“I’m glad they’re safe. We really owe our DIS counterparts a big thank-you,” McClane said. Like they gave us a bouquet of roses or something, Sam thought. McClane was a nice guy and he meant well, but half the time he talked like a douchebag bureaucrat.
“Yeah. Anyway, Mace, I need that passenger manifest for all the outbound flights from Tucson yesterday afternoon. And for the diplomatic flight from Canada to Skopje.”
She heard computer keys clicking. “I saw that in my inbox, I think. Hold on.” A moment passed, during which Sam chewed her fingernails. “There it is,” McClane said. “Coming your way. I’ll copy it to Dan as well.”
Sam thanked him. A few moments later, Dan gave her the thumb’s up. “We got the manifests,” she told McClane. “We need something else, too,” Sam said. “Your Zip Line access code.”
McClane was silent for a moment on the other end of the line. “Can’t do it, Sam. You know that’s a security violation.”
“Do you know how to use it?” she asked, knowing the answer.
“Why don’t you talk me through it,” McClane said. Figures, Sam thought. McClane probably hadn’t done anything with any direct operational application in his entire tenure at Homeland. He was too wrapped up in meetings and memos to notice anything that happened outside the building.
Sam gave him the cell phone number they were searching for, and walked him through the application’s interface. “It says here that the system is experiencing a backlog due to extreme demand,” McClane said after a few minutes of back-and-forth.
Sam’s jaw clenched. “That’s why we need your access code, Mace. You’re one of twenty humans with the power to jump to the top of the list.”
“I am?”
“Mace, you’re completely worthless sometimes.”
“I don’t appreciate your insubordination,” McClane warned.
“And I don’t appreciate your operational incompetence,” Sam said, knowing instantly that she’d pushed too far. Some things couldn’t be un-said.
A long moment of silence passed, after which Sam apologized.
Mace quietly accepted her apology, but she knew that she’d crossed a line with him. Another burned bridge? She really had to watch her mouth when she was tired and pissed off.
“Tell me where to type the access code,” McClane said quietly. Sam told him. She heard computer keys clicking in the background.
“Rome,” McClane said after a moment.
Sam didn’t think she’d heard him right. “Rome? As in New York?”
“No. As in Italy,” McClane said. “That cell phone is in Italy right now.”
How’s that for a wrench in the works? There were suddenly jurisdictional problems that an army of pencil-pushers might not be able to solve. McClane would want to ask the Homeland chief for permission to pursue the Rome lead; Homeland’s boss would want to ask the DCI, who would want to involve the CIA, after which everything would get screwed up beyond recovery.
“Damn,” Sam finally said.
“Listen, Sam, get everyone home,” McClane said. “Your financial crime investigation was hugely important two days ago, but the demand signal from the senior leadership in the Executive Branch is now very heavily focused on the foreign terror threat.”
More bullshit bureaucrat non-speak, Sam thought. But she held her tongue as McClane continued. “There have been several incidents involving National Guardsmen and citizens, and shots were fired this morning. There’s fear of a widespread uprising.”
Sam shook her head, suddenly feeling extremely tired. “That’s not good.”
“Not at all,” McClane said. “DCI is afraid that foreign interests will use the unrest to their advantage, and launch an attack on US soil.”
“Did you explain to him that there’s already a serious attack underway?” Sam asked, an edge returning to her voice.
McClane sighed. “I relayed my serious concerns about the severity of the cyber currency theft. He was unmoved.”
“Did you tell him that the thieves already have enough money to buy themselves a new government?” Sam pressed.
“Sam, I did my best to convince him. You and I know the case you’re working is important. But give me some plausible deniability here, please, and come home.”
Sam considered. There was no way they’d receive permission to use a US government jet to chase a cell phone hit in freaking Italy. It would require State Department coordination that wasn’t likely to happen in her lifetime.
