“Okay, suppose you get him,” Hugh-S said, “what’ll we have? Some teenage sharpie, I suppose, thinkin’ all this is funny. You want me to liquidate some poor kid?”
I doubted the profile would be of a type that destroys for amusement. The Transylvanian was technically good at data transmission and reception and an outstanding programmer. But above all, he was a stunning hacker, maybe the world’s best. Covert entry into Hugh-S’s vault? It would be impossible without an unheard of level of genius. “If I find him,” I advised Hugh-S, “you might want to soft-glove him. I doubt we’re looking for a teenage sharpie. He’s more likely a type that with a little reorientation could make a durable contribution to your operation.”
A pause. “What are you sayin’, Cahsun?”
“Look at his tactics. He doesn’t want his virus arriving in any obvious way, through one portal, or one Audile, so he picks two. To make that work his timing has to be impeccable, requiring precise information on Audiles orbits. Where is that data? In the vault. So…?”
Silence up and down the phone line.
“There’s more,” I continued. “Part of his attack plan was to lie low…in the vault…for some minutes so the virus could assemble. What I’m saying is that he figured how to get in, move around, use available information, and get out. Did anybody pick that up? I see it as sort of on par with that squadron of undercover KGB file clerks which, unbeknownst to you, worked for a good while in your records section during the height of the Cold War.”
The silence on the other end of the scramble phone ended. “Not possible.” But Hugh-S’s voice lacked its usual folksy confidence.
“Not impossible either. More worryingly, it may not be provable. And he may not be detectable in the future either. The fact is, he hit the Audiles perfectly. I believe he was in the vault routinely, milked it, and used the data he needed. Spontaneous creation? No way. The way I see it, a genius like that…It’s best to have him inside the tent. If I were you I’d hire him.”
Another pause. “I doan get it, Cahsun. Why did he have it in for yous Canucks? What made him bugger you? You’re not supposed to have any enemies.”
“Maybe it’s as simple as bearing a grudge.”
“I’d like to get this one behind me, Cahsun. Do what you can. Stay in touch.”
I put the phone down and did some electronic tidying up. A copy of the file I sent to Hugh-S was encrypted and transferred from the laptop hard drive onto a disk. I then put the computer through deep memory cleansing, removing all traces of where I had been and what had been done. After that I took stock.
I thought about the data sources needed to locate the Transylvanian. I was confident that once the right questions were formulated and the sources trawled, he would stick out like a sore thumb. But mostly I thought about ways to keep the embassy in Bucharest out of it. Speed was important. Hugh-S’s people would get busy scanning photographic data from space. I believed I had a window of maybe two days to deliver the culprit. If I did that and then made some alterations, further investigations that could implicate Rachel might be headed off at the pass.
I recall being interrupted then by a gentle tapping on my door. It sounded hesitant, from someone respectful, someone reluctant to disturb me. All the same, because my line of thinking was broken, I was instantly exasperated and nearly shouted through the door to come back some other time. There was a second round of tapping. Sighing loudly, I got up and pushed my chair backwards. With too much force. It tripped over a temporary cable on the floor and banged into a flimsy table. A leg buckled. Some journals, my briefcase and a pile of disks clattered to the floor. The noise and the mess fuelled my anger. I swung the door open. In the hallway, with her head cocked to one side, stood Heywood’s acolyte. She looked up at me, obviously amused.
“What?” I demanded.
“Moving house?”
“What do you want?”
“Thought I’d introduce myself.”
“I know who you are.”
“All right. And I know who you are. Got five minutes?”
“No.”
“I’d like to compare notes.”
“I haven’t any notes. None you’d be interested in.”
“Maybe I’ve got some you’d be interested in.”
“I don’t think so.”
“The virus came in through the server you use a lot.”
This surprised me. My expectation was that Heywood’s groggy technicians would need weeks to figure that out. “So,” I said, rattled by her steady, happy, goodwill look. “That ought to be old news by now.”
