Tom Clancy's Op-center_ Op-center Part 18

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR.

Tuesday, 10:10 A.M., Washington, D.C.

Hood felt as though he'd been cut off at the knees, but he didn't dislike the President. He couldn't.

Michael Lawrence wasn't the brightest man who ever held the office, but he had the touch, he had charisma, and that worked on TV and at rallies. The public liked his style. He certainly wasn't the best manager to hold the office. He didn't like getting his hands dirty with the nitty-gritty of running the government: he wasn't a detail man like Jimmy Carter. Trusted aides like Burkow and Lawrence's Press Secretary Adrian Crow had been allowed to create their own little fiefdoms, power bases that won over or alienated other government agencies by rewarding cooperation and success with access to the President and increased responsibilities, punishing failure with backwater a.s.signments and busywork. Even when he was making his rookie failures in foreign policy, this President didn't suffer the kind of bad press that dogged his predecessors: by wining and dining the Press Corps, increasing perks and amenities for reporters, and carefully doling out leaks and exclusives, Crow had put all but a few crusty columnists in her hip pocket. And no one read the Op-Ed pages anyway, she maintained. Sound bites and advertising controlled the voters, not George Will and Carl Rowan.

Lawrence could be ruthless, blind, and stubborn. But if nothing else, he had a vision for the country that was bold and intelligent and was just starting to work. For a year prior to announcing his candidacy, Florida Governor Lawrence had met with industrial leaders and asked if, in exchange for considerable tax breaks and deferments, they would buy into the privatization of NASA with the government managing all launches and facilities, the companies a.s.suming most costs for personnel and R&D. In effect, Lawrence was proposing to boost the s.p.a.ce agency's budget nearly threefold without going through Congress. Moreover, government expenses on s.p.a.ce would be cut by two billion dollars, money that Lawrence earmarked for crime fighting and education. He also suggested that one third of the new blue-collar work force for NASA be culled from welfare, making for an annual savings of half a billion dollars.

U.S. industry agreed to the plan, and Lawrence's campaign advertis.e.m.e.nts reminded Americans of the lost glory of the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo days, of blue-collar and white-collar workers laboring side by side for a common goal, of high employment and low inflation. He tied them all together, and hammered voters with views of existing spinoffs-- personal computers and calculators, communications satellites and cellular phones, Teflon and portable video cameras and video games-- and with visions of antic.i.p.ated spinoffs-- medicines to cure cancer and AIDS, s.p.a.ce-based generators to convert solar energy into electricity to reduce costs and reliance on foreign oil, and even weather control. During the campaign, every time his opponent argued that the money would be better spent on Earth, Lawrence countered that Earth had become a sinkhole, swallowing up jobs and tax dollars, and that his plan would put an end to that and also end foreign inroads in technological advances that were stealing American jobs.

Lawrence won handily, and as soon as he was elected he met with those same business leaders and the new heads of NASA to get some tangible results, fast, while they worked on getting the s.p.a.ce station into orbit before the end of his first term. Leasing the abandoned Russian s.p.a.ce station Nevsky, they put medical researchers and engineers in s.p.a.ce, and within eighteen months Adrian Crow's press machine was touting the developments: most startling of all were images of a young medic, paralyzed below the waist in Desert Storm, playing zero-gravity basketball with an astronaut. The President had cured the lame, and it was an image people would never forget.

You could be frustrated with the man for his faults and for his frequent heavy-handedness, but you had to admire his vision. And even though his foreign policy faltered badly in the early going, he was smart enough to put together Op-Center to help run things. Burkow had argued that less bureaucracy and not more was what they needed to make things work abroad, but the President had disagreed with him on that-- creating the ongoing tension between Hood and the National Security Council.

But that was okay: Paul could live with that. Compared to some of the special interest groups and political correctness monitors he'd had to deal with in Los Angeles, Burkow was a day at the beach.

Hood pulled up to the hospital, parked in the Emergency area, and hurried to the elevator. He had the room number, 834, from phoning earlier and went right up. The door of the private room was open; Sharon was slumped in the chair, eyes shut, and started when he entered. He kissed her on the forehead.

"Dad!"

