The Fool's Run

CHAPTER 13

Computer programming can be as beautiful and complicated as a tree, as compelling as the best painting. Programmers admire each other's code. They talk like rock climbers: that was a very difficult pitch, and look how he did it-with style.A good programmer uses a computer's potential to create worlds where other people will live. Or, in some cases, where they will fight.

The attack on Whitemark began after breakfast on a beautiful August morning. Maggie and I split a bag of bagels and a pot of coffee, chatted and laughed, cleaned up the kitchen, and went to war. The attack lasted precisely four weeks: twenty-eight days to the hour.

The first moves were invisible to Whitemark. We infested their system with a virus. A virus is a chunk of computer code, compact and deadly. Once a virus has infected a computer's system software, it makes copies of itself and inserts them into the working programs being run through the system. The working program, in turn, infects other operating systems. Unless the virus is detected, it will eventually infect every program that passes through the system. And those programs will infect every other program they encounter.

Besides replicating itself, the virus usually does damage. Not always. There are Christmas card viruses, for example, that insert graphic Christmas cards in every text file they find. When somebody opens the computer file, the first thing that appears is the Christmas card.

The disease viruses are a different story. They are killer bugs. They erase information, jumble it, destroy expensive, one-of-a-kind custom programs. There are some viruses, more complicated than the straight-out bombs, that may change a system's programming in more subtle ways.

Our first virus was not subtle. It was a bomb, pure and simple. Forty-five days after being inserted in the Whitemark computer system (viruses can count), it would explode. Any Whitemark program containing a virus would be thoroughly and irretrievably jumbled. Nothing would come out of the company's computers but garbage.

"Why forty-five days?" Maggie asked, when I explained the virus to her. We were in the Whitemark computer using the special entry codes I had created for us.

"The Whitemark programmers will eventually catch on to what we're doing. We've got three or four weeks at the most. If their top systems man is busted on the porno charge, we may get a few more days out of the confusion. Anyway, when the trouble starts, they'll do the routine system checks. That will take a couple of days. When nothing works, they'll start sweating. Eventually, they'll figure it out. They'll realize they're under attack, and they'll shut down outside access. There are some ways around that, but only for a day or two. At that point, we'll be fifteen or twenty days out, and they'll call in the FBI, or somebody like that, to look for us. They'll be worried about sabotage.

"Once they get everything shut down, there'll be a couple of weeks of confusion. They'll be paranoid about the system. They'll run all kinds of tests. Then they'll start repairs, bringing in new software. Checking it. That should get us five or six weeks down the road. So then, at six and a half weeks, the bomb explodes. It'll be the finishing touch. They won't recover before the contract deadlines."

She thought about it for a minute, nibbling on her lower lip. "So what's the first move after you get the viruses in? The first thing that will affect them? If we don't hurt them soon, it'll be too late."

"I'll start on that tonight," I said. "Most of their design work is done at individual work stations, but all the stations are tied into the central computer. I can get to them when they're not being used. I'll start by hacking up the math programs. Engineers run a million numbers through their computers. I'll stick in a program that will add or subtract various small percentages on certain calculations. It won't be quite random. Identical calculations will come out the same way every time, so if they check their work, it'll be confirmed. But it'll all be wrong."

She didn't understand. "What's the practical effect?" she asked. "Tell me a practical effect."

"Okay. Say you were designing a screw-in gas cap for your Porsche. There's a male part and a female part. The threading has to be the same on both parts. Say the twist on the male part is altered just slightly-the pitch is changed a few degrees. The cap becomes worthless. You can't look at the plans and tell that it's worthless; you can't tell it's worthless when you're making it. It looks fine right up to the time you try to screw the parts together. Then they don't work. And the whole problem is in a calculation somewhere.

"Or say that you want to design the kind of round gas-cap cover that goes on the outside of some cars, on the fender. Say you make the round metal cover a quarter inch too big in diameter. It won't fit; it's useless. You can't make it fit any more than you can push a nickel through a pop-bottle top. But it looks fine, right up to the moment you try to put it on the car."

She considered it for a moment, staring dead into the eye of an onion bagel.

