The waiter was staring at them, rooted in the doorway from the kitchen.
"Let him go," Feferman said to Buck, "and if he touches anything but his sandwich, break his arm." He picked up a chunk of bread and began to butter it, then looked straight at Andy. "We're not encouraged to do that, but you get my drift."
Andy still felt pain where Buck's fingers had been. "Feferman, please." If he needed to beg, he would beg.
Feferman spread another layer of butter on the bread, the bear building up fats after a long winter. Working the knife through the butter, teasing it out to the crust, the big white hands taking infinite care. "Feferman, please," Feferman said, putting down the knife and inspecting his handiwork.
Buck moved in closer, and Andy realized he was holding up his own knife with the serrated edge toward Feferman. He sank the blade into the sandwich.
"That sounded nice, telephone man." Feferman picked up the two sheets of paper from the table, scanned them, then handed them to Howland. "Mr. Howland, call Special Agent Dicker at the FBI and suggest that he run these names through his computer." He shrugged at Andy. "Special Agent Dicker is a real hard worker but this could take a while. You see, you've given me seventeen names, ten years old, and we have to assume that they could be anywhere in the fifty states now, especially if they still work for the telephone company. If the names are in the computer somewhere—DMV records, voter registration, credit records—that speeds things up of course, but in some states information may be only manually available. Hard to believe, isn't it? If these people are out of the country, if they've changed their names, if they've gone underground, if they're dead, that slows things down."
"Feferman."
"And then, Mr. Howland," the chief special agent continued, "request on my behalf that Agent Dicker pick up Mr. Raymond Colson for questioning. Then finish your dinner." He waved Buck back to his table. "Go."
Andy's hand shook on the knife. Feferman, bless him, was acting.
Feferman bit off a piece of the buttered bread, chewed, took a long drink of his berry shake. "I figure," he said at last, "that you owe me. Your case against Mr. Colson is based on coincidence." He frowned, as if he had found a piece of meat in his casserole. "The only reason I'm pursuing it is that I have a natural concern for the safety of your son."
The hell you do, thought Andy. But it didn't matter; Feferman was going after Colson. "Where are they going to bring him? I want to be there."
"As I said, you owe me. For the moment, I am going to assume that your compiler scenario is correct. You are going to tell me how to disarm this Trojan horse."
"I don't know." What if they couldn't find Colson? "I want to be there when they question Colson."
"Colson is not a hot issue right now. I'll be notified when they bring in Colson, but until then we'll file Colson. Right now the hot issue is the Trojan horse. So you just wait patiently along with me, Mr. Faulkner, eat your sandwich, and answer my question."
"I don't want the damned sandwich."
Feferman swiped out a large hand and slid Andy's plate next to his own. "What are you going to propose to neutralize the Trojan horse?"
"Christ, Feferman, I don't know! Ask your tiger team."
"Right now, I'm asking you."
"I don't know."
"That answer wouldn't be acceptable at Stanford. Or at R-TAC. Come on, problem-solve."
"I don't work for you, Feferman, go to your tiger team."
"I'm lifting your suspension. You work for R-TAC and you're accusing your boss of sabotage. Unless you wish to be suspended again, get to work."
Andy's chest tightened, as if pinned under Feferman's huge paws. It was suffocating. "I can't think about anything but finding my son."
''You thought up a Trojan horse in the D compiler."
"I wasn't trying, it just happened."
Feferman wagged his finger. "No, no, no, it didn't just happen. Remember that I've studied you. You're a zealot with a mission, you're a telephone man, and your mind can't stop working on this any more than a switch can stop processing calls."
"Unless it's shut down."
"Unless it's shut down," Feferman agreed. "But you're not dead, Mr. Faulkner, so your mind is still processing."
"I don't care about the switches, Feferman. Not now."
"You care."
No, Andy thought, I'm not Joe Faulkner. I'm a father before I'm an engineer.
"According to the extortion message that someone—Mr. Colson, in your scenario—that someone sent to the company, a goodly number of number five switches are going to fail. That bothers me, and it should bother you."
