“Good. Then how long will it take?”
Murph and Eric looked at each other and shrugged.
“Maybe ten years,” Eric said.
Rivard looked like he’d blow an artery. “What?”
“A hundred years assumes using current technology. But with computer power doubling every eighteen months, we should be able to solve a cryptographic problem like this in ten years.”
“Maybe even five,” Murph suggested.
Juan didn’t know if they were being serious or just yanking the imperious Rivard’s chain. “Keep reading,” he said.
“Don’t think you have that long, either,” Marie continued. “Every day counts and you’ve got ten left. All of the backups and banks connected to Credit Condamine are infected now. Upon reaching the time limit, if our forthcoming demands aren’t met, you’ll see the economy of Europe plunged into a chaos that will make you long for the good old days of the Great Depression.”
The room quieted at that line.
“Can they really do that?” Juan asked Gretchen.
She shook her head. “I don’t know. Without being able to see exactly what they’ve done to the software, it may be impossible to tell. But this bank is connected tightly with many other European banks. Perhaps they found some way of corrupting the transfer files.”
“There’s one final part,” Marie said, and kept reading.
“Go ahead and comb through the code looking for this time bomb, if you dare, but eventually you’ll have to cough up the dough to us. Heaven help you if you don’t. One more major bank will suffer a catastrophic system failure in five days as a signal that we’re not lying. We’ll be in touch.”
“We’re obviously dealing with at least one highly skilled hacker here,” Murph said. “This is top-of-the-line work. And we likely won’t be able to dig down farther without some kind of access key.”
“For all we know,” Eric said, “digging farther may even activate the time bomb that they’re talking about.”
Rivard didn’t seem worried by the threat. “You all are fools. Don’t you see? Munier planted this.”
“What do you mean?” Gretchen asked.
“He knew that we would bring in analysts to check out the system, once he reported the break-in, and the guards were found dead, wherever he dumped them. This message was intended to throw the suspicion off him.”
“A bank president didn’t create this virus himself. It’s possible that the hacker had his own agenda and wrote this message without Munier’s knowledge.”
“There’s another possibility,” Juan said. “We think Munier might have been coerced into planting the virus, that he was framed to make it look like he was trying to cover up an embezzlement scheme.”
“That’s absurd,” Rivard said. “If someone went to the trouble of framing Munier, why would they give themselves away by planting a message?”
That was actually a good question, and Juan thought there were several possible answers.
“The hackers might have thought we wouldn’t crack their code so quickly. Or they wanted us to read it so we’d think Munier was a willing accomplice.”
Rivard gave him a skeptical look. “‘They’?”
“The message refers to ‘our demands.’ We have to assume la
rger forces are behind this.”
“I think we should take the threat seriously,” Gretchen said.
Rivard took a breath and wiped his brow. “And we will. We take all threats seriously. Thank you for your help in uncovering this message. But we need to concentrate our resources on investigating the most likely possibilities first. If you want to focus your investigation in a different direction, by all means go ahead.”
Gretchen began to object but was rebuffed.
As a cringing Marie looked at them apologetically, Rivard kept talking. “I will not send us on a course that makes the Sûreté Publique look ridiculous and causes an unwarranted economic panic. I will let Interpol decide if they want to issue a warning to the banking community based on this flimsy evidence, but that warning will not be coming from us. If, and when, we find more data to support your theory, I will gladly take that path. Until then, leave us to do our work. I spoke to the commissioner on the way over and he agrees. I will inform you of our findings as they become available.”