Boston—Tuesday morning
Convinced by Chelsea to help save the FBI agent’s life, Louis Massina approached the problem the way he approached any problem: all-out. All of his resources were devoted to the young man. Not only did that mean all of Smart Metal’s technical expertise and devices; it also meant all of Massina’s considerable contacts. Grace Sisters’ Hospital and its experimental operating suite were put at Johnny Givens’s disposal, as were its doctors. Drugs that would speed his recovery as well as sustain him through the heart operations—drugs that couldn’t be bought at any price—were rushed to the hospital, with the FDA’s blessing. Sister Rose Marie saw personally to the young man’s care, and even Father O’Gorman, one of the hospital’s crusty chaplains, took an interest in the case.
The latter was doubly unusual, in that Johnny Givens was a confirmed Baptist.
It was O’Gorman whom Chelsea met outside the ICU when she came to check on the man she’d helped so much to save. O’Gorman sighed and shook his head when he saw her. Chelsea was Catholic, but to O’Gorman she represented the grievous future versus the blessed past. For despite working in one of the world’s most advanced medical centers, O’Gorman regarded technology as something close to the Devil’s plaything.
If not worse.
“Hello, Father,” said Chelsea.
O’Gorman shook his head and pointed at Chelsea’s iPhone, which she was just turning off.
“I hope you’re not thinking of taking a selfie,” grumbled the priest.
“I’m just turning the ringer off.” Chelsea slipped the phone into her pocket. “I’m surprised, Father.”
“What?”
“That you actually know what a selfie is.”
“Vanity, young lady, is one of the seven deadly sins. That I know. Book of Proverbs 6:16–19. King Solomon. The phrase is a ‘proud look.’ And as—”
“How is that vanity?” interrupted Chelsea.
“Just when I thought there was hope,” grumbled the priest, stalking away.
“It’s vanity because it means to be too proud, which is when God trips us up,” said Sister Rose, turning the corner. “But I don’t think it’s a sin you have to worry about, dear,” she added kindly. “It’s not wrong to be aware of the gifts God has bestowed on us. As long as we put them to their best use.”
“I try.”
“You’re here for our patient.” The nun was practically the only adult Chelsea knew in Boston whom she could regard eye to eye without raising her head. “Come.”
Chelsea followed her down the hall to an intensive-care room. Johnny lay sandwiched in the high-tech bed, only his arms visible on the side. His body floated on a mattress of air currents, which bathed him top and bottom with medicated vapor designed to quickly heal his burned skin as well as lessen the pain. Tubes and wires ran from the top of this metal sandwich to an array of machines on both sides of the room.
“We’ll have him up by the end of the week,” said Sister Rose.
“That soon?”
“He’s responded well to the new heart. And we’re using an experimental therapy—it is very promising, though it does rely on some nanocompounds. If he hadn’t been close to death . . .”
Chelsea did not work on the medical side of the company, and she knew very little about its prosthetics, let alone the more exotic and experimental devices like the artificial heart. But she was well aware of how important those devices were, as well as the huge advances they represented. The heart machine was a perfect example. Made of a proprietary carbon-strand-fiber and microlattice nickel phosphorus, it weighed just under a pound. That was still a little heavier than Johnny’s actual heart had weighed, but it was less than half what the leading fully artificial heart weighed.
His new heart was only the headline. Some of his nerve damage had already been repaired by grafts that used a synthetic growth system—the doctor who had pioneered it described it as something like a cancer bath, a miniature tube inside which actual nerve cells were propagated to replace the damaged ones. And Johnny had already been measured for two artificial legs, which were being fashioned to his exact specifications.
Sister Rose stopped Chelsea as she stepped closer to the bed.
“This is as close as we should get,” said the Sister. Despite her diminutive size, her grip on Chelsea’s arm was remarkably tight. A doctor had warned Chelsea never to arm-wrestle the nun. “You never know what germs we carry.”
Chelsea glanced to the floor. Their toes were edging a red line.
“I’m sorry, Sister. I just wanted to see his face.”
“Still intact,” said Sister Rose. “Barely a blemish. Tell me—is this interest more than professional?”
“No, professional only.”
“A white lie is still a lie,” said the Sister tartly. “Especially if you tell it to a nun.”
Two hours later, Chelsea stood in front of a large glass screen in Smart Metal’s Number 3 conference room, summarizing the situation for the group Massina had put together to help the FBI on the bank card fraud case. Jenkins, the FBI agent, sat at the far end of the table. Massina was next to him.
“It wasn’t a software problem at all that caused the computer in the FBI surveillance van to freeze,” she told them. “The operator hit a succession of keys as he tried to clean up the coffee he’d spilled. Two of the keys were shorted, and to the program, this looked like a series of command inputs that overflowed the error buffer. In layman’s terms,” she added, noticing the perplexed look on Jenkins’s face, “the coffee fried the keyboard, so the computer hung. The program did not trap for that kind of error.”
“No spilled coffee algorithm?” asked Terrence Sharpe.
Sharpe was the head of the company’s programming unit. He was trying to make a joke. As usual, his timing and tact were out of whack.
“I feel terrible about it,” said Chelsea.
“We all do,” said Sharpe. “But the freeze had nothing to do with what happened to Agent Givens.”
“No,” agreed Jenkins. “Not at all.”
“So, getting back to your situation here, your case,” said Sharpe. “Maybe it’s not a skimmer.”
“How else do they get the data off the ATMs?” asked Jenkins.
“Maybe the ATMs are a red herring. It’s just a coincidence that there are transactions being made there with those accounts.”
“I think it’s way too much coincidence to rule them out.”
Chelsea had spent much of the night studying ATM systems and bank security. Even before she started, she knew security on the terminals was a joke. The machines’ security features, with four-digit passwords and early DES encryption might have been state of the art when first introduced in the late 1960s, but they were now child’s play to crack. Card skimmers could be built and programmed by preteens handy with a screwdriver and willing to spend a few hours searching on the Internet.
“Track the code from the banks,” suggested Massina. “There must be a clue there.”
“We’ve been working on that,” said Jenkins, “but we’ve run into a number of technical problems and, frankly, a lack of cooperation from the banks and the processing houses in between.”
“Mr. Sharpe and his people will help you,” said Massina. “In the meantime, we’ll give you hardened laptops. No more worries about spilled anything. You’ll use our equipment for your surveillance.”
“Nobody is spilling coffee again,” said Jenkins. “There will be no coffee in the van. Period.”
“I just don’t see this as a skimmer operation,” said Sharpe. “None have been found at any of the banks. And nobody takes cash from them. You should look in a different direction.”
“I have a theory,” said Chelsea. “I can’t prove it yet, but maybe the coding is on the card.”
She suggested—this time solely in layman’s terms—that the automated teller machines were being infected by a virus. There wasn’t enough “room” on the card’s magnetic strip for an actual virus, though; what she proposed was a little more clever. The card directed the machine to go to a bank account where the virus was actually stored; it downloaded instructions to the ATM, then erased itself after a certain period of time.
“Clever, but in that case, all of the machines would have accessed the same account before they were attacked,” suggested Jenkins. “And that sort of pattern would have jumped out at us.”
“Not if they kept switching those accounts,” said Chelsea. “Or if they did use the same account, they could set it up so that it would only activate after a certain period of time or transactions.”
“We’ll have to look deeper at the pattern,” conceded Jenkins.
“Then let’s get it done,” said Massina, standing to signal that the meeting was over.