“Dr. Kriegel and Mr. Briner are here to see you.” Roberta’s throaty voice warmed the area around his desk.
“Thank you, Roberta. Allow them to enter, please.”
Daniel looked up from his keyboard and flashed a smile as the two men entered the office. “Gentlemen—I trust all is going well?”
“Things are great, Daniel.” Taylor dropped into one of the empty chairs before Daniel’s desk and pulled a mechanical pencil from behind his ear.
“Things are moving along at a prodigious rate,” the professor added, perching on the edge of his chair. He looked around, distracted, then slid slowly back, apparently ill at ease.
“Is something wrong, Professor?” Daniel asked.
Kriegel pushed at his glasses. “No, not really. It’s just that this office smells different than mine.” He looked over at Taylor. “Do you notice it?”
“Um, Dr. Kriegel—” color rose in Taylor’s cheeks—“maybe it’s the cat box. Mr. Prentice’s office doesn’t have one.”
“Oh.” The professor’s eyes widened. “Yes, that could account for it. Very good. Yes, I see.” He nodded, then folded his hands in his lap and looked at Daniel. “We’re glad you’re back. Rather dull around here without you.”
“How was Washington?” Taylor’s eyes glowed with envy. “How was the White House? You’ll have to write up a little something about your trip; everyone wants to know all about it.”
“Soon enough.” Daniel grinned at his eager assistant. “You’ll get full details, I promise, but right now I’d like to talk about something else.” Shifting in his chair, he approached the matter that had been bothering him for several days. “Gentlemen, we have a security leak. I don’t know how, but not only did the Feds manage to obtain a copy of the Millennium Code, but they tapped my calls the entire time I was in Washington. Roberta caught them whenever I called the office, but I want to know how they did it.” He bent his head slightly forward and caught the professor’s eye. “I especially want to know who sold them the Millennium Code.”
“Oh, dear.” The professor went pale. “Surely none of our people—”
“The Feds had a copy of the Millennium Code the morning after you demonstrated it for me, Dr. Kriegel.” Daniel leaned back in his chair and dropped his hands to the armrests. “It was running on the network monitors when I arrived. Who ran it through the network? And how did the Feds get a copy?”
Taylor furrowed his brow and tapped his pencil on his thigh. The professor frowned and scratched behind his ear. Daniel felt their frustration; he’d been wrestling with the problem for two days.
Taylor spoke first. “A diskette?” He lifted one brow. “I know we don’t have floppies on our computers, but maybe someone brought in a portable zip drive and hooked it in.”
“There’s an alarm; Roberta would have noticed the new device and reported it,” the professor said, shaking his head. “No way could anyone hook into the system. But perhaps someone managed to override the network or the e-mail system. They could have sent the file over a modem. . . .”
Daniel turned to his computer. “Roberta?”
“Yes, Mr. Prentice?”
“Check your records for the twelve hours between 9:00 P.M. on November sixth to 9:00 A.M. November seventh, please.”
“Checking, Mr. Prentice. Data is loaded.”
“Report any unusual activity, please.”
“There are no unusual entries, sir.”
“Look for modem transmissions, please.”
“No modem transmissions.”
“Look for e-mail, please.”
“No messages until 6:48 A.M. Forty-four messages between that time and 9:00 A.M.”
“Report outbound messages only, please.”
“One message, sent 8:05 to Jokeaday at Joke.com.”
Daniel shook his head. This was ordinary stuff, nothing unusual. “Report employees present in the building after midnight, November seventh, please.”
“One employee present: Dr. Howard Kriegel.”
The professor leaned forward. “I slept here that night, I remember. And I left my computer powered on, of course, but I don’t remember setting it to run on the network. There were still a few adjustments to be made, and we hadn’t even begun to debug the beta version.”
“Roberta—” Daniel swiped his hand through his hair in frustration— “report Susan McGuire’s arrival time, please.”
“You suspect Mrs. McGuire?” Taylor asked, his brow lifting.
