‘My dear boy, before I was detached to Tiger Team Seven, I worked for the National Security Agency. The biggest and baddest information-collection agency in the world. Finding out what you were doing was quite simple. The matter of finding one memo sent through the ether that should have been encrypted. There you go.’
‘And you’re telling me this ... why? A threat? Blackmail?’
Darren tried to put a shocked expression in his voice. ‘Not at all. My goal is to make sure you do your job better.’
Now the confusion was back on Brian’s face. Oh, this was so much fun. Darren said, ‘Surprised, aren’t you?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Then here’s another surprise. I bet I know what was said in your report. That Darren Coover is a valued member of the team, has problematic social skills, and has one flaw. And here’s that one flaw. He enjoys viewing on-line pornography of women with large breasts. Am I correct?’
Brian said, ‘I shouldn’t be saying so, but yeah, you’re correct. That’s what the report said.’
Darren grinned, got up from the couch, went to the coffee table and spun the laptop around. Brian looked at the upright screen and then raised his head. ‘Why are you showing me this? A big titty page. So what?’
‘Ah, but watch. Tell me what’s going on.’
Brian returned his gaze. ‘The pages - they’re moving on their own. They’re bringing up photos and...videos. Quicktime videos. That’s what I’m seeing.’
Darren turned the laptop around again, and returned to the couch. ‘Delightful program that I found on the net, and which I tweaked on my own time. It’s an avatar program. Do you know what an avatar is, Brian?’
‘Enlighten me, why don’t you.’
‘Very well. An avatar is a construct, an artificial person. If you go on-line and play a computer game against somebody else, you might want to call yourself Brian the Magnificent, Slayer of Dragons and Savior of Maidens. That would be your avatar.’
Darren pointed to his laptop. ‘That’s my avatar, Brian. For somebody monitoring my computer usage - like you did, no doubt with the assistance of my agency’s Technical Security Department - would quickly determine that I was a heterosexual male with an unhealthy fascination with large mammary glands. Correct?’
Brian nodded slowly. ‘Correct.’
He reached into his pants pocket, pulled out a black and gold matchbook, which he tossed over. Brian caught it and Darren said, ‘What’s it say?’
‘It says The Wilde One. What’s that?’
‘It’s a private club outside of Baltimore. A members-only club. The membership requirement is quite simple. One has to be a male homosexual. Guess you and the agency didn’t spend any time performing a surveillance on me, tailing me to see where I went and what I did.’
Brian’s response was better than Darren had anticipated. He just nodded again and tossed the matchbook back, and Darren was pleased that he was able to catch it. Having always been bad at student athletics, it was a very small but fun victory.
‘Okay. So you’re gay. I don’t care and probably most of the team doesn’t care either. What’s the deal with the surfing of the titty sites?’
‘To prove a point.’
‘Point being . . .?’
‘Information. What you can trust and what you can’t trust. Brian, you probably had a checklist of items to review for me. Am I correct? Schooling, contacts with friends and neighbors, bank accounts, credit-card debt, and everything else. Lot of work for one guy to perform, especially with a deadline handcuffed to you. So you did what you could. You looked again at old interviews. Maybe made a few phone calls. And relied on others who went before you to really look at my background. I was able to spoof the investigators quite easily. You see, they tend to look for secrets, for embarrassing little background items. A perfect person doesn’t exist. So if you give them something to write about - like a preference for women with huge breasts - they’re satisfied. They have found the flaw that they’ve been looking for, and they go on to other assignments. Especially during these troubled times, when so many-people are being investigated, from Cabinet secretaries to Saudi students to FBI job applicants. The investigators were able to check off their little boxes. But their jobs weren’t done. Not by a long shot.’
Brian now seemed amused. ‘You want I should go back and rewrite my report? Say that you’re gay?’
Darren shrugged. ‘In these alleged enlightened times, it doesn’t make much of a difference anymore. Back during the Cold War, there was the fear of having homosexuals in sensitive areas because their background meant that they could be blackmailed by the KGB or others. But nowadays...hell, there’s nothing there to blackmail about. But I do enjoy keeping the secret. It keeps me on my toes, and it tells me how we’re managing information.’
Brian said, ‘Secret’s safe with me, and thanks for the lesson.’
‘You’re quite welcome.’ Darren was enjoying this moment with the detective and didn’t want it to end. He folded his arms and said, ‘We all need to do a better job about the information we receive. Yet we don’t.’
‘I don’t get what you’re saying.’
Darren paused, and then said, ‘Oh, what the hell. You’ve got the proper clearance, or you wouldn’t be part of the team. It’s just that. . . well, you know what the big advantage is of having the Tiger Teams in place?’
‘Unless it’s going to screw with my pension, tell me.’
