Death of Secrets (24 page)

She nodded, and turned the box on. The boot up process was
slow, but finally the desktop appeared – a simple flat color with no fancy
pictures or themes. She checked the menu of recently used applications, from
that determined which icon belonged to the TR system, and clicked it.

A window opened up on the screen. Nathan watched in fascination
as text began to scroll down. Having seen it before, Kathy was already
accustomed to the lack of punctuation and grammar in the TR output.

>Self-test completed; all results within norms.

>Listening on port 110101

>Subject COLLEEN CHRISTINA reacquired; identified from file.

>Subject MICHAEL VINCENT reacquired; identified from file.

>Subject KATHERINE KELVER reacquired; identified from file.

>Six other subjects acquired.

>Identified input from subject four: "It can't really
be what she thinks."

>Identified input from subject MICHAEL VINCENT: "I
wonder if Nathan will help me keep this out of the press."

>Subject six feels annoyance with individuals to right.

> Identified input from subject MICHAEL VINCENT: "Oops,
I forgot."

>Subject nine expresses interest in object to front.

>Identified input from subject COLLEEN CHRISTINA: "See
director jacobs? Thought recognition."

>Subject four self identifies as NATHAN JACOBS

> Subject NATHAN JACOBS feels awe.

>Subject NATHAN JACOBS feels disbelief.

>Identified input from subject MICHAEL VINCENT: "How
can you not think of anything it's like impossible things always rush in oops
don't think about kathy pink elephant pink elephant pink elephant pink
elephant"

>Laughter from subject KATHERINE KELVER.

>Identified input from subject COLLEEN CHRISTINA:
"think a complete sentence director and watch it appear on screen."

>Subject nine feels boredom.

>Uncatalogued input from subject six, sexual in nature.

>Identified input from subject NATHAN JACOBS: "test
thought for thought recognition system does this come through my mother's
maiden name is Weiss."

***

"I don’t believe it," Nathan breathed aloud.

"My thoughts exactly," Colleen replied with more than
just a touch of irony. She nodded to the screen, where ">Subject NATHAN
JACOBS says aloud: "I don’t believe it." showed up loud and clear.

"Shut that thing off," Jacobs said, backing away.
"What's it's range?"

Colleen closed the window. "I don't know its exact range,
but it picked Jakarta up while he was walking down the hall. That's how we
escaped, we were in here when he came after us."

Kathy grinned at Mike. "What's with that pink elephant
stuff, anyway?"

Mike ran his hand over his head, and took a deep breath.
"That thing is just morally wrong," he said. "When I was a kid,
I remember someone telling me that it was impossible to
not
think of
pink elephants if you were told not to think of pink elephants. That whole
thing just came back to me and I kept thinking about pink elephants to keep
myself from thinking something embarrassing."

Kathy laughed. "Controlling your thoughts is a lot harder
than you'd think, huh?"

Mike nodded ruefully.

Colleen turned to Jacobs. "You see, Director? It’s not
some hare-brained science fiction scheme. It’s real."

Jacobs nodded but didn't speak. He just licked his lips and
tried to take stock of what he’d just seen. Finally he said, "I’m torn
between awe at the skill it took to make it and fear of what that thing could
mean on the open market."

"Right," Michael agreed. "This stuff is
ridiculously Orwellian. I mean, what possible justification could there be for
invading people’s thoughts like this?"

Nathan replied, "Well, I
can
see valid uses for it.
As Colleen said, thought recognition would be a real breakthrough for a
computer operating system. It could help people with injuries or disabilities
too. And I won’t deny if would make intelligence-gathering way easier. But …
Well, whoever did that was never planning on defending it in court. Mike, can
you imagine the political firestorm if the NSA admitted to having this kind of
technology? It’d make the meta-data scandal look like a press release."

The Congressman grunted. "I’d have to hire a whole second
staff just to keep the mailbox from getting jammed."

"But still," Nathan mused. "Being a bit of a
geek myself, I can’t help but marvel at the technological achievement. Did you
guys find any schematics around here, that he used to design this?"

