John Sandford: The Fool's Run

"So I'm eighty-three, and the company is all I'm leaving behind. Now I might not leave that. In this business, development costs are so high that if you don't win the contract, if you don't get to build the plane, the whole company can go down.

"Right now, we employ thirteen thousand workers in our aviation division. If Sunfire wins the competition, we'll hire ten thousand more. If we lose, and all we have left is the corporate jet division, we'll be down to five thousand by the end of the decade. The corporate jet field is saturated, competition is getting worse, and we have nowhere else to go. There are eight thousand people, more or less, who could lose their jobs because of a rotten little thief. I'm not going to stand for it. Not if I can do anything about it."

"Do you know who the thief is?"

He glanced at Dillon. Dillon stared back impassively, and when Anshiser turned to me again, I got the feeling he was about to tell a lie. "No. We have some ideas. But right now, we don't know."

"Okay. So where do I come in? What do you want me to do?"

"A couple of things. Everything we do, from design to production to cost estimating, we do on computers. It's all so complicated, there is no other way. If somebody smart got into our computer system, I don't know how, but did it, he could hurt us. Badly."

"And you think it's the same with Whitemark."

"I know it is. There simply isn't any other way to do the work. Whitemark has about three months to integrate the String system with their Hellwolf avionics. Then they have to demonstrate to the Navy and Air Force that it will work. As it is, they might not make the deadline. They've got a crash program going, but they started late. I want you to slow them down. I want you to get into their computer system and screw it up. Be subtle, be obvious, I don't care. But I want you to push them to the wall-I want you to jam them up so they can't move. If they can't demonstrate their system in three months, and we can, we're back in the ball game."

"What's the other thing you want?" I asked.

"Revenge," he said, his killer's eyes glittering in the dying light. "I want revenge on the bastards who stole my baby."

I spent the night in a Chicago hotel, watching a bad movie about teenagers and thinking over the job proposition. Anshiser was a maniac, of course. He knew what he was doing, but he was clinging to a thin edge of control, like a grunt with battle fatigue. Would a crisis crack the control, or harden it? It could go either way. Maggie was something else. She was precise, measured, cool. She knew what she was doing, and she was nowhere near the edge. She apparently agreed with Anshiser. Dillon was a cipher.

Their proposition was not entirely novel. There have been several hushed-up incidents in which businesses were damaged by computer attacks. Most of the time, the object of the attack was theft or embezzlement, and the damage was an unintentional byproduct.

A major railroad was burned when a group of techno-thieves, as they were called in the FBI report, began shuffling and relabeling boxcars. The intent was to send certain cars, loaded with high-value consumer items like televisions and stereos, to remote sidings, where the gang would crack the cars, load the loot onto trucks, and haul it away. The most serious damage came when they tried to cover their tracks. Three thousand boxcars were mislabeled and sent to the wrong destinations. The result was chaos. Perishable products rotted, time-critical shipments were late. It cost the railroad millions to straighten out.

In a few of the known raids, the damage was intentional. In every case, though, the attacks were from the inside-guerrilla hits by employees against their own company. Anshiser's proposition was altogether different. He was proposing a war, an act of naked aggression, an attack to the death by one corporation on another. As far as I knew, there had never been anything like it. A war that was business by other means, to paraphrase a famous Prussian.

Maggie called at eight o'clock.

"Jesus," I said with a yawn. "When you said morning, I thought you meant like eleven. Where are you?"

"Downstairs," she said briskly. "I have three warm bagels, a small cup of cream cheese, a plastic knife, two Styrofoam cups of coffee, and your room number. What do you think?"

She looked like she'd been up for hours. She came in, sat in one of the chairs, and ate one of the bagels while she watched me finish the other two.

"You look like you've been dragged through hell by the ankles," she said. "Any thoughts yet?"

"It will take a while," I said, scratching my day-old beard. "I wonder about Anshiser."

"If he's crazy?"

"I might have picked a different word."

"But that's what you want to know," she said. "The answer is, no, he is not crazy. He is extremely anxious. This might be our last card. If we're going to play it, we have to do it soon. In six weeks, or two months, it will be too late."

"Hmph." I drank the last of my coffee. "Let me shave and take a shower, and we can get out of here."

She came and leaned on the bathroom door-jamb while I shaved, still nibbling on her first bagel. "I used to watch my father shave when I was a little girl," she said as I wiped the last of the shaving cream off my face.

"You watch your father take a shower, too?" I asked.

"Of course not." A tiny frown.

"Well, if you'll move your elbow, I'll shut the door and spare you the experience," I said, and she grinned and moved off across the room.

The Anshiser research plant was somewhere out by O'Hare, a nondescript, modernoid building. It looked, as somebody clever once said, like the box the building should have come in. The director didn't quite slaver over Maggie's hand, but he personally took us down to the laboratory level, where a String package was being assembled.

The lab looked like the world's cleanest machine shop, with concrete floors and a lot of noise. The String package was in a back room. Entry was through three sets of glass doors, and for the last two the director needed different-colored key cards.

String was the size of a console television. It was mounted on a testing gyro that allowed it to swivel freely. There was nothing tidy about it. Wires and electronics boards stuck out at all angles. There were nozzlelike protrusions here and there, and cylindrical openings where other nozzlelike protrusions would fit. A dolly full of testing equipment sat next to it, and nearby, two engineers in blue smocks argued about readouts. They stopped when we walked in.

Maggie introduced me as Mr. Lamb and told them I was cleared for all access. "What do you think?" she asked me.

I walked around the instrument package and shook my head. "Beats the shit out of me," I said.

"We could give you the Bigshot show," one of the engineers suggested. He had tape wrapped around the bridge of his glasses, which gave him a slightly crazed look. "It'd take about two minutes to rig up."

"Sure, why not?"

The testing equipment was quickly disconnected. The two engineers rolled in a dolly that carried what looked like a cartoon fishbowl, except that it bristled with short metallic rods. At the end of each rod was a glassy bubble. The engineers fitted the fishbowl around the String package like a Plexiglas jacket, and plugged in a half dozen multicolored flat cables.

"Okay," said one of the engineers. There was a keypad with a tiny digital LED panel on the side of the package. He punched a few buttons and peered at the readout, punched a few more, and nodded.

"Mr. Lamb, if you could stand right here." He pointed at a spot on the floor and I stood there. "Okay. Now look at this screen."

He turned on a monitor. It showed what looked like a head as painted by a two-year-old.