“And in the meantime,” Dagmar said, “the Internet works perfectly well for anyone with the right codes.”
“Correct.”
“How does the Zap get into the router?” Dagmar asked.
Lincoln narrowed his eyes. “That was another technical problem that took a lot of years to solve. Suffice it to say that it was solved, and that it’s now in every router made in the last six or seven years.”
Does it propagate like a virus? Dagmar wondered. But no-routers were different, had different doors into them, and in any case they were made to route information onward, not keep it in memory… But that meant the Zap had to be installed in them, at the factory, and that didn’t make sense, either, because routers were made in so many different countries by so many different companies.
“The Zap can be localized, as it seems to be here,” Lincoln was saying. “The command can be sent to a particular router, and then forwarded to any other router that responds to a ping in a time of a given fraction of a light-second. Of course, if the area is wide enough, it can go clear up to the Clarke Orbit.” He flapped a hand in the general direction of the satellite that had just carried their voices to North America.
“The moon is only-what?” Dagmar tried to remember the figure. “Half a light-second away?”
“Let’s just say the Zap has all the reach it needs,” Lincoln said.
Dagmar’s mind flailed like a drowning man through the sea of fresh information.
“The Zap takes down TCP/IP?” she said.
“Yes.”
“But cell phones don’t use TCP/IP, and they’re down.”
“Telephones use PSTN protocol,” Lincolon said. “But the controls for the telephone relays use TCP/IP-or they do unless they’re old-fashioned mechanical relays. So the Zap guarantees a slow degradation of phone service-the phones will be all right until you need to give them an order through TCP/IP, and then they start going mad, and then the network goes into a death spiral and crashes.” He gestured to his cell phone. “Apparently the local net ran into a whole complex series of problems and went down fast.”
“Jesus,” Dagmar muttered. “Is there more bad news?”
“Lots,” Lincoln said dryly. “TCP/IP is used by all modern military networks. All modern military satellites. All email. All social media. All local area networks. Voice over Internet. The entirety of the World Wide Web.”
An objection occurred to Dagmar.
“But this was designed to bring down military networks, right?” Dagmar said. “Aren’t they kept physically apart from other networks? How do you get to them?”
Lincoln raised an eyebrow. “In the event that we can’t bring down an enemy by preventing them from ordering online merchandise, sending text messages, and participating in flamewars, we can trash a military net provided we can gain access.”
“All it would take,” Dagmar said, “is a connection left open at the right moment. But you can’t count on that.”
“It could be engineered. Or…” He sucked in breath through clenched teeth. “Actually, that’s where our problems started. Because it wasn’t enough to own the Internet equivalent of an End of Times plague for the Internet, some of our politicians wanted to actually use it.”
“So Bozbeyli is just retaliating?” Dagmar asked. “Or-”
“It wasn’t used on Bozbeyli,” Lincoln said. “Back last spring, the Zap was used on our friends the Syrians-and for good reason, because they were continuing their never-ending quest for weapons of mass destruction. The Israelis wanted to stage an air raid on several sites simultaneously, and they wanted the Syrian air defenses down while they did it.”
“So you start with the rumor of a secret method for crashing an air defense network,” Dagmar said, “and then you end up with an actual secret method for crashing an air defense network.” She shook her head. “You people are too literal minded.”
Lincoln was grim. “I’m a little too close to the action to appreciate any irony, thanks.” He leaned back in his Aeron chair. Cold anger haunted his eyes. “I was against the action, quite frankly. I thought the Internet Apocalypse was too big a weapon to use against gnats-I argued that it needed to be held in reserve for a real emergency.”
“But you were overruled.”
Lincoln shrugged. “I can see their point,” he said. “It was in the best possible cause-and I supposed that, if we acted to confirm the 1991 rumor, it would only add to our mystical air of omnipotence.”
“But,” Dagmar pointed out, “to knock out the Syrian air defense, you still had to get into a military network, not just the Internet.”
“You are not cleared for knowing how we could do that,” Lincoln said. “But we could- provided that we made use of some highly advanced equipment available in a listening station in the mountains of southeastern Turkey-which itself exists only because the National Security Agency, which is normally tasked with electronic spying in that area, wouldn’t share their raw data with us, only their conclusions.” His face assumed the caste of indignation. “When we’d ask how they knew what they claimed to know, they’d just say they couldn’t give us that information. It was… vexing. So we got some black ops dollars and built our own station, and once we could fact-check them, the NSA grew a lot more tractable. But I digress…”
“Yeah,” Dagmar said. “Spare me your D.C. freakin’ turf wars.”
“Anyway,” Lincoln went on, “two technicians with training in the Zap took a copy of the command software to Turkey in a laptop. So that the secret would be safe in the event of the laptop going astray, the software itself was booby-trapped-it required a password within one minute of the laptop’s booting, or it would erase itself. The two techs were able to get into the Syrian defense net and bring it down for the one hour and ten minutes necessary to ensure the success of the Israeli strike.
“And then-just hours later-Bozbeyli took over Turkey. We didn’t want to send the laptop home through what might be civil disorder, so the laptop stayed on the mountain until Bozbeyli got worried that the listening station might be reporting his own phone calls, and sent in the military to shut it down.”
He spread his hands in a helpless gesture.
“There was a mix-up. Byron and Magnus got away, but the Turkish military got the laptop with the controls to the High Zap on it. And-as is now apparent-our safeguards failed, and the black hats have now broken into the program and figured out how to use it.”
Dagmar was waving her hands, trying frantically to stop the flow of words.
“Byron and Magnus?” she said. “Kilt Boy and Angry Man gave the Zap away?”
Lincoln pursed his lips in a gesture of deliberate patience. “Not gave,” he said.
“And you’re still employing them?”
“It wasn’t precisely their fault,” Lincoln said vaguely. “And they’re qualified for what they’re doing here. And they have first-hand experience with the Zap; we figured they’d have a better idea than most whether the Zap was being used and where, and what countermeasures might be taken.”
Dagmar gazed at Lincoln in weary amazement. She pictured Byron and Magnus high up on the curtain of mountains that rimmed Turkey on the east, bickering and snapping at each other.
At least there were no go-karts to crash up there.
“What did the Turks think of the kilt?” Dagmar asked.
“I’m sure they never saw it.” Lincoln flapped a hand. “Magnus would have been instructed to dress inconspicuously.”
Dagmar looked at Lincoln. Her fingers tightened on the arms of her chair as anger simmered in her consciousness.
“So,” she said, “this whole affair-bringing democracy and a legitimate government back to our allies the Turks-all that is just a way of getting the Zap back?”
Lincoln suddenly looked very tired. He waved a hand.