“Konichi-wa, Suganama-san,” she said politely. (Despite their relationship she’d never used his first name, and probably never would.) “Yes. Yes, I do have a problem.” Quickly she repeated what she’d told the first man. “But he said there was no lock,” she concluded.
“Mmmm.” Suganama was silent for a moment. Then he spoke quietly — hesitantly, for the first time since Nikki had known him. “There is a lock, Miss Garrson. Its emplacement was requested by Yamato-san. You know Yamato-stm?”
The security chief. Nikki ground her teeth as she remembered the morning’s interrogation, but kept her voice as emotionless as she could. “Yes, I know Yamato-s an.”
“Then I am very much afraid you must ask him concerning its removal, Miss Carrson. I am sorry.”
“There is nothing to apologize for, Suganama-sarc,” she said. “Thank you. Domo arrigato gozaimas.” She broke the connection before he could say anything else — a breach of etiquette, but she just didn’t really give a damn at the moment.
She was mad — Mad as a wet cat, as her mother would have said. Immediately she keyed in the number for the security office, punching the keys almost hard enough to break the plastic phone.
“Mushi mushi?” Another drone, it could just as well have been the same one from the voice. But the tone I his time was different, even more arrogant and cold. A voice that went perfectly with Corporate Security.
“This is Nikki Carlson, employee number 21488762,” ·■lie repeated. “You put a lock on my personal directory, and I want it removed.”
“Hold.” A click, followed by samisen music. Not even mi attempt at politeness this time, she thought.
The wait was even shorter this time. “There is no lock on your directory,” the voice said with no preamble. “An error, no doubt. Try again.” And the phone went dead in her hand.
She slammed the handset down on the cradle with ,1 muttered curse. Try again? Then she hesitated. Why not? She hammered in the command to access the tlirectory …
And a file listing filled the screen. Nikki stared at it in disbelief. The lock was gone. What did that mean?
What it means, she thought after a moment, is that security put the lock on, then removed it when I made a noise about it. She grinned mirthlessly. The security drone on the phone had been telling the strict and literal truth, she realized. When he told her there was no lock, he’d already removed it. She laughed, a dry bark with no humor in it. You know you’re losing it when getting told the truth ticks you off…
She leaned back in her chair, tried to force herself to relax. Okay, she thought, so security locked out my personal directory. Why? A few wild possibilities passed through her mind, but none of them made much sense. Not to the way I think, she mused, but how about them? She’d often thought that some of the things Corporate Security did made little sense. Maybe the logical thing to do was to bring in someone who had a better feeling for what made Japanese corporations tick …
She stood, and went to the doorway of her cubicle. “Toshikazu,” she called quietly, “could you come here, please?”
Toshikazu looked up from where he was working alongside Bojo at one of the analyzers. He nodded quickly, issued a few curt instructions to Bojo, and waited for the older man to nod his understanding. Then he hurried over toward Nikki, wiping his hands dry on his labcoat. “Problem solved?” he asked quietly, in English, as he reached her.
It took Nikki a serious effort of will not to glance around at the others. In a way, she didn’t have to: she could feel their eyes on her. “I think we should check the supplies,” she suggested, also in English.
Toshikazu’s eyebrows rose a minuscule degree, but his voice contained no emotion. “Perhaps a good idea,” he agreed. He stepped aside and gestured for her to lead the way. (Always polite, Nikki thought with a grin.) As they crossed the lab toward the door, the others watched them. Or, more probably, watched her, Nikki reflected. They must have overheard her phone conversations. What conclusions had they drawn? Nothing good, she decided. She was tempted to snap at them, tell them to get back to what they were supposed to be doing. But she knew that if she broke and showed weakness now, it would be pure hell regaining their respect after this was all over. If it was ever all over, the thought came unbidden, but she crushed it ruthlessly.
