“I had faith in your initiative, but I had a man prepared to aid you just in case. You bought him a beer at the bar and grill.”
“Then when we met, why didn’t you tell me more? The truth, for instance.”
“Because your subsequent actions would have given me away. I knew then they were watching you. Seeking me out was a logical move on your part, and I had to make sure your moves continued to seem logical.”
“They still tried to kill me.”
“Your interview with Dolorman forced their hand. You had become more than a simple aggravation for them.” Terrell paused. “But there is much more you need to know, both of you. Between the two of you, you have almost all the pieces of the puzzle. Perhaps we can all help each other.” Terrell’s eyes focused on Sandy. “You first, Sandy. Tell us all what you’ve discovered.”
She had to think only briefly. “Basically that about ten years ago Krayman Industries stole an ultra-density microchip apparently to provide them with control over the telecommunications industry and later, somehow, the country. They’ve also got something up in the sky disguised as a satellite that destroyed the space shuttle Adventurer ten days ago.”
“This feels like show-and-tell,” Blaine quipped.
“Your turn, Mr. McCracken,” Terrell told him.
“Krayman is financing two armies,” Blaine started. “One is a black radical group poised for a Christmas Eve strike against major urban centers across the country. The other is a mercenary group devoted to wiping out the radicals once they’ve accomplished their task.”
“Which is?”
“Causing disorder, chaos, ‘total paralysis’ as their leader puts it.”
“And could they accomplish all that?”
“By themselves, no. But they could come damn close, kill an awful lot of people and terrify even more.”
“But what would stop them from succeeding at creating this total paralysis?”
“Channels of emergency response would be slower on Christmas Eve, but eventually they’d call up retaliation Sahhan and the PVR couldn’t hope to contend with. The army could mobilize a hundred thousand troops in a matter of hours. It wouldn’t be much of a fight. The country would be aware of what was happening within an hour of its start. People would know the situation was under control. That would cut down the effects of the strike significantly.”
Terrell was nodding now. “And if all the channels of communication suddenly broke down … or were broken down? What then, Mr. McCracken?”
Blaine felt stymied. “It’s … hard to say.”
“But unfortunately not so hard to bring about. Not anymore.” Terrell paused and traded stares with each of them. As if on cue, all three sat down stiffly. “The two of you have just exchanged twin sides of a plot that aims to control America. I worked closely on it for the final two years I spent with Krayman Industries. It wasn’t until four years after leaving that I realized the true scope of what I’d been involved in, so I went to the one man capable of stopping it: Randall Krayman. I made Randy realize that his dream had been perverted. He promised to put a stop to it.”
“So they killed him,” Blaine concluded.
Terrell nodded. “And concocted the entire ruse of his withdrawal from society. He had outlived his usefulness to them anyway, like so many others involved in Omega.”
“Omega?”
“The name of the plot the two of you have uncovered. By five years ago, the time of Krayman’s ‘disappearance,’ the wheels of Omega were already in motion.” Terrell hesitated and looked at Sandy. “You were right about why Krayman stole Hollins’s discovery. He needed control of the ultra-density microchip.”
“But why?” Sandy asked him.
Terrell’s hand stroked his chin. “Have either of you ever heard of a computer virus?”
“Vaguely,” McCracken responded. “Lab personnel can make themselves indispensable by putting bugs only they know about into programs.”
“In a simplistic sense, you’re not far off,” Terrell confirmed. “Let’s say an employee is worried about being fired or laid off. He programs a virus into the computer that will become active only if his password is deleted from the system. Once the computer registers the deletion, the virus begins to infest every major program in the company’s loop, deleting files, scrambling memory, and causing general havoc, possibly even including turning the entire system off.”
“So obviously,” McCracken noted, “this Omega involves Krayman Industries discovering a way of doing the same thing on a wider scale.”
“Much wider, Mr. McCracken,” Terrell added. “The whole country, to be exact.”
“How?” Sandy asked.
“You’ve got to know more about computer viruses in general to understand the answer to that,” Terrell told her. “Basically, a computer virus is not unlike a biological virus. Both invade a host’s body for the purpose of reproducing. Both are incredibly small at the time of initial entry: in the case of a computer virus, two hundred bytes of memory would be sufficient to get the process rolling. And both spread remarkably fast. A computer virus could infest every program in a major system in a matter of weeks by transmitting itself from program to program — from host to host. But the virus would be undetectable during this, its incubation period. Then when certain preprogrammed conditions are met, like the deletion of a password in the case of that disgruntled employee, the virus is released to attack the system with all its power, creating a kind of epidemic. By the time desperate programmers find the virus in their system, it will in effect be the system. The attack takes over the machine as easily as a biological virus makes its host sick.”
Terrell leaned forward. “There are two ways to create a computer virus. Either you program it into a chip already in place … or you make it part of that chip even before it’s installed into the computer.”
“Oh, my God,” Sandy moaned, goosebumps prickling her flesh. “The Krayman Chip …”
Terrell’s eyes confirmed she was right. “In Seminole, Sandy, I told you Krayman abandoned the direct-appeal approach for gaining control over the nation in favor of a technological one. The type of computer virus his scientists discovered provided this means. Keep in mind now that the key to any computer virus is a preprogrammed set of conditions stored inside a chip. The computer is waiting for something to happen or not to happen, depending on the individual programmer. Krayman scientists discovered a way to build a shutdown response into a memory chip. A billion microchips all waiting for the same signal which would cause them all to shut down their respective systems — that’s the essence of Omega. The only thing Krayman lacked then was the chip itself and, more, total control over the production market. He needed both if Omega was going to succeed.”
“Spud Hollins,” Sandy muttered.
“Exactly.” Terrell nodded. “There’s a saying in the computer industry that if you can’t come up with your own idea, steal someone else’s. Well, COM-U-TECH not only stole Hollins’s chip, they marketed it at a cost so low that they effectively became the sole supplier of this particular chip.”
“Used exclusively in telecommunications?” Blaine asked.
“And its various offshoots, yes. You’re starting to catch on to the scope of this plot, the utter monstrousness of it. So now we have a billion microchips in place all over the country in everything related to data transmissions, from television, to telephone, to commercial air travel. The chips are in place in all the machines, doing what they’re supposed to do, all the time waiting for the signal to come instructing them to shut down their systems.”
“And I suppose Krayman recruited a hundred thousand computer programmers to push the right button at the right time,” Blaine said incredulously.