The Newsmakers by Lis Wiehl

foundation. The voice-over describes her many accomplishments and ends with a visual of the White House and: W ILL SHE OR WON ’ T SHE ? F IND OUT TOMORROW AT EIGHT P.M. IN E RICA S PARKS ’ S EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW WITH K AY B ARRISH .
    Erica clicks off the set, feeling a combination of excitement and almost overwhelming pressure. She retrieves her deck of cards, sits on the edge of the bed, and plays three hands of solitaire. Then she calls the front desk and asks for a printer to be sent up. When it arrives, she prints out the introduction and the questions she has written up. Then she starts to rehearse, walking around the room as if she were at Barrish’s house. She goes over it again and again until she has it just about memorized. She wants to be prepared for any eventuality.
    Before she knows it, it’s almost ten o’clock. She takes a shower, slips into an oversize T-shirt, gets into bed, and turns out the lights. She lies there as her exhaustion battles her adrenaline. She needs to sleep. She closes her eyes and tries to clear her mind. Just as she’s dozing off, her hotel phone rings.
    â€œThis is Erica.”
    â€œErica, it’s Mark Benton.” His voice is charged and urgent. She sits up, throws off the covers, and swings her legs to the floor. “I’ve been working nonstop on our project. I was up all last night and called in sick to work today. I borrowed a page from the North Koreans and hacked into the computer of a midlevel manager at the NYC Department of Transportation. I took on his identity and then used it to maneuver through a maze of DOT systems. But I finally got into the ferry’s system. Erica, the ferry’s controls were hacked.”
    â€œAre you sure?”
    â€œYes. The log files on the DOT router I used to get into the ferry system show invasive activity minutes before the crash.”
    â€œDo you know by who?”
    â€œNo. Finding their identity is going to be a lot harder. I need an IP address or something else to go on, and these people are very good at covering their tracks. They use proxy servers to block or mask their IPs, and Tor, a freeware program that hides your identity online no matter what you’re doing. It basically makes them invisible, or at least indistinguishable from millions of other people online. It could be anyone anywhere. The ferry could have been hacked from Beijing, or it could have been done from Fourteenth Street.”
    â€œBut still, the crash was an act of cyberterrorism.”
    â€œIt certainly looks that way to me.”
    Erica stands up and starts pacing. “Where do we go from here?”
    â€œI’m just going to keep digging, looking for anything that might tell us where the hacking originated. They may have been sloppy somewhere along the line. But listen, forget about this until after the Barrish interview.”
    â€œThat won’t be easy. Five people died in that crash. A dozen more are still in the hospital.”
    â€œThe closer we get to the hackers, the greater the danger that they’ll find out about us. They’re very sophisticated and are no doubt monitoring for intrusions, just like Dave Mullen is up on the sixth floor at GNN.”
    â€œGreat work, Mark.”
    â€œIt’s exciting. And scary.”
    Erica suddenly feels cold. “We may have opened Pandora’s box.”
    â€œYeah, the demons are out.”
    They hang up. Erica grabs a throw and wraps it around her shoulders. She walks over to the window and looks out at the California night—the Pacific is glistening under a three-quarter moon, and the pier’s amusement park is lit up like a pinwheel. But all she sees is darkness.

CHAPTER 20
    ERICA ’ S INTRODUCTION AND THE TOUR of the grounds with Kay Barrish have gone well. The crew is busy setting up for the live interview in the living room. Erica, Greg, and Kay are in the kitchen, alongside Kay’s chief of staff, Audra Ruiz, and