The Ganymede Project
Page 21
An empty soup can toppled from a garbage heap, jostled by Chisholm’s foot. It skidded on the ground and rolled to a stop near Yuri.
Chisholm froze.Shit , he thought.
Yuri’s flashlight beamed in his face. Like a skittish alley cat, he took off, running.
* * *
Ben and his nephew ran along trails near the mountain. Eventually, they came to a level place near a rocky outcrop. Ben stopped, opened the pouch and arranged materials on a rock.
“What will happen to the kethawns?” the boy asked.
“The gods will come. They’ll smoke the cigarettes. While they’re enjoying themselves, they’ll say, ‘The people have kept their promise, now we must keep ours.’“
“Uncle?”
“What?”
“Here they come!”
From their viewpoint in the mountainous foothills, they saw a shining light glide effortlessly across the valley. It skimmed the ground. It ascended the slopes toward their position. A blue beam dropped from the craft like a searchlight.
“Run!” Nightwalker yelled.
The two ran down the hill. Nightwalker stumbled. He seemed to fall down the mountain in slow motion, illuminated by the pale blue beam.
* * *
Vanished! Yuri thought, puffing hard, looking down streets alive with automobiles and pedestrians.I know your face. But what’s the connection ?
35. MESSAGES
1 May 1994
Deke opened his electronic mailbox. It was full, as usual. There were messages from Sysop, probably requesting that he archive files in order to free up disk space. There was a message from his girl friend, Alice Landon, an employee at Los Alamos National Laboratories (LANL). It read:
Deke,
Arrived yesterday in Honolulu. What a place! I think I could stay forever in Paradise.
Eat your heart out!
Love
Alice
He sighed. Ah, yes, Paradise. And he was still in Purgatory. He tried not to think about it. He looked at more mail.
There were “junk mail” announcements about various seminars and symposia, with titles that includededge orpower orhigh . They typically involved cameo roles by high government officials. Mere mortals could hobnob with them for only $800 a shot.
He opened a long-awaited message from “Cyclops.” It read:
Deke,
Here’s something that came in from the Computer UFO Network in Seattle, Washington. You need to put it in the database. Definite evidence of a cover up.
Enjoy.
Regards,
“Cyclops”
The lengthy attached text appeared to be a classified message from the Air Force Office of Special Investigation, AFOSI, concerning authentication of a UFO incident. He carefully filed it.Good material for the newsletter , he thought.
There was a small little message that caught Deke’s eye—only 2K bytes in size, but titled simply ‘?’. The single, interrogative byte made him curious. Okay, I’ll bite, he thought. He double clicked to open it up. The message read:
Embed me in electronic mail.
Send me to a computer that denies access.
I open doors.
He noticed that the message had an attached binary file—probably a program. He thought of Alice in Wonderland.Eat me/Drink me . Was it really a magic potion? “Okay, okay,” he laughed, “I’m ready for a diversion.”
He knew just the person who should get a message befitting Alice in Wonderland. He sent it to his girlfriend (ALANDO@LANL). He included the note:Hey Alice, look what I got in the mail today! I call it the ‘White Rabbit Program.’ BTW, the sun is warm and shining here in Rachel, ‘Paradise of the American Wild West.’ Eat your heart out ! He signed it,Panting for you ...Deke .
* * *
After ten minutes of dialing into the switchboard, only to get frustrating busy signals, Yuri Sverdlov finally connected with an embassy operator who knew almost nothing, and who did not believe it was her job to mediate communications. When he swore at her in Russian, she responded with an efficient toggle of the line that put him through to Fontanova’s answering machine. He left a message:
“This is Agent Yuri Sverdlov, FBI. I’d like to talk to you about the attack in Crystal City the other day. I have an update on the investigation. Please call me at 202-324-2000.”
It was not a lie, but it was not the complete truth. Yuri really wanted to question her about ties with Jack Dugan.
When your partner is killed, you’re supposed to do something, he thought.Right now, I’ve got nothing—a shadowy face. A foreign diplomat who is not what she seems to be. A hunch .
He looked down at the calendar on his desk, sketching with a pen, doodling dark lines around an appointment scheduled for the next day.
The investigative task force will want answers I don’t have. They’ll want connections I can’t verify. And they’ll want details of Project Inquisition that I can’t discuss.
His doodle changed to a box—the one he felt was closing in around him.
36. WHITE RABBIT TO BLUE ROOK
2 May 1994
Early Monday morning at the International UFO Research Center, Deke checked his electronic mailbox. It was sparse. One message stood out—labeledBlue Rook , sent from LANL. He clicked on it, hoping it was a long letter from Alice. She would be apologetic. She would tell him she longed to see his well-sculpted, flexing pectoral muscles. She would tell him that Hawaii didn’t even begin to compare with her visits to Rachel, Nevada.
Right.
It was a short message with an attached 50 KB binary file. It said,I am a Control Panel program .
