He pried the phone from the soap, wiped off the screen. He looked down at her, and she jerked at his foot to get it off her neck. “Can’t breathe, Vanessa?”
He pulled his Beretta out of its holster on the back of his jeans, lifted his boot off her neck. “Who have you been talking to, Vanessa?”
Her throat was on fire. She whispered, “Not mine.” She didn’t know if she’d gotten the words out. She rubbed her throat as she stared at the muzzle of the Beretta. She didn’t move.
He looked thoughtful, none of his manic anger she could see. “Really? What does this mean? FT or AM?” Still his voice was calm, but she could only imagine what was roiling around in that genius brain of his. She knew exactly what it meant.
Follow through or abort mission.
She never blinked. “How would I know, Matthew? I found the phone in the drawer. I was looking through it to see whose it might be. Then you came in and I was afraid you’d think it was mine and I know how you hate phones. Then this all started to happen, you were kissing me and I forgot about it—”
“So you hid it in the soap? Lucky for you it’s such a big bar, otherwise you’d have hid it in your bra?” His voice was flat, emotionless. He leaned over and turned off the shower. He waved the Beretta in her face as he stepped back.
“Get out of here.” She slowly rose, realized she was sopping wet, shook herself, and stepped out of the shower.
“Vanessa,” he said, her name a caress, “you’re lying to me.”
“No, I’m not, Matthew. I’d never break your rules. Obviously the phone belongs to Ian or Andy; it sure isn’t mine. You’ve got to believe me, Matthew. Now let me get on dry clothes and together we can show the phone to Ian and Andy, see what they have to say.”
He stepped into her face, and she felt the Beretta pressing against her breast.
He whispered against her cheek, “You’re lying, you traitorous bitch.”
He dragged her from the bathroom, his arm around her neck, the Beretta against her temple now, and pulled her down the hall. She jerked at his arm, and he let her suck in a breath, then squeezed hard again.
She saw her uncle’s face, knew he would grieve for her, and he’d know in his heart she’d screwed up. She was facing death alone. Alone. She shut her eyes, stopped struggling, and the pressure released. Matthew threw her onto the floor and she rolled, smashing into the corner of the sofa. She heard Ian shouting, heard Andy talking fast and crazy, nothing new in that.
Ian shouted, “What is going on here, Matthew? Don’t hurt her, you bastard.”
Matthew said nothing, merely stood over her, the Beretta aimed squarely at her heart, and tossed Ian the phone.
“What is this? I’ve never seen this before. Is this her phone?”
Ian paused, looked down at Vanessa, sodden, huddled in on herself. “Is this your phone, Van? Really, it’s your phone?” She heard the horror in his voice, but also heard the acceptance that she was guilty.
“You think we’ve got a traitor here, Matthew?” Andy asked, and jerked the phone out of Ian’s hand. “Let me see it, we’ll know soon enough.”
“Ian, Andy, it isn’t mine. I already told Matthew that it wasn’t, that I found it in a drawer when I was cleaning them out to pack. Is it yours, Ian? Andy? It’s not mine, I swear it. But Matthew doesn’t believe me. Tell him it can’t be mine, Ian. Tell him.”
Ian wouldn’t meet her eyes. Andy was staring down at the tiny phone in his palm, ignoring all of them. “Tell me your secrets, little phone,” he said, his voice almost a croon. Crazy, crazy Andy, even more twisted than Matthew was now, and that was saying something. “Where did you come from, little beauty? So tiny you are. Tell Andy your secrets.”
Matthew said, “Andy, quit screwing around. Who’s she been calling?”
Andy finally looked up. “Sorry, dude, there’s no history, everything’s been wiped.”
Without a word, Matthew hauled her up and threw her into the wall. His fist moved so quickly she almost didn’t see it coming. But he didn’t hit her; instead, his fist slammed into the paneling behind her head, cracking the wood. He stuck the Beretta into her cheek.
