The zenith angle (3 page)

Van packed three PCs, a laptop, a printer, three toolboxes, eight car batteries, five cell phones, and a satellite dish. Van’s car was a sixty-thousand-dollar truck with fifty-eight cubic feet of cargo space. This was the Range Rover’s finest hour. He also removed the rearmost seats and packed the futon from his office, for the sake of catnaps. No matter what Van was going to be doing, he was sure he would be doing it around the clock.

Van wasn’t keen on lugging Helga all the way to California. Helga was nineteen years old, and pretty, and a foreigner. For Helga, the United States was one big Disney World where sweet older men showered her with gifts. Real terrorism made Helga really terrified. Helga sobbed miserably as she climbed aboard the Range Rover. She couldn’t stop weeping.

Van was an excellent driver. Dottie was a careful, methodical driver. Helga was a lousy teenage driver who lacked even an international driver’s license. But Van made Helga drive the Rover anyway. The work made her stop sniffling.

As the miles rolled beneath the Range Rover’s Michelins, Dottie comforted baby Ted and tried to doze, saving up for her time at the wheel. Dottie wasn’t allowed much sleep. Time and again her Motorola tri-band sprang to shrill, bleeping life. Dottie’s astrophysicists in Boston regarded Dottie as their den mom. Dottie was the only one in the lab who knew where they kept the whiteboard markers and the Coffee-mate.

Van had never overheard Dottie dealing at such intimate length with her colleagues. During their married life, she had usually spared him this ordeal. Van was guiltily aware that he had never been a good faculty spouse for Dottie. They had a two-career marriage where neither party self-sacrificed. They were hugely respectful of each other’s gifts and ambitions, so whenever somebody’s personal sacrifice became absolutely necessary, they would hire somebody else to do it, and pay them a salary. On I-470 near Columbus, Ohio, Van’s third phone rang. Of the five he had packed, the batteries had already died in two.

“Vandeveer.”

“Van, that was not a hack attack.” This was a familiar voice for Van. A growl, really. Orson Welles with a Texas accent. A man who weighed three hundred pounds and always talked straight from the gut. Van knew Jeb’s voice well, but there was a new quality in it since those towers had gone down.

“How do you know that?” Van said, scowling as he sat cross-legged on his folded futon. “Did they check the avionics boxes?”

“Al Qaeda can’t hack avionics. They’re too dumb for that. That was a Moslem suicide attack. The biggest one ever.”

Van considered this. Moslem fanatical terrorists, crashing American jets into giant skyscrapers, with themselves still aboard. This was absurd to him. It was a nutty thriller-fantasy straight out of Hollywood blockbusters. If Jeb said it was true, though, then Van was willing to accept it as the working hypothesis. Jeb had the best contacts in the business.

Van cleared his throat. “So how did they do that?”

“They used box cutters to seize the cockpit. We think they trained their kamikaze pilots on flight simulators.”

“So they knocked down two skyscrapers with razor blades? And the Pentagon, too?”

“That’s the story, Van.”

“What is with these guys?” Van barked. “They have got to die!”

“You haven’t heard the good part yet. The fourth plane missed the White House. That was their last target: economic, military, and finally political. They missed the White House because the passengers attacked them inside the fourth plane. Their families got through to them on cell phones.” Jeb lowered his growl. “That is gonna be the
future
of this story, Van. It’s phones versus razors. It’s our networks versus their death cult. For as long as that takes.”

Van was in a rage. His ears thumped with each heartbeat. “It’s a real good thing they like dying, then.”

“Van, I need you on my team. Has anyone else called you?”

“Oh, yeah, lots,” Van blurted. Jeb had called first, it was true, but since then he had heard from the Bureau. The Commerce Department. The CIRC. The OMB. Several Air Force outfits he had never heard of. Even the Bureau of Weights and Measures.

“Lotta headhunters out there all of a sudden,” Jeb agreed cordially. “But where were they when the screen was blank, huh?”

