The President Is Missing(95)

She wrinkles her nose. “No. Deleting is different. When something is deleted, it’s marked as deleted. It’s inactive, and it becomes unallocated space that could eventually be replaced when storage hits capacity—”

“Casey, for Christ’s sake. Would you speak English?”

She pushes her thick glasses up on the bridge of her nose. “It doesn’t really matter, sir. All I was saying was, when the user deletes a file, it doesn’t disappear immediately and forever. The computer marks it as deleted, so that space opens up in the memory, and it disappears from your active files. But an expert could reconstruct it. That’s not what this virus is doing. The wiper virus overwrites the data. And that is permanent.”

“Show me,” I say again. “Show me the virus overwriting the data.”

“Okay. We made a simulation in case you ever wanted to see it.” Casey runs through a couple things on the computer so fast that I don’t even know what she’s done. “Here is a random active file on this laptop. See it here? All the rows, the various properties of the file?”

On the smartscreen, a box has opened up showing a single file’s properties. A series of horizontal rows, each occupied by a number or word.

“Now I’ll show you that same file after the overwrite.”

Suddenly a different image appears on the smartscreen.

Again, I’d envisioned something dramatic, but the actual visual experience is decidedly anticlimactic.

“It’s identical,” I say, “except the last three rows have been replaced with a zero.”

“That’s the overwrite. The zero. We can never reconstruct it once it’s gone.”

A bunch of zeros. America will be transformed into a third-world country by a bunch of zeros.

“Show me the virus again,” I say.

She pops it back on the screen, the amalgamation of numbers and symbols and letters.

“So this thing goes kaboom, and everything vanishes like that?” I snap my fingers.

“Not quite,” says Casey. “Some wiper viruses act that way. This one goes file by file. It’s fairly quick, but it’s slower than the snap of a finger. It’s like the difference between dying suddenly from a massive coronary versus dying slowly from cancer.”

“How slow is slowly?”

“Maybe, I don’t know, about twenty minutes.”

Find a way.

“That thing has a timing mechanism inside it?”

“It might. We can’t tell.”

“Well, what’s the other possibility?”

“That it’s waiting for a command to execute. That the viruses in each affected device are communicating with one another. One of them will issue a command to execute, and they all will, simultaneously.”

I look at Augie. “Which is it?”

He shrugs. “I do not know. I’m sorry. Nina did not share that with me.”

“Well, can’t we play with the time?” I ask. “Can’t we change the time on the computer so it’s a different year? If it’s set to go off today, can’t we change the clock and calendar back a century? So it thinks it has to wait a hundred years to go off? I mean, how the hell does this virus know what date and what year it is if we tell it something different?”

Augie shakes his head. “Nina would not have tied it to a computer’s clock,” he says. “It’s too imprecise and too easy to manipulate. Either it’s master-controlled or she gave it a specific amount of time. She would start back from the desired date and time, calculate it in terms of seconds, and tell it to detonate in that many seconds.”

“Three years ago she did that?”

“Yes, Mr. President. It would be simple multiplication. It would be trillions of seconds, but so be it. It’s still just mathematics.”

I deflate.

“If you can’t change the timer,” I ask, “how did you guys make this virus go off?”

“We tried to remove the virus or disable it,” says Devin. “And it detonated. It has a trigger function, like a booby trap, that recognizes hostile activity.”

“Nina did not expect anyone to ever detect it,” says Augie. “And she was correct. No one did. But she installed this trigger in case someone did.”

“Okay,” I say, pacing the room. “Work with me. Think big picture. Big picture but simple.”

Everyone nods, concentrating, as if readjusting their thinking. These people are accustomed to sophistication, to brainteasers, to matching wits with other experts.

“Can we—can we somehow quarantine the virus? Put it inside a box that it can’t see out of?”

Augie is shaking his head before I’ve finished my sentence. “It will overwrite all active files, Mr. President. No ‘box’ would change that.”

“We tried that, believe me,” says Casey. “Many different versions of that idea. We can’t isolate the virus from the rest of the files.”

“Can we…couldn’t we just unplug every device from the Internet?”

Her head inclines. “Possibly. It’s possible that this is a distributive system, meaning the viruses are communicating from device to device, like we just said, and one of them will send an ‘execute’ command to the other viruses. It’s possible that she set it up that way. So if she did, then yes, if we disconnected everything from the Internet, that ‘execute’ command wouldn’t be received and the wiper virus wouldn’t activate.”