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Celina released him. The hacker coughed, clearing his airway, breathing deeply, coughing again, blinking rapidly. She abruptly grabbed his groin. “I'm going to start squeezing unless I hear something interesting.”

The hacker lowered his gaze to the daggerlike polished nails at the end of long fingers in between his legs. “I'm not being totally honest with the FBI,” he said quickly, shifting his gaze between his groin and Celina.

Strokk stood to the side, watching with half amusement at his sister at work.

“The pigs,” he continued. “Bastards put me in jail and specifically ordered no computer privileges for me. Do you know what that meant? I'd rather get executed than not be allowed to get on the Internet, to write code.
That's my life!
And those pigs took it away, and only when they needed me did they come back and offer to grant me those privileges in return for my assistance.”

“So you gave them the initial version of your tracking code,” stated Strokk. “But with a slight twist.”

“Damned right. I added an offset to the coordinates reported by the Scent-Sniffers to have some fun with the bastards and keep them busy for a little while to give me time to retrieve some of my old code and trigger a virus that I can use to hold them up for ransom later on.”

Strokk waved Celina off and squatted in front of Bloodaxe, leveling his gaze with the hacker's. “To trigger a virus that you can use for ransom? What about the virus that's striking every day now? Where did
that one
come from?”

Bloodaxe shrugged. “I have no idea. I'm not responsible for it, though the program I released to the FBI this morning should help get them. I eliminated the offset. The revised Scent-Sniffers would yield the true coordinates, which should still be somewhere in the Yucatán jungle because my original offset wasn't that significant, just enough to keep the FBI from getting to the source of the virus right away, which they'll be able to accomplish with the Scent-Sniffer version, but by then it would have been too late. My
own
virus would have been all over the Internet, waiting for my signal to strike … but I didn't get a chance to release it. I was going to do it after breakfast. Then I was kidnapped.” He made a face.

“Do you know the significance of this virus coming from the jungle?”

“I have no clue … and that's the truth. I just created the Scent-Sniffers. I didn't tell them where to go, except for the small offset.”

Strokk exchanged glances with Celina. If the hacker was telling the truth—and they would soon find out—then all they knew was that this daily virus did originate in the Yucatán Peninsula, and that it may have something to do with the Maya, according to the conversation between Garnett and Slater.

They left Bloodaxe alone in the room to have a private chat in the next one, another empty office with a view of the capital in the distance through large fifth-floor windows.

“This is not going to be that simple,” Celina commented when they were alone. “We're going to have to increase our electronic surveillance of Susan Garnett to see where the unaltered Scents lead her to.”

“What about having the hacker do the same for us right here?” He checked his watch. They still had over three hours before the virus struck again. “You can set him up with a computer, can't you?”

She nodded. “I could, but I don't trust him. What prevents him from tricking us just like he tricked the FBI? There is no way for me to monitor his work simply by looking over his shoulder. Hackers are a strange breed of people,
hermano.
They can accomplish much more than the average programmer with the same number of keystrokes. Instead of deploying his code to track the origin of the virus, the little bastard could just as easily accomplish that while also sending a flash message to the FBI about his abduction. They'll track us down the phone line in minutes, and the building would be surrounded with pigs before we knew it.”

“What options do we have?”

“Not many,” she said.

“What good is he to us?”

“We still must learn if he has been lying. Beyond that…”

Strokk nodded. “All right, then. Do what you must. In the meantime, I'm going to set up a new surveillance post.”

5

Susan Garnett was used to deciphering other people's computer code. She had first done it as a senior at Harvard, while majoring in computer engineering, where she got the unenviable job of translating programs from one language to another—mostly from Pascal or Fortran to C
++
—as part of a modernization effort at the computer department to get all of its programs in C
++
instead of the ancient Pascal and Fortran. Susan continued to take programs apart while earning a master's degree in computer science at Yale. While working on her Ph.D. thesis at Yale on advanced computer algorithms, she had spent months consulting for Honeywell and later on for Siemens on the translation of complex control systems algorithms used by the oil and chemical industries as those corporations switched to newer and more versatile software.

Susan now performed a similar task, combing through thousands of lines of codes, probing, examining, dissecting, just as she had done for most of her career. Only this time she did it not to translate into another language, or to correct malfunctioning software, or to improve the efficiency of a control systems program. Today Susan performed high-tech surgery on a complex C
++
program to find evidence of Bloodaxe's trickery.

First she reviewed the original Scent-Sniffer algorithms that Bloodaxe had given her two days before, following their initial meeting. After checking the short Scent code, whose job was to attach to the queen virus during the seconds before and after the event, Susan pulled up the Sniffer code, frowning after the first few minutes. The hacker had not followed proper programming rules, failing to create a structure that flowed smoothly from top to bottom. Instead, the program jumped all over the place depending on the values of a number of variables, including the Sniffer's current physical location on the Internet, its last location, the expected new location according to the last known location of the nearest Scent, and the calculated quickest route to that new location. The program performed a constant loop through these variables, using the last set as input to the new loop, constantly adjusting its route to follow the Scent to the source of the virus.

On the surface, the code appeared to perform as programmed, but Susan had been around hackers long enough to know to look for subtleties in the code, for minor anomalies usually overlooked by the average programmer. The basic body of the Sniffer program consisted of a tracking section, where the variables were computed over and over as the Sniffer made its way toward its target, and a message section, where the location of the virus, in longitude and latitude, was coded and sent back to Susan for monitoring. Within the message section there was a unique snippet of code chartered with the delivery of the final message, or Bark, to mark the origin of the virus, the results of millions of iterations of the tracking section. Susan paid special attention to this last area, the place that told her where the virus was located, the spot she suspected Bloodaxe may have altered to fool her into thinking that the virus had originated in Tikal.

