Fatal Error

by F. Paul Wilson

  Especially frustrating since Rasalom was no longer smoke. The realization that he had been living for the last ten months—at least—right across Central Park from Rasalom had gnawed at Jack since he’d seen that name on the tenants list. He’d been right there. And if he could be located, he could be followed. And if he could be followed, a routine could be established. And if a routine could be established, a trap could be set. And if a trap could be set, one with a big enough payload . . .

  The One becomes the None.

  And then it’s: Okay, Otherness . . . now what?

  They drove the rest of the way in silence.

  Eventually Jack stopped before the cemetery’s locked gates. He expected to wait with Veilleur but the old guy surprised him by opening his door and getting out.

  “Wait. Where are you going?”

  “They should be along soon.”

  “Who?”

  “That’s what I’m here to find out. May I have the gasoline?”

  A cold breeze sliced at Jack as he got out and retrieved the can from behind his seat.

  “You’re gonna freeze your butt off.”

  Veilleur took the can. “I’ll be fine. I’ve endured much colder.”

  Jack noted his heavy topcoat, scarf, homburg, and leather gloves. Yeah, he’d come prepared.

  “You’re sure you don’t want me to wait?”

  “Positive. I think this will work better if I am alone. Can I call you if I need a ride back?”

  “Sure.”

  Veilleur waved with his cane and walked off, following the sidewalk that ran along the cemetery’s high wall. Jack watched him for a moment, then slid back into the car and headed back to the city.

  He turned on the radio and the Stones’ “Miss You” was playing. Loved this song. Usually when it came on he’d empty his head and just follow the bass line. But tonight it made him think of Gia. He wished he was heading to her place instead of his.

  2

  What are the chances? Kewan wondered as he spliced the wires from the garage door opener receiver to the wires from the two blasting caps. Had to be one in a zillion, but still a chance.

  He’d spent the past two days hooking up receivers to the Semtex and C4 he’d positioned earlier in the week. Kewan would have preferred using cell phones, but the high-ups were expecting transmissions to be iffy when kablooie time came, so these were better. Better for the high-ups maybe. Kewan didn’t want to be anywhere near this stuff when it went off. Not that the explosions would cause much damage above ground—maybe a little flying pavement, maybe the world’s worst potholes—but someone might see him and connect him. The cell would be so much easier and safer. He could sit in a bar on the other side of the world and trigger these things.

  At least it was only moderately cold down here. Not like topside where the wind screamed across the fields and scoured the pavement.

  Okay. The wires were all twisted up inside their splice caps. Now the weird part—powering up the receiver.

  Yeah-yeah-yeah. He knew it was crazy, but what if someone driving nearby just happened to press his garage door opener transmitter at the very moment Kewan installed the batteries, and that transmitter just happened to send the same signal programmed into this receiver?

  Kablooie.

  But he’d done a shitload of these and it hadn’t happened yet. So he took a breath and powered it up. Still holding that breath, he duct-taped the receiver to the fiber optic cable, then headed for the manhole.

  Only a couple more left, then he’d go on standby, waiting for the signal to start activating these receivers.

  He stuck his little periscope through one of the holes in the manhole cover. All clear, so he pushed up and crawled out.

  As he trotted for the shadows where the car hid, his heart rate kicked up. Not from exertion but excitement. Not long now before everything started falling apart. And he’d be partly responsible for the breakdown.

  As he drove away he fought the temptation to shove some batteries into the transmitter and press the button. That would guarantee him the honor of firing the first shot. But it also guaranteed him a shitload of trouble if it tipped off the cops and ATF and all the powers that be that trouble was coming.

  No, he’d be patient.

  3

  The phone woke Jack.

  As he thumbed the TALK button he realized with a start that it was morning and he hadn’t heard from Veilleur about a ride back from the cemetery. Had he caught a cab? Not an easy task in Bayside in the wee hours of the morning. He hoped the old guy hadn’t frozen out there. Maybe this was him.

  “Yeah?”

  “Jack, this is Munir.”

  Uh-oh.

  “Trouble?”

  “Yes. But not personal. I think I know what the Jihad virus intends to do.”

  “What?”

  “I will need to show you. Can you come over?”

  “Sure. On my way.”

  Great, he thought as he pulled on some clothes. The first step toward stopping it is figuring out what it’s gonna do.

  He hurried out into the cold, grabbed a coffee from a cart on Amsterdam, and hopped into a cab for Munir’s. On the way to Turtle Bay he called Veilleur.

  “Yes, I’m fine, Jack. Thanks for your concern. I met two fellows who gave me a ride home. In fact they’re here right now. I’m making them breakfast. Care to join us?”

  “Gotta see Munir. He might have figured out something on the virus.”

  “Interesting. Keep me informed.”

  Met two guys . . . brought them home . . . making them breakfast? Was Veilleur losing a few marbles?

  At the Habib apartment, Munir pressed a finger to his lips as he opened the door.

  “Barbara and Robby are still asleep.”

  He led Jack to his study with the multiple computers and monitors, then began tapping on one of the keyboards.

  “I’ve isolated the stolen game code in the virus.”

