01-01-00 (3 page)

She sat in bed and crossed her legs, eyes looking into the bathroom, focusing on the dark weapon resting on the white shelf. Only now, after walking away from a suicide attempt, did her heart begin to pound heavily. She felt a lump in her throat. A sudden heat flash made her feel light-headed, dizzy.

“Sue? Are you all right?”

Sweat began to form on her forehead. The sheer realization of what she had almost done was finally setting in. He body was reacting to the burst of adrenaline from the short-lived event, just as it would have if a thug had pulled a gun on her, threatened to kill her, and then abruptly walked away.

Laboring to control her breathing, wiping the perspiration with the sleeve of her robe, she said, “What—what do you want?”

“Have you been listening to the news this evening?”

“I'm … no. Look, Troy, I'm really tired. Get to the point. What is it that couldn't wait until tomorrow?”

“Just over two hours ago, at exactly 8:01
P.M.
, all computer systems in Washington, D.C., froze for twenty seconds.”

Her suicidal thoughts momentarily vanished as the scientist in her took over. “Froze for twenty seconds? I don't understand. Did we experience a power glitch?”

“No power glitch. This event was software driven.”

The room began to spin. Susan lay down, resting her head on a pillow and closing her eyes to control her dizziness. Her temples throbbed to the rhythm of her increasing heartbeat. “How … how do you know?”

“Because of the nature of the event. It looks as if someone somehow managed to put every network on hold for twenty seconds, before returning everything back to normal.”

Susan took another deep breath and opened her eyes. The room no longer spun. She swallowed her own spit and tried to focus on the conversation. “What's the estimate on data loss?”

“There's been no reports of data loss.”

“None?”

“Nope, and no messages either, or statements, or warnings. Just frozen screens for twenty seconds and everything back to normal after that, even the system clocks skipped twenty seconds to resynchronize.”

She slowly felt better. The heat flash passed. Her heartbeat became steady. “Strange.”

“What's even
more
strange is that we have gotten calls from our offices around the world. London, Paris, Berlin, Moscow, Hong Kong, Seoul, Taipei—they're all reporting similar events taking place at the exact same time, one minute after eight in the evening our time.”

Susan sat up in bed. “That's—”

“Impossible? I'm past denial, Sue. It's very real, and
very
scary.”

Susan didn't reply. In her short but successful FBI career, she had lured and trapped many brilliant hackers, most of them guilty of releasing viruses into the Internet or illegally accessing private or government networks. In fact, the most tenacious had been Hans Bloodaxe, who'd released the virus that shut down the traffic-light system in Washington, D.C., for several days …

Susan's eyes drifted back to the weapon, for a moment wondering if she would have actually killed herself had Troy Reid not called when he had. She decided that she probably would have. In fact, she felt she could still do so at this moment. The feeling of emptiness that consumed her from the moment she'd awakened from her coma had only deepened after Bloodaxe was convicted. Whatever healing time had done on her emotional wounds had been wiped away by the wave of loneliness that had struck her outside the courtroom, forcing her to take such desperate measures.

“Sue?”

She blinked back to her phone conversation. Troy was concerned about this bizarre event, software driven, probably the act of a skilled hacker.
But both synchronized and global?
She shook her head in disbelief. Even Bloodaxe's strike had been contained to one geographical location. The thought of a global, synchronized strike was unheard of, nearly impossible to coordinate without substantial technical resources.

“Sue? Are you there?”

She nodded. “Just thinking. See, any hacker can release a virus onto the Internet. Most viruses, however, are detected within weeks, or even days or hours, of their original release, prompting software companies to generate treatments that get posted at numerous Internet bulletin boards, where users can download them to disinfect their systems. The virus is then methodically exterminated from the web. In order to release a virus that could infect most of the world while going totally undetected, and then strike in synchronized fashion, requires not just highly specialized skills, but also a lot of software and hardware resources spread across many countries. That's virtually impossible to accomplish. Surely someone somewhere would have stumbled upon this virus before it became active and posted the finding on the Internet for the world to see.”

