WE’RE DONE
Alex sat hunched at the desk, his eyes roving over the laptop screen, reading Hilzoy's notes for what felt like the thousandth time. He'd been up all night, going through the notes forward, then backward, then randomly. He thought if he approached Hilzoy's thinking out of order he might spot something he and Sarah had missed. But nothing.
The Obsidian toolbar was designed like a typical commercial software application, with functions laid out horizontally, each clickable to reveal a drop-down submenu of options related to the primary menu function. You could customize the menu to add functions or hide them, but none of the functions allowed him to do anything but obvious variations of encryption. He tried every version of the menu he could think of. He customized it. He hid functions, then brought them back.
Hidden functions. That's what he was looking for. But where were they? Not in Hilzoy's notes, that was for sure. Alex practically had them memorized at this point. There was nothing there.
Was there another version, maybe? Something Hilzoy didn't even trust his lawyer with?
Maybe. But if there was some sort of double, secret set of notes, Hilzoy would have needed to back that one up, too. Why have Alex hold the backup for one but not the other? It didn't make sense. There wasn't another version. It all had to be right here.
Another version, he thought, rubbing his eyes. Another version.
He cursored up to the menu and scrolled through it. File. Edit. Tools. He selected Tools, then cursored down. Macros, Customize… Track Changes.
Track changes.
Track changes… from previous versions.
Damn. Could it be that simple?
He selected Show Previous Versions. Nothing happened.
Shit.
He scrolled down through Hilzoy's notes. Midway, the numerals one through ten appeared in blue alongside a list of functions, the functions all relating to creation of a macro. The numbers were out of order. Alex stared at them, not understanding. He scrolled through the rest of the notes, but there were no other changes.
He scrolled back up to the numbers. It looked like in a previous version of the notes, Hilzoy had numbered these functions. But why? And why were the numbers out of order?
It had to be significant. If there had been any previous versions, Hilzoy had accepted all the changes, effectively erasing them all. Except for these numbers. He wanted a record of these. But a hidden record, apparently. That couldn't be an accident. It had to mean something.
All right, what if he just performed the functions in the order of the hidden numbers? Worth a try.
He followed the steps, one through ten, then hit enter.
Nothing happened.
Damn. He'd really been hoping there.
He scrolled up to the menu bar again, checking each function. File, nothing new. Edit, same. Tools…
He blinked and leaned forward. The Tools menu had three new entries: Creation. Concealment. Delivery.
“Holy crap,” he said aloud. “This is it. It has to be.”
Hilzoy had built an Easter egg into Obsidian. And not the usual, just-for-laughs version you could find in so many DVDs and so much commercial software. No, this looked like a whole new application for the technology.
But an application for what?
His heart pounding, he started working the keyboard. He got so immersed, he lost track of time, and didn't even remember where he was until light started creeping into the sky outside his window. What he found was electrifying.
At six-thirty, he showered and got dressed. He put the gun Ben had given him in his pocket, acutely aware of its weight and bulk. He couldn't imagine what it would be like to carry a gun-make that two guns-all the time.
He went across to the other room to tell Ben. The tough guy had walked out last night when things had gotten heated, but whatever. Alex wasn't sorry for what he'd said. Part of him wished he'd said more. Maybe that was the problem. Ben was obtuse. You couldn't expect him to understand something, especially something he didn't want to understand, unless you beat him over the head with it.
He tried his key card, but it didn't work. Shit, Ben must have engaged the privacy lock. He might still be sleeping. But the hell with it, this was worth waking him for.
Alex knocked, then waited. No answer. He knocked again, louder. After a minute, he heard Ben's voice.
“Give me a second. Gotta put some clothes on.”
Half a minute went by, then Ben opened the door, wearing only a towel. He said, “You're up early.”
“I did it,” Alex said, walking in past him. “I cracked it. I know what Obsidian is really about.”
Ben closed and locked the door behind him. “Hold on,” he said. “I need to hit the head.”
He disappeared into the bathroom for a minute. Alex looked around the room. One of the beds had the covers pulled off it. There was a pile of clothes on the floor. Looked like the jacket and shirt Ben had been wearing the night before.
Ben came out wearing one of the hotel's robes. He sat down on one of the beds. “Tell me,” he said.
“We have to get Sarah. She needs to hear this, too.”
“She's probably sleeping, don't you think?”
Alex was a little surprised by Ben's solicitude. Yesterday he wouldn't even let Sarah stop to use the bathroom. Now he was concerned about not waking her?
“She'll want to hear this, trust me,” Alex said. He walked over to the common door and opened it, then knocked on the door on the other side. “Sarah, it's Alex. Are you up? I found what we were looking for.”
“I'll be right there,” he heard from the other side of the door. A minute later, she came in, wearing a hotel robe. Her hair was tied back, she wasn't wearing any makeup, she was rubbing sleep from her eyes… and she was still beautiful.
It was funny that she and Ben were both in the robes. “Am I the only one who was getting anything done last night?” Alex asked. He meant the comment to be funny, but neither of them laughed, or even said anything. In fact, they seemed almost awkward. Well, he had just woken them both up.
“What is it?” Sarah said, leaning against the wall next to the door.
“I found an Easter egg,” Alex said. “In Obsidian.”
“Easter egg?” Ben said.
Alex nodded. “A hidden feature set. Something the programmer builds into the application but doesn't document, that's only accessible via a weird sequence of commands. Hilzoy built one into Obsidian. He documented the sequence in his notes, and hid the documentation so that it was only visible if you checked the current set of notes against a previous version.”
“You're losing me,” Ben said. “What are the secret functions? And why document them if they're supposed to be secret?”
“The sequence was complicated. It had to be, otherwise someone might have stumbled onto it by accident. Hilzoy was afraid he would forget it. So he included it in the notes in a kind of invisible ink.”
“He wasn't worried someone would find it?”
“Of course not. No one else had the notes, they were just part of a backup copy of the program he kept with his lawyer, and why would his lawyer bother reading his programming notes? And even if I, or someone else, did read them, why would anyone think to look for earlier versions? And even if you did look for an earlier version, the clues he left wouldn't mean anything to you. You'd have to already know something was hidden, and be racking your brains trying to find out what it was, as Sarah and I were. And even then, you could easily miss it.”
“Well, what is it?” Ben said.
Alex wondered why Sarah was being so quiet. Ordinarily, she got impatient with other people's explanations and was quick to add her own.
“The whole thing is a Trojan horse,” Alex said. “On the surface, it's an excellent, efficient program for
