Brain Jack

traffic light. Green for go.

The panel on his laptop showed seventeen networks in all; the cafe’s own free network for patrons had the strongest signal. The others came from all around and above him, gigabytes of data flying through the air of the cafe. Personal, confidential, private data, broadcast by people with utter faith in the security of their wireless networks.

Nor was that faith totally unjustified. With intrusion detection and high-level encryption, it would take a very special person to hack into that data. An expert. A genius. A devil. All of the above, some would say.

Someone like Sam.

Sam ignored sixteen of the signals. There was only one that interested him: an indistinct signal from a wireless access point on the other side of the old brick wall next to him, probably quite close by, but the wall degraded the signal until it was as thin as a ghost.

The parabolic aerial he was aiming in that direction had a built-in signal booster. He turned it back and forth, gauging the angle where the signal was the strongest.

“How you doing?” Fargas asked.

“No problems so far,” Sam murmured. “ ‘Wireless security’ is a contradiction in terms. Like ‘military intelligence’ or ‘jumbo shrimp.’ ”

“I like jumbo shrimp,” Fargas said.

Sam transmitted a generic disconnect signal, dropping the other station off the network. Lost and alone, it immediately began bleating, like some kitten mewling for its mother.

He intercepted the reconnect signal and broadcast the same signal from his laptop. Less than a second later, he was part of the network.

“Anything happening?” Sam asked quietly.

“A few security guards in the foyer.”

“What are they doing?”

“Line dancing,” Fargas said.

Sam smiled. “Okay, let’s do it,” he said.

With another quick glance around at the other patrons, he reached out cool cyberhands into the network, into the digital world on the other side of the wall.

2 | TELECOMERICA

The New York corporate headquarters of Telecomerica is located on the Avenue of the Americas, but the nerve system is downtown in their offices on Thomas Street. It occupies forty-two floors of prime Manhattan real estate.

From the roof of the building, a forest of aerials and satellite dishes poke holes in the clouds above the city. On the ground floor, security is at its tightest, with armed guards and metal detectors on every entrance. Crash bars protect the front of the building from vehicular attack, and bombproof shutters can be lowered from the ceiling in seconds, if called for. The building was designed, from the outset, to be self-sufficient and protected from fallout for up to two weeks after a nuclear blast. Back when it was built, during the so-called Cold War with the USSR, that had probably seemed like a good idea. Since Vegas, it was a federal requirement.

The physical security is one thing, but the electronic security is just as advanced.

A skilled hacker might make it through the outer defenses but not without setting off alarms, and the system administrators would shut them down before they had a chance to break through the secondary defenses.

None of which mattered to Sam.

Next door to the highly secure Thomas Street facility is a small cafe, popular with the Telecomerica staff.

Just a heavy concrete wall, lined with brick on the cafe side and wooden paneling on the Telecomerica side, separates the cafe from the facility.

Sam sat at a small table on the cafe side and slowly inched his way into the computer network on the other side of the wall.

The rings of firewall security were not a problem. He had already bypassed them simply by connecting to an access point on the inside. Behind all the layers of expensive security.

The trick now was to analyze the network traffic: the tiny packets of data that flowed continuously like high- pressure water through the pipes of the network.

Sam’s custom-built network analyzer was based on a couple of the more advanced black-ops programs used by other hackers but with special mods of his own. It didn’t look like software at all. More like a random collection of code fragments in no particular shape or order. “Ghillie,” he called it, after the shaggy camouflage “ghillie suits” worn by Special Forces snipers.

Ghillie slithered into a small space in the network, just a shapeless pile of old code, computer droppings, lying in the memory of one of the big network routers. It lay there undetected, skimming the TCP/IP packets as they flew past, studying them, reporting on them.

The first thing Sam noticed was the silence. The TCP/IP traffic to and from the access point was minimal. There were no computers connecting to the wireless access point that he had hacked into. That indicated that the room was empty. An unused office maybe, or a conference room.

He scanned the room for peripherals: a printer, a digital projector, and a Smart Board. A conference room for sure.

He kept low, watching for intrusion-detection programs—the network’s guard dogs, smoke alarms, or trip wires.

“One of the guards is talking on his cell,” Fargas said in his ear. “You sure they can’t detect this program of yours?”

“Positive. What’s the guard doing?”

“He’s smiling. Probably ordering Krispy Kremes.”

“Got a big router running hot on the fifth floor,” Sam said. “Think I’ll just go hide in the packet flood and hunt for a network controller.”

“One strawberry, two cinnamon twists, and a chocolate iced. And don’t hold the sprinkles,” Fargas said.

Softly, softly, Sam thought, insinuating himself into the new router and making no further movements, just keeping his head down, watching the flow of data, looking for the software that would be looking for him.

There was nothing. And yet …

He couldn’t shake off a feeling that somewhere in the depths of the network, an eye, like the Eye of Sauron, was turned in his direction.

“Ever get that feeling you’re being watched?” he asked.

“You are being watched,” Fargas said from the other side of the street. “I’m watching you. Or your feet at least.”

“You’re supposed to be watching the guards,” Sam said as he ran a triple check for all known detection programs. Nothing.

“We can back out of this,” Fargas said.

Sam ignored him and began to look around, sending tiny cyberfilaments out through the network, scanning for servers.

There were hundreds of servers scattered throughout the building. Some big number-crunchers, others smaller, dedicated to a single task. The one he wanted was a network controller, one of the DHCP servers that ran the network.

It wasn’t hard to find. He simply had to trace the security requests, which all had to be routed through the network controller. This was the machine with the key to the entire system, the SAM database where the network passwords were stored. Unlock that file and the network was his.

“Got the SAM file,” he said. “I’m going to run a rainbow crack and—”

He froze. Something just passed right over the top of him, reading his code. Anti-intrusion! This was new, though. Not so much a watchdog, chained to a post, barking at intruders, but something infinitely more dangerous. Something unseen that crawled in the dark places of the network, probing here and there with electronic feelers. A