The Celestial Instructi0n (14 page)

Joex thanked him and bowed deeply to the delighted
boys. He watched the truck drive off, raising a modest plume of dust as it
re-entered the Interstate. It was hot for a spring day and looked around for
shade. To the south there was a briny lake surrounded by a salt berm and a
machine that looked like a narrow harvesting machine parked between him and the
lake. Refreshed by the sandwich he thought it prudent to continue, to at least be
somewhere peopled with the blended advantage of protective coloration from
spying eyes. He spied a loose newspaper page caught on a tussock; he could fold
it into a hat if he could remember how. Fold down the corners, but leave a thin
bottom edge to fold up. Both sides. Pop it open, put on head. A shade!

Joex could not get a ride. There was not a problem
with the traffic, which was moderate. Nor anything wrong with his technique that
he could think of. Rule one: make it clear you want a ride. A thumb out, stand
by the road, stare at the drivers, all those were pretty clear. Rule two: make them
happy. Usually a big smile—no matter how crappy or tired or hungry or sunburned
you were—worked fine. Here, he melodramatically mimed and jumped and twisted
and twitched to play the pratfall and the fool; anything to keep them from
thinking “deviant murderer.” Nothing this afternoon worked. He even cocked his
newspaper hat sideways and mimed a Napoleon with one hand stuck to his belly
and the other hand stretched out, fluttering. Or he became a roadside Angel
Moroni, summoning the traveler with an invisible horn. The drivers passed, eyes
locked in front of them.

At the first reddening of sunset, Joex retreated
from the road and sat down in the dappling shade of the harvester machine,
looking out over the shimmering shallow lake—more a briny pond, he realized. He
took off his hat and wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. He unfolded
the paper and began to read it before it got too dark. Nothing out of the usual;
the world had no inkling of Joex’s hunt. A darter waiting for the hawk, or a
blinded rat hearing the silky approach of the python. In the world of high-tech
thievery, he saw the coarse wire photo of a an alleged Chinese spy caught
delivering massive quantities of technical information to email addresses
traced to servers in Beijing. The photo was hard to make out. It showed an
Asian-looking man about as old as Joex in three-quarters pose with the hand of
a bald Special Agent clamped on his shoulder. A Mr. Rui Bao. A citizen by
birth, the article alleged that his mother a Chinese national (deported to
China) had come to the United States specifically to give birth. The article
was well-prepared, probably sourced from a FBI press release. Bao was accused
of being a spy for decades. It listed the companies he had worked for along
with denials of lax security by their spokespeople. One of the companies was
Mooneye, Inc. That caught his eye. Interesting, I wonder if I knew him when I
was there. Joex studied the photo in the waning light.

He looked familiar, but it was hard to tell. What
was that guy’s name? He had worked with one other person in the new lab Mooneye
had created for its first Internetwork switch. But this more than twenty years
ago. He and that other engineer wrote one of very first Internetwork operating
system stacks for the switch, a box the size of a microwave with racks of
cables going in and out. Its job was to keep track of all the Internet
addresses it was connected to, to minimize the time taken to both switch from
one to another as needed, and to minimize the overhead of transferring data
from one cable to another. Joex had been assigned by (what was his name? It
wasn’t “Riu Bao,” it was just a regular American name) to handle the address
cache. He remembered he found a way of changing the quick hash association to
an even faster radix one. One comparison most of the time rather than two or
more. Doesn’t sound like much except times ten million. I remembered
what-was-his-name had bragged about using a system error trap rather than a
comparison to an end-point to tell him when he finished traversing a link list.
When the system interrupted him with an “executing in data area” error, he knew
that the traversal was finished, popped the error off the stack and restarted
the routine. It had seemed so anti-good programming, even though the firmware
was intended to be burned once, frozen into read-only memory. Cast in ROM,
there was no chance that this trick would come undone by another programmer.
Compared to his memory of people, his technical memory was remarkable.

What was his name? Robert-something? It was like two
first names together. Like Robert Mark or Robert Mike.

