“Lily used an emergency device I had given her after her rescue from China,” he explained, filling in some backstory the others knew, but the Morgans didn’t. “She informed me of the assault on Zeta and the destruction of your HQ.”
“‘Informed,’” Lily scoffed. “Screeched like a crazy lady, more like.”
Renard observed her coolly. “You were remarkably composed,” he assured her. “Considering the situation.”
“Where were you?” Dan inquired of her.
“Driving away,” she said.
“I don’t suppose a voice told you to get out?” Alex said.
“No such luck,” she answered with a sympathetic smile.
“Plenty of such luck,” Dan interjected, nodding toward Renard. “With friends like him, who needs fairy godmothers?”
Lily chuckled, looking gratefully at the billionaire, then sheepishly at Dan. “Yes,” she concurred. “And, like you, by the time I got to my apartment, it had been firebombed.”
“Which I had advised her not to return to,” Renard said. “I instigated my own disaster protocol, sending Palecto to collect everyone it could.”
“He even flew it in person,” Lily interjected with a certain sense of appreciation. “Usually, he does it from wherever he is,” she told Alex. “By remote control.” She looked to Dan. “That’s how he got you out of New Mexico.”
“I begged him to let me give it a try,” Conley called from the far wall. “But he said, ‘maybe next time.’” He stared at the tech master. “I’m holding you to that, Foxy.”
Renard nodded, then shook his head, as if he couldn’t decide which tack to take. “It’s a glorified drone,” he contended modestly.
“So you collected Lily, Linc, Karen, and Peter?” Alex asked, getting them back to the matter at hand.
Renard chuckled. “Not Mr. Conley,” he revealed, looking over at where the man in question leaned against a med-cabinet.
“Cougar’s got his own disaster protocol,” Dan informed his daughter. “It’s hard to destroy a home that can’t be found.”
“Yeah,” Conley chimed in. “But as soon as the Zeta ear-comm started screeching, I started trashing stuff and headed west.”
“We found him at the house where we first met,” Renard explained, looking at the lanky pilot in admiration. “Inside the house, with his SubSonex personal jet in the driveway.”
“That was fun,” Conley remembered. “Getting there, and getting inside.” He grinned at his partner. “No lasers, needles, or air cannons for me, Cobra.”
Dan looked back at their benefactors, and noticed that Lily was affixing him with a serious, even somber stare.
“Kirby and big boss Bloch are still in the wind,” she told him.
“Diana Bloch may be still in the wind,” Dan Morgan replied. “But she is not the big boss. Remember?”
Dan’s words sank into everyone present like honey into hot tea, and as if by a cue whispered into their ear by a mother’s voice, they all started moving.
Chapter 20
As much as Alex wanted to hop out of bed and go with them, Dr. Whittaker made her see reason and remain resting—the best, but not the easiest, thing to do.
Dan left a little paternal and personal concern behind with her, but then focused forward, following Renard, Randall, Shepard, and O’Neal. Conley, not surprisingly, covered the rear in general—and Dan’s rear specifically—as the parade passed by the table, fireplace, and windows into a space that was as futuristic as the salon was rustic.
Dan stopped short, forcing Conley to bump into him before sidling by.
“Yeah,” he drawled into Dan’s ear as he passed. “Had the same reaction the first time I came into this room too.”
As the others spread out a bit, Dan endeavored to take it all in. Although no one had opened or shut a door, going from one room to the other was like stepping from noon to midnight. Somehow, even the light that was beaming into the salon stopped dead at the entry to this space.
From Dan’s perspective, it felt and looked like going from Renard’s heart to his brain. While the salon was designed to be as welcoming and comfortable as possible, with all the senses engaged, this control center was seemingly designed as a sensory deprivation tank, only with the water replaced by data.
It was illuminated by subtle recessed lighting as well as at least two dozen monitor screens of various sizes expertly placed around the ovoid room. It was shaped similarly to the Palecto’s interior, but while the Flying Fox’s resting place seemed like a womb, this seemed like a black hole. Even the monitor screens seemed muted.
