by Chris Mooney
"There's a lot riding on today," Conway said.
"Two years of work. I want to make sure it goes down right. Make sure all the team members are in place and know what to do."
"We're prepared, Stephen. You're not in this alone."
"I realize that."
Pasha waited for the rest of it. She stared at him, her blue eyes filled with that constant expression of wariness and guard, the vigilant hunter staring down the scope of a rifle searching for the next target.
Conway looked away from her hard gaze. Her left ear was missing; what remained was a molten blob that, even when they were alone in the bedroom, she carefully hid behind her shoulder-length hair. No one knew what had caused the deformity. Her private life was as vaulted as her emotions.
Pasha Romanov was nine years older than he had turned forty-three two days ago and in the five years they had worked together, and even when their professional relationship had turned private, she had rarely opened up about her life. It was as if all of her memories and their affixed emotions were stored in vials only to be examined in private.
Conway propped himself up and rubbed the fatigue out of his face.
"I'm going to go out for a run," he said.
"Want to come?"
Pasha's full lips were clamped together, pouting.
"What?" he asked.
Pasha pushed herself up to her knees. Conway watched as she climbed up on top of him, her breasts swelling against the tightness of his white tank top. The first time he saw her breasts, he had been taken aback by their size and fullness. Pasha wore modern Armani business suits to work. She never wore clothes generally worn by most women and eschewed any style that accented her femininity.
Without a word or sound, Pasha yanked his boxers down his legs and then took him into her mouth. Behind her thick locks, her blue eyes stared up at him, her gaze serious and intense, the way one stared down an adversary. Conway surrendered himself to the smooth, texture of her mouth, and the dream and the hollow feeling of loneliness that had haunted him just moments ago began to drift away.
Several minutes later, his knees grew weak. His body started to jerk.
Pasha sensed what was about to happen and stopped. She slid out of her underwear, removed her tank top, then moved on top of him and guided him deep inside her. Pasha always had to be on top she didn't like sex any other way and he wasn't surprised when she grabbed his wrists, moved them over his head, and pinned them hard against the mattress with a surprising strength. Pasha needed to dominate him like she did everything else in her life; she controlled how they fucked, set the pace and tempo she even controlled where he touched her by guiding his hands to certain areas, watching him the entire time.
Pasha leaned forward, her back arched, until her breasts rubbed against the upper part of his chest and the whiskers along his face, and then rocked back and forth, slowly, in full control, and stared down at him through her hair. Other women in his life had required constant foreplay before actual intercourse. Sex was a production. Not with Pasha. She fucked like a man, got right down to it without any pretense, no moaning, no change in expression, just greedy, give me what I need and absolutely no talking, her eyes always open and watching, her intense gaze reminding Conway of the way a jewel thief prizes a rare, priceless stone locked behind glass.
What a pair we make, Conway thought.
A moment later Conway felt the pressure build again. Without a sound or a change in expression, Pasha rocked her hips even quicker while keeping his hands pinned above his head, her strength amazing. His body jerked and shuddered and a moment later it was over, both of them quiet, breathing hard and sweating.
Pasha lay on top of his chest, her breasts damp with perspiration, sliding against his already wet skin. She still held his hands in place and then rested her chin on his shoulder, near his scar, her hair covering his face and eyes. It was like he was looking at the world from a jail cell.
"I'll always be here for you," Pasha whispered, her words a low, drowsy hum against his ear. Conway could hear her labored breaths, could smell the sleepiness and sweat lingering on her skin.
"I know."
"I'll keep you safe," she said.
"I promise."
Conway pried his hands away from her grasp, wrapped his arms around her back, and hugged her close to him. He felt the hard, rubbery stump of her left ear press against his cheek, a grim reminder that love and the whispered promises of solace and protection were no match against the chaotic agenda of the outside world.
According to the glossy sales brochures and slick advertising materials, Delburn Systems specialized in helping companies develop successful e-business solutions for their Web sites. Delburn's twenty-odd employees, the overwhelming majority of them in their late twenties to early thirties, had their own business cards printed with their names, phone numbers, and job tides, listing their areas of expertise. They hustled about the city of Austin, Texas, playing the part of eager young professionals looking to cash in on the exploding potential of the Internet.
In reality, Delburn was a CIA front, the temporary base of operations for the Information Warfare Analysis Center. The five-floor, nondescript brick building that housed them was owned and operated by the CIA and used the latest technological advances in bio-metric security to keep the true activities of the company safe from prying eyes and ears.
The conference room was painted a pale yellow and had floor-to-ceiling windows that offered a partial aerial view of the bustling activity of downtown Austin's sprawling University of Texas campus. Steve Conway was alone, the dream still clinging to him. He looked away from the window, went over to the coffeemaker, and poured himself another cup.
Mounted on the opposite wall was a flat-screen TV hooked up to a desktop computer.
Conway finished pouring his coffee and then drew the blinds. He picked up the remote from the long table, sat down, leaned back in the comfortable leather executive chair and hit the MENU button. Using the remote, he moved the arrow down until the word ROMU-LAN was highlighted and then hit the PLAY button.
