27 | THE PHANTOM
The paramedics took Swamp Witch out on a stretcher, her breathing shallow, her eyes empty. John Jaggard went with them, holding her hand as if she was his child.
The intense laser-beam stare was now just a soft wash of moonlight. The piercing intelligence had been replaced by the vacuous mind of an infant.
Sam had hardly known her and certainly wouldn’t have been one to put his hand up and say that he liked her. But there was something about that happening to someone he knew, something about it happening right in front of him, that made it shocking in ways he couldn’t fully comprehend. And coming right on the heels of the news about Fargas, it seemed almost too much to deal with.
“Well, I guess she wasn’t the insider,” Dodge said in a vague attempt at humor.
The main doors closed behind the paramedic team, and after a moment or two, people around the room began to turn back to their screens. Getting back to their work, or just discussing what had happened.
“Come with me,” Dodge said, picking up the silver field kit that was still sitting under his desk.
Sam started to ask where he was going, but it was unnecessary. Dodge was heading for the swamp.
He rose on shaky legs and followed. By the time Sam got there, Dodge had already plugged in the kit and was cloning the data from the tall tower workstation beneath Swamp Witch’s desk.
It smelled a bit dank in the swamp, Sam thought, or was that just his imagination? In the center was an L-shaped desk, where she worked. The big windows gave a perfect view of the entire control center, while a series of screens arranged in a circle on the outer circumference of the office showed what various members of the team were working on.
The first two screens he looked at showed the contents of his and Dodge’s workstations, and he felt slightly uncomfortable, knowing that someone had been watching his every keystroke throughout the afternoon.
Swamp Witch was clearly the kind of person who liked to work in a mess. There were scraps of paper in piles everywhere, along with books, pens, and scattered Blu-rays.
“I’ve got her drive,” Dodge said very slowly. “But it won’t matter.”
“Why?” asked Sam.
“Because I can already tell you what’s on it,” Dodge said. “Absolutely bleedin’ nothing. It’s been wiped clean. Just like Chicago.”
Sam hardly heard. He was too busy looking at what he hadn’t seen on his first glance around the office. On the floor, by her chair, half hanging by a cable from the desk, was a neuro-headset.
“Who could do this?” Sam asked, shaking his head. “Inside this room. This is supposed to be a heavily guarded, top-secret government facility. But someone just reached inside and squeezed her brain like a grape.”
“Get back to the workstation,” Dodge said. “I’ll be there in a minute.”
Kiwi was just walking in as Sam returned to his own desk and was looking around, aware that something was going on.
“What just happened in here?” he asked.
“Swamp Witch,” Sam said. “Some kind of seizure, or stroke, or something.”
What else could he say, really? What else did he know for sure?
“Oh.” Kiwi looked shocked and unsure what to say. He put on his headset and plugged in. After a moment, he said, as if it was somehow important, “Vienna’s on her way.”
When Dodge sat down at his desk, there was an edge to his jawline. He pulled his neuro-headset down over his biohazard tattoo and looked at Sam with narrowed eyes.
“What are you doing?” Sam asked.
“I’m going after them,” he said. “Right now. Are you with me?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that whoever messed with Swamp Witch cannot have blasted their way into this room, through all our security, without leaving traces.”
“Dodge.” Sam looked down and spoke quietly. “I don’t think it’s safe. Don’t ask me how, but I think the neuro-headsets have something to do with it.”
“I’m sure of it,” Dodge agreed, “and I’m just as sure that it’s the only way we’re going to be able to keep up with these guys. Now I’m going after them. Are you with me or not?”
“What if they do to you what they did to Swamp Witch?” Sam blurted.
“They won’t,” Dodge said darkly.
“How do you know?”
“Because you are going to protect me, wingman.”
Sam stared at him for a moment, then strapped on his headset. “Hit it,” he said.
They started in the swamp, breaching security with callous disregard for protocol. They swept through the interior network with their scanners blazing, illuminating every nook and cranny of the structure. Sam ran his scopes at full power, checking and rechecking Dodge’s system every few fractions of a second.
“Code fragments,” Dodge’s voice said inside Sam’s head. “Chewed up and spat out. Same stuff we saw after the terrorists attacked us. Same stuff we saw in Chicago.”
“Why leave it lying around?” Sam asked. “Why not wipe up the traces?”
“I don’t know,” Dodge said. “Am I still clean?”
“As a whistle,” Sam said.
