“Alert! Grid failure! Alert! Grid failure!” The synthesized contralto voice blared in sterile monotone as an ear-splitting Klaxon wailed through its cycles.
What the hell? The steady stream of cool air from the vents slowed, then died, as the control center switched to standby power from an onsite generator. Display screens all over the room scrolled in sync to the alarm that still screamed: “Alert! Grid failure!”
On the big screen, the reassuring glow of seconds ago was faltering. I watched in stunned silence as Mississippi flickered and went black.
Tarkleton blew back into the room, a gray-haired twister looking for a place to touch down. “Decker, I didn’t authorize any drills!”
I ignored him and started back to the console.
He put a heavy paw on my arm. “Where do you think you’re going? I’m not letting you anywhere near the controls!”
“Alert! Grid failure! Alert!” The voice was relentless.
“Will somebody please turn that dang thing off?” Tarkleton bellowed. The alarms died and the twister focused on me again. He was still holding on to my arm. “Mr. Decker, I suggest you tell me exactly what you’ve been up to in my control room.”
“And I suggest you let go of my arm,” I said. “This is no drill, man. You just lost a state.”
His hand dropped. He stood motionless, a spent twister. The room was unnaturally quiet in the aftermath of the alarms.
“Alert! Grid failure! Alert! Grid failure!” Hell broke loose again. This could not be happening. I looked up, unwilling to believe my eyes. On the screen, Alabama winked out.
I pushed past Tarkleton and returned to the console, where Abidi was already typing away, his fingers flying over the keyboard with uncanny speed. I leaned over, scanning the monitors. Grids don’t fail without a damn good reason. I directed Abidi’s search, telling him where to look.
Tarkleton’s massive presence loomed over me. “It’s a hundred and four degrees outside and a lot of air conditioners just quit. If we don’t get the power back up, we’ve got a problem.”
“Since we’re exchanging suggestions, I suggest you let me do my thing,” I said without looking up. I already had a problem of un-frigging-believable proportion. My company had designed every system in the room.
“You know what happened?”
“Not yet, but I intend to find out.”
He was silent for a moment, relighting his pipe while he mulled this over. “Very well, then. Gentlemen! Mr. Decker has the floor. Give him your cooperation.” He paused, and I felt the weight of his eyes on me. “It’s your system, Decker. Fix it.”
A secretary stuck her head through the doorway. “Mr. Tarkleton, North Mississippi Medical Center on the blue line. They have people in surgery and their generator failed. What do I tell them?”
“Lord Almighty. Tell them we’re on it, but get that generator back up.” He turned to me. “That’s the largest hospital in the state. Stop twiddling your thumbs and get that grid back up.”
“I need your station,” I said to Harold Beeman. The room was heating up and he was already covered in sweat. He looked right at me, his eyes the size of golf balls through the glasses, but he didn’t move. I motioned for him to get up and still he sat. I looked to Tarkleton for help.
“Harold, move your butt!” he said.
Beeman got up slowly, still staring at me. A big bead of sweat rolled off the tip of his oily nose. He finally cleared the chair and I slid into it.
I typed and clicked my way through analysis screens and grid models, looking for answers, finding none. Everything was normal, except for the two entire states that—
“Alert! Grid failure! Alert! Grid failure!”
Make that three. Tennessee faded. My career was disintegrating. I pictured a room full of reporters in bloodlust frenzy, jackals closing in on wounded prey. Mr. Decker, what went wrong? Did you cut security corners when you designed this system? Was Decker Digital not ready for the challenge of such a project? Exactly how vulnerable are your systems, Mr. Decker?
Someone killed the alarms.
“I’ll have to call Washington if we don’t get them back up in a hurry,” Tarkleton said. “Any chance these states went down independently?”
“Didn’t happen,” I said, working my way deeper into the system.
“I agree,” Brett Fulton said. “The problem is here. With Decker’s system.”
I vowed to wipe the smug smile off his face as soon as I had the grids back up. And to fire the Decker Digital employee responsible for this gaffe.
The secretary was back. “Mr. Tarkleton, blue line again, Memphis International, they’re screaming and cursing, demanding to talk to you.”
