The Intruder (28 page)

"Should we show it to Duncan first?" MacKenzie asked.

"It's addressed to me," Hanna said with a mischievous smile.

Dear Hanna and MacKenzie,

It's been a long time. I'd like to get together. Since, as I explained before, there's no way you can visit me, I hope to drop by soon. I should be free on Saturday. There's a nice restaurant three miles due west of where we met last time. Please meet me there for dinner.

Jeremy

"I don't get it," MacKenzie said. "Is this some kind of code? And are we being set up, or does he want to help us?"

"I don't know. My first thought is to look at a map and see if there's a restaurant three miles west of here," Hanna said.

Duncan devoted one corner of the office -- next to the VR tanks -- to a detailed, holographic map of the D.C. area. It reminded all his intruders that they needed to know the area like the backs of their hands to be effective. Hanna and MacKenzie studied it carefully. There were several buildings three miles west. They selected these with the laser pointer and read the details on the pop-up view screen. It gave the name of the building's address, any other public information about it, like its hole address, and any notes Duncan's intruders thought to enter.

None of them was a restaurant.

"We're going at this all wrong," Hanna said. "Jeremy didn't know where he met us. At least we hope he didn't. So he can't mean three miles west of
here
."

They looked back and forth at each other, at the letter and at the map, trying to figure out what was going on.

"Hey, wait a minute," Hanna said. "Look at this." She pointed to an Italian restaurant farther to the left.

"But that's way farther than three miles west of here," MacKenzie objected. But then she saw it too. "I see. It's three miles west of the campus cafeteria. But we didn't meet him there."

"Exactly," Hanna said, and rushed off to Duncan's office. MacKenzie followed, glancing back at the map and trying to figure out what Hanna was up to.

Hanna showed Duncan the note from Jeremy. He read it quickly and then looked up at her and MacKenzie. "I don't get it," his expression said. Hanna took Duncan and MacKenzie back across the warehouse to the holomap.

"Look at this," she said. "There's no restaurant three miles west of here, which is where we really met with Jeremy." She indicated the warehouse with the laser pointer. "But there is a restaurant three miles west of the cafeteria."

"And that means?" Duncan asked.

"I think he's spooked," Hanna explained. "He's afraid that someone might intercept his letter, so he's written it so that even if somebody in the conspiracy did get a hold of it, it'll just look like he's trying to set up a date. But he's really giving us the location of the new office."

MacKenzie shook her head, confused, but Duncan looked on with interest. Hanna traced her finger down to the bottom of the map. "This is where their office was set up before," she said. "To the west there isn't much -- just houses -- until you get here, three miles away." She pointed to a small cluster of office buildings.

Duncan smiled at her. "Their new location. Very good. We'll check it out later."

*
             
*
             
*

Despite his misgivings, Jeremy enjoyed being back at the agency office. He was growing to dislike and distrust the agency itself, but he enjoyed interacting with the people. He was back on patrol now, walking the halls, continuing his somewhat pointless questioning about implant interference. But he enjoyed it more than field work.

He knew he had to meet with Peter, but he had told him to wait a little while. As Jeremy walked the hallways he noticed that the office construction was finished. All signs of remodeling were gone. If he had slept through the evacuation of the old office and been placed in this new one, he would never have known that the agency had moved. It was identical, as far as he could tell.

After several hours of wandering the halls he decided it was time for a break. Returning to his office, he thought he saw something in one of the hallways and stopped for a better look.

"Is something the matter, Mr. Mitchell?" one of the support staff asked.

There was. Jeremy could clearly see four net spies at the other end of the hall, apparently talking amongst themselves. He couldn't make out faces very well, but he was certain that one of them was Hanna.

"No," he said. "Nothing's the matter."

"Will you be needing anything then, sir?"

"Yes, actually, thank you. Would you bring a bowl of onion soup to my office?"

"Certainly, sir," the man said, and headed off towards the kitchen.

A few minutes later, Jeremy was picking through the cheese on the top of his French onion soup and using his implant to search for news of the death of Dr. Jenkins. He knew that as he relaxed in his office, at least four net spies were roaming the building. 

Chapter 18

Jeremy awoke from sleep on the couch in his office to the sound of light tapping on the door. He put on a pair of pants and checked his implant. It was 1:10 a.m.
Who could that be?
he wondered.

"Open," he said. The door mechanism hissed as the pneumatic pistons filled with air. His room was dark, and he expected the bright light of the hallway to pour in and blind his eyes. Instead, he saw the silhouette of a medium-sized man framed in dim light from the hall. He didn't wait to be invited, but came in quickly, pressing the manual close switch.

"Dr. Jenkins is alive, it seems," Peter's voice said.

"Lights," Jeremy said, sitting up and reaching for his shirt. The automated lights instantly came up to their day-time brightness.

"Yes. I aborted the mission in time. I was concerned that I might have waited too long."

"So you knew it was Dr. Jenkins?" he asked. "You weren't supposed to know that."

Jeremy explained what had happened, and how the reflection in the truck window just happened to give him a view of Dr. Jenkins' apartment. Peter shook his head.

"You can't plan everything. No matter how hard you try, something like that can always ruin an operation. We didn't want you to know that it was Dr. Jenkins because we knew you might have met him at Dr. Berry's office. I suppose you're having second thoughts about the agency right now." His voice was unemotional and unapologetic.

"Yes," Jeremy said. He let it hang in the air for a few moments, then continued. "Why did you approve a sanction against him?"