“I want to check out the firewalls,” Dodge said. “Try and find out how they got in. Stay with me.”
“No problem,” Sam said.
The firewalls were solid. No holes, no tunnels, not even a small data leak.
“So they disabled part of the security and enabled it again when they left?” Sam suggested.
“I don’t think so,” Dodge said. “These aren’t toys, and they’re overlapping protective fields so that you’d have to crack two firewalls simultaneously. Impossible unless you had a tunnel like the terrorists used, one that has been filled in and welded shut.”
“How, then?”
“I don’t know,” Dodge said. “Maybe they just passed through the firewalls, like ghosts passing through a solid wall.”
“You’re not suggesting ghosts?” Sam almost laughed.
“No, that’s not what I mean,” Dodge said. “It’s possible, theoretically, to bypass any software on any system, if you’re able to program on the fly in machine code.”
“Theoretically,” Sam said, running a security check on Dodge’s CPU cycles. “But a few days ago, you were saying it was impossible to program in real time. Nobody could write low-level machine code on the fly.”
“Which is why we’ve never considered it before,” Dodge agreed. “But what if somebody could? Some genius. Some freak.”
“Still not possible,” Sam said. “Machine code is different from machine to machine. The CPUs in the routers use different addressing and bit-and-byte order from the firewalls, and they are different from the servers. You’d have to be coding them all simultaneously.”
“If you’re free tomorrow, my grandma needs an egg-sucking lesson,” Dodge said. “Let’s head out of the building; I am going to release some search spiders and hunt for more of that chewed code. See if the phantom has left a trail.”
“Dodge, think this through,” Sam said. “The phantom wipes out the terrorists. So the phantom is on our side, right?”
“You’d guess so, wouldn’t you,” Dodge said.
“Then someone wipes out the spammers and the gamers.”
“Did the world a favor.”
“Then someone wipes out Swamp Witch,” Sam said carefully.
“And you think it’s the phantom doing it all?” Dodge said. “But why help us fight the terrorists, then attack us? Whose side is the phantom really on?”
“Its own,” Sam said. “Maybe it has its own reasons for taking out the terrorists. As for Swamp Witch, maybe she just went digging a little too deep and stumbled onto something she wasn’t supposed to. Maybe the phantom was just protecting itself. Protecting its identity.”
Dodge nodded. “First, delete all the incriminating evidence in her computer. Then delete all the incriminating evidence in her brain.”
“The phantom is probably watching us right now,” Sam said.
“Probably.”
“That’s what you want,” Sam realized. “You want to be attacked! You’re poking a stick into the hornet’s nest, trying to stir up some trouble.”
“And when it comes, we’ll be able to see where it’s coming from,” Dodge said.
“You’re relying on me to protect you!” Sam said with horror.
“Isn’t that what you get paid for?”
“Dodge, the phantom swatted Swamp Witch like a fly. It’s too risky.”
“No,” Dodge said. “I’m going now, while the trail is still hot, and—” He broke off, staring at his screen.
“What have you got?” Sam asked.
“Returns from the spiders. That chewed-looking code. They’re finding it all over the place.”
“How could that be?” Sam asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe the phantom is hiding in the machine code, trolling along the lower levels of the Internet like some big-arsed shark cruising around the ocean. But when it breaks surface, that’s where it’s leaving the crushed remains of the code. Maybe if we analyze the pattern of code fragment sites, we can find the source, track its location.”
“This is nuts,” Sam said. “Let’s at least wait until Vienna gets in. She and Kiwi can help me cover your backside while you go do your bait-dangling thing.”
“I’m not going to let this trail get cold.”
“Dodge, I’m serious. It’s not just the Internet firewalls the phantom is breaking through; it’s getting through neuro-firewalls as well. Into your brain!”
Dodge shook his head, concentrating on his center screen.
“No way. I’m getting out of here,” Sam said, reaching for his headset. “Seriously, the phantom probably knows what we’re thinking right now. It knows we’re after it and—”
A million bolts of lightning flashed behind his eyes. A searing pain ripped at his temples. A spasm of pain pulsed through his arms, which jerked wildly, flicking the headset from his scalp. It clattered onto the floor by his chair.
“Get your headset off, now!” Sam shrieked, turning to Dodge.
Dodge’s eyes were white, turned upward in his skull. His hands were claws, gripping the arms of his chair, and the tendons in his neck strained as his head thrust backward. His mouth opened in a cruel, demonic grin, and he began to scream.