The general frowned. “Commander, I don’t think you want to get into a power struggle with me. I could draft your people and keep them right where they are.”
Now Thorn was really getting angry. “You don’t really believe that, do you? Face it, General, the most you could do is to keep their butts in the chair. That’s all. And you know as well as I do that if you did that with threats, you could kiss any chance of solving your problem — or your next problem, or the one after that — good-bye. These are creative and independent people. Push some of them too far and hell will freeze over before they give you squat. They will look real busy, but they won’t be doing anything useful.”
Hadden leaned back a little. “You’re part Native American, aren’t you?”
“I don’t mind the term ‘Indian.’ Yes, sir, I am.”
“You know, I had a great-great-grandfather who served with Custer. An ordinary trooper. He died at the Little Bighorn.”
“None of my relatives were there,” Thorn said. “Different tribe. But Custer got what he deserved. And if your grandfather was part of what he did to the innocent women and children along the way, then he got what he deserved, too.”
Hadden laughed. That puzzled Thorn, overriding his anger.
“If a man doesn’t have balls, I don’t need him working for me,” Hadden said. He stood and extended his hand. “Keep giving me your best efforts, son, and I’ll stay out of your hair. But if I think you’re dogging it, you’ll be rejoining the private sector PDQ.”
Thorn stood, surprised. “Fair enough.” He extended his own hand.
The two men shook. Hadden said, “I’ll talk to you later.”
And with that, he turned and left. Not quite a march, but not too far from it.
After he was gone, Thorn shook his head. Well. That had been… unexpected. And he wasn’t sure of what he had heard. It sounded as if the man was giving him slack, but that he’d shown up here and pushed him to see how he’d react was a little irritating. Thorn would just have to see how it went. If this was all Hadden was going to do, fine. If he decided to come back and apply pressure again? That wasn’t going to work. Thorn didn’t have to put up with that.
As he ate, Jay pondered his realization. It was the middle of the night — actually closer to two A.M., and Saji and the boy were asleep. Chang had packed up and gone back to his hotel a couple hours ago. Jay hadn’t stopped for supper, and it was early for breakfast. What was the nighttime equivalent of brunch? Dinfast? Supbreak?
The meal, whatever it might be called, was simple: a couple of boiled eggs he’d found in the fridge, an apple, and some cashews. Not the most exciting food, but at least it was something.
He sat at the kitchen table and went over it again, checking his reasoning.
He had gone at the problem every way he knew how, and it was the dog not barking in the night, he was sure.
Sherlock Holmes’s dictum once again — everything else had been eliminated, and there wasn’t anything left — at least not that Jay could figure out. He had run down every possibility except one:
There was a back door in the basic software — one that had been there since before the military — or CyberNation — ever got their hands on the programs. Put there by somebody looking far ahead.
In an interlinked multiple-affect synergistic software system this big, with its layers upon layers and wheels within wheels, figuring out where the hidden door was made looking for a needle in a haystack seem like a walk in the park on a nice spring day. It was more akin to finding a particular grain of sand on a big honkin’ beach. It could be done, if you knew exactly what you were looking for — and you had lots and lots and lots of time to spend on it…
Many million lines of code would have to be searched, and even with a dedicated Super-Cray or a Blue whale running full-blast looking, if you didn’t have a pretty specific idea of how to frame your search, you could still miss it. Like putting the word “the” into a big Internet search engine — you came up with more than five and a half billion hits, and it only took two tenths of a second to get those, but reading all those for content? You wouldn’t live long enough to do it.
There was another way to maybe get to the “who,” and he was pretty sure that Chang’s help had already put him on that track. Amazing what the guy could do even when he had almost nothing to work with. Chang said he would identify the man in the sampan, the one they had seen in the joint scenario. Jay had a gut feeling that this guy was involved, though he didn’t know how.
Jay had already done the obvious — he had run a search for Chinese programmers on the original software crew, then the revision crews, even the marketing team, anybody who might have been able to embed a few clever lines of code where they’d leave unauthorized access to the system. Along the way, hundreds of programmers had worked on the beast, some extensively, some for only a few loops and lines. The score of Sino-sounding names still in the U.S. that had come up would be on a visit-now list for the FBI, but none of them looked like promising candidates. Jay’s instincts, which had no basis in any kind of logic, told him that the guy had gone home.
Of course, it might be — was likely, in fact — that the Chinese op hadn’t done the deed himself, but had socially engineered a programmer with a name as far away from China as Iceland…
More, just being able to get into the system wasn’t the whole answer: Once there, the guy doing the rascal had to manage it in such a way that it wouldn’t be spotted, and it wouldn’t point straight back at the hidden door even if it was picked up. Since none of the program’s built-in virus-, worm-, or trojanware had caught the attacking sequence, the slashware either had to be piggybacked on something where nobody had thought to look, or so smooth that it looked harmless on its own.
Jay would bet that the slashware had been installed at the same time as the back door, and in such a way that the program didn’t see it as anything but part of its normal OS. It wasn’t a foreign invader, it was part of the body. Whatever it did, the program would think it was merely doing what it was supposed to do. And even so, it still had to be convoluted enough that the diagnostic safeware couldn’t see it.
The sucker could even be on a timer…
Jay himself could do something like this, assuming he’d been one of the original code-writers with access early on. There was more than one way to go about it, though, and how Jay would manage it could be far different than the way it had been done.
This guy was good, no question, but now, at least, Jay had a handle on him.
He hoped.
Jay had four options, as he saw the situation.
One, he could find the door and close it, then find the built-in disguised slashware and deep-six it.
That could take slightly less than forever.
Two, somebody — and it wasn’t going to be Jay — would have to go over every line of code and verify it. That would take forever — and then some.
Three, the military — and CyberNation — would have to junk their infected programs and any other programs that interfaced with them, and start over with new software. Neither one of them was likely to do that, since that would cost a king’s ransom, and take major systems off-line for a long time. The cure would be nearly as bad as the disease — worse, even, like cutting off your hand to get rid of a wart on your little finger. And the wart’s virus could still be in your system…
Or four, Jay could find the guy responsible and then have somebody lean on him hard enough so he’d give up the door and slashware. Somehow, Chang’s guy on the boat was in it. Maybe he was the player, maybe not, but he was in it. Somehow. Chang had a better handle on his country’s system, even though Jay was worlds better generally.