The TV screen came to life with the crisp, vivid picture of a man dressed head-to-toe in what looked like futuristic combat gear. The black, lightweight outfit and attached motorcycle-style helmet was, in reality, a working prototype of a high-tech military-combat suit being developed by the Army's Future Warrior combat system.
The narrator began a Discovery Channel-type overview of the military suit. The two small boxes attached to the back of the utility belt contained a power supply fueled by liquid hydrogen, the other a climate-conditioning system that provided either warm or cool air to the soldier wearing the suit. The weapon's pod mounted on the soldier's wrist responded to voice commands, which, when activated, would fire either rounds of bullets or launch one of the four projectiles that could take down a car, even a helicopter. Mounted on the opposite wrist was a small, rectangular box containing a keypad and computer rolled into one unit, the heart and brain of the suit.
On the screen the soldier ran across an open field. Out of nowhere came a pistol shot, its sound erupting over the conference room's ceiling-mounted speakers. Conway watched as the soldier collapsed to the ground.
The soldier was not hurt; the suit's outer shell consisted of a layer of body armor. Microsensors attached to the soldier's skin relayed his life signs to the nearby base camp; orders were relayed back to him through the receiver placed inside the helmet. The enemy could not hear the encrypted voices speaking over the helmet.
The soldier made a hand gesture to signal he was okay. No one was around to see it. The sensors placed inside the fingertips of his gloves relayed the gesture through microprocessors and then simultaneously transmitted the data back to base camp and across the visors of the other soldiers.
The helmet itself was a technological marvel; it offered night vision, could pick up thermal heat signatures given off by any living creature, and allowed a soldier to zoom in on a target and then transmit the imag
e and its coordinates to both base camp and onto the visors of other soldiers. The carbon nanotubes installed in the helmet's visor protected the soldier from an attack from a new and potentially lethal technology: blinding laser weapons.
The next demonstration was the reason why Conway was in Austin.
The soldier stood up. For the purposes of the video, the soldier typed the five-digit code into the keyboard instead of whispering the voice-activated command. When he was done, the soldier faced the camera.
Conway leaned forward in his chair and stared at the screen. This was his favorite part.
Blink and you' II miss it.
The soldier waved to the camera… And then vanished.
"Jesus," Conway mumbled under his breath. The transition was so fast, so fluid, that the first time he saw a demonstration, his mind couldn't process what had just happened had, in fact, refused to believe what it had just witnessed.
This wasn't some Hollywood special effect. The technology used to make the soldier vanish was called optical camouflage. The wrist-mounted computer took pictures of the soldier's surroundings and using real-time pixel replication "painted" the images on the suit through thousands of fiber-optic cameras. Thanks to recent advances in computer microprocessors, the cloaking happened so fast, the transition so fluid, that it looked like the soldier had vanished into thin air.
With the suit's power supply, a soldier could stay cloaked for more than eight hours.
Invisibility was now a reality.
A soldier could sneak into an enemy camp and kill everyone in their sleep, could sneak across enemy lines and plant a bomb, day or night, it didn't matter. Wearing this suit, you could walk up to a terrorist target and blow the back of his head off and no one would be able to see you.
The possible scenarios and potential applications were endless.
Which was why Angel Eyes was willing to pay cash for the working prototype.
Angel Eyes was the code name given to the man who, over a six-year period, had stolen several high-tech weapons from U.S. companies, most of them working prototypes. The stolen weapons never appeared on any black markets; they were never used to wage a battle on U.S. soil or against a foreign company. It was as if the weapons had simply vanished.
The true identity of Angel Eyes, his race and age, what he did for a living all of it was unknown. The IWAC team believed he had a group of professionals who worked for him. The team didn't know if Angel Eyes was operating out of the U.S. or, more disturbing, what the man's true agenda was. Was he going to use the weapons for some sinister purpose whose agenda would one day announce itself to the world like the Oklahoma bombing? Theories abounded.
What IWAC did know was the name of Angel Eyes's last two victims.
A sticky foam spray used as a nonlethal means of riot control had been around for several years. You sprayed the target, the foam formed and then hardened, and the person was stuck to the floor or street, immobilized. No one died. A great, nonlethal weapon.
The problem was clean-up. It was a time-consuming, pain-in-the-ass process that was very, very expensive. Massive police departments like Los Angeles and prisons, where the sticky foam would be the most useful, wanted to wait until the technology was more refined. A twenty-two-year-old brainiac chemist from Berkeley named Jonathan King stepped in and developed a foam that, when sprayed with a certain chemical compound, turned into dust.
The working prototype and design schematics for the spray gun, along with all the backup information on the chemical compounds that made the foam work, disappeared from the Berkeley-based lab. Three days later, at a junkyard in St. Paul, Minnesota, a man and his four-year-old son were looking at a part on a 1987 Buick Century when the boy heard what sounded like someone crying. The father pressed his ear against the trunk and heard a dry, tired voice just barely stronger than a whisper crying for help.