As Dan took a step further into the space, he noted that no matter where he looked, his eyes were captured by a specific section of screens, allowing whatever was on those screens to share, support and monopolize a specific subject, be it news, sports, entertainment, communication, or surveillance.
It was confusing, constantly changing chaos to Dan’s eyes, but not, apparently, to anyone else’s. While Conley went to a small spot at the exact opposite of the entryway, the others moved to spots that seemed to be reserved for them. They settled into them, standing, leaning, or sitting with content comfort.
“Cobra,” Lily called softly to him.
Dan looked from the void to where she stood on one side of a large central screen. She motioned for him to approach, and as he did, Renard’s head seemed to appear on the other side of the screen. His black clothing had all but disappeared into the rest of the room.
“You were right,” Lily told Dan. “Diana may be our boss, but, to paraphrase ex-President Truman, the buck doesn’t stop there.”
Dan kept himself from twitching as a third head appeared between Randall and Renard—a floating head of a thin man with thick, swept-back hair, whose expression mingled serenity, strength, sardonicism, and a certain slyness. It was a head that seemed as real as either of the others in the eerie light.
It was a face Dan recognized. It was the head of the man he and all the others knew only as Mr. Smith. Originally, he was known to the Zeta operatives as the man who had recruited them to the organization. But as time—and trouble—went on, it became pretty apparent that he was more than just a secret agent scout. Much more.
Now they all accepted that he was the literal and figurative figure head of the Aegis Initiative—an organization that had turned out to finance Zeta and, as Dan suspected, had its fingers in all sorts of international pies.
Everything was a conglomerate these days, Dan thought annoyingly. A conglomerate that lived by the golden rule: he who has the gold makes the rules. It had also become obvious that when push came to shove, Mr. Smith called the shots at Zeta.
Dan had never been completely happy about that. If he was to be under anyone’s thumb, he wanted it to be just one thumb. It was bad enough that Paul Kirby was trying to wrest control, without two more leaders in line to muddy the waters.
At Zeta, Mr. Smith’s rule was law. But this wasn’t Zeta.
“You’ll never guess what his first name is,” Dan heard Conley comment from the far wall.
Dan’s eyes were as narrow as his smile was thin. “John,” he surmised.
Conley cocked his head to the side with a bemused smirk. “Right the first time.”
“And wrong,” Renard added, sharing a glance with Randall, who gave him a look that said “pray, continue,” as well as communicating her gratitude that she didn’t have to be the one who spilled Zeta secrets.
As Renard’s fingers tapped into the darkness below the floating face, Smith’s head turned in place.
“He’s had at least three names that we’re aware of,” Renard mused. “Maybe four.”
“Or more,” Linc interjected, more than happy to spill what were once secrets.
“We can only guess at his childhood and family,” Renard continued, “but the first time we were abl
e to spot him in history, despite remarkable efforts to avoid detection, was as Thaddeus Jeffries, a linguistics fellow at Middlebury College in Vermont.”
Smith’s head winked out, replaced by a grainy, blown up college yearbook photo showing a tall, thin, thick-haired person seemingly in mid-move, as if trying to get his face behind another student’s face in front of him.
“The next time we found evidence of him,” Renard continued, “was when he was a forensic accountant by the name of Warren Pendleton at the Advanced Intercept and Recovery Company in New Haven, Connecticut.”
The yearbook photo was replaced by a newspaper crime scene photo digitally focusing on a tall, thin, thick-haired man in a three-piece suit behind two cops talking to two plain clothed detectives. The man had his head down and was studiously looking into a wallet.
“Advanced Intercept and Recovery?” Dan echoed.
“Private investigation company,” Renard elaborated, nodding at the floating picture. “Pendleton, aka Smith, was looking through a corpse’s billfold for clues. Apparently his ability to, as they say, ‘follow the money,’ was unparalleled.”
