The voice snorted. "My room! I ain't got a phone in my room, this ain't the Ritz. You got the pay phone in the lobby, fella."
"I'm sorry I bothered you. I'll call the front desk."
"No bother. I don't get many calls."
Andy hung up. A pay phone in the lobby of the Carolina Hotel, in Palo Alto, and the guy had called from there to trigger the failure of the switch in the Palo Alto office.
Andy would bet good money that the phone calls on the night of the storm had been made from a pay phone somewhere near his house—a restaurant, a gas station, maybe another hotel.
He picked up the handset. What if he dialed one of the patterns? What would happen? He punched in the Stanford prefix, stopped, then hung up. Whatever the pattern did, he didn't want it on his call records. Not with Feferman on the prowl.
There was a pay phone at the gas station on the corner. He turned, heading for the door, then stopped. Wayne stood in the doorway, in his pajamas, watching him.
"You're up early," Andy said.
"You earlier," Wayne signed.
Clearly, Andy thought, he looked as ragged as he felt.
"What you working on?"
Andy sank back into the brown chair and regarded his son. Wayne's pajamas were emblazoned with the Star Trek logo, a birthday gift from his mother. Sandra's presents were always more appropriate for a younger kid; she seemed to think that because he was deaf he grew up slowly. But Wayne always wore or used whatever she sent.
Tell him you're working on the bills, Sandra would advise, he wouldn't understand all this stuff about switches.
Andy said, "I'm trying to figure out how someone made the switches fail."
Wayne came into the room and took Andy's desk chair. He rolled it back from the computer, spun it, and stopped to face Andy full on. Like the captain of something. "Maybe put something in the TDDs. Bad ..." He switched to fingerspelling. "Component."
"No, the TDDs were clean. Good idea, though." Andy frowned. Why the TDDs? Did it have something to do with data versus voice transmissions? But no, you said "hello" on the phone and the word was broken down into electronic signals to be transmitted over the line; you typed "hello" on the TDD and the tones were broken down into electronic signals and transmitted over the line. The switch didn't recognize the difference between voice and data traffic; it didn't give a shit if you called with a TDD or a Mickey Mouse phone, it just processed the call.
The pattern of calls he had just discovered seemingly had nothing to do with TDDs. It was only when Andy or Wayne made a TDD call that the switches died.
Andy's skin prickled.
"What? What?" Wayne was mouthing.
Andy realized he was holding up the printout like a trophy. He said, slowly, more for himself than for Wayne, "Someone called two phone numbers in a certain pattern before each failure. When you pick up the receiver to make a call, you have access to the switch. All you have to do is communicate. Punch in your numbers."
Wayne's eyes riveted on the printout. "He could tell the switch what to do?"
"He could if he had set up some kind of communications channel." His own private hot line.
"How?" The stark sign.
"I don't know how he set up the channel." Andy gripped the printout. "But we seem to have a record here of how he used it."
"To stop the switches."
"To instruct the switches to fail when a call came through on one of our telephone numbers."
"Then we've got him!" Wayne's fingers played over the handles of the chair, as if he were triggering laser beams.
"No. We've got something. But we don't have evidence of how he set up the channel."
"Then look!" Fingers flying:
"We did look." If this channel really existed, there had to be instructions, a few rogue lines somewhere in the programming code. He and Lloyd and Candace and Speedy had combed that code looking for the virus that wasn't there, looking for anything bogus. No, they had started the job. "I looked, everybody's looking. It's not like one of the programs you use. The program for the switch runs millions of lines of code. It's... well, it's complicated."
Wayne stared at him. Finally, he mouthed, "I'd look again."
"I can't." Andy stared back. "I don't have access to the code."
"What's that?" Wayne pointed at the printout.
Andy suddenly grinned. "A start."
He stood up, told Wayne to grab a jacket.
They went together to the gas station at the corner. As they crowded inside, Andy wondered if this was the phone the guy had used the night of the storm. He dropped in the coins and dialed 725-6652.
A young voice answered, a student. "Telecom." It sounded like "talcum." The voice was slurred with fatigue and Andy knew how it was, spend your Friday night in the lab and still there Saturday morning.
"Sorry," said Andy, "wrong number."
Eyes on his wristwatch, he hung up. He counted fifteen seconds, dropped in the coins, and dialed 767-2676. Just as the guy had on the night of the storm.
Ring-backs, then a recording. "Good morning. At the tone, Pacific...." The second number was the recording for Time. He hung up, counted forty seconds, then paid and dialed the lab number again.
The kid answered right away, "Talcum."
"Sorry again." Andy hung up.
Wayne was watching him with a kid-intent expression. Worried or impressed, Andy couldn't tell.
Twenty seconds, and he put in his coins and dialed the last number in the sequence, Time again.
He stood there, the receiver locked to his ear, and waited through sixty seconds of Time, but as far as he could tell, no back door into the switch opened to him.
Finally, he hung up.
He undoubtedly needed some kind of number code, a password. That's the way he would have done it, so that no random caller could dial the sequence, unlikely as that was, and find himself on a private hot line to the number five.
