by Tom Clancy
” ‘Unbalanced,’ ” Charlie said, trying to get control of himself. “This suggests certain possibilities about you, Mr. Gridley.”
“Don’t it just,” Mark said, sounding distracted for a moment. “Necessary, though. A lot of the Net Force master computers’ routines are running in Digamma … you want to work with those, you have to learn it eventually. My dad started teaching it to me when I was seven. I’m just now really getting the hang of _t.” He interlaced his fingers, cracked his knuckles. “Okay, now watch this.”
He beckoned over the window in which Charlie’s “addresses” were written, and poked the first one with his finger. “Identify,” he said to his program, “and locate.”
They stood there in the bright silence for a moment, and suddenly a string of letters and numbers which meant nothing whatsoever to Charlie strung themselves out in the air in front of him and Mark in a blaze of crimson. Around them, the colors of the penetration program went mostly to blues and greens.
“Good,” Mark said. “That’s the raw Net address. It tells me a little about their security … which frankly, needs to be looked at. These guys must think they’re safe from intrusion.” He smiled slightly. “Well …”
“Can you get in?” Charlie said.
“In? We’re in already.” Mark glanced around him. “At least, we’re in their system. Now we have to crack their security, preferably without them noticing, and go hunting. Look, the information you want, it’d probably be easier for you to identify as images, yeah?”
“That’s the best way for me.”
“Okay. Home system. Go graphic.”
Everything went dark, then filled with light again, and the two of them found themselves looking at a wall. It reared up as high above them as they could see, and ran off to what seemed infinity in both directions. It appeared to be made of red brick, and some wit had posted up on it a neatly lettered sign that said: FIREWALL.
“Everybody’s a comedian,” Mark said, walking alongside the wall for a little way, examining it. “Let’s see what we’ve got here. C3? Caldera? Levolor?” He patted the wall, felt one of the bricks. “Nope, it’s Fomalhaut. One of the lousiest programming languages of the decade. Why in the world did they use Fomalhaut for this?”
Charlie stood watching Mark kick the wall once or twice in an experimental kind of way. “What’s the matter with the language?”
“Terrible structure,” Mark muttered. “You have to really like doing things over and over to use Fomalhaut. Look at this-” He glanced up and down the length of the wall. “In any normal virtual programming language, a wall like this would be set up with one command that you then told to repeat itself however many times, and then you would tell it where to stop, or to seal itself up. In Fomalhaut, you have to do every single command separately.” Mark shook his head. “Each of these”-he kicked another brick-“represents a separate command. Really dumb.”
“So why would they have used it, then?”
Mark shrugged. “Oh, some people might think it was better for security. More trouble, they would think, to have to disassemble a ‘wall’ brick by brick, you couldn’t just subvert one. But plainly it didn’t occur to them that sooner or later a more sophisticated way to deal with this protocol might come along. Or that someone else who knew the language really, really well-”
Mark reached out behind him, plucked something out of the empty air. It was a crowbar.
Charlie had to laugh. ” ‘More sophisticated’?”
“Yeah, don’t laugh. You’ll see. Meanwhile-” Mark stood there and touched one brick. It lit from within, revealing what looked like a little churning square of boiling alphabet soup, all letters and numbers. “Right.” Mark said. “And this one-” He touched another brick, farther down, the wall. It revealed another oblong full of soup. “Uhhuh. One more-”
The third brick revealed the same contents. Mark stood there for a moment. “Someone here,” he said with satisfaction, “got real sloppy. These aren’t all separately written instructions. They’ve been cloned from a single one. Jeez, a lazy Fomalhaut programmer. What’s the point? Why use an obsessive-compulsive language, and then not obsess?”
Mark shouldered the crowbar and grinned at Charlie. “Never mind,” he said, “we’re in business.”
He put two fingers in his mouth and whistled.
From some distance away came a tiny sound, like a faraway screech of surprise. “Aha,” Mark said, cheerful. “Come on, that’s what we’re after.”
He started to jog to their left, down the wall. Charlie followed him. “Look,” he said, “what are our chances of getting caught in here?”
