He did the same to Ruth as she stepped out of the car.
"You'll both be happy to know that neither of you have any transmitters on you." He put the device back on the shelf where it blended in with the rest of the junk. "Come with me."
He led them out of the garage and through a weed-filled backyard whose main feature was a stack of old tires piled next to the rear wall of the house. Their guide took them to the back door. The door had an iron security grate; the window behind the grate was covered by a sheet of plywood. Despite the security, their guide opened the door without a key.
From the outside, the place made Gideon feel uneasy. You found bodies inside this kind of place. Inside he expected to see mattresses and used needles scattered on the floor—a shooting gallery or a crack house.
The interior was different.
They stepped through into a kitchen and their guide hit a light switch, filling the room with bright white light from a brand-new fluorescent fixture. The place was clean, even though the plaster was cracked and a half-dozen tiles were missing from the walls. There wasn't a stove or a refrigerator, but a new microwave sat on one of the kitchen counters.
They stepped through the kitchen, and into the front of the house. The living room and dining room were both as clean and as empty as the kitchen. A card table and a few chairs sat in the dining room, and a lone futon sat in the living room. The futon faced a small television that sat on a small dorm fridge that was only slightly bigger than it was.
One of the folding chairs was occupied.
"Have a seat," said the man, waving at two of the other chairs. Their guide, who probably still had his Uzi, remained standing.
Gideon sat next to Ruth and studied this new person. He was probably in his eighties. His hair was snow white and somewhat wild. His eyes were hard and penetrating, but seemed to glimmer at some private joke.
"Gideon Malcolm," he nodded at Gideon, "Ruth Zimmerman."
"Who are you?" Gideon asked. "Why are we here?"
The man leaned back in his chair. "My name wouldn't be a prudent revelation. And I think you both know why you are here."
"What do you have to do with my sister's disappearance?" Ruth finally said.
Gideon could see her muscles tense, and sensed that she was on the verge of some sort of outburst.
She had been quiet most of the way here, all the tension building up. . .
Gideon put a hand on her shoulder and hoped that was enough to calm her.
"That," said the old man, "I can tell you. Neither I, nor the people I work with, have anything to do with your absent sister. If we had, your sister never would have disappeared."
"What do you mean by that?" Ruth said. "What's happened to her? Why are people shooting at me?"
Gideon squeezed Ruth's shoulder and asked his own question. "Why did you step between us and a bunch of gunmen? What do you get out of all this?"
The old man stood and started pacing around the table. "Dr. Zimmerman is a very dangerous person," he said. "Her flight has threatened a great many people. Including the people I work for, including your own government."
Ruth shook her head. "Julia wouldn't threaten anybody."
"What she knows is threatening, regardless of what her motives are. And the presence of those gunmen bring her motives into question."
"Who are they?" Gideon asked.
The old man ran his hands through his white mane of hair. "In the 1980s there were a number of states in the Middle East that sponsored—publicly and privately— various terrorist organizations. Back then there was a lot of financing by the Soviet Union and these groups had common training grounds in Lebanon, Libya, Angola. When the USSR split apart, the loose network of organizations remained, sharing intelligence, expertise, and occasionally personnel. What had begun as group of terrorist organizations soon became an independent multistate intelligence network with a Pan-Islamic agenda. It calls itself the International Unification Front. It stretches from Bosnia to Iran, from Kazakstahn to Angola. It represents a continual threat to your country and the European democracies."
"So these people are Arab terrorists?" Gideon asked.
The old man shook his head. "Both terms are probably inappropriate. While this organization contains Palestinians, Syrians, and Libyans, it also contains its share of Europeans, Africans, Russians. Its goal is the domination of the Middle East and Central Asia, and its ideology is inherently anti-Western. Its function is predominately espionage: economic, industrial, technological."
"They have Zimmerman, don't they?" Gideon said.
The old man turned and faced both of them. "Yes, God help us all. The people that have died, they've been assassinated by the IUF. All of them. I'm unsure if your own government realizes who is responsible."
Ruth shook her head and said, "Oh, God."
"Then why didn't they come after me until now?" Gideon asked. "Or Ruth?"
The old man got up and walked into the living room. He picked up a small camcorder, one with the flat LCD playback screen, and brought it back to the table. He pointed the screen at Gideon.
"Too dangerous to bring your car back here, but we taped the pickup to show you what you're dealing with."
Gideon watched as the shaky handheld shot approached his car. Suddenly, three other men appeared in the shot. One popped the driver's door with a slim-jim so fast that it was hard to tell he didn't have a key. One man entered the car while the two others went to opposite ends of the Nissan. One popped the hood and the other popped the trunk. They were going over the car with electronic devices akin to what they'd used on Gideon and Ruth in the garage. This time they found something.
The one inside the car took apart his crutches. They stripped off the padding on top of one and held it up for the camera. Gideon saw a small device, little bigger than a cold capsule, hidden in a slit in the padding.
"What's that?" Gideon asked, pretty sure what the answer was already.
