Wormhole (The Rho Agenda #3)(57)

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.”





The secondary log-in timer began its countdown as Windows Explorer displayed the desktop, waiting for the Valid-User event to be posted. When, sixty seconds later, the event had failed to arrive, the timer posted another custom Windows event, this one triggering the Unauthorized-User callback.

On the motherboard, the subspace receiver-transmitter (SRT) came on line, commencing a scan for all computer networks within a one-kilometer radius. Its worm had an initial set of prioritized actions. Infiltrate. Replicate. Hide.

Only after the SRT had transferred the worm to sixteen separate systems did its state machine transition from Initial-Response-Mode to Local-Environment-Analysis-and-Optimization. In this mode it began building a prioritized list of networks and processors within the specified radius, assigning the highest priority to computer systems with the largest processor arrays. Within miliseconds, its attention focused on a system that temporarily shifted the SRT’s state into High Priority Target Mode.

Sampling the Internet protocol packets entering and leaving this new target, the SRT extracted a hostname.

Big-John.





President Jackson looked at the assembled war fighters and intelligence officials seated around the long table in the Pentagon’s National Military Command Center. Covering one of the Emergency Conference Room’s walls, six large-screen monitors displayed various maps of the United States. As the president stared up at the maps, he experienced a moment of Cold War déjà vu, half expecting to see Dr. Strangelove come wheeling around the table to give one of his stiff-armed Nazi salutes.

General McKittrick, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had just concluded the morning situation brief, which had gone about as President Jackson had expected. The situation was bad and would continue to worsen while the military consolidated its hold on key national assets. Aside from the isolated pockets where the US military had been deployed to maintain order, it was every man for himself out there. Worse than that, it was every gang for itself. In cities and towns across the country, where the police found themselves overwhelmed, they had hunkered down protecting key local facilities, waiting for the promised National Guard reinforcements. But National Guard troops were stretched too thin, assigned to protect key localities as designated by the national command authority.