“We assume this was about the time he decided to streamline and simplify his pseudonym,” O’Neal added from her position at a computer screen next to Linc. “Thaddeus and Warren could be a lot more easily found than Smith, who could weave in and out of engineering, mathematics, scientific research, history studies, statistics, engineering, and entrepreneurial positions like smoke.”
Dan made a doubtful noise. “I think I’d remember John Smith more than Jeffries and Pendleton.”
“Yeah,” Conley concurred, “but that’s you, Dan. I don’t think you’re what anyone would call normal.”
It was meant as a compliment, and Dan took it as such before turning back to Lily. “You think he did all that?”
“Looks like it,” she answered.
“And probably more,” O’Neal chipped in. “Near as we can tell, he only stayed at any one position until he got so good at it that he made himself indispensable. Then he was gone.” She stared at her screen. “Usually no more than eighteen months.”
Dan gave out a low whistle as Renard took the story back again, illustrating Smith’s bio with incriminating photos as he went along.
“As we got closer to the twenty-first century, the man now known as John Smith seemed to focus his intentions, moving more and more into corporate and government finance. He seemed intent on trying to remain as anonymous as possible until word of his expertise became too widespread. He stepped into the edge of the spotlight as a personal consultant.”
A business card appeared in mid-air in front of Dan’s face, as if an invisible hand were holding it up to him. On it were five simple letters, S-M-I-T-H, and a series of numbers he couldn’t identify.
“What is that?” he wondered aloud. “It’s not a phone number or address.”
“That’s the beautiful cunning of it,” Linc enthused from his screen. “Apparently each card that was bestowed had to be deciphered. Break the code and you could contact him …or he would contact you.”
“That one’s longitude and latitude,” Conley explained from his vantage point. “Show up at the spot, and you get access.”
Dan restudied the card. “But there’s no time designated.”
Conley grinned. “Turns out you could show up anytime …except one second too late. That was when the great and glorious Smith would decide you had taken too long or were trying to bend him to your own will. In either case, you weren’t smart enough to deserve an audience with the wizard of Oz.”
“The guy’s got style,” Dan muttered. “I’ll give him that.” He turned back toward Lily. “How did you get all this? I got nothing every time I tried checking him out.”
Lily looked, in turn, to Karen. Karen looked up at Dan. “Algorithms.”
Dan threw up his hands. “Of course.” The science nerd had tried explaining them to him during what had turned out to be Zeta’s last b.e. mission—Before Explosion. “Data tattling on other data, right?”
Karen smiled on the unique Dan-view of the extremely complex situation. She opened her mouth to go into even more detail on the advances she, Linc, and now Renard had developed since last time, but then her eyes sparkled and her mouth closed.
“So now we know,” Dan summarized. “Mr. Smith is not Mr. Smith, or maybe he is, but whether he is or isn’t, how does that get us any closer to whatever or whoever attacked Zeta HQ?”
Lily Randall stepped up. “Our immediate superiors are still in the wind, Cobra,” she reminded him. “We can’t find Diana Bloch. Believe me, we’ve tried. But I think we can find S-M-I-T-H.”
She looked back at Renard, who said, “Chilly. Got a sec?”
The burly, bespectacled, bearded hacker entered the room. Dan’s face showed some concern as he passed him.
“Won’t Hot Shot need you if the invisible assault is as bad as your boss said?”
Chilly moved coolly past Dan. “Nah,” he said casually. “Not for a bit.”
Linc snorted, but when no one else joined in, he elaborated. “Get it? Bit? Abbreviation for ‘binary digit.’ Get it?”
Karen rolled her eyes affectionately. “Nerd humor,” she told the others. “Ignore him.”
By that time Chilly had reached his boss’s side. He was apparently used to the way Renard’s dark clothes blended with the data room.
“Mr. Morgan makes a valid point, Chilly,” Renard said in the company’s way of communicating “at ease.”
