LITMIR.BIZ

       CHAPTER ELEVEN

      Friday, 9.43pm, Chennai, India The nights were getting cooler. Still, Sanjay Ramesh preferred to stay here in the air-conditioned chill of the office than risk the suffocating heat of the city. He would wait till the sun had fully set before heading for home.

      That way he might avoid not only the clammy heat, but the ordeal of the stoop. Every night it happened, his mother trading gossip and health complaints with her friends as they sat outside until late. He found himself tongue-tied in such company; in most company as it happened. Besides, September might be cool by the standards of Chennai but it was still punishingly hot and sticky. Inside this room, an aircraft hangar of an open-plan office, filled by row after row of sound-muffling cubicles, the conditions were just right. For what he needed to do, it was the perfect environment.

      It was a call centre, one of thousands that had sprung up across India. Four storeys packed with young Indians taking calls from America or Britain, from people in Philadelphia anxious to pay their phone bill or travellers in Macclesfield wanting to check the train times to Manchester. Few, if any, of them ever realized their call was being routed to the other side of the world.

      Sanjay liked his job well enough. For an eighteen-year-old living at home, the money was good. And he could work odd shifts to fit in with his studies. The big draw, though, was right here inside this little cubicle. He had everything he needed: a chair, a desk and, most important of all, a computer with a fast connection to the world.

      Sanjay was young, but he was a veteran of the internet. He discovered it when both he and it were in their infancy. There were only a few hundred websites then, maybe a thousand. As he had grown, so had it. The worldwide web expanded like a binary number sequence − 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128 – apparently doubling its size with each passing day, until it now girdled the globe many times over. Sanjay had not matched that pace physically of course – if anything he was a slight, skinny lad – but he felt his mind had kept up. As the internet grew, he grew with it, constantly opening up whole new areas of knowledge and curiosity. From his upstairs bedroom in India, he had travelled to Brazil, mastered the disputed border politics of Nagorno-Karabakh, laughed at Indonesian cartoons, gazed inside the world of the Scottish caravan enthusiast, scanned the junior fencing league tables of Flanders and seen what really motivated the tree-growers of Taipei. There was no corner of human activity closed off to him. The internet had shown him everything.

      Including the images he had not wanted to see, the ones that had prompted the project he had completed just twenty-four hours earlier. He was a late developer as a computer hacker, coming to it when he was fifteen: most started before they were teenagers. He had played the usual tricks – hacking into the NATO target list, coming within one click of shutting down the Pentagon system – but each time he had held back from pressing the final button. Causing mayhem held no appeal for him. It would only give people a lot of grief and, his surfing of the web had taught him, there was plenty of that in the world already.

      Now he felt the urge to laugh, partly at his own genius, partly at the joke he had played on those he had designated as his enemy. It had taken him months to perfect, but it had worked.

      He had devised a benign virus, one capable of spreading through the computers of the world just as rapidly as any of the poisonous varieties hatched by his fellow boy-geniuses, those whose malign purpose made them, in the argot of the web, crackers rather than hackers.

      At this moment, it was his method, rather than his objective, which delighted him. Like most viruses, his was designed to spread via ordinary desktop computers, those that were connected to the internet all the time. While people in Hong Kong or Hanover were tapping away, emailing their friends or doing their accounts, or even fast asleep, his little baby was inside their machine, hard at work.

      He had given it a target to look for and, just like everyone else, it used Google to find it. Invisible to the user, below the screen, it got back its results and used them to compile what Sanjay thought of as an enemies list. These would be the sites to feel the virus's wrath. All of them, like any other site, would have some bug or glitch in their software: the challenge was to find it. For that, hackers (and crackers) would devise a set of ‘exploits’, designed to trigger the glitch. It might mean sending it a little nugget of data the software was not expecting; even one rogue symbol, a semi-colon perhaps, might do the trick. You never knew until you tried. Sanjay imagined it like medieval warfare: you would fire hundreds of arrows at a castle, knowing that only one might find the slit in the stone and get through. Each castle would have a different gap in the armour, a different weakness. But if your list of exploits was long enough, you would find it eventually. And once you had, you could take down the site and the server that was hosting it. It would be gone, just like that.

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