She pulled the donut from between her teeth. “Help yourself. They’re right on my desk. In fact, take the whole box. Less for me to guilt over.” She sighed, taking a step back in an attempt to realize any pattern not yet obvious to her.
Kronos stabbed through the hole of one of the donuts and picked it up from the box like a ring around his index finger. He held it that way as he started to nibble his way around, removing the chocolate covering like a lathe. He walked over to Janice. “Doing a little programming?”
“Kronos, please, I’m trying to work this out. Could you just take your donut and leave? Ewwwww!” She finally looked away from the chart and reacted to the sight of him eating it off his finger.
“Jeez, what a grouch.”
Something ruminated in Janice’s mind. “Kronos!”
He returned. “Yeah?”
“What did you mean ‘was I programming’?”
“What you got plastered on the wall here looks like an old Basic program.”
“How so?”
“Well, in that old language, each line of instruction was numbered, like the way you got it there. And you see that grouping there …” he pointed to a “paragraph” that stood alone. “That looks like a subroutine. This here looks like an old ‘If-Then’ statement. You know, if the proposition is true then do this, if it is false then do that.”
“Hold it, hold it, go slow. What’s a subroutine?”
“Well, it’s a way to get the computer to do repetitive tasks without having to write repetitive code. So you write it once and keep telling the machine to run the subroutine as many times as you need it to. Burying a nasty line of instruction in a subroutine was how I did some of my best hacking, because the program wouldn’t immediately hit it until the subroutine was called up. I named them ‘time bombs’ cause it was just a matter of time ’til …”
She kissed Kronos, interrupting his boasting. “Mister, you just got yourself a year’s supply of donuts!”
The two most powerful places in America being Washington and Hollywood, the news of the movie star’s and senator’s deaths came as a shock to just about everyone. The details were never released by the LAPD. “Murder-suicide” was the official cause of death in the coroner’s report. The impact on Hollywood was considerable, as Miss Saks was in the middle of a $200-million film that would now have to be trashed. The senator was just about to start his re-election bid and many pundits, posthumously of course, foresaw a possible White House residency in his recently extinguished future.
Unreported in the L.A. Times was the fact that along with the senator’s death came the death of the Dent-Farber Emergency Cyber Crimes Initiative legislation. That bill would have pseudo-nationalized his corporate constituents in Silicon Valley, forcing them to design a new Internet police force in exchange for the political plum of getting billions in funding for advanced computational research engines. This, ostensibly, would be done as a national security issue to thwart any future attempts by any foreign power to gain the advantage in the never-talked-about computational power race.
The Hollywood press, however, reported the following news bulletin: “Self-help guru Kindwa Seiene, multimillionaire TV empowerer and author of My Karma, My Power has offered $44 million for the Saks estate. The mansion and grounds in Beverly Hills was the former home of mogul …”
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
“You know what makes a church a basilica?” Kronos said.
“No, what?” Janice asked, playing along as she and Cheryl set up enlargements of the outlines on easels.
“A basilica is a church where the pope has held mass. It can be any church. Once the pope celebrates mass in it, boom, it becomes a basilica.”
“You… are an idiot,” Hiccock said as he opened the briefing folders.
“I was just wondering if this is the Presidential Suite because some president stayed here once … if the same rule applies.”
“According to that, then Yankee Stadium would be a basilica!”
“How ya figure that?”
“Hello, the pope held mass there back in the sixties or seventies.”
“Guys, guys!” Janice called out, “can you finish this theological debate later. The president will be here any minute.”
“Bill, don’t you think we should have waited until the president got back to Washington to do this?” Janice’s anxiety tinged her tone. “He’s going to be here on the West Coast for two more days. He needs to hear what you’ve discovered now.” Kronos stood captivated by two tables of catered food. “Did you see this spread?”
Kronos’s eyes widened as he surveyed the bounty sprawled before him. The buffet offered everything from finger sandwiches to hot chafing dishes all laid out just in case the president, on a whim, wanted a bite or decided to invite a head of state to his suite.
While Cheryl prepared the briefing papers and Kronos worked his way methodically through the food groups, Hiccock took Janice aside. “Are you okay?”
Janice nervously smoothed the St. John suit, which only a few hours ago seemed to her to be a “sure-fire look.” She caught herself and forced her hands to her side. “It’s easy for you. You work with the man. I’ve never met a president before, much less reported a ‘theory’ to one. It’s just a little nerve-racking, Bill.”
“He’s a really decent guy, Janice, a straight shooter and pretty smart. I think he’s going to get this without too much trouble. Besides, he knows you’re the best in your field.”
Bill’s cell phone chirped. “Hiccock.”
Joey Palumbo was on the other end in his new capacity as the FBI’s Quarterback liaison officer. “Bill, we just put together a time line on the Saks-Dent killings.”
“Give me the shorthand. We’re about to meet with the boss.”
“She worked out from 11 AM to 12:15, threatened her agent on a conference call until 12:35, then spent more than an hour online. After that, she dismissed all her house staff for the rest of the day and placed a call to Dent’s personal phone. Forty minutes later at 3 PM, they were both dead according to the coroner.”
“And so was Dent’s firewall legislation.”
“It’s certainly a high-tech enough motive. I have my guys running her computer through your cockamamie subliminal gadget back in D.C. right now. Hansen says that the first few messages he’s found so far point to an online-ordered assassination of a sitting U.S. senator.”
“Gadget” was the in-house term the FBI geeks had given to Hiccock’s circa 1960s technological dinosaur, which just now happened to be the single key to breaking open the most devastating use of technology in American history.
“As soon as they have a hard copy printout, have it sent to us here …” Hiccock’s phone went dead. Pulling it away from his ear, he saw there was full signal strength. That’s when he remembered “the bubble” that blanked out all cell service when the president was nearby.
At that moment, the Secret Service appeared in the room to conduct their secondary sweep. Two agents, having already cleared Hiccock’s team, concerned themselves with the windows and any possible line of fire that a rooftop assassin might utilize to achieve infamy.
“He’s here,” Bill said to Janice.
An agent mumbled something into his wrist radio microphone about the room being secure. A split second later, the president, followed by Chief of Staff Reynolds, entered the room with Tate in tow. The president took off his jacket, laid it over the back of a chair, and loosened his tie. He headed straight to the bar. One of the Secret Service agents shadowed the president’s movements, positioning himself between the window and the president. The Commander in Chief commandeered a ginger ale and popped it open, grabbed some ice, and poured. The White House steward, Mr. Jefferies, watched helplessly as the president temporarily usurped his duties. His only way to do his job was to hand the president a cocktail napkin.