"That sounds pretty crude," she said finally.

"Those examples are," I agreed. "But if you do analogous things in electronics, it gets more complicated. You can't see which parts are wrong; it can take days to figure out a mistake. Every individual part works, and every part is just as specified, but the system won't work. Anytime you build a complicated electronic machine there are always mistakes, pure accidents. They're nightmares. Sometimes it takes days to find them. You don't know if you're dealing with a basic design flaw, or if there's a bad electrical connection somewhere. If mistakes are generated on a large scale, by design. I don't know of a cure."

She thought that over as she got into the onion bagel. "How do you know that they just won't check the computer and fix it?" she asked as she chewed.

"They will, sooner or later. But probably later. Computers are the water engineers swim in. They don't question the answers they get from computers any more than a fish questions water. They know the computer is correct: the problem must be somewhere else."

That seemed to satisfy her, although she was more thoughtful than pleased. Later in the morning, I injected the first of the viruses into the Whitemark system. When it was done, I wandered into the kitchen and heard her talking on an extension phone, relaying what I'd told her. When she got off the phone, she came in and sat down.

"I was talking to our systems man," she said. "I didn't tell him what we're doing, of course, but I did say that I'd talked to a guy about computer security. He says you're right. But he says the chances of a good enough programmer ever getting into our system are slim and none."

"That's why it could be done."

I was tempted to tell her that Bobby had already been in the Anshiser system, but some things are best left untold. "If I were you, I might have another little chat with him."

"I made a note," she said. She smiled, and the skin crinkled at the corners of her eyes.

While I was working on the attack programs that we'd insert into the Whitemark system, Dace was working on the publicity angle. His first product was a package on the systems director, the pornographer.

"I put it together with words cut out of the Post," he said. He was wearing surgeon's latex gloves and holding the paper by the corners. It was an ugly jumble of clipped-out news type Scotch-taped to a piece of spiral notebook paper.

"The hardest part was getting the words right. Nothing too big, but nothing too small, either. Something just right for a half-bright crackhead." The text was three paragraphs long and explained:

we needed the MONEY from

the Robbery for medicine, so

we Started robbing Houses.

found these Porno magazines

Full of little children, which

was not Cool, which is

a Hundred Times more cruel than

ANYTHING we Ever done.

It specified names, the address, and the day and time of the burglary.

Maybe They HID it BY now.

But If you watch Them you

you catch TheM.

little kids are getting FuCked.

A sample magazine was enclosed, along with the list of subscribers.

"One thing that strikes me as phony is that we're sending it to the right police jurisdiction. A junkie would probably send it to the Washington cops," Dace said as he sealed the envelope. "I don't want to take a chance that the whole thing would get lost in the bureaucracy, so I'm going to send it to the right place, to the chief. Even if they're a little suspicious, they'll check. Especially with the magazine and the subscriber list."

"What do you think they'll do? The cops?" Maggie asked.

"When I was working a police beat years ago, they'd pass it off to the vice squad. The vice cops would go over to the house, see if the door looks like it had been broken in recently. I'm assuming that the break-in wasn't reported. Then they might look in the windows and see if we described the place right. Or knock on the door with some phony excuse, to see if it looks right. If everything jibes, they'll watch the place, see who comes and goes. Maybe have a quiet talk with a neighbor or two. They'll do a computer search and see if these people have ever been involved in a sex thing in the past. If they find anything, they may do a discreet black-bag job themselves, to check the place out. Then, depending on what they find, they'll go to a pet judge and get a search warrant. They won't have a real good case, but it should be enough for a warrant."

"What if they did report the break-in? For insurance?"

Dace shrugged. "In that case, they probably moved the porn out, at least during the investigation. If they did report it, the cops would have corroboration in their own files that the burglary took place. They'll still watch the place. Sooner or later, they'll bust them."

"It better be sooner," Maggie said. "If it happens two months from now, it won't help."

"It's not a sure thing," Dace said. "But I'd be willing to bet it'll happen in a week."

"How'll we know if it happened?"

