They entered Parks’s home. Looking around the inside, the sparse furniture, curtains on the windows, and wood burning stove reminded Kronos of a family trap restaurant on Route 4 in Paramus, New Jersey. The politically correct environment of the eatery was corporately designed to look like a country home. It was a ploy to get people’s minds off the portion-controlled servings as mandated by the head office in Milwaukee or someplace. Except for the Sun Microsystems minicomputer in anvil cases, this house looked like a small corner of that restaurant, complete with an old grandmother.
Taking it all in, Kronos turned to Hiccock. “So where’s the Admiral?”
“She’s at the computer,” Hiccock said, pointing.
Kronos was enraged. “She? She’s, she’s … she’s an old broad!”
“Mind that tongue, boy. She is an old Admiral broad. And she forgot more than you’ll ever know.”
Kronos felt the skin on his face start to heat up. He bit the inside of his cheek, pivoted on his heels, and stormed out the door.
“Come on, Kronos,” Hiccock said, following him. “This isn’t some hacking competition. People are dying out there wholesale. We have to try everything.”
“Look, I hacked for the mob. I made them millions. I was Electronic Enemy Number One for four years. I got pride. Why do I have to work with her? What could she possibly know?”
“Let’s go find out. I left her with her first computer four days ago.”
Kronos planted himself, not moving. “What? She didn’t have a computer? Are you whacked out of your freaking mind?”
“Look, in the early days she was in Naval Administration, a fancy name for the secretarial pool in the Navy.”
“Is this going to be a long freaking story?”
“When the computer first came along, the torpedo heads didn’t know what it was and assigned it to her command.”
“You are boring me here.”
“Well, when they started aiming guns and figuring out missile arcs with the damn things, her department grew. She had the first machine, an ENIAC.
“Electronic numerical integrator and computer, yeah, so? I had a Commodore 64, big whoop!” Kronos crossed his arms, assuming a petulant stance.
“The story goes that one day the whole machine went down. Couldn’t get it running. Techs and engineers all over it. No go. Then she got this idea. She walked over to a big rack, reached inside, and found a moth had flown into the cabinet and got stuck in a relay contact. She removed it and the thing started right up. She logged it officially as ‘Computer not functioning. It had a bug in it’!”
Slowly Kronos turned. “That was this broad?”
“Wherever you are, young grasshopper, she got there first.”
“Yeah, so what’s with the no box till four days ago?”
“She abandoned all technology. I read her papers when I was in college. She called for a halt to further computer research and enhancements, claiming that one day they would become too fast and too smart to overcome, and then whoever controlled the boxes could control the world.”
“So they kicked her ass out of the Navy for that?”
“If anybody was going to control anybody, Uncle Sam wanted to make sure it was us. C’mon ‘couzeen,’ let’s go see if she can help us.”
“That’s ‘cucheen.’”
Kronos looked back through the doorway. The old woman was busy doing something at the keyboard. He thought of Elmira. He had won the trust of the assistant warden when he fixed the warden’s son’s laptop, saving the old man a few hundred from a rip-off repair shop. Although he then became the de facto IT guy at the prison, he still had to return to his cell three times a day and report to the workout yard whenever the screws wanted him out there. Since he was a white-collar criminal, the macho guards didn’t fuck with him much. With the assistant warden’s blessing, his life there was better than most inmates’, but the crummiest, worst day of freedom was still a million times better than the best day in jail. Hiccock had gotten him out of there and Kronos didn’t want to go back. Reluctantly, he re-entered the house. Parks was at Hiccock’s laptop as the familiar audio signature for Microsoft Windows tinkled out of the machine.
“Whoever came up with this was a pretty smart fellow,” she said to the two men as they approached.
“Windows?” Hiccock said. “Yeah, I’d say so.”
“It’s the Killer App of all time!” Kronos added.
“The what?” Parks scrunched her nose, looking up over her bifocals.
“Killer application?” Kronos sighed, not believing he had to explain this. “Software so hot, people buy the hardware just to use it.”
“I think he’s agreeing with you that this guy was smart,” Hiccock said.
“Yep, except he missed a few things like right …” she typed a few keystrokes, “… here. He’s got a big hole here …”
Suddenly Kronos felt like he was falling. He experienced the sensation of wind whipping past his ears as he looked at the screen beyond the Admiral’s gray hair. Right there in uncompiled language was a nested loop error that had been missed by legions of proofers and beta-test site weenies who must have been paid millions by Microsoft.
“He’d pay you a king’s ransom for finding that little bug,” Hiccock said.
Kronos spun his head to Hiccock on the word bug. Whatever Parks had seen was forever lost as she hit the power button and said, “Ah, he’s a smart fella. He’ll figure it out on his own sooner or later.”
Kronos was in awe. He had found a new guru. He pulled Hiccock aside. “She didn’t have a computer ’til four days ago?”
Hiccock checked his watch. “Three days and twenty-one-and-one-half-hours, actually.”
Kronos sat down and powered up the Sun System, positioning himself next to Parks. “Yo, how you doin’, Admiral? I’m Kronos. We’re going to work together and blast through that freaking firewall.”
“What’s a firewall?” she asked.
After a deep breath, Kronos started typing a hundred words per minute as he proceeded to teach and preach “Computers 102.” “It’s a form of active encryption.”
“Like the Enigma code of World War Two?”
“Yes, only those codes were passive, waiting for someone to figure out the key. A firewall actively rejects any attempt to decode it by changing itself and confusing the destructuring logic of the code breaker.”
“So it slithers and slides when you probe it?”
“Exactly.”
“Show me how far you got when you hit this firewall,” Parks commanded.
He typed like a machine gun as Parks watched the screen.
CHAPTER THIRTY
The rest stop on the Jersey Turnpike provided an excellent observation point from which Tommy could research and plan his attack. At the end of the cracked asphalt parking lot, through the scratched windshield of his Camaro, he could observe the comings and goings of the stainless steel tanker trucks at night. The trucks formed a mobile pipeline into the storage tanks. This specific tank facility had already been earmarked by groups like Greenpeace and Earth First as one of the world’s most dangerous ecological time bombs. The intent of these organizations was to merely alert the citizenry to the obscene violations big corporations were imposing on Mother Earth. The most they envisioned, or could hope for as a result of their efforts, was the occasional protest or letter-writing campaign. They never in their worst nightmares counted on Tommy and his dedication to bringing instant justice and notoriety for the cause.