Page 11.

Chapter 6

During that fine half summer, half autumn weekend in September, a graying Coast Guard specialist sat in a restricted, gloomy basement at the U.S. Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C., working with the world’s most powerful computer. His name was Ibrahim “Ib” Shoob, and he was a head walker. He caught hackers who broke into secure data bases, civilian or military, and got their hands on sensitive information. It was all in a day’s work, as Ib smoked cigarette after cigarette in the Secure Room of the National Systems Security Office (NSSO).

Ib was away from his family for long stretches. By day when the observatory’s silvery domes made flashbulb shots of the noon sun, or by night when the domes glimmered in moonlight, Ib was usually at work stalking his targets. Ib lived for his wife and children, computing, and the Coast Guard, not necessarily in that order. He was grateful to the nation that had sheltered his immigrant parents from the ravages of Lebanon during Israel-Hezbollah campaigns. They were an industrious family of merchants and bankers, but proud of their middle son who’d chosen military service instead. Now Ib was on the verge of retirement. His three children were well on their way, two of them in college. He’d earned his degree while in the Coast Guard, and the service had helped him discover his genius for computing. He had just been admitted to the doctoral program in computer science at Boston University, and was to matriculate after his retirement next year. He looked forward to relocating with his wife Hala to some picturesque New England town with brick buildings and winding little streets. Meanwhile, he used his technical finesse and moral zeal to chase electronic wrongdoers. He felt privileged to be working on the CloudMaster computer system, of which only four machines existed.

CloudMaster had originally been developed for the Navy as a weather modeling system. It was so powerful that it could reliably micro-read the weather over a huge footprint of land and sea. It could predict the number and force of raindrops or balls of hail that would hit a square yard of aircraft carrier flight deck during a given segment of minutes or hours, adjusting constantly as real-time information in the system drifted through changes. In its guts, each CloudMaster created a tiny universe complete with pulsing stars, whizzing comets, and rotating planets—cyber fantasies. On the rotating planets were seasons, latitudes, weather pinwheels, storm systems, high and low pressure areas, rain fronts, snow levels, tornadoes, nights and days. CloudMaster worked on the principle of a fuzzy network—over a million virtual pico-processors shuffling information at near light speed, sharing registers, floating data streams. To prevent the machine from burning up, its insides were, like outer space, chilled to near absolute zero and reduced to near-vacuum pressure. Photon bit streams streaked across each other’s luminous vapor trails, racing between golden logic gates. To keep the machine from collapsing under earth’s tremendous atmospheric pressure, CloudMaster resembled a deep-ocean bathyscaph with an egg-shaped, massive steel hull. The machine had been developed as a weather modeling system for the U.S. Navy, but it could also model a nation’s economy in a thousand dimensions, or predict the fate of a nation. Just before CON2, all four CloudMaster machines in Washington were yanked from most of their work streams and linked together in a secret net. This puzzled Ib. And he was not one to let go of a puzzle.

At the moment, Ib was tracking an intruder. The hacker was somewhere in Holland and went by the handle Flying Dutchman, though head walkers at NSSO quickly dubbed him Salty. He’d pop up in a Navy parts list or an Air Force flight schedule, and flaunt his icon: a wooden warship under full sail, with a cannon blowing smoke. Gotcha, a sign in the sail read, and he’d be gone.

You just wait, Ib thought. This afternoon, Salty had shown up in a top secret personnel data base of Metro Power & Light, groping into sensitive information about people’s salaries, ages, that sort of thing. The phones to NSSO flooded with frantic calls from system administration at MP&L. Like a Texas Ranger, Ib hopped into the saddle—or rather, his office chair while wearing V-goggles—and entered a parallel reality. Ib was the ultimate pro. He had no working icon, just a symbol he displayed at the moment when he had his man and the police were breaking doors down in Tokyo, Rio, London, or Mombasa: a cross with R.I.P. above, and Thank You underneath. Most head walkers liked to use the effects provided by manufacturers and software enhancers—a walking or running man complete with clicking footsteps, or a race car with roaring engine, a thundering rocket, a clanking knight—but Ib preferred to be a silently floating, invisible eye. He left almost no signature. He glided in and out of forbidden places like the truncus of a flashlight beam moving flat along a wall. He was a ghostly manta ray in the cyber ocean, barely flicking a wingtip. With CloudMaster running in background, dissecting thousand digit numbers to find their two unique prime factors that were 500-digit entry codes, Ib could break any lock on cyber-earth in seconds.

Head walkers traversed a pseudo-reality of highways, roads, bridges, skyscrapers, underground metropolises, long halls—a virtual city peopled with the icons of its population, millions of workers and players around the world like Ib. When the call from MP&L came, Ib put on his goggles. The presentation of V-world sites varied. Some places were monochrome black on gray. Many were cartoon-like. Some achieved oil-painting artistry. Most were interesting. But Ib never dallied among other people’s silly games. Blending into the raging river of raw photons that was the net, he sidestepped knights or cowboys challenging him to fight. He avoided beautiful females luring him, with winks and waggling fingers, to flash credit cards and step into shady side-rooms with a promise of more to be seen. These were often just roll-joints; your session was relayed to some casino town in Africa or Asia, maybe to a ship in international waters, where such billing was legal, and presto—you’d be billed 100 bucks a minute on the plastic you flashed to get in.

Ib entered MP&L’s General Area Network. It was a simple, elegant environment, a monochrome reminding Ib of an architect’s rendering of a future airport: spacious, floors dotted with meandering stick figures, its walls numbered with access ports to data bases. In the middle of this imaginary lobby floated a 1500’s Dutch warship with cannon blazing. Of course it was too late to catch Salty entering. Ib could only hope to follow him, link him to the trail he’d left, have him arrested based on that evidence.

