with the bullhorn had been saying. The cops are the enemy. Kill them. Take their weapons. Simple, brutal instructions commands the crowd was ready to obey.

The mass started to move forward, and he fought down a feeling that the whole thing was headed straight at him. He tried to pick out individuals at the edge and saw that while they were eager to shout, they were reluctant to challenge the police line physically. Pushed from behind, though, they did advance, first walking and then running.

Calvin heard more feet slamming onto the pavement behind him, and knew that the line was being extended as every ablebodied officer joined them. Would it be enough? If they were outflanked…

Haskin’s voice bellowed, “Guard!”

He brought his baton up, ready to take the shock and defend himself. The mob seemed as big as the ocean, and the tide was coming in.

“Advance!”

Calvin blinked. The tactical manuals said the best defense was a good offence, but who ever heard of a shoreline advancing to meet the waves? Nevertheless, he took one step in unison with the officers on either side, paused a moment, and then went forward again, falling into the well-drilled rhythm designed to cow an unruly crowd.

More tear-gas canisters landed right in front of them. The yelling people nearest to the grey haze recoiled for a second and then were pushed forward by the vast throng behind them. Some fell, retching, and were swallowed up.

With a heart-stopping, guttural roar, the mob slammed into the advancing police line.

A short, skinny teenager rushed Calvin first, trying to grab his baton. The policeman easily dodged his outstretched hands and brought the baton around in a slashing blow. The boy screamed and ducked back, clutching a broken wrist.

Another man, older and much larger, tried to tear the shield out of Calvin’s grip. Pain shot up his forearm as he slammed the baton down across the attacker’s arm and then again across the man’s head. The rioter went down in a boneless heap.

After that, the struggle disintegrated into a flurry of halfseen, half-felt, and half-remembered blows and counterblows, strike and counter strike. His earlier fears submerged by the primal urge to survive, Calvin fought calmly and effectively. But no matter how many rioters he knocked down or drove off, there was a seemingly endless supply of others still surging forward in an effort to tear him apart.

Twice he heard Haskins pulling the police line back to tighten its sagging formation. He saw another policeman dragged down and grimaced. They were running out of men and maneuvering room.

And still the mob came on.

Calvin felt a bullet whiz past his head and heard the deafening sound of a shot close by in the same moment. His eyes focused on a man in his twenties, heavyset and bald, coldly aiming a pistol at him at point-blank range.

Oh, hell.

The man fired again and Calvin felt his shield take the bullet this time, deflecting it, but the shock of its impact ran up his arm. It felt like his elbow had been hit by a ball peen hammer. He staggered backward.

The gunman fired a third time. This time the round tore through the Plexiglas shield and slammed into his bulletproof vest. At such short range, the 9mm slug had enough velocity to shock and bruise him, but the shield and vest stopped it from doing more damage.

His assailant snarled in frustration, acting as though the policeman had broken the rules by not falling down dead. The man raised his aim, pointing the pistol straight at Calvin’s unprotected face.

No! He didn’t have time to draw his own weapon.

Calvin lunged forward and slammed the point of his baton into the gunman’s sternum. As the man doubled over in agony, he slashed downward, striking him across the back of the neck, just below the skull. That was potentially a killing blow, but the policeman didn’t give a damn. There was only one law operating right now the law of survival.

He looked up, gasping for breath, and realized that he was surrounded by screaming, shouting rioters. His lunge had carried him well out into the midst of the mob.

People swarmed past him, pouring through the sudden gap in the police line. Others dove on top of him, knocking him over as they tried to pull off his helmet or grab his weapons. His shield protected him from many of their blows, but it also trapped one of his arms. Punches and kicks rained down in an unrelenting hail. Something sharp stabbed into his leg. He felt himself being driven down into unconsciousness.

Calvin struggled desperately to get up off the ground. Staying down meant dying.

A baseball bat swung overhand caught his shield and knocked him back down. Someone else stomped on his wrist and grabbed his baton away. The world blurred in a red fog.

Shots rang out suddenly. Calvin felt the pressure on him slacken as his attackers turned away in surprise. Seconds later, another ragged volley cut across the crowd noise. Somebody was firing tear-gas guns a lot of them. A dozen brilliant beams of white light lanced into the plaza, blinding rioters caught staring at them and turning night into artificial day.

Clouds of grey mist billowed up from each gas canister. The mob began coughing, gagging as the tear gas rolled over them. Their shouts changed swiftly in tone from anger and hate to fear.

Calvin heard the growing roar of diesel engines moving closer.

