The zenith angle (9 page)

He threw up a colorful PowerPoint screen to keep them happy. Then he read aloud from his script. “As this shows you, today’s security industry will tell you certain very predictable things. They will tell you that a federal agency needs to buy their products. Secure servers, secure routers, firewalls, crypto, authentication, all brand-new out of the box . . . That is the conventional wisdom.”

Van switched PowerPoint screens, to a nicer one with a lot of colored bars and arrows. “But even for us, a small coordinating bureau, those purchases would set us back sixteen million dollars. We don’t have that money.”

Another screen. “In the CCIAB, we can’t wait the standard eight months to install conventional secure equipment. We need to be up and running, effective yesterday. We can’t afford the time and money for security products. But we do have to meet a very serious security need. You reconcile those two vectors, and that means only one thing.”

Van switched screens. This new screen took a while to refresh. To his vast relief, PowerPoint did not crash. “We have to create a brand-new breakthrough system. Thinking way outside the box. Really quickly, really quietly, using about one-tenth the number of normal staffers. With radically innovative hardware and code.”

The room had a holy hush over it. They were totally with him. Jeb was beaming in the PowerPoint screen glow.

“In the CCIAB, we do have one great advantage. We don’t need to rely on anybody’s lame industry vendors, because, in the CCIAB, we actually understand code. So we can build, and we will build, our own Grendel supercluster. Grendels are made from obsolete PCs, but clustered in parallel without any von Neumann bottlenecks.”

Another nice screen.

“For about a hundred grand, we will own a new federal system with more raw computational power than the entire Commerce Department. And, in the short term, that system will be very, very secure. Because no hacker anywhere has invented or found any security holes for Grendel distributed supercomputation code. There are maybe ten guys in the whole world who understand that code. They are all loyal American computer-science academics, and they are all real, real busy.”

A hand went up. It was a late arrival, a skinny younger guy with a battered laptop on his knees. “May I ask a question, sir?”

“What?”

“You, Dr. Derek Vandeveer, you’re one of those ten guys?”

“Yeah. And I know the other nine. Who are you?”

“Well, I’m a Web journalist, and—”

“Meeting adjourned!” Jeb bellowed, lurching to his feet.

Van was lying in bed, staring at the ceiling, and thinking hard about streams. Van had always wanted to do something useful and important with streams, because streams were inherently superior to the conventional structure of files. Van was planning to implement distributed streams within the Grendel. That was overkill, really. There wasn’t a kode-kid, cracker, hacktivist, or even intelligence agency in the whole world that could break into a Grendel. But a Grendel running
streams—
man, that would be beyond all coolness.

Blinking occasionally, Van thought about streams. He thought about streams seriously, and then, very, very seriously. Eventually, Van became aware that someone was pounding on his apartment door. Surprised, he sat up and pulled on his pants.

Van had rented his Washington apartment point-and-click off a real-estate Web site. Van had been in a big hurry to find a place in Washington, and the street was close enough to a telecom central station to get himself an ADSL line. The rooms had looked okay in the GIF file. In real life, the apartment was tiny and reeked of insecticide. Van’s apartment had ugly walls of exposed yellow brick, a lot of peeling Formica, and a foul layer of oily grime on the kitchen walls and ceiling. The toilet wobbled in the bathroom.

The Web site hadn’t talked at all about the neighborhood, either. Van’s neighborhood was sinister. Van now kept his grandfather’s ray gun handy beside the door. The people who knocked on Van’s door usually wanted to sell him crack cocaine, or themselves.

Van removed his glasses and placed his right eye to the peephole. Out in the dim, ratty hallway stood a skinny girl with a big nose, dark eyes too close together, and black, frizzy hair. She wore a strange little frock of greenish-looking, all-organic, undyed cotton, and carried a shapeless fabric purse. She looked like a Girl Scout who’d sold all her cookies and taken up panhandling. Van undid three large brass locks and opened the door on a length of steel chain.

“Dr. Vandeveer?”

“Huh?”

“I’m your new secretary. Can I come in?”

Van considered this. It was unexpected. “Can I see some ID first?”

The woman showed him a plastic-coated mag-stripe card with an embedded photo. The card had a nice red lanyard. The card identified her as “Fawn Glickleister, Executive Assistant, CCIAB Technical Services.”

“Huh,” Van said.

