It had led her to a very unexpected destination, and she had very little time to get there.
“Sam, be careful,” Dan admonished. “These aren’t just powerful people. These are some of the most powerful people who have ever lived. You can’t imagine the resources they control.”
“They’re human.” Sam honked and cursed at a motorist who was too busy texting to notice her flashing emergency lights.
“But you have to get to them, Sam. I can’t imagine a scenario where that’s going to happen on the timeline you’re looking for. It might be too much, even for you.”
“That’s why I need that goddamned warrant!” Another blast of her horn at a recalcitrant driver punctuated her sentence.
“Are you high?” Dan’s pitch rose. “You know how this works. No sane man alive would issue an arrest warrant for the Chairman of the Executive Board of the damned World Bank Group, even if they found a corpse in his closet! Do you have any idea how many trillions of dollars Erwin Graves controls? Unless you know a suicidal judge, we need to work on a different plan.”
She heard something in Dan’s voice that she couldn’t recall ever hearing before. It sounded like . . . defeat.
Sam had been ecstatic to have a name and an address, a next step in her frantic search for Brock.
But reality was settling in, and Dan Gable’s admonition had hit the mark. She began to fully appreciate the depth of the predicament.
Sam felt the weight of the past few days crash down on her again. She had hardly slept since Brock’s abduction. She had been in an all-out sprint to find Brock’s kidnappers, subsisting largely on caffeine and adrenaline.
Analysis of the horrific picture of Brock’s pain-contorted face hadn’t revealed any clues yet, and the lead she was currently working was beginning to feel even more untouchable than she had first anticipated.
Hot tears welled in her eyes, which made her even angrier than before. “Dammit, I need you to help me find a way. I’m twenty minutes from Graves’s estate, and I have to have something when I get there.”
She swerved and accelerated around a stalled car. “And I can’t wait—Landers said Graves leaves for Finland tonight!”
She knew a note of hysteria had crept into her voice, and she felt instantly embarrassed.
The phone was silent for a few seconds before Dan spoke again. “Sam, I’m right there with you on this. We’ve worked together for the better part of five years, and I’ll go to the mat for you. You know that. We’ve almost always found a way. But dammit, Sam, this is a tough one. Guys like this play by their own rules. And a little backup never killed anyone.”
Sam shook her head. “No way. Unless you can guarantee that DHS isn’t compromised.”
“You know I can’t.”
“Then no backup. It would jeopardize Brock. I couldn’t live with myself if…” She couldn’t bring herself to finish the thought.
“Jesus, Sam, we’re bringing a butter knife to a bazooka fight here.”
He was right.
Sam let up on the gas. Her headlong dash to the twenty-acre estate belonging to Erwin Graves, Chairman of the Executive Board of the World Bank Group, and known in a very small circle as the Intermediary, suddenly felt like a fool’s errand. What am I going to do when I get there?
She exhaled a long, slow breath. As the air left her lungs, it felt as though her entire self were deflating. She felt helpless, and the tears began to flow.
She knew her soft sobs were audible on the other end of the line. Tears obstructed her vision, and she wiped her eyes repeatedly to keep from running off the road. The picture of Brock’s pain-riddled face kept filling her mind’s eye, spurring waves of anxiety and grief.
“I’m sorry. I’m a mess,” she said after a long moment.
“Yes, but only a little more than usual,” Dan said.
A laugh interrupted her tears, and she suddenly felt better. Dan Gable was always great at helping her face long odds. “I hate you now more than ever,” she said, a smile tucked in her voice.
“Just keep driving, Sam. I have an idea. I’ll call you in five.” With that, he hung up.
87
Clarksville, MD. Monday, 7:17 p.m. ET.
Rand Wilson, NSA computer security specialist, walked to his Honda Civic parked at the curb in front of his house. He stopped at the mailbox, even though he knew his wife had already collected the day’s mail.
He swept his hand from left to right along the bottom of the metal mailbox. His hand scraped against the edge of a magnetic key holder.
He quickly removed the key holder and climbed into his beat-up import for the quick trip to work at the NSA’s sprawling campus.
He hated the night shift, which usually added to his general malaise and malcontent.
But tonight would be his last night shift for a while. Maybe forever.
He opened the sliding latch on the key holder, revealing the small box’s contents: one red memory stick. How fitting. We will bring the bastards to their knees with one little thumb drive.
He shoved the memory stick down into his underwear. He knew he would have to empty his pockets prior to entering the NSA data center, and bags of any kind were strictly prohibited. But they would never search for contraband tucked into his skivvies. Security was one thing, but not everything. Even the security guards had a bit of manly pride, and he had never been patted there during any security screening in his decade of service at NSA.
For the first time in his memory, Rand Wilson drove to work with a smile.
Wilson sailed through security at the NSA facility in Fort Meade, Maryland. The jovial guard gave him a friendly wave.
He walked for ten minutes through the gargantuan facility, home to a large portion of NSA’s thirty thousand employees, before finally arriving at the data center vault.