Van said nothing. Jeb had been the very first cop to take serious, practical notice of Van’s talents. The state and local cyber-cops in California were so hip that they ran their own user’s groups. Silicon Valley cops met a lot of white-hat hacker kids, and tended to think they were cute. But when Van had encountered Jeb, Van’s life had changed overnight. Young Derek Vandeveer, a dewy-eyed comp-sci student with an intellectual interest in security issues, had suddenly met the maven’s maven. Jeb had collared Van and dragged him right behind the curtains. Suddenly there were special, classified courses for Van in FLETC and Quantico, with behind-the-scenes briefings from panting, sweaty computer emergency-response teams. Jeb had shown Van the ropes, put him in the know, enrolled him in the big-time show. He’d shown Van the realities of federal information technology: awesome levels of screwup that only a superpower could create or afford. “Situation Normal: All Fouled Up.” If a SNAFU

remained a superpower, it was due to guys like Jeb.

“In my outfit,” Jeb promised, “we actually know what we’re doing. That’s what’s so different and refreshing about us at the CCIAB.”

“Jeb, I’ve got to talk to a consultant about all this.”

Van glanced up guiltily at the passenger seat. To judge by that stricken look in her eyes, Dottie knew very well what he was doing. Dottie knew about Jeb and Jeb’s world. But Dottie was not his

“consultant.” Dottie was just his collateral damage. Dottie had the look of a woman in a
Titanic
lifeboat, watching the black icy water come up over the bows at the man she had left behind. Van had never been able to hide anything important from Dottie. He had married a woman with an IQ of 155. And besides, New York was on fire.

“I knew your father, Van,” Jeb said. “We never had to ask him twice.”

“I told you I needed seventy-two hours to make up my mind.”

“You just call me whenever you reach a decision, Van. I’ll be here in the Beltway.” Jeb clicked off. As he labored on his computers in the back of the truck, Van thought darkly of the various times in his life when he should have felt terrorized. Basically, there weren’t any. He’d had some strange experiences, here and there. Van could rightly say that he had been blooded out in the field. He was a civilian computer expert from a large, aggressive corporation. He’d taken part in five hacker raids with joint federal-state investigation teams. American computer cops often took large crowds with them when they raided computer hackers. This made it clear to the other, more everyday cops that kids sitting alone in their bedrooms really were committing crimes. So Van had been there when muscled Secret Service guys in their tasseled shoes and Kevlar armor were stomping from attic to basement, menacing Mom and Dad with drawn guns.

Mom and Dad were always pretty terrified by this. Van just concentrated on the bagging-and-tagging, hauling Junior’s piece-of-junk hotrod PC out to the white Chevy vans. Van rather liked that part of the assignment. Especially that look on the face of the code kid when he realized that he knew nothing about the people who really owned and ran the Internet.

The hacking scene was pretty brainy as crime scenes went, but it did have down-and-dirty sides. Hacker kids were an ankle-biting nuisance, but the scene also featured ugly grown-ups who stole real money. Van’s counsel had often been sought in such matters. Van knew more than anyone should know about the bad programming habits of Russian bank hackers. Vietnamese computer-chip theft rings were certainly no shrinking violets. A crime family of crazy, shotgun-toting hillbillies in West Virginia had preyed on Mondiale for years, stealing mile after mile of copper telephone cable and selling it for junk. The thought of their criminal lives and attitudes gave Van a metallic tang in his mouth. Van had never spent much brainpower on ethics, law, or philosophy, but Van could taste evil. Cops knew this about him. Cops regarded Van as a stand-up guy. Cops bought him beer. They respected the difficult things that he told them about network security and computer forensics, and they took the technical steps that he recommended. Van’s software and his advice worked out pretty well for cops. Arrests and convictions followed, and cops liked that a lot.

Since cops were underfoot and on the phone so much, Van had taught himself to speak the language of cops. He kind of liked the way that cops cut the crap. When people became cops, certain delicate, fussy, annoying parts of them got scraped off. Van understood this much more keenly after the events of September 11, 2001. The size and scale of what had happened . . . it had freed him from some complicated doubts and hesitations.

Van was not saying much about these new perceptions. He was trying to figure out his proper place in the world to come.

He stared at his wife as she cradled her infant and her phone with the same overloaded arm, the kid’s noggin nudging her glasses up her cheek. Van was dragging his wife across America, from sea to shining sea, and Dottie could not tell her friends why she had left, or where she was going, or what it was all about.

Because it was secret.

Dottie understood about secret lives, because she had married a Vandeveer. She had met Van’s father, mother, and even his grandfather, and got along with them better than Van did. The women in the Vandeveer family always caught on about the nature of government secrecy, even when their men never said much.

