Gridlock

by Byron L. Dorgan

  She’d taken a cab, which had dropped her off at the Central Railway Station right on the waterfront. She’d not taken a train yet. She was still inside. But she was leaving him, and a blind rage threatened to blot everything else out of his mind.

  Karn was leaving him, but to where? And more importantly to or with whom?

  He threw on a denim jacket and slammed out of the apartment, taking the stairs two at a time to the ground floor and outside where he ran as fast as he could all the way to Westerstraat where he got lucky finding a cruising cab almost immediately and waved it down. The cabby was hesitant to stop for him because of his shabby dress and long, out-of-control hair, but Amsterdam law made it imperative that anyone who hailed a cab was to be picked up.

  “The Central Station,” Dekker said. He handed the cabby a one-hundred-euro note. “And hurry please.”

  The driver was impressed and he sped off, much faster than the speed limit.

  Despite his anger Dekker had to grin. Having money was definitely better than not having any. And five hundred thousand euros was a lot.

  One part of his mind had been thinking lately about getting out of Amsterdam, or certainly out of the slum building, to someplace decent. Maybe their own small apartment. Under assumed names, of course. Someplace just as anonymous as the Haven. And he had thought about discussing it with Karn—until now.

  Goddamnit, just thinking that the bitch was up to something made him think about killing her. Throttling her goddamn neck, until her face turned purple and her eyes bugged out.

  The nearly deserted station wasn’t far, and it only took a couple of minutes to get there. The cabby turned around.

  “Would you like some change, sir?” he asked.

  “No,” Dekker said. “And if you wait a few minutes to take me back there’ll be another hundred for you.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Dekker headed across to the main entrance as he opened the GPS program on his iPad. Karn was right here. He was almost on top of her.

  He turned left in time to see her and a man in a dark jacket looking at him. They were seated on a park bench. Karn said something to the man and he shook his head, but they both got up.

  Just before Dekker reached them, the man said something to Karn then turned on his heel and walked away.

  Dekker was of a mind to go after the guy, but Karn was right there.

  “What the fuck are you doing here?” she demanded, her voice strident.

  “Is that guy fucking you?” Dekker shouted.

  She noticed the iPad, its GPS program still running, and grabbed it out of his hand. “Spying? Are you a goddamned spy?”

  “I asked you a question. Is he fucking you?”

  Karn pushed him back. “If he was, so what?”

  Dekker was shaken to the core. All he could do was step back and whimper like a beaten little boy. No one had ever stayed with him. Never in his life. But Karn had been with him for years; always there with her smiles, and good sex, and little kindnesses like sometimes washing his clothes, or once buying him a Myna bird from the market. He’d had to kill the damned thing because of the messes it made and because of the constant noise, but her present had been sweet. And she was a lot smarter than any other woman he’d ever met.

  She stepped into him and touched his shoulder. “No, he’s not fucking me. But he’s come to help me—us.”

  “With what?”

  “You’re such a baby sometimes. With all this money I figured that somebody would come looking for us. Maybe wanting to figure out what we’re doing. People in the Haven aren’t exactly rich.”

  “Who is he?”

  “A cop from Helsinki I used to date.”

  Dekker’s gorge rose again.

  “He’s just a friend, Barend. Like an uncle, nothing more than that. Ever. I asked for help, he took the train down and when I tried to give him money he was insulted. He’s going to look out for us.”

  Dekker breathed through his partially open mouth like he always did when he was worked up. “What’s his name?”

  “No,” Karn said. “You start looking down his background he’ll quit. We need his help.”

  Her no was like a red flag waving in front of his face. “Help? How?”

  “Someone might be coming here.”

  “Why?”

  “To stop you from interfering with the American electrical grid.”

  “They don’t know who I am—” Dekker said, but then he stopped. The power in Nashville had come on briefly. Someone had tracked him down, or at least hacked into his program.

