The Zero Hour

Sarah strode to the phone. “Yes? Alex, I’m in a-Uh huh… I don’t understand, what do you mean he called it in himself?… All right.”

She hung up and turned to the three FBI men, who had been watching her throughout the conversation.

“That was Alex Pappas. Roth got a call from NYPD Homicide. They located a body in a drainage tunnel under the streets in the Wall Street area. The victim seems to be the guy who planted the computer virus in the Manhattan Bank.”

“Baumann?” Whitman gasped.

“Some guy Baumann hired, a computer-hacker type.”

Walsh sat bolt upright. “How do you know this?”

“Seems the victim had had a call put in to 911 after his death.”

“The hell you talking about, Agent Cahill?” Walsh thundered.

“It’s complicated. Seems this computer guy was afraid he’d be knocked off. Had some tape recorder call 911 with a report of his own homicide. I didn’t quite follow. The point is-”

“Is this for real?” Whitman said.

“Apparently so. An emergency-medical team and some guys from the fire department went down in the tunnels and found a body. Homicide and some of our people are on their way over to the victim’s apartment right now.”

CHAPTER EIGHTY-TWO

Ken Alton examined the computer equipment at Leo Krasner’s apartment with the admiration of a fellow hacker. He whistled. The guy had a nice Macintosh Duo with a docking station for a removable Powerbook, a couple of enormous Apple color screens, an IBM with a Pentium processor, and a SPARC-20 Unix-based workstation, all networked together. There was also a new 1,200-d.p.i. color PostScript printer and a Xerox color scanner.

Jesus, there was even an alpha-test prototype from the Hewlett-Packard/Intel/Sun consortium, the HPIS-35. This was a scientific workstation containing a network of five high-performance RISC processors in the SPARC/Pentium family, plus three gallium-arsenide multiprocessors from HP Labs.

Very cool.

He tried to access the HPIS-35 and the SPARC-20, but a password was necessary-of course. He said, “Shit,” got to his feet, and lumbered around the apartment.

“What?” Roth asked.

Ken ignored him. He wandered around, thinking.

In the bedroom, on the nightstand, Ken found a palm-top computer. And he knew he had the problem solved.

The palm-top could be connected to the workstation by means of a spread-spectrum link. In other words, the guy could use his palm-top in the bedroom to do stuff on the workstation in the living room. And of course there was a protocol built into it that accessed the workstation by giving the password. This was for easy access.

Even geniuses got lazy once in a while, Ken knew.

Quickly he listed the files on each machine. Some of the documents looked potentially interesting, but then, on the SPARC, he came across a couple of intriguing files, intriguing because they each had a JPEG extension. JPEG was a standardized image-compression mechanism, so named for the committee that wrote the standard, the Joint Photographic Experts Group. Each file with a JPEG extension was around 39K in size, just about the right size for a good-quality black-and-white photograph, but probably not big enough for color.

Ah, Ken thought. Hence the scanner. All you do is run a photo through the scanner, which stores the image in either color or in a gray-scale. A black-and-white photo is broken down into particles, or pixels, each of which is assigned a gray-scale value between 1 and 256. The JPEG program takes this big hunk of data and identifies the redundancies in it and then compresses it. So you end up with a computer file, a binary file, a bunch of ones and zeroes. The compression certainly isn’t perfect-it’s “lossy,” as the techies call it-but it has the advantage of making extremely small files if you use the default quality setting.

Ken didn’t know exactly how JPEG worked-you heard buzz phrases like discrete cosine transforms, chrominance subsampling, and coefficient quantization-but he knew how to use it. That was all that counted.

Well, he mused, if he’s storing images, he’s got to have a display program on here, something that will grab the image and convert it, an interactive image-manipulation and display program.

He typed “xv brit.jpeg &” and hit enter. This was the command for a common display program.

“Whaddaya got there?” Roth asked, standing over Ken’s shoulder.

“We’ll see…” Ken said.

In a few seconds the screen was filled with a high-resolution photographic image of a man, a dark-haired, dark-eyed, ruggedly handsome man of around forty. Though the picture seemed to have been taken with a long lens in some kind of public place, a restaurant or something, the man’s face was perfectly clear.

“Is that the dead guy?” Roth asked.

“No,” Ken said. “Leo Krasner’s tape-recorded message to 911 said he had a picture of the man who had hired him. This has got to be one of the pictures in question.”

“Who is-?”

“I think it’s Baumann.”