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Hoping that a soda might calm her stomach, Susan headed for the vending machines, on the way walking by Troy Reid's office a few doors down. She stuck her head in the doorway. “Knock knock.”

His back to the Washington skyline, Reid lifted his wrinkled face from the documents sprawled across his desk. He regarded Susan over the silver rim of the spectacles perched at the tip of his nose. Looking ten years older than his age, Reid was an old hand at the Bureau, having started his career during the final months of J. Edgar Hoover. He had an engineering degree from the University of Virginia and a second degree in criminology from Georgetown University. His blue eyes, although encased in dark and wrinkled sockets, still gleamed with bold intelligence. Ten years behind a desk, however, had turned his once athletic body into a mass of fat, which he still managed to carry reasonably well due to his height. His bald head and deeply lined face, combined with his bulk, reminded Susan of her father. Reid was due to retire next year.

“What did you find?” he asked in the hoarse voice of a chain-smoker. He waved the unlit cigar in his right hand toward one of the chairs across his desk.

“Not much, actually,” she replied, walking in and sitting down, feeling the envelope in her back pocket, forcing it out of her mind for the time being. She took a few minutes to explain her current tactic.

Leaning back in his swivel chair, Reid exhaled heavily and ran a hand over his gleaming head. Probably a handsome man in his youth, three decades of stress and hard living as a field agent and then as a desk agent had taken a severe toll on him.

“These hackers scare me, Sue. Bastards are learning new tricks every day, and we can't seem to keep up.”

Susan crossed her legs. “I'd say we're right on their heels, especially since we started turning them instead of putting them behind bars.”

“That was part your idea,” he said, pointing at her with the cigar.

She shrugged. It really didn't matter. Nothing mattered anymore. Once again, she questioned why in the hell she was here, sitting in this office, discussing yet another high-tech crime with her boss. She had sworn to herself that yesterday would be her last day. She had paid all of her bills, bought a plot at the city's cemetery, put all of her affairs in order, and even included the numbers of all bank accounts in her will. The total amount would not only pay for her funeral services, but it should also cover the expenses her relatives would incur by coming down for the funeral. She had even packed her personal belongings to make it easy for her parents to haul it all off to their house in Maryland.

“So what's next?” Reid asked.

“We wait for the hacker to strike again.”

“That's something else that's been bothering me,” Reid said, setting down the cigar and interlacing his fingers before resting his arms over the papers he had been reading. “What was this guy trying to do? Why just freeze the systems? If he had the power to freeze them, he could have also displayed a message on the screens, said something. There was also no loss of data. No real damage done. I don't get it. And why freeze systems for only twenty seconds instead of an hour, or longer? Is there any significance in that?”

Susan had not thought about the hacker's reasons for doing what he or she had done. After catching so many of them, she had long ago stopped questioning their motives. And in this case, she cared even less. Still, she felt she owed Troy Reid her attention in return for his support and encouragement over the past eighteen months. Reid had been more than fair to her, which maybe was part of the reason for her sitting here today, instead of lying naked in a morgue awaiting identification by her parents.

An image of herself, covered with a sheet, stuffed inside one of those refrigerated cubicles, probably without a face, after the bullet had done its intended damage, chilled her.

Is that what you really want?

She forced herself back to the conversation. Reid was talking about the possibility that this attack could be the result of a terrorist trying to disturb the delicate state of the Internet at the turn of the millennium. “I mean, Sue, look at the statistics. Only the United States has achieved a ninety percent compliance level with Year 2000 policies. France and Germany are still at the seventy percent level. Japan is up around eighty. Southeast Asian nations are just barely breaking the sixty percent level. And God help countries in South America and Eastern Europe, which at our last count were barely past the fifty percent point. Perhaps one of those countries is out to sabotage our efforts in order to level the playing field a little.”

Susan thought about the possibility and decided that Troy Reid had a valid concern. “I think you're on to something here. But I still hope it's just a rogue group of hackers trying to get noticed.”

