Joe Ledger: Code Zero Part 46

"Then explain what's happening."

"I can't."

Rudy asked, "Could Bliss have done that if she was alive?"

"No way," said Auntie. "She was a computer engineer and-"

"Yes," said Hu.

All eyes snapped back in his direction.

"You keep forgetting that Bliss wasn't just a genius, she was a supergenius. That's not a casual phrase. Her intellect was staggering. If she had the information and enough resources, she could either do it or arrange to have it done. That was one of the things we were all afraid of when we discovered that she was copying information and planning on selling it. Her level of genius was profoundly dangerous."

Auntie said, "So what are we talking about? We know Bliss is dead. Could she have obtained Berserker science and sold it elsewhere while she was alive? Sold it and then cleaned up after herself?"

"I don't ... think so," said Bug tentatively. "MindReader tore her computer apart, and if she'd ever had that information there would have been some record. You can't erase that much data without leaving a trace."

"Couldn't she have bought another computer?"

"We hacked her banking records going back a lot of years," said Bug. "We were looking for that kind of purchase, but there was nothing. We found the stuff she actually stole, and that's why we busted her." He paused and c.o.c.ked his head thoughtfully. "You know, though ... if she was still alive, then I could build a pretty good case for her being Mother Night. The level of genius, the subtlety and complexity. She had that by the bagful. And I've played a lot of games with her. She was devious as s.h.i.+t."

"But she's dead," said Circe.

"She's dead," agreed Bug.

"Guys, guys," I said, "let's stick with who might actually be alive. Bug, have Nikki run a thorough background check on Bliss. I know she was adopted from China, so see if you guys can hack Chinese adoption records and-"

"I already did that," said Hu. "She had one sister, but the girl was adopted by a family in Des Moines. School records indicate above-average intelligence, but only just. There's nothing to indicate that she had anything approaching Artie's genius. And there's no indication that Bliss ever had contact with that girl."

"Check again," Church said to Bug. "Find that girl and run a deep background check. Also establish her whereabouts on all dates and times relative to this case."

"On it."

"And send information to all law enforcement agencies about the Berserkers."

Bug hesitated. "Really? That's going to raise a whole lot of questions."

"Do it."

Chapter Seventy-three.

The Hangar Floyd Bennett Field Brooklyn, New York Monday, September 1, 5:53 a.m.

I was on my sixth cup of coffee and my hands shook with the aftereffects of violence and way too much caffeine. The last hours of Sunday had burned away and now we were four and a half hours into Monday. We'd spent all night going over every bit of data going all the way back to Arlington and up to the news reports of violence all across the country.

The number of bombings was now eight.

Random acts of violence, fifty-three.

Arsons, eleven.

The release of weaponized pathogens, four. DMS teams were handling each of those, but with plenty of help from local law. Word came down from the White House through subtle channels to drastically but quietly diminish any show of federal involvement in matters that might involve a trigger pull. At the same time, the press secretary and his team were doing heroic spin control. Experts were being trotted out to decry the government's involvement. Those experts included a number of writers, pundits, and scientists in various extreme groups, but people who were willing to partic.i.p.ate in a conversation rather than rant and shout. So far it was working. A bit.

The radical right and left, the loudmouth extremists on both sides, were being jacka.s.ses. As they usually were. A lot of the moderates were keeping mum for fear of standing on the wrong side when the full story finally came out. If it ever came out.

The president made a few short and very calm statements to the nation, and attended one press conference. Even that, I learned, was staged pretty well, with handpicked members of the White House press corps.

So far, Was.h.i.+ngton was not burning.

Other places were not so lucky.

At one point I turned to Hu. "Doc, that was definitely the seif-al-din down in the subway, no doubt about it, right? One of the early generations."

He nodded. "I know, though my people are running tests."

