Judgement Read online

  He took a lot more care at the main gate, pulling over into the parking bay by the guard post and walking over to explain things. By the time he got to the department it was 9:30.

  'Bob, you look awful!' Nancy's brow knitted with concern.

  'Yeah, right,' he said as he walked by.

  'Robert Leith, Special Agent returns from assignment,' he heard DeMarco say as he entered the office.

  Morgan looked up from his desk. 'Where the fuck's my jeep?'

  Leith jerked a finger back over his shoulder. 'Out in the lot.' He tossed him the keys and headed for his desk as Morgan hurried out.

  'Leith strode manfully forward despite his shattered thigh, still aching from Chenkov's bullets.''

  'Hey, come on, Bob,' Slattery pouted at him from the library desk, 'what’s been happening?'

  'I don't want to talk about it.' Leith was already logging on.

  'Ooh hev...vvyyy,' DeMarco winked at Slattery.

  Their chatter slid out of his mental focus as the familiar feeling of immersion came over him. Sometimes he thought of his work as an intellectual swamp, sucking him in, becoming all of his universe. Today it had an even greater pull.

  Garner's name drew a blank but Guin did show up as tagged because he had worked for two years at Sydell Aerospace. Sydell handled a few military contracts so all their workers were tagged automatically. Guin had left the firm nearly a year ago.

  Leith checked Social Security and IRS databases and downloaded the data into a buffer file. He initiated an auto-search through all the criminal records databanks, then started to read through the files he had already retrieved.

  Neither men had ever claimed off Social Security and only Guin had ever paid any taxes. That had been during his time at Sydell. Guin was twenty-five and had got married when he was twenty-one, divorcing less than a year later. He had one child who was in the custody of the mother, a Caroline Mendoza who lived in Syracuse. Garner had never married.

  He accessed the CIA's US graduate directory and found that Garner had graduated in Politics from Ohio State, and Guin in Electronics from Case Western Reserve. Then his terminal beeped and he saw the auto-search had returned with a big zero.

  'You've put nearly a thousand miles on the clock. Where the fuck've you been, Mars?' Morgan looked angry but curious.

  Leith turned away from the screen. 'I'll make it up to you. I promise. I need to do some work right now but I'll tell you all about it later.'

  Morgan stared for a few seconds then walked off.

  Leith sighed. He'd hoped to get more meat on the first scan. Now he would have to leave the well-beaten paths and investigate the data backwaters of school, medical and municipal records. It was going to take a while.

  Hesitating, thinking that maybe he should check in with Nevis, he suddenly had an idea. He laughed because it was such a long shot and he knew he was just searching for some displacement activity. The debriefing with Nevis was sure to be intense and uncomfortable, and he wanted to put it off for a little longer.

  Faking up a standard IRS request probe, he slipped into a Sydell payroll port in Cambridge, Maryland. The data was read-only in case energetic employees took it into their heads to hack a pay increase, but that wasn't his intention. In the few seconds the port was open for an apparently legitimate read, he exposed it to 'Trojan Horse' Version 92/3.

  The worm fired in a series of responses, trying to tease out an error message that would identify the operating system. It took three goes: each time the system timed out after two seconds when the phantom IRS probe could not come up with a mutually recognised password, but if finally gave itself away.

  The name of the operating system came as no surprise to him. It was one of the most common and had had a trapdoor inserted right from the time it was created. He didn't need the worm to tell him the access code.

  He initiated one more access using the trapdoor, and the system rolled over like a puppy and waited for him to scratch it's belly.

  Sydell's computing was performed on a distributed basis with periodic data backup to a central depository. That could only be used for reconstituting the whole system after a crash, and was not open to access. He would have to flip around the network to find the information he wanted.

  Individual workstation nodes usually always gave priority to local tasks. That prevented someone from the other side of the country bulling in and screwing up the data and software. But electronic mail was always allowed in and dumped into a low priority buffer where it would wait patiently and uncomplaining until it was read.