Colleen nodded. "He used EG's design, we got it from the
flash drive. Here, I’ll print up another copy." She opened Jakarta’s
decoded files from the flash drive, and sent the diagram to the printer. A few
seconds later, Nathan was tugging at the page, trying to get it out and
readable quicker. For a few moments, all he did was look.

When he finally did speak, it was only a whisper, as if someone
had punched his gut and knocked all the wind out of him. "That answers the
motive question."

"What’s that, Nate?" Mike asked. Kathy leaned
forward, trying to hear.

"I said, that answers the motive question."

"Whaddaya mean?" Colleen asked.

"Well, I kept asking myself," Nathan said. "If
you had technology like this, why give it to the NSA? I mean, GigaStar is an
NSA project, right? So if you’re Jakarta and you’ve got this kind of
capability, why just hand it over to us? At the very least, he should have been
trying to charge an arm and a leg."

"But it’s not Jakarta’s idea, it’s Electron Guidewire who
designed the thing…" Colleen interjected.

"I’m not so sure," Nathan replied. "You see,
this diagram you’ve shown me has one very important difference from EG's
diagrams. I saw them when they were pitching the project to us, and I would
have seen something like this."

"What?" Colleen, Kathy and Mike spoke almost in
unison.

"It broadcasts on two frequencies instead of one."

"What do you mean?" Mike asked. But Colleen's eyes
had gone as wide as saucers.

Nathan explained. "Well, GigaStar is supposed to be a wireless
network traffic monitor right? We plant it where it can monitor a network, and
it sends the information to us at a remote receiver, right? Sending the data to
us at the remote location requires it to broadcast the data, essentially just
like a radio station. Of course, the frequency is totally different than the
public radio spectrum, and it’s encrypted, but basically it has to broadcast.
But this thing broadcasts twice. It sends one signal, just as we’re expecting,
on the frequency that we’d be listening on for our surveillance. But there’s
also a totally separate frequency."

"So?"

"So when we use the GigaStar for surveillance, someone
else could be listening."

Kathy nodded. "I get it. So you put a wire tap on some
criminal’s network, and hear what they talk about. But not only do you hear,
someone else hears too."

Nathan nodded. "Exactly. And looking at this diagram, it
looks like the second frequency would only be broadcasting the TR input."
He paused to laugh. "This thing is brilliant. Unless we went specifically
looking for it, we’d never have found this. And since the TR input only goes to
the second frequency, we’d never have known we had anything but an ordinary
wiretap. Our old friend Jakarta is slick!"

Colleen disagreed. "Except for one little problem. Jakarta
didn’t do this, Electron Guidewire did. Hugh never meant for you to have it. He
sabotaged the code so it would
never
work for the NSA. I sat right here
and watched him do it."

Nathan’s eyes widened. "Really?"

Colleen nodded. "I keep telling you, those corporate
sharks at EG are the ones responsible for this, not Jakarta."

Jacobs took his time replying. "Miss Christina, I'm going
to be right up front with you. I want to know why – after he tried to kidnap
your friend Kathy and lied to you about wanting to destroy this TR technology
when he was actually building it – you're so willing to trust Jakarta's story
here."

Nathan took his hands out of his pockets and gestured at the
thought reading box. "Look at that. That's not an Electron Guidewire
design. It's clunky, big, and sloppy. EG is on the cutting edge of
miniaturization."

Colleen interrupted. "Jakarta’s people had to improvise –
they don't have the facilities here to build on that small scale. It's EG's
design, but built on a different scale."

"What makes you so sure it's EG's design? Look, EG called
me and reported an electronic break-in earlier tonight. They said someone had
broken into their system and possibly been corrupting their code – making
unauthorized changes in their software. Jakarta’s a known criminal, and also
known to be very good at what he does. What makes you so sure it wasn’t him
that put this into their product, in some kind of attempt to corrupt NSA
surveillance activities?"

"That’s crazy! If he had this technology on his own, why
would he even bother sneaking it into the NSA’s wiretapping technology? Why not
just set one up on the floor of the stock exchange and start making
money?"

"Ah, but how does he get it to the stock exchange,"
Jacobs replied. "The model you see here is bulky and very difficult to
conceal, not to mention being tied to a PC by a wire. But if he could sneak it
into EG's project and from there to us, well, it’s not out of the question that
we might have to monitor the stock exchange, so suddenly he’s got his little
mind reader spying on every trader on the floor."

