“This is Kosinski in Operations,” she announced. “We’ve got it!”
“Hang on.”
After a short pause, she heard, “This is Taylor.” Midwest Telephone’s CEO sounded almost as tired as she did, almost as tired as they all were. Nobody had gotten much sleep in the past three days.
Kosinski forced herself to speak calmly and distinctly. “We’ve confirmed our initial diagnosis, sir. We were able to track down the virus and its source, and we’ve started a reboot. The whole system will be back on-line in forty-five minutes.”
“Thank God!” Taylor breathed. His voice sharpened. “Where was the damned thing hidden?”
Kosinski prodded the diskette on her desk with a pen. She didn’t even want to touch it with her bare hands. “In one of our printers, sir.”
“What?!”
She explained further. “Some clever bastard hid the virus inside our laser printer ROM chip piggybacked onto its normal code in several pieces. Every time we rebooted, it would reassemble the pieces and reinfect the system from scratch.” She shook her head at the vicious intelligence behind the attack, half in unwilling admiration and half in anger. “We got lucky or we’d probably still be looking for it. One of my techs turned the printer off to clear a paper jam and forgot to turn it back on. While it was off, we rebooted the system again and everything started to come back online. But as soon as we powered up the printer, the virus reappeared.”
“Good God!” Taylor exclaimed. He hesitated. “Have you discovered any more nasty surprises lurking out there?”
“Yes, sir.” Kosinski’s lips thinned. “We found the same type of altered ROM chip in every switching center’s printer. They’d all been serviced in the past two months.”
“Son of a bitch.”
“Yeah.” Kosinski prodded the diskette on her desk again. “This is no virus I’ve ever seen or heard of, sir. I’ve already passed the ROM chip we found here to the FBI and the Computer Emergency Response Team. It’s their baby now.”
Personally, she wished them luck. Virusland was a mysterious and spooky place, full of secrecy and strange personalities. It took a special kind of weirdo, she thought, to write a program that deliberately fouled up a computer.
And someone out there, some terrorist, had gone straight to the top of a very twisted bunch to find this little gem.
CHAPTER 19
BACKLASH
Helen Gray fought off the last clinging tendrils of a nightmare and woke up, suddenly aware that she was all alone in the rumpled bed. She opened her eyes. The glowing digits on his bedside clock read 1:41 A.M. Where had Peter gone?
She pushed herself upright and looked around the room. The lights were off, but her eyes were adjusted to the darkness. Her lips curved upward in a smile as she noticed the pieces of clothing strewn across the floor from the half-open door all the way over to the bed. Someday she and Peter Thorn were going to have to learn to set a somewhat slower, less frantic pace in their lovemaking.
But not now. After weeks of strain and enforced separation, neither of them could have been expected to restrain themselves for very long. And they hadn’t.
With her section on a twelve-hour stand-down, Helen had driven straight to Peter’s town house. She remembered falling into his arms as soon as he opened the front door. Her memories after that were a tangled mix of roving hands, parted lips, motion, warmth, and finally, a swelling, crashing wave of sheer ecstasy.
Sleep had come after a welcome slide into restful oblivion that had been broken only by an old nightmare from her childhood. A nightmare of being hunted through an endless maze of narrow, dead-end corridors and impossible turnings. It was an evil dream that had come back to haunt her in these past several weeks as she and her fellow FBI agents grappled with their faceless, nameless foes.
Helen glanced at the empty place beside her and guessed that the nightmare had begun only after Peter left her side. She shook off the last wisps of sleep.
Her nose twitched as she caught the welcome smell of coffee wafting in through the open doorway. She slid out of bed, threw on one of his shirts, and glided quietly out into the hallway.
The lights were on in the guest bedroom Peter used as a work space. She pushed open the unlatched door and went inside.
Wearing only a pair of ash-grey Army sweatpants, Peter Thorn sat at a desk, paging steadily through a stack of reports she had forwarded from the FBI task force. Under enormous pressure from above for results, Special Agent Flynn’s initial reluctance to share their information with the government’s other counterterrorist units had faded somewhat.
Peter had pinned a large map of the United States to the wall above his desk. Color-coded pins marked the location of different terrorist attacks. His light brown hair was tousled and his green eyes looked weary. A forgotten cup of coffee sat cooling beside a calculator and a pocket calendar.
Helen leaned over and put her arms around him. “Couldn’t sleep?” she asked softly.
He looked around with the same wry, boyish grin that had first attracted her to him. “Nope. Sorry.” He tapped the disordered pile of papers in front of him. “I just can’t seem to stop going over and over these reports in my mind.”
“What are you looking for?”
Thorn shrugged tiredly. “I’m not sure exactly. Maybe some pattern we haven’t spotted yet. Some common method of operations or choice of targets.”
She nodded slowly. “Not a bad idea, Peter. Nobody on our task force has the time or energy to look very hard at the big picture. Everybody’s locked into the little piece of the puzzle they’re directly responsible for investigating.”
“What about Flynn?”
Helen shook her head. “He tries. But every time he starts pulling all our data together, it seems like somebody from the White House calls for another briefing. Or he has to fend off the press or the Congress. There are too many distractions. Too many conflicting demands on his time.” She nodded toward his desk. “So, are you finding anything interesting in all of that?”
Peter grimaced. “Nothing solid. Just an ugly sneaking suspicion that we’re looking in the wrong god damned place for these bastards. I’m beginning to think we’re not dealing with domestic terrorism at all. That maybe most of what’s been happening is something that was planned and organised overseas. That we could be facing a single, coordinated terrorist effort.”
Helen straightened up to her full height, suddenly very alert.
“Explain.”
His mouth turned down even more. “I wish I could. It’s more a feeling than anything else.” He pushed some of the FBI incident reports to one side. “Look, discount the background noise the murders and penny-ante bombings conducted by the second-raters and punks we’ve already caught. Right?”
She nodded. Each large-scale terrorist massacre or bombing seemed to spawn half a dozen or more copycat acts most by known psychos or members of hate groups already under FBI surveillance. The legwork involved in running those incidents down consumed precious time and resources, but it never seemed to bring them any closer to the people who were doing the real damage.
“Well, then, take another look at what’s left. Bombings and massacres that jump from D.C. to Seattle, to Chicago, then back to D.C., and on to Dallas. More bombs that hit L.A. and Louisville on the same day. Then another series of bombs and ambushes back in this area. And now this communications virus in the Midwest.” Thorn jabbed a finger at the map as he spoke, pinpointing each separate incident. “Every attack is professionally planned and executed. Every attack strikes a new area and a new type of target. And every attack spreads our personnel and resources across a wider and wider area.”