The Fool's Run Read online

  This room was a complete contrast to the waiting area. Anshiser had opened up the rear wall with huge glass windows. The lake made a sharp, dark horizon line as far as you could see to the north; to the south you could sense the great cul-de-sac at South Bend.

  Anshiser, in wheat jeans and a blue rough-silk sweatshirt, sat behind an ornate table, his back to the windows. Another man, dressed in a gray business suit, white shirt, wine tie, and wingtips, sat on a side chair, one leg crossed over the other. Maggie and I plodded across a pond-sized carpet, and Anshiser stood to shake my hand.

  “Mr. Kidd.” His face had once been craggy, but the crags were softening with age and erosion. His eyebrows were thick tangled mats hanging over the pale blue eyes of a born killer—a man who lived on energy, but his energy, betrayed by the flesh, was beginning to fail. He gestured to a leather chair. As I sat down, facing him across the table, I noticed that his hand shook.

  “This is Mr. Dillon,” he said, indicating the man in the side chair. Dillon nodded.

  Two computer terminals squatted on Anshiser’s table. One was a dedicated stock-trading link, its screen covered with lists of numbers in tiny amber print. The other was a general-purpose IBM showing a dense block of text, a report of some kind. As he introduced Dillon, Anshiser reached out and tapped a key sequence, and the screen went blank.

  “Tell me how you identified us,” he said. “I don’t want any trade secrets, just in general.”

  I told him, without mentioning names or phone numbers.

  “Hmm.” He pulled at his chin when I finished. “Suppose somebody like your friend wanted to get into my company files. Is there any foolproof way to protect them?”

  “From the outside? Sure. Don’t hook them up to a telephone. Your little IBM there”—I nodded at his desktop terminal—“is absolutely secure from telephone interference as long as the modem is turned off. If you set it to auto-answer, because you have people calling in, then you could have a problem. And I assume you’re hooked into a mainframe, which means that it has incoming lines, so that could be vulnerable.”

  “Everything important is protected by randomly generated passwords.”

  “There are lots of ways to get passwords.”

  “Tell me one.”

  I told him several, and, since he lived on a lake, mentioned work done in the Netherlands involving the processing of images projected onto computer monitors.

  “Everything that shows up on a monitor is the result of a high-speed beam that scans back and forth across it—letters, words, pictures, everything. As the beam switches on and off it creates an electromagnetic pulse, sort of like a radio wave. It’s weak, but with the right gear, it can be picked up, amplified, sorted, synchronized, and reproduced on another screen, up to a few hundred feet away. Or further, if there isn’t much interference. A boat on the lake would do quite well. They wouldn’t have independent access to your files, but they’d see everything you see.”

  When I finished, Anshiser glanced out at the lake, then over at Maggie, who was sitting at a side table with a leather-bound book.

  “Check this,” he said briefly.

  She nodded. “I’ll call that FBI fellow who helped on the container ship contamination problem. He should know somebody.”

  Anshiser turned back to me, contemplated my face for a minute, and then decided. “Have you had any contact with the aviation industry?”

  I shrugged. “Not much. I did some work on Boeing’s economic and political clout in Seattle, and plugged the data into a political model. It didn’t come to much.”

  “Why not?” he asked curiously.

  “It wasn’t a vote discriminator. Nobody in Seattle fools with Boeing. The discriminators involved other issues.”

  “Hmph.” Anshiser pivoted his leather chair and peered out the window toward the lake. It was getting dark, and the line of the horizon was splitting deep blue sky and black water.

  “I have a problem,” he said, after a moment. He sighed and shook his head and pivoted back to face me. “It’s the biggest problem of my career. It could destroy or badly damage the heart of this company. More than forty years of work for me, and twenty-five more for my father.”

  “I can help?”

  He grunted. “Maybe.” He turned the chair again, to look out over the lake, gathering his thoughts.

