“Fell asleep in theTank.”
“On my way back. I think I’ve got it.” Crockett hung up and hit thegas.
Ten minutes later, he swiped his badge, entered his suite, and flipped on lights before powering down the desertedhallway.
When he opened the door to the Tank, Decker shifted his zombie-like gaze to Crockett. “Ugh.”
“You look like hell.” Crockett shut thedoor.
“You’re not so prettyyourself.”
After dropping into the chair, he slid two sandwiches over to Decker. “FromAlexandra.”
He lifted the egg, cheese and Canadian bacon sandwich. “Nice.” They wolfed down their food in silence. When finished, Decker appeared more awake. “What did you dreamup?”
“No dream, my friend. Two words. Ghostcode.”
“Hmm.” Decker chewed on his lowerlip.
“We’ve ruled out the hardware. We checked and re-checked existing code. What we couldn’t check was code we couldn’tsee.”
“It would explain why the code in the devices mirrors what’s in SDDS.” Sitting tall, Decker tapped away on thekeyboard.
Wilde Innovations utilized a proprietary Software Development and Deployment System—SDDS—that tracked the deployment of software to all surveillancedevices.
Over the next hour, they re-examined the code and memory in each of the devices that had failures. While they couldn’t find any remnant of ghost code, they did discover that the memory allocation significantly exceeded what was normallyrequired.
“Holy hell,” Decker said. “I think you figured itout.”
“Credit goes to Alexandra. She got methinking.”
“The memory differential is almost a hundred meg. All I can see in the excess space is a bunch ofzeros.”
Energy rocketed through Crockett as he stared at the screen. “How can we see what isn’tthere?”
“I’m not sure we can,” Decker said. “But this is consistent with what a programmer would see after ghost code erasesitself.”
Crockett reviewed the logs to determine the time frames when SDDS pushed software to each of the devices. “None of the dates arerecent.”
“Someone either connected to the devices directly or accessed them through the LAN.” Decker rolled his chair back and crossed his ankle over his thigh. “It’s too bad there’s no way to track unauthorizedconnections.”
“There might be,” Crockett said. “When the multi-hub was installed, I instructed the network engineers to configure it to keep track of all connections, regardless ofsource.”
Decker pulled the multi-hub log and reviewed it, line by line. “I’m going to either lose my sight or mymind.”
“Look, there’s a pattern.” Crockett pointed. “Someone connected to each of the Spy Flies in question at two in the morning the night before the FBI demo.” He swiveled to Decker. “Let’s check Maverick’sbird.”
That, too, had been accessed the night before the surveillance craft had been shippedout.
“No way,” Decker said. “This is the same IPaddress.”
Crockett logged in and queried Wilde’s IP database. “Gotcha!” Crockett said. “It’s Larry Berry’scomputer.”
“I want to jump up and down,” Decker said. “But I have noenergy.”
Knock,knock.
Without waiting for a response, the door opened. “Oh, thank goodness.” Ellen put a calming hand on her chest. “All the lights are on. I wasn’t sure what I’dfind.”
