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"Hi Tom. We're making some slow progress and we have a few things planned for today. We should have a pretty good picture of things by tomorrow morning.""Well me and the Federal Bureau of Investigation just got a pretty good picture of things. I just hung up from talking to Fred Lindquest again. He called me back because the terrorists sent the FBI a message through a coded listing in our classifieds and he wanted some fast help in trying to trace them from the ad. We did our best but they had paid with cash and used fake names. The FBI switchboard had gotten an anonymous call telling them to look for the ad in this morning's edition and how to decode it." "Tom, settle down. Slow down. Just tell me what happened from the beginning." "Okay. They gave the switchboard a decoding key of some kind. Once the ad had been decoded, it told the FBI to arrange for the electronic transfer of $10 million dollars to a certain bank account number in the Cayman Islands. They have 48 hours to complete the transfer or else the terrorists will take the Internet out of service. They didn't specify how they would do it, but it did warn of a demonstration being set for today at noon. Sure enough there was some kind of disturbance, but no bombing or anything like that. It was another one of those probe type things you and your friend told me about. Fred was calling this one a drone. This time the thing didn't seem to be gathering data. It was just generating huge volumes of network traffic and sending it through one of the bottlenecked nodes that had been probed last week. After a few minutes of tying that node up, the drone just disappeared." "Tom, did you ask Fred where the drone was sending from?" Nancy asked. "Yeah, I thought maybe they could link it back to Lexicon Industries and then we'd be able to bring them in on what we know. Fred told me they were able to trace the location because it didn't attempt to conceal itself through any rerouting. You'll never guess where it was coming from," Tom said with disgust. "I give Tom, where?" "It was running on the FBI's own computer system. Their system manager traced the log backwards and what Fred told me is that it looks like the drone has been sitting there dormant for weeks. They can't tell how it got there, who put it there, or where it came from! They sound really worried, now. They think there may be thousands of these things sitting out on people's computers. They either wake up in response to a certain message or on some kind of timing basis." "Well, at least we now understand their method," Nancy offered. "That may help Spike find some more information on them." "Nancy, when do you want to connect with Lindquest? We can't wait much longer before telling him what we know. The clock is ticking now." "I know Tom. I'll have to let you know as soon as I can talk to Spike and Roger. They're both in sensitive positions right now. I'll get back to you in a couple hours." She hung up quickly. As Nancy looked at the clock she saw that it was time for Spike's call with Lexicon. Now she'd have to wait a while to talk to him.
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