Razing Beijing: A Thriller (38 page)

Devinn looked down at the table, where the clutter of maps
and instructions were part of a larger plan he could only imagine. Rather than
being taken aback, he found his handler’s reaction intriguing. “I was thinking,
you could access your sources—”

“Are you out of your mind?” Lee’s expression darkened.

Devinn wondered why his handler should care a whit about
Stuart, except maybe as an irritating reminder of a blown operation? “It’s
possible that Stuart has been screwing the Asian woman all along,” Devinn
reported, choosing his words carefully.

Lee stared.

“If her secrets are his secrets, that would make
me—us—doubly vulnerable, particularly should the authorities decide to dig
deeper into my disappearance. I’m certain you agree it’s in our interest that
there be no trail linking us to their Mojave incident. Frankly, I don’t plan to
spend the rest of my days looking over my shoulder.” He had to be careful not
to overplay that risk. When it came to maintaining their own distance from the
risk of exposure, he suspected they would stop short of nothing.

“That won’t be necessary,” Lee assured him.

“Don’t you see—”

“This is really beyond your brief, Mr. Devinn. Already you
took it upon yourself to mishandle the matter of your agent, whose murder I had
to discover on my own. You convinced me that your haste was probably justified.
My workload in the wake of your bloody Rivergate fiasco still hasn’t...oh. You
might be interested to know something. The FBI
did
, in fact, determine
the location of the stolen Vandenberg launch data that you failed to extract
from Ahmadi.”

Devinn stared back at Lee. So the Iranian had been holding
out on him, after all. “Going forward, I’ll adjust my methods accordingly.”

“Now, it is true that you are paid to endure a certain
level of risk for our client, and our philosophy has been to defer to you as
the bearer of that risk an appropriate level of judgment. The fact remains that
we were right, and you turned out to be wrong, about the level of risk with
your execution of the Thanatech objective. But I cannot impress upon you
enough—I
insist
—do
not
overstep your mission. You will only make
matters worse by going after these people and inviting further scrutiny. I hate
to think of the consequences if we can no longer be confident in our mutual
trust. Do we understand one another?”

“I understand.”

“That’s good, because we’re going to be very busy in the
coming weeks.” Lee nodded toward the assortment of documents spread over the
table. “The same men are going to assist you again.”

“I’m a little worried about that.”

“Exactly what are you worried about?”

“Well, it has been awhile since we eliminated Ahmadi. You
seem convinced the codes and cutout procedures are still valid.”

“The security protocols work just fine.” Lee nodded
assuredly, his eyes dancing affectionately over the documents on the table.

“You seem certain of that.”

“I have put them to a little test. Had Tehran still been in
the loop, or somehow managed to re-establish them, Ahmadi’s network would not
have responded. You’re certain your calendar is clear?”

“Six weeks—I think I get it,” Devinn confirmed, having
already agreed to that twice.

THACKERAY GESTURED EMILY
CHANG
toward the thick stainless-steel door, already open to reveal
four, two-inch diameter slide bolts retracted into the door jam—a brass plate
displayed the name of a prominent vault manufacturer in York, Pennsylvania. He
smiled at Emily, who wondered what it was about her newly assigned project that
warranted so many safeguards. “I think you’ll understand when you see what’s
inside.”

Recessed into the wall beside the facility entrance, a
computer screen displayed in bright-blue characters the date and time along
with the indication that ‘79 occupants’ were currently admitted. Below the
screen and keyboard were viewing goggles and a touch screen.

Thackeray explained. “This thing simultaneously scans the
retina of your left eye and the digits of your right hand, while comparing the
features to those in our database. Hey, Stu, housed inside this baby is one of
your old argon LSU-2’s.”

“Magnifico,” said Stuart.

“You ought to be proud. We’ve shipped over a thousand of
’em.”

Emily asked, “Isn’t a retinal image alone impossible to
duplicate?”