  “About ten years ago, it appeared that there would be an opportunity. An opportunity to design a cutting-edge, all-weather fighter aircraft. It would be a half-step after the F-15, F-16, F-18 generation, but earlier than a really operational F-30 hypersonic plane came on. There was a lot of skepticism back then, in and out of government, about new military fighters. We were paying huge amounts of money for tiny increments of advantage.”

  He laced his hands behind his head. “In any case, the big defense aviation companies were focusing on the hypersonic aerospace fighter. To a few of us, it seemed that a gap might open, and we could slip into it with a privately built plane. So we started working on one. Just concepts at first, springing some engineers here and there to do studies and try out new ideas.

  “We weren’t the only ones doing that. Whitemark Aerospace had its own project going, and the bugs were out of it. They tried building private fighters and got burned. They got burned even though they did a hell of a job. But they weren’t working with the same kind of gap that we are now.”

  He paused and looked at his hands, as though he would find words in them.

  “Anyway, it was us and Whitemark. These things get complicated, almost philosophical, but we took different routes to the new fighters. They went with a heavy bird, called it Hellwolf. Big weapons platform, lots of armor, lots of computer assist. It’s a brute. We went with a light bird, the Sunfire. Not much armor, limited amounts of weaponry, although it could take a good variety—cannon, rockets, smart bombs, air-to-air and air-to-ground missiles, area-denial canisters, the full spectrum. It has an exceptional stealth configuration and selectively malleable wings that make it into a hell of a lifting body, with great idle time. It can go out and hang there, waiting. It’s as fast as the Whitemark entry, Mach 3.4 at thirty-five thousand feet, 1.3 at treetops. But it has half again the combat radius, better than twenty-three hundred miles.”

  “Sounds unbeatable,” I said, uncertainly. “Though I don’t know much about fighter specs.”

  “It looked good,” Anshiser said. There was a bitter note in his voice. “For a while, at least.”

  He turned and looked at me. “There are reasons to build light birds, and reasons to build them heavy. Pure speed is good, but it’s not everything. Dogfighting speeds are a lot lower than full-burn running. If you’re trying to maintain air superiority over a ground fight, you’ve got to stay over the killing ground. Whitemark figured that for practical purposes, in dogfights, Hellwolf would be as maneuverable as our Sunfire, with the advantage of the armor and the extra weaponry. They also knew that the American defense establishment has always gone for the heavy fighter when it had a choice. So Whitemark thought they had an advantage. But we had something they didn’t.”

  “And that was?”

  He hesitated. “I haven’t told you anything secret yet. I’m aware of your old military security clearance, but you’ve got to know that some of this is classified.”

  “I don’t talk.”

  He nodded. “What we had was a genius. Walter Markess. He was a synthesizer. They’re pretty rare among engineers. He took some stuff from Navy submarine design and some stuff from the Corps of Engineers, God help him. He did some research of his own, and he had access to all the work on air target acquisition. He came up with a thing that he called ‘String,’ for Selective Targeting.

  “You see, the maneuverability of a fighter is not limited so much by its design as by what the pilot can endure. Above certain turn rates, you get pilot failure. They’re crushed by the high-g turns, they black out, they red out, their reactions go to hell, they get confused and disoriented. String targeting was
a system that used laser tags, radar imaging, and even acoustics to get a target and hold it. It didn’t make any difference what altitude the enemy plane was in, or your plane, what speeds or directions they were going. Once the target was acquired, String would hold it, and relate it to your plane, until it was so far out that it was no longer a factor. Just like you had a string tied to it.

  “Then Markess took the whole thing a step further. He designed a control system using limited artificial intelligence software that could game-play the opposing fighters, given selections made by the pilot. In other words, the plane could fly by itself. It could make intelligent choices by considering a whole array of data: type of armaments and remaining supply, remaining fuel, number of opponents and their armament, actions of allied and enemy aircraft, prospects of success, the importance of success, and so on. And the thing is, you see, a pilot could opt to let the plane go beyond his own control. Even beyond his blackout point. He could say to the plane, ‘Take it. Run it to x number of gees, and it’s okay if I go out for a while, because you can handle it.’ And the plane would stay short of lethal maneuvers.

