“Hey!” Dean said.
“No, speak French,” said Chafetz. “Tell him you’re lost.”
A translator jumped on the line and gave Dean a few phrases, telling him how to say that he was lost and he was looking for the medina.
The man responded by pulling out a pistol.
“Sixty seconds more,” said Telach.
“English? Do you speak English then?” said Dean.
The man lifted the pistol.
“Why are you holding a gun at me?” said Dean.
“Get out of there, Charlie!” yelled Chafetz.
The man said something in Arabic.
“He says go or die,” said the translator.
“Oui, OK. Yes, yes, I’m going,” said Dean. He held his hands out at the man and gestured again that he would go. He grabbed the bike and started to back up — then seemed to lose his grip and drop it.
The man said something in Arabic. Charlie grabbed the bike and turned around, pushing the pedals in earnest now.
“We’ve got it covered,” said Telach. “Good going.”
“Give me directions back to Lia,” Dean said.
* * *
The drainpipe pulled away from the house as Lia grabbed it to climb back up, so she decided it would be easier to go around to the next building and climb up the fire escape. When she reached the second floor she saw that someone was near the window, and waited for a few minutes until deciding she could pull herself up on the other side without being seen. Lia did the same on the third floor, scrambling onto the roof.
She retrieved her gear, unloading and stowing the gun in its case and then pulling the strap over her rucksack. As she rose, there was a noise on the roof behind her. Lia swung around, not sure if it was Dean; a shadow appeared across the way near the fire escape ladder, then disappeared. Lia sprinted after it, pulling a small Glock handgun from her waistband as she crossed the roof. She reached the edge in a few bounds and bolted over the side, jumping down the ladder to the next landing, where the figure had just descended. The shadow tried to escape through the window, but Lia grabbed hold, pulling it out and sticking the pistol in its face.
The face of a nine-year-old-boy, shaking like a leaf, eyes like acorns.
She stared into them, saw his fear.
Is that how I looked to them? Is that how I look to everyone, now?
Lia pushed the boy away, then went down to the street. Dean was waiting on his bike.
“What were you doing?” he said.
“Making mistakes,” she told him brusquely, brushing past.
46
Rubens sat in one of the empty seats in the Art Room’s theater-style layout, staring at the screen saver on the computer monitor in front of him. A multicolored object floated across the screen, morphing into different forms as it came to each edge of the viewing area. The changes seemed random but were actually determined by a pair of complex mathematical formulas whose results only looked random when viewed over a short period of time. If you stared at the screen long enough a pattern would begin to emerge.
Intelligence gathering worked like that. Seemingly random bits of information had to be stitched together from a wide variety of sources to reveal themselves as something generated by a purposeful formula. This was, in Rubens’ opinion, the reason that those trained in mathematics and cryptography were so good at intelligence work: they knew there were formulas behind what others saw as unrelated information flitting through the universe.
But there was also a danger that truly random events might be misinterpreted as being part of a nonexistent pattern. Or worse, unconnected strands might be erroneously connected, leading the analyst in the wrong direction.
Was that happening now? The man Dean had followed had used an antiquated analog coupling device to send a very short piece of information to a computer bulletin board in France. The technology was so old — it dated from the mid-1980s — that under other circumstances the NSA wouldn’t have bothered paying any attention.
Ninety seconds after the transmission, the weather site on the World Wide Web that Rubens had discussed with Johnny Bib had been rewritten, two minutes ahead of normal schedule.
According to Johnny Bib, the change was doubly significant not only was it outside the normal pattern of updates, but it also didn’t alter a temperature as the other ones had. Instead, it involved a forecast three days ahead.
The change was subtle: “cloudy” became “thunder-storms.” At the regular update time, the old prediction was restored.
Surely this meant something… or was it a simple programming mess-up?
The potential intersection of the two Desk Three missions — one to find missing atomic material, the other to find a chemist who might have made explosives for terrorists — was both tantalizing and frightening.
But was it a pattern or a non-pattern, meaningful or random noise?
“Boss, Lia and Charlie are clear. You want them back here?” asked Telach.
“No. Have them go to France. Tell them…”
He paused, not knowing exactly what to tell them.
“Have them go to Paris, spend the night, relax a little,” he said.
“Relax?”
“If nothing specific develops, they can back up Tommy Karr. Let’s let Lia catch her breath for a few hours. Contact Tommy — I want him to see if he can get more information from Monsieur LaFoote on the Web sites that were used to transmit instructions. Why wasn’t his friend suspicious? Or was he? What else does he know about the e-mails or domains? See if he can find out what computer his friend used to go on these sites, that sort of thing. And check if there were others.”
“He did already try. I’m not sure how technically competent the old guy is, let alone how much he really knows. Tommy worked him over pretty well while they were watching the police search the house. There are two more CD-ROMs, and possibly some information about an account that Vefoures had that we haven’t been able to track down on our own. Otherwise — well, you know Tommy. He’s everybody’s best friend. I don’t know that LaFoote is holding back too much else. Certainly not about computers.”
“Have him try anyway. LaFoote may not know he knows. Where is Tommy?”
“Tommy went back to Paris to dump the information on the disk for us, and LaFoote stayed back in Aux Boix, where he lives. We had a CIA agent follow him back to his house. He was still there last time I checked. I told Tommy to get some rest. He’s supposed to meet LaFoote at nine p.m. their time.”
“All right. Let Tommy get some rest,” said Rubens. “But when he checks in, have him try and move up his meeting with LaFoote.”
“You don’t want the CIA agent to get involved, right?”
Rubens gave her a withering look. “Do you feel he would succeed where Tommy wouldn’t?”
“I just wanted to check. It does seem—”
“Like a random pattern that doesn’t actually cohere?”
“I was going to say wild-goose chase.”
Rubens got up from the console. “What is Johnny Bib doing?”
“His team has the servers under surveillance,” said Telach. “They’re trying to trace anyone who accesses these pages.”
“Let me know if they come up with anything. I’ll be upstairs.”
* * *
At the very moment Rubens was asking about him, Johnny Bib was hovering over the shoulder of a cryptologist who’d been shanghaied into serving as a computer operator, trying to track the different queries onto the Web site they thought was being used to send codes through the terrorist network. The tracing work was done by a small program the techies called Spider Goblin 3. It was an extremely sophisticated version of the so-called spy programs used by commercial Web sites to track interested visitors to their Web sites. Spider Goblin 3 spat out a list of different nodes on the net showing where requests for the information had come from; this list was then compared to earlier captures of information to see if there were any matches.
There w
ere literally thousands, as a typical request for a Web site might pass through twelve or more “nodes” on the World Wide Web network as it made its way to and back from the place where the information was kept. The difficulty wasn’t that all this information was impossible to obtain — it was there for the taking. The question was what significance it had. Working on the theory that a computer used for one bad purpose might be used for another — as if it were a car owned by a gang who robbed banks and gas stations — Johnny Bib decided to look at the contents of the computers used in accessing the site. The trick was choosing which ones to examine.
Fortunately, this could be placed in the hands of a complicated mathematical formula, which Johnny and his team had compiled the day before. It had involved a great deal of probability work, and thus much of it had been designed by the team’s statisticians — a fault, Johnny Bib believed, since statisticians were by nature imprecise and even messy. They were willing to live with errors in their work, which they classified as “inevitable.” For Johnny Bib, nothing was inevitable. Unknown, perhaps, but not inevitable.
But even a mathematician sometimes had to compromise by rounding off. Numbers existed in the real world, after all.
“Yo, Johnny Bib, Johnny Bib,” said Tristan Young. “Looky, looky, looky.”
Johnny Bib practically hopped across the room to the console where Tristan was working. Twenty-three years old, Tristan’s real calling was string theory and “real” cryptography, but he had been pressed into service in the computer area by a personnel shortage.
“Look at this,” said Young. “Looky, looky, looky.” He pointed to a solid screen of alpha numerals.
Johnny stared for a few seconds but could not discern a pattern. “Assembler code?” he guessed.
“No, no,” said Tristan. “French and German car registrations. Watch.”
Tristan hit a few keys and the wall of digits transformed itself into a list, punctuated at regular intervals by gibberish.
“Wonderful work,” said Johnny Bib. “And where is the computer?”
“A dentist’s office in a town near Marseilles, France.”
“It accessed the Web site after it was changed?”
“Right before.”
“Before?”
“Then again, like, oops, my clock is a little fast. Heh, heh, heh.”
Johnny Bib straightened and considered this.
“The phone number for that bulletin board that was called from the pay phone in Morocco was in this same town,” added Tristan.
“Very good,” said Johnny Bib. “Very, very good.”
“Looks like the dentist’s computer has been hijacked,” added Tristan. “We think there are other computers, spread out across the country, that are used for various chores. There are several Internet accounts associated with the owner of the phone that was called, which of course turns out to be a name we cannot find in any other record.”
Johnny Bib looked at the registration numbers. Not one on the first page was prime.
Interesting. A coincidence probably, but interesting. A sign, definitely, that they were on the right track.
“We’re checking the registrations and tracing the other computers one by one. The whole nine yards, heh, heh, heh,” added Tristan.
“Why is it nine yards?” asked Johnny.
“Don’t know.”
“A significant mystery,” said Johnny, nodding. “Keep me informed.”
47
They caught the last possible plane to Paris that night, an old Boeing 737 operated by a Spanish airline Dean had not only never heard of but which also apparently operated only one aircraft — this one.
The plane sat at the gate for nearly an hour after they boarded. Dean took out the World War I book he’d “borrowed” from the British and read about a wounded German calling to the Marine for help in the dark. The author wondered whether he should put the German out of his misery or take him prisoner. Doing either involved great risk, since he’d be exposing himself to anyone hiding nearby, as well as to the man himself, who might have a concealed weapon. The writer spoke honestly and simply of his uncertainty.
Something similar had happened to Dean in Vietnam: he’d come across a North Vietnamese soldier lying in the brush, stomach full of blood. The man babbled something in Vietnamese; Dean thought he was begging to be killed.
Dean’s job was to kill the enemy. He wasn’t squeamish about it. He’d taken down a Vietcong officer (or at least someone suspected of being one) just a few hours before. But for some reason he couldn’t bring himself to kill this man.
What had stopped him? To this day he couldn’t say.
Did war stay the same, or did men?
* * *
Lia curled her body tight against the comer of the seat, wedging herself next to the window.
All I need to do is sleep, she told herself. Sleep will cure this.
It didn’t, though. The few hours’ dozing on the plane left her restless and stiff, and every bit as confused and scared and unsure as she’d been before.
Lia had trouble finding the ATM at Charles de Gaulle Airport, even though she’d been at the airport dozens of times just in the past two years. It turned out to be only a few yards from the gate where she exited. Then she couldn’t remember the PIN on the ATM card she was carrying, even though the support team always set the PINs on her cards to the same sequence. It took a monstrous amount of effort not to start kicking the machine, to calm down, to ask the Art Room for help.
She found Dean on the taxi line.
“You look tired,” he told her.
“As if you don’t,” she snapped.
He didn’t say anything else.
“Concorde Lazare,” she told the taxi driver when they got in. The man started telling them in French what a nice place it was. “Oui,” she said. Then she switched to English. “Just drive there, though, OK?”
Dean turned and gave her a dirty look. “Excuse us,” he said in English. “My friend has not had much sleep. I apologize for her.”
Lia thought she, too, should apologize, but it was much easier not to say anything at all.
48
Many people say they would like to die in their sleep, but wasn’t that a bit of unexamined foolishness? To die in one’s sleep meant to have no chance to set one’s affairs straight — to have no chance, really, to rage against the coming of the darkness, to hold out, to gasp a few breaths, to resolve to be brave one final time: to meet the ultimate fate with courage, the only real asset one took into old age.
To die in one’s sleep meant to slip into the next life as a passive victim, and Denis LaFoote had never been in his whole life a passive victim. Something deep inside him rebelled at the whisper of death. He found himself struggling as if under deep water and pushed himself toward the surface. He was dreaming and then he was not dreaming — strong hands pushed against him, weighty arms that belonged to a man of flesh and blood, not some nightmare summoned from the dark places of his past. LaFoote pushed upward, calling on the muscles of his once-athletic shoulders and arms to help. The seventy-one-year-old man pushed and shoved toward the light above. He could feel himself choking, but he did not give in; he wasn’t tempted by the sweet warmth he began to feel around his eyes, the lull of more sleep.
“Non!” he shouted. “Non.”
He did not give up, to the bitter end.
* * *
Patrick Donohue sat at the edge of the bed after it was over. It had been some time since he had chosen to kill a man so personally, and he needed a moment to adjust.
Not to get over it, simply to adjust.
The old man had proven stronger than he would have guessed, but there were many benefits to having killed him with no weapon other than the pillow. For one, it was possible that a country coroner might completely miss the fact that his death was a homicide. The struggle had dimmed that possibility, as he’d had to push down heavily on the man’s arms and chest with his body, which would leave tellta
le marks. But the chance had been worth taking.
Given that the coroner was likely to see the obvious, Donohue decided to supply a motive. He went to the old man’s dresser, looking for his wallet. There were only thirty euros in the wallet; he took them. Then he rifled through the drawers quickly, finding nothing of any worth. In the living room, there was a strongbox with old franc notes — a considerable sum, well over two hundred thousand, which would translate roughly into forty thousand euros if taken to a bank. Donohue scattered a few around to make it clear that he had stolen them, then stuffed the rest in his pockets.
He made his exit from the house carefully. There was a policeman or some sort of official watching from a car up the block, who could only be avoided by using the windows at the back of the house. He’d seen the man arrive shortly after LaFoote, which added interest though not particular trouble to the job.
A half hour later, just outside of Paris, he called one of the numbers Mussa had given for reporting on the job.
“Done,” he said.
49
When Tommy Karr woke up in the Paris safe house, he discovered two messages on the telephone number he had given Deidre. Both had been left the day before. One asked if he was “up to anything” the next day, and the other said that she would be outside the Picasso museum at 11:00 a.m., adding that she wouldn’t mind continuing their tour. The museum wasn’t that far from her residence, and she made it sound as if it was a casual idea, but Karr suspected a more elaborate plot.
Which he wholeheartedly approved of.
But duty came first.
The Art Room wanted him to try pushing up the meeting with LaFoote, who according to his CIA shadow had returned home and not stirred since. Karr called the retired French agent but didn’t get an answer.
“You sure he’s inside?” Karr asked Telach.
“Our CIA friend hasn’t seen him leave,” she answered. “It’s still early. Maybe he’s sleeping.”
Dark Zone db-3 Page 20