by Larry Bond
“Sure.” Helen frowned slightly. “But, Peter, several groups with very different agendas have claimed responsibility for the worst attacks.”
“Sure. Groups that no one had heard of before this all started. Terrorist organizations that never showed up on any law enforcement agency’s radar screen. Terrorists with access to plastic explosive, SA-16s, and now computer viruses, for God’s sake!” He shook his head forcefully. “It’s just too damned much, Helen. Every instinct I’ve got tells me that there’s someone lurking out there pulling the strings and watching us jump.”
“Who?” she asked quietly.
“God knows. I don’t.” Some of the fire went out of his eyes. “Maybe those German neo-Nazis we heard about after the synagogue hostage-taking you smashed. Maybe the people who recruited those Bosnian Muslims Rossini and I tried so hard to find earlier this year.”
“So you think the terrorists, or some of them anyway, are foreigners?”
Peter nodded. “Yeah, I do. I think that’s why none of your people have ever been able to find a print they could match at any of the crime scenes. Plus, there’s at least one piece of supporting evidence that backs up my hunch.”
He sorted through the stacked documents and pulled out a stapled collection of transcripts and photocopied letters. “Take a gander at those.”
She glanced through them and looked up. “The oral and written communiqués issued by the different terrorist groups?”
“Uh-huh. Supposedly issued by everybody from the New Aryan Order to the Black Liberation Front. But they’ve got one thing in common. Rossini and I both checked them over to make sure.” Peter paused to take a sip of his cold coffee, set the cup aside again, and continued. “Every single message is perfect. Not a single spelling error. Not a single misplaced comma. Not a single piece of slang. They’re all absolutely grammatically perfect.”
Helen vaguely remembered hearing or reading something similar. Had it been in a memo from the FBI’s own language experts? She frowned. So many documents had crossed her temporary desk in such a short space of time that she’d often suspected the task force would drown in paper before finding its first terrorist. Still, how had she missed something like this? How had they all missed something like this?
She already knew the answer to her question. The FBI task force had been swamped right from the day it was formed—hit from all sides at every turn by new demands on its time and its limited resources. If Peter’s guess was right, that had been an important part of the terrorist plan from the very beginning. Her face darkened in anger.
He reached out and took the material out of her unresisting hand. “I think all of these little propaganda pieces were written by the same people. By people with a thorough, but very academic, knowledge of American English.”
Helen nodded slowly, still rocked by the stomach-turning possibility that the Bureau task force had been walking right past an important clue. “God, Peter, I think you’re probably right.” She hesitated. “But …”
“But I don’t have a single shred of solid proof beyond those communiqués,” he finished the sentence for her.
She shook her head. “I’ll talk to Flynn tomorrow morning anyway. We’ve been focusing all our energies on the domestic angle. Maybe it’s high time we widened our search.”
Peter smiled crookedly. “You think Special Agent Flynn’s really going to listen to a wild-eyed theory from an Army grunt?”
“Coming from a smart Army grunt? He might. Mike Flynn’s got a good head on his shoulders,” Helen countered. “He doesn’t put up with bullshit, but I’ve never seen him turn away a good idea—no matter where it came from.”
“That’s nice,” Peter said, still clearly unconvinced. He bit down on a yawn and glanced at his watch. Then he pushed back his chair and stood up. “Look, maybe we should try to get some sleep. You’ve got to report back, and I’ve got a date with Rossini a little later this morning.”
“Oh? A date with the Maestro?” Helen asked, slipping her arm around his waist. “Is there something I should know about you, Colonel Thorn?”
He laughed softly, almost against his will. “Not that kind of a date, Agent Gray.” His smile slipped. “Rossini wangled a copy of that damned computer virus out of the Computer Emergency Response Team. We’re going to run it by somebody he knows—a guy the Maestro says is a Grade A computer whiz.”
He shrugged. “Of course, it’s probably just a waste of time. God knows, every cybernetics expert in the federal government is already doing the same thing.”
Helen hugged him tighter. “You just keep at it, Peter.” Then she stepped back and held out her hand. “Now come take me to bed.”
Thorn’s grin returned. “Yes, ma’am. Anything you say.”
Herndon, northern Virginia
Joseph Rossini took the Dulles Access Road out toward Herndon, relying on their official Pentagon identity cards to get them through the tollbooths without having to scratch around for exact change. He also drove fast, exceeding the speed limit by at least fifteen miles an hour.
The older man caught Thorn watching him out of the corner of his eye and lifted his shoulders. “I hate poking along, Pete. Going fifty-five’s just not efficient.”
Thorn hid a smile by pretending to take an interest in the passing scenery. Saddled with a loving wife and a multitude of kids, the Maestro had obviously decided to settle for the first half of the male equation seeking “fast cars and loose women.”
They sped past what looked like a military encampment. It was a staging area for one of the security patrols established under the President’s vaunted Operation SAFE SKIES. Two Blackhawk helicopters and a couple of Humvees sat under camouflage netting in a clearing off to the side of the road. Soldiers wearing the Screaming Eagles patch of the 101st Air Assault Division tramped through the mud left by another hard rain. They looked thoroughly bored and uncomfortable.
