'Were you two ever married?' Dawn said.
'No!' they replied in unison, perhaps a tad too loudly.
'Oh, because-'
'We go back a long way,' Jack said. 'A real long-'
'Wait,' Weezy said, holding up a hand. 'Do you hear something?'
Jack listened and heard a voice coming from the spare bedroom. Sounded like a woman.
He looked at Weezy. 'Someone here?'
She looked baffled, and a little worried. 'No way.'
Jack stepped up to the darkened doorway and peered within. The computer was running, with a black-and- white film playing on the monitor. It looked familiar.
Weezy came up behind him and peered over his shoulder.
'What the…?' She squeezed past and flicked on the light. 'I turned that off before I left to go to Eddie's place. And what's playing?'
'Dark Victory.'
'You think?'
He pointed to the actress speaking. 'She's got Bette Davis eyes.'
Weezy looked at him. 'But I don't have any movies on my-' Her hand shot to her mouth. 'Oh no!'
Jack's gut clenched as Munir's theory flashed through his brain.
'Video… it's downloading a video. It's started.'
Dawn joined them. 'What's started?'
'The Jihad virus,' Weezy said as she leaped to her keyboard and began tapping madly. 'I can't stop it. And it won't shut down.' She leaned over and pressed the power button on the tower. The screen went blank. 'There-' The screen came to life again. 'It turned itself on!'
'Just unplug it,' Jack said.
Instead she hit the lighted off switch on her power strip. As the screen went dark again, she looked at him with wide eyes.
'If this is happening all over the world…'
Jack said, 'But it'll happen in a wave, right? As all the computer clocks hit the trigger time?'
'Not necessarily. Not if the virus is set to Greenwich Mean Time. If it was set for three P.M. GMT, then computers on the U.S. East Coast would trigger at eight local time. In the Central Time Zone they'd go at seven local, and in the Pacific Zone at five local.'
'So they'd all start at once?'
She nodded. 'That's the way I'd do it. That's the way to get the most bang out of the virus. Don't give anyone a chance to mount a defense. Hit them with an all-out frontal assault.'
Jack envisioned a billion-plus computers across the globe turning themselves on and beginning to download video from the Internet. And as the data is recorded onto the hard drive, the computer begins to upload it to other computers in the botnet which in turn upload video back to it, back and forth and back and forth until their bandwidth is maxed out. All the computers in empty offices in every country, unattended but busily enslaved to Jihad4/20, trading video throughout their networks and beyond. Servers and routers all over the world crashing with the overload.
Gia… Vicky.
'How long…' His mouth had gone dry. 'How long do you think it will take?'
She shrugged. 'I'm no expert, not even close, but I imagine it depends on the size of the Jihad botnet. If it's as extensive as they say, could be just a matter of minutes, certainly no more than a few hours.'
Jack pulled his phone from a pocket and speed dialed Gia. Her voice mail came up almost immediately. That meant she had her cell turned off. Of course she would. The airlines made you turn them off.
What flight had she said-346, right?
He dialed 411, got the number, and called American Airlines. After navigating a voice tree and punching in the flight number, a robotic female voice told him flight 346 had taken off on time and was due in at 10:50.
'Well,' he said, turning to Weezy and Dawn, 'at least that computer is still working.'
Weezy said, 'They're in the air?'
She kept her expression neutral but he could tell from her eyes that she didn't like that idea.
'They'll make it.'
Dawn was shaking her head, her expression baffled. 'What's happening? I've heard about the virus on the news, but what's that got to do with computer video and planes?'
As Weezy began to explain, Jack wandered back into the front room. His hands balled into fists. He jammed them into his pockets and squeezed his eyes shut as he fought to control the frustration boiling within.
Everywhere he turned lately he found himself facing situations he couldn't control, couldn't do anything about. Rasalom, the Jihad virus, and now Gia and Vicky in the air, in possible danger, and he could do nothing to bring them down safely. Had to depend on someone else… always someone else…
He needed to break something, hurt someone.
But he wouldn't. Instead he'd do the thing he hated, but the only thing he could do.
He'd wait.
11
'… again, if you're just tuning in, the message from the Department of Homeland Security is to unplug your computer and disconnect it from the Internet. In other words, if you have dial-up service, unplug the phone connector; if you have high-speed cable, disconnect from the cable; if you have Wi-Fi, disconnect and power off your router. Do this even if you have an uninfected computer. Where the Internet is working at all, transmission has slowed to a crawl. Many servers and routers are down and the ones still working are jammed.'
Dawn hugged herself as she leaned forward on the couch and stared at the TV.
'This is totally scary.'
Weezy sat beside her. Jack hung back at the dining area table, listening with growing alarm as news heads from the local stations kept breaking into the regular programming with bulletins from the city and the feds.
The botnet had been active for only an hour or so but was already sending seismic shock waves through cyberspace.
'This just in from the mayor's office: Unless it is absolutely necessary to be elsewhere, please stay in your homes. Traffic signals have malfunctioned and traffic is snarled. We have the mother of all traffic jams out there, folks.'
'Oh, hell.'
Jack jumped up and stepped to the window. Saturday night traffic on the Upper West Side was always snarled, but what he could see below wasn't moving at all.
'What's wrong?' Weezy said.
'I've got to head for the airport.'
'But it's only nine-thirty. They're not due in till eleven.'
Right. Less than a ten-mile trip. New York City traffic could be a hassle any time, especially on a Saturday night. But this was New York City traffic on a Saturday night in the middle of a cyber meltdown.
'From the way things look, it could take me that long.'
She came up beside him and stared down at the traffic.
'I see what you mean.' She put a hand on his shoulder. 'Be careful out there. And stay in touch, okay?'
'Will do. You stay put.'
She shook her head. 'I'm going over to sit with the Lady. She may need some company.'
The Lady-in his worries about Gia and Vicky he'd forgotten about her.
'Think she's feeling the effects?'
Concern tightened her features. 'I don't know. Nobody's ever been here before. She could have a slow weakening, or might not feel a thing till the whole Net crashes.'