Then the article said it at its end: “Rui Bao, who
had reverted his name to his Chinese family name, was listed on his birth
certificate as ‘Robert Marks.’ In a press release from the Portland Bureau of
the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Riu Bao is described a ‘citizen of the
United States in name only: he had been groomed from birth with the specific
task of stealing US technology for the fledgling Chinese telecommunications
sector.’ Neither his mother could found nor was there any specific comment from
Chinese officials, who asserted they had no need for American secrets, as their
technology led the world.”

“Wow.
I worked with a Chinese spy,” Joex thought. But what secrets could he steal in
our switch project? We had no idea of it eventual importance throughout the
Internet. And we were the creators of the code. There weren’t anyone else’s
secrets that could be pilfered, by Robert or myself. We went days in the lab
without even seeing anyone else. The project itself was a modest success. The
first Mooneye Internetwork switch was popular—if expensive—but soon had to deal
with a flood of competitors. There were allegations of trade secret theft by
others, but never an accusation that any of us were the thieves; we had
invented the technology. Now that ancient technology had been swallowed up by
switches that could handle names instead of numbers, arbitrary subnets, and
could handle a thousand times greater Internet traffic at half the power outlay.

Joex
considered this, but wondered why a spy would be involved in a project that had
no secrets to steal? Rather a waste of time if he had been a secret mole for
the Chinese during this time. It would have been more of a benefit to have
repatriated him and just have him lead up a design team in China. Of course,
few predicted that the Internet and its electronic infrastructure would grow so
explosively, or achieve such a pervasive, global reach. Other than the sheer
bandwidth of fiber optic cable linking together Internet centers, the key hardware,
which assured the Internet performance, was the Internetwork switch. Unlike a
pure hardware device, the successor to Baroco’s and Marks’ simple device could
handle switching, firewall and denial-of-service attacks, and shape traffic in
one rackable box. Major Internet hubs had dozens of such switches, each costing
upwards of a hundred thousand dollars, not including service contracts and
interface racks. If the giant server farms of Google and other major Internet
services, which required proximity to major sources of power and cooling such
as hydroelectric dams just to keep working day to day, were the basic memory
cells of the Internet, the medulla cortex of these cells were the switches;
they mediated the transactions, routing the queries in and the results out, or
bundled together the differing aspects of a complete financial transaction.
Joex relived this technical history with a flush of pride that he had not felt
for many years, certainly not since he had left Mooneye and had become
homeless. But that was past. The flare and asphyxiation of a match.

It
was the edge of twilight. A worker had come out in a pickup and was maneuvering
a backhoe near edge of the salt berm. He ignored Joex and cut a channel in the
berm, then another cut a few feet adjacent to the first. The brackish water was
draining out of the pond; its rate picked up speed as it washed out the
intervening slice of salty soil between the two cuts. The wind was picking up.
The pond was draining.

Joex
looked at the emptying pond and, as quietly as the building stream eroded its
boundaries, an idea about Riu (or Marks) struck him. It was just a theory.
Probably the Games Machine just rousing his imagination. It could be easily
disproved. But it would explain everything. And it became more compelling and
more shocking the more he thought about it. He had to get to the FBI right now.

Ignoring
his sore legs he ran stiffly up to the Interstate and waved and smiled and
acted like the happiest man in the world. In a sense he was, for he was
beginning to realize why he needed to be killed. The worker who used the
backhoe gave him a ride into the city.

“Rauchmann.”
The Assistant United State Attorney didn’t like being disturbed at home,
especially on the secure line.

“Langley
here,” I just got a call from the Salt Lake City field office; they claim to
have a walk-in who has information about the Riu Bao arrest. He says he was a
co-worker of Riu’s in Silicon Valley twenty years ago.”

“Can’t
this wait until morning? Riu’s in custody, we’ve got the Grand Jury complaint
before the Judge. Why not just have this guy—whoever he is—contact me tomorrow
morning.” Rauchmann adjusted the underwear under his robe.