He had found the guy's covert channel, but he couldn't use it.
Like a phone phreak whose blue box wouldn't work.
He pulled Wayne out of the booth. "Let's go get some breakfast, Spock."
On the walk back home, he replayed the story about Strowger, just as Amin had told it. For the life of him, he couldn't figure out how Strowger and the channel fit together.
But if Candace had seen a connection, then by God there was a connection.
CHAPTER 13
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Andy must have read the sign before, but it had never seemed to be addressed to him.
In fact, he had never noticed before how secure the grounds around the AT&T building were. Acres of grassy carpet rising into berms, well-trimmed trees, low flower beds; no one approaching the building would be out of range of those cameras. The private road curled through the grasslands and parking areas; speeding would be difficult.
Andy pulled up in front of the main entrance and parked in the visitors' lot. Without an ID badge, he supposed he was a visitor.
He walked past the side-by-side flags, the red, white, and blue American flag and the baby-blue AT&T flag, past the big concrete planters sprouting red and pink geraniums. Lloyd once had told him about the time the flowers had been ripped out of the planters and replaced with weeds. The joke went around that the deed had been done by someone irate over his phone bill. Whether or not Security nabbed the culprit was a topic of speculation; the flowers were replaced before lunch-time.
Inside, Andy glanced around a lobby he had rarely entered. This wasn't the way he came to work. He used a side door, quick access from the parking lot to R-TAC, and just slapped his badge against the scanner.
The lobby was huge, done in the smog sunset colors of brown, orange, tan, and red. Huge paintings on the walls, huge indoor plants in copper planters. He looked around for remote security cameras and then realized there was no way to check without appearing furtive.
The curv
ed reception desk, too, was huge, like the side of a cruise ship. He identified himself to the receptionist, was verified, and was pinned with a visitor badge.
A gofer appeared and led him at a brisk clip up the stairs and into the Security district of the building. He had been here just once before, escorted by Colson into the conference room where they had suspended him.
The gofer bypassed the conference room, and Andy heard voices behind the closed doors. He wondered if the tiger team was meeting in there.
Security had assigned its chief special agent a corner office, no secretary. The gofer knocked, opened the door, delivered Andy, and closed the door behind him.
Feferman was standing in front of his desk, arms folded. "Mr. Faulkner."
Andy had seen a bear like Feferman on one of Wayne's nature shows, a full-grown adult male standing on his back legs in a stance of power and challenge.
Andy stepped forward. "I have some information for you."
Feferman said nothing, did not move.
Andy waited. He was certain that Feferman, whatever game he was playing, wanted the information. Behind Feferman were a wood-grain desk, padded desk chair, speakerphone and a six-line telephone, gold pen and pencil set. No papers on the desk, one folder in the Incoming box. A secure desk. The desk abutted two oversize corner windows. Feferman had a sweeping view of the entrance to the AT&T building. Feferman could have been the remote security camera constantly in use.
"Sit down," Feferman said.
Andy found a straight-backed visitor chair. By the time he was seated Feferman had silently circled into his own padded desk chair.
"Feferman, I know how the guy got into the system."
Feferman just waited, as if Andy had told him that he knew what time it was.
"Do you understand? I figured out how the guy got into the number fives."
Feferman made a sound, a groan or a heavy sigh. He rubbed a broad white hand across his face. "The 'guy'?"
"The person who garbaged the switches."
"The person who set you up."
The person who killed Candace; neither of them said it.
"That's right."
Feferman swiveled his chair to face out one of the corner windows.
It was a game, Andy reminded himself. The chief special agent was a student of psychology. He said evenly, "I see that I'm wasting your time. Your tiger team's already figured it all out?"
Feferman swung his heavy head around to face Andy, swiveling his chair back to the desk. "Tell me your story, Mr. Faulkner. And don't waste my time."
"You be the judge of whether it's worth your time," Andy said, keeping it neutral; he was catching on. He explained the pattern match, the calls, clear and brief as they did in R-TAC when they presented a solution to Colson.
"Uh-huh." Barely a grunt from Feferman.
"It's clearly the same pattern."
"And so?"
"So the same pattern of calls before each failure can't be a coincidence."
"Oh, I agree, Mr. Faulkner. I don't buy coincidences."
Andy tightened his hand on the chair arm. "So someone intentionally called that sequence both times."
"And so?"
"And so..." Andy relaxed his grip and smiled at Feferman. "Cause and effect, Mr. Feferman. We have a pattern of telephone calls and a switch failure. Twice. We have one of your crosspoints. I assume the chief special agent can reach the conclusion."
"My title is head of Security." Feferman smiled back at Andy and leaned forward until his body touched the desk. His face caught light from the window and the light disappeared in his small dark eyes.
Andy said softly, "I think that the telephone call pattern gives him a covert channel into the switch."
Feferman was nodding.
"Once he opened his channel into the number five, he programmed the switch to fail when someone made a call to or from my telephone."
Feferman kept nodding.
"Do you see? My number was just the trigger."
"What about the TDDs?"
Andy frowned. "I don't know. The switch can't tell the difference between a TDD call and a standard call."