Hood walked over to the bed. Alexander's voice was m.u.f.fled by the clear tent, but his eyes and smile were luminous. He was wheezing slowly, his strong little chest righting hard to skim air off the top of each breath. Hood knelt on one knee.

Hood asked, "Koopa Lord knock you for a loop, Super Mario?"

"It's the Koopa King, Dad."

"Sorry. You know me and video games. I'm surprised you haven't got your Game Boy in there."

The boy shrugged a shoulder. "They wouldn't let me have it. I can't even have a comic book in here. Mom had to read me Supreme and hold up the pictures."

"We'll have to talk about some of the comics he's been reading," Sharon said, walking over. "Ripping off arms and punching out teeth--"

"Mom, it's good for my imagination."

"Don't get agitated," Hood said. "We'll talk about it when you're better."

"Dad, I love my comics--"

"You'll have them," Hood said. He touched the tent with the back of his hand, rubbing his son's cheek through it. Just now, medical advances seemed very important. He leaned closer and winked. "You worry about getting on your feet, and we'll see about convincing your mom later."

Alexander nodded weakly, and his father rose.

"Thanks for coming," Sharon said. "Crisis over?"

"No." He wasn't sure if that was a dig, but gave her the benefit of the doubt. "Look, I'm sorry about before, but we're really swimming through it. What are you doing about Harleigh?"

"She's going to my sister's."

Hood nodded, then kissed Sharon. "I'll call you later."

"Paul--"

He looked back.

"I really don't think those comics are good for him. They're very violent."

"So were the comics when I was a kid, and look how well adjusted I am. Severed heads, zombies, and Uncle Creepy notwithstanding."

Sharon arched her brows and sighed heavily as Hood kissed her again. Giving Alexander a thumbs-up, he hurried to the elevator, not daring to look at his watch until he was safely inside.

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE.

Tuesday, 10:05 A.M., Op-Center

"What the h.e.l.l's taking Viens so long?" Matt Stoll asked as he stared at his monitor. "You program in the time differential, hit Search, and it should go to the start of your bogus satellite imagery."

Phil Katzen was sitting on a bridge chair beside him, also watching the screen. While the NRO searched back through the morning's photo-file, Stoll and Katzen were running the detailed diagnostics programs on the system. The eleventh and final program was nearly completed.

"Maybe Viens didn't find anything, Matty."

"h.e.l.l, you know that's not possible."

"I know that. But maybe the computer doesn't."

Stoll's lips puckered. "Touche." He shook his head as the last diagnostics self-exited with an AOK graphic. "And we know that's not true either!" He resisted the urge to slap the computer. The way his luck was running, the entire system would go down again.

"There's no way the diagnostics could have been corrupted, is there?" Katzen asked.

"None. But that's what I thought about the rest of the software too. I hate to say it, Phil, but I'd give my left nostril to meet the son of a b.i.t.c.h who did this to me."

"You're taking it personally, huh?"

"You bet. Hurt my software, hurt me. What gets me is not only that he outsmarted me, but he didn't leave any footprints. Not a one."

"Let's wait and see what the NRO--"

The phone rang and the caller's ID number flashed on the rectangular screen. "Speak of the devil," Stoll said as he hit the Speaker b.u.t.ton. "Stoll here."

"Matty, it's Steve. Sorry it took so long, but the computer showed that there was no problem so I decided to check the photos themselves."

"My apologies."

"For what?"

"For b.i.t.c.hing to my pal Phil, here, about you taking so long. What'd you find?"

"Just what you said we would. A photo that came in at 7:58.00.8965 this morning exactly.001 seconds late. And guess what? It's full of rolling thunder that wasn't there.8955 seconds before."

"This is f.u.c.king amazing," Stoll said. "Put 'em on my screen, would you? And, Steve-- thanks much."

"You're welcome. Meanwhile, is there anything we can do to purge the system?"

"Can't say until I've looked at the pictures. I'll get back to you ASAP."

Stoll punched off even as the pictures were scanning onto his monitor. The first photograph showed the terrain as it really was: no troops, no artillery, no tanks. The second photograph had them edging into the frame. Everything from the grain to the shadows looked authentic.

"If it's a fake, it's a d.a.m.n good one," Katzen said.

"Maybe not. Look here."

