"You in the center of town?"

"We're near the airport."

"Then I give you less than five minutes, no more. You better be leaving, sir."

"We wish we could," Jaggard said under his breath, then more loudly, "Victoria, do you know where in the building the UAS computers are located?"

"I believe so, yes, sir."

"Victoria, I want you to get there now and shut them down. Pull out power cables if you have to, smash them up, I don't care. Just take that system off-line any way you can. If you can shut down the UAS, the plane will return control to the pilot."

There was a m.u.f.fled conversation at the other end of the phone; then her voice came through clearly. "I'm heading there now, sir."

Taylor ran along next to her, out of breath after just a few steps. Somewhere along the way, he had discarded his suit jacket, and his tie was loosened into a loop, like a hangman's knot, Victoria thought.

Her phone was in her pocket, on speakerphone, and she could hear Jaggard issuing terse orders from its tinny speaker.

The UAS was housed in a small, unmanned office next to the central computer room. It was down one floor at the end of a long, dimly lit corridor. Human beings seldom came here except for repair and maintenance work. The corridor seemed endless, although it couldn't have been more than sixty yards.

She beat Taylor to the door, but he was right behind her, despite his labored breathing. She slammed her security card into the slot by the door and jerked on the handle, but it did not open. The light stayed red.

"Try mine," Taylor said, handing her his supervisor's card. Victoria snapped a glance at her watch. Maybe three minutes left, if they were lucky. She slid Taylor's card into the slot.

The light remained a steady, constant red.

"They must have been expecting us," Dodge said. "They've locked down our access."

"Can you get in?" Jaggard asked.

"I think so," Dodge said. "It's a Linux system. I'm going to crash the sh.e.l.l with a buffer overflow and get in via the rhosts file."

"Do you have time for that?" Jaggard asked.

"No choice. Sam, you gotta keep this bug off my tail for a bit longer, mate."

"Doing my best," Sam said.

"Move aside." It was Vienna's voice. She moved next to Sam, nudging him with her body, reaching out for his keyboard.

Sam blasted a wide swathe through a pile of crawling fungus on the doorstep of Dodge's workstation.

"I'm a little busy right now," he said, lining up his next shot.

"Get out of the way, Sam." To Jaggard she said, "Dodge is our only hope. If they get him, we are all dead. Dead as in cemetery, not as in reboot your system. Sam hasn't got the experience."

"Sam is the only thing keeping me alive," Dodge said. "You stay right there, mate."

"Vienna's right," Jaggard said. "Sam's only been on the job for a couple of months. I don't care what kind of hot shot he is. Move aside, Sam, and that is an order."

"Sam stays." A thin, wiry voice came from behind Jaggard, and without even looking, Sam knew who it belonged to.

Swamp Witch.

She continued, "He's our best hope right now; the intruders are too fast."

"I'm in," Dodge said, and a moment later, "Oh, oh!"

"What is it?" Jaggard asked.

"UAS has its own firewall, inside the system. It's heavily protected, and they've locked us out of that too."

"Can you break it?" Jaggard asked. There was a note in his voice that hadn't been there before, Sam thought. It sounded a lot like despair.

"I don't think we have the time," Dodge said.

Next to him, Vienna glanced upward, and Sam couldn't help but follow her gaze. Through the large, rounded, tinted windows of the control center, high in the sky, he could see an airplane.

"Smash it!" Victoria cried as Taylor pounded on the door frame with the b.u.t.t of a large fire extinguisher. It left red paint on the door but otherwise made little impression.

"Give it to me," she said, and didn't wait for him to agree, s.n.a.t.c.hing the heavy fire extinguisher away from him.

She moved to the right and ignored the lock, pounding instead on the hinge side of the door with huge crashing blows, holding the extinguisher high above her head. Each blow sent shock waves through her arms, juddering into her spine, but she kept at it.

Suddenly there was a crack and the top of the door gave way slightly.

"G.o.d, I hope we're not too late," she cried, and switched to the bottom hinge.

The intruder was everywhere now, crawling in and out of the systems like a creeping black vine. It was all Sam could do to keep Dodge and himself alive. The shape of the airplane was clearly distinguishable in the sky by the eastern tower of the Adobe buildings.

"Give me half an hour and I could bust this wide open," Dodge said, his eyes focused on his screen.

He hasn't seen the plane yet, Sam thought.