Okay, he thought. I’ll put you in the Control Panel folder and see what happens.
Sure enough, the system recognized Blue Rook as a control panel. He double clicked on the program. The disk drive churned. It kept churning.
Whoa! he thought.Virus attack !
He powered off the machine, hoping that the harm to his disk drive was minimal.
* * *
“This is Katrina Fontanova,” she said, talking to Yuri Sverdlov’s answering machine at FBI headquarters. “I am returning your phone call.”
She hung up with a smile, grateful that Sverdlov was not actually in the office. If he called back, it would be extremely difficult to get through the embassy switchboard. She would instruct the operators to delay his calls and waste his time. Eventually, he would give up, just as Kostiya Baskakov from the Ukrainian Embassy had given up.
There is something going on, she thought.Something below the surface. Sverdlov’s presence during the recent attack was too convenient. Maybe he staged it—to get close. Maybe the dead attacker wasn’t actually dead—like in the old Cary Grant movie, ‘North By Northwest .’
The corpse had been very realistic, but America, after all, was the land of Hollywood. The land of illusion.
And Washington, D.C. is a Potemkin village, she thought.
* * *
Rain fell in a quiet pitter-patter against glass windows of an FBI conference room, keeping the rhythm of a random gray sky, setting the tone. Agent Jafuskie from homicide—silver hair, pale face, wire-rimmed glasses—shuffled papers in practiced monotony as Yuri Sverdlov took a seat.
On the other side of the table, Elliott Briggam issued a little sneeze, stifled another, sneezed again, then pulled a booger-infested handkerchief from his breast pocket with a quiet “Damn,” and a nasal honk.
“This is just a routine meeting to take a sworn statement, Agent Sverdlov,” Jafuskie said, pressing the button of a tape recorder. Raise your right hand, please. Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help you God?”
“I do.”
“Did you know the deceased, Jack Ian Dugan?”
“Yes. He was my partner.”
“Did he tell you where he was going or what he was doing on 30 April, 1994?”
“No.”
“Did you know what he was supposed to be doing?”
<
br /> “He had some project work to catch up on.”
“What project?”
“Inquisition. You don’t have a clearance, or a need to know. Anyway, it’s not relevant.”
Jafuski stopped the tape, tightening his lips into a thin line. “I’ll be the judge of what’s relevant. Who can read me in on the project?”
“The Attorney General of the United States.”
Jafuski let out a sigh, removed his glasses and polished them with a handkerchief. “That’s all, Agent Sverdlov. You can go.”
“No, it’s not all,” Yuri said. “Not by a long shot. I believe Jack was killed because he stumbled onto something he wasn’t supposed to know about.”
Jafuski lifted an eyebrow, then started the tape again. “What was that? And what’s your evidence?”
The two men from homicide leaned forward. Even with the rain, Yuri could hear the tick-tick-tick of the recorder, waiting for his response.
“I think it had to do with the Russians, and certain advanced technology. As for evidence... I don’t have any yet.”
“The Russians?” Jafuski asked, smiling, looking at his two colleagues.
Yuri felt his breathing tighten as he read the body language. “You know what’s going on, don’t you? You know why Jack was killed.”
“Yes. We think so. But you’ll be disappointed. There was no conspiracy,” Jafuski said. “It was a gang.”
“How can you say that?” Yuri asked, voice trembling. “What was the motive?”
“Maybe he was on their turf. Maybe he was wearing the wrong color shirt. Maybe there was no motive, other than the sheer joy of killing.”
“What about the writing?”
“Gang writing. Sometimes gang members give each other pet names or military-style ranks.”
“They said the message was written in Jack’s own blood.”
“A gang member could have written it, or could have forced Dugan himself to write it, as a kind of ritual domination over the enemy. Maybe it was the killer’s signature.”
“A simpler explanation is that Jack was telling us who killed him.”
“Who do you think killed him?”
“I told you. The Russians. Katrina Fontanova, one of their top-level operatives, is a major in the Russian Army.”
“So? What was the motive?”
“We had them under intense surveillance.”
“To your knowledge, have members of Boris Yeltsin’s regime ever deliberately killed U.S. personnel—for any reason?”
“Not that I am aware of.”
“I am also not aware of any such occurrence. Your theory would be a bizarre anomaly. It’s irrational.”
“I only see that I need more evidence to nail down the connection.”
“You’re counterintelligence, not homicide. If the only tool you have is a hammer, then every problem looks like a nail. That’s just human nature. Please let us do our job, Sverdlov. And stay off the case.”
* * *
Back in Rachel, Nevada, Deke was puzzled. Someone had gone to a great deal of trouble to create the Blue Rook program. He was determined to find out what it did—and warn the community. A virus attack was like an act of mental rape. Someone or something had invaded his mass memory and tried to screw his system. He was not about to passively roll over.
This was war!
