Zero Day: A Novel (3 page)

Greene gave Jeff a withering look that suggested he was at fault for the situation. “In short, we are dead in the water. Our cash flow has been stopped; our attorneys are unable to adequately work on existing cases. Once clients start figuring this out, those in a position to will defect, the others will sue. We need everything back, as soon as possible. The situation is critical.”

Sue spoke, eyeing Jeff steadily. “The server is unbootable. I couldn’t access the system at all.”

That was odd, Jeff thought. In most cases, an infected computer would still boot, even if it didn’t properly operate thereafter. “What are you able to do as an office?” Jeff asked.

“The attorneys are working on e-mail through our Internet provider’s backup system,” she said. “Many had current files in their laptops and are using those. I’ve not touched our backups since I have no idea what I’m dealing with here.”

“How do you handle those?” Jeff asked.

“We have nightly backups of each computer to an in-house master server. Once a week, we make backup tapes that are stored in a fireproof safe. Once a
month,
we make a second set of backup tapes, and those are stored in another safe, off-site.”

“Good. We’ll have something to work with. How much can you tell me about what happened?”

“Sorry to say, almost nothing. The system simply isn’t accessible. Not to me, at least.” Sue grimaced.

Greene spoke. “Working without computers is a real problem for us. The younger attorneys simply don’t know how to do without them; they’ve always had access to the various legal databases and resources. I had no idea we’d become so dependent on them.” He glanced at Sue, then back to Jeff. “And obviously, being denied access to our work product is a serious problem—one that will prove very costly if you fail to fix this in a timely manner. Serious enough to put us out of business, in fact.

“But my most immediate concern is the prospect of losing our recent billing records. The longer we are down, the worse this is going to get. The system was automated. Now our attorneys are using pen and paper. We need to have our automated program up and running, and we need those billing records. They are vital. As is the case with any company, our income stream is essential.”

Jeff took a long pull of coffee. It was hot and bitter. “Have you considered that your staff may have the virus in their laptops, since they were connecting to their office computers?”

Sue nodded. “I thought of that. Over the weekend I warned them not to boot, but I was too late. Some had already turned on their computers, but they had no problems. I’ve been running virus scans and system checks on their computers and found nothing other than the usual. Fortunately, so far whatever struck us is limited to our main system. Or seems to be.” She smiled wanly.

“Do you have any idea what it is?” Jeff asked.

“None, but that’s not really my area. Our firewall is excellent and up-to-date. We run antivirus software and keep it current. When I say ‘up-to-date,’ I mean daily. I have an assistant whose first job every morning is updating everything, seeing to the patches and running system security scans. He does that before he does anything else, and he comes to work ahead of most of the associates. So you can appreciate that I’m mystified how this could happen, because it should not have.”

“That sounds good. And you’re right: your measures should have been enough.” Faced with the fresh challenge, Jeff felt himself growing suddenly alert and energized. This was very different from the work he’d just been doing, and any solution was going to be demanding, exactly the kind of problem in which he could lose himself.

Greene interrupted Jeff’s thoughts. “I’ve got a meeting with the other partners and need to give them something. How long, Aiken? How long will this take, and how much of our information can we get back?”

“I can’t say, in all honesty. Not at this point. I’ll let you know as soon as I can make an assessment.”

“All right,” Greene said grimly. “I’m told you’re the best. I need you to prove it.”

3

DETROIT, MICHIGAN

MONDAY, AUGUST 14

9:21 A.M.

Buddy Morgan, balding, fifty-three years old, overweight, returned from his coffee break four minutes early. A twenty-three-year veteran of the United Auto Workers, he had the right to select his own shift; that’s why he was working now. The supervisor, a longtime drinking companion, didn’t give him any grief while the new robots did what they were programmed to do.

Not like the old days, not at all. Buddy had served his time on an air gun, the last eight years of it driving three nuts home to partially mount the right front wheel of the Ford Taurus. God, how he’d hated those never-ending days.

But that was behind him. Now he had seniority. As he told his wife, June, he was nothing more than a grease monkey. The robots did all the work. His job was to make sure they stayed online.