“If that's the case, why aren't they advertising their objectives? Why didn't they send us a message during the event?”

She tilted her head. “Well, message or no message, they sure got our attention.”

“That, I'm afraid, they did. And not just ours. The director got two more calls from the White House this morning. The President's been on the phone with the leaders of a dozen nations already, all of them quite troubled by the event. Some countries are blaming their enemies for the attack on their networks. In fact, Iraq and Iran have already issued statements blaming Israel. North Korea is blaming South Korea. China is blaming Taiwan. Japan is blaming China. Even the CIA is now suspecting someone.”

“Who?”

“They wouldn't say. You know how the spooks are about these matters.”

“Maybe that's just what they're trying to accomplish, Troy. Maybe they want to create confusion, make everyone suspicious of everyone else.”

Reid bit into his cigar while inspecting his ego wall to the right of his desk, where, in addition to his college diplomas, hung a number of training certificates, commendation plaques, and several framed pictures of Troy Reid shaking hands with important people, including a couple of presidents. The chief of the high-tech crime unit nodded. “Maybe you're right. It sure looks like this strange event stirred up quite a few world leaders.”

“Well, it's all speculation for now anyway. If there's ever another event, we should at least be able to learn something from it.” Her stomach rumbled.

Reid grinned and stood. “When's the last time you ate?”

Susan shrugged.

“Let's go to the cafeteria. I'll buy.”

She exhaled and also stood, not really knowing what to do or think anymore. She was obviously starving, but didn't want to eat because that went against her ground rules for a clean suicide. On the other hand, if she didn't eat something soon, she might pass out. This morning she had already seen dark spots a couple of times and had to sit down to regain her strength.

Resigned to the fact that she would have to live just a little longer than expected, Susan followed her superior to the elevators.

2

La Serena, Chile

Dr. Ishiguro Nakamura rushed inside the main building at the Cerro Tolo Observatory, in the Andes Mountains, climbing the circular stairway two steps at a time, reaching the main platform nearly out of breath. Two years of intensive graduate work, plus three more of specialized studies to earn his Ph.D. in astrophysics from Stanford University, plus the intense work of upgrading Cerro Tolo to a world-class radio telescope facility, had left the native of Osaka, Japan, with little time for exercise. Ishiguro, although still lean thanks to a sensible diet of fish and vegetables, was hopelessly out of shape, in sharp contrast with his undergraduate days, when he had jogged regularly at Stanford while pursuing a B.S. in computer engineering, before discovering an affinity for astrophysics he never knew he had.

He stormed inside the central observatory room, illuminated only by the pulsating glow from the monitors of a dozen Hewlett-Packard 735 workstations. Modern deep space observatories did not use regular telescopes.

“Ishiguro-san! Ishiguro-san! What is happening?” asked the corporate liaison from Sagata Enterprises, the Japanese conglomerate currently leasing the large observatory from the Chilean government. The young executive, Kuoshi Honichi, unaffected by the long climb, had tried to catch up with Ishiguro outside the building, where the whiz kid from Stanford had dropped his two-way radio and run inside the building. Kuoshi spent about one week out of every six at Cerro Tolo at the request of Sagata executives to monitor the team's progress. The rest of the time he spent either at their headquarters in Osaka, or at three other Japanese-controlled sites engaged in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI).

“When … did it happen?” Ishiguro asked Jackie Nakamura, his wife, also a Ph.D. from Stanford. The rest of the SETI team was formed by technicians from Sagata Enterprises.

Jackie glanced at Kuoshi and shook her head while sipping from a can of diet Coke. She returned her attention to the screen. “At one minute past nine in the evening local time today. One minute after one in the morning GMT.” She checked her watch. “About two hours ago. The automatic scanner picked it up. I've just noticed it while browsing through the day's telemetry.”