"Not just number fives," Andy said wearily. "Everything programmed in D language, and that means everything that is controlled by the 3B20D superprocessor and the 20E processor."
"He shuts down number fives, Mr. Faulkner. His extortion message threatens number fives. Nothing else."
"You were the one who asked if he had the capability to take out other switches. If you'll recall."
"And you convinced me otherwise. And then I saw the extortion message. Number fives, Mr. Faulkner."
Andy sighed. "Think it through. What if the number fives are a decoy, the channel opened up by the Stanford number is a decoy, to make you think that he's only going after number fives, that he can only trigger one switch at a time?"
"You're sure about that?"
"I'm problem-solving, Feferman, I'm not giving you a goddamned money-back guarantee. I figure that when he planted his Trojan horse ten years ago he also planted a piece of code that gave him this access ... this back door.... into any contaminated machine by dialing the Stanford telecom lab number. That's the Stanford connection. He had this thing about Stanford and he chose the lab number as the key to open the channel. So now, when he decides to use the channel, he dials the combination of the Stanford number and the number for Time—he can count on Time always being in service."
"What if the numbers are busy?"
"He waits and tries again, just like the rest of us."
Feferman scraped the last of the Spanish sauce from his plate. "Theoretically, then, once he's opened the channel he can choose any phone number he wants as the trigger?"
"I'd say so."
"Mine, for instance;"
"Sure." I wish he had, Andy thought.
"But what about the TDDs?"
Andy looked at Feferman in disgust. "The TDDs were decoys, a way to set me up, a way to get you to go after me and not him. And you bit."
Feferman sucked gently on the tines of his fork, then placed it across his plate. The fork and the plate were spotless. "I like your Trojan horse in the compiler. I'll buy that for a while. But I'm still not convinced that he intends to use it on anything but number fives. What makes you think he will?"
"Because he can."
"Faulkner."
Andy leaned forward; the table edge pressed into his ribs. "Remember Strowger."
Feferman's eyes narrowed, nearly squeezed shut. "The message Ms. Fuentes left on your machine."
"Strowger invented an automatic switching system, it could process numerous calls at a time. It changed telephony. I think Candace was making the point that what Colson did was like that. He designed a mechanism to destroy numerous switches at a time. If he got into the compiler, then he had the capability to contaminate every piece of equipment driven by the 30B20D and 20E processors. If he had the capability, then I'll lay you dollars to donuts that he did it. He's the downside of Strowger."
"The downside of Strowger." Feferman regarded his empty plate for moments, long moments. "Then.... precisely.... what can he do to the system?"
Andy watched Feferman's heavy face, still inclined over his plate. "With the Stanford channel, he can shut down one switch at a time. With the Trojan horse.... you don't want it to happen. If he's designed his Trojan horses to all fire at once, then he can hit every contaminated machine in the country at once. You get it? He can shut down, I'd say, ninety percent of our netwo
rk. And he can shut down the other long-distance carriers wherever they feed into our local switches. And he can shut down our GCNS-2000s, which switch a good part of the broadband network. That leaves maybe ten percent of the entire U.S. communication network able to function, if it doesn't crash too because of the overload." Andy sank back against the seat. "That's an estimate, not precision."
Feferman's head snapped up. He was smiling. "You care."
Feferman was right, Andy thought, numb. He still cared.
Feferman lifted a corner of Andy's sandwich, found chicken in the bushy bed of sprouts, walnuts, and olives, and regretfully pushed the plate aside. "What shall we do about Mr. Colson's Trojan horse?"
"I really don't know."
"Write a vaccine program to go after it?"
Andy shook his head.
"Why not?"
"First of all, he's probably buried the code. It's encrypted or scrambled all the hell over the place, it's masked. A vaccine has to be able to find the code, to differentiate between legitimate instructions and bogus instructions, and from the vaccine's point of view all this code's probably going to look legitimate. I'm not saying you can't write an effective detection program, I'm just saying it would be a real bitch to do. If you have the time before the whole thing blows up."
