by David Lender
Pain washed over her, but she went on. “Ibrahim became involved with these Islamic fundamentalist fanatics who I’m sure you’ve heard of—the al-Mujari.”
She saw him nod stiffly, eyes glazed over.
“I was recruited by the CIA as an undercover agent to report back on Ibrahim’s and the al-Mujari’s activities. When they influenced Ibrahim to help them kill his father—Yassar—and install Ibrahim as their puppet ruler of Saudi Arabia, I helped the CIA kill Ibrahim.” No. Not enough. Her omission burned in her soul. “I—I killed him myself.”
Daniel leaned forward now. It was a few moments before he realized he was staring off at the wall—at nothing, his mind working. Jesus. He was aware his mouth had started moving well before any sound came from him, then heard a gulping noise from his throat. He swallowed hard and looked at Lydia. “Go on,” he said in a hollow voice.
“You haven’t heard the worst.”
Now he felt his breathing ragged. He motioned with his head for her to continue.
Sasha saw that the pupils of Daniel’s eyes had shrunk, watching her as if wondering how much more there was, Sasha herself afraid because she couldn’t read his reaction. Would he get through it? She went on. “I went back, pleaded, explained to Yassar. He was like my father—he’s still the only father I’ve ever known—and he took me back. I lived on in the Royal Palace, started doing what I’d been trained for—covert intelligence. The multiple identities, the passports, the money. You were right to question it all.”
Sasha spoke slowly, felt each word was like giving birth. “I did it for years, to thwart these terrorists, living on and off undercover. I even helped Yassar with you, Daniel.” She heard a roar like jet engines in her ears. “When Yassar learned the al-Mujari might be planning some form of computer-based terrorism on the oil and gas industry, he sent me here to spy on you. I couldn’t tell you because we didn’t know if we could trust you. I was sent to meet and get involved with you, pass on information and, most importantly, wait to see if any of the rumored al-Mujari terrorism surfaced.”
She pushed on, talking faster, wanting to get through it now, all the while watching his face. It was frozen, a death mask.
“It has: the terrorists plan to bring down the Saudi royal family, install a Shiite fundamentalist government, and cripple the world’s oil capacity. Their plot leads directly to you and your clients. They’ll hack into and sabotage the industry’s software programs that run all its operations. And it appears their main window into the industry is through your links to your clients. But there must be others, probably through other advisors to the industry. I’m even using an alias as a computer hacker, Alica, to learn of their activities. That’s why I hacked into your computer.” She continued searching his face, her heart wailing. “Will you trust me again? Will you help us? Daniel, I fell in love with you, too, and I don’t want to lose you.” Her voice was thin. “I’m sorry, darling, so sorry…”
She felt her nerves sandpapered raw, and yet she was clear. They could do this, the two of them. Get through it and live it. Just a little longer. She clutched Daniel’s hands in hers. Don’t let him fade, not now, not after all this. “Daniel, don’t doubt that I love you.” She threw herself beside him on the sofa.
“Stop it, stop talking,” he said.
She felt his arms around her, his chest heaving. She wanted to tell him that she’d never leave him, but kept silent. Now words didn’t matter, because she felt the command in his embrace and was infused with a soaring sense of completion. It was as if she’d arrived abruptly at a destination—as if “Oh, here so soon” had taken the wind out of her, blanked her thoughts, and left her unable to describe the impression. All at once something was singing inside; she knew it not from any sound, but from feeling it, a wonderful tickling vibration, like humming in her soul. What a way to know his love! A lyricism from within. She realized there would be no more searching.
Daniel was still experiencing the release of pushing through to the other side of his fears, having heard her words as so much flotsam from a past that didn’t exist anymore. She loved him back. Now it was all about their future. He leaned back and took in Lydia. She looked urgent, intense. Then seeing her discern his acceptance, her face grew joyous, and she was again the little dancer he’d met across the room at Gary and Jonathan’s. Daniel now experienced her anew, saw her smiling, the mixture of languor and energy. He was almost unbelieving, nearly unable to stand the intensity of simply embracing her here this way. Then in the next moment it all seemed so effortless. He sighed and felt perfection. No, not perfection, realizing that didn’t happen, wasn’t for him, but that she was for him, for as long as he could earn that of her.
