'Okay.'
Captain Piechowski and the chief led them into a dark, cavernous room in the rear of the building. The walls were painted black, there were no windows, and the interior seemed to soak up the small spotlights that illuminated a desk and two chairs, the only furniture, which stood in one corner between two large steel cabinets.
'This is it,' Piechowski said. The chief unlocked the cabinet and removed five helmets with faceplates. 'It's a virtual reality simulator.' He gestured around him. 'This used to be the base gymnasium.'
Toad Tarkington looked at Jake, looked at the helmets, pursed his lips to speak, then changed his mind. Ilin took one of the helmets, examined it skeptically.
'Let's put on helmets,' Piechowski suggested, 'and we'll give you the two-dollar tour. We have a set of gloves we'd like you to wear, Admiral.' Chief Hyer helped each man don a helmet and connect it to an electrical cable that led to a large bus on the wall.
When the system came on, the effect was extraordinary. With the helmets on they were standing outside the submarine, which was semitransparent. Captain Piechowski took Jake's arm and led him through the steel hull and ballast tanks and bulkheads to the control room. As Jake stood in the control room looking around, Piechowski went back to escort Ilin. When all of the guests were in the control room, the chief began talking. His voice sounded in their helmet headsets.
'Welcome aboard USS
The large computer screens on the bulkheads came alive. Forward, on both sides, and in the rear of the room, the screens became windows that allowed the helmeted visitors to look directly into the sea. 'We are sixty feet below the surface,' their guide told them, 'under way at seven knots. If you will look at the starboard screen, you can see the hull of a ship protruding down into the water.' He used a pointer to enlarge the ship's hull, which grew in size as the computer zoomed in, until it became recognizable as a warship hull, one with a sonar bulb on its bow. The photonics mast was up, so the camera image was laid over the top half of the sonar picture, and now the superstructure of the warship leapt into view. The chief explained the mast and sonar, demonstrated some of their capabilities, then moved on.
Jake found himself staring at the joystick that controlled the sub.
He reached for it and found that the image moved in his hand, although he could of course feel nothing. He moved the image with his hand, and the submarine reacted.
'Ooh boy!'
'Sensors in the room tell the computer where the helmets are, where you are looking. Sensors also track the position of the gloves.'
'So I can touch and manipulate the controls?'
'All the controls, levers, valves, knobs, switches, the works. We train the crew here in the virtual sim, teach normal and emergency procedures.'
The captain led them aft to see the reactor and engineering spaces, then forward through the boat, looking at pipes and valves and tanks and torpedoes and cruise missiles. They didn't go through the hatchways, although they could have; they walked through bulkheads and sealed hatches. The visitors examined the sonar hydrophones, looked at the intricacies of the computers and the ship's electrical systems, played with the photonics mast controls, inspected the radio room and torpedo room, walked through the solid mass of cruise missiles standing erect in their launchers, visited the galley and captain's cabin.
Finally their guide suggested they take off their helmets. The submarine disappeared, and the five of them were again standing in the large, dark room. Jake Grafton fought back the urge to reach out to feel for the submarine that had surrounded him just seconds ago.
Janos Ilin had his feet braced wide apart. His hands did move, probably involuntarily, trying to find something to restore his sense of balance.
'Hot damn,' muttered Toad Tarkington.
'And that, gentlemen,' said Captain Piechowski, 'is the submarine the hijackers stole.'
'Did you see all those computer consoles in the control room?' Toad Tarkington whispered to his boss.
'Yeah,' Jake whispered back. One thing was crystal clear: Someone who knew a lot more than an ad hoc group of German and Russian submariners could learn in a couple of weeks had gone to sea with them in
So who was that person?
When the cabdriver dropped Zelda Hudson in front of an old brick warehouse in Newark, he was dubious. 'You sure about this address, lady?'
'It's the new economy,' she replied, 'rising from the ashes of the old.'
'Ashes still look pretty cold to me,' he said, and got out of the car to help get her bag from the trunk and pull out the airport handle.
After she paid him she said, 'Wait for a minute until I get in.'
The door was the tip-off that this building was not a crumbling wreck like the others that stood nearby. It was solid steel, inset so that it could not be jimmied, with an inletted cylinder lock. Of course there were no windows on the ground floor; the ones on the second, third, and fourth were covered with wire mesh and steel bars. Small video cameras were mounted unobtrusively high on the corners of the building.
The number of the building was above the door, in peeling paint. Beside the door, bolted to the brick of the building, was a sign that said, in inch-high black letters, 'Hudson Security Services.' Under the sign was a telephone. She picked it up, pushed the button, waited until it buzzed. 'Hi, it's me.'
The door unlatched with an audible click.
Zelda Hudson pulled the door open, waved to the cabdriver, and pulled her bag in. She made sure the door locked behind her. To her right was a wire-cage elevator. She used the lever to close the door, then pushed the Up button.
The first three stories of the old warehouse were open, with a magnificent high ceiling supported by a latticework of massive oak beams and trusses, barely visible amid the dusty gloom and cobwebs. The only light was from the dirty, painted-over windows. The thought struck Zelda Hudson, not for the first time, that this building could be renovated into a marvelous place, with lights and modern furniture and walls of glass bricks. She could almost hear the sound system playing jazz and the party laughter.
The top floor, 'world headquarters' of Hudson Security Services, looked lived in. Lights hanging from the wooden beams illuminated rows of wooden tables sitting on sawhorses. Covering the tables were computers, monitors, and printers. Servers, storage units, and backup power supplies sat on the floor wherever they would fit. Shelves held boxes of software, developers' kits, and manuals. Over, under, around, and through the clutter ran a veritable jungle of wires bundled with network and power cables. Piles of pizza boxes and mountains of computer paper overflowed from gray plastic garbage cams. Mounted high in the corners of the room were television monitors, which just now were tuned to CNN, MSNBC, and two other twenty-four-hour news networks.
In one corner sat a large caged system with racks of tapes and storage disks housing samples of almost every computer bug extant, as well as Hudson Security's own proprietary designs — Zelda's 'unfair competitive advantage,' as she liked to say. Ideas and codes came from every source, acquired legitimately from libraries used by the international security industry, from hacking into government activities, and from stealing from some of the most creative elements of the hacker community.
Another system quietly hummed away in another corner, logging every network, computer, and software event seen by the SuperAegis contractor's own security systems. Algorithms would analyze those events without human involvement, searching for irregular activity, and setting off alarms when something was detected. Hundreds of thousands of these recorded events would eventually comprise the 'audit trail' for postevent analysis of security breaches and routine security assessments.
Electronically projected on a recently painted section of wall in front of the workstations were duplicates of the very displays watched by the targeted contractor's security managers, complete with the highlighted yellow and