  “There was a problem with one of the power outages,” Karn said. “You fixed it, but it was there, and it makes—my friend nervous. He says that it could become a problem for us.”

  Dekker almost hit her in the mouth, but he held himself in check, just like he did when his old man used to whale on him. In those days he’d thought about the butcher knives in the kitchen drawer. And maybe getting up in the middle of the night and slitting the old bastard’s throat. Maybe doing his mum as well.

  “What is he going to do?”

  “Watch our backs.”

  Dekker looked beyond her to the station entrance, but the guy in the dark jacket was gone. He turned back to her and looked into her eyes. If she was lying he couldn’t tell. But there’d always been a secret part to her, just like a cat that was sometimes aloof but arched its back and purred when it wanted to.

  He put his arm around her bony shoulder and pulled her close. “Okay, let’s go home.”

  Karn handed back his iPad. “No more spying,” she said. “I mean it.” She grinned. “Maybe next time I’ll bite your balls off.”

  52

  OSBORNE DELIVERED GRAFTON’S body to his parents in Minneapolis. The governor had loaned him the use of the North Dakota Air National Guard’s C-21 Lear jet and crew from the 119th Fighter Wing in Fargo for as long as he needed it, and Ashley had bummed a ride, getting her more than halfway to her next assignment, and saving her a lot of driving.

  It was noon when they touched down and taxied over to a hangar on the Minnesota Air National Guard side of the airport.

  “What’s your plan?” Osborne asked her.

  “I’m going to rent a car and drive down to Sioux Falls. I have a few questions I want to ask Stu Wyman, the guy from the control center where all this started.”

  “Can’t you phone him?”

  “Nope. I want to see his face. You can tell lot about someone that way.”

  Grafton’s parents got out of a Cadillac Escalade, and were waiting for the airplane to stop. A hearse was parked next to them, its rear door open, and two men in dark suits waited with a gurney.

  “Do you want me to go with you?” Ashley asked.

  “No, but just be careful on the road, okay? This mess is long from over.”

  “I know, but that goes for you, too. Your Russian got away, he’s still out there.”

  “He thinks he killed me.”

  “When he, or whoever hired him, finds out differently they’ll try again.”

  The jet came to a complete stop, and as the engines spooled down, the attendant, Staff Sergeant Bruce, opened the door and lowered the boarding stairs. A pair of Minnesota Air National Guard flight line technicians came across from the hangar, chocked the wheels, and opened the Lear’s cargo bay hatch, as Osborne got out and went over to Tony Grafton whose wife, Susan, was holding his hand. He was an ER doctor at Abbott Northwestern Hospital and she was the chief ER nurse.

  “Chapped their asses that I wanted to go into law enforcement,” Grafton had told Osborne. “But they got over it. I think they were relieved that I took a job out in the boonies, where nothing much ever happens.”

  “I’m Nate Osborne and I’m very sorry to be here today like this.”

  Grafton shook his hand. “Thank you.”

  “David spoke often of you,” Susan Grafton said, but then she watched the men from the funeral home pull the silver metal coffin from the aircraf
t. “I couldn’t believe it until just this moment,” she whispered.

  Grafton was having a hard time as well, watching the men. “The services will be tomorrow afternoon. Will you stay for them?”

  “I’m sorry, no,” Osborne said. “I’m trying to find the man who did this.”

  Susan Grafton looked Osborne in the eye, a sudden grim set to her features. “You do that, Sheriff. You get the bastard, because I want to be there at his trial so I can look him in the eye.”

  As soon as the coffin was loaded into the hearse, the Graftons got back in their Caddy and left.

  Ashley, carrying a small overnight bag and her laptop, got off the plane. She was going to get a ride over to the car rental counters in the main terminal. “Too bad for them,” she said. “I know how devastated my father would be if someone delivered my body in a coffin to him.”

  “I wish you would go back to Bismarck and stay there,” Osborne said.

