'I think so.'
'Shit,' said Ford quietly. '
54
Abbey sat cross-legged on the rucked-up bed, laptop in front of her, FireWired to the mysterious hard drive. Stenciled on the side was the information:
#785A56H6T 160Tb
CLASSIFIED: DO NOT DUPLICATE
Property of NPF
California Institute of Technology
National Aeronautics and Space Administration
The five-dollar motel clock, screwed to the Formica night table to prevent it from being stolen, glowed midnight. They had gotten into Washington-Dulles at eight and driven for an hour into the middle of nowhere in suburban Virginia to a hotel that Ford seemed to have once used as some kind of safe house. The Watergate it wasn't and Abbey didn't like it at all. There was no room service, the room smelled of old cigar smoke, and the sheets looked suspiciously dirty. Ford had registered without showing an ID and had paid in cash. The sleazy clerk had leered at them, and Abbey had a pretty good idea of the kind of vile thoughts that were going through his mind.
Ford had ordered her pizza and disappeared, refusing to say where he was going, promising to be back before dawn. He had left her with a laptop and the hard drive and told her to break into it.
Easier said than done. She'd been at it for hours with no success. The hard drive was no brand she recognized or could find on the Web; it looked proprietary, very high density. No normal drive this size could possibly hold 160Tb. An NPF special. And password protected. She'd been running through all the obvious candidates, 'password,' 'letmein,' 'qwerty,' '12345678' and a zillion other common combinations, taken from Web sites that listed common passwords. Then she had started in on combinations of Corso's names, birthdate, his mother's names and birthdate, various street and place names near his house, local bars, names of his high school and college teams, mascots, the top bands and hit songs of his teen years--in short, anything she could guess about him from his age and digging up information on him on the Web. But then she considered that she was going about it all wrong. The password would have been created by the mysterious professor who'd stolen it from NPF. She knew nothing about this man, not even his name. How could she possibly guess his password? Or even worse, it might still have an NPF password, which would be well-nigh uncrackable.
She downloaded several programs from the Web and tried a brute-force attack using hashes and rainbow tables, to no avail. It was starting to look hopeless. For all she knew, the drive was locked up with military-level cryptography.
Still, the drive did ask for a password and that was a good sign. There had to be another way to solve the problem. She cracked her sixth Diet Coke and guzzled it. Feeling the need for further sustenance, she rummaged in the pizza box and pried up the last cold, hard piece from the cardboard, scarfed it down, and chased it with more Coke.
She thought about her own passwords and how she chose them. Most of them were dreamed up on the spot, often curse words mingled with the first digits of p or
She sipped the Coke, imagining this professor's last day at work, what it would be like to get fired and told to clear out his desk by five. He was pissed enough to steal a hard drive with classified data. As soon as he got home, he would have changed the password on the drive to prevent anyone from NPF being able to access it.
She sighed and tossed the Coke can toward the wastebasket. It bounced off the rim and rolled across the floor, dribbling liquid on the already stained rug. 'Fuck,' she said out loud. If only she had a joint to relax her, help her mind drift a little, figure things out.
She picked up her earlier train of thought. He would have changed the password when he got home, first thing. She closed her eyes, trying to visualize the scene: this imaginary professor arriving back at some shabby bungalow in Southern California, stained carpeting, wife upstairs complaining about having no money. The guy pulls the hard drive out of his underwear or wherever he'd put it, plugs it into his laptop. He's furious, he's upset, he can't believe what's happened to him. He's not thinking clearly. But he has to change the password--that's essential. So he pulls a new one out of his head and types it in.
What was going through his head
Abbey typed in
She recalled the standard rules: a good password should consist of at least eight characters of mixed numbers and letters, lower and uppercase.
She typed in
Bingo.
55
Ford eased his rented Mercedes down the curving lanes of the posh Washington neighborhood around Quebec Street NW, until he found an evening house party. He parked his car behind the other cars along the curb and stepped out into the warm night, buttoning his suit jacket. Elegant Georgian houses lined the leafy lanes, windows glowing yellow in the summer dark. The party house was more brightly lit than most, and as he walked past it he heard muted jazz trickling into the air. Ambling down the street in his suit, hands in his pockets like a neighbor out for a stroll, he made his way toward Spring Valley Park, a small ribbon of trees alongside a creek. Slipping into the park on a path, he waited until he was sure he was alone and then swiftly cut into the woods, crossed the creek, and approached the backyard of number 16 Hillbrook Lane. It was nearing midnight but he was in luck: there was only one car in the driveway. Lockwood was still at work. No doubt he was very busy these days-- and nights.
Circling the property, he could see no evidence it was under active surveillance or being patrolled. The house was mostly dark, with a soft glow in an upper window--the wife, probably, reading in bed. The front stoop light had been left on. Fortunately, the president's science advisor didn't rate Secret Service protection. Still, there might be alarms or motion sensors that turned on lights, the usual suburban stuff, but by moving extremely slowly he was able to minimize the risk of setting one off. He managed to creep close to the driveway undetected.
He chose a hiding place in a grouping of yews alongside the driveway and crouched in the deepest shadow, waiting. It was possible Lockwood might remain at work all night, but he knew the man's habits well enough to