  The mail Leith sent was much more aggressive. It contained a worm that fired interrupts which broke it out of the buffer and into the core, paralysing the local system and locking out operator input. The paralysis lasted for a couple of seconds while the worm looked for any mention of Guin: relevant files were mailed out to one of Langley's isolated data dumps in case the worm returned other potentially infective worms or viruses. The data was finally dumped out as hard copy onto Leith's printer.

  It turned out Guin had spent all his time at Sydell employed at the Cambridge cabin refurbishing facility. Leith reaccessed the system at Cambridge to find out more about the place.

  'Want a cup of coffee?' asked Slattery, laying a cup down by his elbow.

  'Yeah, thanks,' he smiled up at her. She leaned close to look at his screen, the smell of her perfume cutting through his preoccupation.

  'Mmmmm, Margaret, did I ever tell you that you smell gorgeous?'

  'Every Christmas party, without fail.' She laid a hand on his shoulder. 'What's so interesting about Sydell?'

  'Just a hunch. Follow on from the weekend.'

  'Hey, don't look so unhappy. What did happen at the weekend?'

  His expression must have conveyed a lot. Her eyes blinked wide. 'Don't tell me it really was rough,' she sounded incredulous. Maybe Nevis was right, he thought: maybe they had it too soft.

  He nodded miserably. 'It was for me.'

  She looked like she was struggling to contain her excitement. 'Want to talk about it?'

  'In a while. Not right now.'

  She nodded but seemed reluctant to go. She bent down until her head was next to his shoulder. 'Whenever you're ready,' she whispered, then she was gone.

  Distracted, he glanced back at the screen trying to remember what he had been doing. The worm had found ten files in the main management directory with either 'cabin' or 'refurbishment' in their titles. He chose one that had both, and got what looked like a sales document.

  The text was ripe with bullshit, but said essentially that the Sydell facility in Cambridge was devoted to undercutting aeroplane manufacturers in fitting out the interiors of aircraft. They installed or replaced seats, hand luggage lockers, bulkhead mouldings and all the other aspects of cabin decor members of the travelling public could dirty up.

  Guin had a degree in electronics. Why had he been pissing about with upholstery? Leith felt a tingle of excitement.

  Data from worksheets more than a few months old weren't kept in the core memory of the local system. They were downloaded monthly to a commercial firm that sold encrypted-access storage space on multi-terabyte servers: security would be a lot more stringent.

  The company’s name was Telenetto, based in Seattle. But every time a company like this one started looking to the banks for money to set up a system, the NSA would start to ease its way in with money from its own astronomical budget. Communications engineers, like most other engineers and scientists, were relatively poorly paid. Ten million dollars could buy just about any of them, especially if it was said to be in the interests of national security.

  So there were trapdoors built in, and the NSA had already leased several address nodes. All he had to do was fake up a transfer via Telenetto’s Vancouver facilities and insert the trapdoor code as part of the input address. The system would open and he could send in the appropriate worm.

  But there was a big problem: the switching system Leith need to gain acce
ss had been carefully designed so that it could not read more than the first small section of any stream. The customers would have it no other way. Under the circumstances, all his worm could do was redirect the data for a fixed time to Leith's dump. He could then search through all the captured data until he found Telenetto's code for Sydell in Seattle, provided it had been accessed during that time. He could use that for his own access request. But while the data was being redirected ...

  'Oh my God! You're not going to do what I think you're going to do?'

  Startled, Leith swivelled round in his chair. DeMarco was gaping at the screen, his light brown eyes flicking over Leith's command set. To skilled eyes it was all there. Leith hit the screen clear button but it was way too late.

  'Do what?'

  'Take Telenetto Vancouver down! You've got to be crazy!'

  Leith hesitated. 'I'm on to something here.'

  'What?'

  'I'll let you know.'

  'Hey pal, I'm senior to you.'

  'Only just.'

  'Maybe, but with Nevis at Division I'm in charge.'