Feferman's eyes narrowed, nearly closed. "All right. Then explain something else. How did he program the switch to recognize this trigger call?"
"I don't know."
"All right." Feferman sighed. "Then tell me if your covert channel can tap into other switches."
"It's not my channel. I wouldn't know."
"It's your theory. Tell me if your theory works with other switches. Tell me if it works with the entire network."
"What, switch by switch? He has to dial in to trigger the failure. What's he going to do, call all day?"
"So this channel is limited in scope."
"It would seem to be. I don't know that for a fact."
"There's a lot you don't know."
"If I had access to the code, maybe I could figure it out for you."
"So the answer is in the code."
"Candace seemed to think so."
"Ms. Fuentes made a cryptic reference to the story about Strowger. Are you going to explain how Strowger fits this whole scenario?"
"No."
"You don't know." Feferman was on his feet, starting to pace. "I deeply regret the loss of Ms. Fuentes. But I still have a tiger team, and my tiger team will find whatever is there to be found."
Andy did not turn. "Your tiger team didn't find the pattern match in the call records."
"Mr. Faulkner, you don't know what my tiger team had for breakfast, and you don't know what they found in the call records."
Andy could smell Feferman, piney, close; the chief special agent had stopped dead behind him. "Breakfast? Probably cold cereal and strong coffee because you don't give them time for more. The call records? They looked for patterns but they couldn't find a match."
"Why not?"
"Because the match is in the intervals of time between the calls. But it would be damned near impossible to look for a match of time intervals between calls when you don't know which calls, out of tens of thousands, you're checking the times of."
"But you managed."
"Only after I recognized the telephone number from Stanford. Anyone on your tiger team from Stanford?" Candace, Andy thought again, had gone to Berkeley. If she had found the pattern, she apparently had not shared it with Feferman.
"Stanford," Feferman said. He circled back to his desk, sat down. "Hotshot school. And you're a hotshot Stanford man. You think that's part of the setup? The Stanford number?"
"I thought of that."
"Or maybe this person is connected with Stanford."
"I thought of that."
"But if this person were connected with Stanford, why would he choose a Stanford number as his channel into the switch?"
"To set me up."
"And risk exposing himself?"
"I sure as hell hope so."
"So who is it?"
Andy stared. Feferman seemed genuinely curious. No games. "I wish I knew."
"Brainstorm. What's the first name you come up with when I say Stanford?"
Amin al-Masri. Andy was silent.
"You're thinking of your former professor? Your thesis advisor? Perhaps your mentor? Dr. Masri."
"I had quite a few professors at Stanford. I had lab partners, classmates ..."
"All of them experts in telecommunications?" Expert enough to sabotage those switches? Stanford students were bright, cocky as hell, but Andy wondered which of his former classmates was today that expert in telecommunications, which one hated the telephone system, which one hated him enough to set him up. And if there was one who qualified, was he capable of murder?
"No suspects?"
What about Zot? He didn't want to give Zot to Feferman, not yet anyway. "No. I wish I knew."
"Well, Mr. Faulkner, shall we just dismiss the Stanford connection as a coincidence?"
"We don't believe in coincidences."
Feferman s
miled. "So what is the significance of Time? Why that number?"
"I don't know."
"Once again."
"Well, Mr. Feferman, maybe he's telling us that he has time on his side, so maybe we'd better work together and figure this out."
Feferman was on his feet again, charging around the desk, looming over Andy. "Mr. Faulkner, how did you get a tape of the call records?"
He couldn't answer, not without involving Nell. "I managed."
"You managed? I ordered all records connected with these failures to be confiscated by my people. Now I'm going to have to browbeat them and find out how and when they disobeyed my orders."
"They didn't."
"Then who gave you the tape?"
"I managed to get it."
"You're cleverer than I am?"
Andy stood. "I'm more desperate. You took my job."
Feferman looked surprised. He backed up to his desk, folded his arms. Stood as he had when Andy came in. "Thank you for the information, Mr. Faulkner. We'll take a good look at your theory and we'll take a good look at the Stanford angle."
"That's not enough."
Feferman waited.
"I want my job back."
Feferman shook his head.
"I've cooperated."
"You brought me an interesting pattern of phone calls, which may or may not be a channel into the switches. You brought me a possible Stanford connection." His tone became soft, friendly. "What you didn't bring me was any evidence that the channel could not have been created by you."
Andy felt sick. He was clutching the rail of a bridge, he was tethered to a telephone pole forty feet up, he was letting go and falling. He said, "Why would I tell you about the channel if I were the one who set it up?"
Feferman's answer followed him down. "The old bait and switch, Mr. Faulkner. Bait, you give me this channel, only you don't give me the entire thing, you just couldn't manage to figure out the final piece that makes it work, the password. So I get my tiger team busy trying to find the password, trying to verify your pattern matches, but—and here's the switch— there's another channel that really works. You keep me distracted with the dummy channel and I won't find the real one."
"Yeah, you got it, Feferman. I set the whole thing up. I bugged my own telephone. And I...." Andy just shook his head. "Jesus, Feferman."
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