The crowd began backing away, slowly at first, and then faster. More and more of them turned to flee.

Still barely clinging to consciousness, Calvin lifted his head just high enough to see what was going on. Hundreds of soldiers in full battle gear and gas masks were advancing across the wreckage-strewn Renaissance Center Plaza. Armored personnel carriers mounting searchlights trundled behind the troops.

Suddenly, Bob Calvin lay alone. He tried to get up, but his right leg crumpled under him and he landed heavily on the pavement. The ground seemed very cold. He heard someone calling for a stretcher as he surrendered at last to the pain filling every corner of his being.

The ABC News Special Report showed signs of being hurriedly assembled. Half the video aired was live or only minutes old. And none of the news was good.

The Midwest’s phone system was still down, and it would remain down for the foreseeable future. Caught without the ability to communicate, tens of thousands of businesses had been forced to close, idling millions of workers. So far the only beneficiaries of the disaster had been messenger services. Most normal commerce had ground to a halt. The economic losses alone were already estimated in the tens of billions of dollars.

But there were other, far more serious losses. Detroit was not alone. With police and emergency services degraded, every major city in the region had experienced a vicious crime wave. The governors of Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, and Iowa had all mobilised their National Guard units by midafternoon and instituted an immediate nighttime curfew. Hundreds were already dead, and hundreds more were seriously injured in the continuing civil disorder.

Pressed hard for an explanation, company representatives now blamed “an external cause, most likely the deliberate sabotage of the switching network by a highly sophisticated computer virus.”

This claim was immediately backed up by several electronics and computer experts. In the blink of an eye, the phone company went from villain to victim. The news also transformed the ongoing catastrophe from an unavoidable act of God to an act of deliberate, calculated terror.

The final piece of the ABC News Special was an interview with Senator George Roland, one of the few survivors of the National Press Club bombing. Since the attack, Roland had acquired immense standing, and he used every ounce of it in making his points.

“There is no doubt that these terrorists are bent on destroying American society. The government can no longer deny that these attacks are part of a larger plan. Unless the administration acts swiftly, strongly, and positively, our nation may not survive.”

No one disagreed.

With Jim Johnston standing next to her, Maggie Kosinski dialed the boss’s number. Light-headed, almost shaking with fatigue and excitement, she hit the last digit and then looked again at the diskette on her desk. The label read simply

“Alpha Virus.”

An urgent, pleading voice answered on the first ring. “Yes?”

“This is Kosinski in Operations,” she announced. “We’ve got it!”

“Hang on.”

After a short pause, she heard, “This is Taylor.” Midwest Telephone’s CEO sounded almost as tired as she did, almost as tired as they all were. Nobody had gotten much sleep in the past three days.

Kosinski forced herself to speak calmly and distinctly. “We’ve confirmed our initial diagnosis, sir. We were able to track down the virus and its source, and we’ve started a reboot. The whole system will be back on-line in forty-five minutes.”

“Thank God!” Taylor breathed. His voice sharpened. “Where was the damned thing hidden?”

Kosinski prodded the diskette on her desk with a pen. She didn’t even want to touch it with her bare hands. “In one of our printers, sir.”

“What?!”

She explained further. “Some clever bastard hid the virus inside our laser printer ROM chip piggybacked onto its normal code in several pieces. Every time we rebooted, it would reassemble the pieces and reinfect the system from scratch.” She shook her head at the vicious intelligence behind the attack, half in unwilling admiration and half in anger. “We got lucky or we’d probably still be looking for it. One of my techs turned the printer off to clear a paper jam and forgot to turn it back on. While it was off, we rebooted the system again and everything started to come back online. But as soon as we powered up the printer, the virus reappeared.”

“Good God!” Taylor exclaimed. He hesitated. “Have you discovered any more nasty surprises lurking out there?”

“Yes, sir.” Kosinski’s lips thinned. “We found the same type of altered ROM chip in every switching center’s printer. They’d all been serviced in the past two months.”

“Son of a bitch.”

“Yeah.” Kosinski prodded the diskette on her desk again. “This is no virus I’ve ever seen or heard of, sir. I’ve already passed the ROM chip we found here to the FBI and the Computer Emergency Response Team. It’s their baby now.”

Personally, she wished them luck. Virusland was a mysterious and spooky place, full of secrecy and strange personalities. It took a special kind of weirdo, she thought, to write a program that deliberately fouled up a computer.

And someone out there, some terrorist, had gone straight to the top of a very twisted bunch to find this little gem.