Fawn held up a different badge, still in fresh shrink-wrap. “I brought your badge, too, uhm, Derek. These badges are new. You haven’t been to work in three days.”

“I
am
working,” Van insisted, stung. “I just can’t do any meetings with anybody right now.”

“Can I come in please? It’s kind of scary out here!”

Van undid his rattling chain.

Fawn came inside. She studied the big plastic weight-lifting bench, which dominated Van’s small apartment. The grimy wall behind the bench was covered with posters of Full-Contact Karate champions, guys with staring eyes, flying sweat, and feet swathed in red plastic gauntlets. “Is all this yours?”

“I just moved in.” The apartment’s previous tenant had abandoned everything he owned, including his thong underwear, his girlie mags, and his size-twelve kung-fu shoes. Van was pretty sure the guy had gotten shot or arrested. No one seemed to know or care about that.

“Wow,” Fawn marveled, “that is one really cool chair!”

The magnesium chair was the only piece of furniture that Van had managed to bring from Merwinster. He’d grabbed the chair on impulse and thrown it into the Range Rover. His plan was to junk everything in the Washington apartment and replace it all—the Korean landlord said that would be just fine—but he had lacked the time.

Fawn Glickleister was definitely older than twelve. She was older than Helga, Van’s sad little fired au pair, but she was as restless as a sixth-grader. Her lips were badly chapped and her brown eyes looked red and puffy. She had a high, squeaky voice. “This chair doesn’t outgas any toxins, does it?”

Van stared at her. “How could magnesium outgas?”

Fawn sat down daintily. “Wow, it’s a lot more comfortable than it looks!” She pulled a thick pair of wireless specs from her canvas purse.

An ominous silence fell as she looked around the apartment.

“Can I tell you something, Derek? It’s even scarier in here than it is out in the hall. Are you sure you’re a computer geek? I know a whole lot of nerds, and most of them aren’t, like, weight-lifting, scary karate guys in the ghetto. Hey, wow, what happened to that kitchen?”

“You just sit in that chair for a sec,” Van commanded. He opened the door, stepped into the gloomy hall, and slammed the door behind him.

“Jeb,” said the phone.

“Jeb, what the hell is it with this girl you just gave me? She’s twelve years old, Jeb. She looks like a Muppet.”

“That would be Fawn Glickleister.”

“I know her name. If I need help, I know where to get it.”

“Glickleister!” Jeb insisted. “She’s not twelve, she’s twenty-six. She’s Glickleister’s daughter.”

Recognition dawned. “
The
Glickleister? Hyman Glickleister?”

“Do you know any
other
Glickleisters?”

Van took a breath. Hyman Glickleister. Legendary computer visionary. ARPANET. Packet-switching guru. A man thirty years ahead of his time. Glickleister had spent the last fifteen years of his life in a wheelchair, dying of some obscure neuromuscular disease, and that had only made him concentrate more fiercely. Van had been crushed when Glickleister had died. It was as if some vast blazing bonfire had gone out. There ought to be bronze statues to Glickleister in front of every router station in the world. Van mulled it over, shaken. So weird to think that Hyman Glickleister had actually reproduced. Some woman had married Glickleister and borne Glickleister’s child. Once would pretty much do it for that activity, Van guessed glumly.

“Okay, so she’s his kid,” he admitted. Fawn looked just like Glickleister. Jeb was eager to soft-pedal the situation. “Now, Van, you taught at Stanford. You get it about today’s young people. Fawn is bright, she’s a quick study. You can mellow her out.”

Jeb was old-fashioned. He still thought that college students were wild, crazy kids. Van’s students at Stanford had been sober workaholic Indian and Chinese software engineers with astronomical SATs.

“Jeb, I don’t want her. I don’t like her.”

“Then I can get you another secretary. Some old lady from the Defense Department with her hair in a bun and a pencil through it. And you know what she’s going to do to you, Van? She’s going to tape all your phone calls to Monica Lewinsky, and she’ll betray you to some political operative. People do that kind of thing in this town. I’m trying to protect you here, Van. We raging supergeeks don’t have a lot of friends inside the Beltway. You’re my Deputy Director for Technical Services. You’re my top boy and I want to kiss you, but somebody has got to answer your phone. Because you don’t do that. So Fawn will. Because Fawn is one of us. Fawn was born one of us. We can trust her.”

