Wormhole (28 page)

Sudden insight flashed through her. Frequency! Heather reviewed what she knew about the changes the Bandolier Ship had wrought in their brains. The human brain held over a hundred billion neurons, each with thousands of synaptic connections to other neurons, hundreds of trillions of synapses involved in the massively parallel chemical and electrical operations that gave the human mind its power.

The difference between the way Heather’s, Mark’s, and Jennifer’s brains functioned and the way the average person’s did had little to do with the number of synapses in use. It was the way their functions were timed and coordinated into one synchronized whole. That tightly coordinated signal timing allowed their brains to function as a phased array.

Heather had first heard of phased array radars in middle school while studying the first Gulf War. The US had deployed Patriot missile batteries to protect key assets in Saudi Arabia and Israel; at the heart of each missile battery was a flat phased array radar that painted the sky in front of it with a powerful pencil beam of radar energy, steering the beam back and forth across the sky many times per second. She’d been fascinated by the fact the beam could be directed at so many different spots so quickly without any moving parts in the radar.

It all worked by timing the energy output from thousands of radar emitters spread across the radar surface. If you turned on all the emitters at once, the energy went straight out. By precisely controlling the pattern and timing of each emitter, the radar created a focused beam that could be rapidly and precisely directed. The principle worked for directed communications signals or for any application in which directed energy was required.

What kind of signal processing efficiency could be achieved with a phased array formed from hundreds of trillions of emitters and receivers? Good enough to relay signals to other parts of the same brain without the delay of traversing the intervening neural pathways. And if it could do that, it should be able to accomplish similar signal communication to another’s brain.

A surge of adrenaline flooded Heather as she zoomed in on the answer. There were still a number of problems associated with establishing that sort of communication link. First, every brain was different. That implied that targeting of the brain’s phased
array was just part of the problem. You would also have to identify the frequency and pattern of the other person’s receptor array.

How had that happened automatically when she’d been under heavy stress? When the Rag Man had grabbed her, she hadn’t been aware of exactly where Mark and Jennifer were. With the tiny signal strengths generated by the human brain, the signal would have to be tightly focused and precisely directed to avoid the inverse-radius-squared loss associated with spherical waves.

Apparently her brain had produced a rapidly scanning pencil beam that had first located Mark and Jennifer and then, given that information, had identified the appropriate communication patterns and frequencies that their brains accepted.

Again she felt the rush of near discovery. She was so close to the answer she could taste it and, with rising anticipation, she felt herself crawl ever deeper into her savant trance.

Dr. Jacobs glanced at his watch as he spoke into the digital recorder.

“Subject entered fugue state at oh-nine-eighteen hours and has remained quasi-comatose for the last thirty-two minutes. At oh-nine-forty-seven, subject’s vitals began exhibiting significant fluctuations. Heart rate and blood pressure are up, although well within the expected range for a person in an agitated state. EEG readings correspond to the unusual results catalogued by Dr. Sigmund during her Los Alamos observations.”

He clicked off the recorder and returned his attention to Heather McFarland. As he stared down into that beautiful face with those strange, milky eyes staring right through him, thin lines of concentration furrowed her brow. Dr. Jacobs thought he detected the leading edge of a smile caress her lips.

Starting first on his arms and legs, gooseflesh tightened, raising the fine hairs to attention, spreading rapidly up the back of his neck to his scalp. As he stared down at this young woman, Dr. Jacobs felt the strength leach from his legs, forcing him to grab the instrument table for support. And though his mind rebelled at the notion, he suddenly found himself more frightened of this girl than of anything he’d ever experienced.

Dr. Bert Mathews fastened the antistatic wrist strap around his right wrist, connecting the alligator clip at the other end of the wire to the metal frame that held the laptop, then sat down in the chair beside Eileen Wu, the nineteen-year-old Caltech prodigy known throughout the hacker community as Hex. Fine-boned and slender, the Amerasian teen wore her black hair boyishly short, highlighting the way her throat plunged down into the tight yellow cami that didn’t quite make it down to her ragged jeans.

Hardly appropriate work attire at the NSA, but for Eileen he’d made an exception. Besides, as far as Bert knew, she didn’t own any clothes but jeans and camis. The thing Bert found most startling about her appearance was her complete lack of tattoos or piercings, an indication of just how different Eileen was. Not goth. More like a Celtic high priestess of code.

It was hard to recognize the device on the lab table before her as one of the laptops captured at Jack Gregory’s Bolivian hideout. The case had been disassembled, the motherboard and components mounted into an instrumented metal frame. The laptop monitor had been removed, the wiring routed through a small black box and then to a large flat-panel display. A nest of thin colored wires had been attached to the motherboard, CPU, network cards, memory modules, hard drive, and video card, connecting them to a rack-mounted system to Eileen’s right.