Lydia was watching him, her expression peaceful. She spoke again. “When I realized I loved you, it was as if my spirit stirred with recognition, as if it was always there and I just needed to understand it. Not preordained I’d find you, but since our souls had once touched, you were there to help us both nurture our love with belief, teach ourselves what we already knew.”
Daniel didn’t respond, had no voice to speak even if he’d be able to formulate the thoughts. Then, slowly, words came, and with them a sense of gravity.
“If all this is true, there’s a lot more at stake than the Saudi royal family. If this sabotage means what I think it does, thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands could die. And it could cripple more than the oil and gas industry. Energy, transportation, industrial production—everything grinds to a halt. Economies will topple like dominoes. We can’t waste time. We need to move—now.”
CHAPTER 31
AUGUST, THIS YEAR. NEW YORK City. Sasha kissed Daniel on the forehead as he slept on the sofa, where he’d crashed from exhaustion within fifteen minutes after they’d finished talking.
He stirred. “What time is it?”
“Almost midnight.”
“Jesus, why didn’t you wake me?”
“Darling, you’re exhausted. You did a one-day out-and-back to Europe, then had the last twenty-five years of my life dumped on your head.”
He smiled. “I’m looking forward to the next twenty-five.”
“If it’s not longer than that I’m going to feel awfully cheated. I waited a long time to find you.”
He kissed her. “Agreed.” Then his eyes narrowed. “Hey, we should get going. We have a lot of work to do.”
“First thing tomorrow. Right now I’m putting you to bed.”
“Just me?”
She felt her own face change, her lips pull taut and her brow furrow. “I have something to do before tomorrow.”
After she put Daniel to bed, Sasha went to Daniel’s study and pulled out her notebook computer. She typed an email:
ANYTHING NEW? I AWAIT NEXT INSTRUCTIONS FROM BIN
ABDUR.
ALICA
She encrypted it and hit “send.” A few minutes later her computer beeped. She deencrypted and opened the email response.
NOTHING. QUIET. WILL LET YOU KNOW.
ALI
She felt her arm muscles tense. Stonewalled again.
August, This Year. Online. After responding to Alica’s email, Ali gazed at his computer screen. His eyes blinked in rhythm with the cursor that pulsed on the green background.
He decided it was time he hacked into Saudi Aramco’s system himself. The username and password Alicia gave him worked, but now he couldn’t be certain he could trust her. Always asking questions, probing for next steps. What if the username she gave him was a plant, and therefore traceable? Perhaps her questions and probing were only that she was greedy and wanted more involvement for more of the fees. But even if she were trustworthy, now that he had seen the scale of the Sheik’s ambitions and the commensurate size of the fees, he wasn’t sure he wanted to share them with Alicia if he could do it himself. Besides, he had a half-dozen other hackers, all of whom he’d known and trusted for years, he’d need to pay in order to get all the Sheik’s work done in time.
So
he’d start by hacking into Saudi Aramco and getting his own username and password on their system.
He started to hack his way in but ran into the company’s firewall. After an hour of trying, he guessed the firewall was the formidable Raptor Eagle and finally gave up.
He sat down to what he now knew would be a long siege. He checked the personal profiles he had created on three of the Saudi Aramco system managers. He didn’t have to go further than the first.
Let’s see, Mr. Bopal. You are thirty-one years old, you attended private high school in Bombay, were shipped off to MIT to undergraduate school and for a Master’s in computer sciences. You worked for IBM in Armonk, New York, as a systems programmer for two years, then moved directly to Saudi Aramco, after which you made your way up through the ranks to system manager. Oh, infidel, you like to visit the sex.fun.com website, you’re an avid follower of cricket, you enjoy Shakespeare plays, you’re a religious Hindu.