"We'll give the cops a couple of days to work. Then we tip off the papers and the TV stations that they're about to bust the biggest kiddie-porn ring in the country. It's hyperbole, but the TV people love that kind of thing. A new record for kiddie porn. They'll get in touch with the cops, and that'll goose the cops along. We'll see it on the evening news."

The night after the first attack, Maggie lay on her back in bed, the lights out. The code was still running through my head.

"It's weird," she said, reaching over to pat me on the stomach. "When Rudy and Dillon and I talked about hiring you, I had this picture of somebody climbing a barbwire fence with plastic explosive in his teeth. Instead, we sit in an air-conditioned apartment and eat donuts, and you type on a computer."

"You never carry plastic explosive in your teeth," I said.

"Have you ever seen the Whitemark building?"

"Nope. Should I?"

"I guess not. There's not much to see. Just a big glass cube with a funny pyramid thing for the roof. I thought you might be curious."

"Nah. You can tell more sitting here than you can from looking at the outside of the building."

She shook her head. "That doesn't seem right, somehow. It's like. " She groped for an analogy. "It's like dropping bombs on Vietnamese peasants. You know, you push a button and people die, but you go home to lunch. If you're going to have a war, you should have the courtesy to kill your enemies in person. And maybe suffer a little bit."

"You're rambling," I said.

"I know. I don't even know what I'm trying to say. But it seems. wrong. to be able to attack somebody you've never seen, don't know, and probably won't ever meet."

"You mean I should find the president of Whitemark and personally rip his heart out."

"Oh, bullshit, Kidd. You know what I'm getting at. This seems so. sterile. I mean, it's scary. It's little electronic lights ruining a huge company."

"Welcome to the big city," I said.

"That's an ugly attitude," she said.

"Yeah, but that's the way it is. You wanted this done, and I can do it. We're both consenting adults. It's the new reality. The little electronic lights are more real than that glass building with the pyramid on top."

She shivered.

The letter about the porn merchants went in the mail the first day. Over the next two days, as I jimmied the Whitemark computer system, Dace and Maggie worked and reworked the approaches to the media on the public attack.

Dace suggested that the Whitemark letters to the generals be leaked first, anonymously, to a weekly defense newsletter called From the Turret.

"A lot of people read it, a lot of reporters. Turret's not too scrupulous about what they use or where they get it. If we drop them a note, say we have been unfairly demoted in the company, and send along the letters, they'll use them," he said.

"It doesn't sound public enough," Maggie said with a frown. "I mean, frankly, every company in the defense industry hires retired generals to lobby for them. We do. You put that story in a defense newsletter, there might be a few raised eyebrows, but nothing much will happen."

"Ah. But this isn't hiring a few generals. This involves a quid pro quo. They're saying, 'If our airplane is picked, there'll be jobs in procurement for those who helped us.' That's not recruiting, that's bribery. As soon as Turret publishes, we call the Post, The New York Times, and Knight-Ridder bureau, and so on, and tip them off. Just being in print gives the story cachet. They'll be interested, because it's the kind of thing they expect to find in a newsletter. Then the next day, we send along copies of the letters to the papers' defense specialist writers."

"Think that will break it out?"

"I think so. It won't be the biggest story of the year, but it will be a nice one. The front pages of the Post, probably a good inside spot in the Times."

"After we get that going," Maggie said, "we should get in touch with the business magazines about the problems they're having meeting the Hellwolf schedules. That will have a nasty effect on their stock prices."

Dace and LuEllen usually went out at night, and often spent the night at his apartment. I worked evenings. Maggie talked with Chicago or worked with the other computer terminal, via telephone, with her Chicago office. One night, simultaneously overcome with office fatigue and horniness, we staggered into our bedroom, pulling off clothes, and fell on the bed in a frenzy. Afterward, Maggie showered and dropped into the bed, naked, and was instantly asleep.

The next morning, I woke first, yawned, slid out of bed, and half-opened the narrow Venetian blinds that covered the bedroom window. Light flooded across the bed, illuminating the long valley of her spine and the turn of her hip and shoulders. Her face was turned away, her blond hair spread over the pillow. She was still sleeping soundly. I looked at her a moment, then tiptoed out and got the big pad of parchment paper I use for sketching. When she woke, I'd done a half dozen preliminaries.