Feferman's small eyes bored into him, bright with interest. "So what shall we do?"
"Find the trigger."
"How?"
"I don't know!" Andy looked at the pager tucked into Feferman's shirt pocket, willing it to beep. How long could it take to find Colson?
Feferman fingered the pager. "Perhaps when we locate Mr. Colson we can convince him to give us the trigger."
"When you find Colson, Wayne comes first."
Feferman shrugged.
It was a game, Feferman was still running the game on him. Andy kept his voice steady. "Look, the trigger's got to be a date, a specific time, and when the clocks in the processors reach that time the Trojan horse shuts down the system."
"What's the date?"
"How should I know? Maybe Colson's birthday."
"Possible, but a little obvious."
"Yeah."
"So how do we find the date?"
Maybe Nell's birthday. He didn't want to think about Nell. "Maybe the Stanford connection," he said. "Maybe the date he found out he wasn't going to Stanford. Maybe the telecom lab number transposed to a date."
"Maybe you'd like to thumb through Mr. Colson's engagement calendar and see if he's circled any dates in red." Feferman winked.
"Damn you," Andy said.
"Then stop playing guessing games and give me an engineered solution."
He wanted to walk away. He wanted to sweep the bread bits and butter and picked-over sandwich into Feferman's glutted face. He wanted to have Feferman's thick bones in his hands again. But Feferman was going after Colson, and Andy had to wait for the pager in the chief special agent's pocket to signal him. As he seethed, his mind began to process, as if it now took its instructions from Feferman. The trigger had to be a date, a time, the time was unknown, unknown to everyone but Colson. No. The time was known. It was known to the CPU, the central processing unit, the machine's brain. The time existed in a piece of code hidden in the brain's permanent memory, an instruction to destroy itself when the time and date in the code matched the time and date on its clock.
Andy leaned across the table toward Feferman. "Build a virtual machine," he said, his voice raw. Excited.
"Explain it to me." Feferman laced his fingers like a schoolboy.
"A virtual machine, it acts like the real machine but it's just a simulator, a piece of software and some boards. It thinks it's a real switch. Shouldn't take too many hours to build. Then drive it with the 3B20D processor and contaminated software—from the Palo Alto office, there's no question that there's bad code in there. The trick is to make the Trojan horse in the software trigger a failure in our virtual machine. We're assuming that the trigger is a date, a time, but we can't just wait for it to occur in real time. We have to speed it up. So we advance the clock in the virtual machine one second for every real minute until we hit the trigger. Then we'll have the trigger, we'll know when the Trojan horse is set to go off in real time."
Feferman held out his big hand. "You work well under pressure."
"That wasn't pressure, Feferman, that was extortion."
Feferman shrugged, withdrew his hand. "Now we'll assume that your machine has been built and has given us the trigger, let's say"—he looked at his watch—"seven o'clock tonight, just to maintain the pressure. What can we do to stop it?"
"Bypass it."
"Explain that."
"At six fifty-nine and fifty-five seconds, stop the clock in every 3B20D and 20E processor. The clocks never hit seven o'clock on this particular date. They bypass seven o'clock, and the Trojan horse doesn't realize that it's missed its big chance. It just keeps on waiting for a time that will never come, has already passed."
Feferman was staring at his watch, shaking his head, again the schoolboy, trying to learn how to tell time. "Stop the clocks," he said. "Temporarily."
Abruptly, Feferman snapped up his head and scowled at Andy. "But the clock in the processor records the times that calls are made."
"That's right."
"The goddamned clock can't record precise times if it isn't working."
"That's right."
"Then how do we know when people are making their goddamned telephone calls? "We don't."
Feferman's face slackened, an expression Andy had not seen before. Feferman was surprised, and not happy about it. "We can't bill someone for a phone call unless we have a record that tells us when the call was made and how long it lasted."
"That's right." Andy felt his own stab of surprise, that he could enjoy anything at this point. He wondered if Feferman was going to get this incensed if he had to pick up the dinner check.
