“Problems?” he asked in a voice that showed some impatience as he leaned over and put both large hands palms down on Dan’s desk.
“None that I can’t handle,” Dan replied trying to put on a slight air of smugness as if Louis weren’t needed.
“Deal,” Louis said trying to reinforce in Dan that no one reneges on a deal with him.
“Solid,” Dan replied as if trying to mimic Louis’ one word answers. Then he added, “But.”
“But what?” Louis asked gruffly not used to hearing any conditions placed on his statements.
“But I need an additional week, or I pay you off and go another direction,” Dan said trying to show confidence on the outside while he was shaking on the inside. He knew there was no other seventeen million; and if Louis called his bluff, there was nowhere to go.
“Why?” Louis asked already knowing the answer but wishing to check any way.
“Slight hitch in a program,” Dan answered quickly. “Needs to be rewritten. Might take an extra day or two, a week at the most. But if you can’t wait and need the money, then I -.”
“One additional week…no more,” Louis said emphasizing the finality in his statement with a look that would peel paint off a wall. He turned and walked out of the room as Dan’s stomach left his throat and settled back into the lower part of his body; the bluff had worked. Now, all he had to do was hope that something was actually in there that they didn’t already have and that Ron could deliver.
CHAPTER 7
Ron began but went agonizingly slowly, sticking to his belief that the first two levels would be the most difficult to crack. A few times he came very close to making the wrong decision; but then he stopped thinking like himself and more like Stryker, and he was able to proceed. He quickly concluded that there had to be something of great importance for Stryker to have taken such extraordinary measures to protect it. A lot of what the computer genius had done was cutting edge, so far above ordinary hackers as to be in another world all by itself. Ron knew, however, that there had to be a way in, a safeguard that Stryker would employ as a sort of fail-safe mechanism if something catastrophic were to happen…especially to him. That was the basic flaw in any file system that someone was hired to protect. It had to be able to be accessed and modified if the original installer died and someone else took over. That tiny chink in the armor was what Ron was searching for hoping not to awaken the Knight while he was doing it.
Dan dropped by frequently but didn’t make his presence known so as not to distract Ron; instead, he paced quietly in the background, downing cup after cup of coffee. His fate was in the hands of a teenager, a highly skilled teenager, but one nevertheless.
As the days ticked by, Ron was still on the first level while Dan was becoming more and more impatient. Finally, on the morning of the fourth day, Ron succeeded in cracking level one. In doing so, he had picked up a lot of information about Stryker’s moves and countermoves, something he hoped would bring him quicker success in the second level. Dan used Richie and himself as sort of human shields so as not to give Louis’ spying devices the opportunity to see exactly what Ron was doing at all times. They had agreed on hand signals to show each other the progress that was being made.
Now, the second level and what it entailed lay before them. If Ron’s original theory was correct, this was the one that separated the men from the boys. It was designed to trap anyone lucky enough to penetrate this far, and that was the edge Ron was counting on. This was all traps, and anything that seemed ordinary wasn’t. This was the level where opposite thinking was required; if it looked good, don’t do it. If it looked complicated, go for the easiest solution. Here was where over thinking was the major trap. Ordinary hackers would assume that this was a harder level than number one, so they’d bring their “A” game, which was what Stryker counted on. Ron would try the opposite tact and use basic strategies. The only problem was time was running out, and he didn’t know how many more levels he would have to penetrate.
It took a day-and-a-half to get through this level, and the effects of the pressure were starting to get to Ron. He slowed down even more than before because he was starting to concentrate too hard on what he had accomplished and less on what was ahead of him. A batter with a one game hitting streak has little pressure since he can start all over easily; one with a twenty-six game streak, however, keeps thinking that if he misses now, he loses all those games. He stops thinking about the idea of one game at a time because he has so much on the line riding on what he has already accomplished. Dan saw that Ron needed a break before his over-cautiousness did him in.
“Why don’t you rest awhile,” Ron suggested. “Walk around, go outside…do anything but this.”
“I’m afraid if I lose the moment, it’ll be tough to get it back,” Ron said. What he really meant was he wasn’t sure how much longer he could keep doing this. Stopping now might mean he wouldn’t want to come back; besides, he didn’t know how many more levels Stryker had built in and the clock was ticking.
Contrary to what he had originally thought, the third level looked to be the most perplexing of all since it appeared to be a duplicate of the protection of the first level. The questions began to pile up in Ron’s head: should he attack each part the same way he had done on level one? Should he try just the opposite of every step he had taken on the first level? Why would Stryker go back to something that had already been mastered if anyone ever got this far?
He tried to stop thinking like Stryker the computer god and more like Stryker the man. Was there anything in his background that would give away his strategy at this juncture? Ron looked at the biography he had compiled on Stryker to see if there was any event in his life which would give a clue, but nothing leaped out. Both parents still alive…no brothers or sisters…jump to computer genius status came quickly…no tragic deaths in the family, accidents, major illnesses, or injuries…money was no problem…private schools all the way…there was no smoking gun as far as Ron could decipher. He kept looking at the profile and the chronology over and over, but nothing appeared to stick out. It was like adding a column of figures over and over and coming up with the same wrong answer every time, yet knowing subconsciously that something isn’t right. In those cases, the brain has to slow down and take each figure, one at a time, and add it to the next. Since he had no other strategy, Ron decided to try that.
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