Thorn looked away, still angry at the clear waste of good manpower. He turned back to Rossini. “You’re sure this guy Kettler can handle the job?”
“Uh-huh. Without breaking a sweat.”
Thorn hoped the Maestro’s confidence wasn’t misplaced. The man they were on their way to see, Derek Kettler, made his living as a freelance software designer and consultant. Apparently, JSOC had hired him once before to craft special security and antiviral programs for its intelligence section.
“Kettler lives and breathes computers, Pete,” Rossini continued. “The guy’s a little unusual, but he practically dreams in machine code. He’s good. One of the best.”
“Just how unusual is he?” Thorn asked skeptically.
Rossini shrugged. “He telecommutes so he can work alone. He likes being alone. He hates having to take orders. In fact, he hates just about anything to do with authority or control.”
Thorn arched an eyebrow. “Then why work with computers? Hell, they’re nothing but rules and instructions …”
Rossini shook his head. “Those are physical limitations, like gravity or the speed of light. It’s people telling him what to do that Kettler has trouble with.”
Great, Thorn thought. They were off on a visit to the Computer Hermit of Herndon.
The older man pulled off the Access Road, fast-talked their way past the local tollbooth, and followed a series of treelined streets to a newer part of the town.
The housing development still showed signs of newness. A Dumpster loaded with construction scraps marked the corner where they turned off the main road, and two of the end units still had raw, muddy earth instead of lawns. The homes were attractive, brick-fronted, two-story town houses. Different gables and copper trim gave each a small bit of identity otherwise lacking in their construction.
Derek Kettler’s house was third from the left in a row of ten. They parked, and Rossini muttered, “Stay here in the car for a minute, until I signal. He agreed to meet with us over the phone last night because he’s dying to see this new virus, but he really wasn’t very happy with the ide
a of a face-to-face chat. Like I said, he prefers dealing by modem.”
Swell. Thorn sat stiffly in the front seat, watching Rossini climb the front steps to Kettler’s town house.
The Maestro knocked, and then, after waiting a few moments without any apparent response, pressed the bell. Even in the car, Thorn could hear the sound, not of a bell, but a fierce animal roar. Rossini seemed to expect it and looked apologetically toward the car, shrugging.
The door opened, and Thorn saw Kettler for the first time.
His immediate impression was a 1960s-style hippie without any of the tie-dyed color. Rossini’s computer genius wore a gray sweatshirt, jeans, and sneakers, all of which looked rumpled—even the shoes. Kettler himself was in his thirties, slightly overweight, and badly in need of a haircut. His black hair and beard were long and lank.
Thorn watched the two men speak for a few minutes. Kettler kept nervously glancing toward the car while Rossini made soothing gestures. Finally, the computer expert disappeared, still shaking his head, and the Maestro motioned for Thorn to come on up.
He trotted up the steps and followed Rossini inside.
He first noticed the smell, a mixture of stale food and mustiness and other things he didn’t want to identify. The front door opened into the living room, which was dominated by a six-foot-high, ten-foot-wide entertainment center. Thorn considered himself something of an audiophile, but this system was incredible. It included a CD player and a tape deck, but it also contained a reel-to-reel tape player and a turntable. There was even what looked like a CRT and a computer keyboard built into the system.
A mass of scattered clothes, magazines, and paperback books surrounded the wall unit, covering about half the carpet. Empty potato chip bags punctuated the mess.
If Thorn expected the living room to be the worst of it, he was mistaken. When they walked back past the kitchen, he spotted countertops littered with dirty dishes and empty soda cans. The room’s main fixture seemed to be a large green plastic trash can with so many pizza boxes stuffed into it that they overflowed onto the floor.
Kettler led them upstairs.
A converted bedroom was obviously the heart of the house. A large U-shaped desk filled the center of the room, with computer boxes and electronic components on the desk, on shelves over the desk, and on the floor beside it. Bookshelves crammed with thick hardcovers and trade paperbacks lined one wall. They were all computer-related, with titles like Numeric Process Control Codes.
Thorn didn’t even feel tempted to open that one.
Like the rest of the house, the blinds were closed, and he doubted if they were ever opened. In stark contrast to the rest of the house, though, the desk and the room were comparatively neat, although he could see small piles of debris in the corners.
Kettler’s system was already on. Several large-screen monitors displayed brightly colored geometric designs against a darkened background. The center monitor, a huge two-page display, showed a blue and white emblem surrounded with the words “United Federation of Planets.”
Cute. Very cute.
“Gimme the disk,” demanded Kettler.
Rossini handed it over without apparent qualm, violating several federal laws in the process. Thorn winced a little, but kept his thoughts to himself. The diskette passed to them by CERT bore only a handwritten label identifying its contents as “MidTel Virus, Unknown.”
Kettler handled it like it was red-hot.
He sat down in a swivel chair and started typing. “Okay, Maestro, I’m going to reconfigure my system. I’ll isolate one CPU, and then we’ll see what this beast looks like.”
