Chapter 22

Zeus

January 15, early evening

At 1700 the shift change in the security force was underway at the Shanghai Power Property Unit. By 1715 it was supposed to be over. By then I had placed a tiny amount of polynitro polycyclic heteroaromatic compound, connected to a radio controlled receiver that was carefully wrapped in a drop of acrylic with a tiny wire antenna extending from it, on a relay in breaker box #4 of the electric power transmission circuit. If Io's information was accurate – and when wasn't it? – that little bit of PHAC would melt the breaker's connection and look like a routine outage. Even the tiny receiver that was attached to the antenna would melt to meaningless atoms.

PHAC wasn't even the final acronym for the high temperature explosive that was a research project in an unnamed Navy-funded lab. I had carried the little thing stuck to a corner of the frame of the sunglasses that I never wore. A duplicate was on the underside of a shirt button on my camo shirt. No sense placing all my eggs in one basket that may get blown overboard or something. Always nice to have backup. Oh ... yes, the duplicate ran on a different radio frequency, so I wouldn't burn a hole in my chest by accident.

In a concession to James Bond-ism, the radio transmitter that would activate one or the other of them was in my belt buckle – 'Q' style.

The older, more cumbersome C4-like plastique was in bricks in my backpack. That was for later.

I snaked back into my sewer hide out, well before the next scheduled security patrol at 1730. Now I had nothing to do but wait. For an hour.

I hoped everything was going well for Arti and Trav. It made me nervous to NOT have her close by – Arti, that is. She wasn't a trained operative, despite all the things she'd been through in the past six months. I didn't know what to expect from Trav, but I had Io's indirect reference on her: according to the CIA's file on Agent Zhengfu, she was top notch.

At 1810, I got three clicks in my ITE. That should mean that all was well at Arti's end and it was okay to proceed.

Twenty-four minutes later, I sent a short burst message to Io, and to Arti if she was listening. "Green..." I paused a few seconds to let the sweep-second hand of my chronometer to reach exactly 1834 " ... NOW." Then I waited another five seconds for the satellite delays to work themselves out – a previously agreed pause -- and hit the small button on my radio transmitter.

I didn't even hear the poof of the mini-explosion, but the entire area around the manhole overhead went dark.

#17, Way of the People, Shanghai

At 1834.05, the building went dark for a fraction of a second. Then the generators in the basement kicked in and power was restored. The computers in the main room flickered, went down briefly, and then rebooted as the power came back up. It wasn't exactly an uninterruptible power supply.

In that fraction of a second, Io began sending the control codes that would disable the security protocols. In a time frame that was so slight it wasn't even noticed by the humans controlling the computers, a small program was insinuated. That program opened the gates to the internet for more seconds, delaying the built in security programs that the Yinhe-IV super-computers employed.

The Chinese had instituted the best high security they could steal from IBM and Cisco and DEC on the newest of the new Yinhe-IV computers. The designs for the twenty-year old Yinhe-I mainframe had been stolen from IBM in the 90s. Since then they had been upgraded with new technology taken mostly from Intel. Now the Yinhe-IV was only a half-year out of date vs the newest super computers in the U.S.

Yet, they had married 21^st century nearly-state-of-the-art computers to mid-20^th century power systems. And it was that weakness that Io now exploited.

She downloaded a virtual copy of herself into the Yinhe-IV. When 'Chaing' ran, it wouldn't be 'Chaing' at all. It would be a stripped down 'slave' version of Io herself. One that reported to Io, first, and then to Shanghai. Whenever the programmers at Chaing-central modified the program, the changes were to a disk-version. The disk version would be loaded into memory, but never activated.

Io would spend the next week and a half looking closely at the code of Chaing. Do you have any idea how much time that is for a machine that thinks a pico-second is a long time? A pico-second is 1,000,000,000,000^th of a second – one trillionth of a second.

Chaing was built to destroy. In addition to hiding himself on computers and hard disks everywhere, and recalling and restarting himself in the event of any attack on its operation, he (Chaing) would destroy electric grids, water distribution networks, military control systems, and communication networks. He'd mess with GPS, and trucks that relied on GPS would go astray, cruise missiles wouldn't hit targets, and ships and planes would go in the wrong direction. The financial markets – when they operated at all – would be a total mess. In addition, his most virulent attacks were directed at the Chinese Politburo: no power in Beijing, no water, no banking facilities, doors would be automatically locked, and only selected units of the People's Army would have communications.

The Chinese Government would be decapitated amid the general chaos that was going on in the rest of the world.

Well ... that was what was supposed to happen. Now, Io ran Chaing and that would never happen. She hadn't decided what to do with the Chinese power struggle. In fact, Io was going to make sure that the system automation that backed up the Chaing program would instead be making backups of meaningless 1's and 0's. Eventually, all the backups would be useless and then there would be a catastrophic failure on the Yinhe-IVs.