  “Can’t stop me from doing my job any more than I can stop you from doing yours. Are you going home now?”

  “Hibbing, I want to talk to Lundgren. In person.”

  “Then what?”

  “I don’t know,” Osborne said. But he did know.

  * * *

  LUNDGREN WAS waiting for Osborne at the Range Regional Airport when the Lear jet pulled up at the Minnesota Army National Guard’s 94th Air Cavalry operations center a few minutes before one.

  “Any idea how long you’ll be?” Captain Dan Gruder, the pilot, asked.

  “Shouldn’t be too long,” Osborne said at the open door. “Grab some lunch.”

  “We’ll refuel first.”

  Osborne walked across to where Lundgren was waiting. “Thanks for coming out,” he said and they shook hands.

  “You hungry?” Lundgren asked. He was wearing faded jeans, and a bulky turtleneck sweater. The wind was raw.

  “I could eat something, but I thought we could go back to the computer center.”

  “Nope,” Lundgren said. “I’m taking you to my place, the Bureau hasn’t figured out how to bug it or my car yet, and what I have to say is for your ears only, okay?”

  “Sure.”

  Lundgren gave him a hard look. “Afterwards it’ll be your call if you want to share it with anyone.”

  “Why me?”

  “I did some checking. You’re straight up, something most people—especially in D.C.—are not.”

  Lundgren’s car turned out to be a new or nearly new shiny black Mercedes S500, which he handled like a professional driver. “People up here are mad at anyone who owns a foreign car, especially German, for whatever reason. So I bought this beast just to piss ’em off.”

  “Does it work?”

  Lundgren glanced over at Osborne. “Not usually. I’m an odd duck who has bags of money, so I’m pretty much left alone. But I found your hacker, and I can guarantee you that I pissed him off. Big time.”

  Osborne had gotten a call last night from Lundgren asking for a meeting up here, though he refused to explain why. “I’m here.”

  They headed over to Hibbing, a few miles west of the airport. The day was overcast, some patches of dirty snow still on the ground, and the vast craters of open-pit iron ore mines scattered through what was left of the pine forests looked like a giant’s footprints.

  “I turned the lights on in Nashville a couple of times,” Lundgren said.

  “That was you?”

  “Yeah, and Dekker fell for it. The guy is a genius but he’s as dumb as a box of rocks. Always was at MIT.”

  “You found out where he lives?”

  “Yeah, but aren’t you going to ask me how I did Nashville?”

  “I suppose that you hacked into his program, but what about the rest of the blackouts?”

  Lundgren was a little disappointed. “He sent me a virus, and by the time I got it cleaned up, the lights on the East Coast came back on. Do you understand?”

  “I can turn on a computer, send an e-mail, and check a bunch of law enforcement databases, but that’s as far as it goes,” Osborne said.

  Lundgren managed to grin. “I suppose that’ll have to do. I find them because that’s what I’m good at. And you can shoot them because that’s what you’re good at.”

  “I’m not a Neanderthal, Mr. Lundgren.”

  Lundgren laughed out loud. “Nope, and the name is Toby. He and his girlfriend live on the tenth floor of an abandoned apartment building outside of Amsterdam, in what’s called the Haven with a bunch of other computer hackers, hippies, potheads, and a Roma camp that the Dutch police used to raid. But every time the cops cleaned out the place, their computer systems all crashed. They got the message a couple of years ago, and don’t go back unless something serious happens, like a murder or something.”

  “The FBI knows about them?”

  “Yeah, but the Dutch aren’t interested in helping, because none of their laws are being broken. They’d just as soon leave well enough alone.”

  “Okay, how’d you find him?” Osborne asked.

  “Thought you’d never ask,” Lundgren said. “It was his really cool virus, which left a lot of calling cards if you know where to look. I do. Essentially what he did was cram all of my files onto a sliver of memory on my hard disk, and tried to download them to his machine. Before he got that far I found the cache, put a tracker on it, scrambled everything, and then followed the trail.”