Mark grinned as he trotted along. “No better than one in a hundred at the moment.” Charlie instantly broke out in a sweat. He preferred much longer odds. “I mean, think about it, Charlie! Programmers are a spoiled bunch these days. They work what they used to call ‘banker’s hours.’
Nobody in the coroner’s office in some little county building in Maine is going to be hanging over their terminal at eight-thirty in the evening waiting to see if someone breaks in or not! If the system is even housed in the same building, which isn’t necessarily the case. And their automatic system security is junk. I know, because I broke through it five minutes ago. I pretended to be its system administrator, and my penetration manager gave it a nice set of circular instructions to play with, based on its own check cycle … so right now it’s doing the machine equivalent of staring in the mirror and telling itself that everything is fine. And here we are.”
Mark stopped and pointed at a brick high up in the wall. “See that?”
That particular “brick” was glowing red hot. “Kind of hard to miss,” Charlie said.
“That’s the instruction all these other ones were cloned from. Now then.” Mark started to walk up the air as if there were stairs there. With the crowbar he pried out that particular brick and caught it in one hand as it fell.
The wall started to crumble. Charlie jumped back, out of reflex, but as the wall tottered outward toward him, the bricks began to fade: By the time they reached the “floor,” they were vanishing like fog in sunlight. A moment later he and Mark were looking out across a vast hall full of thousands of beige filing cabinets.
“Wow, imaginative,” Mark said, sounding unusually dry. “Somebody in the data-processing department here really gets off on their work.”
He walked down out of the air again, tossing the single glowing red brick in his hand as he did. “We’ll hang on to this,” Mark said. “We’ll want it to put things back the way we found them when we’re ready to go.” He shoved the brick into the air between them. It vanished.
Charlie started walking among the lines and lines of filing cabinets. “This is the visual paradigm the people who work here have been using?” he said.
“The default, yeah,” Mark said. “It may make it easier for you to search. The clerking staff’ll probably have left some markers for themselves, to make it easier to find things. But boy, oh, boy,” and Mark chuckled, “at times like this, do I ever get seized with the desire to redecorate.”
“Please don’t,” Charlie said, walking among the filing cabinets and looking at the little cards inserted in their drawer-fronts.
“Oh, come on, Charlie. Let me just leave a potted palm in here somewhere. I’ll even tie a big red ribbon around it.”
“No!” 2004 2005, read one cabinet: 2005-2006 … Charlie walked along the line of cabinets, looking for 2024.
“Just kidding,” Mark said. Charlie wondered about that. “Aha,” he said, and grinned at himself. Mark’s turn of phrase was catching. “2020 . .”
The 2024 cabinet was the fourth one down. Charlie pulled its top drawer open, and suddenly there were five other cabinets standing next to that one. “January through May,” he said.
He headed for May, opened that cabinet up, and started riffling through the files there. Delano, he thought. Richard Delano. May third …
The file was th
ere, a plain manila folder. Charlie pulled it out.
Instantly the air around him and Mark was full of windows. One of them showed a file structure “tree,” full of files all of whose names began with DELANO. Another few windows showed pictures: crime scene shots, pictures of someone’s house, probably Delano’ s. Then one more window said STATE PATHOLOGIST’S REPORT.
“Yes, indeed,” Charlie said softly. “Mark, can I copy these into your workspace?”
“You can copy them right back to yours, if you like. I’ve still got a link open.”
“Both, then. I want to make sure the data’s safe.” “Consider it done.” A big bright gold hoop appeared in the air and set itself on fire. “Chuck anything you want copied through that: It’ll make copies both places and then refile itself.”
“Good.” Charlie glanced at the ring, amused, then reached out and, with one finger, poked the window with the pathologist’s report. It opened out into a series of still more windows, with screenfuls and screenfuls of text, and in one window, images of the body at autopsy. Charlie looked at this somberly, then turned his attention to the text.
“He looked real young,” Mark said, from behind him, softly.