It was a helluva system, he had to admit. His domain was fourteen of the robots, “turkeys” as he called them. Each consisted of a massive arm mounted on a squat pedestal. At the working end of the arm was the “head,” complete with a “beak.” This was the part that did the welding, fast, accurate, untiring. The whole “gaggle”—he was unaware that the proper word was
rafter
—was run by the master computer. He monitored a dummy terminal at his workstation, but had no control of the system. That was work for the college boys.

Buddy spent most of his shift at his station, glancing at the monitor, then up at the slow-moving assembly line, then at his turkeys, nodding and twisting in their odd dance. The area around the workstation was filled with the smell of electronic welding and a not unpleasant sweet aroma of fine oil that came from the robots. His nearest coworker was a hundred feet away, and that was just fine with Buddy. Most UAW brothers were a pain in the ass.

Buddy’s job was simple enough. He walked behind the turkeys and checked the moving parts for signs of a problem. This rarely happened. Japanese-designed, the things were built in Korea and could really take it, he often said. On a regular schedule, he pulled one off-line for examination. Not pulled, exactly; he pressed a large blue plastic button that caused the robot to retreat from the assembly line five feet. There he lubricated certain points, in all just six; then he wiped the entire machine down, though that really wasn’t his job, but he liked his turkeys looking good; then he pressed the blue button again, and the docile thing slid back in place.

The amazing part was that the other turkeys knew one of them was missing—something to do with the programming—and they simply assumed the job of the one he took off-line. Amazing. Really amazing. If you didn’t get laid off, this automation thing was a wonder.

At first he’d been surprised such high-tech turkeys required manual oiling at all. He’d figured they’d designed that into them. His trainers explained that they had originally been self-oiling, but factory managers, in an excess of cost-mindedness, had put the robots on the floor without adequate supervision. There had been some real problems. They might be twenty-first-century marvels, but a certain number of turkeys required the presence of a human. The solution had been to design them so they had to be serviced regularly.

But for the most part, his fourteen turkeys worked untended and to perfection. They were completely silent, as far as he could tell. The only sound came when they zapped the frame of the SUV moving along its two rails, like a subway car crawling along.

Today, however, Number Eight was giving him fits. He’d pulled it off-line three times already, and his boss, Eddie, told him to quit messing with it. Take it off-line for good and let the techs fix it. The other turkeys could take up the slack for a few hours.

That struck Buddy as pretty sloppy. He would never have told anyone, not even June, but he loved sitting at his station, that monitor frozen in place telling him everything was as it should be, the turkeys, nodding and straightening, twisting this way and that, as they welded the frame of Ford’s new SUV, the first of the really big hybrids. He just loved it.

But Eddie had a point. Sometimes even a turkey acted up. They could work forever, but not without some maintenance. Buddy reached Number Eight and lowered his hand to press the button. Unseen behind him, the dummy monitor at his workstation flickered. The screen reset.

Along the line, the turkeys stopped in place. Then, like soldiers in close-order drill, they pulled themselves back as if standing to attention. Buddy stopped what he was doing and gawked. He’d never seen anything like this. The assembly line was still moving, but the turkeys weren’t zapping the frames. He stepped forward to take a better look.

At that moment, all fourteen turkeys spun in place in a violent, dizzying circle. Number Eight struck Buddy with its beak, sending him flying onto the assembly line, landing with a loud grunt, sprawling across the tracks.

Stunned, he couldn’t move for several vital seconds. Just as he grasped where he was, the frame of a new Monument SUV moved across his neck.

4

MANHATTAN, NYC

IT CENTER

FISCHERMAN, PLATT & COHEN

MONDAY, AUGUST 14

9:32 A.M.

After Greene left the conference room, Sue Tabor led Jeff to the IT room, moving with a catlike grace. “Don’t let his manner bother you,” she said. “Josh is a good guy—for a lawyer, I mean—but his neck’s on the line over this. If we don’t recover enough data to save his hide, he’ll be forced into retirement and I may be out of a job.”