“Yeah. Never fails, right? The barn door stands open, but even so, everyone wants to know how the horse bolted. Speaking of old news, I’m retrieving files. Most of you down here are back at work.”
“Their gratitude will be boundless,” I said, still irritated at Arthur’s childlike glee.
“And yours?”
“My files are my business.”
“You didn’t lose any? Everybody else’s got kayoed.”
“Then help everyone else.”
She persisted. Unperturbed, like a shrink, she asked me to explain if I had any special vibes when the virus arrived. Had I felt chilled? Had I had the willies?
“My computer went blank,” I sneered. “I heard a noise. I opened my door, stood where I’m standing now, watched people go berserk. It was forgettable. Do you mind? I’ve got stuff to do.” With this I slammed my door.
I stood awhile before righting the chair and fixing the table leg back in place. Heywood’s young thing, Jaime From-up-North, what would she do now? Go to him? Say I wasn’t co-operating? She hadn’t come knocking to compare notes. I was sure of that. She threw a pile of questions at me. But I had a few too. All right, so she figured out the plague’s entry point. The decrypted back-up tapes had no doubt helped, but all the same, that was good work. What else had she looked at? The plague’s destruction started at our end of the pipeline. Had she actually managed to get into the pipeline to see how it worked? Occasionally, inadvertently, I may not have cleansed the hard drive on my computer before leaving for the night. This meant that information on pipeline process and even some pipeline contents could have been backed up over time and ended up somewhere on a back-up tape. Had she found certain things that were mine? I pondered this.
Threats from Transylvania. Threats from my own backyard. What were the greatest vulnerabilities? I made a mental list of the lines of defence I urgently had to put up. Determining the origin of the Transylvanian bug so as to save Rachel was at the top. I would deal with Jaime after that. I plunged into the work, punching out instructions. On the laptop I saw a global list of portable satellite antenna manufacturers form…
8 CHAPTER EIGHT
I was right. Jaime went straight to Heywood. She found him in his office engrossed in penciling changes onto a report. He didn’t hear her come and silently she observed his efforts from the doorway. Orthographically expressive swirls filled the margins; precise lines were being traced to places where text was to be altered; punctuation was going through a meticulous modification. The concentrated movements resembled those of a medieval, manuscript-copying monk.
“Irv,” she broke in. “Got a minute?”
“Jaime! My child. Of course. Come in.” He pushed his theological work aside. “I want you to know,” he continued proudly, “that this morning I reviewed the material you posted on Zadokite Port. Marvellous. I’m delighted. I’m just now completing an update for Étienne and all your good work will be in it. It will knock his socks off. Sit down. Coffee? Juice? I can have it brought in.”
Heywood ushered Jaime to the small round table and began clearing it of paper, stacking it into an untidy pile which he carried to a vacant spot on a ledge by the window. Some of the pages began flapping in the air rising from the heating register and the pile itself started tilting sideways, but with fashioning hands the Czar pushed and squeezed and formed a stabler column. Outside the window, below on the street
, a scene arrested his attention. Giant graders were shoving the weekend snow into a long straight windrow, a ragged dike of ice down the middle of the road, and a huge and merciless machine with jaws and rotating blades was digesting it, spewing a stream of winter slurry through a funnel into a trailing truck. A battery of empty dumpsters stood at the ready farther down the snow-cleared road. The city was digging itself out, getting back to normal. “Not high tech,” Heywood observed distantly, “but effective. Did you enjoy the winter weekend, Jaime? Used to be my favourite season when I was young – hay rides, cuddling to stay warm, that sort of thing.”
“Spent the weekend feeding Zadokite Port, Irv.”
“Ah, no cuddling…” The Czar sat down at the little table. “Someday I’ll tell you how I helped Hannah through her first Ottawa winter. We were living in Lagos before. Everyone warned her it would be worse here than Moscow. It gave her a terrible apprehension. But once we were here and winter started, its beauty drew us together. I remember the first spring too. We went to a maple grove to see the sap getting boiled down into syrup. Arboreal nectar, that’s what she called it. Ever since, when she cooks pancakes, we drench them in it.” The Czar patted his bloated belly.