The supply room was across the hallway from Nikki’s lab, a small room filled with shelving units, the shelves themselves packed with boxes of supplies and bottles of reagents. The room was slightly refrigerated to maximize the useful life of the chemicals, but even so it was marginally warmer than the lab itself.
Nikki held the door open while Toshikazu joined her inside, then shut it behind him. She glanced around the bare white walls and ceiling. Bugged? She shook her In ,id in disgust at her own thought. That’s too paranoid, she told herself.
“What has happened?” Toshikazu asked, again in english.
Keeping to the same language, she gave him a quick run down of the last half-hours events. She watched his eyes as she spoke, looking for some indication that he understood what was going on. But his face remained as unchanging as a statue’s. “And when I loggged back on, the lock was gone,” she concluded at last. “What the hell is going on here?”
Toshikazu was silent for a moment in thought. His gaze was expressionless. ‘The eyes are windows to the soul; she thought, but he’s closed the drapes. What was going on?
finally he spoke. “There are several possibilities,” he said slowly. “Perhaps they wished to search for any personal correspondence you might have on the system, or maybe phone or address lists. They would be interested in anything that shed some light on your thoughts and your motivations.” He hesitated, then add ed, “And your loyalties.” He paused again, as though about to say something else, but then he simply shrugged wordlessly.
Nikki looked into his eyes. There was something I here; she could see he was thinking something he hmln’t yet put into words. Why?
“We’re friends, Toshikazu?” she asked quietly, then < i’iit on without waiting for an answer. “Then why are nil holding something back?” He glanced away from In i scrutiny, and for the first time she saw emotion in Ins lace: shame. “I know you think you’re helping me,“She continued gently, “but I don’t want to be kept in the dark. What is it you’re not telling me? What is it you know?”
Ihe was silent again, and she could almost feel his racing thoughts. After a dozen heartbeats, his eyes again met hers, and this time they were clear. “Know?” he mused softly. “I know nothing; I just suspect.”
“Then why won’t you share your suspicions?”
He shrugged, as though uncomfortable putting it into words. “These are security matters,” he began, his voice bleak. “In security matters, sometimes it is best to be ignorant of what they may be after, or of what they may be planning. If you are innocent, you have no need to know—that’s what people say. If you do know, ever if you are innocent, you will certainly react to the knowledge. And if you do react, how will the security forces interpret that reaction? They will be searching for anything out of the ordinary, and you will have just given them what they are looking for.”
Nikki snorted. “That’s ridiculous,” she told him flatly. “You’re saying the best thing to do is bury my head in the sand. That’s not going to help.”
Toshikazu shrugged again. “Perhaps,” he said, al though from his voice she knew he wasn’t convinced “Perhaps you may be right.” His wry grin returned ‘“The nail that sticks up gets hammered down.’ Maybe I take that too seriously, now.”
“So what should I do now?”
“I suggest you look through the directory for any thing out of the ordinary,” he answered immediately “Are there any missing files? Are any files missing data?”
“I’ll do that.” She gave Toshikazu a warm smile “Thank you,” she said softly. “You’re a good friend.’
“I hope so,” he said earnestly.
* X- *
Nikki typed i
n the now-familiar computer com mand to access her private directory, almost expecting to find it locked again. But there was no beep, no
DIRECTORY LOCKED message. Obediently, the computer filled the terminal screen with a listing of all thef iles in the directory.
There were about forty of them, more than enough In fill a single screen. At first she’d only kept her work journal in this directory. But with time, she’d filled it out with more and more files. Letters to friends at home, written on coffee breaks and run off on the laser printer late at night when only Toshikazu was around. (Fortunately, the computer was “bilingual” in that it could handle both English letters and kanji characters. All of her personal files were in English.) Address and phone records. Personal to-do lists. Records for her personal accounting, and lists of financial and career goals. It had taken her a while to feel comfortable with using the computer system as a personal resource, but as soon as she’d started she couldn’t understand how she’d ever functioned without it. Now she had to scan through all those files. I can’t remember half of what should be there, she thought. How will l know if something’s missing? But even though she thought it was futile, she pressed on.