As she jotted down the essence of the code on a notepad next to her laptop, Troy Reid walked into her office.

“There's still no news on Bloodaxe,” he said, pulling up a chair. “Any news on your end?”

“I'm not sure yet,” she said, tapping the screen with the eraser of her pencil. “This is the section that generated the final set of coordinates for the origin of the virus.”

“Which pointed to Tikal, right?”

“That's right. Now, look here, this is how it works.”

ROUTINE ADJUST

IMPORT ADJUST1, ADJUST2

LONG = LAST_LONG + ADJUST1

LAT = LASTLAT + ADJUST2

CALL MESSAGE LONG, LAT

“The new longitude and latitude of the virus is calculated by making adjustments according to the most recent location of the Scent code attached to the queen virus.
ADJUST1
and
ADJUST2
mark the difference between the last location and the new location in degrees, minutes, and seconds, providing an accurate position within a dozen feet. Once the adjustments have been done, the set of variables,
LONG
and
LAT
, are transferred to the
MESSAGE
routine, which fires them directly to me.”

Susan tapped the
PAGE DOWN
key and browsed to the
MESSAGE
routine, inspecting the cryptic C
++
code, and then writing:

ROUTINE MESSAGE

IMPORT LONG, LAT

RLOGIN [email protected]

PASSWORD *******

FTP LONG

FTP LAT

LOGOFF

RETURN

“It's pretty simple, actually,” she said. “Just grab the last set of coordinates, remote log into my account, and FTP the coordinates into my account before logging back off. I have a script that automatically reads the E-mails and maps them to my tracking chart.” FTP was a Unix command to transfer a file from one location to another.

“I don't see any evidence of wrongdoing,” commented Reid, the wrinkles of his face moving as he frowned.

“On the surface,” she said. “But you're forgetting about blank spaces to the right of the variable name. Did you notice the blank space between
LONG
and the comma? There's a blank space there. Watch.”

She ran the snippet of code through a program that recognized all blank spaces not being used for actual spacing of instructions and data, marking them with a $ sign.

ROUTINE MESSAGE

IMPORT LONG$, LAT$

RLOGIN [email protected]

PASSWORD *******

FTP LONG$

FTP LAT$

LOGOFF

RETURN

“Now let's run the same blank space identifier on the adjustment routine.”

ROUTINE ADJUST

IMPORT ADJUST1, ADJUST2

LONG = LONG + ADJUSTl

LAT = LAT + ADJUST2

“No dollar signs,” said Reid.

Susan nodded. “That means that this section is truly doing what it's supposed to be doing, adjusting the location as the virus moves across the Internet. But it never transfers the outcome of the computation.”

“Instead you get whatever values are stored in the variables
LONG
$ and
LAT
$.”

“Let's find out where those variables are being generated.”

Susan did a massive search through the Sniffer code for any matches to
LONG
$ and
LAT
$. The search routine took her to a new section of code:

ROUTINE 586RH

IMPORT ADJUST1, ADJUST2

LONG$ = LONG + OFFSET1

LAT$ = LAT + OFFSET1

CALL MESSAGE LONG$, LAT$

RETURN

Susan turned to Reid. “That bastard,” she said. “He was just messing with us, adding an offset to the coordinates to keep us from getting to the right place.”

“It makes sense,” commented Reid, pointing at the plasma screen. “He is taking the true longitude and latitude coordinates and adding a constant offset. On the surface, the Scent-Sniffers appear to be doing their job, tracking the virus, only the final coordinates will not be exact. Can you tell how much this offset was?”

She browsed down the screen and nodded. “Here it is. It looks like a fifty-mile offset, which means that the true coordinates should still be in the jungles of the Petén.”

“Brilliant,” said Reid. “But also puzzling. He should have known that eventually we would have combed through this code and figured out his trick. Why do it and risk losing his computer privilege?”

Susan stood, checking her watch. One hour to go before the next event. Dusk had already fallen over the nation's capital. Hues of burnt orange and gold washed the indigo sky, splashing buildings and monuments with dazzling colors, before fading away, giving way to grayish streetlights and the crisscrossing halogen beams of evening traffic.

She stared at the magnificent sight, but in her mind she saw Bloodaxe, finally understanding his true motive for cooperating. “He was buying time,” she finally said.

“Time?”

“To escape. He knew we would eventually figure out his scheme, but not until he had used his skills to break out of jail. And we fell right into his plan. Damn him.”

“What about the program he sent you this morning, the one already deployed across the Internet to intercept the virus after today's event?”

Susan returned to her laptop and spent thirty minutes searching through the new program, largely based on the one she had already dissected. This most recent version of the Scent-Sniffer code appeared clean, at least based on the checks Susan knew to perform. There was always a chance that Bloodaxe had introduced a programming element that Susan was not familiar with. But if there was one, it must have been quite revolutionary because she didn't see it.

“Looks clean,” she finally said, checking her watch once more. “But then again, there's no way to be certain with Bloodaxe. Just to be sure, I've introduced a new routine to Bloodaxe's Sniffers. We'll find out if we've been tricked in another fifteen minutes.”

They watched the clock count down to 8:01
P.M.
, and as expected, the screen froze for seventeen seconds. After her system returned to life, she released the new version of the Sniffers, which scrambled after the Scents attached to the queen viruses, converging south, on the same Hughes satellite, which pinpointed a location in the Yucatán Peninsula.