Brian Freemantle - The Watchmen

Regulations required that a tally be kept, so John Barclay, a timid man whose speech hesitation was only just short of a stutter, knew he’d taken fifteen people from the top of the obelisk on the 10:00 A.M. tour. There had been three teenagers-he guessed one at eleven, the other two slightly older-and thought the adults divided between seven men and five women. He couldn’t remember anyone behaving suspiciously during the descent or more specifically at the level where the bomb had gone off. The routine was to lead the party down, so he would have been looking back up at them, pointing out the gift stones, and could be expected to see anything unusual, which he hadn’t. He couldn’t recall how many people carried or used cameras, but most tourists usually did.

Janice Smallbone, who’d conducted the afternoon tour, was in fact a large black woman. There’d been seventeen in her group, all adults, seven women and ten men. She remembered one man wearing the sort of jungle-suit camouflage jacket veterans sometimes wore for their vigil at the Vietnam Memorial. She thought he’d been with another man. Both had short military-type haircuts, but that’s all she could remember and she didn’t think she could identify them again or describe them sufficiently for an artist’s or computer-generated impression. Neither they nor anyone else had acted in any way to attract her particular attention. There would have been cameras but she didn’t know how many and couldn’t remember any being used during the descent. There probably had been.

By noon four people-two men and two women-who had made the monument descent on foot responded to the FBI appeal to come forward. Unprompted, one of the women, a kindergarten teacher from Houston named Hillary Petty, talked of the man in the camouflage jacket. “It seemed such an odd thing to wear, to someone like myself, from Texas. He wore a black beret, too, as if it was part of a uniform.” There had definitely been a second man, who’d carried a satchel from a strap over his shoulder. She was sure they’d been the last of the group to come down because she’d been the next in line, at the rear, but she hadn’t seen either of them do anything to suggest they might have been planting a bomb. She guessed both their ages between thirty and thirty-five. Although both had military haircuts, she didn’t remember more than that to provide enough for a detailed description. She said of course she’d look at the photographs that Cowley was expecting sometime that day from the Pentagon-she wasn’t leaving Washington until the end of the week-but she really wasn’t sure she could identify anyone. She listened several times to the Highway Patrol copy tape of the New Rochelle cruiser fire report but wasn’t able to recognize the voice as being that of anyone she had heard during the tour. She’d taken several photographs herself on the way down and surrendered her film, which was immediately developed. Neither man was shown in any of the prints, but two more people in the afternoon group-a man and a woman-were sufficiently recognizable for the photograph to be published in a renewed plea to contact the bureau.

“How much credibility can we put on it?” asked Pamela.

“It’s more than enough to describe as a positive lead,” judged Cowley. “But cautiously. Not too much detail-not even whether it was on the morning or afternoon tour-for them to realize how little we have. Hillary’s photograph will help: We can talk about other prints, as if we do have pictures of the two men. We might just spook them into a mistake.”

At that moment Cowley’s direct line rang. Carl Ashton, the Pentagon’s head of computer security, said, “You won’t believe what the bastards have done. I don’t believe it myself. Call up the government’s home page.”

There were only two Words-THE WATCHMEN-replicated thousands upon thousands of times until the Pentagon’s VDU server was totally full, immobilizing the system. In doing so the virus infected subsidiary, linked programs, causing computer crashes in the Commerce, Agriculture, Welfare, and Social Security departments.

Cowley stood with the telephone cupped to one ear, not fully comprehending the screen in front of him. Ashton said, “What you’re seeing isn’t the worst of it.”

“What else?” asked Cowley.

“Computers generate static-glue, dust and hair, stuff like that, to the screen. So there’s antistatic bands that attach to the supply lines. Computer shops sell a gizmo identical to antistatic bands. It fits on to the main feed and can record, for later downloading, the ten most recent access numbers and entry codes dialed from a machine.”

“Jesus!” Cowley exclaimed, numbed. “How many?”

“We’re still sweeping,” said Ashton. “So far every lower-level VDU and fifteen stations with their own hard disks. There’ll be more.”

“Any way of knowing the complete access they’ve achieved?”

“Every operator keeps a work log, but it’ll take weeks. But all that will tell us-hopefully-is the last ten from each individual machine. Which they’ve had God knows how much time to get into and move on. They can just ride piggyback on any call that’s made, anywhere else from their new host number.”

“Make it simple for me,” said Cowley.

“The Watchmen could already be, unknown and undetected, inside as many as five thousand programs anywhere in the world. There’s not a chance in hell of tracing them. And they can cause the sort of blocking chaos they’ve done with the official government page whenever they feel like it.”

“How are they doing that specifically?”

“It’s called a Trojan horse, which is self-explanatory. There’s no way of telling when one’s been lodged in a system or when it’ll open up. That happens when a code word or phrase is entered. Once that happens it becomes, quite literally, a computer infection, compounding and compounding itself over and over again. People die from virulent medical infections; programs die from virulent computer infections. Same principle. And we probably caused it ourselves.”

“Help me with that, too,” demanded Cowley.

“It would have been their burglar alarm,” said Ashton. “I’ve got thirty operators sweeping everything it’s possible to sweep. When one of them got close to the dormant Trojan horse, the alarm would have gone off, opening it up. It’s an absolute disaster.”

“What about the disgruntled list?” asked Cowley. “That on hard copy or disk?”

“That’s part of the disaster,” said the computer expert. “We were a third of the way through printing it off.”

“Which could be what triggered the alarm,” Cowley suggested at once. “The closeness to a particular name.”

There was no reaction from the other end for several moments. Then Ashton said, “I didn’t think of that! But it could easily be the way it happened.”

“The list alphabetical?”

“Yes.”

“And there was no master, backup file?”

“There should have been. But there wasn’t. An inquiry’s already started.”

“What other way could there be?” said Cowley, the question as much to himself as to the man at the Pentagon.

“There isn’t one,” said Ashton. “We’re looking at the failure of modern technology.”

“No,” refused Cowley. “What’s the system for letting people go? They get severance, vacation money, stuff like …?”

“That could be it!” accepted Ashton, understanding at once. “No idea how long it might take but it could be a cross-reference.”

“And there’s the photographs,” reminded Cowley, recalling the arrangement with Hillary Petty. “That’s another check, surely?”

There was another silence. “Part of the problem,” admitted Ashton. “They’re digitized.”