Archive had better be right, he thought.
Then he went on about his day, doing his best to calm his frazzled nerves.
62
Washington, DC. Monday, 10:49 a.m. ET.
Two thousand miles away from the Senior Quantum compound, Trojan the strung-out computer hacker was awakened by a loud beeping sound.
He roused himself from his post-amphetamine sleep. He had delivered the virus to Whitey on time. He had no idea how he had done it, but he had somehow managed to enclose the code-breaking algorithm into a world-class virus in under forty-eight hours.
Now, it was time for his next task. He walked to the source of the beeping noise, his powerful desktop computer. A dialog box flashed on the screen: Remote Connection Established.
So the disgruntled physicist had come through, Trojan thought to himself. Hard to believe we still get away with this stuff.
He had used an old to establish a remote, secure connection into Jonathan Cooper’s classified computer, located two thousand miles away on the Senior Quantum compound in the middle of the Nevada desert, using nothing other than the non-isolated power line. It was a trick the Soviets hatched in the 60s to spy on telephone conversations without tapping into the phone lines, and it had taken surprisingly little adaptation to make it applicable to the modern computer age.
Normally, top-secret computer systems were plugged into a sanitized power supply, one that was isolated from the grid, to prevent such exploitation. Today, however, the highly classified computer out west was plugged into the Wild West, the unruly, unsanitized power grid, full of prying eyes. It was more vulnerable than a twelve-year-old in a chat room, and Trojan’s computer had just auto-hacked into the top-secret computer in a couple of milliseconds.
Trojan went to work. He opened the first file and was met with a challenge for the access code. He glanced at the Chinese fortune taped to his computer monitor. It read, “You will be successful in an important venture.”
Yes, I will, Trojan thought to himself as he turned the fortune over and typed in the string of numbers on the reverse side.
Within minutes, the hacker had a complete replica of the ultra-classified Senior Quantum control system software stored safely on his hard drive.
The software created the Senior Quantum waveform, which required specialized hardware to turn it into a usable beam of energy. That hardware, Trojan suspected, was the object of a separate op.
He burned one copy of the software to DVD, and created a second copy on a thumb drive.
After a quick trip to the post office, where he left the thumb drive in an otherwise empty post office box, Trojan crawled back in bed for a well-deserved nap.
63
Washington, DC. Monday, 11:07 a.m. ET.
Protégé sat at his desk at General Electronics’ Government Services Division in Washington, DC, unable to concentrate on any of the email that had piled up over the weekend.
He was thinking of yesterday’s flight home from Aspen. The pilots hadn’t emerged from the cockpit once during the entire three-hour flight, and he and Allison had had the cabin completely to themselves.
They had made good use of the time, and the fun had started almost as soon as the airplane lifted off.
His mind replayed her parting words to him. “Robert, it’s going to be hard not to make a habit of you,” she had said.
“I’d rather you didn’t resist,” was his reply.
His office phone rang, interrupting his fond recollection.
Archive’s familiar voice came through the receiver. Despite serious misgivings that he hadn’t quite put behind him, Protégé had agreed to play a small but important role in the bloodless devolution, and the old man wanted to talk business.
64
Shirlington, VA. Monday, 12:06 p.m. ET.
The knock at Vaneesh’s door startled him, even though it was expected. He padded across his condominium in his socks and peered through the spyglass. Where do they find these people, he wondered to himself.
A short, slight girl with numerous facial piercings and body art visible beneath her open-collared brown shirt stood in the hallway smacking her chewing gum, a parcel tucked beneath her arm.
Vaneesh opened the door.
“Mr. Ramashanjarian?”
He nodded.
“Please sign here.” The girl’s voice was surprisingly friendly, and Vaneesh complied with a smile. Her attire mimicked a well-known parcel delivery company uniform, but Vaneesh knew that she was an employee of an entirely different organization altogether.
She smiled as she handed over the package. He was surprised to find her . . . beautiful. He hadn’t thought a girl like that could be his type—a little too freaky for the conservative blood still coursing through his veins—but the thought was entertaining.
No time for shenanigans. He had taken a sick day to be available for this particular delivery.
He opened the package. Beneath the top layer of manila paper were two more layers of wrapping. The inner layer was marked “SECRET: SPECIAL ACCESS REQUIRED.”
Vaneesh removed all of the wrapping paper to reveal a three-inch by four-inch removable disk drive.
He opened the patio door, started the gas grill on his small eleventh-floor balcony, and dropped the wrapping paper onto the meat rack above the glowing flames.
He walked back inside to his desk, inserted the removable hard drive into a waiting computer receptacle, and turned on the power.
Then he connected a USB cable from the first computer, a cheap Dell desktop, to his Apple laptop. Using the track pad on his laptop, he opened the cryptographic deciphering application that was built around the algorithm he and his colleagues at Pro-Tek had designed, and that he had illegally replicated for his own use.
The Dell’s login screen appeared. Vaneesh established a remote connection between the laptop and the other computer, then set the code-breaking algorithm to work on the password.
Designed to defeat world-class enterprise security encryption, the cryptographic algorithm took just over a second to break the paltry protection on the stolen hard drive.