It was at the bottom of the file list that she found it: i file name that didn’t look immediately familiar. Not that it it was too different from the files around it — files with names like MOTHER.LET, SAMANTHA.LET, ‘sTEVE.LET, and TO-DO.NOT. STORM.LET, it was called. Most of the others she remembered, or she could at least guess what they contained from the names she’d chosen at the time. But not STORM.LET. puzzled, she hit the function key that would display the contents of the file on the screen.
The computer beeped and flashed a message on the status line at the top of the screen — ENTER PASSWORD (STORM.LET):
Encrypted, she thought. The only time the computer asked for a password before opening a file was if the person who’d created the file had encrypted it for secrecy and locked it out. Without the password, the file would appear as unintelligible garbage, if the person trying to view it could even get it to display at all. Nikki rarely encrypted her personal files. Only letters dealing with particularly personal or emotional issues, and her work journal, were locked. It was more a reflex than anything, about akin to hiding a diary in a desk drawer rather than leaving it out in the open — and not much more useful, when it came down to it. She always used the same password for any files she happened to lock, something she knew she’d have no trouble remembering: NLMC, for Nikki Louise Mary Carlson. She knew that anybody who was serious about cracking into her files would include that as one of their first guesses; the primary rule of computer security was always to use a password that had no obvious connection with anything that anyone els knew about you. Locking a file with her own initials it was basically useless, other than as a trick to make herself less uncomfortable about leaving intensely personal matter on the corporate computer system.
At least I don’t have to worry about not remembering th password. She typed in the letters NLMC and hit the Enter key.
Beep. INVALID PASSWORD, the terminal displayed.
What? Maybe she’d mis-keyed it: “NMLC” instead of “NLMC,” maybe. She tried again.
Again the beep, again INVALID PASSWORD STORM.LET remained encrypted and locked.
Nikki gnawed at her lower lip with her front teeth. Something was very wrong. Something continued to be very wrong. “Toshikazu,” she called, pitching her voice just loudly enough to be heard outside the cubicle.
He was there immediately, almost as if he’d bee waiting for her summons. “Yes, Nikki?” She pointed to the file listing on the screen. “Something missing?” he asked, now speaking in English.
Nikki kept her voice low. “Something added,” she corrected him. “This one, here.” She indicated the offending entry in the listing.
“Not yours?” Toshikazu’s voice held something more than surprise, Nikki thought, but his face was once more expressionless. (That should tell me something, she mused, when he goes stone-faced he’s holding something back.) “What is in it?”
“Not mine,” she confirmed. “And it’s locked and encrypted.”
“Truly?” That had shocked him, Nikki could tell. “Delete it, Nikki. Get rid of it. Now.”
“I want to see what’s in it,” she told him, keeping her voice as calm as she could, free of the anger she felt. “Somebody’s trying to screw me over. Can you decrypt it for me?”
“No, I can’t. Not in time.”
It was Nikki’s turn to feel shock. A cold ball of ice was in the pit of her stomach. “In time for what?”
Toshikazu pointed at the large digital clock on the wall of the lab. The red digits read 4:51. “At five o’clock every day, the MIS department backs up the entire memory of the computer onto magnetic tape.”
“So what?”
Toshikazu pitched his voice even lower, until it was barely more than a whisper. “Nikki,” he said, “somebody created that file, locked it so you could never read it — I assume they hoped you would never try — and placed it in your directory. We can only assume they intend it to be found, by somebody. I think that would be very bad. Disastrous.”
She stared at him. Her mind was racing. “Are you saying …?”
