Lindros tasted his own blood. He wondered dimly if his lip could swell any more than it already had. "You have more in common with your brother than you seem to think," he said thickly.
"My brother and I could not be more different."
There was an awkward silence. Lindros realized that Muta had revealed something he regretted. He wondered what dispute lay between Abbud and Muta, and whether there was a way to exploit it.
"I've spent some weeks with Abbud ibn Aziz," Lindros said. "He has tortured me then, when that didn't work, he tried to become my friend."
"Hah!"
"That was my response also," Lindros said. "All he wanted was how much I knew about the shooting of Hamid ibn Ashef."
He could hear Muta's body shift, could feel him moving closer. When Muta spoke again, his voice was barely audible over the drone of the engines. "Why would he want to know about that? Did he tell you?"
"That would have been stupid." Lindros's internal antenna was focused now on what had just happened. The mention of the Hamid ibn Ashef incident was obviously of extreme importance to both brothers. Why? "Abbud ibn Aziz may be many things, but stupid isn't one of them."
"No, he's not stupid." Muta's voice had hardened into steel. "But a liar and a deceiver, now that is another matter."
Karim al-Jamil bin Hamid ibn Ashraf al-Wahhib, the man who for the past few days had passed for Martin Lindros, was in the process of worming his way into the CI mainframe, where every iota of sensitive data was stored. The problem was, he didn't know the access code that would unlock the digital gateway. The real Martin Lindros had failed to cough up his access code. No surprise there. He'd devised an alternative that was as elegant as it was efficient. Trying to hack into the CI mainframe was useless. People more talented than he was at geek-logic had tried and failed. The CI firewall-known as Sentinel-was notorious for its vault-like properties.
The problem was then how to get into a hackproof computer for which you lacked an access code. Karim knew that if he could shut down the CI mainframe, the CI tech people would issue everyone-including him-new access codes. The only way to do that was to introduce a computer virus into the system. Since that couldn't be done from the outside-because of Sentinel-it had to be done from the inside.
Therefore, he had needed an absolutely foolproof way to get the computer virus into the CI building. Far too dangerous for him or Anne to smuggle it in; and there were too many safeguards for it to be done another way. No. It could not even be brought into the building by a CI agent. This was the problem he and Fadi had spent months trying to solve.
Here was what they had come up with: The cipher on the button the CI agents had found on Fadi's shirt wasn't a cipher at all, which was why Tim Hytner had gotten nowhere in trying to break it. It was step-by-step instructions on how to reconstruct the virus using ordinary computer binary code-a string of root-level commands that worked in the background, totally invisible. Once reconstructed on a CI computer, the root-level commands attacked the operating system-in this case, UNIX-corrupting its basic commands. The process would create wholesale havoc, rendering the CI terminals inoperative in the space of six minutes.
There was a safeguard, too, so that even if by some fluke of luck Hytner tumbled to the fact that it wasn't a cipher, he couldn't inadvertently begin the chain of instructions-because they were reversed.
He brought up the computer file Hytner was working on, typed in the binary string in reverse, saved it to a file. Then he exited the Linux OS and went into C++ computer language. Pasting the chain of instructions into this set up the steps he needed to build the virus in C++.
Karim al-Jamil, staring at the virus, needed only to depress one key to activate it. In a tenth of a second it would insinuate itself into the operating system-not simply the main pathways, but also the byways and cross-connections. In other words, it would clog and then corrupt the data streams as they entered and exited the CI mainframe, thus bypassing Sentinel altogether. This could only be accomplished on a networked computer inside CI, because Sentinel would stop any extra-network attack, no matter how sophisticated, dead