“Alert, Ib. Subject on site,” CloudMaster’s unisex voice whispered.

Ib’s heart leapt. Somewhere nearby Salty still lingered, perhaps greedy to look into women’s files, unaware of the head walker stalking him. “Triangulate.”

“Searching.”

“Echo,” Ib said. CloudMaster, linked to the scenario in Ib’s goggles, churned through Metro’s history buffers, looking for the moment when Salty had showed himself just long enough to instruct Metro’s system to display the warship. “Echo successful.”

“Trace,” Ib said.

“Please wait,” CloudMaster said. “Trace successful.”

There Salty was, the trace a tiny moving dot like a pinprick. “Follow,” Ib said. As long as Ib followed his prey unnoticed, CloudMaster could slam data files back and forth from anywhere in the world to find, and deliver Salty’s name, address, phone number, gender, birth weight, and so on to Amsterdam’s computer crime detectives. As he pursued Salty, Ib found himself traveling along a kind of highway tunnel. Where was this bird headed? They entered a cartoon landscape owned by Columbia Net, the Washington network authority. Here, cutesy animal figures chased each other under pastel skies, with old-style cartoon music. Ib streaked on behind his nearly invisible quarry. Beneath them raged the data stream, giving an illusion of danger, for the icon people were evanescent, like ghosts. One could pass through the stream and, at worst, have to do a reconnect. Cartoon cop cars drove by with pigs shooting rubbery guns. Ib entered a very utilitarian, cold environment. CloudMaster announced: “Metro Emergency Archive.”

Ib found himself in a rotunda modeled on the Old Post Office, its huge lobby filled with conceptual chip carousels. The real thing, he knew, was a freezing warehouse full of nitrogen, its storage pagodas tended by figures in space garb carrying oxygen bottles. Here in the cyber-fantasy rendition, a dot that represented Salty drifted among the carousels, poking his nose here and there. The dot entered one labeled Carousel 49, Directory Z. Ib hovered carefully. If he went in, the system might send a message—that it was read-only, or access denied multiple users. With a single keystroke in the Netherlands, Salty could log off and escape capture. Ib must keep him here long enough to make him. CloudMaster whispered: “Compiling street address. Amsterdam police alerted.”

“Yes!” Ib made fists and grinned. He forgot to light a new cigarette. Seconds more, and police cars would be cruising Salty’s neighborhood.

“Subject logging off.”

“What?” Ib’s joy vanished, and he surged forward. Frantically, he entered Directory Z. There he saw Salty’s dot. As if he’d turned and seen Ib, he vanished. Logged off.

Lost.

Gone.

But a new voice, a man’s filtered through an electrical storm over the North Atlantic and pleasantly accented, said: “Amsterdam police on scene.” CloudMaster added: “Escape not over 80% likely.”

Heart pounding, Ib drifted closer to Salty’s last location. The walls were shoeboxed with hundreds of long subdirectory codes. He recognized a number of files with encrypt keys only someone with high level permissions could access. Touching one brought the words White House into Ib’s lenses. Touching the next brought up Admiral’s House.

“Escape not more than 33% likely,” CloudMaster said.

Ib’s mind wandered toward the words Admiral’s House. Wasn’t that the old name of what was now called The Vice President’s House? The Vice President’s residence—empty nearly a year now. Vice President Cardoza had been assassinated last December. A search in the Cascades Mountains had turned up some mountain men, but none who could be linked with Cardoza’s death. The nation had been without a vice president since last year because of wrangling between OCP and MCP Congress members over the next vice president—each party wanted their own candidate. So what could be going on here in Washington Metro? Idling now because he’d done his best—”Escape not more than 10% likely,” CloudMaster said—Ib loitered in the Admiral’s House files a moment. His heart flip-flopped and his stomach lurched. Could this be an evil trick by Salty? Ib backed out and checked the entry log file. His own had been the last access to this file since an emergency browndown procedure on—he checked the internet—God, on the hour—of Cardoza’s death!

“Escape not more than 0% likely,” CloudMaster said, but Ib ignored the machine. Sweat dribbled down his face as he read the Vice President’s resignation, his confession, a warning about CON2 which was about to begin, some hand-written documents scanned and saved as bitmapped files, and a list of names some of whom Ib recognized: General Robert Montclair, General Felix Mason, billionaire Robert Lee Hamilton, some congressmen...

“Congratulations and thank you!” CloudMaster relayed the Dutch voice to Ib. “Hallo? This is Amsterdam calling, ja? Nice cross and Thanks-You. What means R.I.P please?”

“Yes, yes,” Ib said impatiently. “Phone off. Lock Admiral’s House subdirectory. Copy files NSSO-dot-Ib.” That would put the memo into his working directory here. He changed his mind. “Uncopy.” Then he amended to copy the files to a directory shared by himself and several colleagues, so he could not be pinpointed by some rival head walker in league with these devils.

Slipping the virtual goggles off, Ib sagged in his seat. Sweat beaded his forehead, and he ran a hand idly across, trailing goggles and wires. This was no joke. Directory Z had not been overwritten since Cardoza’s death. Cardoza had sent that message less than an hour before the rocket attack. It dawned on Ib that lives were in danger—starting with his own. He thought of his family. Then he thought of his duty. Apparently nobody knew this message had been auto-captured, probably during a browndown. And if he walked away from this, maybe nobody would ever know. But that wasn’t Ib’s style. He mopped his brow with a towel. Once he opened his mouth, no telling what kind of hell would break loose. His first step, according to military procedure, had to be to notify his immediate superior. That would be the XO, or Executive Officer, Lt. Victoria Breen. A nice young woman, he thought with pity. Would it really serve a purpose to put this target on her back? But she was a soldier, he considered, and she had accepted her commission knowing there were risks.