Darren unfolded his arms, leaned forward a bit on the couch. ‘It’s broken down the barriers. Information was kept in the different agencies, like big old vertical office buildings, everybody guarding their little turfs, their little pools of information. Very little in terms of cooperation and information-sharing. But the Tiger Teams broke that all apart. It’s like these huge office buildings suddenly had sky-walks installed between the different floors, letting information flow side to side, besides bottom to top, like it used to. Which means a lot of shared information. But a lot of shared questions, too.’
‘Like what?’
Darren said, ‘Just my paranoid nature, I guess. It’s just that...well, I’ve been poking around into other agencies. Like Homeland Security. FBI. Border Patrol. You would think that with Final Winter barreling down on us within a few weeks, that they would be on heightened alert, would call back their people, cancel all vacations and overseas trips. But if it’s happening, I’m not seeing it. And there’s another thing.’
‘Which is?’
‘The chatter,’ Darren said.
Brian shook his head. ‘I swear to God, I’m sick and tired of hearing the word. Chatter, chatter, chatter. Makes me think of those old dime-store chattering teeth you wound up and put on your kitchen table. Chatter.’
‘I’m sick of it too, Brian, but I’ve been reviewing the chatter. And you know what?’
‘What?’
‘It’s exactly the amount and level of chatter one would anticipate if a major attack like Final Winter was being undertaken. A lot of code phrases and sentences, being sent to and fro among a number of terrorist and support cells. And coming from different parts of the world. Pakistan. Great Britain. Bali. Among others. And then there’s the Predator surveillance of that car doing a test run in Damascus. Not to mention our dead Syrian friend in a Canadian hospital. It’s all pointing to that one thing: Final Winter, and coming soon to a metropolis near you.’
‘And what’s the problem?’ Brian asked.
Darren rubbed at his chin. ‘The problem is what I just said. Don’t you see?’
Brian, sharp operator that he was, picked right up on it. ‘I get it now. The amount and level of chatter you’re seeing is exactly what you’d expect. Nothing less, nothing more. It’s like...it’s like somebody is trying to warn us beforehand. Nothing dramatic. Quiet. So he or she isn’t putting themselves at risk for giving away secrets. Like somebody within the cells wants us to know what’s going to happen. A sympathetic ally, buried deep within the organization? Someone who
secretly enjoys Britney Spears or X-rated video or racks of beer?’
‘Perhaps. I mean, that’s a simplistic answer to a complex problem, but as one of our late lamented presidents said, sometimes simple answers are just the hard ones. I just don’t know. I’m just one analyst, Brian. I know that there are better and more experienced analysts out there who are probably looking at the same problem, right now.’
‘So if you had the power, what would you do?’
‘I’d recommend that the people who are performing this chatter, that some of them get picked up and squeezed. In fact, I’m surprised that it hasn’t happened yet. And I may do just that at our meeting this afternoon. Ask Adrianna to have some of these characters picked up.’
Brian said, ‘Typical response from those who make the rules. If I knew about some low-level street dealers setting up shop in my precinct, sometimes we’d string them along. See where they went and who they saw. Makes sense.’
‘Sure, but if the intelligence is correct, a major terrorist attack is set to take place within a month. I’d think you’d want those people in your control, debriefing them, before that date arrived.’
‘Well, that’s for the higher-ups to decide, I guess. All I know is that I’ve got lots of work to do and precious little time to do it.’
Darren said, ‘Adrianna’s the next one on your investigation list, am I right?’
Brian said, ‘Christ, is there anything you don’t know?’
‘Sure. Lots. What are you going to do?’
‘I don’t know, smart one, you tell me. What should I do?’ Darren thought for a moment and shrugged. ‘Hell, I’d wait until after this Final Winter thing is completed before digging into the Princess’s background. What’s the point?’
Brian seemed to agree. ‘My thoughts, too.’
~ * ~
Adrianna noted the time from a little clock icon up on the corner of her screen. Time to get out of this little hole and get dressed, but not before one more task was done. She toggled open a familiar file and looked again at the names. Amil Zahrain of Pakistan.
Ranon Degun of Bali.
Henry Muhammad Dolan of Great Britain.
They had performed their roles, and had performed them well. They had taken messages and rebroadcast them, and had added to the din of the chatter out there. They were good soldiers.
Just like poor Hamad Suseel of Palestine. Brought over to the United States for one purpose, to raid the offices of Tiger Team Five. Things had been too quiet the past several months. She needed something to shake up the increasing complacency, to make the higher-ups and her own Tiger Team members fearful of the hard-core men out there who wanted to kill for the sake of their God.
Of course she felt bad about the deaths in Connecticut. Two of the Tiger Team members she had counted as friends.
But it had had to be done.
Just like now, with what was going to happen to the men from Bali, Britain and Pakistan.