“So, are we ready?” Dr. Mathews asked.

Eileen pressed the power button, waiting for several seconds for the standard Windows login screen to appear. Two user icons appeared, HAL and PickMe.

“Cute,” Eileen muttered. “This shouldn’t take long.”

Spinning her chair ninety degrees to the right, she shifted her attention to the bank of monitors and the keyboard attached to the rack of blade servers. As she entered the commands, Dr. Mathews watched the laptop display reboot to the BIOS screen, cycling to the boot device selection, changing the setting to Boot from USB Device.

Again the laptop rebooted, stopping again at the log-in screen. Eileen turned back to the laptop keyboard, selected the HAL icon, moved her cursor to the password edit box, and hit Enter. A thin smile tweaked the corners of her lips as the Windows desktop appeared.

“So now what?” Bert asked. Normally he would have a set of scripts running every step of the forensic data recovery. But he wanted Eileen to look through the system before he launched the standard scripts, just in case there were any unknown security protocols running on this system. After all, this was one of the Jack Gregory laptops, and the word from cartel intercepts
about Jennifer Smythe indicated she might be nearly as talented a hacker as Hex.

“Give me a second. I want to see a list of processes and services running on this machine. We’re mirroring everything on the buses, registers, hard disk reads and writes, data passing through the TCP/IP stack to the network driver interfaces, and everything coming in or out of the NICs. If bits are flipping on this laptop we’re capturing them.”

“You’ve got Wi-Fi enabled?”

“And I’ve hooked the network interfaces up to our LAN. I want to see what data this thing tries to send, if any. Don’t worry, no signal can make it out of this room.”

“We’ve been penetrated before.”

“Those were standard TEMPEST cages. This room is solid steel. No electromagnetic signal is propagating through that. Certainly not from a laptop.”

For six hours Dr. Mathews watched as Eileen worked her way through the laptop, a stretch broken only for coffee and associated bathroom breaks. Despite the way his stomach rumbled, he refused to leave Eileen, and she showed no inclination to go anywhere. It appeared this was going to lead to another straightforward data dump, after which they could turn the encrypted data over to systems designed to crack that protection.

Suddenly Eileen shifted in her chair, rising up over the keyboard like a cougar crouched on a mountain ledge.

“That’s odd.”

“What?”

Eileen continued to work the keyboards, shifting back and forth between the blade rack and the laptop. Just as Bert decided she hadn’t heard him, Eileen pointed at the readout.

“There. We’ve got a significant amount of reads and writes happening across the TCP stack. I almost missed it because we’ve
got nothing coming in or out on the wireless network hardware or through the Ethernet cards. But data is definitely coming and going between the network layer and the framing layer.”

“Loopback?”

“No. It has to be going to a custom network driver.”

“But if the driver’s not talking to the network cards or loopback, what’s it talking to?”

“The only other piece of hardware is the USB dongle.”

“Can you tell how long the TCP stack has been actively transmitting and receiving data?”

Eileen brought up another Linux xterm, rapidly entering a sequence of commands that launched a new program on one of the blade servers, filling one of the monitors. Framed data graphs filled most of the window and below these a thin blue time line slider extended across the screen. Dragging the glowing current-position widget slowly backward, Eileen watched the data graphs change. As it neared the beginning, Eileen paused, reversing it slightly. She brought up another display, this one a list of processes running at that point in time. She began stepping forward in thirty-second increments, stopped, reversed again, then froze.

“Damn it.”

Dr. Mathews didn’t like the tone of her voice. “Tell me.”

“It looks like some sort of timer process activated shortly after I logged in.”

“Timer? For what?”

“Well, I won’t know for sure until I spend a few more hours going through this data, but if I was guessing, which I am, I’d say we had a certain amount of time to do some sort of validation after log-in. One minute to be exact.”

“One minute?”

“Yeah. Because exactly one minute after the timer activated, it went away. That’s when the data started coming and going on the TCP stack.”

Dr. Mathews ran the fingers of his left hand through his graying hair. “OK. Let’s assume that there was some sort of second log-in we were supposed to do but didn’t. Why not just erase the hard drive?”

“That would be too obvious and to do a military-grade wipe would take way too long. We would have powered down the system, pulled the drive, and handed it over to our hardware guys to recover the data.”

Mathews knew all of this thoroughly, but he was rattled, thinking out loud. He shook his head. “It still doesn’t add up. While that system is messing around with its TCP stack, we’ve duplicated the entire hard drive and mirrored all the data transfers going on in the whole system. Plus, no traffic is going in or out through the network cards. Even if it had been, no signals could make it in or out of this room.”

Dr. Mathews rose from his chair to stand, chin in hand, behind Eileen Wu. “So what’s it doing?”

Eileen spun her chair to stare up at him, her clear black eyes unblinking.

“Beats the shit out of me.”