The Digital Dream Read online

  PART TWO

  1

  I’ve grown less patient as I’ve grown older. I guess it’s the effect of the online world. Shop on the Internet, send email, book hotel reservations… It’s all got to be immediate or it’s no damn good. So, I don’t wait for people.

  Never.

  Except, like, now.

  When your managing partner is keeping you waiting, tolerance suddenly becomes way elastic.

  So, I sit, thinking sour, beaming sweet. Beatific smile on stretchy-tolerant face.

  Plush office. Langan continues his phone conversation with some prospect from Charleston, South Carolina. At least the delay gives me a chance to stop and think. Unusual event in the working day. Mind wanders. Maybe I should sell the old car at last. It’s a classic, born in Britain, just like me, but it’s sick, the gaps between visits to the car-doctor gradually decreasing. Medical fees now cost more than gas. Maybe I should get something more comfortable. Another sports car, for sure. Now that I’m wife-free and the threat of rug-rats has disappeared from the future, I can live like a monk of indulgence. It’s been a good year, anyway, dollarwise. Good partner distribution in store. The bank account’ll run to it. One of the new Jaguars, maybe. The brain splits into its two halves. One side, calculator-like, computes the interest payments on an XK8. The other side sits back like a cynical ex-lover at a wedding feast. Sarcastic inner comments about one-time hippies becoming yuppies. At least I have the integrity to recognize that I’ve sold out.

  Langan swings on his leather swivel chair, balancing the telephone on his shoulder and making apologetic signals with his hands.

  I can see my reflection in the glass front of the drinks cabinet. Sometimes I hardly recognize myself. Time was, I fitted the image, long-hair proggie, chinos and tee shirts, mad genius. Now I’m just another pin-stripe suit. On the surface, at least. I’d have an identity crisis if I could just work out who I was meant to be to start with. Like, am I really supposed to be a young exec in Armani shirts or a hippie in disguise? Now, torn jeans are exiled to the land of weekends—most of which seem to be spent working anyway—and the suits are hand-made and the hair’s short. Jackie says it’s fashionable and that it suits the thin face, crooked nose, high cheek bones, but then, she works in television so what do you believe?

  Langan finishes at last and turns his chair back towards me. I refresh the smile. Thank you, oh great one, for honoring my existence with your brief attention.

  “Amalgamated Metalworkers. You did some security work there last year?”

  Oh fuck. “No hopers. I told them they needed to tighten all of their processes but I don’t think they took it too seriously.”

  “They will now. Seems they’ve been hit by a virus. Seems their entire system is off the air and they’ve lost all their data files. Their own people have been trying to deal with it but they’re not making any progress. They’re a trifle concerned.”

  Langan loves the British. Used to work in the London office at the same time I was there. I picked up the culture and he caught the image. Wears a bow tie. Polka-dotted. Cultivates the accent and what he thinks is the under-stated wit. Kind of like David Niven transplanted into Sydney Greenstreet’s body. I cough. “I’m not really an expert on the technical side of system recovery.”

  “I know that,” Langan says patiently. “I’ve already sent one of our technical people down there. Kathleen Hennessey. You know her?”

  “Not really. Seen her around a couple of times but we’ve never worked together.”

  “She’s fairly new. Joined us from IBM. I’m told she’s very good. You can probably rely on her to do the technical stuff. But the client’s is in a bit of a tiz and, of course, they’re saying that we should have done more to protect them from their own folly.”

  Bastards. “I tried to tell them...”

  “I know, old chap. It’s always the same. Nobody ever takes security seriously until something goes wrong. Anyway, I need someone senior to go there and convince them that we’re doing all we can.”

  Fuck, fuck, fuck. “I’m kinda busy, Robin. What about the fallout from the Satellite crash…” The pun is unintentional but Langan doesn’t notice it anyway.

  “That’s down to the lawyers now. We’ve got your report and the technical people are conducting the investigation. There’s nothing more for you to do until the legal people want to talk to you again.”

