She suspected the wee child at Eriskay had distracted him. The social worker had called him twice now to report on the infant’s progress.
She too had sympathy for the infant, but the matter went beyond that. They were well past their inability to have a child. She was. It had struck her hard but she had come to accept it, a decree from God. Artificial measures were not so commonplace fifteen years ago, and even now the idea seemed foreign.
The doorbell rang. Nan took a towel in her hands, wiping them though they weren’t wet as she walked through the front room to the door. As her hand reached the doorknob she felt her breathing grow quite sharp.
“Sorry to bother you, mum,” said a thin young man in a blue jumpsuit. He had a small box in his hand, an instrument of some sort. “Report of gas in the neighborhood.”
“Here?” she said, rubbing her hands together as her breathing relaxed.
“Trying to trace it,” he said. “Have you smelled anything?”
“Afraid not.”
“Well that’s a good thing then,” said the man, already heading next door.
The phone rang as she closed the door.
“I hadn’t realized the time, sweets,” said her husband when she picked up.
“Losh, Frank — where are ya now?”
“At the office. I have some calls to make — would you eat without me?”
“Well of course, if I’m hungry.” She glanced back at the stove.
He was quiet for a moment. Nan thought of saying something about the child, but couldn’t find the words.
“I may be here a bit,” Frank told her. “Some calls to make.”
“Well, be here by eight, would you? We have a guest coming round.”
“Not your brother, I hope — he’ll be asking for cigars.”
“Don’t you go encouraging him to smoke now.”
“Who’s the guest?”
“An American teacher. She’s been on holiday and today she came to the school to see our methods. Head-mistress brought her over. Very nice Yank.”
“You should have invited her for dinner.”
“And that would have been sweet, wouldn’t it, with you standing us up.”
Actually, she had, but the American had said she had another engagement. She had seemed charming, however. A little too enthusiastic — but that was a good fault to have when you were young.
“By eight,” she reminded her husband.
“Count on it, Sweets.”
In the red-lit room at UpLink’s satellite recording center in Glasgow, Glyn Lowry banged the space bar on his keyboard in frustration. For the past three nights, an intruder had been attempting to hack his way into one of the UpLink e-mail servers. The attempt seemed to be the work of an amateur, but that didn’t mean it couldn’t do considerable damage. Nor could it be allowed to continue. UpLink’s security programs easily kept the intruder at bay — but for some reason the powerful sniffers that Lowry launched to track him down had failed miserably.
It looked like the same story tonight. The sniffer pretended to allow access to the UpLink system, downloading a large graphic file. As the file loaded on the hacker’s computer, it activated a Trojan horse. That program would then give Lowry a complete rundown of the route back to the hacker. It would also give Lowry access to the hard drives on the hacker’s computer.
But as the seconds ticked away, it became increasingly clear that it had failed again. They were obviously being attacked by someone more sophisticated than the average thirteen-year-old.
Had to be fourteen at least.
His computer appeared to have hung, just as it had last night. Lowry picked up his cola and reached to reboot. Just as his fingers touched the keyboard, the cursor began running across the top of the screen.
ACCESS ACHIEVED. DUMPING DRIVES C:, D:, E:.
“No shit,” said Lowry. He leaned back in his swivel chair and gulped the last bit of the soda. Then he tossed the can and slid back the keyboard. “Let’s have a look at our sweetheart’s life, eh?”
Besides the normal systems programs — Windows ME, definitely an amateur — and office suites, the hacker chap had a good store of perv pix-nudie shots that confirmed for Lowry that he was indeed dealing with a teenage boy. There were a number of word-processing files that looked like German to his admittedly unfamiliar eye. He flipped through a few, took a look at some more of the porn, and then found a directory of the standard plug-and-play hacker scripts that allowed so many idiot brats to pretend they were true geeks.
But it was when he started to examine the contents of the lad’s D: drive that things got interesting.
The chap liked to break into e-mail systems. He had accessed a Fleet Street newspaper, which included quite a few off-color remarks about the Queen. He’d also gotten into UKAE, the regulatory agency for British nuclear power. Lowry glanced through the texts, which were run together with the headers indicating when they had been sent. He was on the second page and giving thought to returning to the nudies when a message in the middle of the page caught his attention.
“Eliminate Ewie Cameron. Set up as an accident. L (POUNDS) 100,000. CB.”
The Highland Camerons were not the most renowned family in northern Scotland, but they were well known enough to have been included in several of the lectures on local history Lowry had attended over the past few months on the days he kept his mom company in Inverness; the Cameron estate was located about a mile from her home.
As Lowry continued to read the messages, he picked up the phone and called his supervisor.
TEN
High above Ross island, the volcano’s fulminating lava lake seethed and bubbled and abruptly shot a dollop of molten rock into the sky with a belch of pressurized gas. Trailing smoke and licks of flame, the red-hot ejecta hurtled toward the rim of the summit cone, and over it, and then smacked into the mountainside a mile away. It was larger than a howitzer round, and its ballistic impact threw a cloud of ash, snow, and ice crystals up from the crater’s rim.
There the plastery magma bomb hardened in the supercooled air to lay among countless other chunks of igneous debris tossed across the slope.
While signs of the eruption traveled across many miles in this frigid and barren land, they drew only a scattering of attention.
It was heard clearly by National Science Foundation vulcanologists working on the mount’s upper elevations, and produced a tremor that rattled the equipment in their mobile apple huts. Its sonic precursors (vibrational pulses that signal an impending eruption) and signature oscillations (harmonic changes that indicate a discrete eruption, or series of eruptions, in progress) were registered by seismometers and broadband microphones that the researchers had installed and maintained with steady diligence throughout the Antarctic summer.
Ten thousand feet below on another corner of the island, the discharge and resultant concussion would be audible as two dull, thudding blurts of sound to McMurdites who took notice. Few did, however. The continuous volcanic output had never inflicted damage on the station, and was for them little more than background noise.
Eastward across the Transantarctic Mountains, the seismic precursors were detected in instantaneous-wave readouts from sensors on Erebus’s flank that had been well camouflaged from the NSF research team. As the sound of the explosive outbursts carried to Bull Pass, bouncing faintly between its craggy walls, hidden men and equipment went into clockwork action.