“Not to my knowledge. This one seems to have caught us by surprise.”

“Do we have any leads?”

“No. That's why I called. I need you to start digging right away. The director got a call from the White House an hour ago. Apparently the President and his advisers were in the middle of a video conference call with some classified party in the Middle East when the networks froze, killing the satellite link.”

Susan sighed. The problem seemed quite distant and irrelevant to a person about to end her life. And at the moment, for reasons that she could not explain, hearing that the strange event had disconnected the President from his call actually struck her as humorous. Maybe it was hysteria from her near-death encounter in the bathtub. Or perhaps her tired mind had difficulty separating her feelings. But before she could help herself, she blurted, “Just tell the President to stop complaining and call them back. It's not as if he has to dial the phone himself.”

“Susan Garnett!”

Reid reminded Susan of her own father, who would call her by her full name only when he was angry with her. And the fact that Reid was almost as old as her father only added a level of authority to the remark. “Sorry. It's late and I'm very tired.”

“Well, see, that's part of the problem. We can't wait until morning. I need you over here ASAP.”

“Now? But—”

“Now, Sue. Please: I've already sent a car to pick you up. It should be there momentarily. This is a real emergency. Somebody out there appears to have the power to freeze global networks at will. What if today's event was just a test? What if the next strike involves severe data loss? We're talking global shutdown, lady. We don't need this kind of crap right before the turn of the millennium. Everyone's having a hell of a time just getting their systems Year 2000 compliant. No one needs a group of rogue programmers making a delicate transition time even more difficult. Get over here now to get things going. I promise you some sleep before dawn in one of the offices upstairs.”

Exhaling heavily, she agreed and hung up the phone. She unloaded the PPK and locked it away in her nightstand. She also snagged the sealed envelope she had set next to the picture frame. It contained her final will, quite simple actually, along with an explanation of her actions.

She slipped into a pair of blue jeans, a flannel shirt, and a sweater. She folded the envelope in half and shoved it in her back pocket. The doorbell rang as she crammed her feet into a pair of hiking boots. She grabbed a jacket, a scarf, and her computer carrying case as she dashed out the door.

2

The Earth continued to rotate along its axis, marking the dawn of a new day, just as it had done for billions of years, since the creation of the Solar System. Beneath the atmosphere, the large digital displays atop the world's best known structures continued their countdown to the end of the millennium, numbers pulsating to the rhythm of their computerized brains, projecting crimson hues into the sky, sequences of ever-decreasing numbers that raced across space as the Earth continued to spin while traveling along its elliptical orbit around the Sun.

One after another the numbers came, as the blue planet obeyed the laws of physics, always spinning, exposing to dark space one continent after the next, metropolis after metropolis, all displaying the same monumental icons of the passage of time.

The clocks radiated their energy in the visual range of the electromagnetic spectrum, projecting it high into the sky at the speed of light, where it mixed with electromagnetic energy from other sources as it reached the upper layers of the atmosphere, as it broke free from the Earth's gravitational force, as it ventured into outer space. The electromagnetic energy containing the visual spectrum of those magnificent clocks traveled past moon orbit and Mars, across the asteroid ring, beyond the orbits of the outer planets, plunging into deep space.

The Earth continued to spin, continued to flash electromagnetic pulses, continued to transmit these bands of energy encoding the scarlet images of the countdown clocks beyond the Solar System, day after day, land after land, city after city, over and over, creating a pulsating rhythm that moved across space as the Earth orbited the Sun, always spinning, always releasing energy, always broadcasting the global countdown to the inevitable end of the millennium.

Chapter Two

000010

1

December 12, 1999

Catching hackers was an acquired skill, something not taught in school. Oftentimes it took a hacker to catch a hacker. The FBI knew this and kept hackers in its list of ghost consultants. Many of them had been caught by Troy Reid's high-tech warriors of the caliber of Susan Garnett. Those hackers guilty of harmless crimes, like accessing a classified government web page just to prove to a friend that it could be done, were normally given a choice: a prison term, or probation with a lifetime obligation to provide free consulting services for the Bureau, anytime, anyplace. It was a pretty easy choice for most.

