She had a limited amount of time before the floor wardens finished their tallies and someone was sent back up to find her. Dexter & Reed took its fire alarm and active-shooter drills seriously, thanks to all the former Feds on the payroll. Cecily pushed that terrifying thought out of her mind and sprinted down the empty corridor to the vault. She used both her ID badge and the one she’d stolen from Phil Beasley to scan her way inside. She’d worried that the door might fail-secure during an alarm, and breathed a sigh of relief when she heard the electronic mechanism release with an audible clunk.
She yanked open the door and inserted the thumb drive, clicking a few keys to open the program as her handler had instructed her. She’d been assured it would do the rest. And it did, lightning fast. In less than forty-five seconds, she was able to remove the thumb drive and log off the terminal. Whatever this new program did, it didn’t need her to do it.
No one had told her what it was she was loading. She assumed it was a RAT — remote access Trojan — or some other virus that would turn over control of the system or wreak other sorts of havoc on behalf of the Chinese government. Stuxnet, the virus developed and implemented by the U.S. but blamed on Israel, and which caused Iran’s nuclear centrifuges to go off kilter and crash, had caused Iran to throw all the scientists working on it against the wall and shoot them on the mistaken notion that one of them had to be the mole. WannaCry shut down businesses, NotPetya brought a large portion of global shipping to a halt. Computer glitches (viruses that governments wouldn’t admit to having) had caused drones to crash and communication centers to go dark. The possibilities were deliciously endless.
Four and a half minutes after the fire alarm had gone off, Cecily ran out the side doors of the building, panting from jumping and sliding down three flights of stairs. She’d left Phil’s ID on his desk a few inches from where she’d swiped it, wiping any fingerprints off on the front of her shirt.
“Hey,” Phil said, giving her a quizzical look when she approached her group in the greenbelt behind the building. “Where were you?”
She gave the floor warden — an older woman who reminded her of a junior high English teacher — a nod to show that she was present.
“It’s embarrassing,” she said, rocking from foot to foot, working to slow her heart rate so she didn’t sound so guilty.
“More embarrassing than burning to death?”
Dr. Li was still on his phone, scanning the crowd of employees as he talked. His gaze settled on Cecily long enough to make her squirm, but he moved on, checking on the rest of his charges. A benevolent dictator.
She lifted the hem of her blouse so Phil could see her waist, conveniently showing a sliver of her belly to keep his mind right. “I wore button-fly jeans today. Took me a minute to get decent.”
“Ah,” Phil said. “Gotcha.”
She gave him a smile, groaning inside, adjusting the leather strap of her purse on her shoulder. A bead of sweat ran down her cheek, easily blamed on the warm weather. She could hardly wait to find out what she’d been a part of. This mission had been tense, but so far, at least, it had gone smoothly. The program was installed — and she hadn’t even had to use the pistol…
Li looked at her again, then checked his watch — like he’d been timing her. She shook her head to clear it. That was impossible. There was no way for him to know what she’d done.
It would have almost been a mistake to call Calliope sentient. She was not aware of her surroundings in a physical sense — plastic cabinets, circuit boards, and hard drives. But an observer who understood code would be hard-pressed to believe that she was not somehow alive and on a specific mission within the Dexter & Reed computer system. The software was so much more than a virus, but beautiful in her viruslike simplicity.
Using a variation of the problem-solving method called a Monte Carlo tree search, Calliope ran the possible scenarios — all outcomes of the game — tens of thousands of times, looking for the one that presented the result nearest to what she’d been coded to do.
Shortly after returning to the building after the fire alarm evacuation, Peter Li pushed out the notice of a software patch. Calliope attached herself to the patch, hitched a ride, and then deleted herself from Dexter & Reed computers, so there was no sign that she’d ever been there. Within minutes, avionics technicians with Carrier Airborne Early Warning Squadrons VAW 116 and VAW 117 out of Naval Base Ventura County and Point Mugu had downloaded the patch into the E2-C Hawkeye command and control aircraft in their squadron. With the mission of handling communication between other aircraft and surface vessels, the Hawkeye made the perfect vector from which to infect other machines.
Calliope was now in play.
