Now the director was smiling too. “And they didn’t?”
“No ma’am they did not. So some slimy little newt comes along, uses the password to set up his own accounts and starts helping himself to all the free computer time he can carry. Now they’ve found it, they’re embarrassed and they’re scared it’s a major security breach so they want us to nail the little sucker.”
The director was still smiling. Bureaucratically this was better and better. Not only did No Such Agency need a favor-it didn’t have law enforcement powers and couldn’t arrest the system breaker even if it could find him-but the problem was the result of a bone-headed blunder by their people. When the FBI cleaned up this mess No Such Agency would owe them big time.
“In fairness to them,” Conklin’s boss broke in, “it was an easy thing to overlook. The system has only been operational a few weeks and since the firewall doesn’t have any users there was no reason to check the password file.”
The director shook her head. She wasn’t interested in being fair to No Such Agency, she was interested in milking this for all it was worth. Unless . . .
“Is this really a national security problem? I mean is there a possibility the main system was penetrated by an outside agency?”
Conklin shook his head. “That’s what No Such Agency is afraid of, but that’s a bunch of professional paranoids playing Cover Your Ass. Fundamentally this was a dumb stunt, the sort of thing a fourteen-year-old kid would do from his Macintosh. There’s no sign of any other tampering with the system or of any attempt to get from the firewall back to the main system. I’m ninety-nine percent sure it’s a run-of-the-mill newt.”
“But not one hundred percent sure? Then of course we need to pursue it.” And put those arrogant SOBs even further in our debt, she thought. “What are the chances we can catch this, uh, ‘newt’?”
“If he keeps using those accounts, about a hundred percent. That’s why No Such Agency hasn’t canceled them. We’re watching, waiting and tracing him back.”
* * *
“I don’t understand,” Moira said. “If Wiz is talking to us ‘real-time,’ as you say, why is it harder to track him in chat than when he sends us messages?”
Moira was sitting with the programmers in their workroom. She tried to spend as little time there as possible to let them work in peace. So she only popped in a dozen or so times a day. Jerry had rigged a panic button to summon her and any of them who weren’t in the room if they got a message from Wiz, but Moira still checked constantly.
Danny shook his head and compressed his lips into a tight line. “It shouldn’t be, but Wiz got real clever. He’s using a program called IRC to chat and he’s connecting through the freenet in Cleveland. Dialing in on the phone system to one of the freenet’s numbers and using their IRC facility.”
“But you said if you could get back to the telephones in your world you could easily find where he is tapping in from our world,” Moira said plaintively.
“And normally we could. We can use the software built into a digital phone switch to let us trace someone’s connection point in about three seconds.” He made a face. “Problem is, Wiz knows it too.”
Jerry nodded. “It’s as if he’s deliberately making this as hard as he can.”
Moira’s mouth quirked up in something that wasn’t quite a smile. “Most likely he is. If the geas commands that he keep his location secret then he will bend all his efforts to that end. He cannot deliberately go against the geas.”
“Anyway,” Danny said, “Wiz always said he didn’t know much about how we tapped into the phone system.”
“That’s because he didn’t want to know,” Jerry said. “The whole thing’s blatantly illegal.”
“So what are they going to do? Send the FBI to arrest us?”
“His conscience bothered him.”
Danny shrugged. “Anyway, he must have understood more than I thought. See, we can use the automatic trace facility in the switch to find him, provided he’s coming in through a digital switch. Digital phone switches are just about universal in the United States so I took that as a given.”