“This is sabotage,” she murmured.
“Excuse me?” said the trainee ten feet below her.
“Ah… nothing. Just talking to myself. Hand me a pair of wire cutters, would you?” Vera decided this was highly classified information. Someone had definitely attempted to sabotage the orbiter and she would make sure the information reached the appropriate authorities, namely the center’s director.
The technician handed her the wire cutters. Vera disconnected the small cylinder from the valve, put it in her pocket, and shook her head. Whoever did this knew exactly what to do. Since the timer would not kick it until after liftoff, the General Purpose Computers would not diagnose a problem. Damn!
“Wait here for the others and tell them this engine is fine,” she said as she walked to the edge of the platform.
“All right.”
She was about to reach for the rail to crawl down from the scaffold when she felt a shove from behind. Before she could react, her body flipped over the short safety rail.
“Ahhh!” Vera twisted her body in midair and slapped both hands against the array of pipes hoping to grab one, but failed. She hit the welded steel edge of the elevator platform with her back, bounced, and fell for another thirty feet, finally crashing headfirst against the concrete stand.
In one of twelve cubicles inside a computer room on the third floor of the Central Intelligence Agency headquarters, George Pruett removed his thick glasses and rubbed his eyes and the bridge of his nose. Grimacing, he looked at the heavy lenses, the result of ten years of staring at computer screens.
Working for the Office of Computer Services within the Directorate of Science and Technology, George had been given the colossal task of writing and debugging a series of algorithms designed to detect patterns in a variety of government agencies related to job-switching, promotions, resignations, and several other patterns, including deaths. He knew the reason the Agency had given him such a task was the same reason the CIA had lured George from his previous job with the NSA a year ago by doubling his salary: George was a computer genius. There was no algorithm he couldn’t write, no computer he couldn’t break into, and certainly no programming language he couldn’t master in a fraction of the time it would take one of the other CIA senior computer science analysts, like the ones working behind the Sun Sparks workstations in the other cubicles of the large room.
George also sat behind a Sun, which not only had access to the CIA mainframe computer in the adjacent room, but also had its own stand-alone hard disk — the place where his programs resided.
He put his glasses back on and gazed at the array of small half-inch-by-half-inch icons, seven across by nine down on the screen. Each icon had a three-letter acronym that described a government agency. Some acronyms were straightforward, like IRS. Others he’d learned as his program evolved. The INS, for example, stood for the Immigration and Naturalization Service. In these instances — which were quite a few — where three letters were not enough to describe an agency fully, the acronym described only part of the name. George knew the meaning of all of them.
The icons were color-coded according to the “relevance” of the pattern as defined by the algorithm, which he had programmed to detect and accumulate events for the previous month only. A white-bordered icon meant there were no significant changes in that particular government agency. Yellow was borderline, a possible pattern probably worth investigating. A red border meant the algorithm had definitely detected a pattern of some sort that might or might not be significant to the user, and had flagged it.
George looked at an icon in the center of the array. It had a yellow border — the third such icon he’d seen in the past two hours. He read the letters NAS. George wondered what was happening at NASA.
His right hand reached over the mouse connected to his workstation. He slowly dragged it over the mousepad and brought the screen pointer inside the icon. He clicked the left button on the mouse twice. The screen suddenly changed. All of the icons disappeared as the screen displayed “NASA” across the top. On the left-hand side of the screen he read the list of possible pattern-generating parameters. He noticed the DEATHS parameter blinking.
George grunted his curiosity and grabbed a cup of coffee next to the Sun. He took two small sips and frowned at the coffee’s bitter taste. He set the cup down and placed his hand on the mouse once more. Again the screen changed.
George studied the new display, which included two names, brief biographical descriptions of the individuals named, and a cause of death for each. The first one was Claude Guilloux, a well-known French rocket scientist who had been killed a few days earlier in an auto accident. Interesting, thought George, wondering why his algorithm had grabbed someone who was not associated with NASA. The he smiled when he remembered that his program would enter not only anything associated with a particular agency itself, but also any relevant occurrences in that agency’s field.
George had begun to read the second entry when he was interrupted by the analysts in the other cubicle getting ready to leave for lunch.
“You sure you don’t want to come, George?” asked a fairly new female analyst as everyone headed for the glass door on the left side of the rectangular room.
George got up and glanced at her over the short cubicle wall. “Ah, no, thanks,” he replied. “I’ve got a few errands to run.”
“You kidding?” asked a man in his late thirties as he zipped up his jacket. “That’ll be the day when George joins us for lunch. I gave up on him about six months ago.”
George raised an eyebrow and grinned. He had better things to do with his free time than spend it chewing the fat with CIA analysts talking about their problems at work and at home. He heard enough of that just by sitting in that room with them, and besides, George already had had more than his share of problems in life. His father, a former senior CIA operative, had mysteriously died almost ten years before in East Berlin, shortly after George’s seventeenth birthday. When his mother sustained permanent injuries in a tragic hit-and-run accident four years later, George had been forced to become the head of the household practically overnight, taking care of her and his two younger sisters. While working two jobs to help support his family, George had finished college and gotten his degree before he turned twenty-three.
No, George decided, he definitely didn’t feel like listening to his coworkers’ problems during his free time. With his mother in a wheelchair, George and his two sisters took turns going home during lunch to look after her. During the days when one of his sisters went home for lunch, like today, he spent his time enjoying the only other activity that filled his life besides computers: reading spy novels. George read them by the dozens. He simply couldn’t ever get enough, even as a teenager, when he’d visualized his own father playing the roles of the main characters. A love for clandestine work had been part of the reason he’d chosen the intelligence field after college. He had wanted to be a field operative, follow his father’s footsteps, become a Cold War master spy, but reality had fallen far short of expectations when George had failed the rigorous physical examination required for all operatives. He just wasn’t the physical type, and that revelation had nearly crushed him. But he had hung in there. He’d still wanted to be a part of it, to live up to his father’s memory. And so, with a computer engineering degree and a minor in political science, he had joined the National Security Agency right out of school.