“I don’t know what to think, but she’s new, and she came in late that morning—with me.” Daniel pressed his fingertips together. “She could have loaded the program onto the network, gone out to alert a waiting accomplice with some kind of eavesdropping laser, then returned as I was coming in.”
Roberta interrupted his thoughts. “On Friday, November seventh, Mrs. Susan McGuire entered at 9:56 A.M.”
“Report any earlier entries for Susan McGuire, please.”
“No data available in the specified twelve-hour field.”
Daniel rubbed the bridge of his nose, simultaneously troubled and relieved. He had hoped that Susan McGuire would prove to be the leak. Though he’d be disappointed to lose one of his people, it’d be a relief to know how his system had been infiltrated. He was beginning to suspect that Roberta was no longer impenetrable. What had Brad said? You’re a genius, Daniel, but you don’t have a criminal mind.
Obviously, a good defense was no match for a cutting-edge offense.
Unless—had Brad lied to him? Perhaps he had learned about the Millennium Code through another source. After all, by the time he told Daniel about the supposed leak several people knew about the program and its success, including Ernest Schocken of First Manhattan. Maybe his phones were tapped, and maybe Brad was bluffing about Prentice Technology’s vulnerability.
But Schocken hadn’t known about Daniel’s trip to Canada . . . or exactly when Daniel had first seen the program. And Brad knew both details. And someone had definitely been eavesdropping on his calls from Washington.
“Taylor,” he turned to his assistant, “find out everything you can about the latest surveillance systems and wireless interception. I want to know everything going on in this field—legal and illegal.”
Taylor clicked his mechanical pencil. “Got it.”
“What would you like me to do?” The professor crinkled his nose. “The Millennium Code is running like a dream.”
“Professor, I need you to begin a much bigger project. And if you’ll permit me to change the subject for a moment, I’ll explain it.” Daniel pulled a folder of notes from his briefcase, then slid them across the desk toward the professor. “We need to devise a code that will convey the most useful specifics of an individual’s life history—medical and financial records, DNA markers, voice- and fingerprints. I need you to sift through all the available data and let me know which will be most feasible to include in a human personal identification chip. I believe we’re about to begin the mass production of human PIDs.”
“A government contract?” Taylor’s eyes widened. “We got a government contract?”
Daniel returned Taylor’s smile in full measure. “It’s bigger than that, Taylor. If Congress approves the president’s legislation—and it’s a certain bet they will, with the year 2000 breathing down their necks—we’ll be the senior contractors for the entire nation. And, if all goes well when I travel to Brussels in January, we may very well find ourselves in charge of PIDs for the entire world.”
Daniel smiled when both men gaped at him in astonishment.
“But before you breathe a word of this, Taylor, write up a memo guaranteeing triple time for any hourly employees willing to work through weekends, on Thanksgiving, and Christmas Eve. We’ll let the hourlies have Christmas Day off, but I’d like to have the Millennium Chip specs ready for production teams by December thirty-first.”
“Triple time for those willing to work that night?” Taylor asked, his pencil driving furiou
sly across his notepad.
“No.” Daniel looked at the professor and grinned. “Book a band and call a caterer for New Year’s Eve. If all goes according to plan, we’ll spend that night celebrating with the biggest party Mount Vernon has ever seen.”
FIFTEEN
10:00 P.M., Thursday, December 31, 1998
LAUREN MITCHELL HISSED IN EXASPERATION AS SHE BENT AND YANKED ON THE hem that kept catching on her narrow heel. If she couldn’t manage to make it from the taxi to the entrance of Prentice Technologies without snagging her heel on this ridiculously expensive designer dress, how could she expect to get through a gala New Year’s Eve party?
“You okay there, Miss Mitchell?” The gray-haired limo driver shifted in the front seat and gave her a look of worried concern.
Lauren slipped her hem free and opened her sequined evening bag. “Yes, fine. I’d like to give you a little something for your trouble—”
The driver waved his hand. “No thank you, ma’am, that’s not necessary. Mr. Prentice takes good care of me.”