"What are you doing?" she said sleepily.

"Drawing."

She was suddenly awake, alarmed. "Let me see those." She crawled across the bed and I showed her the pad. She looked at the drawings, and lay back. "Can't see my face," she said.

"I can always put it in," I joked.

"Just what I need. A nude picture of myself hanging over the bar. What are you going to do with them?"

"Probably do a painting-if I can convince you to lie in the light for a few mornings, so I can get your skin."

"I don't know; I'd feel silly. I'm no model," she said, and seemed genuinely shy.

That afternoon, by chance, I saw an old-fashioned red-white-and-blue-checked comforter in a shop window, and went in and bought it. Dace and LuEllen were gone again the next morning, and I got her to lie on it, nude, face down, her head turned away, the light streaming in over her shoulders and butt. I spent an hour doing color studies before she put a stop to it.

"How much do models get paid?" she asked.

"Depends on how good they are," I said. "Anything between nine and fifteen dollars an hour."

"You owe me fifteen bucks," she said, pulling up her underpants.

"'Fraid not. You're awful. Five bucks at the most. You kept scratching your back, and you'd move around on that checked background. Drove me nuts."

"Awful, huh? So it's not a fallback if I get fired?"

Dace saw the beginnings of the painting that afternoon and whistled.

"Nice ass, huh?" Maggie said.

"Nice painting," he said seriously.

Maggie looked at me as if she had never seen me before.

The changes I sneaked into the Whitemark computers were worked out on editing programs at the apartment. I wrote the code on our machines, tested it, developed the sequence for inserting it at Whitemark, and put it in. I was on-line with Whitemark for only a few minutes-sometimes a matter of seconds.

As the work progressed I drifted into the traditional programming schedule. The programming and debugging were done at night, and I slept late. Once I even ordered out for a pizza with everything, the only official programmer food.

The attack programs were inserted into the Whitemark software during the heavy computer-working hours in the morning, when we'd be less likely to be noticed.

In the afternoons, I'd paint. I'd never worked in Washington, but it was an exceptional place, with its heavy subtropical flora, the water, the varied stone and brick buildings going back two hundred years. The light was almost Italianate, but bluer and clearer. When I went out to paint, often along the Mall, Maggie would come along, bring a book and a blanket, and lie in the sun and read and doze.

Dace and LuEllen were making plans for Mexico. With the burglaries done, LuEllen had almost nothing to do, and spent the days touring Washington. Scouting possible burglary targets, I suspected. Twice she flew back to Duluth, alone, to make arrangements for a longer absence. Dace had decided on the west coast of Mexico, a semi-modern fishing village in Baja with American-owned villas on the hillside. "Just the right combination of ambience and convenience," he said. His first novel would involve Pentagon power politics with a dash of sexual intrigue. "Like it really is."

Maggie and Dace sent the material on the generals off to Turret. Dace, playing the part of a demoted and treacherous executive, called the newsletter to make sure they had gotten the package, and that they understood it. They had, and they did. The television stations were tipped on the pornographers and promised to make inquiries. Dace also spent some time hanging around the Pentagon, talking with reporter friends, listening for rumors about Whitemark. There was nothing at first. Then, slowly, they began to come. Trouble with plans; trouble with production; disputes between lower-level managers over a series of brutal snafus.

On the ninth day of the attack, I found something interesting in the Whitemark system. I had noticed a data-exchange line that ran out of the main computer to a satellite computer elsewhere. I paid no attention to it, until one day I saw an exchange that involved a remote terminal beyond the satellite. That meant that somebody was telephoning the satellite computer, and from there, was getting into the main computer. If I could learn how to access the satellite from the outside, I could avoid the phone lines that went directly into the main computers. For practical purposes, I would be working from inside the Whitemark building. Toward the end of the attack, it might buy me a few more days of work.

Unfortunately, the computers accessed each other with special codes, and I couldn't find the code listings inside the main system. It was all done inside the satellite.

What I could see were incoming codes. Each five-numeral code group was unique-the same one was never used twice. All the codes were handtyped, so they weren't coming off a master list on a disk. Eventually I fed a list of once-used codes to Bobby, explained the problem, and asked if he had an analysis. He called back three hours later.