"But that doesn’t change the fact that he deliberately
sabotaged the EG code, so it wouldn't work for you. So obviously he can’t have
been planning what you’re saying."

Jacobs nodded slowly. "Yeah, that is an issue. OK, what,
exactly did he do?"

Colleen looked at him suspiciously. "What, so you can undo
it and use this little contraption to spy on people?"

Mike shifted uncomfortably from foot to foot. The growing
disagreement between Colleen and his friend put him in an awkward position. He
had to admit, it was a lot easier to believe that Jakarta did all this than to
suspect Tilman, one of his oldest friends. But on the other hand, Colleen had
been right there.

Nathan sighed. "Miss Christina, look. I’ve been helping
your friends through this whole thing. I personally helped them dodge a tail
and get away from Mike’s office. You have to trust me at least a little bit, or
we’re never going to get anywhere."

She hemmed and hawed for a moment before going on. "Well,
he got into EG's source code for the program that interprets the input from the
GigaStar, and put in a little Easter egg. If he doesn’t log in every 24 hours
and enter a password, the Easter egg fatally corrupts the source code."

Jacobs’ eyes widened. "I see! So in actual fact, he didn’t
sabotage it. He left it running, but gave himself the power to stop it at any
time. Miss Christina, honestly, does that sound like someone who wanted to
prevent the NSA from getting this, or someone who wanted to sneak it in under
our noses?"

Colleen's eyes flared, but she didn’t answer right away. Then
she blurted out, "No, wait, he said it guaranteed that the NSA’s copy
would never work, because he couldn’t get into your system to enter the
password. So he could keep it working as long as only EG had it, so they
wouldn’t know their code had been corrupted, but as soon as they passed it on
to you, boom, it self-destructs."

Jacobs nodded. "I suppose he didn’t tell you that he’s
hacked us once before, did he? So when he tried to tell you he couldn’t hack
the NSA…" Nathan let the thought sit there unfinished. The conclusion was
obvious. Jakarta lied – again.

Colleen didn’t have an answer for that. But she didn’t buy
Nathan’s interpretation either. She turned away and stared out the window.

Jacobs shrugged. "Look, I’m not saying there won’t be an
investigation. There will. But Tilman is a decent guy. Let’s not go around
smearing his reputation before we…" His cell phone rang.

Jacobs muttered and started slapping pockets on his coat until
he found the phone. He clicked it on and heard Detective Franken’s voice.

Kathy listened to the part of the conversation she could hear
with mounting alarm. "Oh, yeah, I completely forgot… OK, Detective
Franken. I can be there… Yeah, I’ve got a lot of new information for you. Sit
tight and we can discuss it."

As soon as Jacobs hung up, Kathy got his attention. "Did I
hear you say Franken?"

"Yeah, why?"

"Um… there’s something you should know before you go talk
to him," she said.

Jacobs raised his eyebrows.

"Well, he seems to think I’m up to something here. I’m
not, all I was trying to do was find out about the flash drive without getting
Mike in trouble with the police, but because of that I didn’t always tell him
everything, and I think that made him suspicious of me."

Jacobs chuckled. "Oh, he’s interested all right. You have
no idea. But don’t worry, I’ll set him straight. While I’m gone, I’m sure it’d
make the FBI field agents rest a lot easier if you guys would clear out of the
crime scene while they investigate."

The woman who’d spoken to them earlier nodded vigorously as she
passed by, and Colleen reluctantly rose from the chair. Mike said, "I
guess we can see if there’s a coffee shop nearby."

***

They didn't find a coffee shop. In fact they barely walked far
enough down the street to be out of hearing range of the FBI agents swarming
over Jakarta's apartment complex. But that was all the further Colleen could go
before spitting out, "That arrogant, know-it-all jerk! If they ever want
me to give a statement for evidence, they’re going to hear some things!"

Kathy took her friend's hand as Colleen led them around the
corner of the building, away from the street. "Why does it make you so
mad, them trying to pin the whole thing on Jakarta? You saw what he did to us.
He held a gun on me!"