Soft, his voice was so soft, cajoling. “Tell me who you really are, Vanessa. Tell me right now or I will shoot you dead.” She felt the rage pouring off him, even as his face remained emotionless, as if they were talking about what to have for dinner.
“Please, Matthew,” she whispered, voice shaking, a little girl’s terrified voice, “please don’t kill me, I didn’t do anything. You’ve got to believe me. It was probably Andy, you know how crazy he is, haven’t you always told me how nuts he is? I mean, give him a match and he’d set the world on fire, and he’s always playing with that Zippo. But not me, how could it be me? You know I’ve wanted you, I was proving it to you in the bathroom. It isn’t my phone, Matthew, really, it isn’t my phone.”
He grabbed her wet hair, jerked her head forward. His voice remained soft, even soothing, comforting.
“Vanessa, I will let Andy set fire to your hair if you don’t start talking. Now.”
Vanessa knew he was ready to kill her with his bare hands. She had to find the right words. “Listen, Matthew, you hired me to make you bombs, and I’ve done my job well. I’ve stuck with you, helped you.” She raised her hand to touch his face. He froze. “Don’t you know I love you, that I’ve loved you since the moment Ian introduced us in Belfast? Why won’t you believe me?”
“How long have you been with me, Vanessa?”
Where is he going with this?
Before she could answer, he turned to Ian. “How long since you brought her to me, Ian?”
Ian was staring down at her. “Four months and, a week or so—we first met at the Duck and Deer pub in Londonderry.” A look of pain crossed his face. “I thought she’d be perfect for us.”
“Four and a half months. And you’ve been in every hour of our lives since.”
Andy looked up from the phone. “I heard Darius telling you she was trouble. I thought he said that because she wouldn’t sleep with him.”
“Matthew, Ian, you’ve got to listen to me. It’s not my phone. Even though there were deaths tonight at the refinery, it will be offline for weeks, and the world will listen to you, Matthew, finally listen. And look what Andy did—he took down the big oil company systems. We’ll have them under our thumbs by morning. You know I feel the same way as you about how our president is cozying up to the Iranians and all those other Middle East terrorists, you know I do.”
Ian said to Andy, his voice and his eyes dead cold, “Take the phone apart.”
Andy plugged it into his computer and tapped on the keyboard. There was stark silence in the living room except for the sounds of the keys and Matthew’s heaving breathing.
Andy called over his shoulder, “The outgoing texts are automatically deleted, very nice custom program to do that. There’s a single number in the memory, though it’s deleted from the phone itself, too. The number’s been called three times in the past two weeks, but the calls go different places.” He looked at Vanessa. “Who are you talking to? Who’s on the other side of the call?”
“Can you reverse the number?” Matthew asked, never taking his eyes off her, his gun now steady on her chest. Center mass: she’d be dead in less than a heartbeat if he pulled the trigger.
“Yeah.” More tapping. “The number’s cloaked, it bounces off four satellites before it goes through. Phone’s encrypted, Matthew.”
His voice—so soft, so deadly calm. “Where’d you get an encrypted phone, Vanessa?”
She said again, “It’s not mine.”
Matthew kept his eyes on her face. “I know, it belongs to Ian, it belongs to Andy. Could it belong to me as well?”
“Maybe it belongs to Darius, and he’s manipulating you yet again. Maybe he isn’t who you believe he is.”
“Darius? Now, that’s a thought.” He said to Andy, “Call the number, Andy.”
15
PAWN TO E4
26 Federal Plaza
New York, New York
As Nicholas drove the Crown Vic into Manhattan, he could still see the plume of fire from the refinery in his rearview, could still taste the burning oil in his mouth. It was hard to get his brain around all that had happened in such a short time. COE had murdered three FBI agents and Richard Hodges, blown up Bayway, not caring how many people died. And now, the launching of a coordinated attack on the oil companies themselves. He saw Mr. Hodges’s face, the perfect circle in his forehead. He’d been a hero, he’d given them Larry Reeves, a man Nicholas was certain was as dead as all the other workers at Bayway.