The code is the 17th Mersenne Prime, 13,395 digits in 2,679 groups of five, starting with 85450. Your code sample starts 875 groups in and continues in sequence. I am sending you the next 500 sequence groups. Enough?

Plenty. How much?

My pleasure. No charge.

Bobby is not a person to bother with unimportant matters, so I never asked him directly how he figured it out. That he did is bizarre beyond words.

Once I had the codes, I got inside the satellite. It turned out to be a small computer in the accounting department. I got its phone number from its files.

On the tenth day of the attack, Maggie flew out to Chicago. She was back two days later.

"How was Anshiser?" I asked.

She sat at a dressing table with her back to me, peering into a dark mirror as she took down her hair.

"Worse," she said tersely. "I hate to look at him. He's losing more weight. His skin looks like crepe paper."

"The doctors still don't know what's wrong?"

"They keep saying stress, but some of them are nervous about the diagnosis. He may go out to the Mayo."

"He should have gone a month ago."

I was lying on the bed in my shorts, all the lights out except the small pink-shaded lamp on the dressing table. The apartment was quiet. Dace was at his apartment, closing it down, and LuEllen was in Duluth.

"How has it been here?" Maggie asked, unscrewing an earring.

"Whitemark will figure it out soon now," I said. "The engineering system is falling apart. Things must be chaotic. The office mail system will stop working tomorrow. That's the main way they route assignments and schedules, so that'll be shot. On Friday the paychecks all come up short."

Maggie dropped a second earring on the table-top and turned on the cushioned bench, so she was facing me. "Turret comes out tomorrow," she said. "I called Dace this morning before I left Chicago. He had solid word that the generals' story would be in it."

"He didn't mention it to me," I said. "I didn't see him today, just the note on the table saying he would be at his place tonight."

She stood up and stepped toward the bed, wearing a brassiere and panties and slip. She pulled the slip over her head and tossed it negligently on a side chair. "You were on the computer, and he didn't want to bother you," she said. "He said you were in a fugue state. Undo me?"

She sat on the edge of the bed; I propped myself up and unsnapped the brassiere, and kissed her between the shoulder blades. She arched her shoulders and pivoted on her butt and lay back on her pillow, her hair spreading out.

"Haven't heard anything about the kiddie porn yet," I said.

"Ah. Dace said something was happening. He attached his video recorder to the TV and set the timer for the news programs. It's running now," she said.

"Jesus, I didn't even see it. I've been out of it."

She rolled on her side facing me and slid her hand down inside my shorts. "Aw, has you been aw wonesome and sulking since mama's been gone?"

I groaned. "God save me from women who talk baby talk to my dick."

"Oh yeah? "she said.

Later that night we were lying in spoons, my arm over her hip, her butt against my stomach. When she had been breathing deep and steady for ten minutes, I got up and padded out of the room and quietly closed the door behind me. I had the computer up a minute later, and I was out on the phone lines, looking around. Sometimes, nothing will stop the code in your head.

The next day was the peak of the programming. I sat on the computer for nine straight hours, working out one piece after another, checking, debugging, rechecking. When I got out of the chair I could barely walk.

"You need a Fuji," Dace said as I hobbled out of the office.

"What's that?"

Fuji 's Water-Gate was a thoroughly westernized Japanese bathhouse not far from the Pentagon-westernized because the patrons wore tank suits and bathed in private groups. The bathing pools were not much bigger than good-sized hot tubs, but the water was infinitely hotter. Dace and Maggie dropped into it, moaned for a few seconds, then relaxed, and watched LuEllen and me test the water.

"C'mon, you'll live," Maggie said. "No guts?" With that, LuEllen dropped in like a stone, went completely under, gasped, and tried to crawl back out. Dace, laughing, grabbed her around the waist and held her squealing until she settled down. "Get your ass in here, Kidd," she said.

The water was hot enough to boil lobsters. I slipped in, an inch at a time, to my hips, supporting my weight with my hands.

