He paused and nodded at Esther. “I’ve also been informed that my counterpart in Tel Aviv would like Ms. Freeman to be part of your team as well. Is that correct, Ms. Freeman?” When Esther nodded, the Director stood up. “There’s a great deal more that the rest of us have to do, but I think it would be best if you two get back to that virus as quickly as possible.”
He must have hit some sort of signal because a man came through the door and escorted us to a work area on a lower floor. He pointed at the computer terminals and encrypted telephone stations and invited us to make ourselves at home. “I’ll be outside the door if you need anyone or anything,” he told us.
The room we’d been given was not an ordinary conference room. On the walls was an array of television screens, each labeled with a city around the world and each with a live news feed from that city. Below each screen was a clock displaying the local time. “Look,” Esther pointed, “it’s 5:30 in the afternoon of the 30th here,” she said, “but in Israel New Year’s Eve has already started. If the attack is planned for midnight, we don’t have much time.”
I sat down at a terminal and called up the work I’d already done on the virus. The code scrolled out in front of me, line after line, page after page. I tried different applications on it, hoping to make sense of it, but none of my cracking tools worked. I immersed myself in the work and lost all sense of time. Someone brought sandwiches and I nibbled on one without ever knowing what kind it was. My eyes began to burn and I laid my head down to rest them for a minute.
December 31
I awoke to Esther’s hand shaking my shoulder. I looked at her in confusion, but all she did was point at the clock for Tel Aviv. It read 1:00 p.m., December 31st. In confusion I looked at the other screens and saw that it was 6:00 a.m. here in Washington. Suddenly from one of the TV monitors came the sound of explosions, but when I looked around frantically I saw that they were coming from the feed from New Zealand, not Israel, and they were fireworks, not the sounds of combat.
Comprehension slowly came, and I looked at Esther apprehensively. “It’s midnight in Auckland – New Year’s Eve has already arrived there. Time is running out.”
I looked down at the computer monitor, but the code displayed there didn’t look any more comprehensible than it had last night. It seemed obvious to me that the virus was written to infect a proprietary operating system, but I knew that there were thousands if not millions of such systems in use around the world. The only person likely to recognize the system code was someone who worked on it regularly. We were going to have to try something different.
I turned to Esther and said, “Maybe the way to attack this puzzle is to leave the code alone for a while and try to figure out what the bad guys want to achieve. If we can guess their objective, maybe that will give us a clue on how to attack the code.
“Let’s start with the basics. Bad guys often use viruses to steal account numbers, passwords or other confidential data. Stealing a bunch of state secrets might create big problems, but I can’t see how that would help ISIS all that much. Besides, from what I’ve read, that kind of espionage is only really effective if the enemy doesn’t know you have penetrated their security.”
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