“Actually, that’s all the original system featured. Then
the government sent people down to evaluate our security. DOE is sketchy about
it, but somewhere—Sandia National Lab, maybe? Guess it doesn’t matter. Some contractor’s
security system was compromised, and the breach apparently occurred within the
database. The solution is the redundancy you see here—two independent biometric
scans, each connected to an independent computer system installed and
maintained by separate contractors, one US and the other UK.”

“It’s funny that Perry never mentioned this,” Stuart observed.
“Sounds like expensive overkill.”

“It isn’t cheap. Each database provider has to comply with
verification that no common employment histories exist, such that no one person
can readily crack both architectures.”

“Impressive,” Emily said.

Stuart asked, “So do we use it or just admire it?”

Thackeray stooped slightly in order to engage the system; a
small red luminescent reticule appeared on his cheek and disappeared into his
eye as he drew his face against the rubber goggles. He also rested his open
hand on the touch screen. “It’s activated by pressing your forehead against the
pad,” Thackeray explained for Emily, “like this.”

The computer screen changed hue; the message ‘100%
complete’ coincided with an audible tone. The name ‘Thackeray, Milton, EN-381’
flashed onto the screen. A light above the door changed from red to green,
indicating admission approval; Thack stepped through the doorway past infra-red
scanners. The light above the door reverted to red.

Following Stuart and Thackeray through, Emily’s entrance took
a few extra minutes in order to log her into the system.

Stuart turned to Thackeray. “You mentioned to me the other
day something about extra security precautions. When was it that they came down
on us to implement this redundancy?”

“A little while ago.”

“Emily was born a little while ago. Can you please narrow it
down some?”

“We—” Thackeray cast a nervous glance toward Emily.

“Emily’s entitled to know as much as I am.”

“Perry’ll have my ass. Is that what you want?”

“If he doesn’t, I will.”

Thackeray let out a deep breath. “Perry’s freaked about
word getting out that CLI practices lax security and if you ask me, they blew
the whole damn thing way out of proportion. Chrissakes, we’re talking about one
suspicious incident, okay, one that we know about. The bureaucracy was bad
enough already. This all hit the fan at about the time we wrapped up work on that
Reedy boondoggle I was telling you about.”

“What suspicious incident?”

“We’re going to be late for the test.”

Stuart stared him down.

“Why don’t I just show you? Emily needs to know the vault
procedures any way.”

“Good.” Stuart frowned. “Another vault?”

Thackeray led the way down a wide corridor, explaining for Emily
as they walked that the project facility was comprised of four subterranean
levels, including the floor of the laboratory or ‘well’ where all of their
tests were conducted. Most of the work in the office areas was dedicated to the
tele-transportation project, the exception being a few engineers to support the
Satellite Telecom Services unit. They paused beside the glass wall of a room
where a videoconference was taking place, its participants flipping pages on
the table in front of them.

“Tell us more about the vault,” Stuart said.

Thackeray replied, “How much do you remember about the nuts
and bolts of writing proprietary software?”

Thackeray’s question prompted for Emily disturbing images
involving her effort to resurrect the damaged Thanatech engine control.
Sabotage...blackmail...murder...

Stuart cast her a knowing glance. “I’ve got the luxury of
surrounding myself with people smarter than me to take care of that.”

“Smarter people than you, huh? Could you please narrow that
down some?” Thackeray turned and led them into a large office area full of
shoulder-height cubicles. A few conversing employees paused mid-sentence as
they entered the room. “Everyone here, forty or so software engineers and
thirty-odd systems analysts, writes software for two of the five modules that
control the tele-transportation process, Exciter and Power Modulation. Between
sublevels four and three are six office areas just like this one. A total of one-hundred
ninety-seven software people, so the point is, CLI spends a lot every day to
write proprietary software. That investment of time and money has to be
protected. This way.”

