The President Is Missing(98)

Augie, standing near the smartboard now, wags a finger. “You are suggesting we delete all active files on the computer.”

“Yes,” I say. “When it’s time for the virus to activate, it opens its eyes and sees no active files to delete. It’s like—well, here: it’s like the virus is an assassin, an assassin whose job is to walk into a room and shoot everyone inside. But when he gets inside, everyone’s already dead. Or so he thinks. So he never pulls out his gun. He just turns around and leaves, because his work was already done for him.”

“So we mark every active file as deleted,” says Casey. “Then the virus activates. It doesn’t do anything, because it sees no active files to overwrite.”

She looks at Devin, who seems skeptical. “And then what?” he asks. “At some point we have to recover those files, right? I mean, that’s the whole point—to save those files, to save all that data. So when we recover them, when we unmark them and make them active again—the virus just overwrites them then. It happens later instead of sooner, but it still happens. We’re just delaying the inevitable.”

I look around at everyone in the room, unwilling to let this go. I have the tiniest fraction of their knowledge, but the more I interact with them, the more I think that might be an advantage. They are way too engulfed in the trees to see the forest.

“Are you sure?” I ask. “After the virus does its job, are we sure it doesn’t go back to sleep, or die, or whatever? I asked you that before, and you responded by asking what happens to a cancer cell after the host body dies. Use my analogy instead. The assassin walks into the room, ready to kill everybody, and finds them all dead. Does the assassin leave, thinking his job is already accomplished? Or does he wait around forever, just in case someone wakes up?”

Casey, thinking it over, starts nodding. “He’s right,” she says to Devin. “We don’t know. In every model we’ve run, the virus overwrote the core operating files and killed the computer. We’ve never asked ourselves what happens to the virus afterward. We’ve never run a model where the computer survives afterward. We can’t say for certain the virus would remain active.”

“But why wouldn’t it remain active?” asks Devin. “I can’t imagine Nina would’ve programmed the Suliman virus to stop at any point. Would she?”

All eyes turn to Augie, his hands stuffed in his pockets, eyes in a focused squint, peering off into some point in the present or the past. I can all but hear the tick of the clock. I want to grab him and shake him. But he’s working this through. When his mouth opens, everyone in the room seems to lean toward him.

“I think your plan is possible,” he says. “Certainly worth trying on a trial run.”

I check my watch. Eighteen minutes have passed since I made my offer of a pardon. No attempts to contact me.

Why not? It’s the deal of a lifetime.

“Let’s run a test right now,” says Casey.

Devin folds his arms, not looking convinced.

“What?” I ask him.

“This isn’t going to work,” he says. “And we’re wasting time we don’t have.”





Chapter

92



A group of scraggly, frumpy, frazzled computer experts stares at the smartboard in the room as Devin completes his preparations for the test run.

“Okay,” says Devin, hovering over the keyboard of one of the test computers. “Every single file on this computer has been marked as deleted. Even the core operating files.”

“You can delete the core operating files and still run the computer?”

“Normally, no,” he says. “But what we did was—”

“Never mind. I don’t care,” I say. “So…let’s do it. Activate the virus.”

“I’ll delete the virus, which should activate it.”

I turn to the smartboard as Devin performs one of the few things that even a dinosaur like me could do—clicking on the Suliman.exe file and hitting Delete.

Nothing happens.

“Okay, it resisted my deletion,” says Devin. “It’s triggered the activation process.”

“Devin—”

“The virus is active, Mr. President,” says Casey, translating. “The assassin has entered the room.”

A series of files pops up on the screen, just like the random files they showed me before, a series of boxes, the properties in a group of descending rows for each file.

“It’s not overwriting them,” says Casey.

The assassin hasn’t found anyone to kill yet. So far so good.

I turn to Casey. “You said it took about twenty minutes to look for all the files. So we have twenty—”

“No,” she says. “I said it took twenty minutes to overwrite them all, one by one. But it finds them much quicker. It—”

“Here.” Devin works the keyboard, popping up an image of the Suliman virus.

Completing scan…

62%





She’s right. It’s moving much faster.

70 percent…80 percent…

I close my eyes, open them, look at the smartboard:

Scan completed

Number of files located: 0