Chilly cocked his head and shrugged. “We’ve gotten ahead of the attack curve and made some dead bugs, Trojan horses, byte backs, malware mirrors, web worms, cache twenty-twos, and an ABEND algorithm that should hold them for”—Chilly checked his watch—“a half-hour or so before we have to update and counter any attempts at superseding or infiltrating the code.” He met Dan’s eyes. “Besides, Hot Shot’ll signal if he needs back-up,”
Most of the rest of the agents reacted as if the hacker had been speaking Swahili, but Linc was laughing so hard he had tears in his eyes. “ABEND,” he chortled at O’Neal. “Get it? The old IBM error message? Abnormal end? Oh man, that’s good.”
“Yes, yes, Linc, I get it,” she whispered to him. “It was good. Now shut up and listen, okay?” O’Neal was happy he hadn’t gotten into a monologue deciphering all of Chilly’s hacker wordplay about bugs, bytes, malware, worms, caches, and even the term “back-up”—although even she had to admit they were all pretty darn clever.
“Good,” Renard told Chilly. “While you were doing that, we’ve been trying to track down this Mr. Smith. Got anything?”
Spoken like a true cue, Dan thought.
Chilly considered the question for a second, then spoke up. “Yeah, I think so.”
Linc, although he admired the Renard hackers and truly appreciated Chilly’s pun-laden update, had still always harbored envy. “Hey, if we’ve been breaking our bones trying to find Bloch and Smith, what makes you think you can do it?”
Chilly turned his impassive, calm blue eyes on the I.T. guy. “Because he sent us a card, man.”
“What?” Linc exclaimed, leaping to his feet. “What card?”
Chilly moved the fingers of his left hand in the air and they watched as a net of data fell over them. They all stood in it like hikers lost in a Himalayan sleet storm, but then Chilly started shaping it with his right hand’s fingers. One by one, pieces of data dropped, flew, flicked, or condensed away until a roughly rectangular pattern took shape.
Renard’s smile got wider and wider as his eyes got brighter. “Oh, the clever devil,” he breathed. He turned his smile onto Randall. “And here we thought we were so smart. But I don’t think we found anything that he didn’t want us to find.”
“Of course,” Randall realized, before looking at the others while the data continued to winnow and fluctu
ate. “He wouldn’t try reaching out to us with any of Zeta’s clearly compromised contact routes. If he wanted to drop us a clue, it would be through outside sources.”
As Dan watched with ignorant fascination, he couldn’t help but wonder. “But why him? Why not Diana? Why didn’t she try?”
“Maybe she did,” Lily answered without taking her eyes off the changing, shifting data. It was like watching Michelangelo chipping away at a block of stone until all that was left was his most famous sculpture. “Maybe we were too stupid to find it.”
“Or maybe,” Karen suggested, “the Zeta communication channels were too corrupted to allow any messages out.”
Dan noticed how she, as well as all the others—including himself—scrupulously avoided even mentioning the most obvious possible reason Diana Bloch didn’t get a message to them: that she was dead. But then he stopped thinking about anything except the card that was taking its final shape before their eyes. Even he, with his self-admitted Paleolithic approach to modern technology, knew that this process was staggeringly complex and involved billions of seemingly disparate pieces of information.
To his surprise and Linc’s delight, they all heard a small pinging sound when it was done.
Floating in front of their faces, somehow, was a card that was a virtual twin to the one that had been there just a few minutes before. Only this one had five different letters and seventeen different numbers.
“Is that even English?” Dan wondered, concentrating on the letters.
“Nope,” Linc said, who had come over from his screen to stare at the floating data as if they were dancing gems. “Definitely not.”
Dan looked at the others with impatience. He couldn’t help but feel time slipping out of his grasp. And the more time passed, the more powerful their enemies became …and the farther the people who had destroyed his home could run.
“What now?” he demanded. “Are we back at square one?”
“Definitely not,” repeated Renard, who had joined Linc and Chilly to stand in a triangle around the floating card. He, like them, seemed mesmerized by the genius it took to pull this off.
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