Exit Code Read online

  “Good. Now why don’t you tell me where you’ve set up this base for the Arab’s network?”

  Predictably, Pescia began to spill his guts.

  Washington, D.C.

  ONCE SADIQ RHATIB HAD rested, changed clothes and consumed a hearty meal, he went to work on the network systems. There were still remnants of Carnivore in their control—sleepers he’d left in the programming algorithms—and all he had to do was activate them. But there would be a right time and place for that. As long as the programs weren’t active, they were virtually undetectable. Besides, it was going to be some time before word got to the right people that he’d escaped, and by that time he’d have the system in place.

  The first order of business would be to start bringing Nicolas Lenzini’s network programs online. Rhatib’s uncle had already gone to meet the American criminal at his estate in Arlington, and once he’d gotten the signal, his uncle would terminate their relationship with Lenzini—permanently.

  Rhatib could remember arguing with his uncle about bringing Lenzini on in the first place. He didn’t trust the American crime syndicate, and he certainly didn’t trust Lenzini and his people. First, they had allowed the Garden of Allah to be destroyed, and risked little to protect such an important investment. That club, while seemingly only a physical structure, had served a multitude of purposes including providing a safehouse for soldiers in the NIF who had conducted operations within American borders. It had even served as a temporary sanctuary for Rhatib during the few months he’d spent here in America, working to perfect the system they would eventually use to control U.S. defensive systems.

  Still, he did have to admit that Lenzini had come through on providing the network coverage necessary to implement their plan. They now had to bring certain systems online in a certain sequence, so as not to arouse the suspicions of those government agencies that were electronically monitoring for specific kinds of traffic. The nice thing was that they wouldn’t be looking for Rhatib in this exercise, since they had no way to tie Lenzini with the NIF.

  “Auxiliary systems are online and waiting,” Malcolm Shurish announced with a triumphant beating of his fist on a nearby table.

  Rhatib only nodded, trying to remain focused on the tasks at hand. They were working from Shurish’s hideaway retreat, a small Georgian-style house nestled away in the Appalachian foothills he’d purchased some time back. Shurish had the perfect excuse to work from home, since he’d rigged the bomb in his office, and repair and remodeling efforts were still underway. Shurish had remarked about how long it took the government to complete anything, but somehow Rhatib and Abdalrahman hadn’t really caught onto the joke.

  “What’s the next step?” Shurish asked.

  “We must insure that each system can talk to the others,” Rhatib said. “Even though the networks are up and running, it will take at least twenty-four hours to run all of the necessary diagnostics.”

  “We may not have twenty-four hours,” Shurish replied. “Your uncle wants us ready to go as soon as possible.”

  “My uncle trusts me to decide that, Doctor,” Rhatib said, his face reddening. “I am the expert here.”

  “On some of it maybe,” Shurish replied. The scientist was older and more experienced, and he was not about to concede to some boy wonder just off the boat.

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “It means that we are supposed to work together,” Shurish said. He walked around the table until he could look Rhatib straight in the eye. “It means that we both want the same thing.”

  “And that is?”

  “The victory of the New Islamic Front,” Shurish declared.

  “But I would guess,” Rhatib replied, “that you would also like to see your system up and running?”

  “Why not?” Shurish asked. “I don’t deny it for a moment. It is a work of art, and a demonstration of man’s genius in the world of technology. We can now communicate at lightning-fast speeds with very little effort and with devices no wider than the nail of my smallest finger. Nothing in the U.S. government’s present arsenal can even come close to that. With this system, we will be able to predict the response of missile defense systems three-times faster than those systems can actually respond. We can intercept and scramble communications and disperse communication packets across multiple locations so that it can never be traced or pulled back together. And, most importantly, we will be able to garble radio, microwave, satellite and broadband communication frequencies so that not only will American forces not be able to talk with allied systems, but they will not even be able to talk among themselves. This is the SuperNet we are about to implement. It is a power unequaled in human history, and one which we are about to unleash upon the entire world. It is my life’s work. Why wouldn’t I want to see it come to life?”

  Rhatib watched Shurish with fascination, and in that moment he realized the man was insane. He’d come to believe in his own infallibility, and put all of his faith in this technological wonder. There was no longer any strong sense of religious conviction to be found in him. He no longer believed in Allah, and it was doubtful he even believed in the NIF’s cause. It was apparent the only thing Shurish had come to believe in was himself.

  And that made him as dangerous as their enemies.

  10

  Tyra MacEwan concluded her study of the SuperNet maps and network topologies, leaned back in her chair and shook her head with amazement. She stopped only for a moment to study her surroundings. She felt lonely and nervous, jumping at every sound as if it were the bogie man coming to get her. She chided herself for letting the sounds of the night rattle her cage. She was an adult possessing talent, brains and a .38-caiber snub nose—and she knew how to use all of them.

