Departure (Seth Walker) by Joseph Reid

Author:Joseph Reid [Reid, Joseph]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781542041812
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
Published: 2020-08-10T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 20

Monday, August 13, Five Years Ago

Three days after the crash, my body continued to heal—my bruises had turned yellowish-green, plus the stiffness was subsiding—but my mood had grown considerably worse.

Having lost the chance to search for any additional video traces of the masked impostor when the security camera files automatically erased, I’d been forced to look elsewhere for clues to the person’s identity. The impostor’s exploit file seemed a logical place to start. After all, the person must have had some kind of a technical background even to come up with the idea; creating, polishing, and debugging a finished program would have taken some pretty deft coding skill.

When I thought about who might have wanted to sabotage Boost—or Clarence, or me—there weren’t many candidates with the requisite résumé. The original Boost team might have been able to do it, and they likely bore a grudge after getting fired, but the chances they could have gotten someone on campus and into our lab were pretty slim. I had to think security would have been warned to watch for them, plus their badges and other credentials would have been turned off. That meant I had to consider that an engineer from my new team might have been behind the exploit. Someone tight with one of the team members who’d been fired, maybe? There were probably also other technical folks inside T.E. who wanted Boost to fail. Zachary Scott for one, although he’d seemed reasonably nice at the meeting with Rodgers. Besides, I didn’t know that his BS in computer science was enough to pull off this kind of hacking—Scott was a salesman more than anything else.

With all that in mind, I returned to the exploit file itself. Source code is written in computer language, but there are still plenty of stylistic choices when you write a program. Habits, tics, preferences—they all influence the command structure you use and how you lay out the steps the program will follow. After reading tens of thousands of lines of code from my own engineers, I could generally distinguish one person’s work from another’s. In poring over the work of the original Boost team, I’d seen enough of their code that I thought I could identify it.

But when I examined the hostile code again, I didn’t see any hallmarks I recognized. Clarence certainly hadn’t written it—his code reminded me of the way my eleventh-grade English teacher described Ernest Hemingway: minimalist. Clarence’s programs were extraordinarily pristine and precise, without even a single command or line more than he absolutely needed. This exploit file . . . wasn’t that. I understood the code, but the lines were much more regimented, the structures far more repetitive, than I was accustomed to seeing. The file was probably 20 percent longer than I would have expected from someone junior on my team, given the shortcuts we’d all learned in school and become accustomed to using at T.E. It wasn’t that the exploit code was badly written—it had certainly been brutally effective—it just seemed .

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