"That's the worst way," Dace said snidely. "You get ten minutes of pain instead of ten seconds."

"I'll do it my way," I said.

"You'll boil your balls, is what you'll do," Maggie snorted. LuEllen and Dace looked at her strangely, and she blushed, then all three burst out laughing.

"All right, all right." I took a breath and dropped the rest of the way in, up to my chin. LuEllen, who is as strong as an ox, reached over and pushed my head under. For a moment, I thought my heart had stopped. When it started again, I huddled up next to Maggie until all the nerve endings died and I could straighten out.

"Jesus. How long do we have to stay in here?"

"An hour or so," Maggie said, grinning.

"We'll be dead in an hour."

"Nonsense. In two minutes, you'll feel fine."

She was right. Two minutes later I felt fine. We floated around the pool, talking, not touching, never mentioning Whitemark or the attack. LuEllen had been to the Smithsonian and-Dace laughed-had been looking at the display of locks. Dace, LuEllen said, had been closing down his apartment, and she had been helping. When she cleaned out the front room, she found a sack lunch behind the couch. Dace admitted that it was probably two years old, from a tough time when he was making his own lunch. There was a little plastic container of green grapes, LuEllen said, that had gone past raisinhood and had reached petrification.

Maggie told the other two that when I thought she was asleep, I snuck out of the bedroom and went back to the computer. "I can't compete, I guess."

"Of course you can," Dace said, ogling her thinly concealed breasts.

"Down, boy," said LuEllen.

Maggie threw back her head and laughed and lay back in the water, and she looked like a medieval swan queen come to life. Sometime during the forty-five minutes we spent in the pool, the code stopped running through my head.

The head of the Whitemark systems department, his wife, and twenty-three-year-old son were arrested at seven o'clock the next morning on a variety of pornography charges, all of them felonies. It was midmorning, and I was already on the machine, working, when the phone rang and Maggie answered. She listened for a moment, said, "Great" and "What channel?" and "Goodbye."

"That was Dace," she reported, leaning in the doorway. "He said to look at the 'Morning Break' news on Channel Three. He said the cops picked up our pornographer friends. There was a 'Live Eye' report right from the house."

We went into the living room and backed up the video recorder until we found the "Morning Break" segment, and watched the three people coming out of the house in handcuffs.

"I feel kind of sorry for them," Maggie said. The wife, a weighty, gray-haired matron, was weeping. She tried to cover her face with her hands, but the cameras tracked her right to the car.

"Think about what they were doing," I said. But it wasn't pretty.

After the unhappy family was bundled off in a squad car, the camera cut to a half dozen uniformed cops filing in and out of the garage door, carrying boxes full of magazines. We watched until the end of the segment, and then Maggie called Channel Three.

"Listen," she said when she got the news department, "if you hadn't heard, this man they arrested on the child pornography is a very important executive at Whitemark Aerospace. I work there, and I know. He runs all their computers. I think some of the other guys in that department may be working with him on this porn thing. They're pretty close."

She listened for a minute. "No, I can't. If I told you my name I could get fired. But he's really a bigshot."

She dropped the phone on the hook, and it rang again almost before she had taken her hand away. She listened for a moment, said "Thanks," and hung up. "Dace again," she said. "Turret is out. The generals are on the front. They reprinted the critical letters word for word."

"Ah. We're rolling."

"Yes." She got the phone book and methodically called the rest of the television stations about the tie between the pornographer and Whitemark. Then she started calling the newspapers and wire services, urging them to look at the Turret article.

On day 16, The Wall Street Journal ran an expanded version of the Turret story. The New York Times, the Post, and the Associated Press followed the next day, although the AP story was so hedged against libel that it was hard to tell what was happening.

The Post is not nearly as good a paper as the Times, but it can bleed a story like an eighteenth-century barber-surgeon squeezing every exquisite moment of agony out of a public death. After reporting the generals' relationship with Whitemark, it followed the next day with a complicated explanation by Whitemark. The day after that, there was an even more complicated explanation from the generals, paired with a Post editorial deploring military corruption. The day after that, there was an analysis, and the day after that, more of the letters-Dace had saved a few to use as fresheners after the story started to age. Dace also called the Post metro desk and reminded them of the pornographers' arrest. He hinted that the release of letters was revenge taken by somebody in the computer department on the company that was currently blackguarding their former systems director. That produced a masterpiece of analysis that ran on day 23.

