Clear and present danger - Tom Clancy [326]
Since personal computers had entered the marketplace, it was only a matter of time until they were used in criminal enterprises. To investigate such use, the Bureau had its own department, but the most useful people of all were private consultants whose real business was "hacking," and for whom computers were marvelous toys and their use the most entertaining of games. To have an important government agency pay them for playing the game was their equivalent of a pro-football career. The one O'Day found waiting for him was one of the champs. He was twenty-five, and still a student at a local community college despite over two hundred hours of credits, the lowest grade for which had been a B +. He had longish red hair and a beard, both of which needed washing. O'Day handed it over.
"This is a code-word case," he said.
"That's nice," the consultant said. "This is a Sony MFD-2DD microfloppy, double-sided, double-density, 135TPI, probably formatted for 800K. What's supposed to be on it?"
"We're not sure, but probably an encipherment algorithm."
"Ah! Russian communications systems? The Sovs getting sophisticated on us?"
"You don't need to know that," O'Day pointed out.
"You guys are no fun at all," the man said as he slid the disk into the drive. The computer to which it was attached was a new Apple Macintosh IIx, each of whose expander slots was occupied by a special circuit board, two of which the technician had personally designed. O'Day had heard that he'd work on an IBM only if someone put a gun to his head.
The programs he used for this task had been designed by other hackers to recover data from damaged disks. The first one was called Rescuedata. The operation was a delicate one. First the read heads mapped each magnetic zone on the disk, copying the data over to the eight-megabyte memory of the IIx and making a permanent copy on the hard drive, plus a floppy-disk copy. That allowed him to eject the original, which O'Day immediately reinserted in the baggie.
"It's been wiped," the man said next.
"What?"
"It's been wiped, not erased or initialized, but wiped. Probably with a little toy magnet."
"Shit," O'Day observed. He knew enough about computers to realize that the magnetically stored data was destroyed by magnetic interference.
"Don't get excited."
"Huh?"
"If this guy had initialized the disk, we'd be screwed, but he just swiped a magnet around. Some of the data is gone, but some probably isn't. Give me a couple of hours and maybe I can get some of this data back for you - there's a smidge right there. It's in machine language, but I don't recognize the format… looks like a transposition algorithm. I don't know any of that cryppie stuff, sir. Looks fairly complex." He looked around. "This is going to take some time."
"How long?"
"How long to paint the Mona Lisa? How long to build a cathedral, How long…" O'Day was out of the room before he heard the third one. He dropped the disk off in the secure file in his office, then headed for the gym for a shower and a half hour in the whirlpool. The shower removed the stink, and while the whirlpool went to work on the aches, O'Day reflected that the case against the son of a bitch was shaping up rather nicely.
"Sir, they just ain't there."
Ramirez handed the headset back and nodded. There was no denying it now. He looked over to Guerra, his operations sergeant.
"I think somebody forgot about us."
"Well, that's good news, Cap'n. What are we gonna do about it?"
"Our next check-in time is zero-one-hundred. We give 'em one more chance. If nothing by then, I guess we move out."
"Where to, sir?"
"Head down off the mountain, see if we can borrow some transport and - Christ, I don't know. We probably have enough cash we can use to fly out of here -"
"No passports,