John Sandford - The Fool's Run

Our first virus was not subtle. It was a bomb, pure and simple. Forty-five days after being inserted in the Whitemark computer system (viruses can count), it would explode. Any Whitemark program containing a virus would be thoroughly and irretrievably jumbled. Nothing would come out of the company's computers but garbage.

"Why forty-five days?" Maggie asked, when I explained the virus to her. We were in the Whitemark computer using the special entry codes I had created for us.

"The Whitemark programmers will eventually catch on to what we're doing. We've got three or four weeks at the most. If their top systems man is busted on the porno charge, we may get a few more days out of the confusion. Anyway, when the trouble starts, they'll do the routine system checks. That will take a couple of days. When nothing works, they'll start sweating. Eventually, they'll figure it out. They'll realize they're under attack, and they'll shut down outside access. There are some ways around that, but only for a day or two. At that point, we'll be fifteen or twenty days out, and they'll call in the FBI, or somebody like that, to look for us. They'll be worried about sabotage.

"Once they get everything shut down, there'll be a couple of weeks of confusion. They'll be paranoid about the system. They'll run all kinds of tests. Then they'll start repairs, bringing in new software. Checking it. That should get us five or six weeks down the road. So then, at six and a half weeks, the bomb explodes. It'll be the finishing touch. They won't recover before the contract deadlines."

She thought about it for a minute, nibbling on her lower lip. "So what's the first move after you get the viruses in? The first thing that will affect them? If we don't hurt them soon, it'll be too late."

"I'll start on that tonight," I said. "Most of their design work is done at individual work stations, but all the stations are tied into the central computer. I can get to them when they're not being used. I'll start by hacking up the math programs. Engineers run a million numbers through their computers. I'll stick in a program that will add or subtract various small percentages on certain calculations. It won't be quite random. Identical calculations will come out the same way every time, so if they check their work, it'll be confirmed. But it'll all be wrong."

She didn't understand. "What's the practical effect?" she asked. "Tell me a practical effect."

"Okay. Say you were designing a screw-in gas cap for your Porsche. There's a male part and a female part. The threading has to be the same on both parts. Say the twist on the male part is altered just slightly-the pitch is changed a few degrees. The cap becomes worthless. You can't look at the plans and tell that it's worthless; you can't tell it's worthless when you're making it. It looks fine right up to the time you try to screw the parts together. Then they don't work. And the whole problem is in a calculation somewhere.

"Or say that you want to design the kind of round gas-cap cover that goes on the outside of some cars, on the fender. Say you make the round metal cover a quarter inch too big in diameter. It won't fit; it's useless. You can't make it fit any more than you can push a nickel through a pop-bottle top. But it looks fine, right up to the moment you try to put it on the car."

She considered it for a moment, staring dead into the eye of an onion bagel.

"That sounds pretty crude," she said finally.

"Those examples are," I agreed. "But if you do analogous things in electronics, it gets more complicated. You can't see which parts are wrong; it can take days to figure out a mistake. Every individual part works, and every part is just as specified, but the system won't work. Anytime you build a complicated electronic machine there are always mistakes, pure accidents. They're nightmares. Sometimes it takes days to find them. You don't know if you're dealing with a basic design flaw, or if there's a bad electrical connection somewhere. If mistakes are generated on a large scale, by design. I don't know of a cure."

She thought that over as she got into the onion bagel. "How do you know that they just won't check the computer and fix it?" she asked as she chewed.

"They will, sooner or later. But probably later. Computers are the water engineers swim in. They don't question the answers they get from computers any more than a fish questions water. They know the computer is correct: the problem must be somewhere else."

That seemed to satisfy her, although she was more thoughtful than pleased. Later in the morning, I injected the first of the viruses into the Whitemark system. When it was done, I wandered into the kitchen and heard her talking on an extension phone, relaying what I'd told her. When she got off the phone, she came in and sat down.

"I was talking to our systems man," she said. "I didn't tell him what we're doing, of course, but I did say that I'd talked to a guy about computer security. He says you're right. But he says the chances of a good enough programmer ever getting into our system are slim and none."

"That's why it could be done."

I was tempted to tell her that Bobby had already been in the Anshiser system, but some things are best left untold. "If I were you, I might have another little chat with him."

"I made a note," she said. She smiled, and the skin crinkled at the corners of her eyes.

While I was working on the attack programs that we'd insert into the Whitemark system, Dace was working on the publicity angle. His first product was a package on the systems director, the pornographer.

"I put it together with words cut out of the Post," he said. He was wearing surgeon's latex gloves and holding the paper by the corners. It was an ugly jumble of clipped-out news type Scotch-taped to a piece of spiral notebook paper.

"The hardest part was getting the words right. Nothing too big, but nothing too small, either. Something just right for a half-bright crackhead." The text was three paragraphs long and explained:

we needed the MONEY from

the Robbery for medicine, so

we Started robbing Houses.

found these Porno magazines

Full of little children, which

was not Cool, which is

a Hundred Times more cruel than

ANYTHING we Ever done.

It specified names, the address, and the day and time of the burglary.

Maybe They HID it BY now.

But If you watch Them you

you catch TheM.

little kids are getting FuCked.

A sample magazine was enclosed, along with the list of subscribers.

"One thing that strikes me as phony is that we're sending it to the right police jurisdiction. A junkie would probably send it to the Washington cops," Dace said as he sealed the envelope. "I don't want to take a chance that the whole thing would get lost in the bureaucracy, so I'm going to send it to the right place, to the chief. Even if they're a little suspicious, they'll check. Especially with the magazine and the subscriber list."

"What do you think they'll do? The cops?" Maggie asked.

"When I was working a police beat years ago, they'd pass it off to the vice squad. The vice cops would go over to the house, see if the door looks like it had been broken in recently. I'm assuming that the break-in wasn't reported. Then they might look in the windows and see if we described the place right. Or knock on the door with some phony excuse, to see if it looks right. If everything jibes, they'll watch the place, see who comes and goes. Maybe have a quiet talk with a neighbor or two. They'll do a computer search and see if these people have ever been involved in a sex thing in the past. If they find anything, they may do a discreet black-bag job themselves, to check the place out. Then, depending on what they find, they'll go to a pet judge and get a search warrant. They won't have a real good case, but it should be enough for a warrant."