He was wary. “Well—”
“It’s all right. He said you might call.”
“You’ve seen him?”
There was a pause. “Where are you?”
“In front of your building. The Triumph.”
“I’ll come down.”
__________
In the large, chaotic room crammed with computer terminals, monitors, and circuit boards, Marty Zellerbach leaned forward, concentrating. Torn printouts were stacked in messy piles near his chair. A radio receiver emitted low static as it eavesdropped on the squeals and beeps of data transmissions. The drapes were closed, and the air was cool and dry, almost claustrophobic, which was good for Marty’s equipment and the way he liked it. He was smiling. He had used Jon Smith’s codes to connect with the USAMRIID computer system and enter the server. Now the real action began. He felt a deep thrill as he scrolled through the various directories until he found the system administrator’s password file. He gave a little laugh of derision. The data was scrambled.
He exited and found the file that revealed that the USAMRIID server used Popcorn— one of the latest encryptors. He nodded, pleased. It was first-rate software, which meant the lab was in good hands.
Except that they had not counted on Marty Zellerbach. Using a program he had invented, he configured his computer to search for the password by scrambling every word from Webster’s Unabridged plus the dialogue of all four Star Wars movies, the Star Trek television series and feature movies, Monty Python’s Flying Circus, and every J. R. R. Tolkien novel— all favorites of cybertechs.
Marty jumped up and paced. He grabbed his hands behind his back, and in his weaving gait he moved around the room as if it were a ship on the high seas and he its pirate captain. His program was incredibly fast. Still, like other mortals, he had to wait. Today the best hackers and crackers could steal most passwords, penetrate even the Pentagon’s computers, and ride like Old West outlaws through the worldwide Internet. Even a novice could buy software that enabled him to invade and attack Web sites. For that reason, major corporations and government agencies continually heightened their security. As a result, Marty now wrote his own programs and developed his own scanners to find system weaknesses and to break through the firewalls that would stop others.
Suddenly he heard his computer ring the tones of the doorbell from the old Leave It to Beaver television show. Ding-dong-ding. With a chuckle, he rushed back to his chair, swiveled to face the monitor, and crowed. The password was his. It was not terribly imaginative— Betazoid, named for the extrasensory natives of the Star Trek planet called Beta. He had not had to use his more sophisticated password cracker, which included a number randomizer and avoided all real words. With the system administrator’s password file, he acquired the system’s internal IP— Internet Protocol— address as well. Now he had the blueprint to USAMRIID’s computer network, and soon he was “root,” too, which meant he had access to every file and could change and delete and trace all data. He was God.
For him, what Jon Smith had asked was not child’s play, but it was not climbing Mount Everest either. Quickly Marty scanned all the E-mail messages from the Prince Leopold Institute, but each reported failure to find a match for the new virus. Those files were not what Jon wanted. To most people’s eyes, if there was anything else from the lab, it had been completely erased. Gone forever. They would give up now.
Instead, Marty sent another search program to look in the spaces and cracks between data. As more data was inputted onto a system, the new overwrote the old, and once data was overwritten, it supposedly was not retrievable. When his program could find no evidence of any other E-mail from the Belgium lab, Marty figured that was probably what had happened in this case.
He threw back his head and stretched his arms high to the ceiling. His medication had worn off. A thrill rushed through him as his brain seemed to acquire diamondlike clarity. He looked down, and his fingers flew over the keyboard in a race to keep up with his thoughts. He instructed his program to do a different search, this time focusing on bits of the name, E-mail address, and other identifying qualities. With incredible speed, the program searched… and there it was— two tiny pieces of the laboratory’s name— opold Inst.
With a shout, he followed the E-mail’s footprints— traces of data and numbers, almost a scent to Marty— to NIH’s Federal Resource Medical Clearing House and a terminal accessed only by the password of the director, Lily Lowenstein. From there, he painstakingly tracked the prints forward to the Prince Leopold Institute itself.
His green eyes flashed as he bellowed: “There you are, you frumious beast!” It was a reference to Lewis Carroll and the Jabberwock. In a hidden backup file buried deep within the institute’s system language he had located an actual copy of the report.
The report had been E-mailed from the Prince Leopold Institute of Tropical Medicine to Level Four labs across the world. After a quick glance, it was evident Jon might find this useful. That decided, Marty tried to trace the E-mail elsewhere. He frowned as the evidence mounted: Someone had erased it not only from its origination site in the central computer of the Prince Leopold Institute but also at the addresses of the various recipients. Or that was what was supposed to have happened. And that was what the average computer nerd, the ordinary hacker, even most electronic security experts would have found.
But not Marty Zellerbach. They came to him— the other cyberspace wizards— for solutions to problems not yet seen and for insights into what had never been done. He had no titles— beyond his Ph.D.s in quantum physics and mathematics and his degree in literature— and he worked for no one but himself. Like a whale trapped on land, in the physical world he flopped and gasped and was an object of pity or derision, but deep in the electronic waters of the cyberocean, he slid sleek and powerful. There he was king— Neptune— and lesser mortals paid homage.
Laughing happily, he flourished his finger like a duelist’s sword and jumped to his feet. He punched the print command. As he spun a lopsided pirouette, the machine spat out the report. For Marty, there was nothing quite so satisfying as doing something no one else could. It was small recompense for a life lived alone, and in his quiet moments he occasionally considered that.
But in the end… the truth was he looked down upon the leadfooted, numb-headed folks who judged him while living “ordinary” lives and having “relationships.” Good grief, despite his Asperger’s syndrome, despite his need for drugs, he figured in the last fifteen years of seldom venturing beyond the walls of his bungalow, he had had more relationships than most people in a lifetime. What in heaven’s name did the idiots out there think he had been doing? Geesh. What did they think E-mail was for? Dumb!
Grabbing the report, he waved it aloft like the head of a slain enemy. “Monster virus, none can defeat the paladin. And I am The Paladin! Victory is mine!”
A half hour later, footprints from the same FRMC terminal led him straight into the antiquated electronic network of the Iraqi government and to a series of reports a year ago concerning an outbreak of ARDS. He printed out those, too, and continued to prowl through the Iraqi cybersystem searching for reports of anything like the virus as far back as Desert Storm. But there was nothing else to find.
Sophia Russell’s telephone records were a tougher challenge. He found no intruder footprints in the Frederick phone system. If there had been a record of an unaccounted-for call from Sophia Russell’s line to an outside destination, it had been erased from inside the company and every trace removed.
All attempts to find Bill Griffin through college, medical, social security, or any other private or public part of his past had turned up the same message: Address unknown. So Marty launched into the FBI system, which he had penetrated so often his computer could almost do it on its own. His time was limited before they would trace him, because their Intruder Detection System (IDS) was one of the best. He popped in long enough to see that Griffin’s official record showed termination for cause. If there were any secret arrangements, Marty found none— no clandestine reports, no pay vouchers, no code passwords, and nothing else to indicate Griffin was undercover. However, the record was flagged, and there was a notation: Griffin’s listed address was no longer valid, the Bureau had no current address, and one should be obtained.
Boy, Griffin was really something. Even the FBI wondered where he was.
Far tougher than the FBI’s firewall and IDS was the army intelligence system. Once Marty breached the firewall, he had to dash in, read the personnel file, and dash out. He found no current address. Marty scratched his head and pursed his lips. It seemed to him Griffin had not only wanted to vanish, but he had had the expertise to do it. Shocking.