It was a masterful strategy, Smith was forced to admit. It was elaborate. It was thorough. It showed the working of a brilliant mind with an almost omniscient awareness of CURE operations, from its secret financial conduits to the schedule of the gold shipment to Sinanju, to Remo's specific psychological vulnerabilities.
All of which were stored on the CURE computer-a system that was exhaustively scanned for viruses, electronic eavesdroppers and utterly Tempest shielded.
Somehow someone had entered the CURE system through a back door. There was no other way any of this could have happened.
But there were no back doors to the Folcroft Four, Smith knew for a fact. He had set up the system himself. The new XL SysCorp WORM drives were another matter. They could have been designed with trapdoors.
But why?
Smith was confident of one thing. The system had come to him through his own efforts. He had answered a classified advertisement in a disreputable computer magazine and initiated every contact. Buzz Kuttner was not out there twiddling his thumbs waiting for a call from Harold W Smith just so he could sell Smith a computerized Trojan horse.
If the Trojan horse were not waiting for him, it meant that it might not be the only Trojan horse. Smith turned in his seat to stare out at the sound. He was not used to this, not used to thinking through a CURE problem without the give-and-take data exchange of the Folcroft Four. But he was making progress-surprising progress without the distraction of his monitor.
Steepling his long fingers, Smith rested his pointed chin on them. Yes, it was becoming clear, as clear as Occam's razor, which suggested that the simplest theory was closest to the actual reality. Namely, that there was a mind out there that knew of CURE. Whether it knew of CURE before or after Smith had installed the WORM drives did not matter now. The mind had penetrated his system through a trapdoor, learned all CURE's secrets and exploited them masterfully.
There was only one flaw in the plan. It was a simple oversight. This supermind had broken the chain of CURE command at its strongest points. It was a unique strategy. One usually broke the weakest link to snap a chain.
The weak link was Harold Smith, an aging deskbound bureaucrat operating out of an installation whose very secrecy precluded security arrangements for his personal safety that were routinely extended to the heads of the FBI, CIA and other law-enforcement agencies.
A determined foe could simply walk into Harold Smith's office to kill him with a thirteen-cent bullet. Or ambush him on the lonely drive home.
There were many ways that Harold Smith could be liquidated, and CURE shattered.
The supermind had not elected to do that. It made no sense.
And because it had failed to do the intelligent thing, Harold Smith still lived.
It would prove to be a fatal mistake for the unseen foe Harold Smith was now certain existed out therein cyberspace.
Chapter 15
It was the worst duty of the Cold War and, even with the Cold War over, it had not changed one iota.
The Bridge of No Return was a narrow structure of green-painted wood that spanned an ideological chasm called the Thirty-eighth Parallel just north of the town of Panmunjom on the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea.
No peace treaty marked the end of the Korean conflict back in 1953, only a cessation of hostilities and a semi-permanent cease-fire. For forty years more than a million soldiers eyeballed one another across a three-mile strip of minefields and razor-wire nests set against the misty green hills of the ill-named Land of Peaceful Cahn.
It was on this spot that, after the Korean War armistice, Korean POWs from both side were presented with the heart-rending choice; north or south. Some were forced to choose between family and freedom in the newly divided land.
Here United Nations troops kept an uneasy watch. Border conflicts were few but often bloody. North Korean infiltrators often crept down dressed as raggedy farmers. Every few years the blue helmets discovered a tunnel linking the north and the south and would have to demolish it.
And Sergeant Mark Murdock, US. Army, had actually volunteered for Panmunjom.
Most of the time, it was not so bad. The UN blue helmets handled the donkey work. US. forces were stationed here on observation duty.
Sometimes that duty involved sitting in the Truck. The Truck was a deuce and a half. It was not always the same deuce and a half. They rotated them every other day, and the engines had to be overhauled practically every month.
The Bridge of No Return was the chief choke point against a North Korean land invasion of the south. Barely wide enough for a Humvee to rattle across, it was practically an open door to the human-wave assaults that the North Koreans had used during the conflict so long ago.
That was where the Truck came in.
It was stationed with its ass end pointed at the southern terminus of the bridge, engine perpetually running, clutch depressed and gear set in reverse.
Today it was Sergeant Mark Murdock's turn to sit behind the always vibrating wheel.
There were spotters all around. A mixture of blue helmets and green. It was their job to warn the man in the Truck to slam that sucker into reverse and bottle up the bridge long enough to buy time to evacuate UN personnel or order up reinforcements.
Nobody knew which were the standing orders. Everybody knew that the man who was unlucky enough to be in the Truck when it backed up onto the bridge would probably die behind the wheel. The bridge was too narrow for the doors to open and let him out.
So Sergeant Mark Murdock sat in the cool of the late Korean summer, inhaling carbon monoxide and gritting his teeth against the constant thrum and vibration of the truck motor.
It was horrible duty. The monotony was broken only by the stink of gasoline as the fuel tank was replenished by hand. But as long as the truck stayed in place, Sergeant Mark Murdock figured he'd see Fort Worth again.
Still, he couldn't keep his eyes off the driver's-side mirror. He had heard the stories. How UN guards had gone out one day to trim a poplar tree and shrieking North Koreans had poured across the bridge with axes and clubs. No one ever figured out what set them off. But two American servicemen had died, only the scorched skeleton of the tree marking the spot.
And that was in the calm period after the Pueblo incident and before the Rudong I.
Ever since North Korea had tested the Rudong I-the nuclear-capable modified Scud missile that could hit Tokyo eight minutes after launch-the world had become very nervous about the north.
Patriot missile batteries had been rushed to the DMZ.
There was talk of bombing suspected North Korean nuclear installations before they got the bomb. Some said they had the bomb already.
Not much hard news came down from the north these days. Rumors, yeah. Every other day the scuttle-butt had it that there were food riots, mass executions and other evidences of a dying regime up there.
Now there was talk of a missing US. submarine that had strayed into Korean territorial waters and vanished.
Washington said that it had been captured. Pyongyang swore it knew nothing about any US. submarine. The accusations were flying thick and furious-and the veiled threats were losing their protective gauze.
And on either side of the bridge at Panmunjom, the two armies, technically still in a state of war, had been placed on the highest state of alert, waiting for the word.
So far, the word had been: stand down.
That could change at any moment, Sergeant Murdock knew. So he kept a weather eye on the driver's-side mirror, watching the shadows and imagining they sometimes moved.
He almost wet his pants when someone knocked on the driver's-side window and a distinctly American voice said, "Move the truck, pal."