  This time Osborne had to laugh, but he didn’t think what Lundgren had told him was very funny. None of it was.

  They pulled into the driveway of a three-story pile of a house with turrets and high-peaked rooflines, with huge bay windows and stone columns supporting a massive front porch. Though the house, which at one time had probably been the mansion of some wealthy man, had probably been built around the turn of the century—the nineteenth century—it looked to be in nearly new condition.

  “Well?” Lundgren asked.

  “Hell of a house.”

  “One of the Mesabi iron ore barons built the place, and after I bought it I put a ton of money into it,” Lundgren said. “But I meant about Dekker.”

  Osborne shrugged. “You found him and I’m going to shoot him.”

  “Really?”

  “I’m going to try.”

  “Way cool,” Lundgren said.

  53

  AT THAT SAME moment it was two in the afternoon in Caracas and Colonel Delgado was at his desk preparing to report to President Chavez at a council of war meeting in the Miraflores Palace, when his secretary buzzed him.

  “You have an encrypted Skype call from Tehran. Do you wish to take it now, or should I inform the caller that you have already left?”

  “Who is it?”

  “Colonel Dabir.”

  Delgado glanced at the clock. “I’ll take it now, but phone Sr. Elizondo and tell him with my apologies that I may be a few minutes late.” Edgar Elizondo was the president’s chief of staff.

  “Yes, sir,” his secretary said.

  He accepted the call, and Dabir’s squarish frame appeared on the monitor. The VEVAK colonel was not smiling.

  “I apologize for this call, my old friend, I’m sure that you have your hands full at the moment, but something has come up that must be dealt with.”

  “Yes, we all have our hands full, and it will probably get even busier around here if our presidents persist. So be brief.”

  They spoke English.

  “We have a problem with Mr. Dekker, he’s becoming unstable,” Dabir said.

  “I thought you had an agent in place for just that possibility.”

  “Her name is Karn Simula, and up until now she’s been able to keep him on track, but he’s told her that he means to crash the entire American electrical grid.”

  Delgado’s stomach clenched. “Which he certainly can do because of the virus you supplied him with. Reckless. It’s brought us to the brink of war.”

  “We’re in no better a position, actually. But my analysts assure me that an attack by A
merican military forces is unlikely.”

  “They assured us of that before Balboa, nonetheless we are still repairing the extensive damage their bombs did to five of our airbases, two of which may not be reactivated for several years if ever,” Delgado said. “And if it’s found out that it was you who handed over the virus to Dekker, Tehran could become the next Baghdad.”

  “That’s not likely for a number of reasons, but we think the virus is Russian. The American CIA has known that fact for a number of years.”

  Delgado glanced at the grandfather clock in the corner of his fifth-floor office in El Helicoide, the building that served as SEBIN’s headquarters. It was ticking down the seconds as it always did, but counting down to what?

  “What do you propose we do about Dekker? Pay him more money?”

  “Our agent doesn’t think so. But we believe that his watcher may have become unreliable. Maybe she’s fallen in love with the boy.”

  Delgado tried to work out the ramifications of what Dabir was telling him. He would have to bring it up with Chavez, along with his recommendations. A computer hacker with the means to completely shut down the distribution of electrical power all across the U.S. was in many ways an even more powerful weapon than a nuclear bomb. But if the kid had gone insane, he’d be no better than a terrorist, who the U.S. would hunt down and kill, after which they would come after the kid’s paymasters.

  “If we kill him, we lose the advantage for retaliation.”

  “I think we must do just that,” Dabir said. “And in fact the order must come from your office. That way if it is discovered that Venezuela eliminated the threat, it will be seen by Washington as a conciliatory gesture from your president.”

  “Chavez is not in a particularly conciliatory mood in the best of times,” Delgado said. “But I think you’re right. Makarov is back in Stockholm. I’ll see if he’ll take the job.”