He tried to reconstruct. He had sent theI open doors message, with binary file attached, to his girlfriend at Los Alamos Laboratories. TheBlue Rook message returned from LANL and said it was a Control Program.How did it know he had a Macintosh? he thought. Usually, differences in operating systems represent a natural barrier to viruses.
He booted the system from a diskette in order to avoid re-activating the virus. Then he backed up his entire hard drive, except forBlue Rook . At least he might be able to salvage some of his work.
He isolated his machine from the local area network and re-booted. Sure enough, the hard drive began to churn again. “Let’s see what you do, bastard!” he said.
Thirty minutes later, the churning stopped. His desktop appeared normal. There was now a blue, castle-shaped icon sitting in the hard drive window. He double-clicked. It was like being teleported to LANL as a super-user. Super-users have access to everything in the system. They are all powerful. On the screen was a replica of the LANL system, including all the accounts and files—in only 100 megabytes of space!
He navigated through the system with ease. The system did not ask for passwords or IDs. It just let him roam. This was a cracker’s dream!
He entered Alice’s account. It turned out that Alice was corresponding with someone named Phil, and it was more than technical discussion. He would have to ask her about that when she got back.
Exploring the vast terrain of LANL supercomputer and administrative files was going to take a long time. He decided to eat dinner first.
* * *
“If we were in the Dark Ages, we’d be sitting around, befuddled, wondering how demons possessed this place. We are not in the Dark Ages. Your job is to understand this technology. I want you to be thorough. I want you to be systematic. I want you to purge this system,” Katrina said.
Dark circles ringed her eyes. The investigation was not going well. “I want every hard drive written over with alternating zeros and ones—three times, just to make sure. Then re-create the system prior to infection.”
“We’re going to be out of commission for a long time.”
“Just do it...”
As she spoke, lights in the printer room dimmed, then fluctuated erratically. Katrina and Dmitry looked at each other.
“I just deleted all the foreign code,” Dmitry said. “There shouldn’t be anything—”
“Maybe someone or something is inserting a new program.” They heard a cascade of clicks as power levels went sub-critical and systems turned off. Then they heard the soft “washboard” sounds as the systems re-booted. After two minutes, high speed printers burped paper. They spoke:Ganymede ...Groom ...Ganymede ...Groom ...
* * *
Gallagan paced back and forth, occasionally glancing at Katrina and Dmitry. He was in a dark mood. The gallon of kvass in his belly made it even darker. He wasn’t quite sure what to think or what to say about the extraordinary penetration of the SIGINT Operations Center.
“Are you suggesting,” he said, with an irritated lilt to his voice, “that the American spies are idiot savants?” He paced some more. “On the one hand, they penetrate our systems—right under our very noses. They do it in a way that would be difficult or impossible to find unless they announce themselves. And on the other hand—they announce themselves.”
Katrina and Dmitry both nodded their heads, “Yes.”
“I don’t know which thing I find more incredible—the behavior of this foreign code, or your analysis of it! I mean, does this even make sense to you?”
Katrina and Dmitry shook their heads, “No.”
“An alternate possibility,” Katrina said, “is that they are thumbing their noses at us.”
“That’s stupid.”
“It’s not stupid if they just want to shut us down. In effect, they are showing us they can penetrate the system at any time. Telling us,Here we are, reading your thoughts and ideas .” She slammed her fist on his desk. “They do this with impunity, Nikolai!”
* * *
In the LANL files, Deke found an interesting e-mail thread:
TOP SECRET
11/11/81
Harry,
What we are faced with here is the same type of dilemma Oppenheimer faced in the 40’s and Teller faced in the 50s. Namely, if a weapon CAN be built from this technology, then shouldn’t we be the first ones to do it? After Hiroshima, did Szilard still think he didthe right thing?
Regards,
—Andy
TOP SECRET
The reply:
TOP SECRET
11/11/81
Andy,
There really is no issue here. We a
re scientists. Science is about penetrating Nature’s cloak and exposing her secrets. This technology has fallen into our hands as a result of a fortuitous accident. Science can jump ahead, perhaps 10,000 years. Should we put the artifacts on a shelf and make believe we never saw it?
Regards,
—Harry
TOP SECRET
The answer:
TOP SECRET
11/12/81
Harry,
Maybe we should analyze the depth of the water before we jump off the high dive. That’s all I’m saying.There were people who thought the first A-bomb might create an uncontrollable chain reaction in the atmosphere that could kill all life on the planet. What if they had been right?
—Andy
TOP SECRET
Conclusion:
TOP SECRET
11/12/81
Andy,
I’ll respect your wishes. If you have any doubts about the project, then, quite frankly, I don’t want you on it. I happen to think it’s the greatest thing that’s happened to science in 1000 years, and I want to be part of it. Debrief tomorrow. You’re off the team.
—Harry
TOP SECRET
Appeal:
TOP SECRET
11/12/81
Harry,
I want on the team! I was just talking to myself, walking through the arguments as Oppenheimer must have done. No harm there. You convinced me.