  “Well, there’s this government telecommunications joint working party and...”

  “I know, I know,” he interrupts. The sympathetic air seems to have vanished. He stares over half-moon glasses like an owl giving survival advice to a field mouse. “You’re the only partner who has a good background in computer security. It has to be you, I’m afraid.”

  I shrug. Consider tearing off my clothes and having a screaming fit, decide it’ll have to wait until tomorrow, watch as Langan picks up the phone again, yeah, yeah, very subtle sign of dismissal, drag myself out of the office wondering how I can rearrange the day’s totally fucked schedule.

  ***

  By mid-morning, I’ve cleared the diary and placed a few calls, made a few arrangements. Outside the building, the sky looks like shit. It’s spring and Chicagoans are hoping for warmth after a harsh winter that saw near-constant snow falls for weeks on end, sometimes several feet in the drifts, temperatures of minus twenty-five before the wind chill that whistles off the lake and through the skyscraper-formed canyons downtown. There was an ice storm in December that was severe enough to send a 737 off the end of one of O’Hare International’s runways. The snow’s gone at last but summer’s still a long way off and the wind still cuts like broken glass on the cheek.

  I could take a cab but figure I’ll drive: the Morgan’s parked under the building and when I called the client, he offered the use of a car park. We’re in Rosemont, just a couple of miles from O’Hare, and he’s fifteen minutes along the freeway at Des Plaines. Traffic jams in the morning but at this time of day it shouldn’t be so bad. Drizzle starts. The car’s wipers need replacing. Next thing, the soft top will begin to leak. Only thing needed to make the day perfect.

  Arrive at last. The building’s just another impersonal glass-sided block designed by an architect robot with an in-built hatred of humanity. I park the car in a Visitor’s spot, walk in, carrying my laptop in its leather case, get cleared by security, pointed to the fourth floor office where, it seems, this Kathleen Hennessey woman’s now hard at work. The door’s open but I knock anyway before entering. She’s sitting in front of a terminal. She looks round at me as I walk in, her expression neutral until she recognizes me. Brief smile and she waves me towards a chair next to the one she’s using.

  “Won’t be a moment,” she says. “If I don’t finish this, I’ll lose my place.”

  I nod and watch as her eyes go back to the computer screen and her hands flutter over the keyboard. Reddish-brown hair, tied back, light white skin, a neat blue dress with subtle make-up. Irish rose type, I guess. I’d say she’s in her mid-twenties. Slim. Large, round eyes. Intelligent eyes. Smooth lines over clearly defined cheekbones. A looker, I guess. I wonder why I’ve never been much aware of her before. I guess it’s because she’s rarely in the office. I’ve seen her at a couple of staff meetings. Once in the car park. I try to remember what I’ve heard about her. I recall that she was hired by Connor, a month or two back. Usual sexist jokes at the next partner’s meeting, old Chas has done it again, picking the applicant with the best legs. This is a double-edged joke, actually. Connor’s a dry bastard, logical, last on earth to be swayed by a pretty face. With any luck this will be the usual deal, partner fronting up and charging big, lowly paid consultant doing all the work. Leverage, the firm calls it.

  She finishes a series of keystrokes with a flourish and turns to face me. “I’m sorry. Like I said, I had to finish that off or...”

  “That’s okay. I don’t mind waiting,” I lie. Yeah, well, my tolerance levels are good today. I’m a sweetheart.

/>   “Mr Langan told me you’d be coming here. Er, what should I call you? Andrew or Mr Ross?”

  “Neither,” I smile. “Just Ross.”

  She looks surprised.

  “I hate being called mister,” I say, “almost as much as I hate being called Andrew. Mister makes me feel old, and the only time I was ever called Andrew was when I was a kid and I was in trouble. My folks usually called me Andy but someone at school reckoned it didn’t suit me so it became just Ross. Everyone calls me Ross nowadays. Well, except for my ex-wife, but she only calls me Andrew to annoy me.”