In the meantime, the paychecks failed on day 18, and Maggie planted rumors that swept through Wall Street on the following Monday, containing the killer phrase, "inadequate cash flow." Whitemark stock, which had drifted higher during the year, on favorable rumors about the Hellwolf, plummeted from seventy-one to fifty-nine on Monday, rebounded to sixty on Tuesday, and dropped to fifty-four on Wednesday.

"Is that good enough?" I asked.

She snorted. "Anytime you take twenty-five percent of value off your target in two days, you're doing okay," she said.

"You've done this before?"

She had one computer hooked into a market bank, and she looked up from the numbers and smiled. "Not exactly like this. But we've taken down a few in our time."

On day 21, Dace overheard a rumor about a fistfight at Whitemark. He chased it, and over a couple of drinks an old friend told him that an engineer had attacked a computer tech on the production floor. Another computer tech jumped in, and a couple other engineers tried to break it up and wound up in the fight themselves.

"Something weird is happening out there," Dace's friend told him. "The security guys hauled everybody down to the lounge area to cool them off. One of the computer techs told one of these security guys that the computers were possessed."

"Possessed?"

"Yeah. You know, by the Devil."

All through the attack, when I was alone, I looked at tarot spreads. I did two dozen spreads on day 22. The Emperor, the Empress, the Wheel, the Moon, the Hanged Man. The Fool. I worried it, I assigned identities and reassigned them. I went to bed dreaming of Anshiser and the Hermit.

On day 23, Maggie had a long talk with Dillon. LuEllen and Dace and I were in the kitchen drinking coffee when she got off the line.

"Dillon's freaked out," she said. "Whitemark is shaking right down to the roots. They're paralyzed, their String copy is failing, they're running into new problems with Hellwolf, Dillon said they're completely out of control. He sounded scared. He said we're making history. He said this was like Pearl Harbor, but nobody recognizes it except us."

"So it's working," said LuEllen.

"Look what happened to the Japs," Dace said.

"How's Anshiser?" I asked.

Maggie shook her head. "Dillon says he's about the same. He's not losing much, but he's not gaining, either."

"So?"

"So we just go on."

At one o'clock on the morning of day 24, a few hours after Maggie talked with Dillon, the phone rang. I picked it up and got a 2400-baud carrier tone. I punched the modem up, and there was a quick squirt of data and the line shut down.

Something happens with Whitemark phone lines. Cutouts. Watching incoming calls at Whitemark, set to trace. From now on call me at special line number only. Call now.

I dialed a special number Bobby had arranged that couldn't be traced out to him. The techniques were unremarkable, he said, but if a trace were made, it would end at an Afghanistan banana stand, which he'd found while paging through a Kabul phone directory in the Kremlin.

When he came up this time, there was no What?

Tried to trace the tracers. Not go to FBI, go to NSA. Scary shit. Recommend stay off wires, use back door only.

Okay. Recommend that you change your main number, leave me only special line.

Will do now.

Need more money?

You got more?

Sure. Will send $10K

'Bye.

Frankly, what I did in Vietnam-it sounds silly now, when I think about it-was run up and down the Ho Chi Minh trail and bug VC telephone lines. Most people don't think about the VC having phone lines and operators and all that, but they did, of course. I'd find a good place, tap into a line, lead it out to a battery-operated radio disguised to look like a lump of mud or a polly-wog or whatever the backroom boys at the CIA thought was good that month, and sneak away. For the next couple of weeks, we'd listen to their phone calls, which, I was told, went mostly like this: "Hey Vang, you see the knockers on that PFC came down with that load of bike tires yesterday? Honest to Ho, I wanted to crawl right in between them and play motorboat, you know what I mean?"

In the course of gathering this intelligence, I met dozens of people from the CIA. Most of them were okay, a few were stone killers, and one or two were terminally stupid. I met only two guys from the National Security Agency. Both were frighteningly smart. Somewhere at the back of my head, I tucked away a personal memo that said, "If you get your ass out of this, don't fuck with the NSA."

