Silent Assassin(15)

The decision had not been difficult.

The truth was, as Shep had to admit to himself, he was an overgrown kid. It was a by-product of a cushy upbringing and an environment—hacker culture—where arrested development was something approaching the norm. He would regularly stay up days at a time, put off work, drink nothing but highly caffeinated drinks, and eat nothing but junk food. Bloch’s seriousness and authoritarianism, pain in the ass as it might be, supplemented what discipline he lacked. At Zeta, he worked harder and faster than he had ever worked before.

The job also resonated with him on a deeper level. The group of hackers he ran with had this idea of creating mayhem for a good cause: taking down the websites of governments and financial institutions as a form of protest against injustice, and exposing secrets in hacks that, truth be told, were never more than pranks, but which at least held to some ideal of liberty and transparency. However, the futility of those efforts had been getting to him. They had tried to go up against real bad guys once, a Mexican drug cartel. They’d found out the identities of members and even evidence against a corrupt local police chief in a small Mexican city. But once the cartel had gotten wind of what they were doing, his group had received death threats, not only on themselves, but against their families. Then the cartel had vowed to execute innocent people if they continued their campaign. And finally, one of their members had been kidnapped. Realizing that things had gotten too real, that their group didn’t have the muscle to pull off something like this, they’d backed off with their tails between their legs.

But now, Shepard did have the muscle—or at least, Zeta Division did. The tactical team, Conley, and the newest addition, that smartass Morgan. A number of support teams that worked out of God knew where. But Shepard still had his own moments in the sun, even without the help of the brawn. And this was going to be one of them.

“Okay, here we go,” he said, as the numbers on the monitor counted down four . . . three . . . two . . . one . . .

Shepard hit a couple of keys, a loading bar appeared, completed in a few seconds, and then the clock that had been counting down began counting up.

“Okay,” said Shepard, and set his fingers to the keyboard. “I’m connected to the satellite.” A number of lines of code appeared successively, a list with “OK” appearing successively at the end of each line. “The encryption codes check out. We’re all set here. Running the diagnostics now . . .” He trailed off as he typed. A window popped up, and began to list each item of the diagnostic test he had hacked together himself. Everything seemed to run as expected, until—

“Uh-oh.”

“What is it, Shepard?” asked Bloch, hunching over the back of his chair and staring at the screen.

“Something’s not right,” he said. “It’s not the same.”

“What is it?” she insisted.

“The programming on the satellite isn’t the same as the version of the software I was working with. It’s different.” He called up the specifics on the diagnostic report and scanned the lines of code, with the differences highlighted in red.

“What does that mean?” asked Bloch. “How different is it?”

“Key aspects of the program aren’t what I expected them to be. Big things. I expected they’d tweak it, but they have a whole new layer of security and apparently an overhaul of the—”

“I don’t need a lesson, Shepard. What does it mean for the mission? Are you still going to be able to bring this bird down?”

He sighed hesitantly. “I can try. I’ll have to modify the patch I was going to install, and work manually. It’s going to be tight, and risky, but it’s doable. There’s only one caveat. If I do this workaround and fail, they’ll know we were in there, and they’ll be able to trace it back. They won’t have any way of knowing it’s us, but odds are they’ll know it came from the U.S. I can go forward with this, but I need your say-so.”

Bloch stood up straight and crossed her arms. She frowned, deep in thought.

“Boss, I need an answer now,” he said anxiously.

There was the briefest pause in which her face was filled with doubt, but then her expression turned into hard resolve. She said, “Do it.”

He nodded grimly, fingers back on the keyboard. “We’re pushing the boundary of ‘on the fly’ here, I hope you know, but here we go. . . .” He hunched over as he typed. “Decompiling. This isn’t going to be pretty. Actually, it’ll be a damn mess. But at this moment, you should be glad you sprung for the expensive equipment.”