by Alex Archer
Behind the boy's narrow back, which was wrapped in a tatty dressing gown, Tex caught Annja's eye and winked. Evidently he did know where to find nerdage.
"Can you trace the IP address?" Tex asked.
"Not as such," Liviu said. His accent sounded as much Russian as Romanian to Annja, making her wonder where he'd learned to speak English.
"It is phony as two-dollar bill, you know?"
Annja cocked a brow at Tex. He waggled his eyebrows at her. "Forget it," he said. "He's on a roll."
"The path on your e-mail is also spoofed. Or rather, it is accurate, so far as it goes. It appears to originate from Universidad de Buenos Aires in Argentina. But it does not."
"No?" Annja asked.
Livia made a gesture of disgust. "Computer security in South America is legend for badness. Worse even than English corporate. Someone has broken in and made their system look as if it sent massage. But it is only relay."
Liviu turned to grin over his shoulder at Annja. "This tracing back is not so easy, you know. So is this important? Enough to pay important money?"
Tex laid a gentle hand on his shoulder. "We've been over this already, Liviu," he said in apparently friendly tones. "You're gettin' paid importantly enough. Don't you think?"
Annja saw the kid's shoulders tense. Apparently he read a threat she couldn't hear. Yet the adventure-show host's hand lay lightly on him.
"I need your help. Please. It's an emergency," she said in her, she hoped, passable Romanian. She spoke formally, not like an adult speaking to a child.
Liviu jumped as if stabbed. His two-tone hair flew out in all directions and then settled down in fresh random patterns around his head and face, making him look like a twenty-something Harry Potter who had gone horribly off the rails after graduating Hogwarts. His eyes were like the eyes of a tomcat that had just seen a twelve-foot-long monitor lizard waddle down its Berlin alley licking its scaly chops.
"You speak Romanian? You? America?"
"Yes. A little," she replied.
"Well," he said, "since I am a sucker for a pretty face, especially of so-famous Annja Creed, I will do it. Just for you, you understand?"
If I'm getting to be that famous it could start to be a problem, she thought.
Smiling, Tex started to pat the boy encouragingly on the shoulder.
Liviu batted him away, uttering a sharp statement.
Tex withdrew his paw. He looked hurt. "What'd he say?" he asked Annja.
"Don't touch me," she translated.
"Oh. Sorry."
"So," Liviu said, turning back to his keyboard with a flourish, "I penetrate UBA system, using the power of my mighty supercomputer, and – "
"Wait," Annja said. "Supercomputer?"
He nodded, making his hair flop back and forth like the crest of a chicken. "I have dozen Pentium I processors wired in massively parallel array. Makes supercomputer."
Annja raised a skeptical eyebrow at Tex, who shrugged.
"And so we see – "
"What?" Tex and Annja asked simultaneously.
"I fear there is no way to ascertain who has originated this e-mail. Even for Romanian boy genius with homemade supercomputer."
Tex's smile grew a little taut. "Son," he said, "if you're still thinking about jackin' us up for more money – " His tone stayed pleasant. But Annja noticed his accent got a lot more country.
But Liviu shook his head. "No, no. Would never dream. Truly I cannot find who. But I can find where."
He moved the mouse, clicked. A window appeared in the lower right-hand corner, showing a satellite shot from Google Earth.
"Northern Scotland?" Tex said.
Liviu typed rapidly. A circle appeared.
"Somewhere in here, your fake 419 e-mail comes from."
"The middle of the North Sea?" Annja said.
The boy shrugged. "So traffic analysis tells me. Is very clever software developed by your American NSA."
"You hacked into No Such Agency?" Tex exclaimed.
Liviu laughed. "Not even Liviu is so bold. I may be crazy but I am not insane. I do not wish to end like Karl of Chaos Computer Club, burned up in my Volkswagen in some woods."
"I thought the KGB did that," Tex said.
"So is said. But KGB, CIA, NSA – all same. You play in their games, one rule. You lose! No. National Security Agency generously shares its software with noble allies in the War on Terror. Not all are so very clever at trapping intruders. Is crippleware, no doubt. But it works enough, as you can see."