But in the ten years of their marriage, Dottie had never had to deal hands-on with any serious secrecy, not like this. Cops, Dottie could handle: she was always very polite to cops. Dottie never cheated on taxes or broke any traffic laws. For her own peace of mind, Dottie had read the statute books of both Massachusetts and New Jersey.

Spies were more secret than cops. Sometimes the spook world did lean in on Van. Spooks were getting very into cyber-security and infowar. The NSA had always been into computers, and the rest of the spook crowd were finding that world to be more and more sexy. Van had never looked for any spooks voluntarily. But people he knew intimately had lived in that secret world. They had been transformed à la
Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
Cops changed, but spooks really changed. Spooks could be totally alone, at home, asleep in some warm, dark room, and cold, curling dry-ice fumes would pour out from under their sheets.

Government secrecy was already changing Dottie, right before Van’s eyes. Van had a dark, interior, cavernous feeling, as if his life had crumbled at a touch. He stared at the passing Ohio landscape, annoyed to find it so Ohio-like. He badly missed his e-mail. There was no e-mail available to him inside the Rover. Once he got them both online again, Van figured, he could send Dottie a nice reassuring note. He loved Dottie, but he and Dottie always got along best by e-mail. E-mail was how he had first asked her out. E-mail was how they carried out their professional lives and coordinated their schedules. They often sent each other e-mail over the breakfast table when they were living inside the same house. They’d decided to have a child by e-mail. They’d been talking over e-mail about having another one.

Van stubbornly assembled his hardware in the back of the truck, using racks and plastic cable ties. With the rear seats hauled out and left behind in New Jersey, the Range Rover was cozy for him, about the size and shape of a grad student’s office cubicle. With the ongoing network crisis in Manhattan’s pipes and antennas, Van figured that no one would notice his physical absence from Mondiale’s Merwinster offices. Not as long as he stayed on the Internet around the clock.

Van’s life’s work was software. Although he had seen it done, he would never splice a cable down a manhole. In smoldering Manhattan, Mondiale was trying to call-forward thousands of local numbers, porting them from a smashed and charred facility into underused third-party switching stations in Queens and Hackensack. The FCC was freaking out, so it was willing to let this strange experiment happen. Van knew that Mondiale’s routing algorithms for “local number portability” were not going to scale up. Van knew that the porting code would break. It would break in some interesting ways. He might understand how it had broken, and where. He might figure out how to patch it. That would be nontrivial programming under tremendous time pressure, the kind that very few people could do. It was the most useful emergency service he could offer to his company.

But to be available to his stricken coworkers, Van needed fast, efficient Internet access, all across America. This sounded pretty simple. But it wasn’t simple. It was impossible. Most of the East Coast was okay for high-speed Net access, except for lower Manhattan, which was on fire now. If Van phoned ahead and called in some favors, he could drive in to campuses and computer centers, to hook up on the superfast Internet2 grid. Van was a regular veteran at the Joint Techs conference, the cabal of geeks and wonks who were building the Next Generation Internet. The sysadmins of Internet2 were very much Van’s kind of people.

Van had taught at Stanford before Mondiale had made him their world-beating business offer, so the West Coast was even friendlier to Van and his digital needs. There were also big islands of advanced technical sanity in places like Austin, Texas, and Madison, Wisconsin. But out here in Range Rover land, the Internet was a shambles. Van was rolling across America with two women and a baby, and the United States was huge. Van flew across America quite commonly, but he’d never rolled across it before. The USA had cyber-free boondocks that Van had never imagined were there. Cell phones worked for data delivery—sort of. Dottie was fitfully hooking her Motorola into her laptop, using power from the Rover’s cigarette lighter. That might do for the occasional brief e-mail, but that certainly wasn’t Van’s idea of access. For Van, cell phones were like breath mints. Even on America’s major interstates, which were spiked with cell-phone towers from coast to coast, those breath mints had big holes in the middle. Any dip in the highway could drop you right out of a download. Wireless laptops running on Wi-Fi worked only in Wi-Fi hot spots a hundred yards across. That left Van only one way to angle it: the zenith angle. Satellites, straight overhead. Internet access direct from Space, the Final Frontier. Van had never before used a satellite Internet service. He certainly knew that such things existed, but he lacked any reason to mess with them. Van had broadband Internet2