"Here's the kicker, though," I said, and ran the footage from the subway attack. Not our part in it, but the earliest parts of the video. We watched a sweaty man in a hoodie and yellow raincoat make his announcement about Mother Night and then attack a black teenager. I froze the image. "There! See that guy? He was the patient zero of that attack, right? But he's talking. That means-"

"-he was infected by one of the later strains," said Hu. "I know. I already instructed the forensics team to locate his corpse and take samples."

"My point," I said, "is that someone had access to two different strains of the pathogen."

"Obviously."

"How?" I asked.

There was a beat.

"I mean ... where'd they get them? As far as we can tell, the original lab in Afghanistan blew up. The only person we know of who was infected with Generation Twelve of the pathogen was Amirah, and I put a bullet in her head."

It was true. After El Mujahid tried to release the seif-al-din at the Liberty Bell Center in Philly a few years ago, I took Echo Team to Afghanistan and hunted Amirah down. By then she was already infected and driven mad by the experience. I offered her a chance, live as a monster or ride a bullet into paradise. She made the best choice for everyone.

"So who else has both generations?" I asked.

Hu and Church exchanged a look, then Hu said, "There are three places that have both samples. The Locker in Virginia, the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, and right here in the Hangar."

The tension in the room was palpable.

"And do we know the status of all three sets of samples?" Rudy asked quietly.

"Nikki conveyed your request for a full security scan of the Locker," said Aunt Sallie. "All the lights were green."

"What about the CDC?" I asked.

"Same thing, and they called in additional security."

"And the stuff we have here?" I asked Hu.

"The samples here are safe," Hu said defensively.

"When you say the lights were green," I said, "exactly what does that mean?"

"It means that all of the dozen or so automatic security programs run system-wide diagnostics and-"

I cut him off. "You mean that we're going on nothing but a computer's word that everything is okay? Jesus f.u.c.k, doc."

He immediately whipped out his cell phone to call his senior lab a.s.sistant. "Melanie, I need you to check our storage vault. Put eyes on the samples of the seif-al-din. All generations. I need a count of how much material is in each vial. Exact numbers, okay? Then run a diagnostic on the log-out computer. I want to know who looked at it, if any vials were touched, when, the works. Go back all the way and get back to me. Then get me somebody at the Locker. I want to talk to the senior researcher on s.h.i.+ft or someone in administration." He set his phone down and I gave him a nod.

"What happens if the pathogen is still safely stored in all three places?" asked Rudy.

"Then we're in big f.u.c.king trouble," said Aunt Sallie. "'Cause that means someone else has access to it."

"But who else even knows about it?" persisted Rudy. "We never fully disclosed the nature of the disease to Congress."

"He's right," said Circe. "And the samples at the CDC are in a special lab with access by only a short list of researchers, all of whom are with either DARPA or the DMS."

"We need to check it all," I said. "Triple the security and dig a f.u.c.king moat if we have to."

Hu made another round of calls.

Circe said, "Building on what we were talking about before, about how this may not be as chaotic and anarchical as Mother Night would have us believe, I think her choice of which subway car to hit seems obvious. It's a controlled environment. Going on the a.s.sumption that Mother Night knew both the nature of the disease and how we would have to react to it, the stalled subway car gave her a kind of sound stage. The cameras Joe found prove that it was staged so that the drama would unfold in a precise place and manner."

"There's more to it than that," Hu said. "If Mother Night knows about the function and communicability of the seif-al-din, then she had to know that if it got out there would be a lot more than anarchy. It would be a feeding frenzy."

"Begins with an A and rhymes with Ohpocalypse," I muttered.

Church nodded. "So the stalled subway car was both a stage and a containment facility. That's very interesting."

"Doesn't that give us a little bit of hope?" asked Rudy. "Clearly Mother Night is not trying to create an apocalyptic event."

"She's trying to take down the president," suggested Hu, but nearly everyone shook their heads.

"I think Dr. Sanchez is correct when he says that damaging the presidency is a side effect," said Church. "Or a means to an end."

"How did she do all that? Is this a cyberwarfare attack? Like Comment Crowd or something like that?"

"It could be," said Circe.