  That was a break. DeMarco was going to squeal on him, whatever happened, but it would take time to get in touch with Nevis. The monthly Divisional Committee meetings were considered sacrosanct.

  'How long?' DeMarco's voice was getting louder.

  'Hey, quieten down. Ten seconds at the most.'

  'JESUS!' Out of the corner of his eye he could see Morgan and Slattery looking round.

  The tip of DeMarco's forefinger was now just an inch from the tip of his nose. 'I forbid you to do this!'

  Leith stood up so he was towering over DeMarco. 'Eat shit and die!'

  DeMarco whirled and strode quickly to his desk, shoving aside Morgan who was wandering over to see what the fuss was about.

  Leith knew he hadn't long. His fingers were flickering over the keys even before he sat down.

  All the data redirected would be lost as far as Telenetto's legitimate customers were concerned. He could have set up another circuit and sent all the data on a merry-go-round of satellites, cables and ground stations all the way back to Vancouver, but that would have been fatal to Telenetto's credibility. Data streams were timed to the fraction of a microsecond and the extra delay, the mismatch between transmission and reception, would be clear evidence that the data had been tampered with.

  Better to let the customers think there had been a system failure, that the data had genuinely been lost. But Telenetto couldn't put up with too many losses like that. It might go out of business and customers might go to one of the nets inaccessible to the NSA. And that, in intelligence eyes, would be a crime.

  DeMarco was right. He was crazy, blinded with an obsession that had blown up out of nowhere.

  He should be trying for clearance from the NSA boys, though he knew they would refuse. His idea was too far-fetched, too dependent on coincidence. The information would have to be sought through conventional means. Court orders for data access would have to be served on Sydell and it could take weeks.

  He fired off the initiating transfer and started to pray to the god of data pirates. He was taking Telenetto Vancouver down for ten whole seconds; if Seattle was not accessed in that time by a legitimate user, or if it turned out the place was only a small, little-used reservoir of data rather than Sydell's main dump, then he was lost.

  The buffer overflowed just before the datastream was switched off. He sent in a worm searching for the name Sydell.

  'What's going on?' he heard Morgan ask, but ignored him.

  It was there — a request from a Sydell subsidiary in San Antonio, Texas. He copied the passwords, quickly changing the return address to the Cambridge plant and inserted a request for all the jobs on which Guin, Terence, Employee Code G2/398 had worked during his time at Sydell. Then he hacked back into the Cambridge mainframe.

  When the answer came, the Trojan Horse directed it through a network node at Cambridge and out onto another commercial data link. The worm then eradicated itself, erasing behind it all the tracks it had made. Its final act before disappearing into oblivion was to update the IT department’s directory of trapdoors so that access would be faster if the CIA wanted into Sydell again.

  Leith took one look at the list and felt wonderful. The name Taurus Airlines appeared seven times out of the twelve jobs Guin had been involved with: the company had come about after a government sell-off in the late 90's — just one of many measures introduced to clip the Defence Budget.

  The army had originally run its own transportation service to take soldiers and their wives out to foreign postings, and to this end bought a variety of jets from several major manufacturers but never put them to full use. The fleet had been identified as a loss-maker, and it had been sold as a job lot to a newly founded company called Taurus. Taurus then contracted Sydell to convert the interiors of the aircraft to make them attractive to its civilian customers.

  DeMarco shouted across from his desk. 'It’s Nevis. He orders you to leave Telenetto alone!' Looking over, Leith could see the telephone held out in DeMarco's hand.

  'Too late,' he yelled back.

  Taurus' identification with the US military had served to supplant Pan Am as the favourite target for terrorists. Three of Taurus' wide-bodies, a 747 and two DC10’s had fallen out of the sky over the Atlantic within the last three months. Telephone warnings had come through five minutes before radio contact had been lost with the jets. The calls said a bomb had been planted at their last airports, two at Kennedy and one at Chicago, as a response to Americans meddling in the Middle East and South America. They were calling it the worst air disaster since 9/11.