The whole case had changed in an instant.
What was COE all about now? Certainly it was now about much more than simply wanting Middle Eastern oil to stop being imported.
He parked the Crown Vic in the nearly empty underground garage at Federal Plaza, knowing the moment word was out on the shootings, the place would come alive.
Gray, as usual, looked the mad-genius part—slightly disheveled, clothes wrinkled, hair sticking up, black circles under his eyes. He was a comforting sight and had rapidly become one of Nicholas’s most trusted allies. They understood each other.
Gray threw his hands up when he saw Nicholas, didn’t mention the condition he was in—black face, burned hands, no sleeves on his shirt, ripped and bloody pants. No time, no time. “This is bad, Nicholas. Someone sent a Trojan horse into the oil companies’ e-mail systems. A simple e-mail, designed to look internal, sent to every e-mail address on the corporate rolls, supposedly from the heads of the company themselves. And inside was a nasty worm.
“One of the staff members at ConocoPhillips opened the e-mail from home, thinking it was a note from his boss. It took control of the server from there, unspooled into the system, started wiping hard drives, and no one has been able to get back in. Their Web folks are freaking out. They called us in a panic. I’ve been working on it since. So far, I can’t crack it. It’s working like a distributed denial-of-service attack, but the attackers have put in their own firewalls. So not only can I not get in, I can’t track what they’re doing while they’re inside. All it took was one click. One damn click. The odds were in their favor.”
Nicholas’s brain sparked. “Are we dealing with a DDoS, stopping outsiders from accessing the company websites, or are they taking remote control of the facilities?”
“I don’t know. I can’t get in far enough to tell what they’re up to.”
“If their goal was to blow our infrastructure, this was a good way to go about it. Is it COE who launched the attack? Have they claimed responsibility?”
“They didn’t have to; their COE logo is front and center on the screen.” Gray clicked his mouse a few times and the screen in front of him turned white. In the middle floated a stylish monogram with elegant, ornate letters——atop a rotating chessboard.
Nicholas said, “We have to get in. The worm could be downloading information as well as wiping the memory off the servers. If so, they’ll have access to everything from internal e-mails to finances.”
“Not to mention they can turn the power off to any of the physical locations at will. So much is run by computers today—they could tell the pumps to stop working, and boom. You don’t need a bomb to stop oil production in its tracks.” He hit two more keys. “Look at this.”
The white screen disappeared, and the Shanghai SE Composite Index came up. Numbers ran furiously along the bottom of the screen, red, red, red.
“You can see word is out that something’s up—the overseas markets are already dumping oil stocks. If they continue the pace of this sell-off, we’re going to be in trouble when the markets open over here. Nicholas, if you can’t get in and stop it, I think we should tell Zachery he needs to try getting trading suspended and not opening the stock market this morning.”
“Let me see if I can get past the firewall and limit the damage. Regardless, we need to ask Zachery to talk to the suits on Wall Street, do some spinning. The media will be wild about this, and on top of the explosion—”
“It’s too late for damage control, Nicholas, since the financial markets are already reacting. We have to break COE’s encryption and get the oil companies back online, pronto, or we’re all going to have a very bad morning.”
Nicholas sent a prayer heavenward. “Send all of this to me, Gray. I’ll see what I can do. Oh, yes, you say some prayers, too.”
16
KNIGHT ON B TO D7
Nicholas booted up his computer, made sure he was on the secure internal red server. If he was going to stop this attack, he had to enter the world that was alive and well and lived behind the Web. He initiated his TOR software, left the real-world Internet behind, and headed into the darknet.
He plugged in Gray’s files, started probing the firewalls COE had set up.
Gray was right. The coding was good. More than good, it was solid. Seemingly unbreakable.
“No, this won’t do at all,” he said, and started typing, launching his own protocols to attack the worm.