"I asked Bug about that and he put some people on it," said Aunt Sallie. "MindReader can't trace it exclusively back to China."

"Meaning what?" I asked.

"Meaning that his guys have been backtracking the source of these posts and e-mails, and they're linking everywhere. China, yes, but also England, Taiwan, Guam, you name it. One source went to a tiny village in Peru. I asked Bug if he thought Mother Night had a global network or a rerouting system, and his best answer was 'maybe both, probably.' But he couldn't pin anything down."

Rudy leaned forward and placed his elbows on the table. "That troubles me. Why is MindReader having so hard a time pinning this down?"

"I asked Bug that, too," said Auntie. "He's run ten kinds of diagnostics on the system and hasn't yet come up with an answer. One thing he did find, though, is a number of instances when one computer or another has attempted to sneak in to MindReader. However, every one of those attempts was rebuffed. No one even dented the outer firewall. Bug is confident that no one has hacked us."

"How would we know?" asked Rudy. "Isn't MindReader designed to hide all traces of intrusion?"

"Not in our own system," said Auntie. "When someone or something attempts to hack MindReader all sorts of bells go off."

"And-nothing?"

"Nothing except failed attempts."

"What option does that leave us?" I asked. "You guys always tell me that MindReader is the only computer system capable of doing some of what we're seeing. How true is that statement as of right now?"

Church nodded, approving the question. "It suggests several possibilities. One is that someone else has built a machine identical to MindReader."

"Which is impossible," said Auntie quickly.

"Why impossible?" I asked.

"Because it wasn't designed following any predictable philosophy or developmental progression," she said. "And it's been futzed with a lot, both to make it work better and to keep its operating system unique."

"The next thought is that someone," said Church, "the Chinese or another group with extraordinary resources, has developed a better computer. Something so much more powerful than MindReader that it's doing to our computer what ours does to everyone else's."

Rudy whistled. "That would be devastating."

"We are experiencing a degree of devastation right now," Church pointed out. "This may be proof that our edge has become blunted."

Auntie gave an emphatic shake of her head. "No, I'm not buying it, Deacon. Part of MindReader's daily function is to scout for anything that even suggests that a lab or design team is headed that way. So much of that kind of research, development, and planning would involve the Internet, even proprietary access setups. We'd have seen it."

"Wait," said Rudy, holding up his hands, "pardon me if this is impertinent or above my pay grade, but perhaps if we understood how MindReader came to be the powerhouse that it is then we might have some chance of figuring this out."

Church nibbled a cookie for a moment, then nodded. "Prior to the formation of the DMS, I was involved in various operations with a team of players from different countries, code-named the List. Our primary goal was to tear down a group of scientists called the Cabal, who had built very advanced systems using illegal technologies first initiated by the n.a.z.is. They had a computer scientist named Antonio Bertolini, who was very likely the most brilliant computer engineer I've ever encountered. A soaring intellect who could have done great good with his work. But he took a different path. The cornerstone of the Cabal's efficiency was Bertolini's computer and its search-and-destroy software package-known as Pangaea. The Cabal used Pangaea to steal bulk research material from laboratories, corporations, and governments worldwide, and much of that research was later used by the Jakobys."

I nodded, familiar with part of the story. "You killed Bertolini and took Pangaea and somehow that became MindReader, right?"

"In a way," said Church. "I was already supporting the development of a similar computer system called Oracle."

Oracle, I thought. Wow. That was the computer system Church gave to Lilith and the women of Arklight.

"Oracle was good," Church continued, "but it wasn't Pangaea. However, we were able to combine the best elements of both systems into a new generation, originally designated as Babel. But even that was insufficient for what I believed we needed to create an organization like the Department of Military Sciences. I scouted for the very best software engineers who were also insightful into the current and future needs of cyberwarfare. They wrote the master programs for MindReader."

"Doctor," Rudy said to Hu, "you said that the Jakobys used Pangaea to steal research data?"

"Yes."

"Did they have the actual machines built for the Cabal?"

"No," said Aunt Sallie. "Those were destroyed."