Annja felt her stomach start to sour. It's impossible! she thought. How will we ever find Jadzia now?
Tex started to clap the boy on the shoulder. His hand stopped an inch away, as if repelled by an invisible force field.
"Great job, Liviu," he said. "We'll take it from here."
Annja gave him a look of anguish. "Where?"
"Why, right where the man showed us, of course."
"But it's the middle of the North Sea!"
"Where we'll track it right on down." He showed her a big grin. "I told you. I know people."
"Who is Annja Creed?"
Jadzia had been roused from her cabin, which was small and spare and dank but not any less comfortable than anywhere else she'd been in this place. She was brought into an office with curling papers covering a metal desk and a desktop computer with noticeable monitor flicker. The bald bear of a man and his elegant compatriot were there with a couple of thugs.
She tossed her head and raised her chin defiantly. "How do you know our names?"
Before the big man could answer, Jadzia heard a commotion from the corridor outside. She wore the long shapeless sweater she had been given. Despite the perpetual chill of her unorthodox prison, her long pale legs were bare between the hem and her tennis shoes.
The man with white hair and lilac eyes set down the chipped ceramic bowl from which he had been eating steamed vegetables. His long double-breasted jacket was dark blue, with a stand-up collar that reminded Jadzia of Dr. Evil's suit in the Austin Powers movies.
"Your men, no doubt, Marshall," he said with distaste.
With a grunt and a grimace of irritation the larger man hefted himself to his feet from behind the desk littered with papers. He wore a redchecked flannel shirt and green work pants and reminded Jadzia, uncomfortably, of pictures of her father during his days as a Chicago plumber.
He went to the door of the little office.
"What?" he said, throwing open the faded green door. His name, Jadzia had learned, was Gus Marshall.
Three thugs in wool caps and bulky coats seemed to have charge of a bandy-legged little guy with a shaved head and dark beard, who wore a black T-shirt with a skull and crossbones and the legend, Kill 'Em All Let God Sort 'Em Out! over baggy forest-pattern camouflage pants.
"We caught Dobbs robbing stores from the pantry," said the biggest of the bunch, a Catalan with a slab face. "Again."
"You don't feed us enough!" the captive said in an unrepentant lower-class Manchester accent. "It's my bloody metabolism. I can't help it."
"Charles, Charles," Marshall said, shaking his head. For some reason the captive went pale and his face sagged, though the bigger man's tone was mild.
"We have rules," the elegant man said, his tone, as always, silky. His name was Sulin.
"It's not fair! You're supposed to bloody feed us decent! It's in the contract."
Marshall jerked his head sideways. The three hustled Dobbs into the office, which got very crowded. Jadzia backed up against a metal table with a derelict-looking coffee machine on it. Nobody was paying much attention to her. She entertained the thought of bolting for it but quickly kicked it to her mental curb. There was no place to go, even for a youthful genius who loved spy flicks.
"Your contract was quite explicit," Sulin said. "You get a fixed ration. We are totally dependent upon supplies brought by boat or helicopter, in case you have forgotten."
"When I signed I didn't know it was that small," Dobbs said
sullenly. He seemed oppressed by the presence of Marshall, by something more than his sheer bulk, and sidled as though subconsciously toward Sulin.
"There have been budget cutbacks," Sulin said. "The recession – "
"Recession! But the price of bloody – "
"Enough," Marshall rumbled. He didn't raise his voice. He didn't have to. Just rolling around in that enormous chest before emerging gave his voice the sound of a volcano clearing its throat. "Hold out your hand."
"What?" Dobbs looked blank. Befuddlement momentarily overwhelmed his visible terror of the big man.
Marshall held out a hand that looked as if it had been carved from stone. "Your hand," he said. "Let me read your palm."
Sulin turned away with a sneer. "Superstitious nonsense," he muttered. It took him down a notch or two in Jadzia's esteem. Still, he was very pretty. In an abstract way she understood he was her captor, and certainly she looked forward to seeing him die. But that didn't really impinge on her consideration. She was a healthy young woman. She had needs. She idled with notions of seducing him, whereupon he'd fall in love with her – she being the heroine of her own personal film – and naturally help her escape.
