The Hard Bounce - страница 49

Ollie’s basement apartment looked like a utility closet on the Death Star. The walls were painted sterile white, all four layered with computers, pieces of electronics, and what looked like miles and miles of wires twisting around themselves in a three-dimensional Jackson Pollack.

“You guys gotta see this,” Ollie said, leading us to one of the many screens posted along one wall. “I can’t tell you guys which, but one of the major airlines just dropped a chunk of cash in my hands to test their electronic defense systems. Look.”

On the screen was a radar layout. Little dots slowly moved around the screen, identifying numbers beneath the dots.

“That’s the system?” I asked.

“Nah, it’s a simulation program they’ve linked me into. Basically identical to the real OS they use, same security and whatnot.”

“Solid system?” I asked, as though I had any idea what we were talking about.

“This?” Ollie huffed at me like I’d just defended the Ewoks. “This is shit work. Any hack with half a brain, half a system, and a little bit of patience can break into it.” Then Ollie smiled and held his hands apart like a magician about to yank a rabbit out of a hat. “Ever see a man crack a Federal Black Ice firewall in under a minute?”

“Uh… No?”

“Watch this.” Ollie went to work. He leaned forward in his chair as his fingers flew over the keyboard. Numbers that were meaningless to me raced down the bottom of the monitor. Junior gaped at the screen like a chimp forced to translate ancient Egyptian. He stuck a cigarette in his mouth and popped open his Zippo.

Ollie whipped a pointed finger at Junior. “Do not light a cigarette in here. These machines are exceptionally sensitive.” His eyes never moved off the dancing numbers. The hand remaining on the keyboard picked up speed, as if to compensate for its missing brother. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see smoke curling off Ollie’s fingertips.

Junior frowned and flipped off the back of Ollie’s head. He tucked the cigarette into his T-shirt pocket.

“Now,” Ollie said, “watch this.” With the last few flicks of his fingers, the dots on the screen disappeared. It looked like the computer had shut off.

“Taa-daa!” Ollie sure was excited by the blank screen.

“Uh, I don’t see anything.”

“Exactly. And neither do they.”

“Where’d the planes go?” Junior asked.

“Oh, they’re still up there. I haven’t hacked into their individual systems, but their ground control is completely blind. About eighteen hundred tons of airplanes are about to go crash kaboom.”

“Well,” Junior clapped his hands. “I’m not getting on a plane again. Ever.”

“Man, the boys monitoring these boards must be shitting their pants right now.” Ollie wiggled with pleasure in his seat. It was the way he laughed. He never made a sound, just wiggled happily.

Like most things Ollie, the humor was lost on me. “I thought you said this was a simulation.”

“It is. But they still have guys monitoring the boards to see if we can whack ’em.” Ollie leaned back in his chair and groaned, as though he’d just finished a hugely satisfying meal. “So, what’s this video thingy?”

“We need to get a closer look at one part of a frame. Can you do something like that?”

“Can Captain Kirk bang a green chick?”

“I’ll take that as a yes.”

“I’ll just drop the DVD into the ’puter and rip the file. I’m pretty sure I can jury rig some sort of video capture/enhancement program. It might take me a couple hours to convert the hardware and then render the MPEG into a negotiable file. Is MPEG an okay format? I know it’s almost archaic at this point, but so is the vid software I have.”

I recognized enough English in the sentence to feel retarded. “Whatever works for you, Ollie. The stuff on the DVD… it’s some messed up shit. It’s really important that you forget what’s on it, okay?”

“Gotcha. Can you give me a rough idea of where?”

“At three minutes, thirteen seconds, a curtain gets knocked aside. That’s what we need. We need to see better what’s outside that window.”

Ollie sucked in his upper lip and chewed on it, thinking. “Can do. Gonna take me about an hour or so. You wanna pick up some lunch?”