  “You see the advantage that gave us? No matter how fast their Hellwolf turned, we could turn inside it in critical situations. We could run with it, climb with it, and outwait it on target. We could do maneuvers Hellwolf couldn’t even consider. Maneuvers never seen before. We could attack and keep attacking when the pilots themselves were completely out of it.”

  “What happened?”

  Anshiser had become more and more animated as he recited the qualities of the Sunfire, but suddenly he was still, almost frozen. The hush lasted for five heartbeats before he moved again, to lean forward on his desk.

  “Those sonsofbitches at Whitemark stole String from us.” He slammed a big fist on the desk, his face tense and pale. “Stole it. Paid some sonofabitch to copy plans and carry them out of our corporate headquarters. They built their own String. The specs for their early system designs even had our mistakes, because they didn’t know enough to identify them.”

  “You didn’t have any legal protection?”

  “It’s not the sort of thing you get a patent on,” Anshiser snorted. “If we went to court, we might prove something fifty years from now. But after they figured out the system, they started altering it. Every time they found an alternate way to do something, they took it. If you went out right now and looked at the plans for our system, and their system, you’d probably feel the resemblance. But you’d have a hard time proving that their system is a copy.”

  He suddenly switched direction.

  “How old do you think I am?”

  I figured seventy or seventy-five, but gave him five years out of courtesy. “I don’t know. Sixtyfive? Seventy?”

  “Thank you.” He grinned. “I’m eighty-three. I don’t have much time left. I’ve been feeling . . . hollow. I can’t explain it, but it’s worse than being sick. Not that I’ve been sick that much. The doctors say it’s stress, and Dillon and Maggie say it’s this Sunfire thing.

  “My wife is gone, my kids are okay but nothing special. They’ll each inherit a couple of million or so when I die, and turn into the fossilized dipshits you see standing around country clubs. I can see it in my grandchildren. They’re okay— most of them—but I’m not very interested in them.

  “So I’m eighty-three, and the company is all I’m leaving behind. Now I might not leave that. In this business, development costs are so high that if you don’t win the contract, if you don’t get to build the plane, the whole company can go down.

  “Right now, we employ thirteen thousand workers in our aviation division. If Sunfire wins the competition, we’ll hire ten thousand more. If we lose, and all we have left is the corporate jet division, we’ll be down to five thousand by the end of the decade. The corporate jet field is saturated, competition is getting worse, and we have nowhere else to go. There are eight thousand people, more or less, who could lose their jobs because of a rotten little thief. I’m not going to stand for it. Not if I can do anything about it.”

  “Do you know who the thief is?”

  He glanced at Dillon. Dillon stared back impassively, and when Anshiser turned to me again, I got the feeling he was about to tell a lie. “No. We have some ideas. But right now, we don’t know.”

  “Okay. So where do I come in? What do you want me to do?”

  “A couple of things. Everything we do, from design to production to cost estimating, we do on computers. It’s all so complicated, there is no other way. If somebody smart got into our computer system, I don’t know how, but did it, he could hurt us. Badly.”

  “And you think it’s the same with Whitemark.”

  “I know it is. There simply isn’t any other way to do the work. Whitemark has about three months to integrate the String system with their Hellwolf avionics. Then they have to demonstrate to the Navy and Air Force that it will work. As it is, they might not make the deadline. They’ve got a crash program going, but they started late. I want you to slow them down. I want you to get into their computer system and screw it up. Be subtle, be obvious, I don’t care. But I want you to push them to the wall—I want you to jam them up so they can’t move. If they can’t demonstrate their system in three months, and we can, we’re back in the ball game.”

  “What’s the other thing you want?” I asked.

