Silent Assassin(14)
They’d had a mole who was feeding them information, that was plain, or else they wouldn’t even know about it in the first place. The most important thing that he’d brought in was a copy of the satellite’s operating system. Bloch had delivered it to Shepard in a hard drive along with his deadline to crack it: two weeks. They couldn’t wait longer and risk the Chinese discovering the mole or changing their security protocols significantly enough to keep them from being able to bring it down. “You’re kidding,” he’d said. But she hadn’t been. Diana Bloch was never anything other than completely serious.
“The target is in Low Earth Orbit,” he was telling her, now, exactly two weeks from the day she had delivered the drive, “fifteen minutes away from flying over the Nevada desert.” The fact that he had made the deadline had surprised even him, but Bloch had that quality of pushing people to do things beyond what they thought they were capable of. Sometimes, he was discovering, it was no more than a matter of expecting more from people. And now, everything was geared to go, and the satellite was about to enter an area thick with military satellite dishes—satellite dishes whose controls Bloch had, somehow, gotten him access to. Zeta wasn’t U.S. military, at least not as far as he knew—its exact nature wasn’t exactly crystal clear, not even to its members. But Shepard could be sure of one thing: they had friends in high places.
“So the satellite dishes are going to cause what’ll look like normal interference,” he said. “But in the meantime, I work my magic. I’ve got everything set up here.” He pointed to the six monitors arranged in a rough semicircle around his chair. There were a few windows open on each monitor, colored code against black, and on the upper right corner of the rightmost one, a red timer counted down from fourteen. “Ready to upload everything as soon as our window of opportunity opens.” He played a drum riff on the desk with his fingers. “This here”—he pointed to a monitor on his left—“is what they see.” The screen was taken up mostly by telemetry data and logs of running subroutines—information being fed to him by the satellite in orbit. “I’m basically cutting them off, and periodically feeding them corrupted data, so that it looks like digital interference. They’ll panic while it’s unreachable, but once it’s clear, and when they don’t see any sign of tampering—”
“If they don’t see any sign of tampering,” Bloch interrupted. Shepard could tell she wasn’t going to let anything slide today. He was glad for that, annoying as it was. It always helped to have a second brain working on a problem.
“Who are you talking to, here?” he said, grinning. “Don’t worry, I’ve got it covered. They’ll find no indication we were ever there. And then . . .”
“Then, after a reasonable amount of time,” Bloch cut in, “the satellite will suffer a sudden malfunction, its orbit will decay, and it will burn up in the atmosphere.” She pursed her lips and took a deep breath through her nose.
“To a crisp.” Shepard made a gun with his index finger and thumb, and mimed firing it at the screen that was displaying the data from the satellite. She looked at him with mild disapproval.
If there was one word that described Diana Bloch, it was professional. (Some of the other people at Zeta had other, less kind words for her. But while he agreed that she could be a hard-ass, he couldn’t bring himself to have any real animosity toward his boss.) She was, in some ways, the opposite of Lincoln Shepard: terse and somber where he was boisterous and boyish. But they were both meticulous and precise, perfectionists to a fault. That allowed them to work well together.
It had been a strange path for Shepard, the way to this moment. His hacking career before Zeta had been illustrious—no, meteoric—and he’d had nowhere to go but up. In high school, as a prank, he had defaced the websites of four Internet security firms. Meanwhile, he’d made money on the side expunging infractions from other students’ permanent records. He’d been a member of a group of hackers who found embarrassing secrets of politicians and made them public. While still in college, for the sheer challenge of it, he’d managed to gain access to an enormous cache of secret CIA files. He’d gotten caught for that last one. In a mostly dark interrogation room, in the middle of an intense grilling by a hairy, sweaty, unfriendly investigator, Diana Bloch appeared to him in her impeccable outfit with her eyes of cold steel. She had laid out the choice before him: he could go to federal prison for ten years and get slapped with a lifetime ban on using a networked computer. Or he could come work for her.