He badged in, entered his PIN, and walked through the vault’s outer door into the “fart locker,” a small hallway connecting the inner and outer vault doors. One couldn’t open the inner door until the outer door was closed and locked.
When that happened, Wilson again used his badge to access the inner door leading to his cubicle.
Unlike most cube farms inside the NSA facility, this one featured a large wall of windows. It wasn’t much of a view, however. The windows overlooked one of the world’s largest server installations. Hundreds of racks of high-end computing equipment occupied an acre of floor space.
Wilson smiled. He had plans for all of that computing power.
He had scheduled a week’s vacation beginning in the morning. They had tickets to Jamaica, with reservations at the same resort where he had proposed to her years before, the place where they had made mad, crazy, frantic love, where she had told him she hoped he would never stop loving her that way.
He had stopped, when his soul began to rot, but he planned to spend the entire week making it up to the woman he still craved.
Wilson sat down at his desk, located in a quiet corner of the division and surrounded on three sides by cubicle walls. He retrieved the memory stick from his underwear and inserted it into the USB port on his government computer.
That act alone was a major security violation. It would easily get him fired. Viruses often lurked in the memory sticks. Like mice carrying the plague, they could be extremely dangerous for large computer networks.
While the code contained on Rand’s memory stick was exceptionally dangerous, it wasn’t designed to attack its host network. Instead, it was designed for a far more devastating effect.
Wilson opened a particular software program on his workstation. It allowed him to perform software code updates on the core NSA system.
The program’s function was to take the code that he and others in his office wrote, and wrap it up inside a digitally encrypted permissions wrapper, which identified the code as legitimate.
The NSA’s forest of computers would simply quarantine any software that did not come wrapped in this special identifier, but the computers w
ould run any set of instructions they found inside a properly encrypted packet.
Wilson created a new wrapper using his specialized software program. He opened the text file contained on the memory stick, copied the lengthy segment of computer language from the text file, and pasted it into the editing window.
He clicked “compile/test.” A blue wheel spun on the display while the security program tested the software.
As the seconds ticked away, Wilson felt the swarm of butterflies in his stomach and noticed that his hands were shaking just a bit.
He felt scared. But he felt alive.
Finally, the security software issued its verdict: “No anomalies detected. Click OK to propagate.”
Wilson moved the mouse pointer over the “OK” icon and pressed the button.
“Are you sure?” the popup window wanted to know. “This action will distribute your code throughout the data center.”
He took a deep breath. No turning back, he thought.
He clicked “OK.”
The virus’s target wasn’t the giant bank of computers in the bowels of the NSA that stored the phone and e-mail conversations of nearly 300 million US citizens.
Instead, the virus was designed to propagate outward from within the NSA system.
It was pure genius, really. NSA had spent billions of dollars tapping into every major telecommunications node in the United States.
Those nodes eventually connected to millions of individual computer-enabled devices, allowing NSA to copy and store the traffic humming to and from businesses, households, personal telephones, tablets, game consoles, and the like.
The system was designed to bring information from the world into NSA’s storage and analysis facility. But it was perfectly suited to work blazingly fast in the opposite direction, too.
Wilson had just released a virus that would hitch a ride, undetected, on every signal passing through every major communications node in the United States.
Within an hour, over one hundred million computers would be infected worldwide. By morning, that number would have quintupled.
Unbeknownst to their owners, each of those computers would begin running an undetectable background program. The program didn’t produce any noticeable changes to the computer’s normal operation, other than to slow down performance by a fraction of a second.
But the code stored inside the virus implemented the pseudo-quantum decryption technique invented by a small Washington, DC firm comprised of some of the world’s most brilliant computer scientists. Wilson had met one of them—Vaneesh was his name.
Wilson knew that this particular firm’s major contract was with the National Security Agency, and the irony was almost unbearably rich. NSA had paid the firm to develop the algorithm that was even now hacking into the deepest levels of encryption employed by the US Federal Reserve banking system.
Even better, the algorithm was being delivered to hundreds of millions of computers worldwide by a virus that had been released from within NSA. The virus was racing through the cybersphere at incomprehensible speeds, carried along by the state-of-the-art infrastructure that NSA had built to spy on the world.
This is beautiful, Wilson thought to himself, beaming.
He removed the thumb drive from his computer and slipped it back into his pants, settling in for what he hoped was his last shift at the National Security Agency.
Finally.
Rand Wilson felt better than he had felt in years.
88
Washington, DC. Monday, 7:19 p.m. ET.
Sam’s phone vibrated in her lap. It was another text message. It contained a Severna Park address, along with two words: “Come alone.”
A picture was attached to the message. It was of Brock. He was naked and hogtied. His face was contorted in pain, his thigh covered with blackened blood.
Blind rage overtook her. She was ninety minutes away from Severna Park, which was forty miles east of DC, and she was heading in precisely the wrong direction.