  “Revenge,” he said, his killer’s eyes glittering in the dying light. “I want revenge on the bastards who stole my baby.”

  Chapter 4

  I SPENT THE night in a Chicago hotel, watching a bad movie about teenagers and thinking over the job proposition. Anshiser was a maniac, of course. He knew what he was doing, but he was clinging to a thin edge of control, like a grunt with battle fatigue. Would a crisis crack the control, or harden it? It could go either way. Maggie was something else. She was precise, measured, cool. She knew what she was doing, and she was nowhere near the edge. She apparently agreed with Anshiser. Dillon was a cipher.

  Their proposition was not entirely novel. There have been several hushed-up incidents in which businesses were damaged by computer attacks. Most of the time, the object of the attack was theft or embezzlement, and the damage was an unintentional byproduct.

  A major railroad was burned when a group of techno-thieves, as they were called in the FBI report, began shuffling and relabeling boxcars. The intent was to send certain cars, loaded with high-value consumer items like televisions and stereos, to remote sidings, where the gang would crack the cars, load the loot onto trucks, and haul it away. The most serious damage came when they tried to cover their tracks. Three thousand boxcars were mislabeled and sent to the wrong destinations. The result was chaos. Perishable products rotted, time-critical shipments were late. It cost the railroad millions to straighten out.

  In a few of the known raids, the damage was intentional. In every case, though, the attacks were from the inside—guerrilla hits by employees against their own company. Anshiser’s proposition was altogether different. He was proposing a war, an act of naked aggression, an attack to the death by one corporation on another. As far as I knew, there had never been anything like it. A war that was business by other means, to paraphrase a famous Prussian.

  MAGGIE CALLED AT eight o’clock.

  “Jesus,” I said with a yawn. “When you said morning, I thought you meant like eleven. Where are you?”

  “Downstairs,” she said briskly. “I have three warm bagels, a small cup of cream cheese, a plastic knife, two Styrofoam cups of coffee, and your room number. What do you think?”

  She looked like she’d been up for hours. She came in, sat in one of the chairs, and ate one of the bagels while she watched me finish the other two.

  “You look like you’ve been dragged through hell by the ankles,” she said. “Any thoughts yet?”

  “It will take a while,” I said, scratching my day-old beard. “I wonder about Anshiser.”

  “If he’s crazy?”

  “I might ha
ve picked a different word.”

  “But that’s what you want to know,” she said. “The answer is, no, he is not crazy. He is extremely anxious. This might be our last card. If we’re going to play it, we have to do it soon. In six weeks, or two months, it will be too late.”

  “Hmph.” I drank the last of my coffee. “Let me shave and take a shower, and we can get out of here.”

  She came and leaned on the bathroom door-jamb while I shaved, still nibbling on her first bagel. “I used to watch my father shave when I was a little girl,” she said as I wiped the last of the shaving cream off my face.

  “You watch your father take a shower, too?” I asked.

  “Of course not.” A tiny frown.

  “Well, if you’ll move your elbow, I’ll shut the door and spare you the experience,” I said, and she grinned and moved off across the room.

  THE ANSHISER RESEARCH plant was somewhere out by O’Hare, a nondescript, modernoid building. It looked, as somebody clever once said, like the box the building should have come in. The director didn’t quite slaver over Maggie’s hand, but he personally took us down to the laboratory level, where a String package was being assembled.

  The lab looked like the world’s cleanest machine shop, with concrete floors and a lot of noise. The String package was in a back room. Entry was through three sets of glass doors, and for the last two the director needed different-colored key cards.

  String was the size of a console television. It was mounted on a testing gyro that allowed it to swivel freely. There was nothing tidy about it. Wires and electronics boards stuck out at all angles. There were nozzlelike protrusions here and there, and cylindrical openings where other nozzlelike protrusions would fit. A dolly full of testing equipment sat next to it, and nearby, two engineers in blue smocks argued about readouts. They stopped when we walked in.