The Second Ship (The Rho Agenda #1)(43)

Doug gave the command. “Ready. Go.”

With a shove, the gang of four opened the gym door just enough, pushing the cart, Mark’s butt first, out into the hallway. In the sudden suffocating silence that followed, and before the gym door could swing closed behind the cart, Mark heard their footsteps racing back through the gym toward the far exit.

“Oh my God!” someone yelled.

The hallway of Los Alamos High suddenly exploded into a chorus of laughter that rattled the wall lockers in accompaniment. There, amidst the commotion, too stunned to move, Jennifer and Heather stared at the words printed on the naked posterior of Marcus Aurelius Smythe.





Chapter 28





Jennifer’s hands played her keyboard like a concert pianist at work on a grand piano. It occurred to Heather, as she watched her friend, that despite her protestations to the contrary, Jennifer must have also picked up some neural enhancement that refined her finger dexterity.

Heather glanced over to where Mark had pulled up a chair next to Jennifer’s computer desk. He had laughed off the embarrassing incident at the school, refusing to tell anyone who the perpetrators were, but she knew him. Inside he was seething.

If the boys who had roughed him up knew anything about him, they would not sleep for the rest of the school year. Mark was a bulldog. Once he got motivated, he didn’t let up until he emerged victorious.

“Jen says you’ve started working out,” Heather said.

Mark glanced over at her. “Yep. Dad wasn’t using his old free weights, so I got him to give them to me. A little extra muscle mass on this body wouldn’t hurt.”

“Just don’t go getting so muscle-bound that you look like one of those magazine guys.”

Mark laughed. “Nope. I just want toning and strength.”

“And those books on aikido you bought?” Jennifer asked.

“That’s just for flexibility.”

Heather nodded. “Uh-huh. And just how much time are you spending trying to stay flexible?”

“No more than two hours a night.”

“Every night?”

“Yes. Why?”

“Sounds like you’re going to be one flexible dude.”

“Well, it relaxes me after a hard day of school, basketball practice, and homework.”

Heather looked at Mark closely. He seemed relaxed. Obviously he had a plan in the works and was comfortable that it was progressing on schedule. She changed the subject.

“I’ve got an idea how we may be able to tip off the authorities about Stephenson.”

Jennifer spun her chair to face Heather. “All right. I guess I’m ready to hear this.”

“I’m all ears,” said Mark, leaning forward in his own chair. “Uh, by the way, would you stop? I’m getting whiplash.”

Heather stopped pacing. “Sorry,” she said and sat down on the corner of Jennifer’s bed. “We can send an e-mail message to the National Security Agency.”

Jennifer’s jaw dropped open. “Have you completely lost your mind? They would trace an e-mail in a heartbeat, right back to our three little teenaged butts.”

Mark nodded. “I hope that isn’t the whole plan. I’d get plenty of workout time in the prison weight room.”

Heather scowled. “Of course that isn’t the whole plan. Do you honestly think I would spend a whole week coming up with that?”

“Just making sure the numbers in your head haven’t stopped adding up.”

Heather ignored the jibe. “We’ve got to get a message to someone in the government with the ability to look into highly classified stuff. And from what I’ve found out, the NSA is the king of the secret world. They have computers tracking every e-mail and phone call on the planet.”

Jennifer nodded. “Yes. And that makes it safe for us to e-mail them, how?”

“Look, I didn’t say it was going to be easy. What we’ll have to do is send the e-mail from an untraceable source.” Heather paused, looking directly at Jennifer. “We’ll have to hack our way into some remote system on the Internet, then drop a virus. The virus will send the e-mail after it has covered its tracks.”

“Oh great,” said Jennifer. “There are just a few problems with that scheme. First, it’s highly illegal.”

“Well, I think we burned that bridge a long time ago,” Mark injected.

“And,” Jennifer continued, “the government, along with major corporations, has gotten pretty darned good at tracking people putting viruses on the Internet. As a matter of fact, they catch almost all of them.”

“We’re just going to have to be better than those people,” said Heather with a shrug.

“And,” Jennifer continued, “last but not least, e-mail isn’t secure. When that message gets sent, every major government is going to know what it says, even if it’s addressed to the NSA. And you can bet Dr. Stephenson will find out.”

“I’ve been thinking hard about that. Let’s talk about the e-mail security first,” Heather said. “Anyway, the virus is going to have to sense when it has hopped around the net enough to send the e-mail. The e-mail needs to include an encrypted computer address containing where the real message is stored. The first one to break the encryption on that message will be the first one to find the computer where the real message is.”