  MacEwan turned back to the subject at hand, studying the network one more time before beginning the real work. Hacking into the internal systems of Lenzini’s former dot-com companies wasn’t very hard to do. It didn’t look like the guy had a clue about network security. Bear had managed to get inside the system within a few minutes, and had sent the crack codes onto her. Now it was just a matter of looking for the unseen, and drawing the unusual out of what appeared, on the surface, to be quite ordinary.

  Simple software firewalls protecting a basic Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol configuration over a worldwide network was the first oddity MacEwan noticed. On the surface, the information these systems collected and stored seemed routine, such as customer online orders and the like. However, upon a more detailed scrutiny, Bear’s people had discovered that something was amiss. First, the information stored inside the network wasn’t even valid. Bogus names, addresses, credit card numbers; the list went on and on. Additionally, there was no consistency in any of the internal data or the relational records. No such products existed, and there was absolutely no real-time transaction information stored anywhere. There were no real purchases, deposits, credits or debits, or any real accounts holding real money. The account numbers held internally on the systems weren’t even consistent.

  MacEwan knew immediately what the architects were attempting to do. It started with the fact they were using basic Internet protocols, and something more along the lines of the hardware technology in place at each of the remote sites. Supposedly, these sites were using mainframes, application and Web servers, and a host of other expensive equipment and cabling, and yet the servers were only running basic TCP/IP communications at slow transmission speeds when they were capable of transmitting information at unparalleled rates.

  The TCP/IP communications language actually worked at two different layers. At the higher layer was the Transmission Control Protocol, a program that disassembled messages into smaller and more compact units that were reassembled by another TCP layer on the receiving side. The Internet Protocol, the lower layer of the communications program, actually addressed part of the total message to the same destination, but usually sent each packet disassembled by the TCP layer through different routes.
r />   Rhatib had tried a similar trick after cracking into the Carnivore system, although he’d mixed and matched a variety of programs and scripting languages to do it. Only because MacEwan and Mitch Fowler had worked to create tighter security inside the Carnivore system had she been able to detect Rhatib’s handiwork. Finding out what was really going on behind the scenes inside Lenzini’s network was another matter entirely.

  No, it wasn’t going to be easy.

  MacEwan needed to know if Malcolm Shurish was really involved in all of this, as Cooper’s people suspected. It was possible Shurish was doing something shady, but that didn’t make him a bad guy and it certainly didn’t mean he was a terrorist. After all, Bear or the other man she’d spoken with didn’t offer any hard proof that Shurish had anything to do with the New Islamic Front. Shurish had hired MacEwan for her position at DARPA—the government had hired her on his recommendation. She’d come to trust him, and she’d never seen anything to make her believe he was a traitor. And why go to the trouble of trying to make it look like somebody was trying to kill him? Not to mention the fact that he’d killed his secretary in the process of that bombing, and he didn’t even know Cooper was anything more than a temporary replacement for MacEwan in her absence.

  It just seemed like there had to be another explanation, and MacEwan knew that it was important she find out what was happening inside of Lenzini’s network. Bear was at least right about one thing: it would help her prove Shurish was innocent. And if he wasn’t, well, then, she would deal with that when the time came—even if she had to do it herself.

  MacEwan knew the first step to finding out the real purpose of Lenzini’s networked systems was to get past all of the false data he had stored. Obviously, the technical advisors Lenzini had working for him thought they had enough of a facade to maintain the appearance of a legitimate business across the World Wide Web and they had not accounted for the fact that someone with more brains than they had would actually go beyond a cursory inspection. They hadn’t been counting on someone like Tyra MacEwan to be poking through their systems.

  MacEwan first identified all of the databases Bear’s team had confirmed contained erroneous data and began writing an algorithm that would sort the data into hash tables and put them in a temporary location. She also figured she’d have to write a security program to hide her tracks and lock out anyone attempting to access that portion of the communications portal when she was in it. That would make it look as if there was some bug in the system, and by the time they had anyone actually look at the thing, she’d be off and onto the next area.

  The other thing MacEwan was counting on was the fact that Cooper was going to take care of the physical sites where the hardware was located. While that end of the system would be down, MacEwan could still work the mystery from her end by pulling the information to her and storing it locally. Bear’s team had provided her with quite a sweet setup, actually, with more than enough material on her end to run her own Internet-based business had she really wanted.

  Beneath the large desk were two servers. One would run secondary tasks and applications in the background—her codebreakers, hashers and parsers—while the second would act as a server for local databases and information storage retrieval. She would use the laptop system connected to these to run actual programs, and there was also a desktop unit with three broadband connections. One of those connections was designed for Internet access only, one was hooked into the special virtual private government network and support systems that Bear had set up for her, and the last was a backup system that would fire up in the event she lost either of the first two connections. The entire setup was hooked into a freestanding power supply, so a power loss would not affect her in any way.

  It took MacEwan almost six hours to complete the first program, but she knew it was going to be a tedious process, and she’d told Bear as much. Nonetheless, it appeared the program was working as it began to sort through the data, organize it, and store into the temporary tables she’d created. Now and again, MacEwan had to shut the program down and make a correction, but she’d dealt with it quickly and in minutes it would be up again and continued working through the massive data on Lenzini’s network.