After Bobby's warning, I began entering the Whitemark computer through the satellite, the computer that used the codes from the Mersenne Prime. It was an old machine, a minicomputer with its own phone lines. It wasn't used much, but it did have that direct line into the main system. I would call into the satellite, and from there, plug into the main system. If the NSA was watching only the incoming phone lines for the main computer, I could still get in without being noticed. If my presence in the main machine was detected, it would seem that I was working from inside the system itself.

On the morning of day 26, I put in several minor bombs calculated to alter some critical bits of software in a way that would not be immediately detectable, but which would thoroughly screw selected work output.

On day 27, on the same day the Justice Department announced a special task force to investigate the Whitemark relationship with Defense Department officials, I changed the code that did Whitemark's floating-point mathematics. The change would be virtually undetectable, and the resulting design problems would be almost impossible to pinpoint.

At one o'clock on the morning of day 28, as I was working on a couple of final items, Bobby called again.

More phone changes. Believe monitoring entire exchange for data transmissions. Recommend shutdown.

Can I get in one last time?

There was a pause, and then:

If you call special number, can piggyback on me. I call Whitemark, when get in, you put in code, I watch lines. One time only.

Okay.

Tomorrow 10 a.m. your time.

LuEllen was back the next morning, and she and Dace came in with Maggie to watch over my shoulder as we put the last program in. Or tried to.

"Is there any possibility that they could trace us here?" LuEllen asked.

"I don't think so. But with the NSA, you can't be sure. If they do, Bobby will know. We'll get out."

LuEllen looked around the room. "What about fingerprints and everything? We're all over this place."

"If they're good enough to trace us through Bobby's intercepts, we're cooked," I admitted. "All we can do is run for it and hope Anshiser's interference will pay off. Even if they pick up prints, we'd have a day or two. You guys can get out to Mexico, Maggie can get back to Chicago, and I'll take off in my car."

"Shit. That doesn't sound so good," LuEllen said.

"What's the risk, what's the benefit?" Maggie asked.

"I've got a nice finishing touch to put in. And to tell you the truth, I think Bobby's at least as good with phones as anybody at NSA. Besides, they're not expecting him. They don't know we can see the traces coming out."

She thought about it for a minute, pulling at her lip. "Let's do it," she said.

You on line with code?

Yes. 9-second squirt.

Be ready.

Bobby dialed us into Whitemark through the satellite. When it came up, I punched it in, and our modem started transmitting. Two seconds into it, the transmission shut down as though cut with an ax.

"Holy shit," I muttered.

"What?" LuEllen said anxiously.

"Bobby shut us down. I hope."

"You hope?"

"Yeah. I hope it was Bobby."

A second later the phone rang, and we all looked at it like it was a cobra. After a couple of rings, I picked it up and heard the familiar carrier tone. I turned on the modem again.

Those suckers fast. They on line, followed me at least to Rome. Maybe all the way to banana stand.

You okay? We okay?

Yes. But you must shut down now. No more entries or they get us.

Yes. Will call later, still special line.

'Bye.

"What's the special number?" Maggie asked.

"It's a cutout. I don't know the details, but it signals him that I'm trying to reach him. He's changed the main number, the one I used to have, and I don't have it anymore. We don't know exactly what NSA might do if they caught us, but just in case. I mean, if they use chemicals, it's better if I don't know how to get him. If they get the special number out of me, and try to use it, he'll see the trace and get out."

"Good luck on that," LuEllen said.

We all sat and looked at the monitor for a moment. There was nothing on it.

"That's it," I said, feeling suddenly tired. "We're all done."

"Jesus," said Dace.

I looked over at Maggie. "Satisfied?"

"I'm going in to Chicago," she said. "Dillon will be doing a final analysis."

"We'll shut down here. Are you coming back, or should we come there?"

"You wait here. There might be something else Dillon thinks we should do-I don't know what. But maybe something. I'll bring the rest of the money."

She looked pinched, taut. If the job wasn't done now, it would never be done.

Dillon would know.