Peter shook his head, sadly, and now with a hint of apology. "I've given Lenzke far too much slack with the net spy project. He had intelligence reports that said Jenkins was about to blow our entire hole operation. Secretly, I wished he did, and had. But I have a commission from the president of the United States, Jeremy, and that commission is to be performed, even at the cost of human life. If Dr. Jenkins gets in the way, I'm authorized to take him out of the way. That's rough, I know," he said, looking him in the eye, "but that's life."

Jeremy had never seen Peter so morose, or so personal. He almost seemed human. He sat down next to Jeremy on the couch.

"But we've got a bigger problem on our hands," he said, assuming a more business-like demeanor. "Lenzke hasn't filed anything about his meetings with Dr. Berry. That's a serious breach of procedure. That he would do such a thing implies things I'd rather not consider."

Jeremy was still shaking off the effects of his sleep. He was new to this spy game, and he couldn't decide what Peter was talking about. What did it imply?

"I don't follow you," he said.

Peter shook his head. "For Lenzke to be seeing one of our field contacts like this implies one of two things. Either he has a callous disregard for procedures, or he is involved in something that goes above -- or through -- me. Unfortunately, Lenzke is a stickler for procedures."

"So you think he's threatening you?"

"That's a possibility I have to consider, but I can't wait around to find out," Peter said, suddenly standing, with a look of cold determination and hidden energy. "We need to talk to Dr. Jenkins -- you and I. I've arranged things. We're leaving in 10 minutes. Get yourself ready."

*
             
*
             
*

Duncan's office didn't have any of the standard group-display equipment MacKenzie had access to at school. Her computer science professors always insisted that part of writing a brilliant program was making a brilliant presentation to a group -- otherwise you'd never get the project out of development and into commercial practice -- so they required all the students to make monthly presentations on their work to a mixed crowd of students and professors. MacKenzie hated those presentations. She wasn't much of a public speaker, and frequently asked Hanna to come along and give her pointers. But she was glad of the experience now.

MacKenzie had made a major breakthrough on tracking the intruders, and Duncan wanted her to explain it to the entire staff of his organization. She and Hanna woke up before dawn, and they spent hours trying to rig a projector that would be something like the one MacKenzie used at school. A normal broadcast, using the implants, was out of the question, and MacKenzie didn't like the interface with the holoprojectors.

As they worked, Hanna interjected several pointers on making the presentation and was pleasantly surprised at how willingly MacKenzie took them to heart. 

While MacKenzie put the finishing touches on the make-shift projector, Hanna gathered bed sheets to make a suitable projection screen. It was crude, low-tech, and looked remarkably out of place next to the sophisticated computers against the east wall of the warehouse, but it would do.

Gathering a crowd for the presentation was the easiest part. The "in-house" staff -- those who lived on the premises -- were naturally curious and somewhat amused by the display of low-tech theatrics, and it was difficult to keep them away. As the rest of the morning shift arrived by hovercar, they gladly joined in the carnival atmosphere. Someone happened to bring in several dozen donuts, and the morning's work was largely shot. Duncan disapproved of the waste of time, but he decided to make the best of it and joined the rest of his staff.

MacKenzie stepped in front of the "projection screen," donut in hand, and waited for everyone to calm down. 

"Sorry about the low-budget props," she said, gesturing towards the bed sheets, "and I assure you that Hanna will re-make all the beds she raided." There were a few chuckles, and Hanna smiled. MacKenzie rarely came out of her shell in a group.

"Okay, to business. Most of you have been working on how to block the intruders from using the hole for their dirty deeds," she began. "I've seen most of that work, and I think we're close to a solution. Since you all seem to have that part of the problem well in hand, I've been working with Duncan on a different issue, namely, why can our intruders see their intruders sometimes and not others? Here's what I've figured out.

"The fact that we can see them at all implies certain things. Most importantly, it implies that their virtual location is available on the net, somewhere. You all know that -- I've seen it in your work. But how do we access that information? That's been the problem, because, as you all know, the VR program doesn't do all the work itself -- it interfaces with the VR goggles to determine virtual location, and we don't know how their goggles work. We only know two things for sure: they don't work the way ours do, and they don't work the way the ones on the open market do. If they did, we could locate their intruders easily.

"Several of you have gone through every line of the VR program code, trying to figure out how it knows where the enemy intruders are. I began to wonder if a solution could be found by looking at the implant locator," she said. The 'locator' was the term for the implant utility that allows a hole user to determine his precise location anywhere on the planet. "But let me ask you a question. How many of you use your locator?" No one raised a hand. "Why not?"

One of the technicians spoke up. "Because when you use your locator you're basically broadcasting your location to all the hackers out there," he said. "There's a black-market utility that lets you get a fix on anyone who uses the locator. I don't want people to know where I am."

"Right," MacKenzie said, "and it just so happens that I stumbled across a copy of that utility. But don't tell anyone," she said with a conspiratorial smile. "I took the thing apart line by line, looking for clues on how the VR program knows where the other intruders are. I didn't find anything, but I found a few subroutines that looked suspicious, and I began to tinker with them. I tried redefining variables, adding a line or two here and there, but nothing worked until I fed that black-market utility into our VR program." She heard a sharp intake of breath from someone in the crowd and quickly added, "A copy, of course. I didn't chance corrupting the working code.

"This is what I found," she said, and Hanna tossed another switch on the projector. The map of the United States suddenly showed about 20 pin-point lights. There were about seven of them in the Washington area, three in New York City, four in California, two in Denver and the rest scattered along the east coast.