And there was that apartment in DC, the one with a telephone that someone had used to call the goon in Costa Rica just before the drama had unfolded. It was a lead that had to be run to ground, and it didn’t sound like Homeland had any spare resources for her Bitcoin theft case at the moment.
“Okay, Mace,” she finally said. “I appreciate your going to bat for us. We’ll see you in a few hours.”
She hung up the phone and walked forward to the cockpit. “Home, James,” she told the pilot. “Reagan International.”
The pilot nodded. It was one of the three destinations Sam had told him to plan for, so he was prepared to go right away. He and the copilot got busy as Sam and the other passengers strapped themselves in.
The airplane began to taxi, and Sam’s eyes grew heavy with the rhythmic motion of the plane’s wheels crossing the concrete slabs on the tarmac, bouncing gently up and down. She was asleep by the time the jet reached the end of the runway.
As the engines spooled up for takeoff, Dan reached across the aisle and nudged her awake. She looked at him with groggy annoyance.
“Sorry,” he said, “but they figured out who was on the Canadian diplomatic flight through Tucson to Skopje. Apparently there are still peace talks going on, something about the Muslim situation in the Balkans. Some senator from Arizona apparently hitched a ride with a minister from Canada. Good looking lady. Anyway, aside from the boy-girl angle, it looks legit.”
Sam nodded groggily.
“But you need to see this,” Dan said. He handed his laptop to her.
It took her a moment to figure out that she was looking at the airline passenger manifests McClane had sent via email just a few minutes earlier.
Dan placed his thick, stubby thumb at a particular spot on the screen, right beneath one of the names on one of the passenger lists.
Slobodan Radosz.
Destination: Rome.
25
Sabot sat on the bedroom writing desk and gathered his wits. In the bathroom mirror, he was reluctant witness to Bill Fredericks toweling himself off. Fredericks’ fat, hairy ass looked like used bubble gum rolled in dust bunnies. Sabot cringed.
Fredericks was talking. He hadn’t stopped talking since Sabot had walked in on his shower. “They’ve really been screwing with me, man,” Fredericks was saying. “I mean, how long have we been in here? It must be weeks. And they chained me up under a cold shower for days. I thought I was going to die of hypothermia.” Sabot unwittingly caught sight of another ass shot in the mirror. He felt violated.
“And those chicks,” Fredericks continued. “I mean, no offense, I know they were traveling with you and all—”
Sabot sat up. “Chicks? Women?”
“Yeah, women. You know any other kind of chicks?”
“Angie and Connie?”
“Yeah, man,” Fredericks said, toweling off his ridiculous hair, leaving the rest of his eyesore physique uncovered. “I like them just fine, don’t get me wrong, but all that screaming…”
“Screaming?” Sabot stood, fists clenching subconsciously.
“Bloody murder, man,” Fredericks said. “I thought someone was slaughtering pigs in there.”
“In where?” Sabot’s agitation grew.
“Right next door. Felt like right inside my ear, though, man. I mean, really, they have a pair of lungs on them.”
Sonuvabitch. If anything had happened to Angie and Connie… “Where are they now?”
“What do I look like, man? Clairvoyant? I been l
ocked up in this shithole for who knows how long.”
“Dammit, Fredericks, did you hear anything? Did anybody say anything when they took Angie and Connie away? Like, anything about what they were going to do with them?”
Fredericks winced a little. “Yeah, man, now that you mention it. That mean little cocksucker, Terencio What’s-his-nuts.”
“Zelaya,” Sabot spat.
Fredericks nodded. “That’s right. Zelaya. He was saying something about how they’ll fetch a nice price.”
“A price?”
Fredericks shook his head. “You’re a little dense, aren’t you, man? Price. The oldest profession. They were going to put the chicks to work. Sell them off.”
Sabot’s jaw was agape. “To a pimp?”
“Sorry, man.”
Dread overcame Sabot. “You’re fucking with me,” he said quietly, tears welling.
Fredericks shook his head and grimaced. “Wish I was,” he said.
