The Zenith Angle - Bruce Sterling [41]
This was a crushing speech, but Van resisted mulishly. “How about Jimmie Matson from Mondiale? He was my executive assistant in the lab. Jimmie can get it done. He’s great.”
“You recommended Jimmie Matson to me already. We did a background check. Jimmie Matson is a gay guy with a substance problem.”
“Jimmie is gay?” Van was stunned.
“And he’s on dope. This isn’t the private sector, Van. Fawn passed a security clearance with flying colors. Glickleister’s daughter is more secure than you are. Lots more secure.”
Van’s phone beeped with an incoming call. Van decided to take it because he was losing his argument with Jeb so badly. “I’ll get back to you,” he said.
The other call was Dottie.
“Hi!” he said, startled and pleased. “Are you in Washington?”
“I’m in Colorado,” Dottie told him. “Are you being mean to Fawn?”
“Honey, I’m not being mean.”
“Fawn can cook,” Dottie coaxed. “She cooks Szechuan. Fawn found me on Google and we talked over all your problems. She’s very sweet.”
“I don’t have any problems. I don’t need a secretary or a cook. Besides, the class ‘secretary’ is not congruent with the class ‘cook.’”
Dottie’s voice sharpened and lifted half an octave. “Derek, what did you eat tonight?”
“A TV dinner,” Van lied, caught out. He hadn’t thought to eat at all. He had been thinking very seriously.
“What kind of TV dinner?”
“A Salisbury steak,” Van blurted hastily. And it was true. He actually had eaten a Salisbury steak TV dinner. He had forgotten about doing that, so he had lied to Dottie by accident.
Twenty minutes after Grendel first went up, the system received its first hacker attack. It was a port scan, and of course it got nowhere. A Grendel running streams didn’t have any “ports.” Van had installed emulators that vaguely resembled ports, in the way a Venus-flytrap resembled a nice little red flower.
Triggered by this assault, Van’s pager went off, vibrating his right knee in the cargo pants. Van had guzzled so much coffee during the past twenty-four hours that at first he thought the jittery vibration was happening inside his own leg. Van fetched out the pager and then logged on, wondering. An attack within twenty minutes? How was that even possible?
He watched the intruder fanatically typing. Then he called Jeb. “Jeb, come over here right now. You have got to see this.”
“I’m having a dogfight with the Air Force, Van.”
“To hell with the Air Force, come look.”
By the time Jeb arrived in Van’s office, the would-be intruder had already filled five screens with gibberish and back spaces.
Van paged the terminal, up and down silently, through the long list of line commands.
“Is that who I think it is?”
Jeb’s froggy eyes bulged. “It is! It’s him! This is kind of an honor, really.”
Fawn left her desk, where she had been cleaning up spam while listening to a book on tape. Fawn favored the fictional works of someone named Kathy Acker. Since wearing earphones at work seemed to calm Fawn down some, Van overlooked her strange habits.
“What is it?” Fawn said, chewing the end of a Sharpie.
“‘It’ is The Weevil,” said Jeb solemnly. “Look at that guy. He is going through all top twenty of the biggest vulnerabilities for Windows systems. And he’ll do each one of them ten times.”
“But we’d be crazy to be running a Windows server,” Fawn objected. “Big Bill’s got more holes than baby Swiss cheese.”
“The Weevil is crazy,” Jeb said. “He doesn’t even know what Windows is. He doesn’t know what UNIX is, either. But when he runs out of all of the Windows holes he knows, then he’ll start in with his complete list of UNIX vulnerabilities.”
“I heard The Weevil used an Apple hole once,” Van offered.
“Probably an accident.”
“What does he do once he’s inside the system?” said Fawn.
Jeb shrugged. “He gets root.”
“But what does he do when he gets root?”
“He makes himself superuser, covers up the intrusion