They followed Thackeray down two flights of stairs; more
offices, another wide corridor to a single steel door. Stuart waited while Thackeray
shared the five-digit security code with Emily that he keyed into the cypher
pad. They stepped through the doorway into chill, clean air—not antiseptic
clean, as in sterile, but electrical clean as in ozone and sublimated plastic. The
powerful hum of supercomputers filled their ears.

Thackeray noticed Emily rubbing her arms. “We keep it a
steady sixteen centigrade in here.” The reason for that, he explained, was to
control the environment for the multiprocessing, refrigerator-sized IBM / Sun
servers—eighty-two of their most powerful—delivering up to 5 quintillion
calculations per second. Three-hundred miles of fiber-optic cable snaked
beneath the recessed tile floor connecting them all. Operating the
supercomputer required that CLI maintain its own 20-megawatt power station and emergency
back-up; cooling provided by six 1000-ton industrial chillers had the capacity
to air condition an entire 90-story office building. “By the way, five exaFLOPS
ranks this baby among the top three fastest computers in the world.”

Stuart asked him, “Whose rank first and second?”

Emily flashed him a teasing smile. “China has both top
slots, of course.”

Thackeray rolled his eyes and led them to a tall cabinet
housing an assortment of drive access doors and flat-screen displays. He jabbed
his thumb over his shoulder and raised his voice above the buzzing drone. “All
our daily product runs through the console you see here. During the day the software’s
written in ‘source code,’ then we back-up all of it by running it through this
machine.” He looked at Stuart. “Do you have any idea what source code is?”

“What’s this got to do with the vault?” Stuart asked.

“I’m getting to the vault.”

“Weren’t you worried about missing the test?”

“This is actually important. Come 6 o’clock, and depending
on the day of the week, we conduct either a full or incremental back-up of the day’s
work onto tape drive cartridges. These represent the latest revision of the
project’s executable object code. Usually I and another guy take the cartridges
downstairs to the fireproof vault on sublevel four, where we each enter a
code—”

“We were just down there.” Stuart shook his head.

Emily cast him a frown. “You’re making him nervous.”

“That’ll be the day. What are we paying data operators to
do while you gopher this stuff around?”

“You’ll have to ask the FBI boys who helped revise the
procedure. Anyway, each night—”

“FBI? What are you talking about?”

Thackeray began tugging absently on his beard.

“Exactly what happened here?”

“Somebody screwed up,” Thackeray finally admitted. “And for
once we actually had to restore the previous day’s modules with back-up copy. Low
and behold, the cartridges from the vault were
blank
—the back-ups were
blank! We’d lost two or three days worth of work. But can’t you see how
something like that could happen? All we did was somehow mix up the data
cartridges with blanks. They all look alike. Anybody can get blanks from office
stores. Okay—it was sloppy. We had to report what happened to security. One of
the Boy Scouts up there called in the FBI. ‘Procedural protocol,’ this illiterate
snipe kept whining. Perry just exploded, went utterly freekin’ berserk. He
demanded that the FBI be discreet. I guess we raised a few eyebrows at DOE.

“So, what’s the FBI do but bring in some pricey D.C.
consultants—greenhorn, pointy-headed nit-picks who didn’t really know anything.
They sat down and created this big goddamn laundry list of procedures I’ve been
leading you through. All we ever used to do was back-up a copy of the raw
source code.”

“Without first compiling all the modules into object code?”
Emily asked Thackeray. “Couldn’t you back-up both?”

“Maybe.” Thackeray’s expression soured. “Some good did come
out of the exercise. The full source code, uncompiled, filled up a dozen
cartridges. We got that down to five, plus we get sort of a daily quality
check. But the
bureaucracy...
Do you mind not telling Perry where you
heard this? Better yet, tell him you heard it from Reedy.”

Stuart was perturbed by the whole arrangement. “Somebody’s
been pilfering software, is that what they think?”

“If Perry thinks so, he will never admit it. And I sure
don’t think so. Perry’s worried about the way it could make the company look.”

“How would someone get the cartridge past the metal
detectors?” Emily asked. “Won’t they set off the alarm?”