Smith stood. “I'll be back in an hour or so.”
“All right.” Marty rubbed his hands together. “This is going to be fun.”
Smith left him working his sluggish, awkward fingers on the keyboard. The meds would wear off soon, and then, Smith knew, the fingers and the brain would fly until they came close to spiraling off the earth entirely, and Marty would have to take his Mideral again.
Outside, Smith walked quickly to his Triumph. As traffic drove noisily past, he did not notice a helicopter pause high overhead and then speed on, making a long loop to the left to parallel him as he drove toward Massachusetts Avenue.
The noise of the rotors and wind through the open window of the Bell JetRanger vibrated the chopper. Nadal al-Hassan cupped a microphone close to his mouth. “Maddux? Smith has visited a bungalow near Dupont Circle.” He located the bungalow on a city map and described the hidden driveway and high hedge. “Find out who lives there and what Smith wanted.”
He clicked off his microphone and stared down at the old, classic Triumph below as it headed toward Georgetown. For the first time, al-Hassan felt uneasy. It was not a feeling he would communicate to Tremont, but as a result he would stay close to this Smith. Bill Griffin, even if he were to be trusted, might not be enough to end the threat.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Bill Griffin had been briefly married, and Smith had met the woman twice back before the couple was even engaged. Both times they had been happily out on the town, hitting the noisy New York bars Bill frequented in his army days. Bill did a lot of loud bars then, perhaps because his life was spent in remote foreign locations where every step could be his last and every sound was an enemy. Smith knew almost nothing about the woman or the marriage, except that it had lasted less than two years. He had heard she still lived in the same Georgetown apartment she had shared with Bill. If Bill was in danger, he might have holed up there, where few people would know to look.
It was a long shot, but aside from Marty, he had few options.
When he reached her apartment house, he used his cell phone to call her.
She answered promptly and efficiently. “Marjorie Griffin.”
“Ms. Griffin, you won't remember me, but this is Jonathan Smith, Bill's?”
“I remember you, Captain Smith. Or is it major or colonel by now?”
“I'm not sure what it is, and it doesn't matter anyway, but it was lieutenant colonel yesterday. I see you kept Bill's name.”
“I loved Bill, Colonel Smith. Unfortunately for me, He loved his work more. But you didn't call to inquire about my marriage or divorce. You're looking for Bill, right?”
He was wary. “Well?”
“It's all right. He said you might call.”
“You've seen him?”
There was a pause. “Where are you?”
“In front of your building. The Triumph.”
“I'll come down.”
In the large, chaotic room crammed with computer terminals, monitors, and circuit boards, Marty Zellerbach leaned forward, concentrating. Torn printouts were stacked in messy piles near his chair. A radio receiver emitted low static as it eavesdropped on the squeals and beeps of data transmissions. The drapes were closed, and the air was cool and dry, almost claustrophobic, which was good for Marty's equipment and the way he liked it. He was smiling. He had used Jon Smith's codes to connect with the USAMRIID computer system and enter the server. Now the real action began. He felt a deep thrill as he scrolled through the various directories until he found the system administrator's password file. He gave a little laugh of derision. The data was scrambled.
He exited and found the file that revealed that the USAMRIID server used Popcorn ? one of the latest encryptors. He nodded, pleased. It was first-rate software, which meant the lab was in good hands.
Except that they had not counted on Marty Zellerbach. Using a program he had invented, he configured his computer to search for the password by scrambling every word from Webster's Unabridged plus the dialogue of all four Star Wars movies, the Star Trek television series and feature movies, Monty Python's Flying Circus, and every J. R. R. Tolkien novel ? all favorites of cybertechs.
Marty jumped up and paced. He grabbed his hands behind his back, and in his weaving gait he moved around the room as if it were a ship on the high seas and he its pirate captain. His program was incredibly fast. Still, like other mortals, he had to wait. Today the best hackers and crackers could steal most passwords, penetrate even the Pentagon's computers, and ride like Old West outlaws through the worldwide Internet. Even a novice could buy software that enabled him to invade and attack Web sites. For that reason, major corporations and government agencies continually heightened their security. As a result, Marty now wrote his own programs and developed his own scanners to find system weaknesses and to break through the firewalls that would stop others.
Suddenly he heard his computer ring the tones of the doorbell from the old Leave It to Beaver television show. Ding-dong-ding. With a chuckle, he rushed back to his chair, swiveled to face the monitor, and crowed. The password was his. It was not terribly imaginative ? Betazoid, named for the extrasensory natives of the Star Trek planet called Beta. He had not had to use his more sophisticated password cracker, which included a number randomizer and avoided all real words. With the system administrator's password file, he acquired the system's internal IP ? Internet Protocol ? address as well. Now he had the blueprint to USAMRIID's computer network, and soon he was “root,” too, which meant he had access to every file and could change and delete and trace all data. He was God.
For him, what Jon Smith had asked was not child's play, but it was not climbing Mount Everest either. Quickly Marty scanned all the E-mail messages from the Prince Leopold Institute, but each reported failure to find a match for the new virus. Those files were not what Jon wanted. To most people's eyes, if there was anything else from the lab, it had been completely erased. Gone forever. They would give up now.
Instead, Marty sent another search program to look in the spaces and cracks between data. As more data was inputted onto a system, the new overwrote the old, and once data was overwritten, it supposedly was not retrievable. When his program could find no evidence of any other E-mail from the Belgium lab, Marty figured that was probably what had happened in this case.
He threw back his head and stretched his arms high to the ceiling. His medication had worn off. A thrill rushed through him as his brain seemed to acquire diamondlike clarity. He looked down, and his fingers flew over the keyboard in a race to keep up with his thoughts. He instructed his program to do a different search, this time focusing on bits of the name, E-mail address, and other identifying qualities. With incredible speed, the program searched… and there it was ? two tiny pieces of the laboratory's name ? opold Inst.
With a shout, he followed the E-mail's footprints ? traces of data and numbers, almost a scent to Marty ? to NIH's Federal Resource Medical Clearing House and a terminal accessed only by the password of the director, Lily Lowenstein. From there, he painstakingly tracked the prints forward to the Prince Leopold Institute itself.
His green eyes flashed as he bellowed: “There you are, you frumious beast!” It was a reference to Lewis Carroll and the Jabberwock. In a hidden backup file buried deep within the institute's system language he had located an actual copy of the report.
The report had been E-mailed from the Prince Leopold Institute of Tropical Medicine to Level Four labs across the world. After a quick glance, it was evident Jon might find this useful. That decided, Marty tried to trace the E-mail elsewhere. He frowned as the evidence mounted: Someone had erased it not only from its origination site in the central computer of the Prince Leopold Institute but also at the addresses of the various recipients. Or that was what was supposed to have happened. And that was what the average computer nerd, the ordinary