"Listening device," said the old man. "If we watch the rest of the tape, we'll see them find a tracking device and another microphone in your car."
Gideon nodded as the tape ran. He watched them do as the old man said. However, after going through all he had at this point, he couldn't quite escape the impression that it all could have been staged for his benefit.
"What was the point of watching me?"
The old man shut off the tape. "Up until now you were a useful tool. Watching you, they had a good idea of exactly how close anyone was to Zimmerman."
"The same reason you were watching me?" Gideon looked pointedly at the gunman by the door, the one with the bruised neck. "Why you broke into my house—"
The old man steepled his fingers. "You've managed to scare elements into the open that would've otherwise remained hidden. You're close enough to Zimmerman now that the IUF is nervous."
Gideon shook his head. "That doesn't make sense. I've been playing catch-up since this whole thing started—"
"Why do you think your own government hasn't debriefed you?"
Gideon sat there and looked into the old man's steely eyes. He wasn't sure what he'd meant by that. "Why should they?"
"It's standard procedure when a civilian gets as close as you have to sensitive information. Instead, they've made a point of ignoring you and allowing you to be a loose cannon. They should have brought you in as soon as you hired Morris Kendal. But they're desperate enough to believe you'd be more useful stirring things up."
Gideon stood, his chair crashing to the ground behind him. "What the hell do you know about Kendal?"
It was now Ruth's turn to grab his arm and try and calm him down. The other guy, the Lincoln's driver, took a few steps toward the table until the old man held up a hand to stop him.
"Kendal became a threat to the IUF as soon as he began working with the government."
Gideon stood there, speechless.
"Why don't you pick up your chair?"
"What do you mean, 'working with the government?' "
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"When Morris Kendal started asking your questions to his contacts in the CIA, they brought him in. We only know this because, by that point, we were already watching Kendal's movements."
"But when he met me—"
"We believe he was there to encourage you to go after Zimmerman. To make sure the loose cannon went off in the direction they wanted."
"Why kill him, then?"
"Sit down," the old man said.
Gideon backed up and righted his chair. "Why did they kill him?"
"Sit."
Gideon finally sat.
"Morris Kendal carried out contract security assignments for various Arab and African delegations. It's almost certain that he had seen a number of the people who're working on Zimmerman. If he started working with the U.S. Government directly, the IUF believed it would only be a matter of time before Kendal led the government to them."
"He knew—" Gideon said. "He told me that this International Unification Front was involved."
"Kendal was in a position to know things much more damaging than simply the IUF's involvement."
"Like what?"
Ruth looked up at the old man and said, "Why are we here? What do you want? Who are you?"
"What I want is to prevent Zimmerman's knowledge from falling into the hands of the IUF. Seeing how things have progressed, my secondary goal is to discover what they have gotten from her, how they are using her." The old man looked at Gideon. "I also want to punish those responsible for the death of Mr. Kendal. He was, I think, a friend of mine. I tried to steer him away from dangerous waters. I probably failed him by not being imperative enough."
"What do you want from us?" Gideon asked.
"Your help," the old man said. "Between the both of you, you know something that the IUF believes is dangerous enough for them to come after you. We know that they were watching Ruth, and that there was one of their people in the restaurant—"
"Oh, shit," Ruth whispered.
"In a position to hear your conversation."
"Why should we trust you?" Ruth asked him. "Why should I help you hunt down my sister?"
"Because the other players in this game would gladly execute her to prevent her knowledge from being propagated." He turned to face Gideon. "It was your own government that used that Daedalus computer to lure Dr. Zimmerman out into the open. They would have shot her down the way they shot down you and your brother."
"What do you want from us?" Gideon asked. His mind was already racing over what he and Ruth had said.
"Your conversation in the restaurant. What was it about?"
Gideon glanced at the windows of the living room. Shadows blackened the shades. It was dusk outside, soon to be night.
"I can't believe—" Ruth started.
Gideon grabbed her low on the arm, below the old man's line of sight, and—he hoped—out of view of the other guy who was currently pacing around the room, behind the old guy. He squeezed.
Ruth stopped talking and looked at him.
"On a condition," Gideon said. "You tell me why everyone's after Zimmerman. What does she know that's so important?" He could feel Ruth tense up, but she didn't interrupt.
"There are two reasons. One's provincial to the NSA, the other is more of a universal threat. The first reason, the provincial one, is that Dr. Zimmerman was involved in all the security architecture installed on the NSA's computers over the past five years. She knows what they were protecting against, which is almost as important as how. The NSA's security procedures have filtered through to a series of agencies. As long as Dr. Zimmerman is out there, none of those systems can be considered secure. Both the NSA and the CIA are behaving right now as if all their operations are compromised to some extent."
"That's a provincial reason?"
The old man nodded. "Provincial and transitory. It will take a few months for them to reconstruct their security, no matter what happens with Zimmerman. That kind of intelligence information is devalued the moment the target knows you have it. There's more . . . Have you heard about information warfare?"
"I probably heard about it on Nightline once."