Bopal had visited the cricketnews.com website 52 times over the preceding month. That’s it. He got right to work. He logged onto one of the half-dozen websites he’d commandeered over the past two months for use as an anonymous remailer, a program that cloaked the identity and location of the sender of email messages anywhere on the Internet. From there he logged onto the cricketnews.com website, then logged off. He reviewed the files on his hard drive and found the cookie files the cricketnews.com website had created in his directory. The cookies stored details about users’ activities on the website, and allowed the website to customize responses to individual users based on their activities in prior website visits.
Ali opened the cookie file and appended a file of his own, a trojan horse. Then he logged back onto the cricketnews.com website; by doing so he deposited the trojan horse he had appended when the site grabbed the cookie from his hard drive. He logged off to wait.
The trojan horse program waited, too, in this case for the cricketnews.com website client with the username Bopal to show up. The program’s first line read:
If user = Bopal, then attach
At 7:56 p.m. local time in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, Marij Bopal sat at his computer at Saudi Aramco and logged into the cricketnews.com website to check on the day’s worldwide cricket scores. A few minutes later he logged off the cricketnews.com website, and Ali’s trojan horse stole into the Saudi Aramco system. As the system manager, Bopal enjoyed the highest level of authority available within the Saudi Aramco refinery’s system. It was 8:32 p.m. when Bopal logged off his account, or thought he did. It was Ali’s trojan horse that mimicked the log-off sequence and kept it open. A beep on Ali’s computer told him it was time.
Ali stepped into Bopal’s shoes, then scrolled around the account. He worked rapidly, not out of fear he would be caught, but with the thrill of having cracked a difficult system. As a superuser—with power to manipulate the computer system at the system-manager level, he scrolled around the system. Everything seemed to be routine. A few engineers were running diagnostic routines and some research calculations. The refinery programs slowly chugged through their monitoring and control functions. A few users dabbled with the Internet.
Four accounts hadn’t been used in over three months. Good. As a superuser all he needed to do was delete the passwords for those four accounts, then later log back on the system as each of those users, inputting a new password, which only he would know.
Ten minutes later Ali logged off as Bopal and then dialed back into Saudi Aramco through his anonymous remailer program and logged back on as user name “Portnoy,” one of the four accounts he had stolen. He entered the new password, “Stolen,” that he’d replaced Portnoy’s password with.
“Now the fun begins,” Ali said aloud. He looked on his directory for the logic bomb program he’d written and loaded it onto the Saudi Aramco refinery routines.
August, This Year. New York City. The next morning Sasha was up by 5:00 a.m. She was in the kitchen making tea when she decided she couldn’t wait any longer. Still hearing Daniel in the shower, she dialed Nafta at the clinic in Paris, feeling apprehension as they connected her to Nafta’s room.
“Hello?”
“It’s me,” Sasha said.
“Sister, how are you?” Sasha heard a lift in Nafta’s voice.
“How are you?”
There was a pause. “As feared.”
Sasha gripped the phone tighter. “What does it mean?”
“Caught it too late. Cervical cancer, and it’s metastasized into…” Her voice trailed off, then came back. “…everything.”
Sasha felt as though a meteor had fallen out of the sky on her. “I’m coming.”
“I have time, sister, don’t drop everything. I want to hear how things are going with your man.”
Sasha barely heard her, now thinking. How long does she have? Weeks? Months? “I’m coming.”
“Sister…”
A half hour later Daniel walked into the kitchen to see Lydia—Sasha—Christ, how was he supposed to get used to her name?—sitting at the table holding a photograph with tears welling in her eyes.
“What’s wrong?”
“Someone’s sick.”
“Who?”
“Her name is Nafta. She’s my oldest friend.” She showed him her photo.
“You could pass for sisters.”
“It’s as if we are—we love each other like sisters.”