  “So they’re going to make everyone play World of Warcraft? Or maybe World of Jihadcraft?”

  He said it facetiously but the humor—scant and dubious, he’d admit—was lost on Munir.

  “I told you, I do not believe followers of Islam would countenance what was done to me. It must be someone else.”

  Might as well tell him.

  “It is. The Septimus Order is behind it.”

  He frowned. “Septimus Order . . . I’ve heard of them. Aren’t they like the Elks or the Moose Lodge? Or Masons?”

  “They love you to think that.”

  The frown edged into a faint smile. “Are you going to tell me that they’re a globe-spanning secret society like the Illuminati, plotting to take over the world?”

  “If only.”

  Munir stared at him. “You’re serious.”

  “Deadly—as in Russ, as in Valez. As you said: Well organized, well financed.”

  Munir sat silent for a while, then, “I dismissed you when you said they wanted to bring down the Internet. I thought they wanted to use it for their own purposes, control it rather than destroy it. Mainly because I didn’t think it possible to bring down the Internet. Now . . .”

  This was what Jack had come for.

  “Now what?”

  He shrugged. “If the botnet created by Jihad four/twenty is anywhere near as extensive as theorized, I think they can do it. As a matter of fact, I’m sure they can do it.”

  Jack had suspected this had been the purpose of the virus all along, but to hear it confirmed by a man whose stolen code had been spliced into it . . . chilling.

  “How?”

  “I’ve been baffled from the start as to how an online gaming enhancement program could be of use to hackers. Then I realized they’d utilized only my video transfer protocol and scrapped the rest.”

  “I’m not sure what that means.”

  “I developed a way of rapidly transferring video between a player’s computer and an online game server. It uses a lot of bandwidth while running, but th
e beauty of it is it doesn’t run for long. Russ loved it, called it the ‘primo feature’ of the package. Thinking about it now, I’m sure that was what he must have talked about to his fellow hackers. The wrong person overheard, and now . . . he’s dead and my family’s life is changed forever.”

  Jack saw Munir’s throat work as he blinked a few times. He gave him a moment. Jack felt bad about Russ too. A sweet, harmless guy.

  “Okay,” he said finally, “how does this bring down the Internet?”

  Munir cleared his throat. “By overloading it. I’m not saying this is what the virus intends, but considering that it’s created a billion-unit botnet that has high-bandwidth video transfer capability, that capability could be used to send video back and forth between all the computers on the botnet.”

  “I can see how that would jam up the computers, but how would that affect the Internet?”

  “Imagine all the computers in the botnet simultaneously spewing tons of network traffic. Imagine computers all across the world overloading their ISPs. Not only is each ISP inundated with network traffic, but they keep trying to communicate with servers and Web sites across the world, over and over again, all at the same time. They have tremendous capacity, but they have their limits. Eventually, the whole Net grinds to a halt. Look what happened when Michael Jackson died. There were so many posts and searches about him that Google and Twitter slowed to a crawl. And those were just text, which is nothing compared to video. Even so, they thought they were under a DDoS attack.”

  “That denial of service you told me about?”

  “Yes. A distributed denial of service attack. That’s when hackers stream enormous amounts of data from a botnet at a specific target in an attempt to crash its servers.”

  “Why?”

  “Because they can, I suppose. It’s happened to the social networking sites numerous times; back in 2008 a group called ‘Anonymous’ crashed the Scientology site with a DDoS. If you overload a Web site with too much traffic, eventually it cannot keep up. All the users’ connections to the site time out, and the site appears dead. This Jihad botnet could use my protocol to inundate servers all over the world.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “I’m positive. Since the nineties, experts have worried about demand for bandwidth exceeding the Internet’s capacity. Video transfer demands large amounts and the explosion of video on the Internet has generated no little anxiety. It’s enough of a concern to cause ISPs like AT&T and others to talk about charging extra for high-bandwidth users. So far, the Internet has always been able to expand its capacity to meet growing demand, but I don’t think it’s prepared for what Jihad four/twenty can throw at it.”

  Jack was having a hard time wrapping his mind around this.

  “You’re talking about using something like YouTube to crash the Internet?”

  “I’m talking about bigger, longer, fatter videos than the clips on YouTube. What happens if you miss an episode of your favorite TV show? Used to be you’d have to wait for a rerun. No more. You simply go online and watch it. The days of the movie DVD are numbered. Online film rental services no longer have to ship you a disk, they simply download the film to your computer, or cell phone or iPod. That uses bandwidth—lots of it. Imagine a billion or more devices uploading and downloading video back and forth to each other, over and over.”

  There had to be more to it than that.

  “That will crash the Internet?”

  “If the Jihad botnet encompasses a billion computers—and I believe it has more—that will do it. But I have examined the code and I believe they may have more specific targets—like the root name servers.”

  “The what?”

  “They’re the heart of the Web. When you type in ‘microsoft.com’ or ‘twitter.com,’ those texts need to be translated into numerical IP addresses that computers can read. Knock out those specific servers and the Internet becomes terminally dyslexic. Back in oh-seven a botnet in Southeast Asia mounted a DoS attack on the name servers and managed to damage two. The Jihad botnet is incalculably bigger. It could succeed.”

