Ian Slater - Warshot

The jogger kept moving, cracking the chestnuts on the run as he made his way along Central Park South, turning left on the Fifth Avenue dogleg, entering the park proper on the east side.

Down by the fountain a small man in a dark navy tracksuit doing stretching exercises started running a few seconds after the man in the gray had passed him, catching up to him by the dairy. They were both on the circuit pathway and headed down the mall before cutting across the Sheep Meadow to the snow-covered Strawberry Fields, where they slowed and drew level, blue and gray. “See you got your chestnuts okay,” said the man in the blue.

“Yes,” said the other man, temporarily out of breath. They hadn’t stopped but were walking fast in a strong, long-distance gait. “I thought the price was quite reasonable.”

“Four dollars?”

“Yes.”

“Well-cooked?”

“Best I’ve ever had.”

“All right,” said the smaller man, “I’ve got everyone set. Where’s the main event going down?”

“No idea. All I was told was to get everyone in place.”

“We’ve had everyone in place for ten fucking years,” said the shorter man.

“You’re impatient. Doesn’t do to get in a hurry.”

“We can’t luck out much longer.”

The gray man cracked one of the nuts, dropping the shells on the pathway as they passed under a copse of snow-drooping sugar maples. “If something’s gone wrong,” he told the shorter man, “you’d better tell me right now.”

“Nothing’s gone wrong. Everybody’s a bit edgy, that’s all.”

“Why? What’s the rush — after ten years? A day here or there doesn’t matter.”

“I dunno. Guess I’m stressed myself. I mean I don’t really know how it works. Yeah — okay, so I organize the team, match the talent for the job. But I don’t know how it’s actually going to be done.”

“You’ve no need to know,” responded the man in gray, his breath visible in short puffs of mist. “Organizers aren’t supposed to know. We can’t all do one another’s job.”

“Huh,” said the shorter man, grabbing several chestnuts from the packet. “That’s what the CIA says is worst about our methods. We don’t have cross expertise. So someone else can step in.”

“That right?” said the man in gray. “So who did in their water supply? And knocked Con Ed out? We’re doing all right. They’re in a panic. All we have to remember is everybody does one thing and does it properly. It’s worked so far — that’s the only thing that matters.”

“I’d still like to understand the guts of it.”

“It’s not classified,” said the man in gray. “You can figure it out from any public library.” He knew it was a barren response. One of the things you didn’t do as a sleeper was to take out a lot of technical manuals from American libraries. It was a sure invitation to surveillance.

“What if something goes wrong?” said the shorter man. “Then I’d have to do it. Shit, this job’s the most important thing any of us’ll ever do. Right?”

“You could do it.”

“That’s like telling me I could be a — I dunno, Mario Andretti, ‘cause I can drive. I mean, if something fizzes out — halfway through? If one of our guys is made and’s taken out?”

“All right,” said the taller man, “but let’s keep up the pace. Joggers don’t stroll.” They increased the speed and he explained it — not only how they would simply sow further panic, but how they’d bring the country to its knees. “The old system of phones — still used in most places back home…” He meant the CIS. “They use analog-wave signals. Sound waves goes out through the telephone exchange, where you hear the clicks, electromechanical switches, then the signals go down cable pairs — or to conductors, if you like — to the next switch, and so on. At the receiving end the telephone converts the electrical wave back to sound. Now with digital — used all over America now — you use the binary scale — a series of zeros and ones representing any number you dial. Information’s broken down the same way — into zeros and ones. Like fax. It’s sent via the bipolar pulsing system. Follow me?”

“No.”

“Okay, look. Christ, you’ve eaten all the nuts!”

“You can buy some more. What about this digital crap?”

“What I’m saying, it’s a computer-based system that transmits all information — voice, data, you name it — in a binary code, so, for example, the number sixteen is one-zero-zero-zero-zero, ten is zero-one-zero-one-zero. Got that?”

“Sort of — not much good at math.”

“Doesn’t matter. Don’t worry about it. The point is, what we get is a coded stream of pulses at 1.544 megacycles a second. That’s over a million and a half pulses a second. Computer uses a wave form code. Anyway, just think of it as a whole bunch of pulses containing zeros and ones. Right?”

“Go on.”

The taller man stopped for a moment to tie a lace, his gray tracksuit patched with sweat despite the cold, looking around to see if anyone was following, then started off again.

“Now, because you’re dealing with all info in binary combinations of zeros and ones, you can process signals much faster and more cheaply than with the old mechanical switches that have to clunk through one, two, three, four, five… Follow that?”

“Yeah.”

“Fine. Now digital networks all have to be synchronized, otherwise in a sequence of zeros and ones you wouldn’t know where the start of a message or the end of it was. Only problem is, in order to have all the computers synchronized so they know where the start, middle, and end of a message is, you have to have ‘em all keyed into a cesium atomic clock — it’s got the most accurate beat in the world.”

“That’s why our guys are gonna hit the clock?”

“You win the car. Now, when you lose synchronization with the clock, you can ‘free run’ awhile without synchronization, but the ones and zeros start to pile up in no time, run into one another like rush hour on the turnpike. You have one big god-awful traffic jam. You with me?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay. When that happens — a pileup — you’re out of sync. Computer networks become a horizontal Tower of Babel. Most important thing — data circuits, like radar, are much more sensitive than voice circuits, so the data circuits pile up much faster, or, as the boys in the trade say, the ‘byte error’—the slippage — becomes unmanageable. And it’s garbage out. So a page of printout that should normally take half a second, runs two seconds. Loss factor four. And alarms aren’t set off in the digital system the same way as they are in analog circuits. You can alter the alarms through interfering with the software, but—” Another jogger was coming their way. When he passed, the man in gray turned about to double check, then continued. “The weak link is that with the cesium-atomic-clock-synchronization system, everybody, and I mean everybody —that is, every computer — has to be on the same mark.”

“The same clock?”

“Right — including the military. No matter how many different codes there are, military has to use the same synchronization. So you hit the clock, military computers go out — AT and T’s stations board in New Jersey lights up like the Fourth of July. Massive computer network breakdown. You remember the big screwups in the early 1990s?”

“No.”

“Biggest one was ‘ninety — January twenty-ninth. Two twenty-five p.m. Hit every one of a hundred and fourteen big computers. Cost ‘em over forty million. Year before in Paris, the big police computer went on the fritz — misread over thirty-nine thousand magnetized labels of drivers’ licenses. Started charging auto drivers all over France with everything from rape to homicide. It was beautiful.”