“Is it serious?”
“Cancer. And she doesn’t have much time.”
Now Daniel saw her head sag. “I’m sorry,” he said, taking her hand.
She squeezed his hand. “I want to go see her, but with all this going on…how can I?”
“For God’s sake, lover, if she’s your oldest friend, why wouldn’t you go to her right away? Most of our work tracking down my clients is stuff only I can do anyhow. I can make do without you for a day or two.”
She looked into his eyes. “I’m not sure there’s time.”
Daniel’s stomach tightened.
“Sheik bin Abdur’s lead hacker has most likely started his terrorism. He’s gone silent on me, and it doesn’t feel right.”
Daniel felt a tremor in his chest.
In a taxi on the way to the office, Lydia sitting at his side, Daniel turned the prior day’s events over in his mind. It was surreal. The woman he loved was a spy, with a past you couldn’t make up if you were a pulp novelist. It was so crazy it was believable. But this elaborate computer terrorism plan, the scale of it, a strike at the heart of the engine that drove the world—oil—it just seemed so fiendish it was hard to accept. Maybe he needed to give it more time to sink in.
He clutched Lydia’s hand in his, felt her internal tension in the firmness of her grip. He sighed and tried to stop thinking about himself, consider how Lydia must be feeling. She was clearly shaken by the prospect of losing a friend, not being able to go to her and maybe never seeing her alive again. He’d comforted her as well as he could. But that was a pain she might not be prepared for. And then he felt a twist of the emotions he’d felt after Angie passed away, that unique, unfathomable agony. Then he conjured the unthinkable: Lydia herself could be taken from him as swiftly as her friend Nafta would from her, as Angie was from him.
That put the whole terrorism scheme in context, personalized it. Even as frightening as the big picture was—thousands dead, industries and economies melting down—the possibility of losing Lydia made it more horrible still. He felt a wallop of realization that if Lydia were gone, and given the space she occupied in his life, so overwhelming, so surprisingly large, that it was impossible for him to grasp that level of absence. He didn’t need time for the transforming force of that epiphany to sink in.
CHAPTER 32
AUGUST, THIS YEAR. NEW YORK City. Shortly after arriving at his office, Daniel sat behind his desk briefing his best team: Walter Purcell, Steven Pace and James Cassidy, who sat facing him. Lydia—she’d admonished him to keep calling her that in public, as if he needed to be reminded—sat off to the
side in one of his lounge chairs. Purcell kept looking out of the corner of his eye at her as if wondering what she was doing there. Maybe he’d understand later. They were almost finished reviewing their approach to ferreting out which of Daniel’s software vendor clients were potential targets for infiltration, and then in turn, which of their customers might be sabotaged.
“How deep a dive you want?” Purcell said.
Daniel said, “For starters I want the eighty-twenty rule. Find eighty percent of the customers in twenty percent of the time it will take to find them all.”
Purcell squinted and tightened his jaw.
“What’s wrong?”
“You need all three of us for that?”
“You mean do I need you, too? Yes, I’m interested in speed.” Daniel stared at him a moment, then looked at his other two colleagues. “Understand?”
They both nodded.
He looked back at Purcell. “Walter, you split up the software vendor clients with these guys any way you want, but I want you on IR Systems.”
Purcell nodded.
“Okay guys, thanks, get going. I need a status update in two hours.”
Daniel followed them to the door and closed it after they left. He turned to Lydia, who sat with her hands in her lap, dressed down in a simple blue skirt, silk blouse and blue pumps. Her face showed she was deep in thought. He now took in her hair, which hung over her shoulders and curved with the shape of her breasts. He smelled the scent of her shampoo, or was it a subtle perfume she wore for business? They hadn’t made love last night, even after the climax of that emotional roller coaster. She smiled at him. He felt a rise of desire.
Focus. Not now.
“That would’ve been a lot easier if we could’ve told them what’s really happening,” Daniel said.