“Back before the war, you weren’t allowed to sell these consoles to Iraq because they were classified as supercomputers,” Angel explained. She tore open the plastic bag of a cable with her teeth. “They’re not like normal computers, though, because they have different requirements. You wouldn’t want to use one of these to check your e-mail, probably. What they do have is top-notch graphics cards. They need them to be able to render games at sixty frames per second. We’re talking about billions of floating point operations a second. Which, by happy accident, turns out to be the same kind of operations you do while trying to break hard-core encryption.”
“Seriously?” Chapel asked.
“Uh-huh. The NSA buys graphics card by the boatload. Here, do it like this.” She plugged a power cable into one of the consoles, then an Ethernet cable into one of its ports. “They’re also exactly what I need for the kind of data mining we’re talking about.”
As usual, Chapel just nodded along, understanding a tiny fraction of what she told him. This was her field of expertise. He just needed to follow orders and stay out of her way.
“The game consoles need robust connections, too,” Angel went on. “To allow for multiplayer games with minimal lag. So these Ethernet connections are the best you can get. You know what a LAN party is?”
“LAN stands for, uh,” Chapel said, trying to remember. “Something something network.”
“Local area network. A LAN party is when a bunch of kids get their machines together in the same room and they connect them up in one big network so they can all play the same game at the same time. Which is good — it means these consoles will work well together when I put them in a serial network. They have great WAN connections, too, because they want you to use your video-game console to stream video and download patches and DLC for the games and…” She stopped and looked over at Chapel. “I’m just babbling now,” she said.
“If it helps you focus, babble away. Just don’t give me a pop quiz about all this when we’re done.”
Angel smiled. She plugged a cable into a console and then set it down on the floor. “We make a great team, don’t we?” she asked.
“Just going on the fact that I’m still alive after all the missions we worked together, I’d say yeah,” Chapel confirmed. He smiled back.
She looked at him then in a way he didn’t know how to read. Over the years of listening to her voice he’d come to know her moods, the private jokes they shared. But seeing her face-to-face was like meeting a whole new person. He didn’t understand what it meant when she tilted her head to the side while smiling at him. Or what it signified when she started scratching at her neck and looked away in a hurry.
He had no idea how to respond.
“Anyway,” she said, “let’s start plugging these together. I’m going to need a pretty serious router, but there’ll be one of those around here somewhere.”
“Sure,” he said. “I just keep plugging them together like this?”
“Yeah,” she told him. Then she laughed. “It’s kind of fun, giving you orders for a change. I could get used to this.”
Chapel moved around the stockroom as fast as he could, collecting all the bits and pieces Angel needed — power strips, the fastest laptop he could find, a bewildering array of cables of different pin numbers and lengths. For somebody who had just figured out the difference between USB-A and USB-B connectors, it was a harrowing process.
When it was done, though, he had to admit Angel had created something impressive. She sat on the floor with the laptop, its ports connected by a thick bundle of cables to twenty of the game consoles. These formed a ring around her, each of them wired to each other and to the store’s Internet connection. Finally she attached her hard drive — the one he’d rescued from her trailer — to the laptop and switched everything on.
With a whirring of fans and a high-pitched drone like an entire hive of bees buzzing at once, the network came to life.
Angel got to work instantly. “I’m going to need to write some code, here. The consoles don’t want to work as dumb processors. They’re designed to prevent that kind of tampering, so I’ll need to bypass their built-in operating systems.” She opened a dozen windows on the laptop screen and started typing. “Luckily I don’t need to start from scratch. I can grab a bunch of libraries of code off the Internet and then jerry-rig everything together.”
“And then you can — what? Use the hard drive to…” Chapel shook his head, trying to remember what Paul Moulton had done. “Build a network analyzer?”
“That’s one way, but if I’m right about something, it won’t be necessary. I think we caught a lucky break.”
“How so?”
“Whoever framed me took over my system when they hijacked the Predator over New Orleans. They got root access and zombified my servers, but they never bothered to log me out as an admin, so—”
“Sorry, Angel. My head already hurts. Can you simplify that?”
She looked up at him with a smile. “Considering how often this kind of stuff comes up, you really ought to learn a little about computers.”
“Sure. Maybe when the police aren’t chasing us, though.”
She laughed. “Okay, sugar. Let me try to break it down. They took over my computer when they hijacked the Predator. They used my system to send commands to the drone and make it crash, right? It would have been really easy for them to lock me out of my own system at the same time. But they didn’t. They wanted to be clever — too clever — and so they did it all in such a way I didn’t even know it was happening. In fact, they didn’t cut me off until hours later, when you and I were on the phone, right?”
“When your call just dropped,” Chapel said, remembering how panicked he’d been when it happened.
“Yeah. Now, if they’d been smart, rather than clever, they would have taken over my system just long enough to crash the drone, then they would have shut me down altogether and severed the connection. But they didn’t. They were in my computer for hours.”
The whole time she spoke she kept her fingers moving over her keyboard, her thumb driving the trackpad. “Now, if you really want to hide an Internet connection, your best bet is to do what you need to do very, very fast. Every second their computer and mine were connected my server logs were recording that connection. The records are anonymized with all the packet headers stripped out, but… sorry!” She lifted her hands. “Too much computerese, I know. I guess — think of it like fingerprints. To hijack the drone they had to leave one smudged, partial print on my system. It would be next to impossible to get a match from that. But like a burglar who hangs around the house long after he’s grabbed all the silverware, they stayed connected to my system too long. Which means they left hundreds and hundreds of partial fingerprints all over.”
“And while one print on its own is useless,” Chapel said, seeing where this was going, “if you can compare hundreds of them—”
“Exactly. I can get a little bit of information out of every print and combine it to get one crystal clear print that will give us a good match for our culprit. Well, theoretically.”
“But — wouldn’t they have known they were leaving so many clues?” Chapel asked.
“Maybe. Probably. I mean, whoever this was, they were very, very good. They should have known better.”
Chapel frowned. “So why would they make such a simple mistake?”
“My best bet is that they didn’t just hijack the drone. That they were doing something else while they were in there. Given the amount of time it took, I’m guessing they were reading all my drives. Copying them.”
“So they have access to all the information you had stored? What would that give them?”