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“How’s that?” Payne said.
“Like the candy. Hard shell on the outside. All sweet and soft inside.”
Payne grinned and nodded.
Obviously a damn good guy.
I should look into starting a scholarship fund for guys like Andy.
I’m embarrassed that this Pretty Boy Parkman’s already thought of it before me.
“Okay, Matt, what’s going on?” Rapier said. “What do we need to do?”
Payne explained.
Then Harris handed them the printouts from Stanley Dowbrowski.
“The Bulletin?” Andy Radcliffe then said.
“Yeah.”
At the main keyboard, he began typing. After a moment, the main bank of sixteen TVs showed an unusual Internet browser window. Then that window filled with the front page of the online edition of The Philadelphia Bulletin.
“A school buddy of mine works in the paper’s ISD. He’s also interning over at the FBI,” he said, and pointed his thumb back over his shoulder.
The FBI’s William J. Green Jr. Building was a couple blocks away, over at Sixth and Arch.
Andy Radcliffe then pulled out his cell phone and hit a speed-dial key. When his buddy came on the line, he explained what they were trying to do.
“Can I access it remotely?” Andy Radcliffe said.
Then he tilted his head to hold the phone to his ear. With both hands on the keyboard, his fingers flew. The Internet browser window with the image of the newspaper then shrank to fit on only the left eight TVs. A new browser window opened on the right eight flat-screens.
The new window was mostly blank. There was a single box in the middle. He moved the cursor to it.
“Okay, I got it,” Radcliffe said, and began typing as he said “uh-huh, uh-huh.”
In the box a string of asterisks appeared, clearly obscuring the password’s string of letters and numbers.
Radcliffe hit RETURN and the box went away. Another flashed ENTRY SUCCESSFUL, then it went away and a new page appeared in the window. It was a tree of coded hyperlinks, the blue-colored links a series of alphanumeric file names.
“I’m in,” Radcliffe then said into the cellular phone. “I’ll call you back.”
He broke off the call. Then he typed some more, and the second browser window shrank to fit only the top right four sixty-four-inch flat-screens. Another new window opened on the four panels beneath it.
“What sort of browser is that?” Payne said. “I’ve never seen one quite like it.”
Radcliffe looked at Kerry Rapier, then at Payne. “If I told you, I’d have to kill you.”
Byrth and Harris chuckled.
Payne looked at Andy and saw he was grinning ear to ear.
“It’s a custom-built browser,” Radcliffe then said. “Comes from a skunk works at MIT. The code was written basically to strip out all the commerce parts you find on junk like Explorer and instead concentrates on making the program super-secure.”
“It looks pretty bare-bones.”
“Looks are deceiving.”
