with more than five and a half billion hits, and it only took two tenths of a second to get those, but
There was another way to maybe get to the “who,” and he was pretty sure that Chang’s help had already put him on that track. Amazing what the guy could do even when he had almost nothing to work with. Chang said he would identify the man in the sampan, the one they had seen in the joint scenario. Jay had a gut feeling that this guy was involved, though he didn’t know how.
Jay had already done the obvious — he had run a search for Chinese programmers on the original software crew, then the revision crews, even the marketing team, anybody who might have been able to embed a few clever lines of code where they’d leave unauthorized access to the system. Along the way, hundreds of programmers had worked on the beast, some extensively, some for only a few loops and lines. The score of Sino-sounding names still in the U.S. that had come up would be on a visit-now list for the FBI, but none of them looked like promising candidates. Jay’s instincts, which had no basis in any kind of logic, told him that the guy had gone home.
Of course, it might be — was likely, in fact — that the Chinese op hadn’t done the deed himself, but had socially engineered a programmer with a name as far away from China as Iceland…
More, just being able to get into the system wasn’t the whole answer: Once there, the guy doing the rascal had to manage it in such a way that it wouldn’t be spotted, and it wouldn’t point straight back at the hidden door even if it was picked up. Since none of the program’s built-in virus-, worm-, or trojanware had caught the attacking sequence, the slashware either had to be piggybacked on something where nobody had thought to look, or so smooth that it looked harmless on its own.
Jay would bet that the slashware had been installed at the same time as the back door, and in such a way that the program didn’t see it as anything but part of its normal OS. It wasn’t a foreign invader, it was part of the body. Whatever it did, the program would think it was merely doing what it was
The sucker could even be on a timer…
Jay himself could do something like this, assuming he’d been one of the original code-writers with access early on. There was more than one way to go about it, though, and how Jay would manage it could be far different than the way it had been done.
This guy was good, no question, but now, at least, Jay had a handle on him.
He hoped.
Jay had four options, as he saw the situation.
One, he could find the door and close it, then find the built-in disguised slashware and deep-six it.
That could take slightly less than forever.
Two, somebody — and it wasn’t going to be Jay — would have to go over every line of code and verify it. That would take forever — and then some.
Three, the military — and CyberNation — would have to junk their infected programs and any other programs that interfaced with them, and start over with new software. Neither one of them was likely to do that, since that would cost a king’s ransom, and take major systems off-line for a long time. The cure would be nearly as bad as the disease — worse, even, like cutting off your hand to get rid of a wart on your little finger. And the wart’s virus could
Or four, Jay could find the guy responsible and then have somebody lean on him hard enough so he’d give up the door and slashware. Somehow, Chang’s guy on the boat was in it. Maybe he was the player, maybe not, but he was in it. Somehow. Chang had a better handle on his country’s system, even though Jay was worlds better generally.
Of the options, the only one that made any sense to Jay was the last. The best way to find a well-hidden body was to get the man who buried it to take you there.
The military program had, fortunately, been entirely written in the U.S., no outsourcing allowed for this level of sophistication. So whoever had screwed with it had been in the States during the creation of the program. It had taken three years and some to build and vet, and since Jay couldn’t be sure that the Chinese op had actually laid his own hands on it, he was going to have to take the long road to find him from this end. The guy had to be a player — even if he bribed another programmer, he’d have to know what to tell him to do, and in great detail. And Jay was sure by now that the guy was Chinese, so the way was apparent, if not easy:
Jay would have to run down every computer expert from China who had been in the U.S. during the years that it had taken to build the infected program. Chang could help, and he would — it would go a long way to building a bridge between his organization and Net Force, and Chang would also know that Net Force would certainly be grateful. Such gratitude could manifest in a lot of hardware and software for Chang, and the military would happily foot that bill if Chang helped them solve their problem, no question at all. They’d bury the guy in gold dust if he pulled their fat out of the fire.
Meanwhile, on this end, Jay could start by finding all the Chinese students in computer science programs, as well as any Chinese visitors who listed anything connected with computers on their passports or border entry logs. That alone could be tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of people, he had no idea. It wouldn’t be as hard as verifying multiple millions of lines of computer code, though. Even so, he was going to need major processing time. If they could track the guy down from Chang’s end, Jay didn’t have a problem with that, no, sir, not at all. He’d rather do it himself, of course, but the point was to catch the bad guy, to win. Everything else came second.
He chewed on a mouthful of boiled egg. With enough pepper, it wasn’t so bad…
30
Chang watched through a telescope. The man from the sampan definitely had something to hide.
Chang was a long way off, and mostly behind the cover of a rickety boathouse on the river’s south shore, two hundred meters, easy, so the telescope was necessary. At this distance, Chang would be virtually invisible to his quarry, but the telescope was of sufficient quality so that he could clearly see the man’s expressions. Holding the scope steady was tricky, but the gray and splintery boathouse wall made a good enough support to mostly manage this, though the wood smelled of dead fish and soured waterweed.
The man from the red-eyed sampan sculled his boat to the shore, well downriver from where Chang had first seen him. He tied the boat to a post, shouldered a small kit on a short pole, and started to walk along a muddy path toward the houses in the nearby village. He never stopped glancing around, looking for anybody who might be watching him.
Sampan-man had no fish, for he had not been fishing, even though that was his disguise. Another reason to think he was hiding something.
Chang smiled, remembering an incident in Beijing some years ago. A man had attempted to rob a high-end jewelry store, owned by a Vietnamese. Before he could pull it off, the clerk had become suspicious of him and pushed a silent alarm, so when the man pulled a knife and demanded gold, the police were waiting just outside the shop’s door. He walked right into their arms.
Why had the clerk become worried? Well, he said, it was the man’s appearance. His clothes were ragged and of poor quality, indicating that he did not have the money to be buying expensive jewelry.
Plus, he had a black eye patch and a wooden leg.
Chang smiled again. That would-be thief was never going to blend in anywhere, save maybe at a pirates’ convention…
This was not as blatant, but if sampan-man was a simple fisher, Chang was the son of two turtles and the brother of a sea snake.
Chang closed the telescope and hurried away from the boathouse, circling away from his subject. Following him directly would be risky; the quarry would be looking for anybody behind him, so better that he was in front of him. He had to be going to the village — there was no other place around, and on foot, dressed in fishing clothes, he wasn’t going to be hiking very far, not this late in the day.