“Yeah. This was the sixteen-year-old,” Charlie said as he read hurriedly down through the report, skimming it, and finding the words he had suspected he would find: Strangulation. Self-inflicted-
“Right,” Charlie said, and folded the window down small, and chucked it through the ring. The ring flared. The window vanished. Charlie gathered all the information together again which had come out of the original file, and threw it, too, through the ring. Then he closed the file drawer.
“That it?” Mark said. “You sure you don’t need anything else?”
“Not from here. But we’ve got five other places to hit, still.”
“Gonna be a short, dull night for me at this rate,” Mark said, sounding disappointed. “Never mind.” They walked away from the filing cabinets again to the point where they had first entered, and Mark plucked that red brick out of its hiding place in the air. “Be fruitful and multiply,” he told it, and dropped it on the floor.
A moment later there were two of it, and then four, and eight, sixteen, thirty-two, sixty-four … Within about thirty seconds the wall had completely rebuilt itself, even to the sign that read FIREWALL. “Mark-” Charlie said warningly, for the sign was now upside down.
“Oh, come on, Charlie! I was real good. I didn’t even leave them a potted palm.”
“Mark!”
“Oh, all right. Spoilsport.”
The sign righted itself. A moment later they were back in Mark’s space, where a stack of what appeared to be manila files was floating in midair, and Mark was referencing the “list” window again. “Next-”
The lines and columns and pillars of light dived and swooped around them again, and Charlie closed his eyes after a few seconds of it, since his stomach really did not like this. “Here we are,” Mark said, and they found themselves in another walled area, but this time they were inside the painted concrete walls, not outside them.
“Hmm,” Mark said. Charlie gulped, wanting to say a lot more than that, for the walls were moving in on them, like something out of an ancient 2-D horror flick … except that these walls were in 3-D, and, as they watched, were slowly sprouting long, cruel, inward-pointing iron spikes.
“Interesting,” Mark said. “Those would pin us here, and ID us to the local system administrator, and lock a trace onto my system and any other one affiliated with this search. If we let them.” He snapped his fingers, and the pale tracery of his own Digamma routines became more visible around the two of them inside the rapidly shrinking space.
“And we’re not gonna let them do that,” Charlie said, sweating harder, “are we … ?”
“Not a chance. Hush up now, I have to think.”
Charlie started to sweat harder and closed his eyes again as once more the Digamma framework around them did its zoom-and-swoosh roller-coaster number.
“They’re a little paranoid here,” Mark said matter-of-factly. “I wonder if they’ve had a break-in recently?”
Charlie opened his eyes again. The disorienting slide and swoop of colors had stopped, and Mark was holding in his arms what appeared to be a wide pipe of pure glowing yellow, as thick as the trunk of a tree. He was wedging one end of it against the inward-pushing wall on the left-hand side, and as Charlie watched Mark picked up the other end of the branchless yellow “tree trunk” and began to pull on it. It lengthened as he pulled, until it came right up against the wall on the right-hand side. The walls pushed against it, pushed. The “tree trunk” glowed briefly brighter, bent a little-then braced itself still, bending no more.
“There,” Mark said. He watched the walls keep trying to push, but they were making no headway. “Automatic system,” Mark said. “No one’s watching it-banker’s hours, as I said. Or else someone’s gone for coffee.”
“Any way to tell which?” Charlie said, looking around them for a way out.
“Not without taking a chance that they might notice,” said Mark. “Come on, let’s find you what you need-” He walked over to the wall, brushed his fingers along it in the same testing sort of gesture he had used with the last one. “Huh,” he said. “Thought so. Just Caldera, this time. Here, watch this.”
Charlie went over to him, looked over his shoulder. “See this?” Mark said, and pushed his hand right into the “wall.” “You can manipulate the programming directly without separate instructions, if you know where to grab each line. And you can exploit the holographic nature of the program-”
Charlie didn’t know whether or not he should be relieved that he didn’t have the slightest idea what Mark was talking about. A second after Mark thrust his hand into the wall, he pulled it out again, holding a doorknob. “And as I thought,” Mark said, “the programmer left herself a nice tidy way back into the main programming space for when she was finished testing this.” A door outlined itself in the wall: Mark used the doorknob to open it and stepped through. “Mind your step, here-”
” ‘She’?” Charlie asked, stepping through after him. They appeared to be in a dimly lit office that stretched for miles in all directions. “You sure about that?”