Rossini explained to Thorn what they were seeing while Kettler typed in commands and threw switches on a homemade junction box. The software designer had four computers wired together. One was a server, or file manager. Another did nothing but log on to bulletin boards, download files, and screen them for material he was interested in. The final two were paired processors, hooked up in a special rig that allowed Kettler to designate which processor would handle a task. Isolating one of the units would protect the rest of his system from damage if the virus started running wild.
Despite his misgivings, Thorn had to admit he was impressed by the sheer amount of linked hardware in the room and by the evident ease with which the other man handled his equipment.
New lines of text popped into existence on the central monitor.
“All right, here we go,” Kettler muttered to himself. He slid the disk into a drive and typed in another set of commands.
“All right, it’s just one big file. Okay, baby, let’s see if we can find out just what you’re made of.” Kettler conducted a running monologue with himself while he started running a series of keyboard controlled tests, probing around the file’s periphery. Rossini stood over his shoulder, answering questions about the known behavior of the virus.
“Oh, yeah.” Kettler nodded knowingly. “Same kind of trick we’re supposed to have pulled on the Iraqis during the Gulf War.”
Thorn looked at Rossini. “Is that true?”
“Uh-huh,” the older man agreed. “The story showed up in a number of the journals. According to them, we planted a virus in the printers inside their air defense computers in Baghdad. It would have worked pretty much the same way.”
Thorn whistled sharply. Maybe Amir Taleh’s belief that Iraq was behind the effort to rebuild radical Islam’s terrorist forces was right after all. Was this a case of an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth?
The big monitor suddenly filled with jumbled numbers. “Yes!” Kettler exclaimed.
Thorn looked over Rossini’s shoulder. “That’s it?”
“Yeah, in octal code,” Rossini answered.
“This will make more sense,” Kettler announced, and hit a key. The numbers vanished. They were replaced by text grouped in three-letter combinations.
Assembly code, Thorn realized. That was one step up from octal, but it was still Greek to him.
Kettler, however, studied it as if he were reading a road map. Tracing his finger across the columns of code, he scrolled the screen up and down. There were pages of the stuff. Oblivious to the two men, he murmured to himself and scratched notes on a pad.
Thorn fought the urge to check his watch.
After what seemed like an eternity, Kettler shouted, “All right!” for the umpteenth time. Spinning around in his chair to face them, he smiled, almost beaming. “It’s the Bulgarian!”
“You’re sure?” Rossini demanded.
“Absolutely,” Kettler asserted. “This is his stuff. I know viruses. I have to in my line of work. See?”
The computer expert took a key from his pocket and unlocked one of the desk drawers. He pulled it open and lifted out a long disk box that had been marked with yellow-and-black striped tape.
He held the box carefully, as if afraid to jostle its contents. “This is my collection. Every virus I’ve ever heard of, including some that were stopped before they hit the street.” He patted it almost lovingly.
Rossini looked at the box in horror, as though the codes it contained were about to leap out and infect him personally. Like any good analyst, he was instinctively repelled by the idea of a program deliberately created to destroy information.
Kettler flipped open the lid and pulled out three neatly labeled disks. “All three of these babies hold viruses created by the Bulgarian, and the similarities are unmistakable. Some of the subroutines are identical.”
Rossini saw Thorn’s impatient look and explained. “He’s right, Pete. Programmers are like other artists. They’ve each got their own styles and their own bags of little tricks—favorite techniques they use to achieve specific ends. To somebody who knows how to read this stuff like Derek here, those are as good as fingerprints or signatures.”
Kettler was still engrossed in the machine code showing on his monitor. “God, Maestro, this is beautiful work! Whoever paid to have this little monster made sure went to the right place.”
Unable to contain himself any longer, Thorn cut in. “Much as I hate to break up this little mutual admiration session, can either of you tell me just who the hell this Bulgarian guy is?”
Rossini filled him in, with Kettler interjecting occasional comments.
Only a few viruses had ever been traced back to people with names. Several, the nastiest of a nasty breed, had been linked to a mysterious individual— “the Bulgarian.”
Nobody knew his name, but detective work, much of it unofficial, had traced some viruses back to Bulgaria and to a master programmer working covertly there. Bulgaria’s secret service had always had an evil reputation. It had been involved in several assassinations, and even linked to an attempt on the life of the Pope. As a result, many in the computer world assumed the Bulgarian had originally been trained and paid by that country’s now-defunct communist government, probably as part of a plan to wreak havoc on the technologically advanced West. Whatever he had once been, it was now clear that the virus-maker was working as a cybermercenary—selling his destructive wares to the highest bidders.
Kettler finished by saying, “Whoever made the deal for this program paid pretty dearly for it. There’s all kinds of gossip on the Net, the computer bulletin boards, about what the Bulgarian charges to do his thing—including some pretty wild guesses. But I’d bet you’re talking at least a couple of million bucks to craft this baby, and probably a lot more.”
“Several million dollars?” Thorn raised an eyebrow and looked at Rossini. “You believe that a white racist group or a band of black radicals could raise that kind of cash without anybody hearing about it?”