The Enemy Within

This claim was immediately backed up by several electronics and computer experts. In the blink of an eye, the phone company went from villain to victim. The news also transformed the ongoing catastrophe from an unavoidable act of God to an act of deliberate, calculated terror.

The final piece of the ABC News Special was an interview with Senator George Roland, one of the few survivors of the National Press Club bombing. Since the attack, Roland had acquired immense standing, and he used every ounce of it in making his points.

“There is no doubt that these terrorists are bent on destroying American society. The government can no longer deny that these attacks are part of a larger plan. Unless the administration acts swiftly, strongly, and positively, our nation may not survive.”

No one disagreed.

NOVEMBER 30 Midwest Telephone’s primary operations

With Jim Johnston standing next to her, Maggie Kosinski dialed the boss’s number. Light-headed, almost shaking with fatigue and excitement, she hit the last digit and then looked again at the diskette on her desk. The label read simply

“Alpha Virus.”

An urgent, pleading voice answered on the first ring. “Yes?”

“This is Kosinski in Operations,” she announced. “We’ve got it!”

“Hang on.”

After a short pause, she heard, “This is Taylor.” Midwest Telephone’s CEO sounded almost as tired as she did, almost as tired as they all were. Nobody had gotten much sleep in the past three days.

Kosinski forced herself to speak calmly and distinctly. “We’ve confirmed our initial diagnosis, sir. We were able to track down the virus and its source, and we’ve started a reboot. The whole system will be back on-line in forty-five minutes.”

“Thank God!” Taylor breathed. His voice sharpened. “Where was the damned thing hidden?”

Kosinski prodded the diskette on her desk with a pen. She didn’t even want to touch it with her bare hands. “In one of our printers, sir.”

“What?!”

She explained further. “Some clever bastard hid the virus inside our laser printer ROM chip piggybacked onto its normal code in several pieces. Every time we rebooted, it would reassemble the pieces and reinfect the system from scratch.” She shook her head at the vicious intelligence behind the attack, half in unwilling admiration and half in anger. “We got lucky or we’d probably still be looking for it. One of my techs turned the printer off to clear a paper jam and forgot to turn it back on. While it was off, we rebooted the system again and everything started to come back online. But as soon as we powered up the printer, the virus reappeared.”

“Good God!” Taylor exclaimed. He hesitated. “Have you discovered any more nasty surprises lurking out there?”

“Yes, sir.” Kosinski’s lips thinned. “We found the same type of altered ROM chip in every switching center’s printer. They’d all been serviced in the past two months.”

“Son of a bitch.”

“Yeah.” Kosinski prodded the diskette on her desk again. “This is no virus I’ve ever seen or heard of, sir. I’ve already passed the ROM chip we found here to the FBI and the Computer Emergency Response Team. It’s their baby now.”

Personally, she wished them luck. Virusland was a mysterious and spooky place, full of secrecy and strange personalities. It took a special kind of weirdo, she thought, to write a program that deliberately fouled up a computer.

And someone out there, some terrorist, had gone straight to the top of a very twisted bunch to find this little gem.

CHAPTER 19 BACKLASH

DECEMBER 2

Falls Church, northern Virginia.

Helen Gray fought off the last clinging tendrils of a nightmare and woke up, suddenly aware that she was all alone in the rumpled bed. She opened her eyes. The glowing digits on his bedside clock read 1:41 A.M. Where had Peter gone?

She pushed herself upright and looked around the room. The lights were off, but her eyes were adjusted to the darkness. Her lips curved upward in a smile as she noticed the pieces of clothing strewn across the floor from the half-open door all the way over to the bed. Someday she and Peter Thorn were going to have to learn to set a somewhat slower, less frantic pace in their lovemaking.

But not now. After weeks of strain and enforced separation, neither of them could have been expected to restrain themselves for very long. And they hadn’t.

With her section on a twelve-hour stand-down, Helen had driven straight to Peter’s town house. She remembered falling into his arms as soon as he opened the front door. Her memories after that were a tangled mix of roving hands, parted lips, motion, warmth, and finally, a swelling, crashing wave of sheer ecstasy.

Sleep had come after a welcome slide into restful oblivion that had been broken only by an old nightmare from her childhood. A nightmare of being hunted through an endless maze of narrow, dead-end corridors and impossible turnings. It was an evil dream that had come back to haunt her in these past several weeks as she and her fellow FBI agents grappled with their faceless, nameless foes.