  She smiles. “Okay, Ross.”

  “So, what have you found so far?”

  “Well,” she says, “they clearly had some sort of intrusion on Tuesday night. I think someone hacked in using a dial-in modem. The system here isn’t very smart. It allowed the hacker to have as many tries as he wanted to get the right password.”

  Groan. “I told them to fix that when I was here last year.”

  “Yes, well, they didn’t. Once the hacker was through the security system, he seems to have planted a virus. It went through all the machines connected to the server and did a very thorough job of wiping all their data files. When the operators came in on Wednesday morning, they realized something was wrong and tried to restore the files using their backups.”

  Another groan. It’s a day for them. I sink into the chair.

  “Yes,” she goes on, “they managed to wipe those as well. Not only that, the system got progressively slower as they used it until it just ground to a halt.”

  “The virus would have been replicating itself. Copying itself over and over until it takes all the available memory.”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  “So how have you got it working again?” I nod towards the screen, where the cursor’s happily flashing at us.

  “It’s not working yet. I’ve just deleted everything in this one PC and I’ve managed to program it so that it won’t accept anything from the server. That means the virus can’t infect it.”

  “Well done.”

  “Ah, well, I’m not just a pretty face.” She smiles to take the edge off the remark. “The thing now is that I can access the server’s disk and I think I can recover most of the data. It’s still there but the addresses are all scrambled, so that the normal programs can’t find anything. I can’t do much about the programs themselves. They’re all corrupted.”

  “We’ll have to wipe the system and reload it from scratch. I hope they’ve got backup copies of the programs.”

  “They say they have. Can’t say what state they’ll be in, though.”

  I get up. “We’ve nothing to lose. I’ll go tell their management that’s what we’re doing.”

  Off to the management floor. Client’s busy considering the prospect of a relaxing new career drawing welfare. He needs reassurance. He needs Valium, really, but I carry only the virtual pharmacy of soothing words. It’s an hour before I get back to Kathleen. She’s still working: I wave for her to carry on and she continues to enter keystrokes into the machine. People are talking in the corridor. I close the office door and look out of the window. Rain’s stopped. The windows in the tower block opposite reflect the weak sunlight. No sight of people within to relieve the monotony. The building’s a machine.

  “No problems with using the system here?”

  “No, although these guys are real loose. They couldn’t be bothered giving me a new ID and passwords so they told me to use some belonging to the guy who normally uses this office. Seems he’s on a training course.”

  Oh, man. “Don’t tell me.”

  She turns back to the display. I take a better look around. The office is basic glass-and-steel tower living space, all severe lines and impersonal shininess. Someone has tried to lighten it by sticking a small collection of male pin-ups to the wall next to the desk: the faces stare out above the gleaming torsos with hopeless smiles, as if they know that their two-dimensional humanity is lost inside this alien architecture. The pictures are accompanied by a couple of handbills for Gay Lib meetings and a joke poster: “My mother made me a homosexual.” “If I sent her the money, would she make me one too?”

  I open up the laptop on the windowsill, stand as it initializes, figure I’ll do some work on the telecommunications report I’m writing. Thirty minutes passes, the recovery going slowly as Kathleen patiently rebuilds the system. I leave the report for a while, stand behind her, watching the messages as they appear on the screen. “Anything I can do?”

  “Not really. It’s going to take time. I just need to keep plowing through it.” She glances up at me as her hands continue to work the keyboard. “If you really want to help, you could bring me in a burger or something when you get your lunch. I’m starved.”

  So much for my animal magnetism.

  ***

  Yeah, well, I’m gone, but I know now what she’s doing and thinking. She told me some time later. Although maybe she didn’t need to tell me. You’ll understand. When I tell you more.

