Ward rushed into the RGI building. As he passed by the receptionist, he saw that her phone lines were all lit up, and he could hear a loud angry voice leaking from her headset.
“Mr. McCarty” she said, covering the mouthpiece. “Mr. Wilson is waiting for you up in the conference room.”
Ward took the steps three at a time, rushed to the door, and entered the crowded conference room. His uncle was talking to their head computer technician, Paul Wolfe. A pair of Wolfe's assistants were staring at the screens of laptops open on the table. Over the men's shoulders Ward saw pop- ups opening and stacking in rapid sequence on the screen, each flying up and covering the last in the space of a second or two. It took Ward a minute to realize what he was looking at, but by that point he already felt ill. Naked bodies flashed rapidly, one after the other.
“What's this? What the hell's going on?” he demanded.
“Kiddie porn,” Mark said.
“Somebody had that on one of our computers?” Ward asked, furious at the thought. “Who?”
“We don't know, but our servers are inundated with pictures of kids engaged in sex acts with other kids, kids with adults. Jesus, there's even animals in the mix.”
Paul Wolfe said, “Ward, this crap went out from our server. That's all I can tell at the moment. Viruses are sort of out of my line of expertise, but it's a replicating virus. We're offline and trying to figure out how to shut it down. I've got some calls in for help.”
“Jesus Christ,” Ward said. “What do you mean replicating? What the hell does that mean?”
“It makes copies of itself.”
“I know what replicating means!” Ward snapped.
“I'm sorry. It gets sent in and sends itself back out to the e-mail addresses in the infected computer,” Wolfe said, red- faced.
“So this got sent out to which of our e-mail addresses?”
“All of them, from every computer in the house. The phones are ringing off the hook,” Mark said. “I've never seen anything this big or this bad. There's a massive freak- out going on that started with our clients and friends and families. The media is already calling us about it.”
“And our company's signature is on the outgoing e-mails. We closed off the system to the outside immediately,” Wolfe said. “It opens infected computers to outside servers and downloads compressed files, and those files replicate over and over so our server's memory keeps filling up, and as it does so it overwrites what's stored there. We back up everything nightly, so we won't lose anything we had before the invasion. I think it'll stop when it finishes filling the available memory, but who knows.”
“Call the police,” Ward said, feeling as though someone had dropped a waterbed on him.
“I called the cops right before you got here,” Mark told him. “This is illegal as hell. This will ruin us. I've called our PR firm so we can get in front of this.”
“I'll call…” Ward didn't even finish the thought. He just dialed Gene's number.
“Hello,” Gene answered.
“Gene, it's Ward. Get out here right now.” Ward couldn't control the anxiety, the fear, in his voice.
“I'm going into a meeting,” Gene replied. “What's up?”
“Have you looked at your e-mails from us this morning?”
“Tell him not to,” Paul Wolfe said.
“Just a second,” Gene said. “I'm looking. Okay, here's one from you. ‘You have to see this.’ Okay…”
“No, don't open it!” Ward yelled. “A virus has gone out to everybody in our address books and it's filling our servers with child porn. You open that and it will send it to all your e-mail contacts.”
Paul added, “Tell him to shut down his system. Or delete everything from us without opening anything. Any e-mail that is headed ‘You have to see this’ is going to contain the virus.”
Ward told Gene what Wolfe had said. “I need you here now,” Ward said. “Unk's already called the cops.”
“Relax, I'm on my way,” Gene said. “Don't answer any questions from the cops or anybody else until I get there.”
“I think this crap could be all over the country, hell, the world, in a matter of hours,” Paul Wolfe said, rubbing his eyes.
“Hurry,” Ward said to Gene. He hung up and noticed a teary- eyed Leslie Wilde sitting at the end of the table with a crushed tissue in her hand. “Leslie, are you okay?”
She looked up at him and shook her head vigorously “I'm sorry,” she said, sobbing freely, “Mr. McCarty I just turned on my terminal and it went crazy showing those images. I shut down the computer, but it was too late. I didn't mean… It's horrible. Those awful pictures
…”
“It isn't your fault,” Ward told her, sure that was the case. “We'll fix this,” he said to no one in particular, praying that it was even possible to fix. Thinking about their clients seeing these images made his heart sink.
“Mr. McCarty,” the receptionist's voice said over the intercom. “There are two FBI agents here to see you.”
Mark ran his fingers over his hair. “We're the victims here,” he told everybody in the room and nobody in particular. “Figure out a way to stop it immediately. Get it back or something. Remember, people, we don't make any statements until Gene gets here.”
Ward told the receptionist to direct the agents up to the conference room.