“I’m in the flaming shell.” His voice was a mutter, and Irish now as a shamrock. “And I’ve already tried that. Clever bastard. Look here, look at this. It’s voice printed. Can’t override manually. Fuck it, there she goes.”
Eve saw his monitor erupt with jags of black and white. He flipped out data discs an instant before a nasty grinding sound came through the speakers, and a small, gray plume of smoke puffed out of the back of the machine.
“Toasted,” Jamie said.
Chapter 13
“Unit’s a dead loss.” Roarke had yet to button his shirt, however he had removed the sensors. “But it gave its life for a good cause.”
He turned one of the discs in his hand. “These should be clean—nothing on that program was geared to the external drive. But they should be labeled and set aside for testing after we’ve managed to extract the entire program. Hard copy will do for now. Jamie, you can start imputting the data in the morning.”
“I can start now.”
“You’ll have some supper, then a two-hour recreation break. If you feel like putting an hour in after that—an hour only—that’s fine. In bed, lights out, by midnight. If you don’t rest your brain, it won’t be of any use to me.”
“Man, my mother isn’t even that strict.”
“I’m not your mother. Feeney—”
“You don’t want to tell me when to go to bed, kid. I’m old enough to be your mother.”
“I was going to ask if you could do with a meal. I imagine we all could.”
“Hold it. Just hold it.” Frustrated, Eve held up both hands. “Nobody eats anything until I get an explanation. What did you get, and what does it mean? And if I hear one word of computerese, everybody gets rabbit food.”
“Talk about strict,” Jamie countered.
“Tell me,” ordered Eve.
“He got the frequency,” McNab told her. “And the spectrum. Another minute, tops, we’d’ve had the pulse and speed.”
“Basically, Lieutenant.” Roarke tugged the band out of his hair so it fell like black rain. “With a little more finessing, we’ve got your virus.”
“Did you get the method of infection?” she asked.
“Possibly. There’s data to analyze, but from the look I could get on the scroll, I’m putting my money on the simplicity of e-mail.”
“They e-mailed it? Fucking e-mail?” Eve had wanted simple, but this . . . this was almost insulting. “You can’t infect that way. CompuGuard—”
“Has never seen the likes of this,” Roarke interrupted. “My guess would be . . .” He trailed off, gestured. “Go ahead, Jamie, before you erupt.”
“Okay, see what it looks like—and I have to figure out how to do it—is they cloaked a doc, micro’ed and stealthed—”
“Do you want to eat radishes and lettuce?” Eve asked mildly.
“Right.” He adjusted his brain to lay terms. “So they attached the virus to the e-mail, only it didn’t show up as having an attachment, doesn’t alert the receiver. Sender can check if it went in just by doing the standard scan on when the mail was read. Had to download fast, really fast, without showing the operator what it was doing. It had to talk to the unit, temporarily at least shut down the prompts and alerts for a download. Then it filed itself, as a document, an invisible document in the main drive program. It wouldn’t register on a standard doc search and scan. It doesn’t ID. It’s just there, like lurking and doing its job. It’s way radical.”
“Okay, I follow that.” Eve looked at Roarke. “If this could be done, how come you didn’t know about it?”
“Lieutenant, I am chagrined.”
“Me, I’m just starved.” Jamie patted his belly. “Got any pepperoni pizza?”
Eve had a couple of slices herself, bided her time through the noisy, confused meal, let her mind drift to the case, away from it, back again.
She wasn’t sure when it struck her—maybe when Feeney casually speared some of the pasta off Roarke’s plate, or when Jamie dumped another slice of pizza on McNab’s as he stretched across the table for anothe
r for himself. Maybe it had always been there, and just chose that moment to clarify.