Mount Dragon (46 page)

But the biggest draw of all was the virtual-reality screens arranged along the walls of the public lobby. Standing twelve feet high and employing a proprietary high-definition imaging system, the panels displayed pictures of various GeneDyne sites throughout the world: London, Brussels, Nairobi, Budapest. When combined, the displays formed one massive landscape, breathtaking in its realism. Since the images were computer-controlled, they were not static: trees waved in the breeze in front of the Brussels research facility, and red double-decker buses rumbled in front of the London office. Clouds moved across skies that lightened and darkened with the passing of the day. The displays were the most public example of Scopes's advocacy of emerging technologies. When the landscapes were changed, on the fifteenth of each month, the local news broadcasts never failed to run a story on the new images.

From his parking place in the access road along the rear of the tower, Levine craned his neck upward, gazing at the spot where the unbroken facade suddenly receded, in a maze of cubes, toward the building's summit. Those upper floors of the building, he knew, were Scopes's personal domain. No camera had penetrated them since a photo spread in
Vanity Fair
five years earlier. Somewhere, on the sixtieth floor, beyond the security stations and the computer-controlled locks, was Scopes's famous octagonal room.

He continued to look speculatively upward. Then he ducked his head back inside the van and resumed reading a heavy paperbound manual titled
Digital Telephony
.

True to his word, Mime had spent the last two hours preparing Levine, turning to his connections within the byzantine hacker community, reaching out into remote information banks, threading mysterious datastreams. One by one, like some modern-day league of Baker Street Irregulars, strangers had arrived at Levine's hotel-room door. Boys, mostly; urchins and orphans of the hacker underground. One had brought him an ID card, identifying him as one Joseph O'Roarke of the New England Telephone Company. Levine recognized the photo on the card as one of himself that had appeared in
Business Week
two years before. The card attached to a clip on the front pocket of the phone-company uniform that the valet had delivered earlier.

A kid with an impudent curl to his lip had delivered a small piece of electronic equipment that looked somewhat like a garage-door opener. Another had brought several technical manuals—forbidden bibles within the phone phreaking community. Lastly, a slightly older youth had brought him the keys to a telephone-company van waiting below in the lot of the Holiday Inn. Levine was to leave the keys under the dashboard. The youth had said he'd be needing the van around seven in the morning; for what, he had not said.

Mime had remained in frequent modem contact: downloading the building blueprints to Levine and walking him through such security arrangements as he'd been able to ascertain, providing background on the cover Levine would use to gain access to the building. Finally, he'd transmitted a lengthy program to Levine's computer, with instructions on its use.

But now, Levine's laptop was on the seat next to him, powered down, and Mime was in some remote unguessable location. Now, there was nobody but Levine himself.

He shut the manual and closed his eyes a moment, whispering a brief prayer to the close and silent darkness. Then he picked up his laptop, stepped out of the van, and shut its door loudly, walking away without glancing back. The brisk harbor air had a faint overlay of diesel. He tried to move at the ambling, unhurried pace of technicians everywhere. The weight of the orange line-testing telephone bounced awkwardly against his hip. In his head, he once again went over the various paths the upcoming conversation could take. Then he swallowed hard. There were so many possibilities, and he was prepared for so few.

Stepping up to an unmarked door in the building's backside, he pressed a buzzer. There was a long silence in which Levine struggled to keep from walking away. Then came a squawk of static and a voice said, “Yes?”

“Phone company,” Levine said in what he hoped was a flat voice.

“What is it?” the voice did not sound particularly impressed.

“Our computers show the T-1 lines as being down at this location,” Levine said. “I'm here to check it out.”

“All external lines are down,” came the voice. “It's a temporary condition.”

Levine hesitated a moment. “You can't shut down leased lines. It's against regulations.”

“It's a done deal.”

Shit
. “What's your name, son?”

Long silence. “Weiskamp.”

“All right, Weiskamp. Regulations require that leased point-to-point communications be kept open once established. But listen, I'll tell you what. I don't want to have to go back and fill out a lot of paperwork on you. And I know you and your supervisor don't want to give a long explanation to the FCC. So I'll put a temporary terminator on the lines. Once you bring the system back up, the sites will be reopened automatically.” Levine hoped he sounded more convincing to the disembodied voice inside than he did to himself.

No response.

“Otherwise, we're going to have to pull those circuits manually, from the external junction. And they won't be there when you go live again.”

A sound like a sigh came through the small speaker beside the buzzer. “Let's see some ID.” Levine looked around, spotted a camera lens set inconspicuously above one edge of the doorframe, and angled the badge hanging from his breast pocket in its direction. As he waited, Levine wondered idly why he'd been given the name O'Roarke. He hoped to hell that a Jewish professor from Brookline could imitate a Boston Irish drawl.

There was a loud click, followed by the sound of something heavy being rolled back. The door opened and a tall man peered out, long blond curls falling onto the collar of his gray-and-blue GeneDyne uniform.

“This way,” the man said, nodding Levine inside.

Cradling his laptop carefully, Levine followed the guard down a long flight of corrugated iron stairs. From below his feet came the throaty hum of a huge generator. The concrete walls sweated in the humid air.

