“If they don’t see any sign of tampering,” Bloch interrupted. Shepard could tell she wasn’t going to let anything slide today. He was glad for that, annoying as it was. It always helped to have a second brain working on a problem.
“Who are you talking to, here?” he said, grinning. “Don’t worry, I’ve got it covered. They’ll find no indication we were ever there. And then . . .”
“Then, after a reasonable amount of time,” Bloch cut in, “the satellite will suffer a sudden malfunction, its orbit will decay, and it will burn up in the atmosphere.” She pursed her lips and took a deep breath through her nose.
“To a crisp.” Shepard made a gun with his index finger and thumb, and mimed firing it at the screen that was displaying the data from the satellite. She looked at him with mild disapproval.
If there was one word that described Diana Bloch, it was professional. (Some of the other people at Zeta had other, less kind words for her. But while he agreed that she could be a hard-ass, he couldn’t bring himself to have any real animosity toward his boss.) She was, in some ways, the opposite of Lincoln Shepard: terse and somber where he was boisterous and boyish. But they were both meticulous and precise, perfectionists to a fault. That allowed them to work well together.
It had been a strange path for Shepard, the way to this moment. His hacking career before Zeta had been illustrious—no, meteoric—and he’d had nowhere to go but up. In high school, as a prank, he had defaced the websites of four Internet security firms. Meanwhile, he’d made money on the side expunging infractions from other students’ permanent records. He’d been a member of a group of hackers who found embarrassing secrets of politicians and made them public. While still in college, for the sheer challenge of it, he’d managed to gain access to an enormous cache of secret CIA files. He’d gotten caught for that last one. In a mostly dark interrogation room, in the middle of an intense grilling by a hairy, sweaty, unfriendly investigator, Diana Bloch appeared to him in her impeccable outfit with her eyes of cold steel. She had laid out the choice before him: he could go to federal prison for ten years and get slapped with a lifetime ban on using a networked computer. Or he could come work for her.
The decision had not been difficult.
The truth was, as Shep had to admit to himself, he was an overgrown kid. It was a by-product of a cushy upbringing and an environment—hacker culture—where arrested development was something approaching the norm. He would regularly stay up days at a time, put off work, drink nothing but highly caffeinated drinks, and eat nothing but junk food. Bloch’s seriousness and authoritarianism, pain in the ass as it might be, supplemented what discipline he lacked. At Zeta, he worked harder and faster than he had ever worked before.
The job also resonated with him on a deeper level. The group of hackers he ran with had this idea of creating mayhem for a good cause: taking down the websites of governments and financial institutions as a form of protest against injustice, and exposing secrets in hacks that, truth be told, were never more than pranks, but which at least held to some ideal of liberty and transparency. However, the futility of those efforts had been getting to him. They had tried to go up against real bad guys once, a Mexican drug cartel. They’d found out the identities of members and even evidence against a corrupt local police chief in a small Mexican city. But once the cartel had gotten wind of what they were doing, his group had received death threats, not only on themselves, but against their families. Then the cartel had vowed to execute innocent people if they continued their campaign. And finally, one of their members had been kidnapped. Realizing that things had gotten too real, that their group didn’t have the muscle to pull off something like this, they’d backed off with their tails between their legs.
But now, Shepard did have the muscle—or at least, Zeta Division did. The tactical team, Conley, and the newest addition, that smartass Morgan. A number of support teams that worked out of God knew where. But Shepard still had his own moments in the sun, even without the help of the brawn. And this was going to be one of them.
“Okay, here we go,” he said, as the numbers on the monitor counted down four . . . three . . . two . . . one . . .
Shepard hit a couple of keys, a loading bar appeared, completed in a few seconds, and then the clock that had been counting down began counting up.
“Okay,” said Shepard, and set his fingers to the keyboard. “I’m connected to the satellite.” A number of lines of code appeared successively, a list with “OK” appearing successively at the end of each line. “The encryption codes check out. We’re all set here. Running the diagnostics now . . .” He trailed off as he typed. A window popped up, and began to list each item of the diagnostic test he had hacked together himself. Everything seemed to run as expected, until—
“Uh-oh.”
“What is it, Shepard?” asked Bloch, hunching over the back of his chair and staring at the screen.
“Something’s not right,” he said. “It’s not the same.”
“What is it?” she insisted.
“The programming on the satellite isn’t the same as the version of the software I was working with. It’s different.” He called up the specifics on the diagnostic report and scanned the lines of code, with the differences highlighted in red.
“What does that mean?” asked Bloch. “How different is it?”
“Key aspects of the program aren’t what I expected them to be. Big things. I expected they’d tweak it, but they have a whole new layer of security and apparently an overhaul of the—”
“I don’t need a lesson, Shepard. What does it mean for the mission? Are you still going to be able to bring this bird down?”
He sighed hesitantly. “I can try. I’ll have to modify the patch I was going to install, and work manually. It’s going to be tight, and risky, but it’s doable. There’s only one caveat. If I do this workaround and fail, they’ll know we were in there, and they’ll be able to trace it back. They won’t have any way of knowing it’s us, but odds are they’ll know it came from the U.S. I can go forward with this, but I need your say-so.”