Stoll hit F1/Shift, then went to the magnify option. The screen returned with a cursor, and he moved it over the windshield of a jeep at the top of the screen. He pressed Enter, and the windshield filled the monitor.

"Get a load of that."

Katzen looked, squinted, then exhaled loudly. "No way."

"Way," said Stoll, smiling for the first time in hours. He grabbed his mouse, hit the b.u.t.ton on top, and rolled the cursor across the windshield, drawing a fine yellow line around the reflection of an oak tree. "No trees in the neighborhood, Phil. This image was lifted from another photo or it was shot somewhere else and inserted, digitally." Leaving the photo on doc.u.ment one, he switched screens to doc.u.ment two and asked the computer to search the NRO files for a matching shot. Two minutes and twelve seconds later, the photograph was on the screen.

"Unbelievable," Katzen said.

The technical data on the photograph appeared in a sidebar: it was taken 275 days before in the woods near the Supung Reservoir near the Manchuria/North Korea border.

"Someone went through our photo files," Stoll said, "selected all the images they wanted, and created a new program."

"And loaded it in.001 seconds," Katzen said.

"No. The loading was what the shutdown was all about. Or at least, what seemed like a shutdown to us."

"I don't follow."

"While we thought the computers were off-line, someone, somehow, used the twenty seconds to dump this photo and every successive photo into the system. It took.001 seconds to kick in, and now, like a recording, those prefabricated images are being played back to us every.8955 seconds."

"This is too G.o.dd.a.m.n fantastic--"

"But the fact remains that we-- the NRO, DOD, and the CIA-- are all closed systems. No one could get to any of us over the phone lines. To download that much data, someone would have to have been sitting somewhere in Op-Center popping in diskettes."

"Who? The security videos turned up nothing."

Stoll snickered. "What makes you think you can trust them? We've got someone s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g with our satellites. A camcorder isn't going to be much of a challenge."

"Christ, I didn't think of that."

"But you're right. I don't think this was done on premises. It would mean that someone here's a bad penny, and whatever I think of Bob Herbert personally, he's one very careful cashier."

"I like that."

"Thanks." Stoll went back to doc.u.ment one and looked at the windshield. "So what've we got? Somewhere in this system is a rogue program, and on it are photographs that the NRO satellites haven't even taken yet-- photographs that they will appear to take every.8955 seconds. That's the bad news. The good news is, if we can get to that program, we can drop-kick it, restore our s.p.a.ce eyes, and prove that someone's out to stir up big trouble in Korea."

"How can you do that if you don't know where the file is or what it's called?"

Stoll saved the blowup and exited the file, then went to Directory. He selected Library and waited while the ma.s.sive list loaded.

"The photos the infiltrator used were taken before there even was an Op-Center, so this obviously took a long time to write. It's a big one. Now, it had to have come in on the coattails of some other file or we would have spotted it when we sterilize incoming software. That means the host file has to be seriously bloated."

"So we look at the file of, say, traffic light patterns in Pyongyang, and if it's thirty megabytes fat we probably have our rogue program."

"That's the drill."

"But where do we start looking? Whoever wrote the program had access to surveillance photos of North Korea-- which would make it someone at Op-Center, the NRO, the Pentagon, or ROK."

"No one at Op-Center or the NRO stands to gain by mobilization up and down the peninsula," Stoll said. "Either way, it's business as usual. Which leaves us with DOD and ROK." Stoll began running a search through the Library listing, counting the number of diskettes from each source. In order to obtain diskettes he wanted, it would be necessary to star each file and E-mail his request to Op-Center's archives; the diskettes would then be copied, hand-delivered, signed for, and erased upon their return.

"s.h.i.t," Katzen said as the number grew. "We've got about two hundred diskettes from DOD and forty-odd from ROK. It'll take days to go through them all."

After thinking for a moment, Stoll highlighted the entire ROK file.

"Starting with the shorter one?"

"No," said Stoll, "the safer one." He tapped the Star b.u.t.ton, then Send. "If Bob Herbert ever found out I suspected our guys first, he'd kick my a.s.s."

Katzen clapped a hand on his shoulder and rose. "I'll go bring Paul up to speed, but, Matty, I need you to do me a favor."

"Name it."