“Ninety percent,” Mark said, walking through the office and looking around him. “Just something about the feel of it Uh-oh. Somebody’s in here. No, don’t panic!”
Charlie froze and looked around him. Far off to his right, at what looked like about a mile’s distance across this absurdly huge spread of carpeting and desks and office furniture and dividers, he could see a light shining over a desk.
“Just somebody looking at a file, somewhere else in the system,” Mark said. “Possibly halfway across the city from where this facility is based. The odds of whoever it is being able to see us, or even being authorized to see us, are minuscule. Don’t sweat it, just come on and let’s see what the paradigm is-”
It took them only a few minutes to find it. Some of the desks had old-fashioned computer terminals on them, and Mark stopped by one of these and poked at it, a rounded eggy-looking thing done partly in a rather retro turquoise, partly in a translucent white plastic. “Somebody here has a sense of humor,” Mark said, “or nice taste in antiques.” He bent over to tap at the keyboard. “What’s your victim’s name in Colorado?”
“Velasquez.”
“First initial?”
“J. Jaime.”
“Which year?”
“Twenty-three.”
“Right-” A moment later a large pile of square virtual datascrips appeared on the desk in front of them, and Mark glanced at them. “Copy again?”
Charlie looked through them. Each scrip, as he picked it up, showed him on its surface what it contained. AUTOPSY SYNOPSIS, Charlie read, RAW DATA, ORGAN ANALYSES, TOXICOLOGY-“Yeah.”
Mark tapped at the console again. The datascrips vanished out of Charlie’s hands. “Done. Let’s beat it and hit the next
one-”
They got out of there, Mark carefully removing his “tree trunk” and allowing the squashing walls to start coming together again, while at the same time wiping out any evidence of his and Charlie’s intrusion. Then they hit the third facility, the coroner’s office in Arlington. It had rather more effective security than the first two, so that Mark had to spend five minutes or so breaking in and making sure they wouldn’t leave any trace of their entry behind, but the result was the same as in Bangor and Fort Collins.
The fourth Net-based system, at the coroner’s offices in DeKalb County just east of Atlanta, to the astonishment of both of them had no security precautions installed around it whatsoever. Mark was practically dancing with frustration at such carelessness while Charlie raided it for the information he needed, and it was with the greatest of difficulty that Charlie kept Mark from building a security barrier around that system and then locking the DeKalb County staff out of it. Nothing Charlie could do, however, could keep Mark from putting up a big virtual billboard that said KILROY WAS HERE in front of the space.
“Somebody I should know?” Charlie said as he made sure the files were copied back to his space.
“Probably not,” Mark said, disgusted, “and probably they won’t, either.”
“There won’t be any trace that it was you doing that, will there?” Charlie said, nervous.
“Are you kidding? Of course not. You think I want my dad to-” Mark gave Charlie a look. “Never mind. Come on. Two more-”
They next hit the data storage system for the coroner’s office in Queens. The City of New York system was surrounded with a set of nested security barriers so arcane that they actually kept Mark and Charlie away from the target data for a whole hour. Mark spent the whole time sweating and swearing-first in English, in language that Charlie wouldn’t have thought Mark knew, and then in Thai, withgreat vehemence-as he dealt with the barriers, which in this implementation looked like layer after layer of barbed-wire fences, with long stretches of bare ground between them. But finally they fell, and the two of them found themselves making their way into a virtual domain that exactly duplicated the coroner’s clerk’s offices, right down to the potted plants and the baby pictures. The records Charlie found there were more complete than they had been anywhere else they had raided, and Charlie began thinking that they could have saved time by just raiding this one. But how would we have known? And I need all that other data to make sure the case is watertight… .