The two men left just as Bob Herbert wheeled in. The thirty-eight-year-old Intelligence Officer was in a high dudgeon, as always. Part of him was angry at whatever had gone wrong, the other ninety percent was mad at the die toss that had dropped him in a wheelchair.
'What gives, techboy? Are we pregnant?' There were traces of a Mississippi youth still in his voice, edged with urgency born of ten years in the CIA and lingering bitterness over the bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut in 1983 that had left him crippled.
'I'm checking on the degree and type of penetration,' Stoll said, pressing his lips shut before he added, 'Major Pain in the Ass.' The dogged Herbert took that from Hood and Rodgers but not from anyone else. Especially someone who had never worn a uniform, pulled the Libertarian Party lever most Novembers, and still carried as much weight around Op-Center as he did.
'Well maybe, techboy, it'll help if you know that we weren't the only ones who got slam-dunked.'
'Who else?'
'Portions of Defense went down—'
'For twenty seconds?'
Herbert nodded. 'So did parts of the CIA.'
'Which parts?'
'The crisis management sectors. Every place we supply with data.'
'Shit—'
'Horse apples is right, boy. We knocked up a whole lot of people, and they're gonna want someone's ass.'
'Shit,' Matt said again, turning back to the screen as the first wave of figures stopped.
'The first directory is clean,' sang Mighty Mouse. 'Proceeding to second.'
'I'm not saying it's your fault,' Herbert said. 'I'd be walking if good men didn't get blindsided now and again. But I need you to get me some intelligence from the NRO.'
'I can't do that while the system is in the diagnostics mode, and I can't exit while it's in a file.'
'I know that,' he said, 'junior technoboy Kent told me. That's why I rolled on in here, to keep you company till you get the damn system on-line again and can provide me with the information I need.'
'What information is that?'
'I need to know what's happening in North Korea. We've got a pile of dead people wearing what seems to me Made in the DPRK death masks, there's a planeload of Striker boys en route, and the President wants to know what the troops up there are doing, the current status of missiles, if anything is happening at the nuclear power plants— that sort of thing. We can't do that without satellite surveillance, and—'
'I know. You can't do that without the computers.'
'The second directory is clean,' Mighty Mouse reported. 'Proceeding to—'
'Cancel,' said Matt and the program shut down. Using the keyboard, he exited to DOS, entered the password to go on-line with the National Reconnaissance Office, then folded his arms, waited, and hoped to God that whatever had invaded the computers hadn't gotten through the phone link.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
It was one of the most secret and heavily guarded sections in one of the world's most secretive buildings.
The National Reconnaissance Office in the Pentagon was a small room with no overhead lighting. All of the room's illumination was provided by the computer stations, ten neat rows of them with ten stations in each row, laid out like a NASA control room; one hundred lenses in space watching the Earth in real-time, providing sixty- seven live, black-and-white images a minute at various levels of magnification, wherever the satellite eyes were pointed. Each picture was time-encoded to the hundredth of a second so that the speed of a missile or the power of a nuclear explosion could be determined by comparing successive shots or by factoring in other data, such as seismic readings.
Each station had a television monitor, with a keyboard and a telephone below each monitor, and two operators were responsible for each row, punching in different coordinates for the satellites to watch new areas or provide hard copy of images for the Pentagon, Op-Center, the CIA, or any of America's allies. The men and women who worked here went through training and psychological screening nearly as thorough as that of the people who worked in the control centers of the nation's nuclear missile bases: they couldn't become anesthetized by the steady flow of black-and-white images, they had to be able to tell in seconds whether a plane or tank or soldier's uniform belonged to Cyprus, Swaziland, or the Ukraine, and they had to resist the temptation to check in on their folks' farm in Colorado or brownstone in Baltimore. The space eyes could look at any square foot on the planet, were powerful enough to read a newspaper over someone's shoulder in a park, and the operators had to resist the temptation to play. After looking at the same mountain range, plain, or ocean day after day, the urge to do so was intense.
Two supervisors watched the silent room from a glass control booth that occupied one full wall. They notified the operators of all requests from other departments, and double-checked any changes in satellite orientation.
Supervisor Stephen Viens was an old college buddy of Matt Stoll. They'd graduated one and two in their MIT class, jointly held three patents on artificial neurons for silicon brains, and in a national mall-tour shootout were, respectively, the number two and number one highest scorers on Jaguar's Trevor McFur game. Atari executives had to agree to pay for overtime as Stoll's game continued four hours past mall closing time. The only thing they didn't share was Viens's passion for weight lifting, which gave their wives the idea for their nicknames: Hardware and Software.
Stoll's E-mail arrived just as Viens was settling in with his coffee and chocolate-chip muffin before starting his eight o'clock shift.
'I'll take it,' he told night Supervisor Sam Calvin.
Viens rolled his chair in front of the monitor; he stopped chewing as he read the message:
Facehugger successful. Operating now.
Send 39/126/400/Soft. Check own Alien?
'Whoa Nellie,' Viens muttered.
'Que pasa, Quickdraw?' asked Calvin. The night and day Deputy Supervisors also came over.
'Facehugger?' said day Deputy Supervisor Fred Landwehr. 'What's that?'
'From the movie Alien. The thing that put baby aliens into people to incubate. Matt Stoll says they've got a virus, which means we could have it too. He also wants to see Pyongyang.' Viens snapped up the phone. 'Monica, take a look at longitude 39, latitude 126, magnification 400 and send it over to Matt Stoll at Op-Center. No hard copy.' He hung up. 'Fred, run a diagnostics on our software. Make sure everything's okay.'
'Am I looking for anything in particular?'
'Don't know. Just scan everything and see what beeps.'
Viens turned back to the computer and typed:
Looking for Chestburster. Kick butt Ripley.
39/126/400 Soft copy.
Sending it, he looked out across the rows of monitors, still not quite believing what he'd read. Stoll had come up with what they'd both agreed was as virus-proof a system as someone could design. If it had been compromised, that would be something. He hurt for his pal but he also knew that, like him, Stoll had to be fascinated by the prospect that it had been done at all? and determined to get to the bottom of it.