Sabot’s heart pounded. He sat heavily on the edge of the bed, fists clinching, his feet blurred by the tears in his eyes. What the hell have I gotten us into? And how do I get us out of it? His mind raced. He imagined horrific scenarios, saw visions of Angie lying naked, drugged and chained to a bed in a brothel, sweaty men having their way with her.
And he imagined beating that smug bastard Zelaya to death with his bare hands.
He knew what to do. He would start with Zelaya. He rose from the bed, jaw set at a determined angle, wiping his eyes on his shirtsleeve.
A corpulent paw shoved him back down. Fredericks stood over him. “You need a plan,” Fredericks said. His face had changed. The usual, slightly stupid expression was replaced by something else. Something hard, efficient, and cold.
“Zelaya,” Sabot said through clinched teeth, voice shaky with emotion.
“That’s not a plan,” Fredericks said. “That’s a target.”
Sabot bristled. “What the hell do you know? Fat piece of shit.”
Fredericks laughed. “You’re right, esé. I don’t know anything about anything. Knock yourself out.” He returned to buttoning his shirt. “But before you get your skinny beaner ass capped, I want you to tell me how you got out of your room and into mine. I have no plans to rot in this godforsaken place.” The yokel affectation was now entirely gone. Fredericks sounded… professional.
Sabot stood, suddenly angry. “When you begged me for a spot on the plane,” he said, pointing at Fredericks’ chest, “you said you were running from something. What have you done?”
“None of your business, vato,” Fredericks said, all vestiges of joviality gone.
“Damn right it’s my business,” Sabot said. “What if we’re all in this goddamned place because of something you did?”
Fredericks snorted. “I don’t think so, tough guy. I mean, if that were the case, why have they asked me a thousand questions about you?”
“About me?” The piss and vinegar left Sabot’s voice and face. He looked at Fredericks. The fat man nodded pointedly.
Maybe this is all my fault after all, Sabot thought.
“Yep,” Fredericks said. “That prick Zelaya kept asking me for passwords. ‘Give me the passwords, or I’ll electrocute your nuts.’” Fredericks looked hard at Sabot. “I assume you know what he was talking about. I sure as hell don’t.”
Sabot’s stomach turned, and his face flushed. This whole mess is on me. There was no longer any doubt about it. “Is that all they asked?” His voice sounded weak, deflated.
“And account numbers,” Fredericks said. He glared at Sabot again. “You stole something, didn’t you?”
Sabot nodded.
“And you still have it, don’t you?”
Sabot’s hesitation was confirmation enough for Fredericks. “Thought so,” he said, jowls jiggling. “Thanks for nothing, you little asshole. Plenty of pain and suffering on account of your skinny beaner ass.” He bent down to tie his shoes, the strain of his considerable mass causing obvious distress for his knees. “Least you can do is get me out of here,” he said.
Sabot sighed, then nodded. He reached into his pocket, retrieved the key ring he’d taken from Zelaya, and jingled the keys.
Fredericks whistled. “How did you manage to get your hands on those?”
Sabot told him about his most recent meeting with Zelaya, and about the altercation that ensued.
“You left him alive?” Fredericks asked, incredulous.
Sabot nodded.
Fredericks shook his head. “We really need to get out of here. I want to be on a different continent when that bastard wakes up.”
26
Vaneesh sat in the semi-dark room in the basement of the main house on the Lost Man Lake Ranch compound. The rooms above him afforded staggering views of some of the most spectacular scenery on the planet, but Vaneesh hadn’t seen the Rocky Mountains, or daylight for that matter, for nearly two days.
Like many in his rather rarified peer group, the kind of talented computer programmers that made the modern world go ‘round, Vaneesh had been vigorously recruited by the National Security Agency. His thesis had raised eyebrows around the world. His graduate work had been in the field of pseudo-quantum decryption, a technology that used a normal computer to mimic a quantum computer’s uncanny ability to find factors of very large numbers. It was an arcane and esoteric discipline, at least until one considered that finding factors for very large numbers was the key to breaking cryptographic codes.