  “But using video . . . it’s so . . . simple, so obvious. Why hasn’t some nut tried this before?”

  “It only seems simple and obvious when someone points it out, but the execution is anything but. It took a cadre of expert hackers working in concert to come up with a virus that could slip past the best firewalls and create a botnet of sufficient size to make this feasible. And it took a new approach to video transfer—mine, unfortunately—to make it work.”

  “I’d have thought some terrorists—”

  “Terrorists love the Internet. They can’t communicate without it.”

  “Could this have been done without you?”

  Munir nodded. “I think so. But the extra bandwidth my protocol demands makes it irresistible. That was why they came after me.” He shook his head. “I wish to God I’d never learned how to program. If I’d returned home after college as my father had wished, Robby would still have ten fingers.”

  Jack had gone through his share of if-onlies about Emma, and he knew Munir wasn’t seeing this from all angles.

  “If you’d gone back to Saudi Arabia after college, there’d be no Robby.”

  Munir gave him a strange look. “Yes, that’s true. I didn’t think of that.”

  “Is a nine-fingered Robby better than no Robby?”

  Munir nodded. “Most certainly.”

  Jack stared at the monitor and shook his head. Bring the Internet down just by swapping videos. Who’d have thought?

  “Okay,” he said. “Now that we know what they’re going to do, how do we stop them?”

  “Do we know that they’re going to do this? Everything points to that as their purpose but . . .” Munir shrugged. “Why? This Septimus Order must use the Internet itself—to keep in touch with its membership, to . . . it must use it in many, many ways. Everyone does. Why cripple its own operations by bringing it down?”

  Jack couldn’t tell him about the noosphere and the Lady. Munir would think him crazy.

  “Remember the reason you gave for the denial of service attacks? ‘Because they can’? I believe that holds here.”

  Munir kept shaking his head. “But a DoS harms only the target servers. It doesn’t inconvenience the attacker. This does. This . . .” He shot to his feet and began pacing. “Do you realize how much the everyday operations of civilization are tied into the Internet?”

  “Well, there’s email—”

  “Email!” He began flailing his arms. “Email is nothing! Business will slow to a crawl. Companies have gradually been moving their transactions, their databases, their software online, into the cloud. Without the Internet there is no cloud. The computers that run banking, stock trading, transit systems, and traffic control systems communicate and route parts of their operations through the Internet. Communication networks depend on the Internet. We’re not talking about losing eBay and Facebook. We’re talking about commerce and finance and communication and even street traffic grinding to a halt. The result will be chaos.”

  And worse than all that, Jack thought, we’ll lose the Lady.

  “So—” Jack began, but Munir was still rolling.

  “But what makes no sense is that this will all be temporary. Chaos at first, yes, but then a mad scramble to repair the servers and routers and get them back online as soon as possible. Everything is backed up—or should be—and many systems are redundant, so it won’t be terribly long before things are back to normal. The white hats will figure a way to block the botnet and the antivirus companies will release software to disinfect our computers. People will be enormously inconvenienced for days, perhaps weeks, but the status quo will return before very long.”

  Don’t count on it, Jack thought. Not if they’re able to start the Change during the interval. A crashed Internet will be the least of your worries when you find yourself facing the Otherness.

  “You’re sure of that?”

  “No o
ne can say exactly how long. It’s unprecedented. Of course, the botnet will still be out there, ready to do it again. But not for long, I think. A Jihad four/twenty killer will be developed very quickly.” He shrugged. “So what’s the point? Profit? Mischief? To go down in history?”

  No, Jack thought. To end history.

  He said, “We still need to do what we can to stop it, right?”

  “Of course.”

  “Well, that brings us back to the same old question: Do what?”

  “You and I?” Munir frowned. “Nothing by ourselves. But I’m going to call ICANN and NRO and anyone else I can think of and tell them what I know.”

  Jack wondered if he realized what he was getting himself into.

  He held up a hand. “They’re going to want to know how you know what you know. They’re going to suspect you’re part of the plot.”

  Munir stopped his pacing. “They will? Why would they do that?”

  “Hey, you’re an Arab and the virus is named ‘Jihad’ and your code is part of it. That makes you suspecto numero uno in anybody’s book.”

  Munir stood silent in the center of the room with a stricken expression.

  Jack felt for him. “You could do it anonymously.”

  He shook his head. “No. That would be just another crank call. I’ll need a face and a name if I am to be credible. I’ll go in person if I have to, but I must raise the alarm. This cannot be allowed to happen.”

  “Do you think anyone can stop it?”

  “With enough time . . .” He looked at Jack. “Four/twenty is the Prophet’s birthday. Do we have that long?”

  Jack shook his head. “Not a chance.”

  Murnir dropped into a chair and began banging away on his keyboard.

  “Then I’ve no time to waste. I must find the numbers to call.”

  “Think you’ll find anyone on a weekend?”

  He looked up. “What day it is it?”

  “Saturday.”

  “Is it? With all that’s happened, I’ve lost track.” He shook his head. “I’ll try anyway, but I might not reach anyone of consequence until Monday, because no one sees any danger but me.”