Feferman straightened. "Faulkner. If the point is to keep the clocks from hitting the trigger time, why can't we just set the clocks back to this month and day and hour last year? The Trojan horses think it's last year and they're just going to sit and wait, and we can still keep track of our billing."
"Maybe."
"Maybe?"
"Look, I'm not current on billing software but I'd assume that the programmers built into it the parameter that time goes forward. You'd be asking the software to change to negative time and you might confuse it so much that it would crash. You'd lose all your billing data."
"Couldn't we adjust the software?"
"Time, Feferman. What if the trigger fires before you've got it rigged up?"
Feferman sagged. "Let's say we do it your way. How long do you want to stop the clocks?"
"I'd stop them until we find the Trojan horse or until we clean out the system."
"And how are we going to clean it out?"
"Go back to development, rewrite the D compiler, take every piece of software in the network that's written in D and recompile it with the cleaned compiler. Then test and debug it."
"How long will that take us?" Feferman asked softly.
"A lot of people, working just on that? A week, more," Andy said evenly. "At a guess."
Feferman blinked, a bear blinded by a sudden light. "You're talking about millions in lost revenues. That may not bother you, Mr. Faulkner, but it sure in hell is going to bother someone in Accounting. You think the company is going to approve a plan that gives the entire country free phone calls while we clean house?"
"How much is it going to cost, Mr. Feferman, if Colson's Trojan horses destroy all our superprocessors? What do you want to save, our ability to bill or our ability to transmit network traffic?"
"Mr. Faulkner, if I'm going to go to the company and suggest that we shut down our clocks, I want your goddamned money-back guarantee that there are Trojan horses in the system and not just in your head."
"I'm giving you my engineered solution. Take it or leave it."
&n
bsp; Feferman opened his mouth, then closed it.
"You want to talk about lost revenues, Feferman? If Colson takes down the system, you're going to have a lot of unhappy businesses at your throat. No customers calling, no way to contact branch offices, no way to check inventory, no way to transmit video conferences. Telecommuters are cut off. And banks, Feferman. Cut off from the Federal Reserve. No way to process checks and order cash and wire money. Automated tellers shut down. And transportation, Feferman. Air traffic controllers can't transmit data to each other, and the airports have to shut down. And probably trains. The commodity and stock markets get shut down, the...."
"I get your point."
"You do? You can't use your fax machine. You can't call your broker. You can't call a restaurant and make reservations. You can't order a TV movie, you can't buy a tie without going to the store. You can't log onto the Internet, or the Chief Special Agents' Net, whatever the hell you use. You can't call an ambulance, Feferman, or the fire department or the cops or 911, you can't call the power company when the power goes out, you can't call home, you can't call your kid's school." Andy drew in a breath. "You know the expression 'high and dry,' Feferman? Yes? Not just here, not just one switch, high and dry all across the country. How much do you think that's going to cost?"
Feferman's hand flew to his chest. For a moment, Andy thought the chief special agent was suffering a heart attack, and then he heard the beeps coming from Feferman's shirt. Feferman pulled the pager out of his pocket. "I have to check in." He heaved out of the booth, scattering crumbs.
Andy was on his feet, blocking Feferman from the phone. "The FBI? I'm coming."
"You have work to do. Go build me a virtual machine. Show me where the trigger is. I'll authorize whatever resources you need."
"I'm coming."
Feferman laid a hand on Andy's arm. "Mr. Faulkner, leave it to the FBI. They know what they're doing, and they don't want you there to screw it up."
"I have a right to be there."
"No, you don't."
Andy thought he saw sympathy in Feferman's eyes, but the remainder of the chief special agent was unyielding.
Graceful failure, Andy thought. Processors were designed for graceful failure; when an element failed, the processor promptly shut it down so that the machine's total capacity was reduced only fractionally. He saw Feferman's point. If he were let into the same room with Colson, he might screw it up. He might not be able to control himself, and there would be no graceful failure then.
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