He took the duty bite, then laid the sandwich down. Yep, tuna salad!
“China is so far away,” she mused. “What can you do from here?” Here was their snug little home in Sunnyvale.
“Everything. The Net is everywhere.” His answer was an oversimplification, of course. Steinbaugh didn’t speak a word of Chinese, yet he knew enough symbols to work with their computers. He wasn’t about to get into a discussion of the fine points with Babs, however, not if he could help it.
“This Cole… is he paying you anything?”
“No.”
“Did you even ask for money?”
“We never discussed it, all right? He didn’t mention it and neither did I.”
“Seems like if you’re going to do the crime, you oughta get enough out of it to pay the lawyers. For Christ’s sake, the man’s filthy rich.”
“Next time.”
She grunted and stalked away.
Babs just didn’t appreciate his keen wit. Next time, indeed!
As he waited he thought about the trapdoors — sometimes he referred to them as back doors, because he had installed them — which were secret passages into inner sanctums where he wasn’t supposed to go. While in Beijing he had worked on the main government computer networks in the Forbidden City. The powers that be didn’t want to let him touch the computers, but Cole’s company had the contract and the Chinese didn’t know how to find the problems and solve them, so they were between a rock and a hard place. After much bureaucratic posturing and grandstanding, they let him put his hands on their stuff.
The network security system was essentially nonexistent. That was deplorable, certainly, but understandable in a country where few people had access to computers. Constructing and installing a back door was child’s play once he figured out the Chinese symbols and Pinyin commands. A Pinyin dictionary helped enormously.
Installing back doors in other key government computer systems was not terribly difficult either, for these computers all were linked to the mainframes in the Forbidden City.
Like all top-down systems, the Communist bureaucracy with its uniform security guidelines and procedures was extremely vulnerable to cybersabotage. The best ways to screw with each computer system tended to be similar from system to system, but what worked best with railroad timetables and schedules usually didn’t work at all for financial systems. Putting it all together was a sublime challenge, the culmination of his lifelong interest in logical problems. Eaton Steinbaugh enjoyed himself immensely and was bitterly disappointed when the reality of his cancer symptoms could no longer be ignored.
His illness did create another problem, however, one that he took keen interest in solving. The whole point of triggering the inserted code programs from outside Hong Kong was to prevent compromising the computer facility there — Third Planet Communications. But the person doing the triggering was going to leave a trail through the Internet, a trail that government investigators could later follow back to the guilty party.
Unless the guilty party disguised his tracks, made the trail impossible to follow. One way to do that was to use a generic computer, one dedicated to public use, so the identity of the user could never be established beyond a reasonable doubt. Due to his illness, Steinbaugh thought he might be unable to leave his home. He spent a delightful week working up a way to cover his trail through cyberspace and thought he had the problem solved. He wrote a program that randomly changed the ID codes buried throughout his computer’s innards — called “cookies”—every time the codes were queried by another computer. He liked the program so much that when the China adventure was over he intended to post it on the Internet for the use of anyone seeking to screw with the commercial Web sites that were constructing profiles of visitors to sell to advertisers and each other, a practice that formed the slimy foundation of E-commerce. Of course, if he wasn’t as clever as he thought he was, the FBI was going to be knocking on his door one of these days.
Not that it mattered. In or out of jail, Eaton Steinbaugh only had a few months to live, at the most.
Today, when the computer on his desk began signaling that he had an incoming E-mail, he began pecking at the keys in feverish anticipation.
Yes, there it was. From Virgil Cole. A series of numerals. He counted them.
Eleven.
That was right. Eleven random numbers. The guys at NSA would undoubtedly rack their brains for days trying to crack the code that wasn’t there.
As soon as possible.
That was the message.
Start as soon as possible.
Too excited to sit, Steinbaugh got up, stretched, stared at the screen. Start with a bang, he decided.
He sat back down and began.
In less than a minute he was at the door of the main government computer in Beijing looking for his back door.
He typed. Pushed the Enter button.
Nothing.
Don’t tell me those bastards have changed the access codes.
Not to worry. He had anticipated that possibility.
There! He found it.
He typed some more, inputting a code that no one else on earth knew.
And voilà!
In, in, in!
Ha ha ha ha ha!
Eaton Steinbaugh consulted his notebook, the one in which he had painstakingly written everything, just in case. A copy of the book was in his lawyer’s hands, with instructions to send it to Cole when Steinbaugh died.
He found the menu he wanted, typed some more.
In three minutes he was face-to-face with a critical operational menu, one that gave him a variety of choices. He stared at the Pinyin, consulted his notebook, carefully scrolled the page… yes. Here it was.
He moved the mouse. Positioned the cursor over the icon just so. Clicked once.
Sure enough, the system now gave him access to yet another system, with another menu.
This menu had five choices: safe, arm, fire, self-destruct, exit.
He positioned the icon over the one he wanted, then clicked the button on the mouse.
Just like that. That was all it took.
Sue Lin Buckingham was waiting for Rip when he got home. He had written another story for the Buckingham newspapers predicting imminent revolution in Hong Kong and sent it to Sydney via E-mail. It would be published under his father’s byline, of course, as the first one was.
“Your father sent an E-mail,” Sue Lin said. “He will wire the money to Switzerland tomorrow.”
Rip just nodded. All the members of the Scarlet Team had been in the Third Planet office except Wu and Sonny Wong. Amazingly, the team was going on with the plan despite the fact that one of their members had kidnapped the leader.
Wu had put it together, pushed the entire population of Hong Kong — and China, for the revolutionary movement was nationwide — toward this day with the force of his personality and leadership ability. Now he was a prisoner, held for ransom to enrich Sonny Wong, and nothing could be done!
Rip Buckingham stared at his wife’s drawn features. “I don’t know what to say,” he told her. “I saw Wong earlier this evening at his restaurant. He has Wu, all right. Perhaps Wong will release your brother, perhaps he will kill him. Regardless, we march on.”
“Can’t the senior leadership force Wong to release Wu?”
“There isn’t time for that distraction, they say.” Rip’s upper lip curled. “Some of them seem to think Sonny will share the money with them.”
“You think?”
“I don’t know what to think.”
Rip threw himself in a chair. “I once saw an avalanche in the Andes,” he mused. “It started slowly enough, but once it began to move no power on earth could stop it. The moving snow carried everything with it — trees, rocks, dirt, more snow. It got bigger and bigger and moved faster and faster…”
He looked at his wife. “Perhaps they are right. Perhaps going forward is our only choice.”