“I’ve never worried about winter cold,” Jaime said to set that fact straight.
“I’m sure. New Brunswick, North Bay, places farther north… we’re like that, Jaime. Fearless. Let blizzards roar.”
Jaime observed the Czar. His hands were clasped behind his head and he was looking up, maybe at savage weather taking shape somewhere beyond the ceiling. Whatever he saw, he was enjoying it.
“So you looked into Zadokite Port,” she said. “You managed your way in.”
“I managed, oh yes. And I saw! Wonderful material. Such a turn of events. Can’t wait to rub a few High Council noses in it.” A mean little chuckle escaped the Czar’s bulky chest.
“Don’t oversell it, Irv,” Jaime cautioned. “Not yet. I’ve decrypted some of the back-up tapes. But I don’t know that much about the virus. Not yet. A lot of work remains.”
“I know, but…” Heywood, full of mettle, anticipating the High Council’s next session, smacked a fist into a palm. “The point is, we’ve proved that data can be recovered. We’re on target replacing the hardware too. Twenty percent of HQ done today; forty tomorrow. And new equipment’s being shipped to the embassies as we speak. And I read in Zadokite Port that some of the watchers are back on-line. So they’ll be doing their casting about, picking up clues. We’re gonna get the turkey that did it. A good feeling, Jaime, that’s what I’ve got. We’re back. You did well. I’m proud.” He reached out to pat her shoulder, but couldn’t reach it and the movement was of a fleshy hand flapping in the air. “All along I’ve said that hard work may be old-fashioned, but it’s not yet a lost art.”
Jaime shrugged as if to say: you call it work, I call it play. She explained that the watchers weren’t fully back to work. “They can make-do for now. There’s no new server down there yet and they’re temporarily using another, so there’s a capacity limit. But that’s not why I’m here. There’s another problem with the watchers.”
“Shoot, Jaime. Someone not playing ball? If so, I’ll have his head.”
“Not that. It’s subtler. Remember I said I’d look for irregularities on the back-up tapes?”
“I recall.”
“A perturbation prior to the network going dead could show where the virus entered.”
“And?”
“Well, there are some candidates. The line to Europe had lots going on, and the portal zipping stuff back and forth to the United Nations was hot too.”
“Forget that last one, Jaime. All that UN blarney. Stacks and stacks of reports. There’s nothing in them. Lots of smoke, no fire.”
Jaime nodded. “You’d know. Anyway, both lines, steady volume at a high level. Then I found a third portal. It almost blew a fuse coping with a sudden data dump. Care to guess which one?”
The Czar’s forehead developed a furrow.
“A hint,” she continued. “One of your mission-critical nexus points.”
“Jaime! No techno-babble. Can’t stand it.”
“The watchers!” she cried. One of Jaime’s hands drew an arc of triumph over her head. She was wearing her metal bracelets and they jangled. “I think the bug came in through their server.”
“Jesus,” Heywood swore. His great shifting weight made his chair squeak.
“It’s preliminary,” she advised. “Nothing sure yet. But on the tape for that server there’s a piggin’ dirty great bulge. Two minutes later network disintegration begins.” Jaime underlined these facts with snapping fingers and animated gestures, her bracelets sounding like a gypsy dancer’s. “Problem is, I can’t decipher it. I went at it all weekend. It’s a blob and it won’t yield.”
“Need stronger hardware?” The Czar didn’t understand Jaime’s arcane skills, but if the excursion to the Dallas Police Department was anything to go by, no data bulge had ever been created that would resist for long once she went at it.
“I’d like the Service network specs.” Jaime began tapping the table with a finger, making it resonate with the urgency of her demand. “I have to know more about that server.”
“That’s Claude. He’ll help. I think the information might be classified.” The Czar paused, then realised something. “Was classified. Something that doesn’t exist can’t be secret. Ask him tomorrow. He’s at a bonspiel today. He loves chucking them rocks.”
Jaime grimaced. “That’s a day gone.”