The Dell continued its excruciating boot-up process. The Langston Marlin company logo appeared as the desktop’s background. A dialog window opened: “Welcome, John Averett. Use of this system is consent to monitoring.”
John Averett.
John Averett. Vaneesh had heard the name recently. John Averett of Langston Marlin.
The murdered CEO.
Reality hit him like a freight train. Vaneesh’s entire body began to shake. He had seen the newspaper headlines the day before.
He had just hacked into a computer disk drive belonging to the late John Averett, the CEO of Langston Marlin Corporation, who was murdered by a sniper in Maryland.
Vaneesh felt as if he might be sick.
Then he knew that he would definitely be sick. He retched into the trashcan. Tears of fear and revulsion streamed down his face. What have I gotten myself into?
He panicked. He had trouble breathing, and his body shook. What the hell have they done?
He sure as hell wouldn’t have gotten involved if he had known his counterparts were planning to kill someone to achieve their objectives.
But he could think of no way out.
It took several minutes for rationality to return. Vaneesh hadn’t killed anyone, but he knew that treason was no less a capital offense than murder.
As his heart rate returned to normal, he realized that he was in no more jeopardy now than he was before receiving the dead man’s disk drive.
But the game had changed.
A bloodless devolution? I want my goddamned money back.
He snorted at the absurdity of his thought, and sat in silence for several long moments, pondering what to do.
In for a penny, in for a pound, he ultimately decided. There weren’t many other options.
He got to work. He had less than an hour to deliver the goods.
His hands still shook and his stomach st
ill felt queasy, but he did his job. He typed “optical tracking algorithm” into the computer’s search function, and copied every resulting file onto a thumb drive.
He examined many of the files, but paid particular attention to the .txt file. It was computer code.
He read it with growing admiration. It was beautiful, elegant, and exceptionally simple, but Vaneesh knew it was the product of uncommon insight and skill. It was the calling card of true genius, not unlike the algorithm he had helped create.
It appeared to be a tracking algorithm designed to compensate for optical anomalies due to extreme atmospheric heating.
Vaneesh had no way of knowing that its inventor, a British optical scientist, had recently died a violent death half a globe away, a much more excruciating end than that suffered by the late Mr. John Averett of Langston Marlin.
Vaneesh powered down the computers and tossed both the thumb drive and Averett’s hard disk drive into his gym bag.
Exercise was the last thing he wanted at the moment, but he had no alternative. He had to get to the gym. Locker number 55 this time.
65
Somewhere on the East Coast. Monday, 1:03 p.m. ET.
“Every man has his limits, Colonel James.” The small, slight man had a bookish face divided by a hawkish nose. His shoulders stooped and his head leaned forward, making it appear as though he were peering at Brock through his eyebrows. He hadn’t bothered to introduce himself.
“I don’t doubt it,” Brock answered as neutrally as he could manage. He still had no idea who was holding him captive, or what they might want from him. The small, middle-aged man seated across the small table from him was one of two humans Brock had seen during the past two days.
The other was the beast of a man with wolf’s eyes who had shot him in the thigh, then hauled him around like a sack of potatoes.
Actually, Brock had decided, the big guy wasn’t a sweetheart, but he wasn’t pure evil, either. The man hadn’t gone out of his way to make Brock comfortable, but neither had he made life unnecessarily miserable. Brock’s evasion and resistance training in the Air Force had taught him to be prepared for much worse. All in all, it had been a gentleman’s captivity so far.
Minus the gunshot wound, of course.
All of that could change at a moment’s notice, Brock knew. But he decided to take a risk. “If you don’t mind terribly, I have a question or two for you,” he said.
It was apparent that the small man hadn’t expected his prisoner to exercise any initiative. Brock noticed that the man was slightly taken aback. Tread lightly, Brock thought to himself. He who asked the questions had control, so it was best to appear as friendly as possible as he seized the agenda from his captor.
The small man’s raised eyebrows were all the encouragement Brock needed to continue. “I’m sure it won’t take much imagination to figure out what I’m curious about.” Brock smiled, and it was barely requited. The corners of the man’s tiny mouth crept ever so slightly toward the positive, and Brock thought he caught a hint of a sparkle in the man’s coal-dark eyes, but his captor remained guarded.
Brock forged ahead. “Your friend made a bit of a mess of my house and left a hole or two in my leg. And I’ve been your guest for a couple of days. I was just wondering—”
“I’m sure you were.”
Brock paused, unsure of himself, but decided to keep going. He smiled again. “Right, so anyway, I was just wondering . . . is there anything I can help you gentlemen with? Not that I haven’t enjoyed our time together, but I do have a few things to tend to back at home.”
The small man cocked his head to the side, a quizzical look on his face. Then, involuntarily, a smile erupted. A full, strange-eyed, crooked-lipped, hawk-nosed grin. “Yes, Colonel James, I believe there is something you can help us with. You are in charge of the guidance and control team at the anti-satellite program office, are you not?”