  'He's on his way, Leith.' DeMarco sounded triumphant.

  Leith tapped into Langley's central distribution mainframe, which was mainly for the benefit of field agents and embassies. It was strictly read only and gave out unclassified data that could be obtained in any public library. Leith ran through the help menu until he got to unsolved terrorist acts, then keyed his way through the branching sub-directories until he got to the Taurus jobs. All three planes' ID codes showed up on Guin's work list.

  Leith put his hands over his eyes and thought furiously back to his college physics courses. Microwaves weren't like radio waves; they were strictly line of site transmission/reception. They had short wavelengths and didn't need big receiver set-ups. Something only a few centimetres across would do: It was conceivable that Guin had built a receiver, perhaps even some kind of focusing reflector arrangement, and hidden it in the cabin mouldings. Signals coming in through the cabin windows would be sent back to a small antenna built into the opposite bulkhead. They could trip a relay to close a timer circuit, giving the plane enough time to get out over the Atlantic. Hermetically sealed plastic explosive welded to the bulkhead or even within the plastic cladding would be undetectable. Bomb detectors worked by setting up resonances in the timing circuits, then detecting the radiation sent back. They never worked too well on planes with all the background emissions, and in any event these circuits would be open in the microwave bomb.

  He clapped his hands loudly together, just as the room door flew open and Nevis hurried in red-faced and breathing hard.

  Leith stood up and spread his arms expansively. 'Stan,' he cried, 'am I glad to see you!'

  INTERCUT 3

  Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

  The heavy scent of the single red rose in its long stemmed crystal holder wafted over Calisto as the maid set the tray down. She placed the coffee pot and the plate with the croissants on the exquisitely veined white marble of the table top, positioning the rose slightly to his right near the starched napkin. The air in the tower, filtered and de-ionised until it was a perfect medium, brought to him untainted the perfume of the fresh flower. He always insisted there should be one flower; it had more of a stimulant effect than his first coffee of the morning.

  He sipped the Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee and listened to the genteel chords of a Bach harpsichord concerto. Thro
ugh the mirrored glass and far below, Rio farted itself into life before going about its squalid business in the humid, clinging air of late spring.

  The tower's air was always slightly chilled, because he liked to wear thicker clothes. Kitted out in his alpaca and worsteds he thought of himself as looking European, like an Englishman in the days before they had lost everything.

  But Calisto's skin was dark, a hint of the favelas and a source of shame. He avoided the sun, scorning the Copacabana and the more exclusive beaches to the North. The growing awareness of the link between sun and skin cancer had been a godsend, allowing him to give full reign to his obsession. The Guardador relentlessly lambasted the sun-worshippers, trying to raise Rio's abysmal tone, but few paid attention; darkening bodies still glistened on the beaches.

  The maid, whose name he had never bothered to ascertain, returned and placed the day's last edition of the Guardador onto the table. She curtsied and left. Calisto set aside his coffee and picked up the newspaper. It was in a tabloid format, with colour available on all pages. When Calisto had taken over as publisher almost twenty years ago, he had invested in modern printing technology, scrapping the older Rohanson presses that needed hordes of sweating men on expensive overtime to set and load. Now, everything was controlled from a network of terminals. Editorial commands were translated into hard metal by automation, and only a few specialist engineers were needed to tend the machines.

  In large print and with many pictures, the Guardador was an easy paper to speed-read. Calisto's eye skimmed through the murders and rapes, the pictures of bare breasted women and the stories of multiple births. The content mattered little, so long as it was not controversial or 'political'. The Guardador would mercilessly flay any minor government official suspected of corruption, giving the rag a crusading flavour. Nosy lefties maintained that the paper was scrupulous in avoiding any investigations into the scandalous lives of the elite. They were right, of course: this was a business he was running.

  He paused as he came to the eight page special in the centre. The large picture under the headline 'Massacre in the Amazon' showed a pile of dead bodies. He smiled.