Three minutes later, two layers of encryption were down. Now he was staring at a deep network of code. Whoever had written it was incredibly sophisticated, which helped narrow the suspects. He kept digging and noticed a repeated line of code. He felt a niggling sense of familiarity—it was the structure of the language. Flashy, that was it, “aren’t I clever; you’ll never catch me” flashy. After examining the threads for a few moments, he saw what he needed, and he smiled. This code wasn’t homegrown in the United States. This had been bought from an outsider.
A few more clicks and he knew he was right. The hacker who’d written the code was more than sophisticated, he was on the highest level. And then it came to him—he knew. It was the electronic signature of a German he knew. Gunther Ansell sold hijacked server proxies to the highest bidder—making millions of dollars per proxy. Gunther had always been an egotist, and Nicholas had always known if Gunther kept showing off with his code, putting in his signature, it would be his downfall one day.
Sorry, Gunther, today isn’t going to be your day. He buzzed Gray. “I’ve got a line in.”
Gray came to his cube, laptop in hand. “How did you do it?”
“I’ll show you once we’ve stopped their attack. Call the IT guys who are working for these companies, tell them to ready their new code now. I’m going to need you for a side attack. Upload our denial-of-service package, and I’m going to throw a little homegrown code into the mix. We have to move fast to break their stranglehold. By now they know the breach has been noticed and they’ll be working to close the loop.”
Gray pulled up a squeaky chair, set the laptop on it, and knelt on the floor, brought up a screen full of code. “Ready when you are.”
“Three, two, one . . . go.”
Gray launched his attack, and Nicholas did as well, using his own code to snap along Gunther’s, attacking, dissolving thread after thread. Gunther was good, very good, but so was Nicholas. Five minutes later the first firewall came down, and Nicholas had control of the ConocoPhillips server.
Nicholas pumped a fist in the air. “Yes! Now we’re on to Occidental’s mainframe.”
Twenty minutes later, they’d wrested back control of all the servers and handed them off to the IT heads of each company.
Nicholas let out a big breath. The damage done by the cyber-attack would take weeks to undo, but at least they’d stopped it cold. The companies wouldn’t know the depth of their issues until they had a chance to do a full security assessment. There was no doubt in his or Gray’s mind the attacks would continue, and soon. But for now, they’d won.
“Gray, pray it will hold. COE’s hackers will try to attack again, I’m sure.”
&
nbsp; “Still, it’s a big save. Good going, Nicholas. Zachery will be very pleased, as will the CEOs of the companies we bailed out.”
Nicholas looked at the clock. “It’s late morning in Germany. This genius—Gunther Ansell is his name—he isn’t known to frequent daylight. Chances are right now he’s at home, asleep.” Nicholas grabbed his cell. “If we move fast enough, we can get people in to snatch him before he wakes. We’ll have them take him to a dark site, have a chat with him, get a line into who hired him to build the code and how they paid, and boom—we just might have our problem solved.”
“Who are you going to call?”
Ghostbusters. “FedPol,” he said, and dialed.
Pierre Menard answered on the first ring. Did the man never go on vacation? Maybe sleep late the occasional morning? “Nicholas? It is the middle of the night in New York? What are you doing working?”
Menard’s thick French accent was comfortingly familiar. They’d worked together several times in the past, and Nicholas trusted Menard. He’d never let him down.
“Why do you assume I’m working, Pierre?”
A small laugh, and he pictured Menard shaking his head. “I know you, and I heard about the Bayway bombing. Now what can I do for you?”
“Do you have friends in Munich?”
“Oui, naturellement. I have friends everywhere.”
“Good. I need someone to grab a hacker named Gunther Ansell. He lives in the Glockenbach. He should be home asleep right now. I need him taken silently, and I need him taken now.”
“I believe I have heard this name recently. You said he’s a hacker? One of your sort?”
“He is. Where did you hear his name?”
“Interpol sent out a Blue Notice for him last week, to gather more information about his criminal activity on the Internet. But the notice was canceled yesterday. One moment, Nicholas.”
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