pushed back his chair and stood up. “Look, maybe we should try to get some sleep. You’ve got to report back, and I’ve got a date with Rossini a little later this morning.”
“Oh? A date with the Maestro?” Helen asked, slipping her arm around his waist. “Is there something I should know about you, Colonel Thorn?”
He laughed softly, almost against his will. “Not that kind of a date, Agent Gray.” His smile slipped. “Rossini wangled a copy of that damned computer virus out of the Computer Emergency Response Team. We’re going to run it by somebody he knows a guy the Maestro says is a Grade A computer whiz.”
He shrugged. “Of course, it’s probably just a waste of time. God knows, every cybernetics expert in the federal government is already doing the same thing.”
Helen hugged him tighter. “You just keep at it, Peter.” Then she stepped back and held out her hand. “Now come take me to bed.”
Thorn’s grin returned. “Yes, ma’am. Anything you say.”
Joseph Rossini took the Dulles Access Road out toward Herndon, relying on their official Pentagon identity cards to get them through the tollbooths without having to scratch around for exact change. He also drove fast, exceeding the speed limit by at least fifteen miles an hour.
The older man caught Thorn watching him out of the corner of his eye and lifted his shoulders. “I hate poking along, Pete. Going fifty-five’s just not efficient.”
Thorn hid a smile by pretending to take an interest in the passing scenery. Saddled with a loving wife and a multitude of kids, the Maestro had obviously decided to settle for the first half of the male equation seeking “fast cars and loose women.”
They sped past what looked like a military encampment. It was a staging area for one of the security patrols established under the President’s vaunted Operation SAFE SKIES. Two Blackhawk helicopters and a couple of Humvees sat under camouflage netting in a clearing off to the side of the road. Soldiers wearing the Screaming Eagles patch of the 101st Air Assault Division tramped through the mud left by another hard rain. They looked thoroughly bored and uncomfortable.
Thorn looked away, still angry at the clear waste of good manpower. He turned back to Rossini. “You’re sure this guy Kettler can handle the job?”
“Uh-huh. Without breaking a sweat.”
Thorn hoped the Maestro’s confidence wasn’t misplaced. The man they were on their way to see, Derek Kettler, made his living as a freelance software designer and consultant. Apparently, JSOC had hired him once before to craft special security and antiviral programs for its intelligence section.
“Kettler lives and breathes computers, Pete,” Rossini con tinned. “The guy’s a little unusual, but he practically dreams in machine code. He’s good. One of the best.” “Just how unusual is he?” Thorn asked sceptically.
Rossini shrugged. “He telecommutes so he can work alone. He likes being alone. He hates having to take orders. In fact, he hates just about anything to do with authority or control.”
Thorn arched an eyebrow. “Then why work with computers? Hell, they’re nothing but rules and instructions…”
Rossini shook his head. “Those are physical limitations, like gravity or the speed of light. It’s people telling him what to do that Kettler has trouble with.”
Great, Thorn thought. They were off on a visit to the Computer Hermit of Herndon.
The older man pulled off the Access Road, fast-talked their way past the local tollbooth, and followed a series of treelined streets to a newer part of the town.
The housing development still showed signs of newness. A Dumpster loaded with construction scraps marked the corner where they turned off the main road, and two of the end units still had raw, muddy earth instead of lawns. The homes were attractive, brick-fronted, two-story town houses. Different gables and copper trim gave each a small bit of identity otherwise lacking in their construction.
Derek Kettler’s house was third from the left in a row of ten. They parked, and Rossini muttered, “Stay here in the car for a minute, until I signal. He agreed to meet with us over the phone last night because he’s dying to see this new virus, but he really wasn’t very happy with the idea of a face-to-face chat. Like I said, he prefers dealing by modem.”
Swell. Thorn sat stiffly in the front seat, watching Rossini climb the front steps to Kettler’s town house.
The Maestro knocked, and then, after waiting a few moments without any apparent response, pressed the bell. Even in the car, Thorn could hear the sound, not of a bell, but a fierce animal roar. Rossini seemed to expect it and looked apologetically toward the car, shrugging.
The door opened, and Thorn saw Kettler for the first time.
His immediate impression was a 1960s-style hippie without any of the tie-dyed colon Rossini’s computer genius wore a grey sweatshirt, jeans, and sneakers, all of which looked rumpled even the shoes. Kettler himself was in his thirties, slightly overweight, and badly in need of a haircut. His black hair and beard were long and lank.
Thorn watched the two men speak for a few minutes. Kettler kept nervously glancing toward the car while Rossini made soothing gestures. Finally, the computer expert disappeared, still shaking his head, and the Maestro motioned for Thorn to come on up.
He trotted up the steps and followed Rossini inside.
He first noticed the smell, a mixture of stale food and mustiness and other things he didn’t want to identify. The front door opened into the living room, which was dominated by a six-foot-high, ten-foot-wide entertainment canter. Thorn considered himself something of an audiophile, but this system was incredible. It included a CD player and a tape deck, but it also contained a reel-to-reel tape player and a turntable. There was even what looked like a CRT and a computer keyboard built into the system.
A mass of scattered clothes, magazines, and paperback books surrounded the wall unit, covering about half the carpet. Empty potato chip bags punctuated the mess.
If Thorn expected the living room to be the worst of it, he was mistaken. When they walked back past the kitchen, he spotted countertops littered with dirty dishes and empty soda cans. The room’s main fixture seemed to be a large green plastic trash can with so many pizza boxes stuffed into it that they overflowed onto the floor.
Kettler led them upstairs.
A converted bedroom was obviously the heart of the house. A large U-shaped desk filled the center of the room, with computer boxes and electronic components on the desk, on shelves over the desk, and on the floor beside it. Bookshelves crammed with thick hardcovers and trade paperbacks lined one wall. They were all computer-related, with titles like Numeric Process Control Codes.
Thorn didn’t even feel tempted to open that one.
Like the rest of the house, the blinds were closed, and he doubted if they were ever opened. In stark contrast to the rest of the house, though, the desk and the room were comparatively neat, although he could see small piles of debris in the corners.
Kettler’s system was already on. Several large-screen monitors displayed brightly colored geometric designs against a darkened background. The center monitor, a huge two-page display, showed a blue and white emblem surrounded with the words “United Federation of Planets.”
Cute. Very cute.
“Gimme the disk,” demanded Kettler.
Rossini handed it over without apparent qualm, violating several federal laws in the process. Thorn winced a little, but kept his thoughts to himself. The diskette passed to them by CERT bore only a handwritten label identifying its contents as
“MidTel Virus, Unknown.”
Kettler handled it like it was red-hot.
He sat down in a swivel chair and started typing. “Okay, Maestro, I’m going to reconfigure my system. I’ll isolate one CPU, and then we’ll see what this beast looks like.” Rossini explained to Thorn what they were seeing while Kettler typed in commands and threw switches on a homemade junction box. The software designer had four computers wired together. One was a server, or file manager. Another did nothing but log on to bulletin boards, download files, and screen them for material he was interested in. The final two were paired processors, hooked up in a special rig that allowed Kettler to designate which processor would handle a task. Isolating one of the units