Tarkleton grabbed a telephone handset and punched a large blue button on the base. “Tarkleton here ... Yes ma’am ... I’m sorry, I don’t have a time frame for you ... I understand ... it won’t help, but call him if you want to.” He slammed the handset back into its cradle. “Decker, I’m in a world of hurt here.”
“Perhaps it is not trouble with Matt Decker’s system.” Abidi looked up from his monitor. “I am seeing something most unusual in my lines of code. I am thinking cyber-bomb.”
I leaned over and peered at the screen. “You’re saying the server ordered all three shutdowns? You can’t be serious. Too much redundancy, too many safeguards.”
“It has happened. I am showing you here, and here, and here.” He pointed to three lines of code. “These are the exact times Mississippi, Alabama, and Tennessee became dark. I assure you I am most correct.”
“Fulton, run me a printout of the core system activity log,” I said. “STAT, man, three states are down!”
He glared at me, then typed and clicked. Nerd Beeman waited across the room by the printer, ripped the sheet out as soon as it finished, and brought it to me. I found the three bold lines of print that marked the events in question and told Abdul to call out the times he had found buried in the program code.
“Eighteen-sixteen and thirty-seven seconds, eighteen-eighteen and fifty-three seconds, and eighteen-twenty-one and nine seconds, all Zulu times.”
Yellow Creek was five hours behind Greenwich Mean Time, also known as Zulu, the world standard for matters technical. Abidi was right. The times the states went down perfectly matched the cryptic numbers he had found. “There’s nothing wrong with my systems.” I slapped the printout down on the counter.
“Come again?” Tarkleton said.
“Somebody tampered with the code.” My code. Code engineered to be unbreakable.
Abidi cast me a worried glance. I could see he was already processing the implications, and he didn’t like them. Neither did I.
“Can’t we just do a manual override to switch this first grid back on and then deal with the others?” Fulton said.
This moron had obviously spent all of fifteen minutes studying the systems.
“Oh no no no,” Beeman said. “CEPOCS is not designed for manual overrides. A stunt like that could cause terrible damage.”
He was right. The grid switches were designed for precise machine control, not manual.
“Up until sixteen minutes after one, everything was fine, right?” I said.
“Sixteen minutes plus thirty-seven seconds after one,” Abidi said.
“Whatever. My point is that the shutdowns were rigged to occur at that particular time on the system clock. There’s no reason we can’t turn the main system clock back twenty-four hours until we can figure out what’s going on here.”
“I understand precisely to where you are traveling,” Abidi said. “CEPOCS will return all parameters to the pre-trigger state. You are a computer hero.”
Fulton snorted.
“I don’t know about hero, Decker,” Tarkleton said, “But if this works, you can call me Tark.”
Swell.
Two minutes later we watched Mississippi, Alabama, and Tennessee sequence back to life on the display. Tarkleton wiped his forehead with a sleeve. Abidi was jubila
nt. Fulton dumped a BC powder onto his tongue and swallowed it dry. Beeman was too wired to stand still; he kept walking around peering at readouts. I watched him circle the room.
All states were back online and I could restore the CEPOCS code to its original state. Some P.R. damage control lay ahead, but I had friends in the media—along with a few vulnerable non-friends. I’d gotten off easy. Lurking in the rear chambers of my mind, however, was a nagging buzz: CEPOCS was Decker Digital’s flagship project, and until I could find the hole and plug it, the system was vulnerable.
After three trips around the room Beeman eased into his chair and hunched over the keyboard, his shoulders drawn in tight. Why was he still so worked up? He looked back and I caught his eye. I started toward him.
“Hey, Harold.” He turned his back. His hand was on the mouse, clicking away with jerky movements. Closing programs. Purging files as fast as he could type and click.
I was behind him in two big strides. “Beem—”
He sprang from the chair, sending it careening into my shins. I fell back against a support column. He bolted from the room. I shoved the chair out of the way and went after him. A high-security program had just been hacked and here was a freaky-acting geek.
I made it to the parking lot just in time to see him whiz by, firing a panicky look my way as his car fishtailed past.
Tarkleton came up behind me, panting, his dead pipe still clenched in his teeth. “What’s going on?”
I watched Beeman blow through the main gate and hang a hard turn onto the main road doing about fifty. “I’d say—”
“Matt Decker!” I turned around and saw Abidi in the doorway, motioning frantically. “Come here quickly!”
Pawnbroker: A Thriller Page 26