“Ishiguro-san! What is—”

“Hold on, Kuoshi-san,” Ishiguro snapped at the young executive before turning back to his wife. “Where … where is it?
Show me.
”

“Right here,” she said while two technicians glanced over from their stations. She continued to point at the large color display of her HP workstation. Jackie Nakamura was a second-generation Japanese living in northern California. The glow from the screen washed her soft features. Her slanted eyes belonged to her Japanese mother. Her brown hair, rounded cheekbones, and full lips were her dad's, a native Californian. Ironically, Jackie and Ishiguro had not met through their studies but during their sophomore year at a marathon in Mountain View, California.

Ishiguro tried to control his breathing as much as his growing excitement. The prospect of a SETI breakthrough increased his heartbeat as much as the strenuous climb. Sagata Enterprises, the same company that had awarded him the scholarship that had financed his entire education at Stanford, had hired him and his wife four years ago to lead the Japanese SETI effort. As the millennium came to a close it seemed that every country had an effort out there to search for intelligent life outside our Solar System. The Americans had NASA's Deep Space Network. The Germans ran their research at the legendary Max Planck Institut fur Extraterrestrische Physik. Project Phoenix, a privately funded project to search for extraterrestrial intelligence, operated in Australia using the Parkes 210-foot radio telescope in New South Wales. The Russians and the Chinese had also mounted their own independent efforts. Japan could not be left behind. In addition to the massive radio telescopes at Nobemaya, Kashima, and Mizusawa, the Japanese government, with the financial assistance of Sagata, had not only leased Cerro Tolo for a period of ten years from the Chilean government in an effort to bolster its capabilities in the Southern Hemisphere, but had also invested heavily to outfit the aging facility with state-of-the-art technology.

While Kuoshi mumbled something in Japanese, crossing his arms, Ishiguro grabbed a stool and sat next to Jackie, his dark eyes absorbing the graph on the screen. Sagata had recently built two radio telescopes at Cerro Tolo, one of them with a diameter of 350 feet, larger than the Parkes in New South Wales, making Cerro Tolo the world's most sensitive and comprehensive observatory of its kind.

Unlike regular telescopes, which were only useful for detecting radiation at wavelengths that could be seen with the human eye, radio telescopes covered a wide range of the electromagnetic spectrum, of which light was but a small part. The concept of radio astronomy was invented in 1931 by Karl Jansky, an American engineer, following his discovery of the background radiation that originated from the thermal residue heat of the cooling Big Bang. Since their invention, radio telescopes had opened the door to the cosmos, allowing scientists to probe deeper into the far reaches of the universe, limited only by the ability to process the billions upon billions of bytes of information downloaded from their instruments. Until recently, this had been a crippling limitation for radio telescopes. While old-fashioned astronomers gazed through their telescopes and were rewarded with the instant gratification of live images, radio astronomers trained their sophisticated equipment on the stars and then had to wait for hours, days, or even longer, as the computers crunched away at the electromagnetic data and transformed it into an image. With the advent of the high-speed microprocessor and parallel computing, those waiting periods had been drastically cut down to the range of a few seconds, or even less, overnight making it the preferred tool of the deep space astronomer.

Armed with this sophisticated equipment, Ishiguro and his high-tech team scoured the sky, listening for microwave signals that might be deliberately beamed their way, or were inadvertently transmitted from another planet. The Japanese team focused their search in the 1–4 gigahertz (GHz) frequency range, encompassing the 1.420 GHz frequency emitted by hydrogen atoms. The accepted theory was that since hydrogen was the most abundant element in the universe, another intelligence would logically choose this frequency to communicate. Ishiguro's team divided their frequency search range into very small increments, or channels, 20 hertz wide, starting at 1 GHz up to 4 GHz—skipping bands used for digital cell phones and other high-tech equipment—resulting in billions of radio channels that had to be monitored simultaneously by their networked computers. This frequency search could only be focused on one spot in the cosmos at a time. At a monitoring, or scanning rate of one billion channels per second—which equated to searching through an
Encyclopaedia Britannica
and picking out a three-word phrase in one second—it took the system just over ten seconds to scan through all of the channels in the 1–4 GHz range.