Stoll ignored the attorney as he finished checking his directory: all the files were there. He entered one; when he didn't get an Error prompt, he felt confident the files themselves hadn't been burned.

"Everything looks okay. At least the data seems to be intact." His thick, piston-fast index fingers flew across the keys. Stoll had written a WCS program as a lark, never expecting to have to use it. Now he hurriedly dumped the worst-case-scenario diagnostics file into the system to give it a top-to bottom physical. A more detailed diagnostics examination would have to be made later, using classified software he kept under lock and key, but this should spot any big problems.

Hood chewed on his lower lip. "What time did you get here, Matty?"

"Logged in at five forty-one. I was down here two minutes later."

"Ken Ogan report anything unusual?"

"Nada. The night shift was smooth as glass."

"As the sea when the Titanic sunk," Coffey noted.

Hood seemed not to have heard. "But that doesn't mean something didn't happen in the building. A person at any station could have gotten into the system."

"Yes. And not just today. This could have been a time bomb, entered at any time and set to go off now."

"A bomb," Hood reflected. "Just like the one in Seoul."

"Could it have been an accident?" Coffey asked.

"Mightn't someone simply have pressed a wrong key somewhere?"

"Nearly impossible," Stoll said as he watched the diagnostics checklist begin working its magic. Numbers and characters scrolled up at lightning speed as it looked for aberrations in any of the files, commands that didn't gel with existing programs or weren't entered "on the clock."

Hood drummed the back of the chair. "What you're saying then is that we may have a mole."

"Conceivably."

"How long would it have taken for someone to write a program to bring down the whole system?"

"Anywhere from hours to days, depending on how good they were. But that doesn't mean the program was written on-premises. It could have been created any-where and piggybacked in on the software."

"But we check for that--"

"We check for sore thumbs. That's basically what I'm doing now."

"Sore thumbs? You mean something that sticks out?"

Stoll nodded. "We tag our data with a code, stored at specific intervals-- like a taxicab, either every twenty seconds or every thirty words. If the code doesn't show up, we take a closer look at the data to make sure it's ours."

Hood clapped a hand on his shoulder. "Keep at it, Matty."

Sweat trickled into his left ear. "Oh, I will. I don't like being coldcocked."

"Meantime, Lowell, have the Duty Officer start running through the videos they took last night, all stations inside and out. I want to know who might have come and gone. Have them blow up the badges and check them against file photos-- make sure they're authentic. Put Alikas on that. He's got a good eye. If they don't find anything unusual, have them go to the day before and then the day before that."