“I doubt that it was your fault,” Jeff reassured her. “I’m seeing more and more of this sort of thing. Malware is more easily finding ways into once secure computer systems. Viruses of all kinds are simply getting more sophisticated.”

Sue sighed. “I warned him last year not to go all electronic. He didn’t listen. We had a small accounting department then, run by a blue-haired lady who was the firm’s first hire forty years ago. Though everything was on computers, she insisted on running billing-record hard copies every night. Greene thought the size of her department was a needless expense, and so was all that paper. She was retired, her department was reduced to two, and no more hard copies. I warned him.”

“There’s nothing worse than being right when your boss is wrong.”

Sue looked at Jeff sideways, with a sly smile, and that shine in her eyes. “Sounds like you’ve been there.”

Jeff closed his eyes for a moment and drew a deep breath before turning back to Sue. “It shows, huh? What did you see when you tried to boot? Exactly.”

“Like I told you Saturday night, I couldn’t get into the system and decided immediately not to waste any more time trying. I’m really just a systems manager.” Sue shrugged apologetically. “My primary job is to keep everything running smoothly and make certain there are no hiccups. Security is part of it, of course, but it’s limited to updated antivirus software, patching, and a firewall. Our primary problems have been viruses associates bring in from home on their laptops, or employees opening attachments from spam. Nothing I couldn’t handle until now. To my knowledge, nothing ever made it into the servers.”

“Have you contacted the firm’s bank?” She shook her head. “You need to,” Jeff advised. “You should shut down Internet access to your account until this is solved. It’s possible that’s what this was all about. We can’t know how much information they extracted before the system froze.”

“I’m on it,” she said, her cell phone already out. Near the ladies’ room he watched her speak intensely; then put the phone away and go through the door. As he waited, Jeff geared himself up for what he had to do. A few minutes later Sue returned, makeup freshly applied, her lips repainted that bright crimson. “Thanks,” she said. “I should have thought of that on my own. They’re taking care of it right now.”

“There’s more.” Jeff was never comfortable with this aspect of his job. He hated being the bearer of bad news. “I’m sorry to say that you’re going to have to unplug all the servers and every computer from the network. We have to assume they’re infected, even though you’ve detected nothing—which would mean that at this point they’re serving as a breeding ground, propagating the worm. That means your lawyers will lose their e-mail.”

Sue moaned. “Let me show you to your workstation, then I’ll take care of it.”

The IT Center was located in an undesirable area of the building. Windowless, with monitors, computers, and cables running helter-skelter, a dry static sensation in the still air, it was a copy of hundreds of other such offices Jeff had seen. Sue introduced him to her assistant, Harold, a short, nerdy young man wearing a Yankees baseball cap with the brim backward. He was playing a video game on what looked like a personal laptop. As they entered, he hurriedly put it away.

“What are you playing?” Jeff asked. His secret vice was action video games.

“Uh,
Mega Destructor III.
”

Jeff nodded approvingly. “I’ve got
MD IV
in beta. I’ll burn you a copy.”

The young man grinned.

Sue shook her head. “Boys.”

Jeff grinned. “What can I say?”

Standing with one hand on her hip, Sue explained the system, gesturing with her free hand. “Every lawyer has a desktop PC and a laptop. This is the server room with four blade servers. We use one as our Web server, another as a backup domain controller, and so on. The primary one, with our litigation records and accounting, is the one that’s down. We run a standard networking program, Active Directory, and are connected to the office PCs.” What she described appeared identical to other systems on which Jeff had worked. In theory that should make this job a bit easier than it initially sounded, he thought. But in reality? Jeff was too experienced ever to expect a free ride.

“All right. I’ll get started,” he said, looking for a place to set up. “Which one should I use?” Sue pointed as he reached down and opened his work bag, extracting a black CD case filled with a wide range of disks, which he referred to as his Swiss army knife. As he began, Sue left to inform everyone they were now off-line for the duration, at least at the office. Harold moved a chair over so he could watch what Jeff was doing.