The two men entered Stoll’s office.
“This isn’t a sonar blip, Phil.”
“No. And that’s not the relevant part of the story. We started keeping video records of the images for future reference and found that whenever the transmitters were turned on there was an almost imperceptible burst of energy-”
“A start-up surge. That’s common.”
“Right. The point is, the signal had a fingerprint, a signature we could check before running off on a wild whale chase. The computers went down here for almost twenty seconds-you called it a smokescreen, and you may be right. But as I was watching the countdown clock in the Tank, I realized that there’s one eye that wouldn’t have blinked.”
Stoll stood beside his desk. “The computer clock.”
“Right.”
“How does that help us? We know from when to when the shutdown occurred.”
“Think. The satellite continued to store images, even when it couldn’t transmit them to Earth. If we could compare an image from the instant before with one taken an instant after, we might be able to figure out what was done to the system.”
“Theoretically. You’d have to superimpose two at a time and compare them for subtle changes-”
“The same way astronomers search for asteroids moving against a star field.”
“Right,” said Stoll, “and it’d take a long time to compare the dozens of images pixel-by-pixel. We can’t even trust the computer to compare them for us, since it may have been programmed to overlook certain artifacts.”
“That’s just it. We don’t need the computer. All we have to do is study the one set of before-and-after shots. That’s what I meant about the computer clock. It wouldn’t have shut down, even if a virus crawled in.
But it would have taken a fraction of a second for a false image to supplant a real one-”
“Yes, yes.” Stoll said. “Shit, yes. And that would show up in the time-encoding on the photographs. Instead of coming in at-what is it, every .89-odd seconds, there’d be an infinitesimal delay on the first bad egg.”
“And that delay would show up right on the bottom of the photograph.”
“Phil, you’re brilliant.” Stoll reached around and snatched his calculator from the desk. “Okay-the photographs should advance in increments of .8955 seconds. When we find one that’s .001 second late, we have the first of our fakes.”
“You’ve got it. All we have to do is ask NRO to run a check backward until they hit the time discrepancy.”
Stoll dove for his chair, got Steve Viens on the line, and explained the situation. While he waited for Viens to run his time check, Stoll unlocked his desk drawer, pulled out a tray full of diagnostics diskettes, and began his check of the inner workings of the system.
THIRTY-FIVE
Tuesday, 8:55 A.M., Op-Center
Bob Herbert stewed as he rolled his wheelchair into his office. His mouth was locked in a frown, his teeth clenched, his thin eyebrows pinched in the center. He was angry in part because Stoll had been tactless enough to say what he did, but also because, in his heart, Herbert knew that he was right. They were no different, the glitch in software Matt wrote and the breakdown in security he’d helped to organize-they were all part of the same SNAFU scheme of things. You couldn’t avoid it, however hard you tried.
Liz Gordon was right too. Rodgers had once quoted Benjamin Franklin, the gist of which was that we must all hang together or we’ll all hang separately. Op-Center had to run that way, and it was difficult. Unlike the military or NASA or any organization where the people were of a vaguely similar background or orientation, Op-Center was a potpourri of talent, education, experience-and idiosyncrasies. It was wrong and, worse, counterproductive to expect Stoll to act like anyone but Matthew Stoll.
You’re going to give yourself a stroke-
Herbert slid behind his desk and locked the wheels. Without lifting up the receiver, he punched in the name of the U.S. military base in Seoul. The main number and direct lines came up on a rectangular screen below the keypad. Herbert scrolled through them with the * button, stopped at General Norbom’s office, lifted the receiver, and punched # to enter it. He tried to think of what he could say to Gregory Donald, since he had lost his own wife Yvonne, a fellow CIA agent, in the Beirut blast. But words were not his forte. Only intelligence … and bitterness.
Herbert wished he could relax, just a little, but it wasn’t possible. It had been nearly a decade and a half since the blast. The sense of all he’d lost haunted him, every day, though he had gotten used to the wheelchair and to being a single father to a sixteen-year-old girl. What didn’t diminish with time, what was as wrenchingly vivid today as it was in 1983, was the sheer chance of it all. If Yvonne hadn’t popped in to tell him a joke she’d heard on a Tonight Show tape, she would be alive today. If he hadn’t gotten her that Neil Diamond tape, and Diamond hadn’t been on that night, and she had never asked her sister to record it-
It was enough to make his heart sink and his head spin each time he thought about it. Liz Gordon had told him it was best not to, of course, but that didn’t help. He kept going back to that moment when he stood in the music store, asking for anything by the singer who did the song about the heart-light….
General Norbom’s orderly answered the phone and informed Herbert that Donald had accompanied his wife’s body to the Embassy to see to her return to the U.S. Herbert brought up Libby Hall’s number and entered it.
God, how she loved that dopey song. As many times as he’d tried to interest his wife in Hank Williams and Roger Miller and Johnny Horton, she kept going back to Neil Diamond and Barry Manilow and Engelbert.
Hall’s secretary answered and put Herbert through to Donald.
“Bob,” he said, “it’s good to hear from you.”
Donald’s voice sounded stronger than he’d expected. “How are you, Greg?”
“Like Job.”
“I’ve been there, friend. I know what you’re going through.”
“Thanks. Do you know anything more about what happened? They’re working hard at KCIA but coming up short.”
“We’ve, uh, got a bit of a situation here ourselves, Greg. Seems our computers have been violated. We can’t be sure of the data we’re getting, including the pictures from our satellites.”
“It sounds like someone did their homework for today.”
“They did indeed. Now we know what your situation is, and with God himself holdin’ the Bible I swear I’ll understand if you say no. But the chief wants to know if you’d consider going to the DMZ and eyeballing the situation up there firsthand. The President’s put him in charge of the Korea Task Force, and he needs reliable people on the scene.”
There was a brief silence, after which Donald replied, “Bob, if you’ll arrange the necessary clearances through General Schneider, I’ll be available to go north in about two hours. Will that be acceptable?”
“I’m sure it will,” said Herbert, “and I’ll see to the clearances and a chopper. Good luck, Greg, and God bless.”
“And God bless you,” said Donald.
THIRTY-SIX
Tuesday, 11:07 P.M., the DMZ
The Demilitarized Zone between North and South Korea was thirty-five miles north of Seoul and one hundred miles south of Pyongyang. It was established concurrent with the truce of July 27, 1953, and since that time, soldiers from both sides have watched their counterparts with fear and suspicion. At the present time a total of one million soldiers were stationed on either side, most of them housed in modern, air-conditioned barracks. These were arranged in rows and covered nearly two hundred acres, beginning less than three hundred yards from either side of the border.
The zone was demarcated from northeast to southwest by a ten-foot-high chain-link fence on both sides, with another three feet of barbed wire running along the top. Between them was an area nearly twenty feet across from coast to coast-the DMZ itself. Soldiers armed with high-powered rifles and German shepherds patrolled the outer perimeter of both sides. There was only one way through the DMZ, a narrow roadway that was wide enough for just one vehicle to pass; until Jimmy Carter went to Pyongyang in 1994, no individual had ever crossed from this region to the capital of North Korea. The only direct contact between both sides occurred in a one-story structure that resembled the barracks. There was a single door on each side, two guards beside that door, and a flagpole to the left of the guards; inside was a long conference table that, like the structure itself, neatly straddled the border between North and South. On those rare occasions when meetings were held, the representatives from the North remained on their side of the room, the representatives from the South on theirs.