Wormhole (The Rho Agenda #3)(89)
Just when Eileen thought she’d clearly identified the worm’s unique signature, she’d come back to a machine she’d found it on an hour earlier and discovered that it was gone. Not really gone, just hidden in plain sight. She’d wiped an infected computer’s hard drive, only to discover that the worm restored itself to a different part of the drive later, having managed to write its kernel into a programmable keyboard’s random-access memory.
The worm was amazingly aggressive, migrating through any connection to writeable memory. It loved flash memory, as well as anything that let it save off a version of itself.
The time line confused her. So did the infection vector. Clearly the infection had been present for some time prior to the attack. And as adept as the worm was at spreading and hiding itself, this was a TEMPEST facility. Even if she assumed that someone had illegally carried in an infected flash drive or DVD, the worm’s propagation should have been spotty, with areas of high concentration and others that were infection-free. That wasn’t the case here.
It was as if the worm had simultaneously penetrated the entire facility, like a burst of high-energy radiation. One of the worm’s behaviors had brought it to Eileen’s attention. Whenever it found an Internet-capable system, it opened a telnet port, then hid that port from standard sys-admin tools. Eileen had found it with one of her own special security tools, a program that created its own port map in addition to sniffing all Internet protocol packets.
Eileen identified other back doors, but she felt pretty sure the telnet port had been the door the Valkyrie had used to take over the Ice House. The cameras had gone down first, followed by the facility lights. Then all electronically controlled locks were opened, initiating the prisoner escape. All of those first events had been initiated over an internal Wi-Fi link. Eileen hadn’t yet traced the source, but it was only a matter of time.
Of greater interest was the security monitoring room from which the following attacks had come. Someone had killed the two guards with a series of expertly placed, powerful blows. The subsequent events—halon gassing of the primary control room, diversion of camera video to the Valkyrie’s station, initiation of selected fire suppression systems, and selective manipulation of building lockdown mechanisms—were all indicators that pointed to an infiltrator, possibly disguised as a guard. But the fake message redirecting the security teams to defend the building perimeter had been the key. That had been a woman’s voice, and it had been routed over the public address system from the security station laptop. But last night’s personnel logs showed no female staff on the night shift.
That left the two women in the facility at the time of the attack, Heather McFarland and Jennifer Smythe, both captured at Jack Gregory’s Bolivian compound. They and Mark Smythe were people who had an interest in the captured laptops, although Eileen was mystified by how they had known where to look for them on their way out. And she was pretty sure that they’d made it out alive; at least the medical examiner hadn’t identified their bodies.
Eileen wasn’t an expert on Jack Gregory’s tactics, but the confusion caused by the Fort Meade bombings fit what she imagined his profile to be. Leaning back in her chair, stretching her arms above her head, she cracked her knuckles. She’d leave that to Levi and his team. Right now she had a lot more work to do if she was going to be fully prepared for General Wilson’s eight a.m. meeting. Aside from who had done it, he was going to want to know how they had gotten the worm into every system in the Ice House and how she was going to purge it, two questions Eileen didn’t yet know the answer to.
Eileen wanted those answers.
The trip from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, to Salamanca, on New York’s Cattaraugus Reservation, had been uneventful, but for Jennifer it had been part of the descent into hell she’d begun yesterday. Heather had taken over the subspace hacks required to ensure their travel security while Jennifer huddled in a fetal ball in the backseat, alternately sweating her shirt through and shivering hard enough to damage the car’s suspension.
She’d read all about the physical effects of heroin withdrawal, but living it was a different matter. Heather and Mark had repeatedly tried to help, but there wasn’t a damned thing they could do except let her fight her own battle.
Jack had posted encrypted instructions for their rendezvous on the web and Heather had downloaded them. They’d led to a safe house in Salamanca where Heather had used the laptop to remotely open the garage door. Then they’d settled in for the night. If all went well, Jack would arrive sometime in the morning. In the meantime, as Mark and Heather started their planning, Jennifer, plagued by deepening depression, had taken herself to bed.
To have so much power and feel so helpless filled her with self-loathing. Every meditation she tried failed. It was as if all her neural enhancements had amplified her drug experience as well as its accompanying withdrawal.
Maybe she was attacking this all wrong. She knew clinics sometimes used methadone to ease addicts off of heroin, not that she wanted to substitute one drug for another. But maybe there was another way to ease her symptoms. Opiates such as heroin caused the body to release an excess of dopamine. Perhaps if she used her perfect memory of what it had felt like to sink into that opiate haze, she could trigger the same bodily response. The downside was that she’d be putting herself back into the drugged state.
Her self-debate didn’t last long. She needed to feel that feeling one more time. Besides, Mark and Heather needed her mentally sharp in the morning. And if her idea worked, she could gradually wean herself from the need.