Lauren snapped her bag shut, her embarrassment turning quickly to annoyance. She was behaving more like a country bumpkin than a polished Washington insider. She would feel more together if she’d had more time to prepare for this evening, but Daniel’s invitation had come only yesterday . . . and, like a fool, she had accepted.
“One moment, ma’am, and I’ll get your door.”
As the driver stepped out of the car and circled around to the curbside, Lauren took a deep breath and tried to steady her pounding heart. Some part of her wanted to run back to the Washington sharks and barracudas, where she felt safe. Her boss, her friend, was the president of the United States; and though the Washington waters might boil with trouble and turmoil, she lived in the safe shadow of an upright man. But here—this techno-world was Daniel’s turf, and Lauren had no idea where she stood with him. Tonight she would be surrounded by his friends and his brilliant employees, few of whom would appreciate or even care about her Washington connections. Surrounded by bona fide geniuses, she’d probably be babbling like an intimidated ingenue long before midnight.
The chauffeur opened the door, and Lauren took another deep breath and stepped out onto the sidewalk. The headquarters of Prentice Technology rose like a white monument before her, a clean, spare building of gleaming white stone. Double glass doors and a brass marker adorned the entrance. She glanced around, looking for a doorman or security guard, but the driver motioned toward a small box just to the right of the marker.
“Just go there, Miss Mitchell, and lift the lid. Place your thumb into the tiny oval, and—well, it might be easier if I just show you.”
“I can manage, thank you.” Lauren clutched her purse, then walked forward on legs that suddenly felt as insubstantial as air. Why had she come? She’d been flattered by Daniel’s invitation, surprised at the e-mail that flashed across her screen. It was a clever bit of work, animated and enhanced by sound. Maybe it was the old song “Close to You” that did it, or the simple fact that Daniel had written, “Got Brad married off and on his way. Would love to spend New Year’s Eve with you in Mount Vernon . . . because I miss you.”
Those three little words had been her undoing. Because she had missed him, too.
She lifted the lid of the little box, then hesitantly pressed her thumb to the red oval. She had seen fingerprint scanners before, but how in the world had Daniel managed to snag her thumbprint?
She tucked the question away as the touchpad glowed beneath her thumb. Nothing Daniel did should surprise her. He could have lifted her fingerprints off any object she’d given him, or perhaps he had some sort of arrangement with the FBI. The monstrous bureau computers held more than 100 million sets of fingerprints of anyone who had ever been arrested, applied to adopt a child, enlisted in the military, or applied for a security clearance or a weapons permit. Cab drivers, bus drivers, civil service employees, criminals, and cops. In Washington, it would have been harder to find someone not in the bureau computer than in it.
The gray box beneath her thumb hummed for a moment, then the touchpad flashed green. A pleasant, well-modulated female voice drifted out across the sidewalk. “Good evening, Miss Lauren Mitchell. My sensors indicate that you are not alone.”
“No.” Lauren absently waved her hand over her shoulder. “The limo driver is here, too.”
“Please advance through the front doors, but be advised that the second door will not open unless the individual with you is cleared for admittance.” The voice paused, then added, “Mr. Prentice is waiting for you in the auditorium.”
The limo driver caught her eye as she turned. “I know the drill,” he said, smiling as he moved back to the driver’s side of the car. “And I’ll take off, seeing as how you won’t get in unless I leave.”
Lauren forced a smile to her lips. “It appears you are right. But thank you very much for your help.”
The man paused outside his door. “You’ll be fine, Miss Mitchell,” he said, his eyes twinkling with elderly gallantry. “Don’t be nervous. Mr. Prentice is a very nice man.”
Lauren lifted her chin, mortified by the thought that this man could see how anxious she was. “I’m not the least bit worried.” To prove her lie, she pulled on the first door and stepped inside the narrow vestibule between the two glass entrances. A sensor above the inner door glowed red, then flickered green as the limo pulled away. When Lauren pulled on the second silver handle, it opened easily.