King had been beaten unconscious, and someone had poured Drano down his throat. He was airlifted to the hospital and by the time he arrived had slipped into a coma.
Six weeks passed and then on a cold March morning King woke up. The police came by for questioning, but the problem was that King had suffered severe brain damage. He couldn't talk, but he could write, and when asked the name or a description of the man who had done this to him, all King could (or would) write were the words Angel Eyes. King suffered a heart attack later that night and died.
The major break came two years ago, with thirty-four-year-old Alan Matthews, an MIT graduate who was developing for the government a portable spying device that could pick up the magnetic signals from any unshielded computer monitor or laptop screen any CRT screen. Using a specialized antenna, a person sitting inside a car could stare at the device's screen and watch as you typed your PIN number into the ATM machine to access your account; could read your e-mail or document as you were typing it; could even watch you perform business transactions that ranged from the simple credit-card order on the Internet to buying and trading stocks. Unlike its predecessors, this device had been designed to resemble a laptop, making it inconspicuous. The device's spying implications were endless.
Angel Eyes, posing as Mr. George Winston, the name of the main character from Orwell's 1984, approached Matthews with an offer of half a million dollars for the device. It was not known how Angel Eyes discovered the device or how he found out the name of the Cambridge, Massachusetts, company developing it. What was known was that Matthews accepted the offer.
Matthews was a bitter man, insecure, a brilliant loner who craved a glamorous lifestyle. On the day of the exchange, Matthews did not bring the schematics for the spy device called Tempest. He told Winston the device was worth more than half a million. The new deal required Winston to double the purchase price or the deal was off.
Mr. Winston accepted. Matthews, who had full access to the company and its lab, arranged a break-in.
A week later, on a Saturday evening, the spying device was stolen from the company's lab. A fire broke out sometime after midnight. By the time firemen arrived on the scene, the raging blaze had already decimated half the building. Matthews's charred body was found in the ashes. The device wasn't recovered.
The fire was front page news for both the Boston Globe and the Herald, but the theft of the spying device was never made public. The FBI was called in to investigate. One of the agents was a CIA liaison; the information was forwarded to Raymond Bouchard.
Matthews's condo was broken into the same night as the fire. The thief stole every item that could be easily fenced, including Matthews's computer equipment, discs, answering and fax machines, cell phone, pager and his Palm Pilot electronic organizer. What the thief didn't know about was the floor safe under the rug inside the walk-in closet.
Stored in the fireproof safe was a microcassette recorder that Matthews had used to keep a running verbal diary on his meetings with a man named George Winston. The tapes were mostly full of Matthews's ramblings about how smart he was and how he was going to retire off the money. He also boasted that if George Winston tried to double-cross him, Matthews would threaten Winston with the tapes.
While the tapes didn't contain an actual recording of Angel Eyes's voice or any in-depth descriptions of the man, they did contain one gem, the golden key the IWAC team needed to possibly infiltrate Angel Eyes's covert group: the name of Matthews's friend who was working on a highly advanced military combat suit that used a technology called optical camouflage.
Winston was very interested in this cloaking technology and offered Matthews an additional $200,000 for the information. Matthews refused, saying that he wouldn't accept an offer less than two million. Winston agreed and deposited the money in a Cayman Islands account that could be accessed only by Matthews, and only after the business was completed. Matthews handed over the name of his friend, Major Dixon that was actually the guy's God-given name and the name of the company developing the technology: Praxis, based in Austin, Texas. The money in the Cayman account was withdrawn just two hours bef
ore Matthews was killed. Had Matthews checked his account, he might have known that Angel Eyes had a change of heart.
By the time Angel Eyes, still posing as Mr. Winston, contacted Dixon, Conway and the IWAC team were already in place. Conway worked as the company's network security administrator, a position that granted him access to all the company's servers, including the one that stored all the information on the project code-named ROM ULAN It took the better part of a year for Conway to form a bond with the slightly aloof Dixon. During that time, Dix opened up and told Conway that a man named George Winston had contacted him via e-mail and then by phone and offered half a million dollars for detailed information, preferably testing footage, of the military suit and its applications.
An additional 4.5 million would be paid to Dixon in cash should he decide to sell the prototype.
It took Conway only a few months to convince Dix to sell the information to Angel Eyes. Conway was in the perfect position to help Dixon. As the company's network security administrator, he could doctor the audit logs to show that Dixon had never accessed or downloaded the highly protected schematics or the more prized video footage showing the stunning cloaking technology in action.
Dix agreed to sell the video.
Today, after skydiving, at one o'clock, Major Dixon would walk through the Austin-Bergstrom International Airport to Terminal D, where he would wait for Winston and then hand over a compact disc containing video footage of the stunning optical camouflage technology. Dixon would walk away with half a mil in cash, the advance for the compact disc. Angel Eyes would walk away with video footage that contained a computer virus that would infect all of his system and registry files, decrypt his e-mail, and send all of the information, along with his location, to Delburn Systems. A microscopic transmitter inserted in the CD would allow the IWAC team to track the disc's location within a two-mile radius.