"We don't have half an hour," Jaggard said evenly.

"I know," Dodge said.

"DoS attack!" Sam said. "Hit 'em with a DoS attack."

Denial of Service was a common attack used by vandal hackers, saturating the target server with so many simultaneous connections and requests that it would slow to a crawl.

"That won't get us in." Vienna's voice was loud and unsteady.

"What's your thinking?" Jaggard asked, but Sam could see that Dodge had already worked it out and was scurrying to set it up.

"Just do it," Sam said.

"Kid's a genius," Dodge said. "DoS attack will clog up the routers, slow down the transmission signal. If we slow it down enough, it should have the same effect as shutting down the servers."

Sam ripped a jagged hole in the code of one of the branches of the intruder, but it grew back even as he did it.

"Come on, come on," Dodge muttered, stabbing at the keyboard.

"Too late!" Vienna yelled.

Sam looked up. The nose of the plane seemed to fill the window.

He braced himself for the impact, knowing it would do no good.

The hinge gave way with a final shudder, and Victoria kicked the door to one side, dropping the fire extinguisher and barging into the UAS room.

A long row of metal server racks stared at her, each one alive with flashing lights, blinking and winking behind the fine metal grille of the doors.

The power cables came in through the top, she realized, and traced them quickly with her eyes to where they disappeared into the top of a large, wall-mounted UPS system.

The power switch on the UPS was locked in the on position with a heavy bra.s.s padlock.

"You got a key?" Victoria demanded.

Taylor shook his head.

"Then get out of the way and pa.s.s me that G.o.dd.a.m.n fire extinguisher."

The tinny voices from the phone in her pocket abruptly vanished, replaced by a roaring static.

"Jaggard?" she asked as Taylor pa.s.sed her the fire extinguisher. There was no sound but the static.

She pounded desperately on the padlock with the heavy red cylinder. The shiny metal loop buckled but held.

"Jaggard? Are you there?" she yelled. "Jaggard?"

22

BIGGER FISH

The explosion didn't happen. The momentary burst of brick and gla.s.s before everything turned to oblivion didn't occur, although Sam saw it clearly in his mind's eye all the same.

The entire building shook, and several windows shattered under the shock wave, but the plane pa.s.sed over their heads with a deafening roar.

Through the opposite window, Sam saw the nose of the plane rise high above the tail. It skimmed above the roof of the Park Center Plaza, narrowly avoiding the tall buildings in an adjacent block, and clawed its way back into the sky.

"Jaggard, are you still there?" the voice of the air traffic controller sounded from the overhead speakers as the roar subsided. They could hear bangs and crashes in the background.

"Only just," Jaggard answered.

"How close is the plane?"

"It missed," Jaggard said. "Pilot got control back."

"Thank G.o.d for that," Victoria said. "We've just broken into the cabinet. We're about to kill the power. That'll stop them from trying again."

Sam found he was still staring out the far windows at the shrinking shape of the Boeing. He forced his eyes back to his screen, to find it empty.

All he had now was the blue screen of death. He looked across at Dodge's computer, but his screen was the same.

"Okay, people, we're still alive," Jaggard called out, clapping his hands together. "But if we don't get our act together, then pretty soon this country is going to go China Syndrome. You still up, Socks?"

"Barely," Socks muttered. "Still trying to get into the security door system, though, and..." He trailed off, staring at his screen. "What the h.e.l.l?"

"What is it, Socks?"

"I'm back," he said. "Just like that. Fully operational."

"How?" Jaggard asked.

"Something just ate the intruder."

There was complete silence in the room.

"Say that again."

"I don't know how else to describe it. One minute I was getting smothered by the big mother, and the next minute this big black nothing raced out of nowhere and tore it to shreds, gobbled it up."

"A big black nothing raced out of nowhere and gobbled it up?" Jaggard said. "Please try not to be so technical."

"There's always a bigger fish," Dodge said.

There was a flash in front of Sam, and his central screen suddenly flickered back into life, followed by his left and right screens.

"I'm back," he said in astonishment.

"Me too," Dodge said.

The group dispersed around the room, and there was a chorus of agreement as one by one their systems came back online.

"Where's the intruder?" Jaggard asked.

"No sign of it," Dodge said a moment or two later. "Just fragments of code lying around on the hard drives."

"Just fragments?"