Passwords, for example. Like the kind protecting the US banking system. Rather, the kind that used to protect the banks, until last Tuesday, when Vaneesh’s handy little algorithm had made minced meat of their state-of-the-art security infrastructure.
He shook his head. He still couldn’t believe what he’d taken part in. Really, the whole thing couldn’t have worked without his contribution. His was the crushing blow.
He looked at the computer screens, the graphs he had created to help the old man understand what all the data meant, and he found himself deeply worried.
Had he cast his lot with the wrong crowd? After grad school, he had eschewed Big Brother’s advances, which were long on dogma and short on payola, and had opted instead for the more lucrative private sector.
He was chagrined to discover almost immediately, however, that the private sector wasn’t entirely private, and he had worked out that Pro-Tek, the sleepy little computer security firm with the staggeringly attractive compensation package, was little more than a front company for the NSA.
So the feds had gotten him after all. And he was working on some seriously dangerous shit, the kind of code that could, realistically and with no melodramatic hyperbole, subjugate millions of people. Maybe even billions.
He had somehow found himself working on the modern computer equivalent of the Manhattan Project. It had freaked him out. He wasn’t a hippie peace freak, but neither was he a fascist, and he didn’t trust the government — any government — to act responsibly when it held the passwords to everyone’s pocketbooks in its hands. It was simply too much power, and too much temptation.
And it was wrong. Illegal. Unconstitutional. A violation of any number of international treaties.
But there was another set of laws that prevented him from doing anything about it. He was legally bound, on pain of lengthy incarceration or even death, not to disclose any information the government considered classified. Even if the classified information revealed criminal activity. Especially if that criminal activity was officially sanctioned, ordered, in fact, by the very government he served.
Dilemma.
So, after a couple of years of soul-searching, and a concomitant ulcer, he had ultimately concluded that it was necessary to do what was right, even if it meant doing what was illegal.
That conclusion had set in motion the chain reaction that led to his presence in the basement, really a bunker carved into the side of a Colorado mountain, at Archive’s Lost Man Lake Ranch. His code had devastated the banking system, an
d was largely responsible for the chaos that seemed to be gaining momentum again.
He looked back at the computer screens, felt the familiar weary angst settle over him once again, took a deep breath, and picked up the phone. “Sorry to wake you,” he said to Archive. “But I think you need to see this.”
Archive arrived in the computer server room, housed underneath thousands of tons of Rocky Mountain granite. Large purple bags hung beneath his eyes. He hadn’t slept much since their plan had unfolded several days earlier. The aftermath was tearing him up.
“I’m afraid the news isn’t going to make you feel any better,” Vaneesh said. He pointed to a graph displayed on one of the large computer screens in front of him. “Crowd entropy,” he said.
Archive nodded. “Analogous to the level of civic unrest.”
“Right. You’ll notice the trend isn’t good.”
Archive studied the graph. It showed the chronology of the unrest, at least since Vaneesh had produced the algorithm that measured how many crowds were gathered in view of traffic cameras throughout the country, and how unruly those crowds were. The graph had started out fairly high, as looting and chaos threatened to take root, but had settled down rapidly as people began to cooperate and work together, just as they had done before the banks were disabled.
But the graph had risen sharply in the past twelve hours. In fact, it was at its highest level, and it appeared to still be on the rise.
People were pissed off. They were gathering in crowds, and those crowds looked mean, if Vaneesh’s estimates were correct.
“Martial law,” Archive said, shaking his head.
“I’d say so,” Vaneesh agreed. “There’s more.”
Archive steeled himself for more bad news. “The Bitcoin theft operation appears to be accelerating as well,” Vaneesh said, pointing to another graph on a different computer screen.
The Essential Sam Jameson / Peter Kittredge Box Set: SEVEN bestsellers from international sensation Lars Emmerich Page 177