The old man chuckled. "The agency that Dr. Zimmerman works for was intended to be completely passive. It listened. It would gather in signals intelligence from everywhere it could, landline, radio, satellite, Internet— almost every type of electronic signal generated on this planet will pass through its computers. However, as strong cryptographic methods became prevalent, available to individuals and organizations, the agency was forced to become a more active gatherer of intelligence."
"What do you mean, 'more active' ?"
"One example—they have one program, the community's nicknamed it the 'shadow.' It's a virus that hides on a host system and does nothing but monitor keystrokes and hide the information in a buffer on the victim's hard drive. Whenever the victim makes contact with the Internet, the virus transfers the buffer's data back to a repository where the information can be gathered. A system can seem incredibly secure, and still be vulnerable to that kind of program. It's very hard to defend against."
"They can do that?" Ruth asked. Her voice seemed to carry the same sort of unease that Gideon felt. "Isn't that illegal?"
The old man chuckled. "Many of their current intelligence-gathering methods come from the repertoire of the last wave of hackers. They have a program that can crack eighty percent of all passwords—and it just relies upon the weaknesses of human nature, the tendency to make passwords actual words." He shook his head. "The line between information intelligence and information warfare disappears once you don't stop at simply listening to a target system. And there're other, more active, measures they use. . ."
"Like what?"
"I have little access to that kind of information," he steepled his fingers again. "But try a little thought experiment. Take the shadow virus—change it a little. Now every personal computer nowadays keeps track of the nation it lives in, so it can operate in the proper language, use the correct currency and measurement units . . . Let's just say that this virus will only copy itself to a computer that identifies itself as Iraqi, or Iranian, or Chinese. Now, whenever that computer logs on to the Internet, this virus checks a specific site for a date. If it finds a date there, it decides that it will wipe that computer's hard drive on or after that date."
Gideon leaned back and shook his head. "They're doing this?"
The old man nodded. "There may even be some chance that they've hidden some of this computational ordnance in the operating systems of these computers. It doesn't even require a mole in the software company. It just requires them to engineer it in and deliver it into the target area before the commercial package arrives. Eighty percent of the software in the third world is pirated. A conservative estimate is that a third of it has been tampered with. An early copy of a basic software package will propagate itself throughout the area with little or no help from outside."
"Then a war starts," Gideon said. "And every computer in the target area dies." The old man paused to allow that to sink in. "Now this is all speculation. I don't have exact information on Zimmerman's work. But what we do have suggests that her knowledge was being used to develop this kind of information warfare software—military and paramilitary computer viruses. She seems to have been involved in some sort of breakthrough. Something we don't want the IUF to have access to." He waved to the other man, the driver. He left the room. Gideon couldn't see where he went, but he got a sense that he went down into the basement. "It's now your turn. Tell me what you two discussed in the restaurant."
After Gideon had gone over the conversation, with Ruth's reluctant help, the old man left them and the anonymous driver returned and escorted them to a room upstairs. It was a small bedroom with only a pair of cots, a table, and a table lamp sitting on a stool. The one window was covered with plywood, and the door didn't lock—it only had an empty hole where the doorknob would go.
The driver said, "You can rest here while we decide what's goin
g to happen."
Once the door closed, Ruth started yelling. "What the hell do you think you're doing? You're playing games with Julie's life—our lives. You don't even know who these bastards are."
Gideon sat on the bed and massaged his leg. "My personal bet is Israeli, and they stepped in when we were getting shot at. That counts for something."
"Because they want something. These guys aren't the government. Have you thought about the fact it might be treason to help these people?"
"Whatever Julia was doing, the contents of our conversation weren't classified material. And last I checked, Israel was still our ally." Gideon looked up at Ruth. "Forgive me if my faith in my own government is slipping."
"Damn, damn, damn—" Ruth started pacing, pounding her right fist into her upper thigh. "Why the hell do they care what we were talking about? I don't know any government secrets. The only way I knew Julie was AWOL was because the Feds—and you—came to question me about it. . ."
Gideon shook his head. By most reasonable measures he had all the answers right now. Julia Zimmerman worked for the NSA, she went AWOL—abducted, recruited, or sold her services to—the International Unification Front. The U.S. intelligence community must have gone absolutely nuts trying to locate her. Whatever Zimmerman was doing, she needed a Daedalus, and the IUF hired some Central American thugs to liberate one while one of Zimmerman's old grad students hired a driver. The CIA—or whoever—captured the Daedalus thieves and set up an ambush for the delivery. And, unfortunately, Lionel decided to sell his information to Gideon.
It was a more complicated screwup, but still just a screwup. . .
Why did it still feel as if he hadn't come close to what was really going on?
"Damn it, are you even listening to me?"
Gideon looked up. "What?"
Ruth made a disgusted face and said, "Sheesh. I was asking you about what you plan to do to—" The lights flickered. "What?"
Gideon stood up, somewhat unsteadily. The lights flickered again, and stayed out this time. Suddenly the only light was a dim sodium glow filtering through gaps in the window's plywood.
"What are they doing?" There was a thin note of hysteria in Ruth's voice.
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