Relief washed over Brock. He had prepared himself for the worst, but things had taken a decidedly positive turn. Brock had feared that whoever was holding him might have been using him to get to Sam. She dealt with some complete shitbirds in her line of work. It had taken every ounce of his self-control not to ask the large man with the crazy wolf eyes about Sam. If they—whoever they were—didn’t know or care about her already, he certainly didn’t want to turn their attention in her direction.
It was naïve, of course. The big man was an absolute pro, and he hadn’t barged into Brock’s house unprepared. Certainly the man knew about Sam. But Brock hadn’t wanted to expose the only significant leverage they had on him. Other than physical pain, that is.
The fact that Hawk Nose—his new friend—was asking about his work rather than about Sam came as a welcome relief to Brock.
He exhaled, suddenly feeling better than he had felt since before he heard his front door crash open in the middle of the night several days prior.
Brock’s head was full of state secrets. He’d spent over twenty years protecting secrets. He’d lied on behalf of the federal government countless times to protect those secrets. The lies were called cover stories, partial-truths and bald-faced fabrications meant to misdirect and mislead would-be adversaries from uncovering the truth about American military capabilities.
But he sure as hell wasn’t going to suffer—not even a little bit—to protect any of the anti-satellite technologies rattling around in his brain. Loyalty ran only so far.
Not very far, in Brock’s case. Brock knew that no court on the planet would convict him of treason for divulging secrets to people who had shot and kidnapped him. There was no law that said you had to endure torture for the sake of security.
“Yes,” he said. “That’s right. What do you want to know?”
66
Crystal City, VA. Monday, 2:06 p.m. ET.
The meeting with Vice President Arquist had gone precisely as Stalwart had planned. Langston Marlin’s assassinated CEO occupied a good bit of the discussion. No leads, no answers.
Then the subject had changed to the anti-satellite program. Arquist had asked insightful questions, and Stalwart had provided characteristically astute answers, except in one area. Arquist’s political instincts were aroused by the potentially dubious origin of Langston Marlin’s game-changing optical tracking technology. The company’s refusal to reveal either the source of the breakthrough, or the process that had produced it, troubled the vice president.
His concern wasn’t unfounded. If LM had acquired the technology by dint of corporate espionage, as Stalwart had subtly intimated, there was bound to be trouble down the line.
The technology’s rightful owner would eventually surface, court injunction in hand. The public bloodletting would mean yet another black eye in the press, but it would also jeopardize the sensitive secrets at the heart of the technology. It wouldn’t serve American interests to have every rogue dictator zapping satellites at will.
The logic was unquestioned and unspoken in bureaucratic circles: that kind of capability should belong exclusively to the United States.
Arquist had reacted just as Stalwart expected, and Stalwart had left the vice president’s office with marching orders to uncover the source of the technology.
He had mentioned the meeting’s upshot to Charlie Landers, the mobile anti-satellite program’s habitually angry co-lead, who immediately called LM’s headquarters to crack skulls. That was also precisely as Stalwart had expected.
Stalwart would use the opportunity to play Good Cop in the aftermath of Landers’s trademark histrionics.
He would then use the leverage of a vice presidential mandate to gain access to the working prototype of the targeting technology at the heart of the anti-satellite program.
Which Mullah’s men would steal.
Stalwart looked at his watch. His flight back to Fort Worth departed DC in two hours. It left him enough time to deliver the small piece of paper, still tucked safely in his pants pocket, to a small, grout-free space between two bricks in the wa
ll of a decorative water feature in front of an office building on Crystal Drive.
The water fountain in question adorned the courtyard in front of Langston Marlin’s Global Vigilance building.
Mike Charles, known as Stalwart in the most important circle, enjoyed this irony immensely.
As the sun disappeared behind the drab office buildings, a youngish man of medium build rode his skateboard north on the Crystal Drive sidewalk.
He wore tight jeans ornamented with paisley shapes embroidered in gold stitching. His hair was frosted blonde at the tips, and fashioned into dozens of spike-like shapes around his head. Fa Q 2 emblazoned his sleeveless shirt. White headphones hung in his ears.
He jumped his skateboard off the curb several times, attempting to flip the board while airborne. He succeeded more than he failed, landing squarely on top of the upright skateboard after most attempts.
After a while, he rode the skateboard to the low wall that hemmed in a large decorative fountain’s outflow. He hopped off his skateboard and sat on the edge of the wall.
While his right hand changed the music on his iPod, his left hand retrieved the small piece of paper stuck between the bricks adjacent to his left thigh. He slipped the paper into his pocket.
He had no way of knowing that this particular piece of paper had started the day in the possession of a member of the vice president’s security detail, and was deposited in its hiding place by a very senior Pentagon official.
But he did know that the paper would contain an address in Clarksville, Maryland, where he was to deliver the small memory stick in his pocket, given to him by a man he knew simply as Whitey.
The young skateboarder rolled north again along Crystal Drive, as conspicuously invisible as a spy could possibly be. This shit is easy.
He performed another celebratory flip of the skateboard, then continued toward the bus stop.
The Essential Sam Jameson / Peter Kittredge Box Set: SEVEN bestsellers from international sensation Lars Emmerich Page 132