This was a crushing speech, but Van resisted mulishly. “How about Jimmie Matson from Mondiale? He was my executive assistant in the lab. Jimmie can get it done. He’s great.”

“You recommended Jimmie Matson to me already. We did a background check. Jimmie Matson is a gay guy with a substance problem.”

“Jimmie is gay?” Van was stunned.

“And he’s on dope. This isn’t the private sector, Van. Fawn passed a security clearance with flying colors. Glickleister’s daughter is more secure than you are. Lots more secure.”

Van’s phone beeped with an incoming call. Van decided to take it because he was losing his argument with Jeb so badly. “I’ll get back to you,” he said.

The other call was Dottie.

“Hi!” he said, startled and pleased. “Are you in Washington?”

“I’m in Colorado,” Dottie told him. “Are you being mean to Fawn?”

“Honey, I’m not being mean.”

“Fawn can cook,” Dottie coaxed. “She cooks Szechuan. Fawn found me on Google and we talked over all your problems. She’s very sweet.”

“I don’t have any problems. I don’t need a secretary or a cook. Besides, the class ‘secretary’ is not congruent with the class ‘cook.’ ”

Dottie’s voice sharpened and lifted half an octave. “Derek, what did you eat tonight?”

“A TV dinner,” Van lied, caught out. He hadn’t thought to eat at all. He had been thinking very seriously.

“What kind of TV dinner?”

“A Salisbury steak,” Van blurted hastily. And it was true. He actually had eaten a Salisbury steak TV

dinner. He had forgotten about doing that, so he had lied to Dottie by accident. Twenty minutes after Grendel first went up, the system received its first hacker attack. It was a port scan, and of course it got nowhere. A Grendel running streams didn’t have any “ports.” Van had installed emulators that vaguely resembled ports, in the way a Venus-flytrap resembled a nice little red flower. Triggered by this assault, Van’s pager went off, vibrating his right knee in the cargo pants. Van had guzzled so much coffee during the past twenty-four hours that at first he thought the jittery vibration was happening inside his own leg. Van fetched out the pager and then logged on, wondering. An attack within twenty minutes? How was that even possible?

He watched the intruder fanatically typing. Then he called Jeb. “Jeb, come over here right now. You have got to see this.”

“I’m having a dogfight with the Air Force, Van.”

“To hell with the Air Force, come look.”

By the time Jeb arrived in Van’s office, the would-be intruder had already filled five screens with gibberish and back spaces.

Van paged the terminal, up and down silently, through the long list of line commands.

“Is that who I think it is?”

Jeb’s froggy eyes bulged. “It is! It’s him! This is kind of an honor, really.”

Fawn left her desk, where she had been cleaning up spam while listening to a book on tape. Fawn favored the fictional works of someone named Kathy Acker. Since wearing earphones at work seemed to calm Fawn down some, Van overlooked her strange habits.

“What is it?” Fawn said, chewing the end of a Sharpie.

“ ‘It’ is The Weevil,” said Jeb solemnly. “Look at that guy. He is going through all top twenty of the biggest vulnerabilities for Windows systems. And he’ll do each one of them ten times.”

“But we’d be crazy to be running a Windows server,” Fawn objected. “Big Bill’s got more holes than baby Swiss cheese.”

“The Weevil
is
crazy,” Jeb said. “He doesn’t even know what Windows is. He doesn’t know what UNIX is, either. But when he runs out of all of the Windows holes he knows, then he’ll start in with his complete list of UNIX vulnerabilities.”

“I heard The Weevil used an Apple hole once,” Van offered.

“Probably an accident.”

“What does he do once he’s inside the system?” said Fawn.

Jeb shrugged. “He gets root.”

“But what does he do when he gets root?”

“He makes himself superuser, covers up the intrusion in the logs, and looks for some other machine to get root on.”

“Oh.” Fawn scratched the side of her nose with her pen. “He’s one of those, huh?”

“The Weevil is
the
one of those. He doesn’t know any programming. He’ll never know. He only wants to knows holes and vulnerabilities. He collects them for their own sake. He has long lists of them. And he tries them all, cookbook style. Manually! Look at him backspacing there.”

“Wow.”

“Twenty-four, thirty-six hours straight sometimes. Day after day. Weeks. From his laptop in the toilet,”

said Jeb. “Did you ever
see
The Weevil, Van? He’s been raided about thirty times.”