He cut her off. “I beg forgiveness,” he whispered urgently, “I advised you badly earlier. You were right, I was in error — ignorance is not safety.” He pointed to the file listing on the screen. “Delete that file. If you obliterate it before MIS performs their backup, nobody can prove that it was ever there. If you wait…”
He didn’t have to complete the thought; Nikki knew where he was headed. If it’s still there when the backup’s run, there’s permanent proof that it was there. Whatever it is. It made sense, but… “It’s locked, Toshikazu,” she reminded him. “I can’t delete it without the password.”
“Kusotare,” he swore quietly. “Forgive me, I thought … allow me.”
Nikki rolled her chair out of the way, and Toshikazu crouched at the keyboard. As before, she tried to watch over his shoulder — watch and learn—but he worked too fast.
It wasn’t easy. From what she knew of the computer’s operating system architecture, it should have been impossible. Repeatedly, the computer beeped its refusal to follow the typed commands, echoed by Toshikazu’s growled Japanese oaths. She looked up at the digital clock — 4:57. Beep.
Toshikazu mumbled in anger to himself as the computer again refused to execute his commands. Watching over his shoulder, she saw him clear the screen and start again.
The clock read 4:58. Even though she still didn’t really understand exactly what was going on, Toshikazu’s urgency was contagious. She shifted uncomfortably from foot to foot, hating the forced inaction. I should be doing something to help, she told herself. But there wasn’t anything she could do, she realized with a sick, sinking feeling in her belly. Toshikazu was already way beyond her understanding of the system and her capabilities, off somewhere in some uncharted territory of computer arcana.
Beep. It was 4:59. She found herself worrying at a corner of a broken thumbnail with her front teeth. With an effort, she forced both hands to her sides. Once more she looked over Toshikazu’s shoulder.
It took her a moment to understand what she was seeing. Toshikazu had hacked his way deep into the operating system of the computer system, deeper than even the system operator could normally go. Instead of issuing the normal type of operating system commands — like COPY or DELETE — her friend was writing short assembly-language routines on the fly, tiny programs to take direct control of the system’s hardware, bypassing the operating system’s structure of checks and balances, control and security. How can anybody work so fast? she found herself wondering. Toshikazu’s fingers were moving so quickly as to seem I most a blur. She was overcome with amazement at her friend’s skill.
Even so, he wasn’t going to make it, she realized. The thought carried with it no real fear, just a sense of resignation and fatalism.
>
But then it was over. Toshikazu was sitting back in her chair, breathing deeply, as if trying to clear his body of fatigue poisons built up over the course of a marathon run. He stretched his arms, worked his shoulders to release their tension. On the screen there was no evidence of his deep penetration into the system —just the file listing of Nikki’s personal directory. She leaned closer. Yes, STORM.LET was gone.
The computer beeped, then its small speaker played a tinny rendition of the first phrase from the corporate anthem — the normal indication that the system-wide backup had begun. She glanced up at the digital clock. It was 5:00.
Gently, she laid a hand on Toshikazu’s shoulder. He looked up at her, a sheen of sweat on his forehead. He gave her a tired smile. “A little too close for comfort, I
think,” he murmured.
“Thank you’ she began, “I…” But then she trailed off, not knowing what to say. But Toshikazu’s smile just grew broader, and she realized that words weren’t necessary. You don’t have to thank close friends, she thought, if it’s important, they know. She squeezed his shoulder. Toshikazu reached up and rested his own hand on hers. His palm was cool and smooth. With surprise, she felt a sudden warmth grow in her chest, spreading down to her stomach.
Toshikazu must have sensed the change, maybe seen it in her eyes, because he removed his hand from hers and pushed the chair back from the computer. When he stood up, his smile was still there, but it was more formal, as though he’d tightened his control over himself. But there was still warmth in his eyes, she saw. He felt the same thing 1 did, she told herself. What was it? Part of her mind thought she knew what it might be. But now certainly isn’t the time for that. And that, she realized, was why Toshikazu had withdrawn — at least partially — behind his armor of Japanese politeness. We’ll talk about this later, she promised herself. For the moment, though, there were more pressing things to discuss.
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