Tom Clancy's op-center_ acts of war - Tom Clancy [22]
Mary Rose understood. But that didn't make the aluminum chairs any more comfortable. She also felt sunlight-deprived in here, just as she did when she worked in her Op-Center cubicle. All of the windows in the back had been deeply darkened, and lead-lined walls separated the front section of the van from the rear, with only a narrow, doorless opening in the center. Stoll had insisted on that precaution because many modern spies were equipped with "detection kits" or "DeteKs." These portable receivers literally read the electromagnetic radiation that was emitted by the computer monitor and permitted the spies to monitor the screens from outside and from a distance.
Maybe I should have been a Striker, she thought. Drill, play sports, shoot, rockclimb, and swim at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia. Get some rays. Kick some derriere. But she had to admit she got a lot of sun on her days off, and she loved computers and cutting-edge technology. So stop complaining and do your programming, young lady.
The woman's long, fine brown hair was pulled back with a bow to keep it from tumbling onto the keyboard as she worked. Her hazel eyes were alert, her mouth tight as she modemed OLM to TSF headquarters in Ankara. There, like a perfect little spy, the OLM made room for itself by downloading a legitimate program to the ROC computer for storage.
"Attaboy," she said, her shoulders and thin lips relaxing slightly.
Rodgers chuckled. "It sounds as if you're coaxing one of your father's trotters and pacers."
Her father, William R. Mohalley, was a magazine publisher who owned several of the finest race horses on Long Island. He had always hoped that his only child would ride for him. But when Mary Rose reached a height of five feet seven at age sixteen, and kept on growing to five ten, that became unlikely. And she was just as happy. Horses were one of Mary Rose's passions. She had never wanted it to become work.
"I do feel like I'm racing," Mary Rose replied. "Matt and his German partners packed a lot of speed into this rig."
Assuming the borrowed file name, the On-Line Mole slipped into the system. Once there, OLM found the information, it wanted, copied and downloaded it, then shed its assumed skin and left. As it departed, the program it had temporarily replaced was returned: one bit of OLM would leave as one bit of the original program returned, so that no change in available memory was ever registered. The entire procedure took less than two minutes. If, during the course of the operation, someone went looking for the file OLM had temporarily "become," OLM would quickly restore the program and either impersonate a different file or put the downloading process on hold. The OLM was much more sophisticated than the "Brute Force" attack programs used by most hackers. Instead of randomly flinging passwords at a computer, which could take hours or days, the OLM went right to the "recycle bins" or "trash cans" to find discarded codes. Unobserved in the computer's dumpster, the OLM quickly sought and usually found recurring sets of sequential numbers that gave it a key to valid programs.
Nine percent of the time, nothing useful was located. When that happened, the OLM switched quickly to its "feed mode." Many people used birth dates or the names of favorite movies as codes, just as they did on personal license plates. The OLM rapidly fed in sequences including post-1970 years, which was when most computer-users were born; thousands of first names, including Elvis; and movie or TV titles and characters such as 2001, Star Trek, and 007. Nearly eight percent of the time, OLM found the correct sequence within five minutes. It resorted to "Brute Force" only when faced with the elusive one percent.
Mary Rose beamed as Colonel Seden's dossier appeared, pulled from the recycle bin. "Got it, General," she said.
Mike Rodgers slid to the left. It was a tight squeeze getting out of the chair, and there wasn't enough room for him to stand upright once he was on his feet. Rodgers stood, his head bent low as he leaned over Mary