Adrianna wrote up a file protocol, with information and JPEG photos of the three, plus their home addresses and habits. All placed into a file which was compressed and encoded.
There. Done.
She disconnected the laptop’s power cord, picked the machine up, and left the cubbyhole underneath the stairs. Walking back out to the cellar, she left the door open and walked upstairs, carrying the laptop, her bathrobe still fastened around her waist.
Now she was in the small dining room where she had dined the other night with Brian, that good-looking, interesting young man from—-
Cut it out, she thought harshly. No time for that.
She placed the laptop on the table, moved the screen around so she could look at it properly.
Took a breath.
Pressed a key.
A quick dialogue box appeared.
FILE TRANSFER COMPLETED.
There. It was now in somebody else’s capable hands. Just a second or two earlier, a compressed chunk of data had been uplinked from her CIA laptop to a satellite 23,000 miles overhead in geosynchronous orbit. The transmission had lasted less than a second, if that. Any type of surveillance being conducted at her home - quite unlikely - would have registered, if the watchers were very, very lucky, a tiny burst of static. That would’ve been all. But the data package squirted up to the CIA satellite had been received and the information was being extracted and expanded, and with the proper code phrases and authorizations the data now stored in the memory banks of the overhead satellite would be rebroadcast to certain individuals back on the ground.
And the satellite’s own data-processing software would indicate only that it had received a burst of data from a certain point in Maryland, where dozens and dozens of offices that could have been the source of the information were located.
Quite simple, quite delicate - and quite deadly.
Especially for those three men.
Adrianna powered down the laptop and then looked outside. It was a sunny afternoon and there were children at play on the lawn outside her window. About half a dozen children, maybe six or seven years of age, playing with a couple of large rubber balls. They were laughing and yelling and bouncing into each other, and she smiled at their energy and youth. How wonderful. How purely joyful, to see them at play, and she looked at them...
And thought of something else.
Adrianna thought of these children, their parents. How much love their parents had for them. How much work their parents did to feed and clothe them and keep them safe. How they had chosen this comfortable suburban condo complex as their own little shelter, to keep their loved ones - My God, with such hope, dreams and love invested in those tiny little bodies - safe from the ravages of the outside world.
Safe. So safe.
And she thought of what it would be like, in just a few weeks, when the illness came, for she had no doubt this place would be one of the blighted ones.
At first it would start like any other respiratory illness. Fever, chills. Then labored breathing. Frantic phone calls to the doctor’s office. The doctor’s office crowded. The ER overwhelmed. Patients lining up outside for treatment. Television and radio reports, breathless and shrieking in their reporting of what was going on in New York and DC and Los Angeles and elsewhere ...
These poor children out there. Would they die in their perfect little bedrooms, choking to death, with their parents watching them? Or would they wander through their pretty condo units, wondering why mommy and daddy weren’t waking up, and why wouldn’t somebody feed them or take care of them . . .
What would happen to them?
She knew what would happen. She knew because she was going to do it.
Adrianna looked again at the laughing children.
Odd, when you got right down to it, it was easy to plot and plan for years and years to take your revenge. But when she looked right at those pretty faces, the faces of the children who would play on the sidewalk outside, or ring the doorbell at Halloween, she had to ask herself, could she do it? Could she kill them, just like that?
Adrianna snapped the laptop cover shut.
Of course she could.
In a war, there was always collateral damage.
Just like mama and papa.
~ * ~
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Vladimir Zhukov stood in the motel parking lot outside Bellingham, Washington State, sipping a cup of coffee, hating the taste but knowing he needed the caffeine to stay awake. He would have preferred to have a cup of tea, ah, now that would have been something. A nice freshly brewed pot of tea in a samovar, pulling the little toggle, letting it settle in a china cup. Drink it in the old way, a cube of sugar tucked inside your cheek, my God, how many cups of tea he had swallowed over the years, back at the Institute, back when…
He sipped at the coffee. Back when things made sense. Back when things worked. Back when he was privileged, was someone, was part of the elite, the nomenklatura, the ones who would work very, very hard to protect their Fatherland and their Party.
Which was what he did, all those long years of studying, everything from molecular cell structure to Marxist theory, climbing up that long, rugged path to be someone, to be respected, to devise weapons to protect everything he held dear . . .
And to be betrayed. By Gorbachev and the rest of the lackeys who had rolled over on their backs and spread their legs, like whores or whipped dogs, begging for mercy, begging for hard currency credits from the West so they could buy Sony or Chrysler or any other damn thing. And he ... he had left, had peddled his wares to various shit-holes around the world, knowing in those dark places in his soul at two a.m. that he was a veteran, like one of those Japanese bastards hanging out in an island jungle decades later, never knowing the war was over.
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