Chapter 36

“Manual abort?” Susan stared at her screen, mystified.

She knew she hadn’t typed any manual abort command‑at least not intentionally. She wondered if maybe she’d hit the wrong sequence of keys by mistake.

“Impossible,” she muttered. According to the headers, the abort command had been sent less than twenty minutes ago. Susan knew the only thing she’d typed in the last twenty minutes washer privacy code when she’d stepped out to talk to the commander. It was absurd to think the privacy code could have been misinterpreted as an abort command.

Knowing it was a waste of time, Susan pulled up her ScreenLock log and double‑checked that her privacy code had been entered properly. Sure enough, it had.

“Then where,” she demanded angrily, “where did it get a manual abort?”

Susan scowled and closed the ScreenLock window. Unexpectedly, however, in the split second as the window blipped away, something caught her eye. She reopened the window and studied the data. It made no sense. There was a proper “locking” entry when she’d left Node 3, but the timing of the subsequent “unlock” entry seemed strange. The two entries were less than one minute apart. Susan was certain she’d been outside with the commander for more than one minute.

Susan scrolled down the page. What she saw left her aghast. Registering three minutes later, a second set of lock‑unlock entries appeared. According to the log, someone had unlocked her terminal while she was gone.

“Not possible!” she choked. The only candidate was Greg Hale, and Susan was quite certain she’d never given Hale her privacy code. Following good cryptographic procedure, Susan had chosen her code at random and never written it down; Hale’s guessing the correct five‑character alphanumeric was out of the question‑it was thirty‑six to the fifth power, over sixty million possibilities.

But the ScreenLock entries were as clear as day. Susan stared at them in wonder. Hale had somehow been on her terminal while she was gone. He had sent her tracer a manual abort command.

The questions of how quickly gave way to questions of why? Hale had no motive to break into her terminal. He didn’t even know Susan was running a tracer. Even if he did know, Susan thought, why would he object to her tracking some guy named North Dakota?

The unanswered questions seemed to be multiplying in her head. “First things first,” she said aloud. She would deal with Hale in a moment. Focusing on the matter at hand, Susan reloaded her tracer and hit the enter key. Her terminal beeped once.

Tracer sent

Susan knew the tracer would take hours to return. She cursed Hale, wondering how in the world he’d gotten her privacy code, wondering what interest he had in her tracer.

Susan stood up and strode immediately for Hale’s terminal. The screen was black, but she could tell it was not locked‑the monitor was glowing faintly around the edges. Cryptographers seldom locked their terminals except when they left Node 3 for the night. Instead, they simply dimmed the brightness on their monitors‑a universal, honor‑code indication that no one should disturb the terminal.

Susan reached for Hale’s terminal. “Screw the honor code,” she said. “What the hell are you up to?”

Throwing a quick glance out at the deserted Crypto floor, Susan turned up Hale’s brightness controls. The monitor came into focus, but the screen was entirely empty. Susan frowned at the blank screen. Uncertain how to proceed, she called up a search engine and typed: