The Crimson Code

by Rachel Lee

  Of course, there was always the possibility that Ahmed was refusing to reveal his allies because he feared retribution if they were exposed. This would hardly be the first time someone had rationalized self-interest in terms of religious belief. Still, Veltroni did not think it likely that Ahmed would bend on this issue. At least not tonight.

  "You understand," Veltroni said, "that I may have trouble with my superiors over this. They will find it hard to sit back and do nothing after so many of our cathedrals have been bombed. And there is only one direction in which they will look."

  Ahmed's handsome face creased with both anger and concern. "Of which superiors do you speak? Your superiors at the Vatican? Or your masters in your secret order?"

  Veltroni froze. He never would have imagined that Ahmed could have learned anything about the Stewards of the Faith as a secret order. Especially when they appeared to stand in plain sight for all to see.

  "I don't know what you're talking about."

  Ahmed shook his head. "You don't fool me, my friend. Your Stewards may have a public face and the pope's blessing, but I am not stupid. What we have discussed together tells me that you have a purpose other than the simple ones of the pope."

  "The Stewards of the Faith are dedicated to preserving the Catholic Church. There is no secret in that."

  "Perhaps not." Ahmed sighed. "Perhaps only your methods raise doubt. Somehow I do not think the Holy Father, as you call him, would approve of some of what you have agreed to."

  "The Holy Father lives in a simpler world. Reality must be dealt with."

  "Yes," Ahmed answered. "And now you must trust me to handle reality. I will deal with these traitors because they have harmed my cause."

  For a few minutes, neither man spoke.

  "Trust me," Ahmed said again. "I am as angry as you and your Church."

  Finally Veltroni nodded. When he spoke, his tone intimated a threat that his words did not. "We are left to trust in God. God—Allah—will honor our sincere efforts toward peace, however they may go awry."

  "Yes," Ahmed said, rising. "Thank you for coming, my friend. You are always welcome in my home. Perhaps you can…buffer…the opinions of your superiors, as they consider these horrors. I have no wish to incite another crusade."

  "Nor do we," Veltroni said. "Nor do we."

  * * *

  After Veltroni left, Ahmed Ahsami called for a glass of brandy—one of his few secret vices—and pondered the conversation. Yes, he would deal with the traitors who had blown up the cathedrals. He had already set the wheels in motion to find them and kill them.

  But the Catholic Church was now a wild card on the board. The pope had spoken of forgiveness, but Veltroni's words had carried an implicit threat. Perhaps his doubts about the Stewards of the Faith were correct.

  But correct or not, at the moment they were not his greatest concern. He could deal with them later if it became necessary. For now he had to find the men behind the true horror of Black Christmas.

  And kill them all.

  4

  Frankfurt Airport, Germany

  "You know," Assif Mondi said—in English, for the benefit of the rest of the group, who all spoke English but otherwise diverged greatly in their linguistic skills—"it would have been better if you had wanted to crack into this network a few years ago."

  Renate simply stared expressionlessly at him. All the tears she had shed in the privacy of her apartment since Black Christmas had turned into something harder than diamonds. Sometimes her nostrils flared a little, anticipating the scent of blood. The blood of the killers. No one knew it, though, and no one would, because if they learned of it, she would be removed from this case instantly. But deep inside her, the only purpose she had left, the only desire that existed, was to destroy any and all who had taken part in the killing of her family.

  But Assif was on his hobbyhorse now and not likely to slow down. "A few years ago the banks were on dial-ups. Can you believe it? They used X.25 protocol, which was a good protection, but not unhackable. Now you want me to break into SWIFTNET, a dedicated hardwired network with the most powerful NetScreen encryption devices made. They have firewalls, massive encryption, and worse, they have an untrust fallback."

  "Untrust?" Lawton asked.

  "If the NetScreen device senses anything unusual in the connection, it will immediately fall over to a backup connection. On a different line."

  "Oh, goodie."

  Assif looked at him, then nodded. "Exactly."

  Renate spoke, feeling a flame-lick of the fury that had filled her since Christmas. Assif, she was sure, had no idea how close to the edge he was walking with her. "Are you saying this is impossible?"

  "If I thought it was impossible, I would not have come. I am here. It is not impossible. But don't expect it to be fast."

  They were standing on the chilly, windblown concrete platform at the Frankfurt Airport, awaiting a train to take them to the Frankfurt Main Station. From there they would catch a tram to the business suite Office 119 had rented for them.

  Right now there were only a few people inside the steel-and-glass tunnel, farther along the tracks, but Renate glanced toward the escalators and saw more arrivals beginning to appear. The sky through the overhead glass remained gray and uninviting, maybe even promising snow. The chill nipped at her nose.

  "Let us talk later," she said to Assif. Then, surprising Lawton, she pulled out a pack of cigarettes, moved toward the smoking area on the platform and lit one.

  Lawton exchanged looks with Assif, who was a handsome Indian with the friendly features of the Punjab. Assif shrugged; then they both followed her.

  "Local color," she said when they joined her. "And the smoking section is here at the end of the platform, where we're most likely to have privacy."

  Assif laughed. "Then give me one, please? I haven't smoked since I left New Delhi."

  Lawton stepped upwind. Renate noticed the movement, and something almost like amusement flickered in her eyes before dying. Dying again beneath the ice of death.

  They let the first, and then a second, train leave for Frankfurt. Assif and Renate were still chatting casually when a compact, powerfully built man joined the growing number of travelers in the smoking area. He watched indifferently as another train arrived and departed. A short time later, he alone remained with them.

  He turned and took a couple of strides their way. "Renate," he said, holding out his ticket as if he were asking directions. "Are we all here?"

  "Yes, Niko. You know everyone?"

  He nodded. "By reputation, at least. You must be Lawton Caine."

  Lawton did not extend his hand but simply gave an affirmative glance, as did Assif when Niko greeted him.

  When they at last boarded the train to the city, they took seats in separate cars. The essence of the team was now together.

  Guatemalan Highlands

  Paloma drew Steve Lorenzo away from the rest of the villagers. Most were already asleep, wrapped in colorful wool blankets they carried with them nearly everywhere, blankets that now provided the only protection they had from the elements, except for the tree canopy above. As was so often the case, water dripped steadily from a light rain, and the lanolin in the wool repelled it.

  Steve was grateful for his own blanket, a gift from Paloma, the tribe's elderly bruja. The word could be translated as witch, but in Steve's estimation it would be fairer to call her a shaman, or, better yet, curandera, healer.

  Hundreds of generations of knowledge lay behind Paloma's lively dark eyes, knowledge of curative properties that U.S. pharmaceutical companies would give—or take—nearly anything to discover and patent.

  "You are a good man, Padre," she said to him as they settled on the damp, dead leaves that carpeted the forest floor.

  "I only do what I must, Paloma."

  "Only a good man would say that." Her eyes caught a little of the moonlight that filtered through the canopy and seemed to smile at him. "We are approaching a volcano."
r />   He nodded reluctantly. "I've felt the rumblings."

  "All the volcanoes have become active since the terrible things that happened in Asia."

  Steve had heard the news of the horrifying tsunami in one of his stealthy village visits to buy corn. He had shared it with Paloma, who had accepted it stoically. But what would he have expected? Considering what her people had been facing since the day the village had been attacked in an attempt to arrest Miguel Ortiz, she was hardly likely to care much about hundreds of thousands of dead halfway around the world. These people were in scarcely better straits.

  "The gods are angry," Paloma told him now.

  He sighed, then smiled when a quiet laugh escaped Paloma.

  "I know," she said. "You think your God loves us too much to do such things. But have you forgotten your own stories of the Great Flood? The story of Job?"

  Job was a bit of Bible lore that Paloma dearly loved and had taken much to heart. To her, his story seemed to symbolize everything Mayan in some way.

  "I haven't forgotten," he admitted.

  "So do not deny your god his anger with us. For we have not been a very faithful people."

  After living all this time with this particular group of Mayans, Steve could see absolutely nothing in them about which God should be angry, unless it was their unspoken insistence that there was more than one god…something the Bible itself left just a bit ambiguous.

  "Paloma, your people have done nothing to earn any god's wrath."

  "Perhaps we have not. But there are others…and the innocent always seem to suffer with them. Do you not feel it?"

  Steve hesitated. He wasn't sure he wanted to go down this path with her. "Bad things sometimes happen to good people," he said finally, falling back on aphorism. "He makes the rain to fall on the just and unjust alike."

  Paloma nodded. "You asked about the Kulkulcan Codex."

  Steve froze. All of a sudden time vanished, and he remembered Monsignor Veltroni's charge to him so long ago in Savannah, before he had sent Steve here. "Yes, many months ago. My Church wanted it."

  "They fear it."

  "Yes."

  "And would destroy it."

  Steve shook his head. "I don't know, Paloma. They might hide it somewhere, but I'm not sure they would destroy it."

  "They cannot destroy it."

  Steve forced himself to wait patiently. With Paloma he was ever the student, and with Paloma he had learned true patience.

  "The Codex," Paloma said presently, "cannot be destroyed. It is impossible. It is so old it predates the Maya, the Olmec. It predates the Viracocha who brought it to us."

  "Viracocha?"

  "It is one of his names. You will find he has many and was known throughout this entire part of the world, not just here in the land of the Maya, but among the Inca, also, and perhaps in other ways among our brothers to the north in your country. I do not know. My world is mostly the Mayan world."

  Steve nodded, then murmured his understanding, thinking that in the dark of this darkest of nights, she might not see the gesture.

  "Viracocha, Quetzalcoatl, Kulkulcan…many names. One man. One very holy man. He brought teachings of love, forbade human sacrifice, although many who followed him did not remember that. He brought the Codex to us, as well, and ultimately it was the Codex that caused the wars that sent my people fleeing into jungles for sanctuary."

  "They warred over the Codex?" Steve found that difficult to believe.

  "Yes," Paloma said simply. "For the first time in my people's history, we made war not to take captives but to kill. And all for the power of the Codex."

  Frankfurt, Germany

  The rented suite in a tall office building in the financial district was already outfitted with standard furnishings. In a back room, however, they found the other equipment Office 119 had quietly arranged to have delivered. They spent several hours opening boxes. Since most of them had been shipped from within Germany, their contents were plain to see as bubble wrap and foam popcorn were removed. But a few items, electronics of some kind, had been shipped from outside the country, hidden beneath false bottoms in wooden crates.

  It wasn't that the contents were illegal. It was that Office 119 didn't want to leave a trail to this suite.

  Assif, Niko and Renate set about connecting all the computer equipment, some of which looked as if it had been intended for military use, while Lawton helped as best he could.

  "We have TEMPEST shielding," Assif remarked as he studied some of the equipment.

  "Good," Renate said flatly. "I hacked them once before. I am sure they are much more careful now. And if they have any reason to suspect that someone is hacking them now, they will try to track the hacker."

  She caught Lawton's confused look and motioned him over to a window that gave him a neck-craning view of some of the surrounding buildings. "You see all the microwave dishes? Many of them are listening, not sending. Without TEMPEST shielding, someone can hear the electronic noise of our computers and decode it to figure out what we're doing."

  Lawton nodded. Why did he feel he had just slipped back into the days of the cold war? Maybe he had. The names changed, but the basic plot never varied. "Like the good old bad days of the USSR," he remarked.

  Renate leaned back on a desk and folded her arms. "You Americans can be so naive."

  He bristled a little. Any naiveté he had once owned had perished on a beach in Los Angeles when a little girl saw her father killed before her eyes and blamed Lawton for it. "And you Europeans think you have the corner on sophistication."

  Renate shook her head. "Some do, perhaps. I think we've merely warred ourselves into a terminal case of Weltschmerz."

  World weariness. Lawton might have laughed at that, had he not been so disturbed by the frightening vibes he kept getting from Renate. She needed watching. "So what are you trying to say?"

  "Everyone in Europe wants to say the last pope helped bring down the Soviet Union. Your people want to say it was your President Reagan. Shall I tell you the truth?"

  One corner of Lawton's mouth lifted. "I can take it."

  "The USSR was brought down by the Frankfurt Brotherhood."

  "Oh, come on…."

  "It's true. They refused to capitalize the Soviets in any way, which forced them into a state of poverty and bankruptcy. And the reason for that was simple."

  "Yes?"

  "There was no way for the Brotherhood to make money on the communist system. They looked at the Soviets and saw huge resources and a huge labor pool they couldn't take advantage of until after the communist government collapsed. Now there are investment opportunities. It may take decades, but the Brotherhood is patient. Very patient. They can wait centuries, if necessary."

  Then she went back to work, leaving Lawton to mull that over.

  Niko went out to get them a meal, and while they ate, Assif stood next to a whiteboard and began to outline what they would need to do. "First, we have to get into the bank." He wrote swiftly, then snagged another bite of his sandwich.

  "Could we pose as an international business seeking access to SWIFTNET?" Niko asked, glancing down at a file folder full of research data. "It says here that banks are offering businesses access to the network."

  "No, we can't," Assif said. "First, only a handful of businesses have purchased access to SWIFTNET, and they are all major players in international finance. Second, these business clients are offered only limited access, and they are blocked from the areas of the network I need."

  "And most important," Renate added, "our target is a private bank. Like most private banks, it has no public access, no lobby. Clients do not come in off the street. The bank solicits them…personally."

  "How can we get on their list?" Lawton asked.

  "We can't," Renate answered simply. "The target's clients are very wealthy families, many of them present or former nobility, and huge private trusts. These are not the sort of bona fides that can be manufactured."

  "So if I understan
d correctly, we have no legitimate way to enter that bank," Niko said.

  "Correct," Renate answered.

  "Utility access tunnels?" Lawton asked. "If we can find their network cables, can we tap in from there?"

  "Of course," Assif said. "If we could isolate the network cables. But the only way to do that would be to sample all their communications cables at a time when we know they are making a SWIFTNET transmission. And it has to be a transmission whose content we already know, so I can be sure I have the right lines."

  "Which brings us back to getting inside the bank," Renate said. "With no legitimate way to do so."

  "A black bag job," Lawton said. Renate arched a brow in a silent question, and he continued. "Covert entry."

  "Yes, precisely," she said. "A black-bag job."

  "Then we need to know their security," Niko said. "Working hours. How many people are in the building at what times of day. Whether there are guards at night, and how many. Electronic security, both external and internal. I'm sure their computers are password protected. If we are going to send a transmission, we will need a password."

  "In short," Assif said, staring at the whiteboard as if it might reveal the secrets of the universe, "we need to know their security as well as their security chief does."

  * * *

  Late that night, while Niko and Assif worked steadily in the back room to create what Assif insisted would be an ideal configuration of equipment for the job ahead, Lawton found Renate at the large glass windows in an unlighted executive office.

  With her arms wrapped around herself, she was staring out pensively at the Frankfurt night. Beyond the glass, lights sparkled in the cold air. Traffic had almost disappeared, leaving the streetlights starkly alone along the roads. A few offices in the surrounding buildings remained lit, probably for cleaning crews. At any other time, it would have been beautiful.

  Right now all Lawton could see was a threat, and he suspected Renate was seeing the same thing.