“I know you want to sweep the winner into the house right away, Jaime, but we’re far ahead. We can enjoy each end from here on in. Ever curled? I have. Enjoyed hockey more though. With the neighbourhood kids. Ever done that? Chase a puck along the boards, the snow flying, the wind smarting, toes freezing off?”
“Sure. With my brother.”
“Bet you were good.” Heywood crossed his arms on his chest.
“Started out on figure skates,” Jaime said. “Got better at hockey once I switched.”
“Sure, that’s understandable. You gotta have the right equipment. You know, I used to be on the rink a lot. Shot right-handed. Don’t know why. My youngest, Danny, he played goal. When he was six, he wanted me to pepper him with slapshots. Little nipper stopped them all. He’s got his own tikes now.” Heywood sniffed.
Jaime watched a dreamy look filtering into the Czar’s eyes – an old geezer reminiscing about what he once proudly possessed and had now eternally lost. An hour could go by with old guys in that mood. “Could I come back to that server,” she interrupted. “Know anything else about it? Maybe I can get going on something before Claude excavates the specs.”
“Server? Ah, yes, the watchers. Uh, not much. It’s there for a dedicated data line connecting us to the Yanks. For the intelligence relationship, if you want to know. Doubt it does much good. Carson Pryce is gatekeeper. With him no one gets near it. The Yanks seem to like him.” Heywood scowled. “Proves they know how to pick their friends. Bothers some of us, frankly.”
“Carson Pryce? I’ve met all the watchers. I’ll say this, they’re a palsy-walsy bunch. And then…” She began to shake her head.
Heywood’s laughter was immediate. “And then? I know…” He laughed so hard it brought on a wheezing. “And then there’s Carson Pryce.” The Czar pulled out a handkerchief to clean his nose. “So you met him. You felt exalted in his presence?”
When Carson’s door slammed shut on Jaime, Arthur Beausejour had appeared around a corner with hands thrown up in apology. Sorry about that, he said, escorting Jaime politely to the sliding doors. Carson experiences a lot of pressure. He gets ornery sometimes, but it’s never personal.
“He was loaded for bear,” Jaime admitted to Irving. “But it didn’t seem personal. Just, sort of curt.”
“Curt! Hah. He’s a source of pain. Someone should point a bear gun at him.”
“He’s more a source of puzzlement. He sure is out o
f sync with the procedures the others use down there.” Jaime described meeting the watchers one by one. Each gave her some data, their PINs, that kind of thing, and files were recovered no problem. “So then, there’s only Carson Pryce to go. Except, all the tapes were done. Nothing left to retrieve. Seems he never stored a thing. It struck me as unusual.”
“He keeps it someplace else,” Heywood concluded, surveying the leaning stacks of dossiers on his desk and the slanting rows of reports on the ledges by the windows.
“Naturally he keeps it someplace else,” Jaime said dismissively. “But why? He’s a high tech guy. Why doesn’t he store it like everyone else. What’s so special about him?”
“Nothing’s special about him except the spook stuff he does with the Yanks. Because of that, he thinks he’s special. He thinks he’s the only one that’s special. It’s gone to his head. I said that before.”
“Something is in his head,” Jaime agreed. “He isn’t mellow. Anyway, I went to see him.”
“And his charm touched you.”
“Thought I’d fly a kite.” Jaime smiled. “Told him I knew the virus came in through the server he used a lot. To see how he’d react. Well, he didn’t lose a beat.”
“What did he say?”
“That we had nothing to talk about. Then he closed his door.”
“In your face?”
“It was controlled.”
“He’s a hater, Jaime. He hates everything. I think he hates love.”
“He’s an interesting case.”
Heywood began to hit his palm with a fist again. “I’m not happy Carson closed his door on you. It’s intolerable. Sons of darkness do that, but not we, those of us who value the Service. We strive for mutual respect. I’m prepared to call him in, sit him down, and tell him so. I grew up learning to respect. I’m sure you did too. We cannot condone a lack of it.”
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