Not now, she thought. She couldn’t have a flashback now.
She and Magnus and Byron stared at each other until the jet blast faded. Dagmar tried to regain control of her heart, her breath.
“High Zap,” she said, her mouth dry. “What’s that?”
Byron swallowed, suddenly nervous.
“We can’t tell you.”
Magnus inclined his head toward Lincoln’s office. “Ask Chatsworth,” he said.
Dagmar looked at Chatsworth’s office door, then realized there was something she had to do first.
“In a minute,” she said, and looked at the phone in her hand.
Out of Area, it said. She triggered the VoIP function and saw that it was down as well.
Dagmar enabled the sat phone function. Her nerves tautened as the word Connecting swam into sight on the display, repeating over and over again without any actual connection taking place, and then she almost sagged with relief as her handheld indicated that a signal had reached the satellite and been bounced back.
She walked around the room until she found an area with the strongest signal-sat phones didn’t work well indoors-and then thumbed in Rafet’s number in Ankara. Relief flooded her as the ring tone sang in her ear.
Lincoln had thoughtfully provided the Brigade with sat phones that could connect directly to the satellite, instead of having to go through a ground station at one end or the other.
Rafet answered on the second ring.
“This is Ankara,” he said, in English.
“This is Briana,” Dagmar said. “We’re having some trouble with communications here, and I thought I’d better alert you.”
“Here also,” Rafet said. “Our cell phones are out, and the government seems to have turned off the Internet.”
Dagmar’s head swam.
“That’s happening here as well,” she said.
“So the only way we can communicate is with the satellite phone?”
“Apparently.”
Or send a telegram, she thought. Or a carrier pigeon.
It was a little late in the game to equip every revolutionary with a satellite phone, and in any case she couldn’t afford it. Her plans were in serious trouble.
“Use this phone for primary communication till the Net comes back up,” Dagmar said. “Any word from the drones?”
“The drones haven’t finished their missions yet. But at least they’re still following orders.”
“That’s good news, at least.”
She ended the call and went to Lincoln’s office-knocked once and then opened the door. Lincoln sat at his desk and was staring at his phone while annoyance firmed his face.
“My phone’s stopped working,” he said. “Just as I was about to talk the mayor of Bodrum.”
“Cells and the Internet are down,” Dagmar said. “Byron and Magnus say it’s the High Zap.”
Lincoln’s mouth opened and the air came out of him in a soft sigh. He seemed to deflate, crumpling into himself like a pumpkin left too long on the shelf.
He was still looking at his phone. He put the phone on the desk and turned to Dagmar. His face was gray.
“Well,” he said. “That’s one we’ve lost.”
“Lost what?” Dagmar demanded. “Phones? The Internet?”
“The war.” Lincoln visibly pulled himself together, his shoulders rising, back growing straight. His hands wandered over his torso as if reassuring himself of his own continued existence. Then he turned to Dagmar, his blue eyes hard.
“Close the door,” he said.
Dagmar did so. She sat on one of the brown metal chairs. Lincoln adjusted himself in his Aeron and leaned toward her.
“Are satellite phones working?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“In that case I need you to call your company in California-we’ve got to see how widespread the damage is.”
A cold wind blew up Dagmar’s spine. This couldn’t be worldwide, she told herself.
She punched the number on her handheld. In the meantime Lincoln was launching his phone’s own satellite function.
In Simi Valley, Helmuth’s assistant Marcie answered the phone.
“Hi, Marcie, this is Dagmar. Any problem with the game?”
“Ah-” Marcie seemed surprised. “No, not that I’ve heard of.”
“Could you call up the Handelcorp Web page? Because I’m seeing some strange stuff, here.”
She heard fingers tapping a keyboard, followed by the slap of the Enter key.
“Everything looks good here,” Marcie said.
“You called it up from the Internet, not our own internal database?”
“Yes.”
“Check to see if the links are working.”
Marcie reported that everything seemed to be in order.
“No problem with the servers? The routers?”
“No. I’d hear the screaming if there were.”
“Right. Thanks. It just must be the local ISP that’s buggering up my signal.”
She pressed the End key and listened to the last few sentences of Lincoln’s conversation with whomever it was he’d called.
“You’ll have to do the checking yourself,” he said. “I’m not in a position to do anything, here.”
Lincoln ended his call and looked at her.
“Everything’s fine in Washington except the weather,” he said.
“Good,” she said.
“I should have realized the problem was local when you told me the satellites were still working.”
It can take out communications satellites? she thought.
Lincoln interlaced his fingers, making a single large fist. He placed the doubled fist on the desk before him and leaned toward her.
“The High Zap isn’t the real name,” he said. “But that’s what we’ll call it, okay?”
“Call what? What are we talking about, Lincoln?”
His lips thinned. His clenched fists thumped once, lightly, on the desk.
“It’s hard to know where to begin,” he said.
“The beginning usually works,” Dagmar said.
“Fine.” The fists thumped again on the desk.
“Back in ’91,” Lincoln said, “a U.S.-led coalition launched Operation Desert Storm to drive the Iraqis out of Kuwait. The allied air forces very quickly achieved superiority in the air and began destroying ground targets virtually at will.
“Throughout the Middle East,” he went on, “a rumor spread that the Iraqi air defenses had been knocked out by a computer virus smuggled into an Iraqi defense facility in a printer. The program was supposed to be called ‘Devouring Windows.’ This rumor persists unto the present day.”
Dagmar mentally reviewed the state of cyber arts in 1991, a task made a little uncertain by the fact she’d been a child at the time.
“That couldn’t have happened,” she said. “Right?”
“No.” Lincoln was scornful. “The story originated as an April Fool joke in InfoWorld magazine. The reason Iraqi air defense sites went down is that we were burying them in cluster bombs.”
“That’s what I’d figure,” Dagmar said.
“So after the war was over, and the rumor started going around, people in Washington-and I was one of them-began to wonder, Well, why can’t we? We-the U.S. government, I mean-created the Internet; we should have the keys to take it down.”
He unclenched his hands and spread them flat on the desk. “It took twenty years and a lot of black ops dollars, but eventually we had the High Zap.” He looked around, at the invisible electronic networks that surrounded his cube of an office.
“Now,” he said. “We’re the High Zap’s prisoner.”
Dagmar considered this.
“How does it work?” she asked.
One hand twirled in the air, summoning up a memory.
“Remember back in the nineties, when people were talking about the ‘Java revolution’?”
“Vaguely.”
“Java creates a virtual machine inside the computer that can run programs of its own. The High Zap isn’t written in Java, but the program works the same way-it creates a very simple, very clean little engine inside a router, living between layers of the TCP/IP. When it’s activated, it refuses any packet that doesn’t have the right prefix. Communication is disabled. So communication is completely shut down until a preset time of deactivation has been reached, or until an order arrives that has the correct code prefix ordering it to quit.”