Dobbs put his hand out toward Marshall as eagerly as he would have thrust it into an open furnace. Marshall wrapped it in one of his. He looked like a father making sure his young son had washed up properly before dinner.
A bratwurst forefinger traced lines above the Englishman's palm. Marshall grunted.
"Lifeline's not too long, son," he said. "You should shape up. You aren't living right."
"So me mum always tells me," Dobbs said weakly.
"It also shows you're due for some misfortune in the very near future."
"Story of me life," Dobbs said. "Look, Mr. Marshall, I'm really sorry. I promise I'll never do it again. I'll pay the chopper boys to bring me in some nosh next trip."
"Yes, you will," Marshall said. The hand holding Dobbs's closed like a vise. With the other hand Marshall caught the little finger and broke it with a quick twist. It made a sound like a twig snapping.
Dobbs's scream made the crowded chamber ring like the inside of a giant bell.
"Take him to Pratkul and get that splinted," Marshall said. His voice sounded as if he were telling them what color paint to order to brighten up the place.
The three thugs jostled each other more than they did Dobbs as they dragged the sobbing man out of the office.
"Were you born in a barn?" Marshall called out. A hand came back in and pulled the door shut.
"Barbaric clown," Sulin said. "What do you think you're playing at?"
Lumbering back to his cracked black vinyl swivel chair behind the desk, Marshall shrugged. "Got to make an example every now and then. Fundamental management."
"Our principal pays for a Harvard MBA for you, and this is what you learn?"
"Pretty much. Granted, I got my own little ways of implementing the principles. But it's right in line with modern concepts."
Sulin shook his shock of hair. "How are we supposed to keep good help if you do that sort of thing?"
Marshall gave him a snaggle-toothed grin as he settled back into the chair. "I like ruling by fear," he said. "I guess you probably like to love 'em and turtle-dove 'em. Me, I find that if every once in a while I show them what happens to somebody who really annoys me, they find out their tolerance is pretty elastic."
He chuckled. "Anyway, the thought of trying to find another job that pays this well in this economy – that's real fear."
Sulin glared at him a moment longer. Then he sighed and turned his violet gaze to Jadzia. "Back to the subject of your friend, Ms. Creed," he said.
"How do you know our names, anyway?"
"Before she died, one of your pals at the dig talked to our people," Marshall said with evident relish. "They had to use a little persuasion on her. But don't worry. She didn't suffer long."
Jadzia glared blue laser death at him. "I hope to see you shot in the balls and falling to your death!" she snarled.
For a moment his gray boar-hog eyes got wide in amazement. Then he laughed. "That'd take a pretty unlikely set of circumstances, little girl. You'd better be ready to nurse a grudge through a bunch of reincarnations."
"Enough of this nonsense," Sulin said. "What do you know of Annja Creed?"
"I think she's some kind of special-force operator," Jadzia said. "Or maybe a cyborg."
One of the pair of Croats who had brought Jadzia to the room laughed. Sulin turned around and looked at the man. He said nothing. The man shut up.
"You might even be telling the truth," Sulin told Jadzia. "We have received some very curious reports from our agents who have had the misfortune to encounter her. It may be that yours is as good an explanation as anything else."
"What a load of baloney," Marshall said. "Those clowns are just making up stories because they don't want to admit they got whipped by a woman."
"Surely they realize the consequences of lying about a matter of such import," Sulin practically purred.
"And here your heart just bled all over me because I busted some limey slacker's pinkie finger," Marshall said.
Sulin shrugged. "We all must have standards, I suppose," he said. "And I suppose we agree that those standards must be enforced."
"Yeah. Otherwise, we got anarchy."
"And speaking of standards." Sulin turned to look at Jadzia. "You smell revolting. Have you not been permitted to use the showers? We have given explicit orders you are to be allowed privacy."