She desperately wanted to turn around, but the median between her and the northbound lanes of I-95 was covered in thick forest.
She matted the accelerator, and her Porsche leapt forward, soon passing triple-digit speed. Her tires kicked up dust and debris on the left shoulder, and it seemed like forever until she saw what she was looking for: an emergency turnaround.
She kept the accelerator on the floor until she could no longer stand it, then stood on the brakes, barely slowing to a safe cornering speed as the emergency turnoff appeared.
She felt the car’s stability control kick in as the back tires began to fishtail, but she soon had the accelerator on the floor again as she bounced over the uneven pavement leading to the northbound lanes of I-95.
She didn’t wait for an opening in traffic. She turned hard left onto the northbound shoulder, and was soon racing back into the city, darting in and out of traffic.
She waited for a reasonably long stretch of traffic-free road to forward the text message to Dan Gable, then pushed the green “call” button on her phone. Sam needed her deputy’s help now more than ever.
89
Near Washington, DC. Monday, 7:22 p.m. ET.
The Intermediary left his study, walked slowly through his mansion’s vast foyer, and climbed the ornate spiral staircase to the bedroom he shared with no one.
His knees and hips protested at each step. He was in his early sixties, but he looked like he was pushing eighty.
His wife had passed away years earlier. While painful, the event had little pragmatic impact on his life. His practical needs were met now, as they were when his wife was alive, by a sizable staff of attendants, groundskeepers, cooks, and personal secretaries.
He and his wife had lived largely separate lives, especially during their last two decades together. He personified all-consuming ambition, and she grew increasingly repulsed by the hardening she saw at the center of him.
Her revulsion didn’t grow strong enough to outweigh her taste for the finer things, however, which his income provided in spades. So she stayed. The mansion was certainly big enough for the two of them to live apart under the same roof.
It was a deal made with the devil-in-training, and it had slowly eaten away at her from within. She died embittered and by her own hand.
The details were kept exceptionally private. Not even the Facilitator knew of Minnie’s suicide. Erwin Graves feared it would cast doubt on his ability to discharge his duties as the Intermediary.
Not every Intermediary became Facilitator, but no Facilitator had ever been appointed without first proving himself in the Intermediary’s role.
Graves desperately wanted to be the next Facilitator. He had indeed proven himself most capable, crushing crises with cold, hard aplomb.
He thought that this current crisis would be no different, though the measures needed to excise this set of problems had been far more involved, and certainly more clamorous, than he had ever imagined they might be.
He was worried. Even now, despite his swift, logical, and decisive actions, loose ends refused to be tidied up.
Higgs.
The man was like a recurring nightmare, or a metastasized cancer. How he kept surviving was an absolute mystery.
And then there was the DHS girl, who was now connected to Higgs, and very much on the Facilitator’s mind.
He should have listened to me the first time around. We should have been rid of her then. Would have been easy. The Intermediary didn’t bother pointing this out to the most powerful man alive.
Erwin Graves knew that his years of all-consuming effort and uncanny effectiveness would mean very little unless he was able to neutralize the current situation. If he failed, the Directors would simply replace him. And he would live the remainder of his days looking over his shoulder, wondering whether they would decide his knowledge posed too big a risk to the Consultancy.
He knew what he was signing up for when he was appointed as Intermediary. He was, after all, an ec
onomic development banker. He had decades of experience working with clandestine operatives.
They had been necessary in almost every third-world deal he ever inked. Rulers were seldom eager to co-opt their citizens into paying down mountains of debt, incurred to build “infrastructure,” ostensibly aimed at raising standards of living for the populace but rarely relevant or useful after completion.
Clandestine operatives frequently assisted, helping to bring about a change of mind or a change of regime.
The political players in targeted countries were well aware of how the game worked. American firms swooped into the country, bringing the expertise to undertake expensive projects—dams, aqueducts, bridges, high-rises, and the like—and charged ruinous rates in the process.
World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and other agencies like them, provided the funding. American firms got paid for the work, and all of the expenses went on the debt ledgers of the developing nations.
It was debt they could never repay, and the rulers of the target countries knew it. Most resisted “development” overtures, at first. Invariably, someone like Graves would arrive, warning of the dire consequences of not playing along.
If threats weren’t persuasive, misfortunes inevitably began. The ruler’s family pets disappeared, and relatives or close friends suffered tragic accidents.
If a head of state still resisted development proposals, he or she simply fell victim to a tragic plane crash, instant coup, or assassination. In such situations, successors tended to be far more pliable, and soon signed their country up for billions in World Bank loans.
Of course, the developing country would soon default on the crushing debt. Finance charges frequently became the largest governmental expenditure, sometimes approaching a third of a country’s gross income.
When payments stopped, or fell short of the terms, Graves and his counterparts returned for Part Two of the development game.
The Essential Sam Jameson / Peter Kittredge Box Set: SEVEN bestsellers from international sensation Lars Emmerich Page 138