lunge had carried him well out into the midst of the mob.
People swarmed past him, pouring through the sudden gap in the police line. Others dove on top of him, knocking him over as they tried to pull off his helmet or grab his weapons. His shield protected him from many of their blows, but it also trapped one of his arms. Punches and kicks rained down in an unrelenting hail. Something sharp stabbed into his leg. He felt himself being driven down into unconsciousness.
Calvin struggled desperately to get up off the ground. Staying down meant dying.
A baseball bat swung overhand caught his shield and knocked him back down. Someone else stomped on his wrist and grabbed his baton away. The world blurred in a red fog.
Shots rang out suddenly. Calvin felt the pressure on him slacken as his attackers turned away in surprise. Seconds later, another ragged volley cut across the crowd noise. Somebody was firing tear-gas guns a lot of them. A dozen brilliant beams of white light lanced into the plaza, blinding rioters caught staring at them and turning night into artificial day.
Clouds of grey mist billowed up from each gas canister. The mob began coughing, gagging as the tear gas rolled over them. Their shouts changed swiftly in tone from anger and hate to fear.
Calvin heard the growing roar of diesel engines moving closer.
The crowd began backing away, slowly at first, and then faster. More and more of them turned to flee.
Still barely clinging to consciousness, Calvin lifted his head just high enough to see what was going on. Hundreds of soldiers in full battle gear and gas masks were advancing across the wreckage-strewn Renaissance Center Plaza. Armored personnel carriers mounting searchlights trundled behind the troops.
Suddenly, Bob Calvin lay alone. He tried to get up, but his right leg crumpled under him and he landed heavily on the pavement. The ground seemed very cold. He heard someone calling for a stretcher as he surrendered at last to the pain filling every corner of his being.
The ABC News Special Report showed signs of being hurriedly assembled. Half the video aired was live or only minutes old. And none of the news was good.
The Midwest’s phone system was still down, and it would remain down for the foreseeable future. Caught without the ability to communicate, tens of thousands of businesses had been forced to close, idling millions of workers. So far the only beneficiaries of the disaster had been messenger services. Most normal commerce had ground to a halt. The economic losses alone were already estimated in the tens of billions of dollars.
But there were other, far more serious losses. Detroit was not alone. With police and emergency services degraded, every major city in the region had experienced a vicious crime wave. The governors of Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, and Iowa had all mobilised their National Guard units by midafternoon and instituted an immediate nighttime curfew. Hundreds were already dead, and hundreds more were seriously injured in the continuing civil disorder.
Pressed hard for an explanation, company representatives now blamed “an external cause, most likely the deliberate sabotage of the switching network by a highly sophisticated computer virus.”
This claim was immediately backed up by several electronics and computer experts. In the blink of an eye, the phone company went from villain to victim. The news also transformed the ongoing catastrophe from an unavoidable act of God to an act of deliberate, calculated terror.
The final piece of the ABC News Special was an interview with Senator George Roland, one of the few survivors of the National Press Club bombing. Since the attack, Roland had acquired immense standing, and he used every ounce of it in making his points.
“There is no doubt that these terrorists are bent on destroying American society. The government can no longer deny that these attacks are part of a larger plan. Unless the administration acts swiftly, strongly, and positively, our nation may not survive.”
No one disagreed.
With Jim Johnston standing next to her, Maggie Kosinski dialed the boss’s number. Light-headed, almost shaking with fatigue and excitement, she hit the last digit and then looked again at the diskette on her desk. The label read simply
“Alpha Virus.”
An urgent, pleading voice answered on the first ring. “Yes?”
“This is Kosinski in Operations,” she announced. “We’ve got it!”
“Hang on.”
After a short pause, she heard, “This is Taylor.” Midwest Telephone’s CEO sounded almost as tired as she did, almost as tired as they all were. Nobody had gotten much sleep in the past three days.
Kosinski forced herself to speak calmly and distinctly. “We’ve confirmed our initial diagnosis, sir. We were able to track down the virus and its source, and we’ve started a reboot. The whole system will be back on-line in forty-five minutes.”
“Thank God!” Taylor breathed. His voice sharpened. “Where was the damned thing hidden?”
Kosinski prodded the diskette on her desk with a pen. She didn’t even want to touch it with her bare hands. “In one of our printers, sir.”
“What?!”
She explained further. “Some clever bastard hid the virus inside our laser printer ROM chip piggybacked onto its normal code in several pieces. Every time we rebooted, it would reassemble the pieces and reinfect the system from scratch.” She shook her head at the vicious intelligence behind the attack, half in unwilling admiration and half in anger. “We got lucky or we’d probably still be looking for it. One of my techs turned the printer off to clear a paper jam and forgot to turn it back on. While it was off, we rebooted the system again and everything started to come back online. But as soon as we powered up the printer, the virus reappeared.”
“Good God!” Taylor exclaimed. He hesitated. “Have you discovered any more nasty surprises lurking out there?”
“Yes, sir.” Kosinski’s lips thinned. “We found the same type of altered ROM chip in every switching center’s printer. They’d all been serviced in the past two months.”
“Son of a bitch.”
“Yeah.” Kosinski prodded the diskette on her desk again. “This is no virus I’ve ever seen or heard of, sir. I’ve already passed the ROM chip we found here to the FBI and the Computer Emergency Response Team. It’s their baby now.”
Personally, she wished them luck. Virusland was a mysterious and spooky place, full of secrecy and strange personalities. It took a special kind of weirdo, she thought, to write a program that deliberately fouled up a computer.
And someone out there, some terrorist, had gone straight to the top of a very twisted bunch to find this little gem.
CHAPTER 19
BACKLASH
Helen Gray fought off the last clinging tendrils of a nightmare and woke up, suddenly aware that she was all alone in the rumpled bed. She opened her eyes. The glowing digits on his bedside clock read 1:41 A.M. Where had Peter gone?
She pushed herself upright and looked around the room. The lights were off, but her eyes were adjusted to the darkness. Her lips curved upward in a smile as she noticed the pieces of clothing strewn across the floor from the half-open door all the way over to the bed. Someday she and Peter Thorn were going to have to learn to set a somewhat slower, less frantic pace in their lovemaking.
But not now. After weeks of strain and enforced separation, neither of them could have been expected to restrain themselves for very long. And they hadn’t.
