Checkmate Read Online Free PDF Page A

was already heading for the door. He stopped at the threshold, hesitated a moment, then turned back. “Sam?”
    “Yeah?”
    “Glad you’re in one piece.”
     
     
     
    GRIMSDOTTIR walked in twenty minutes later. Born in Iceland, Anna was tall and statuesque, with a model’s cheekbones and short, brown-auburn hair—a choice Fisher suspected had more to do with function than it did with fashion. Above all else, Anna was practical. Worry about whether she was having a “hair day”—good or bad—wasn’t on her list of priorities.
    “Welcome back, Sam. I don’t see anything glowing.”
    “The day is young.”
    “I talked to the docs at Aberdeen. They confirmed that whatever’s aboard the Trego , you didn’t receive enough of a dose to worry about.” She walked over to a nearby computer workstation and tapped a few keys. A frisbee-shaped 3D model of what Fisher assumed was the hard drive from Trego laptop appeared on the screen. The disk was broken into irregularly sized geometric chunks outlined in either red, green, or yellow.
    Grimsdottir said, “Okay, what do you want first, the good news or the bad news?”
    Lambert said, “Bad news.”
    “All the red data sectors you see were wiped clean by the self-destruct program. They’re gone, period. No coming back.”
    “That’s a lot of red,” Fisher said.
    “About eighty percent. Green is probably recoverable; yellow is iffy.”
    “And the good news?” Lambert said.
    “I may be able to tell who wrote the self-destruct program.”
    “How?”
    “Most programmers have a signature—the way they block code, handle syntax, write background comments. . . . Those kinds of things. Sometimes it’s as distinctive as handwriting. And I can tell you this: Whoever wrote this program is sophisticated; his signature is unique. It may take me a few—”
    Suddenly a muted alarm came over the loudspeakers. In unison, all the computer monitors began flashing, their screens overlayed by a large red exclamation mark.
    “Oh, God,” Grimsdottir murmured, staring at the screen.
    “What?” Lambert said. “What’s going on?”
    “A virus just got past our firewall. It’s attacking the mainframe!”

5
    “ SILENCE those alarms, Anna,” Lambert ordered.
    The room went quiet.
    “How’s this possible?” Lambert asked. “This is the NSA, for God’s sake, not eBay. How could something get past our firewalls?”
    “The laptop,” Fisher murmured.
    Grimsdottir nodded, eyes fixed on the screen. “You got it. Colonel, there was a virus buried in one of the hard drive’s sectors. A worm, designed to come alive as soon as it detected a connection with any of the laptop’s ports. As soon as I hooked it up to run diagnostics—”
    “Can you stop it?”
    “Working on it. It’s moving fast, spreading through the mainframe. I’m trying to get ahead of it . . . set up a firebreak. If I can divert it into a unused server, I can trap it. Damn, it’s moving fast!”
    For the next fifteen minutes Fisher and Lambert watched in silence as she worked. Blocks of green-on-black computer code streamed across the monitor. Grimsdottir’s hands became a blur on the keyboard. Slowly the code seemed to lose momentum, coming in erratic bursts, until finally she leaned back and exhaled. Her face glistened with sweat. Her hands were shaking.
    “I got it,” she said. “It’s trapped on an empty archive server.”
    “How much damage did it do?” Lambert asked.
    “A lot, but it didn’t reach the backup systems, so we’ll be able to rebuild most of the mainframe.”
    “And the laptop?” Fisher asked.
    “Gone. Well and truly dead. One piece of good news, though: There’s only a few people in the world with the voodoo it takes to write that kind of virus. Give me a day, and I’ll have a name.”
    “Go,” Lambert ordered.
     
     
     
    ONCE she was gone, Fisher turned to Lambert. “I have an idea about the Trego .”
    “I’m listening.”
    “I don’t buy the Liberia