The guard opened a door marked
AUTHORIZED ACCESS ONLY
, then stood back, letting Levine enter first. Levine walked into a room crammed floor to ceiling with what he assumed to be digital switches and network relays. Banks of MAUs were arrayed in countless rows on metal racks. Although he knew that the real brain of GeneDyne—the massively-parallel supercomputer that fed the monstrous global network—was housed elsewhere, this room held the guts of the system, the ethernet cables that allowed the building's occupants to interconnect in one vast electronic nervous system.

Up ahead, he saw the outlines of the central relay console. Another guard was sitting at one end of the console, staring at a monitor built into its frame. He turned as Levine stepped in. “Who's this?” he asked, frowning and looking from Levine to Weiskamp.

“Who do you think, fuckin' Tinkerbell?” Weiskamp replied. “He's here about the leased lines.”

“I've got to put a temporary terminator on them,” Levine said, placing his laptop on the terminal and scanning the complex controls for the jack Mime had told him was sure to be there.

“I never heard nothing about that,” the guard said.

“You've never cut them off before,” Levine retorted.

The guard mumbled something threatening about “cutting them off,” but made no move to stop him. Levine continued to scan the controls, a small warning tone sounding in his head as he did so. This second guard was trouble.

There it was: the network access port. Mime had told him the GeneDyne headquarters was so heavily networked that even the bathroom stalls sported outlet jacks for busy executives to use. Quickly, Levine turned on his laptop and connected it to the access port.

“What are you doing?” the guard at the terminal said suspiciously. He stood up and began to walk toward the laptop.

“Running the termination program,” Levine replied.

“Never seen one of you guys use a computer before,” the guard said.

Levine shrugged. “You change with the times. Now, you can just send a termination signal down the line to the control unit. Completely automatic.”

A phone-company logo popped up on the laptop screen, followed by scrolling lines of data. Despite his nervousness, Levine suppressed a smile. Mime had thought of everything. While the screen was busy displaying complicated nonsense to entertain the guards, a program of Mime's own design was being inserted into the GeneDyne network.

“I think we'd better tell Endicott about this,” the suspicious guard said.

The alarm began to ring louder in Levine's head.

“Put a sock in it, will you?” Weiskamp said irritably. “I've heard enough of your noise.”

“You know the drill, pal. Endicott is supposed to okay any maintenance work being done on the system from outside.”

The laptop chirped, and the phone company logo reappeared. Levine quickly yanked the cable out of the network jack.

“See?” Weiskamp said. “He's done.”

“I'll see myself out,” Levine said as the other guard reached for an internal phone. “Accounting will send a completed work order once you go back on-line.”

Levine returned to the hallway. Weiskamp had not followed him. That was good; one less role he'd have to play later on.

But that other guard, the suspicious one, was probably calling Endicott. And that was bad. If Endicott—whoever he was—decided to call the phone company and check out an employee named O'Roarke…

At the top of the stairs, Levine turned right, then moved down a short hallway. The bank of service elevators lay directly ahead, just as Mime had assured him they would.

He entered the nearest service elevator and took it to the second floor. The door whisked open onto an entirely different world. Gone were the drab concrete spaces, the four-foot lengths of fluorescent tubes suspended from the ceilings. Instead, a plush indigo carpet rolled back from the elevator doors and along an elegant corridor. Small violet lights in the ceiling threw colored circles on the thick nap. Levine noticed large black squares lining the walls at regular intervals. He was puzzled until he realized the black squares were actually flat-panel displays, currently dark. During the day, the panels no doubt displayed digitized works of art, floor directories, stock-market quotations—almost anything imaginable.

He stepped out of the elevator, down a deserted corridor, and around another corner to the public elevators. As he pressed the Up button, a chime sounded and one of the bank of black elevator doors whispered open. Looking around one last time, he stepped in. The elevator was carpeted in the same lustrous indigo as the hallway. The side walls were lined in a light, dense wood Levine assumed was teak. The rear wall was glass, affording a spectacular pre-dawn view of Boston Harbor. Countless lights shimmered far below his feet.

Floor, please
, said the elevator.

He had to work quickly now. Locating the network hub beneath the emergency telephone, he plugged his laptop into the metal receptacle. Quickly, he turned on the computer's power and typed a short command: curtain.

He waited as Mime's program disconnected the video feed for his elevator's security camera, recorded ten seconds of the adjoining car's video, and patched it in as a loop. Now the security camera would show an empty elevator: appropriate for one that was about to be placed out of service.

Floor, please
, said the elevator.

Levine typed another command: cripple.

The elevator lights dimmed, then brightened again. The doors hissed shut. Levine watched the passing floors light up above the door. As the seventh floor slid by, the elevator coasted to a stop.

Attention, please
, the voice announced smoothly.
This elevator is out of service
.

Unclipping the portable orange phone from his belt, Levine sat down, his back against the elevator door, the laptop balanced on his knees. Reaching into a pocket, he brought out the odd-looking device the hacker had given him earlier in the evening and attached it to the serial port of the computer. From one end of the device, he untelescoped a short antenna. Then he typed another command: sniff.