Just like the Godfather calling in his favors,
Susan thought as she checked her system and found the name of a hacker she had caught six months ago browsing in one of the servers of the directory of intelligence of the CIA. A few years ago the kid, a junior at UCLA, would have gotten five years at a minimum security prison. The felony would have gone on his permanent record, preventing him from securing a job in the high-tech sector after completing his jail time. Nowadays, those kinds of hackers got off easy, as long as they changed their ways and agreed to the FBI's terms.

Susan sat behind her desk at her window office on the sixth floor of the J. Edgar Hoover Building in downtown Washington. She glanced at the cumulus clouds hovering over the Washington skyline—a scene she hadn't expected to see again. Only yesterday she had stared from this very office at what she thought would be her last sunset. She had watched the hues of burnt orange and yellow-gold splash the Washington Monument, the White House, and the Capitol. Her eyes had drifted to the distant shape of Highway 195 as it snaked its way into the south side of the nation's capital, remembering, reminiscing, plotting. Then she had gone home for the very last time.

Or so she had thought.

She shook her head, not certain of what exactly she was doing here again, behind this desk, tapping the keyboard of her portable computer as dawn broke and the city stirred to life. Streetlights flickered and went off. Traffic thickened. Horns blared. Pedestrians emerged from subway stations. Susan watched it all with detachment, as if she didn't belong to this world anymore.

Tonight,
she told herself.
I'll just get Troy going on this investigation and then I'm gone, for good.

She found the number for the FBI-issued nationwide pager of Chris Logan, now a senior at UCLA and forever slave to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. She used her software to send him an alpha page, ordering him to call the FBI's Watts line, followed by her extension—immediately. The reason why she had selected Logan over all the other hackers in her file was the very reason why the kid got just a slap on the wrist before the FBI sent him back to UCLA: he was a genius. Chris Logan had managed to pierce a dozen security layers at the Central Intelligence Agency, not only cracking passive software shields, but also evading active security programs created by the finest minds in the nation to patrol the myriad of directories in Langley searching for illegal users. Using a reflection program, a piece of code that reflected the image of the programs surrounding it, Logan had managed to disguise his browsing routine from the CIA search engines patrolling the directories. But Logan had underestimated the quality of the active software police, enhanced a month before by Susan Garnett herself as part of a federal program to improve security in the most critical government agencies. The security routine randomly probed files, even if they appeared to be normal, at the rate of one every millisecond, or one thousand files per second, searching for a key binary string buried within every CIA file, deep beneath the software shell that Logan's reflection routine replicated in order to disguise itself. Susan's security program probed Logan's illegal browser beyond its chameleon skin for the secret binary string. Failing to find it, the security program immediately tagged the illegal code. A second security program made a copy of the browser and began to dissect it without warning the prowler, who continued to cruise through the directories. Within seconds a trace was created and the origin of the illegal entry tracked back to a dorm at UCLA.

Susan closed the paging software and continued checking the area's Internet service providers, using a combination of commercial software and her own custom code to comb through every public server in a five-square-mile area, searching for traces of this virus. The search programs Susan used were a combination of virus scan software and search engines. The programs pinged every disk server, comparing their binary codes with a signature file in her virus scan directory. Viruses could range in size from several bytes to several thousand bytes, depending on their ability to replicate, to hide, and to cause harm. Some macro viruses, although annoying, could be relatively harmless in nature, like the Concept Virus in Microsoft Word, which forced the user to save documents as templates. Other word-processing viruses changed fonts, margins, and paragraph formatting. Other viruses attacked operating systems, or data files. The more complex ones lurked at the entrance to a network waiting for legal users to log in, and copying their account numbers and passwords. Those viruses could be particularly devastating stalking the network of a bank or investment firm. Some of those illegal copies would yield a powerful password, like that of a system administrator, which gave the hacker unlimited access to a network.