Germ

She thought now that they might have uncovered her covert intrusion, but the program was designed to maintain surveillance even while feeding false data to the operators who had stumbled onto it. To them, the SATD program would look like a minor system corruption. While they tried untangling the glitch, the covert user had ample time to switch host satellites. At that time, the "glitch" would vanish, without so much as a trace of the program's trespass.

In this case, the signal had blinked out without warning. When she had tried to shift host satellites, she could have been pounding on a dead keyboard for all the good it did.

Now that she thought about it, even the way it malfunctioned seemed odd. Most crashes resulted in the screen simply locking up; blinking cursors stopped blinking and keyboard commands yielded no computer activity at all, but the image always remained frozen on the screen. With this malfunction, first Goody's signal had blinked out, then the map had disappeared—

Almost as if someone had stolen it, one component at a time.

Julia cranked the wheel right and braked to a stop. She punched the gear lever into park and unsnapped her seat belt. Her hands flew to the laptop's keyboard. She used a special key code designed to override system failures to restart it, then waited for the operating system to load.

She tapped a staccato rhythm on the laptop's case as cold moisture seeped from her pores. The feeling that something hellish and huge had descended upon them threatened to cloud out all rational thought.

As if someone had stolen it. . .

Let me be wrong. Let me be wrong.

A few seconds later, the program came online. She instructed it to uplink to the same host satellite. The screen flashed the words MAKING CONNECTION . . .

Then CONNECTING TO: SATCOM6 455HR21911.89 v.62. *2

After a brief pause, as the laptop's hard drive whirled, the words on the screen changed to:

CATALOG B-TREE ERROR

RESOURCE FORK, BLOCK 672 (NODE 792, RECORD 4)

> ?

Julia moaned. The satellite was interpreting her current attempt to connect as unauthorized probing, so it was sending a false error message back to her to make her think the old program was nothing more than a system problem. This red herring would fool a good 99 percent of the world's satellite operators.

Julia knew better.

She bit her lip. The top secret program was to reside in the host satellite only as long as it received microbursts of passwords from the base computer every six seconds. That kept it from remaining in the satellite in the event the base computer failed before its user could instruct the program to withdraw. But her laptop—the program's base computer—had failed. And she had restarted it, which would have kept even a functioning system from feeding passwords to the program for more than a minute.

The old program should not have been running.

But it was.

And that meant only one thing: someone else was feeding it the correct passwords.

She snatched up the radio microphone and keyed the talk switch. "Goody! Goody! If you can hear me, listen." She enunciated her words carefully. "Turn . . . off . . . the . . . tracking . . . transmitter. Someone else is receiving the signal. Someone else is tracking you. Turn off the transmitter."

She tossed the microphone down. What else could she do? She could not defeat the program—not with the limited software utilities her hard drive contained, probably not with all the utilities in the world. Its programmers had anticipated that criminals would continue to increase their technical sophistication. They had made it nearly impossible to disable.

The best she could do for Goody now was to find him—fast.

eight

Blood flowed from him like sap from a broken pine, and dehydration parched his throat. His hands were sticking to the steering wheel. Donnelley focused on the road and tried not to think of his damaged body.

He was tilting forward and sideways now, keeping the wound away from the seat back. The hole in his flesh, piercing him with icy-hot ripples of pain, was just under his rib cage, between side and back. He looked at Vero. Dark skin. Black hair. Coarse features. Mexican or Brazilian, he guessed. The one thing he was sure about: the man was dog-sick.

"What's wrong with you?" he asked.

Vero's lips bent up on one side of his face. A new fissure opened in his bottom lip. "My employer fired me."

"Fired?"

"Instead of a pink slip, he gave me a virus. Not so strange. Gangsters shoot each other. Makes sense biologists infect each other, no?"

"You're a biologist?"

"Virologist, really."

Donnelley thought about it, leaning more than he knew he should against the steering wheel. "So, what, like the flu?"

Vero laughed or coughed, he couldn't tell. "If only it was tame like that."

He glanced over. "Are you dying?"

"Oh yes, yes." He read Donnelley's expression. "It's not contagious."