Unpopular Science

Chiun colored, his green eyes flashing like an angry child’s eyes. “Do you have a reason for insulting me or is this simply your form of in-flight entertainment?”

“What do you think? You are old, Chiun. It’s stupid to dance around it.”

“I am in full possession of my faculties!”

“I didn’t say you were infirm. You’re a Master of Sinanju in your prime. But you are not as strong as I am, and I almost got my brain drained today. The only reason you survived is because you kept your distance.”

“Now you label me a coward?” Chiun hissed, but without conviction.

“I am saying you were smart enough not to go walking into a fight you could not win,” Remo said. “Chiun…”

“Yes?” Chiun demanded, his curiosity evident.

“Chiun,” Remo said at last, “whatever this is, it is not a rock.”

Chiun’s face clouded, then he understood, and he hissed like a snake.

Chapter 27

The President of the United States of America had a killer headache. It wasn’t about to get any better and he knew it. He was watching the clock on the small display on his desk telephone, a small titanium device supplied by the Department of Defense and said to be bug proof and EM-blast proof. The phone clock was synchronized automatically by the U.S. Navy’s atomic clock, which was said to be the global standard for time-keeping. The President didn’t know why the fighting folks needed a clock that was that precise and he didn’t want to ask. He hated having technology explained to him. He wasn’t stupid, but he had a hard time listening to techno-rambling or electro-babble or whatever they called that kind of talk.

He was about to get an earful of it and he was not looking forward to it.

The whizzing hundredths of a second closed in on the top of the hour. When the time came he would get a phone call. The call would not be late. The President would be mildly disappointed if the call was late.

At 08:59:57:96 the phone rang and the President was startled, which was silly—it wasn’t as if the caller was sitting there staring at the atomic clock. Was he? The caller was just maniacally punctual. Right?

He grabbed the phone. Not the titanium one, but the bright red one with the dedicated line.

“Good morning, Mr. Smith.”

“Mr. President,” Smith replied.

“How is everything out your way?”

“Our enforcement arm has arrived on-site with the ill-advised accompaniment of the victim of the attack. She will be contained. The threat to my assistant and my enforcement arm remains—”

“I wasn’t asking for a debriefing, Smith ” the President growled. “I was saying hello.”

There was a wait, then Smith said, “I see. Hello, Mr. President.”

The President should have known it was a waste of time to try to engage the head of CURE in small talk. But the President thought of himself as a people person, a down-to-earth man, who liked to get to know human beings on a personal level. The whole official side of being President was just a little too dry, too official. What was the harm in loosening things up a little?

But not with Smith. Never with Smith.

“Okay, then, give me the debriefing.”

“Yes, sir,” Smith said with respect but without a hint of deprecation. “As you know, the recent technology thefts from our military operations have severely undermined our superiority in military security and offensive automation systems.”

“Not yet they haven’t,” the President corrected him. “Only if the blueprints are distributed.”

“Most of the systems will be distributed in the form of CAD files. That’s Computer-Aided Design.”

“I know what CAD means.”

“CAD files can be sent electronically. In all likelihood, the party that has come into possession of those files will have stored encrypted copies in multiple sites around the world. Retrieving them all successfully would be highly unlikely, even if we apprehended the perpetrator and received his cooperation.”

“But it could happen,” the President said, yanking the desk drawer open and finding it entirely empty. Would it hurt to keep a bottle of Tylenol in the Oval Office?

“Regardless, it would be foolish to have confidence that we had, in fact, retrieved all copies. Servers of all types automatically duplicated their stored data remotely, for replacement in case of catastrophic failure such as fire or flood. Those copies sit on servers that might then make remote copies. At any point in the process, data mining software of various benign and malicious types can channel the data elsewhere for other uses.”

“All right. Smith.”

‘I think it is safe to say that, at the moment that the data escaped our control, we could never again expect to have it fully under our control.”

“Yes. Yes. Hold on.”

The President stabbed a button on the titanium phone, but he squeezed his eyes shut at that moment. He hit the wrong button. It wasn’t his office assistant who answered.

“Yes, Mr. President?” said an alarmed British man.

“Ah, I’m sorry, Mr. Prime Minister. Hit the wrong button.”

There was an exasperated sigh. “Again?”

“I said I was sorry.”