  She’s staring at the screen again before I’m out of the room. The investigation and recovery makes a change from her normal duties, which mainly consist of developing new systems. The work calls for a meticulous attitude that comes naturally to her: a by-product, she figures, of the way she’s always lived her life. She’s learned at an early age to control her outgoing nature and her sense of humor. This ability is a necessary one, you see, for a girl growing up in the middle of two opposite cultures. She’s an American girl but her father was an Irish-American CPD cop, a big, strong man who brought his own version of the law to his home and enforced it with zero tolerance long before that phrase ever occurred to Mayor Guilliano’s spin doctors. So, she’d lived in two worlds between a liberal society and this rigid version of old Ireland at home, right up to the time she’d left, escaping-as-much-as-anything-else to university.

  She’s changed but she’s stayed the same. Even if there had been anyone else present, her face would betray none of her thoughts. She wonders idly what Ross’ll be like to work with. At least he’ll be an improvement, she figures, on her usual boss, a humorless dandruff-speckled man who affects indifference when he isn’t sneaking pervs at her legs and breasts. Ross is better looking, at least, she thinks...

  “Are you still here?” The usual occupant of the room, a thin, curly-haired youth with a fragile air of bravado, sticks his head around the door.

  Kathleen smiles at him. “I’d like to stay on a while longer, if that’s all right.”

  “No problem with me, honey-babe. If I can just grab my bag from under the desk...” He reaches a hand round Kathleen’s legs, pouting extravagantly as she draws back her knees. “Don’t worry, hon, you’re really not my type.”

  2

  USENET-A CHAT SESSION NUMBER 2859-F3. MESSAGES RECORDED AT ***.**.**.

  UNDERDOGG Hey Dude, that shit about George Adams was all over school.

  GRAY GHOST I know, man. What did I tell U?

  UNDERDOGG Yeah, right. Like you reely sprung the pig machine.

  GRAY GHOST I’m telling ya, we did. Huh, Pred?

  PREDATOR The man’s right, Dogg. Cept it was me cracked it. I just shared around, man,

  GRAY GHOST Pred the genius. U told me that somewun else gave you da codes

  UNDERDOGG That right, Dude? Who’s ya man?

  PREDATOR Dunno. Some deever in England, I guess.

  UNDERDOGG Wicked. You still in touch? Get any more outta him?

  PREDATOR I’m trying, man but he don’t talk to me. I’ll send you his email.

  UNDERDOGG Cool.

  3

  It’s late afternoon before we’re done. I walk the corridors to tell one relieved client that his company’s now back in business. He’s so happy that he’s still got a job that he agrees to keep paying while we continue working to try to find out how the sabotage was actually committed.

  When I rejoin Kathleen, she’s staring at the screen with a puzzled look on her face.


  “Problem?”

  “I don’t know. It’s real strange.” She points to a line on the display. “I’ve been able to recover a log containing all records of attempted accesses on the system, so I can see what happened. The hacker got in on a dial-up connection. Supposedly secure but he broke the password system. After he got into the system and planted the virus, it seems to have spread itself to every other machine in the company’s network...”

  “So? It’s worming.”

  “Yeah, I know. That’s not what’s strange.”

  “So what is?”

  “The system contains records of all transactions that pass from one computer to another. Some of these seem to be pointing at computers outside the company. Computers that belong to other organizations. Which is strange.”

  I sit down next to her. “Why?”

  “I checked with the security administrator here. She says that their system has leased line connections to other branches of their company, but no links to other organizations. Yet, somehow, the virus seems to have spread to other organizations.”

  “Wireless connections?”

  “There aren’t any. Not in this company.”

  “I don’t get it, then. How could the virus spread outside the company if there are no physical connections to other systems?”

  “I don’t know. It seems to have removed all trace of where it’s been.”

  “Weird. Why would it do that?”

  “Beats me.”

  “What about the hacker? Any clues to identity?”

  “Not yet. I’m not sure if there’s any way I can find out.”