  Another two hours passed before a very disturbing pattern began to appear. As the data was pushed aside, MacEwan could see that there was nothing behind it. That wasn’t possible though, because all of that data was just stored as relational records in plain, ASCII-based flat files. There wasn’t anything more to it. MacEwan was positive she’d find something else behind it, but no such luck. She ran the program for another hour—peeling the data out of the system layer by layer—but after all of that time, there was nothing there. Instead of finding the true information behind the jigsaw puzzle of data, she instead discovered that nothing resided in any of Lenzini’s core systems.

  MacEwan picked up the telephone and Kurtzman answered on the second ring.

  “Are you seeing this?” she asked him.

  “No,” he replied. “Actually, I’m seeing nothing. And it’s what I’m not seeing that has me worried.”

  “Agreed,” MacEwan said. “I thought for sure we’d find what we were looking for behind all of that data.”

  “As did I, but now I’m wondering if maybe that’s what whoever designed this system was hoping we’d think. They figured we’d waste our time hashing and parsing through the data.”

  “And we took the bait.”

  “Right,” Kurtzman said. “I guess our enemy isn’t as stupid as we thought. Let me ask you this, just based on what you’ve seen to this point. Is it possible Shurish had something to do with this?”

  “No, I—” MacEwan began, but then she stopped herself. “Wait a minute! It is possible, Bear. A few years ago, when I first started working with DARPA, Malcolm was trying to sell some group at the Pentagon on a project he called Operation Poltergeist.”

  Bear stopped her, and she could hear the rapid clack of keys as he typed something into his system. A moment later, he sighed deeply. “There’s nothing in our databanks about it, and there’s something to be said for that.”

  “I don’t think he ever published any of his findings. In fact, I don’t think he even worked on it through any of DARPA’s equipment or systems. He was always very secretive about his work.”

  “What do you know about this Poltergeist?”

  “The entire premise was based on the idea of sorting data in such a way that to the observer it would appear normal. Further investigation of that data, or storing it temporarily in tables, wouldn’t reveal anything unusual and at that point most hackers would probably give up. The trick was in the data itself. It was encrypted so that elements of the data were valid, but they weren’t in a valid order and each record relation was actually indexed by a secret code.”

  “I think I’m beginning to understand here,” Kurtzman said, “and I’m not sure I like the thought. You’re saying that all of the data we just copied out of the system is valid, but it’s scrambled.”

  “Correct. If you think about it, it’s actually a brilliant concept.”

  “Yeah, and it’s Shurish’s brilliance that scares me.”

  “We should be more concerned about what this could mean,” MacEwan said.

  “That is?”

  “The coding algorithms used to index the information so they can be resorted and reorganized into something meaningful are actually controlled by an entry code, much in the same fashion Rhatib used to get inside Carnivore. That means we have to find a way to counteract that entry code by sorting through the data and finding out what it really means. We can then write a program that will counteract it…an exit code of a sort.”

  “I hear a ‘but’ coming,” Kurtzman said.

  “Well, I’m sorry to say this but you hear right. The only way to implement this thing is to port it into the systems in assembly language.”

  “Which means it has to be run locally at each network site,” Kurtzman said.

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p; “Either that, or at the source system from where the entry code is actually executed.”

  “Which would require us to know where, when, and how the NIF plans to use it.”

  “Precisely.”

  “Great,” Kurtzman finally said after a long pause. “It keeps getting better all the time. I don’t suppose there’s another alternative?”

  “None of which I’m aware,” MacEwan replied. “But if you have any suggestions, I’m all ears.”

  There was only silence.

  “While we’re bringing up more problems, I think you should also know that I don’t possess any real expertise in writing assembly language. I’ll need some help.”

  “Our people have plenty of experience in that,” Kurtzman replied. “We’ll start working those angles on this end. In the meantime, I assume you’ll start trying to crack this code.”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay. Let me know if you need anything. And Tyra, we just want you to know that we appreciate everything you’ve done for us. We know that you’ve sacrificed a lot.”

  “As I’ve told you already, Jack and Cooper saved my neck and I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to repay that debt. But you just make sure your people keep their end of the bargain and protect my mom.”

  “You don’t have any reason to worry about that,” Kurtzman said. “She’s in the hands of three of the most able-bodied guys I know.”

  Boston, Massachusetts

  SERGE GRANO SAT in the same chair he’d occupied a hundred times before and tapped his fingers nervously on his knee. He thought about the fact that old man Lenzini had probably kept him waiting on purpose. Nonetheless, Grano couldn’t say he really minded. He respected Mr. Lenzini. The same couldn’t be said for most of the men. He would have done anything for his boss. He considered the old man brilliant, and he was totally devoted to their cause. Still, he hadn’t been comfortable with the idea of working for the Arabs. No, check that—they were working with the Arabs. In either case, it didn’t make much sense to Grano. They could have just as easily made their money the old-fashioned way.