The Second Ship (The Rho Agenda #1)(45)
Mark grinned. “Sounds mysterious. I’ll give it a shot.”
“Good,” said Heather. “Jen, I’ll try to have the algorithms ready for you tomorrow.”
Jennifer nodded. “In the meantime, I’ll make sure I know everything I can about computer worms and viruses. I want to feel comfortable before I write a single line of code.”
Mark paused at the door and glanced back at his sister.
“Doc, don’t wait until you’re comfortable. By that time the sun will be a red giant. We need something by the time Christmas vacation is over.”
The eraser she threw bounced harmlessly off the door as Mark ducked out of the room.
Chapter 29
The next three weeks passed in a flurry of activity, with one day blending into the next. The Los Alamos Hilltoppers basketball team continued their winning ways, although Mark’s scoring settled down to an average of closer to twenty-five points a game. By the time Christmas break came and went, Mark’s workout program was beginning to bring about a noticeable change in his physique. His arms and shoulders had thickened, and his waist had narrowed. Heather had seen him without his shirt after one of his workout sessions, and his stomach looked like it belonged to a comic book superhero.
Apparently his neural augmentation made him incredibly efficient at training his muscles, and they had responded with a vengeance to his indomitable will. It wasn’t that he looked like a weight lifter, far from it. He just looked extremely buff.
January first arrived with little fanfare. Heather had stayed up late the night before to watch the annual dropping of the New Year’s ball in New York City, but she had been the only late bird in her family. Not that she was a party animal herself; she had just had a hard time sleeping, and the televised party coverage provided a welcome distraction. Now she was tired, but anxious to get on with what they had to do.
Today was the day. Virus Day. They had actually been ready to launch the virus for several days now, but just couldn’t bring themselves to do it over Christmas. So the dawn of the New Year would see the first salvo in a war that began decades earlier in the skies above Aztec, a war between good and evil. At least, that is how Heather thought of it.
Mark, Jennifer, and Heather parked their bikes in a rack some distance from their objective. They had selected a public pay phone in the same Los Alamos shopping center where press reports said Abdul Aziz’s car had been found abandoned all those weeks ago.
Thanks to the ancient, acoustically coupled modem Jennifer had scrounged up, they could access the Internet from Jennifer’s PDA without using a traceable wireless connection. She could just hold it up to the phone mouthpiece. As Mark and Heather watched from a distance, Jennifer made her way to the pay phone. She leaned into it in a way that looked like she could be deep in a private discussion with a boyfriend.
It only took her a few minutes to access the Internet and upload the virus. As soon as Jennifer hung up the handset, pocketing her PDA, Heather and Mark moved from their lookout to meet her by the bikes. While crossing the parking lot, Heather had a moment of déjà vu, feeling as if she was a refugee from some 1950s cold war spy movie. The feeling passed as they got on their bicycles. There was just something about the picture of a band of international espionage agents making their getaway on bicycles that didn’t fit the way she felt.
Heather looked down at her hands. She had not been able to stop them from shaking since Jennifer had walked up to the phone booth. Now, as Heather pedaled hard to keep up with Mark and Jennifer as they sped away from the parking lot, she hoped with all her heart that their plan would work. If not, well, she didn’t care to think about it.
From the corner of her eye she glimpsed a tall, thin man with long, stringy, blond hair standing near the corner of the shopping center, but when she turned her head to look, there was no one there. Easy, Heather, she told herself. Don’t get paranoid now. She upped the pace of her pedaling, moving past Mark into the lead as they raced for home.
Behind her, a gaunt, ragged man stepped out into the open. As he watched them disappear around the bend, his expression was as blank as the mannequin in the nearby store window.
Chapter 30
Deep within the bowels of the massive, black-glass structure affectionately known as Crypto City, Jonathan Riles leaned back in his executive chair, surveying the others assembled around the small conference table. He was a stocky man, ex-navy football star, Rhodes Scholar, number one in his class at the Naval Academy, vice admiral. His friendly face served as an unlikely platform for intense, icy gray eyes. As he looked around at his team, he smiled. They were the National Security Agency’s best of the best.
“So, Dave,” Riles said, “tell me what you’ve got.”
David Kurtz sat immediately to Riles’ left, looking every bit the part of the wild-haired, absent-minded professor. If there was one thing that Kurtz was not, though, it was absent minded.
Kurtz reached for a wireless remote control, clicking a button that brought the flat-screen video monitor to life. The far wall showed a map of the United States covered in clusters of red dots.
“As everyone in this room is aware, what the public is calling the New Year’s Day Virus appeared on a large number of systems on New Year’s Day. But since many companies were closed for the holidays, the true extent of the infection wasn’t known until January third.