“This
guy says he knows more about Riu’s spying than we suspect. He says that he
thinks Riu wasn’t here just to steal secrets. And he says that the Church of
the Crux is involved. And that it could be a “bigger Chinese plot.” And one
more thing. That guy is homeless and says agents of the Church of the Crux are
after him to kill him.”

Rauchmann
felt a prickle of alarm over his hips. “You are wasting my time with this shit?
Come on, Mark. This is loony tunes stuff. Just get his name and rehab flophouse
or whatever and well get back in touch with him. Just why are you bothering me
with this crap?”

“Jim,
the Special Agent in Charge of SLC said the guy knows his stuff. He was quoting
all kinds of stuff about the Internet and routing and switches. And his prints
are a hit in the DOD SC database.”

Rauchmann
considered this for a moment. He needed to stretch his shoulder blades back.
Maybe it would be wise to consult his client, just in case.

“O.K.,
I’ll contact the SLC SAIC and listen to his story. Thanks Mark. Goodnight.” Rauchmann
hung up. Probably was just a nut who saw the arrest on Fox. Doing his civic
duty as a patriot and counterspy, sure. On the other hand, his personal stakes
are too high right now to screw anything up. He looked up the field office for
Salt Lake City and let the operator transfer him.

“Special
Agent in Charge Hamblin,” said the voice from the telephone.

“Special
Agent in Charge Hamblin.”

Joex
had an uncomfortable wooden chair in the office of the Salt Lake City Special
Agent who habitually stayed late to get more work done. More than one Special
Agent confused an unhappy marriage with job ambition.

“Pardon
me, Mr. Baroco, would you please wait for me outside?” Hamblin gestured at the
office door. “Please close it behind you. I’ll come and get you when I’m
finished.”

Joex
got and dutifully left the office and closed the door behind him. It was
partially dark in the anteroom. It was very quiet, even the air conditioning
was off for the evening and the room was on the edge of being uncomfortably
warm.

“O.K.
Yes, it sound like the usual nutjob, but this nutjob has been a principal
scientist with a Stanford graduate degree. No, I haven’t checked those facts
out yet. Yes, the guys sounds credible despite his appearance. Which is a bum
with new clothes and a weird haircut. And there is the Special
Compartmentalized hit.”

In
the warmth silence of the outer office, Joex could hear this side of the
conversation as if far away; his own heartbeat was loud enough to blocks words:
“homeless THUMP haircut THUMP compartmen THUMP.”

“Mr.
Rauchmann, no and no. This is his theory: Riu Bao was here not just to steal
secrets, but to implant a software trojan horse into the software. Yes, twenty
years ago. No, this is firmware, virus checkers can’t find it. Below rooting.
Rooting, not routing. In the Internet switches. Can’t be detected. Like a
telephone switchboard. No, he hasn’t shown me any evidence. You think I am a
qualified code-monkey? But he says that it fits perfectly. I don’t know what
the Church of the Crux has to do with it. He says they sent a hit man out to
kill him in California. And that two guys were chasing him in Boise. No, I
don’t know what he was doing in Boise. No, I have no idea why a twenty-year-old
program makes a difference now. But he says that we need to immediately inspect
the software for intentional errors. He said ‘national urgency.’ How would I
know? Yes. Twenty years ago.”

Hamblin
paused for a long time listening to the district attorney.

“Material
witness? For a few weeks? But if he is a nutjob, why would we do that? Well,
I’ll wait for your affidavit and I will detain him. I think we should just talk
to the guy first,” Hamblin listened. “You are right, sir. Yes, sir. Yes, sir. I’ll
wait for the fax, attorney. He is right here.”

But
between the thumps of his heart, Joex had heard the phrase “material witness.” “Fuck,
not again,” Joex actually whispered. And as quickly and wraithlike as possible he
quit the outer office, walked down the carpeted hallway and walked though the shatterproof
self-closing glass doors. By the time Special Agent in Charge Hamblin hung up
the phone, Joex was once again on the run.