She stepped into a carpeted vestibule, as elegant and understated as the building’s exterior. A clean-cut white sculpture stood on a black marble dais in a sea of emptiness. There was no reception desk, no sofa or coffee table, no magazines scattered about for waiting clients. Presumably everyone who entered through those double doors knew exactly where to go.
Lauren sighed in relief when a young man in a tuxedo appeared from behind a pillar. “May I take your coat, Miss Mitchell?” he asked, extending his hand.
How did he know her name? As she walked toward him, Lauren was half-tempted to reach out and pinch his arm to make certain Daniel hadn’t installed an android to man his coatroom, but the blue eyes that twinkled at her seemed human enough.
“Roberta told me you were coming in.” The young man answered her unspoken question as he helped her out of her coat. “And Mr. Prentice asked me to watch for you. He asked me to be certain you were properly greeted and sent upstairs.”
Lauren listened with a vague sense of unreality. If Daniel cared so much, why wasn’t he down here waiting for her?
“Allow me to show you the way.” The young man tossed her coat over his arm, then stepped across the gleaming marble floor to the elevator. He motioned toward the call button. “You’ll have to press the button yourself,” he said, his tone slightly apologetic. “And just tell Roberta that you’d like the fourth floor. That’s where the auditorium is located.”
“I feel like Alice in Wonderland,” Lauren whispered, half-laughing as she reached out and pressed the call button. “Everything in this place ought to be labeled ‘press me.’”
The pleasant female voice Lauren had heard earlier floated from a brass-plated speaker. “Good evening, Miss Mitchell. Welcome to Prentice Technologies.”
Winging a smile toward the helpful young man who had taken her coat, Lauren stepped into the elevator and bit her lip as the doors glided closed. Again, the robot—or whatever it was—spoke. “Where would you like to go?”
“The fourth floor.” Lauren tilted her head, waiting for the familiar hum and whir of an elevator, but heard nothing. She marveled, wondering how Daniel had managed to invent a silent elevator. Then she realized the car had not moved.
“That is an inappropriate response.” The voice sounded slightly chiding. “Miss Mitchell, where would you like to go?”
“The fourth floor,” Lauren repeated. “The auditorium. Wherever Mr. Prentice is.”
“That is an inappropriate response.” No doubt about it, irritation defi
nitely laced the intrusive voice. “Miss Mitchell, where would you like to go?”
Lauren moved to the doors and slid her hands over the brass walls, hoping for some hidden control panel, for some button to bypass the voice-controlled system. But there were no controls on the inside of the car, no phone, nothing whatever of use.
“That is an inappropriate response,” the computer repeated. “You will be returned to the main foyer unless you respond correctly within thirty seconds. Where would you like to go?”
Sighing, Lauren sank to the back wall and felt the cold brass through the sheer fabric of her dress. “The auditorium,” she murmured, no longer caring if she reached Daniel or not. “Anywhere. Just get me out of here. Please.”
At once the elevator began a swift ascent, and the doors slid open a moment later. Puzzled, Lauren stepped out into a carpeted hall and spied a pair of wide doors across the hallway. Under the word Auditorium was another touchpad.
“Touch me,” she murmured wearily, moving forward to press her thumb to the pad.
To her surprise, the doors swung open instantly. She caught her breath, gripped her purse, and then glided inside. Several knots of people, many of them dressed quite casually for New Year’s Eve in New York, milled around with fluted glasses in their hands. One man, an elderly fellow in a white lab coat, squinted up at a much taller lady who seemed intent upon lecturing him in a technical language Lauren didn’t understand. She moved to the wall and slowly surveyed the room from right to left. She saw no sign of Daniel.
Lauren turned toward the door, her heart sinking. She had been wrong to come, and she’d only make a fool of herself if she remained. Daniel Prentice was brilliant and delightful, but this techno-wonderland left Lauren feeling as helpless as a kitten up a tree. Her work involved people and politics, not machines and mathematics. These people probably solved technical equations in their sleep, while Lauren wondered if she and her computer had confused the master/servant relationship every time her desktop flashed an error message.
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