Bloch stood up straight and crossed her arms. She frowned, deep in thought.
“Boss, I need an answer now,” he said anxiously.
There was the briefest pause in which her face was filled with doubt, but then her expression turned into hard resolve. She said, “Do it.”
He nodded grimly, fingers back on the keyboard. “We’re pushing the boundary of ‘on the fly’ here, I hope you know, but here we go. . . .” He hunched over as he typed. “Decompiling. This isn’t going to be pretty. Actually, it’ll be a damn mess. But at this moment, you should be glad you sprung for the expensive equipment.”
“I hope your complaining isn’t detracting from your focus on the task at hand.”
“What I’m doing is strictly productive bitching, I promise,” he said, without looking up.
He bent down and got to work. Bloch gripped his chair and hunched in so close he could feel her breath on his ear. He knew she understood precisely nothing of what was happening on the screen. But still, she did not move. He couldn’t say he didn’t understand the impulse not to look away.
Decompiling, the first process he was running, was a basic hacking procedure that translated code—essentially, the instructions that tell computers what to do—from the utterly undecipherable computer language of ones and zeroes into programming language that people could manipulate and rewrite. The problem was that original code would always have meaningfully named variables and labels, which would have made understanding it a relatively—the key word being relatively—simple process. Decompiling couldn’t rescue any of those, because they didn’t get translated into computer language. This meant that he was going to have to figure out on his own what all the moving parts did, purely from the structure of the program. And even though he had analyzed these programs at length, and knew what each subroutine was meant to do, it would still take a genius to do it in twenty minutes. Luckily, L
incoln Shepard thought to himself, we have one.
A new window full of text popped up when the decompiling was done. His mind worked at a higher level as he scanned the code newly produced by the decompiler. Things fell into place in his head, moving parts coalescing slowly to form a picture of the whole. With increasing clarity, he saw it. He saw how it worked, and how he was going to make it work for him. He glanced at the clock. Just about six minutes to go. He went to work, applying a scalpel to the code, opening up loopholes in security subroutines, and slowly building the outline of his backdoor. Just a few more lines, and—
“Oh damn,” he said.
“What?”
“Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit.” He typed furiously, looking back and forth between the monitors. He had gotten it wrong. One misunderstood variable, and it made most of what he had done so far complete junk.
“What the hell is going on? Shepard, answer me.”
“Just let me work.”
Could he fix it? Yes . . . yes! He saw it. The way out, like a whiff of fresh air in a dank cave. He was going to have to make up for lost time. But he would do it. His fingers moved like the wind, and he saw nothing else. Just variables, abstract symbols swimming around, then locking into place as he set them down. The seconds counted down as he worked, sweating. Shepard blocked out everything else, and went into that entirely abstract zone, where he had no body, just a mind manipulating logical elements. His mind was working three steps ahead of his fingers. He glanced up at the clock on the monitor. The threshold was coming to a close. He just needed one final push. And he was done. This would work. Now it was just a matter of running the compiler....
“Shepard, we’re over the twenty-minute mark,” she said. He looked at the clock, which was now showing 20:13.
“I’m compiling!” The program ran shockingly fast on the Zeta system—but not fast enough.
“Shepard, you need to disconnect!”
“It’s almost done! Uploading . . .”
“We need to disconnect now!”
“Just . . . one . . . more . . . There!” One more hit of the Enter key, and the timer reset. The satellite, to the Chinese, was up and running again, as normal. Everything had been set right back where it had been left, everything but one imperceptible change. And they would be none the wiser that anything had happened until the satellite went down, and then they’d never be able to trace it.
“Shepard. What happened?” asked Bloch.
“I am a goddamn genius, that’s what happened.”
“Did you set the satellite to self-destruct?”
“I did you one better.” He paused for effect. “I built a backdoor. A way in, whenever we want. And that’s not all, there’s more,” he said, in his best imitation of an infomercial. Bloch did not look amused, but he didn’t care. He brought up a fresh screen, filled with varying numbers and graphs—data being beamed down from the satellite. “See? We have full access. Everything they see, we’ll see. Whatever they can order the satellite to do, we can too.”
“And what’s the chance they’ll catch us at it?”
“The way I rigged it? None. I built it into the brick and mortar of the operating system. Like secret passageways in a castle. They can’t detect us there. We can keep downloading information until which time we decide that we want to get rid of it. With just a couple of keystrokes, we can take it over, and then do what we meant to in the first place, and send it to burn up in the atmosphere.”
Bloch sighed, and seemed to relax. She put her hand on his shoulder.
“Well done, Shep. You did good.”
CHAPTER 8
Andover, December 28
Morgan pulled up to his house and eased his 1967 Pontiac GTO into the driveway as gently as he could, crushing the unshoveled snow beneath the tires, fitting it into the snug space in his garage. He got out of the car to the whir of the garage door closing and shivered in the chilly night air. As he swung the car door shut, pain shot up his right shoulder. It had been hurt in his run-in with Novokoff—no long-term damage, but it was sore and raw, and the cold seemed to make the pain well up again. Morgan had yearned for the warmth of his bed, with Jenny by his side, the whole way back. Right now, it seemed like the cure for all his troubles.
