Zero Day_ A Novel - Mark Russinovich [8]
Today, however, Number Eight was giving him fits. He’d pulled it off-line three times already, and his boss, Eddie, told him to quit messing with it. Take it off-line for good and let the techs fix it. The other turkeys could take up the slack for a few hours.
That struck Buddy as pretty sloppy. He would never have told anyone, not even June, but he loved sitting at his station, that monitor frozen in place telling him everything was as it should be, the turkeys, nodding and straightening, twisting this way and that, as they welded the frame of Ford’s new SUV, the first of the really big hybrids. He just loved it.
But Eddie had a point. Sometimes even a turkey acted up. They could work forever, but not without some maintenance. Buddy reached Number Eight and lowered his hand to press the button. Unseen behind him, the dummy monitor at his workstation flickered. The screen reset.
Along the line, the turkeys stopped in place. Then, like soldiers in close-order drill, they pulled themselves back as if standing to attention. Buddy stopped what he was doing and gawked. He’d never seen anything like this. The assembly line was still moving, but the turkeys weren’t zapping the frames. He stepped forward to take a better look.
At that moment, all fourteen turkeys spun in place in a violent, dizzying circle. Number Eight struck Buddy with its beak, sending him flying onto the assembly line, landing with a loud grunt, sprawling across the tracks.
Stunned, he couldn’t move for several vital seconds. Just as he grasped where he was, the frame of a new Monument SUV moved across his neck.
4
MANHATTAN, NYC
IT CENTER
FISCHERMAN, PLATT & COHEN
MONDAY, AUGUST 14
9:32 A.M.
After Greene left the conference room, Sue Tabor led Jeff to the IT room, moving with a catlike grace. “Don’t let his manner bother you,” she said. “Josh is a good guy—for a lawyer, I mean—but his neck’s on the line over this. If we don’t recover enough data to save his hide, he’ll be forced into retirement and I may be out of a job.”
“I doubt that it was your fault,” Jeff reassured her. “I’m seeing more and more of this sort of thing. Malware is more easily finding ways into once secure computer systems. Viruses of all kinds are simply getting more sophisticated.”
Sue sighed. “I warned him last year not to go all electronic. He didn’t listen. We had a small accounting department then, run by a blue-haired lady who was the firm’s first hire forty years ago. Though everything was on computers, she insisted on running billing-record hard copies every night. Greene thought the size of her department was a needless expense, and so was all that paper. She was retired, her department was reduced to two, and no more hard copies. I warned him.”
“There’s nothing worse than being right when your boss is wrong.”
Sue looked at Jeff sideways, with a sly smile, and that shine in her eyes. “Sounds like you’ve been there.”
Jeff closed his eyes for a moment and drew a deep breath before turning back to Sue. “It shows, huh? What did you see when you tried to boot? Exactly.”
“Like I told you Saturday night, I couldn’t get into the system and decided immediately not to waste any more time trying. I’m really just a systems manager.” Sue shrugged apologetically. “My primary job is to keep everything running smoothly and make certain there are no hiccups. Security is part of it, of course, but it’s limited to updated antivirus software, patching, and a firewall. Our primary problems have been viruses associates bring in from home on their laptops, or employees opening attachments from spam. Nothing I couldn’t handle until now. To my knowledge, nothing ever made it into the servers.”
“Have you contacted the firm’s bank?” She shook her head. “You need to,” Jeff advised. “You should shut down Internet access to your account until this is solved. It’s possible that’s what this was all about. We can’t know how much information they extracted before the system froze.”
“I’m on it,” she said, her cell phone