She scowled. He was being so stupid. It was very disenchanting. "Why should I bother with such trivial details?"
"Because other people got noses, sweetie," Marshall said.
"Go and clean yourself, or I shall scrub you myself," Sulin said.
She rallied to show him a big smile. "I might like that."
His violet eyes narrowed. "Then perhaps Marshall should scrub you instead."
Marshall guffawed. "That'd be fun," he said. "For me."
She spun on him. "You wouldn't – "
"Rape you? Naw. Not technically. But there are plenty of things I could do that wouldn't leave a mark. At least, not that anybody could see."
Jadzia got very quiet. This is real, she thought. They might actually hurt me. The thought made her spirit shrivel.
"And remember," Marshall said, "we're on the clock, here. It's just ticking away. And once it runs out, all bets are off."
"Unless Annja Creed really is your friend, and seeks to help you," Sulin said. He smiled.
How did I ever think he was pretty? Jadzia wondered.
"In which case," he said, "we shall destroy her."
Chapter 12
Annja and Tex were now Canadian citizens, complete with new passports and credit cards. Liviu had had some surprising equipment tucked into a closet of his crowded flat. She guessed that forgery had a lot more to do with the young Romanian's actual business model than systems invasion.
"Whose identities are we stealing?" Annja had asked after the boy snapped their pictures with a digital camera and went to work with a small scanner.
He laughed as if she had said something absurd. He reminded her of Jadzia – half poignantly, half annoyingly.
"Nobody's," he said. "Welcome to virtual reality, complete with virtual people."
"But I thought it is supposed to be impossible to fake IDs."
"That shows what mundanes know," Liviu said, stabbing at his keyboard with two blindingly fast if slightly grubby fingers. "They really believe that shit. Making everything digital makes it so much easier. Nobody has to break in anywhere and change old high-school yearbooks now."
He studied the mug shot he had taken of Annja on his screen. After a quick glance she looked quickly elsewhere. The photo made her look bad enough to be official.
"But if it is in database, it must be true, yes? So now you are Alice Chapman and Matthew Wachowski of Toronto. You are schoolteacher and ministry of health investigator, respectiv
ely. You have lived together for three years. At end of questions remember to say, 'eh,'eh? Matthew has appendectomy scar from emergency surgery when he was seventeen."
"Hmm." Tex made a little quizzical noise. "I actually did have an emergency appendectomy. Real pain. Kind of an interesting coincidence that you – "
Liviu had turned his chair around and dropped his head to regard him from beneath arched brows.
"You're kidding," Tex said weakly.
"When you come to Liviu, you come to the best!"
They had spent the night in neighboring rooms at the ultraposh Westin Grand Berlin, under the Canadian identities Liviu had provided. Annja still felt vaguely guilty about who was being charged for their tickets and accommodations. Liviu had only laughed when she rather tentatively asked the question. She intuited it was some official agency he didn't like. That was probably most of them. Everywhere.
Tex had wakened her bright and early, looking eager, as if he had slept for fourteen hours, run ten miles and had himself a shower, a massage and a pot of coffee. She decided she hated him.
She reminded herself he was sparing no effort, nor any of that rumored and now seemingly substantiated resourcefulness, to help a couple of strangers. And he seemed to be genuinely enjoying himself.
"You really were a cowboy?"
He shrugged. "Grew up on a ranch in Idaho. My parents both worked for the Forest Service. Ran cattle on the side. I was born in Massachusetts, though. They named me Mark. And I never set foot in Texas until I joined the Army and got sent to Fort Bliss."
The quickest route to their destination Tex had been able to work out on short notice entailed a plane trip from Templehof to Edinburgh and then a train ride to John o' Groat's on the extreme northern end of the island.
Annja chafed at every second it cost them. Jadzia was in deadly danger. She had received a second message from the kidnappers, likewise disguised as a 419 scam, this one supposedly from the daughter of dead Serbian strongman Slobodan Miloševíc, of all people. Its return path showed it "originated" from the California Department of Motor Vehicles. It gave an address for Annja to return an e-mail telling when and where she'd turn over the scrolls.