As the garage door whirred, he unlocked the door that led into the kitchen and pushed it open. Neika was already waiting on the other side of the door, panting, wagging her tail and nudging his hand with her black snout. Morgan ran his fingers through the soft fur on her head and back. He walked into the kitchen, and his skin tingled from the sudden warmth. The familiar environment enveloped him—the simply ornamented white cupboards with brass pulls that his wife, the home decorator, called “old New England style,” the tan pinstripe wallpaper and copper pots hanging on the wall—the decorative elements that blended with the things that made it home, like the looming shapes of kichen appliances, the stained and warped cast iron skillet that had once belonged to Jenny’s mother, the faint smell of garlic from the night’s cooking. It felt good to be back.
Neika was still whimpering in excitement at his arrival. He ran his hand vigorously down her back a few times. “Shh, that’s right, nice and quiet, girl.” Morgan left her to chase her own tail as he opened the fridge and poured himself a glass of milk. As he closed it, he saw a new picture had been put up. It was Alex standing proudly in her Junior ROTC uniform. This made him smile. For many years, he had felt her slip away from him. As much as he respected that her choices were her own, he couldn’t help rejoicing in this latest one as something that had brought them together. They had started reconnecting recently, and now they were closer than ever.
That picture was also a reminder of his other side—the other side of Cobra, the ruthless killer. Others in his position had not been so lucky. Some, like Novokoff, had become out-and-out monsters. Others, like his friend and longtime partner Peter Conley, had become lifelong loners, with a woman in every port but never someone to come home to and share their lives with. Morgan’s family preserved the side of him that made him feel human, and gave a meaning to the things that he did that was deeper than any abstract duty to protect the innocent. He might even call it his soul, if there was such a thing. It made him whole, having Alex and—
“Dan ? Is that you?” Jenny’s voice was composed of that middle-of-the-night mixture of drowsiness and concern. Morgan turned to see her in her faded blue bathrobe, squinting, her face lined from sleep.
“Hey,” she said. “I didn’t hear you come in.”
“I didn’t want to wake you,” he said tenderly.
“I was awake. Nightmares again.” She had been having them since the Atlanta attack—dreams of terrorist attacks, of their neighborhood destroyed, of everybody she knew dying.
“Every night?”
“Every night you’re not here.” She slid her head onto his shoulder, gently squeezing what turned out to be bruised, raw flesh. He flinched despite himself, wincing.
“Jesus, Dan,” she said, drawing her hand away. “Are you hurt?”
“It’s nothing.” He shrugged.
“What happened?” she insisted, suspicion creeping into her voice. “Let me take a look.”
“No, Jenny, it’s fine.”
“Dan,” she said, the concern in her voice turning into stern insistence, “let me see your shoulder.”
He sighed as he unbuttoned his shirt. There was no way to hide it, not anymore. He pulled it off, exposing his shoulder to the cool air inside. Jenny gasped. He knew it was bad—even though the doctor had taken a look at it, it was still a nasty purplish black.
“It looks worse than it is,” he said.
“How—” she started, then stopped herself, and began again in a weary, resigned tone, her lips pursed, her eyes disapproving. “It’s happening again, isn’t it?”
Morgan opened his mouth to speak, but she interrupted him before he could make a sound.
“Don’t lie to me,” she warned, index finger outstretched. “Not abo
ut this. Not now.”
He took a deep breath. “Yes. I’m back in.”
She took a step back, and seemed momentarily out of air. It took her a moment to digest his confirmation. Emotions seemed to struggle for control of her face, with anger and sadness prevailing. “With the CIA?” she said curtly.
“No. Something different this time.”
“What? NSA?”
“No. Nothing you’ve ever heard of.” Before she could speak, he added, “And I think it’d be better if it stayed that way.”
“Christ, Dan,” she said. “Is that supposed to make me feel better, not to know? Just what have you gotten yourself mixed up in?”
He just looked at her apologetically, but didn’t answer.
“And I don’t suppose you can tell me where you’ve been, can you?”
“You know the answer to that question,” he said. “I’m sorry I kept this from you, Jenny. But you know I have to keep you separate from this side of me. You know why I can’t discuss this sort of thing with you. There are secrets that need to be kept.”
“That,” she said, tears welling up in anger, “is a load of self-serving . . . hogwash!”
“Jenny, you don’t understand,” he said. “I can’t tell you because I need to protect you. Knowing anything at all puts you and Alex in danger.”
“Oh, yeah? Tell me, Dan. What exactly about me not knowing about your involvement in this—stuff—keeps me safe?”
He opened his mouth, but he really didn’t have anything to say for himself. He could have spun a dozen lies in this situation, and made them sound like the truth. He might even have made her believe it. If he lied, he could make her embrace him, offering a tearful apology for ever doubting him. If only he would lie.
“You’re right,” he said. “It doesn’t.”
“Then why didn’t you tell me?” she said though gritted teeth.
Silent Assassin Page 5