Wormhole (The Rho Agenda #3)(56)
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.