The Prisoner - Carlos J. Cortes [32]
Enjoying the blush of a sinking sun, Nikola dug his hands in his trouser pockets, sucked the sweet, and strolled toward his mobile control center.
“These are the fugitives’ numbers.” Nikola Masek drew a thin memory card from his top pocket and deposited it in Dennis Nolan’s outstretched hand.
He squeezed between the back of Dennis’s swivel chair and the wall of the van to a bucket seat in the corner, wedged between two racks of equipment, and flopped down to massage his knees. Vlad Kosmerl, the Washington station head of security, had been most helpful; not that he could have done otherwise without risking a long dip in a tank. After supplying the files Nikola needed, he’d agreed to seal the Washington sugar cube. Fear worked wonders. Until he recaptured the fugitives, all personnel would remain in the building. Relatives had been informed of confidential security exercises with a generous compensation in overtime pay. He doubted anyone would have had the chutzpah to gossip about the breakout, but it was safer to remove the temptation.
The call from the DHS requesting that he drop everything to await instructions had arrived shortly before six-thirty. He’d planned on a light supper followed by a spell of bliss at the tiny Temple Theater. Claus Holtermann’s rendition of Sophocles’ Antigone promised to be a treat, in particular Walter Lindt’s interpretation of Tiresias, the blind prophet. Holtermann’s work doesn’t look for empathy from its audience; its demand is actually greater, to completely surrender to its power and to experience it not as a sophisticated theatergoer but as a wholly immersed witness, had raved Susan Lamarck, the Washington Times’s critic.
When Odelle Marino’s call came through, Nikola had stifled a smile at the uncanny coincidence. Her cry for help involved a wholly immersed witness who had suddenly surfaced. He’d demanded total authority over the DHS’s awesome resources and she’d agreed. Perhaps a tad too quickly.
When his eyes adjusted to the van’s dim interior, he peered at Dennis’s computer screen. The freckled young man’s fingers flew over the keyboard, interrogating wireless networks and scouring through millions of signatures bouncing off cellular repeaters. Fear was a powerful motivator and an excellent tool of persuasion, but it didn’t breed loyalty. That feeling needed to be fostered by admiration, gratitude, or a combination of both.
A few years back Dennis had landed in a tight spot when he’d hacked into one of the hardest networks in the land. He’d slipped a program into his chosen server farm like a lover seducing a virgin—a little at a time. Spaced every few hours, over days or even weeks, Dennis dripped lines of code, innocently disguised inside standard forms or routine queries. The lines would assemble in the uncharted space between memory sectors until triggered. Then the program would run, take over the network, and flash Gotcha! on hundreds or thousands of screens before disappearing without a trace. The NSA classed those messing about with systems as white hats or black hats: hackers or crackers. Both used similar tools, but their goals were as different as the color of their virtual headgear. Hackers never caused damage or tried to retrieve data, restricted or not. Rather, they would highlight the weaknesses of a system. On the other hand, crackers sought mayhem by crashing systems or releasing viruses. The experts agreed on this one: white hat, a prankster.
Eventually people make mistakes, usually triggered by overconfidence or sloppiness. In Dennis’s case, his nemesis had been fatigue: The boy had fallen asleep while running one of his programs, only to be rudely awakened by a security squad. Nikola agreed the hacker had caused no real harm, but he was dangerous and in need of a lesson. After a couple of days in a suitable environment, cunningly prepared to scare his pants off, Dennis had repented and moved in as Nikola’s assistant. Within