Biowar (5 page)

“Oh, Jesus,” she said, falling against him and then away, her blouse somehow popping open in the process.

“Sorry,” said the Ph.D. candidate.

Flustered, Lia helped him up, apologized, slipped down herself, scooped up a folder that had fallen, apologized, laughed at herself, and continued quickly to the automatic door—which opened thanks to the man’s ID card, which Lia had palmed.

“Excuse me, excuse me,” said the man, trotting toward her.

Lia turned at the door. “Oh my God,” she said, staring at the folders in her hands.

She was still unbuttoned. Her bra, not nearly as sensible as her panties, provided a more than ample diversion as she dropped the folder on the ground. His badge tumbled with it; she apologized again, retreating down the lab hallway.

“Smooth,” said Rockman in her ear.

“Never underestimate the power of Intimate Moments,” she said.

“Or male lust,” said Telach.

“You even got me hot,” said Rockman.

“Before you melt down, tell me which of these doors I want,” she said.

“Any one on the left,” he told her. “Um, better get moving—the guys you kneed in the courtyard are at the supervisor’s desk.”

“I didn’t knee anyone,” said Lia, opening the door into a long, narrow room dominated by flat-panel computer displays mounted on benchlike desks parallel to the hallway. Lia walked to the back of the room, remembering the layout she had seen on her computer. She entered a second room, where a row of servers sat behind a locked panel. Ignoring the servers, she went to a PC at the far end, sat at the chair in front of it, and pulled off her right shoe. She removed a small keylike device with a USB plug from the cavity below the heel. The plug’s USB interface, common on all PC-style computers, allowed the hardwired program on the device easy and immediate access to any machine it was plugged into. The Desk Three ops called the device a dongle. They had named it after software protection devices that plugged into early computers. The name was easier to use than the official nomenclature, which referred to the device as the “Universal Access Interface, A54, WIN mod 2, 3.7.”

After placing the dongle into the proper slot, she hit the keys to reboot the computer; as soon as the PC checked the USB drive the worm program lodged in her dongle slipped inside the system.

“So?” she asked the Art Room.

“Give us a minute,” said Telach.

“I’d rather not be caught here,” said Lia.

“Odd time to start worrying about that,” said Telach.

“I do have a plane to catch.”

“These things take time.”

“Guards in the hallway,” warned Rockman.

Lia ducked down, waiting while the NSA-written code infiltrated the lab’s computer system. The system was physically isolated from the outside, unlike the other systems at the lab, which had been compromised by Desk Three earlier. The small device Lia had plugged into the port was now communicating with the Art Room via the com system contained in Lia’s clothes. The physical compromise of the system was not without risk—the agent might be caught, after all—but it would supply the Art Room with a complete copy of the data on the hard drives.

“Okay,” said Rockman. “Go—they’re going for your rest room upstairs. Go. We’re set here.”

Lia pulled the device from its socket and stomped on it, crushing it beyond recognition or use. Its memory had already been erased, and it was now just a useless piece of silicone and metal, which would be unnoticed in the garbage. She found an empty soda can and threw it inside, shocked that the scientists didn’t recycle. Then she made her way outside the hall, where she once again confronted the closed door.

“Can you take the door out for me?” she asked Rockman.

“The alarms will go off. They’ll lock down.”

“Didn’t you just tell me we were in a hurry?”

“You want the video cameras off, too?”

“Not yet,” she told him, since that would mean he wouldn’t be able to see what the guards were doing.

The lights in the facility blinked off. Lia grabbed at the door, pulling it open as the emergency beams came on. The lights came back, but a fire alarm was sounding. Lia trotted up the steps, intending to either find her way back to the roof through the mechanical section or go outside with the rest of the scientists, then slip away. But just as she reached the main floor hallway, one of the guards she had kneed earlier appeared near the doorway, helping herd people out of the building.

Ducking her five-four frame behind two researchers in long white lab coats, Lia pretended to sneeze as she passed by the door. The guard said something as Lia slipped past, but she didn’t hang around to see if he was referring to her. She made it outside, walking quickly from the bricked area to a gravel walkway that skirted around the comer of the building. She turned the comer and quickened her pace, aware that she could be seen on the surveillance cameras. She retrieved the cigarette pack, squeezing one of the cigarettes to make it look like a marijuana joint. With the garbage pails in sight just at the edge of the black spot in the surveillance net, she stopped, made a show of looking around, and then lit up. She stepped out of the camera area, tossed the pseudo-blunt, and ran toward the cans and her backpack. She’d leave the belt; its function wouldn’t be obvious, and as far as she was concerned it wasn’t worth the risk retrieving it.

As she was unzipping the ruck to retrieve her jacket, she heard the security Jeep approaching. She pulled out the cigarette pack and took out the last cigarette, lighting it just as the Jeep pulled up.

“Excuse me, ma’ am,” said one of the security people from the truck.

Lia turned around, holding the cigarette out as if she were embarrassed to be discovered. There were two guards in the truck, a man and a woman.

“You really have to be back in the gravel area,” said the man.

“I’m sorry.”

“Hold on a second,” said the woman as Lia started away. “Who are you and where’s your badge?”

“Corina Jacobs,” whispered Rockman in her ear. He had undoubtedly chosen the name from a roster of legitimate visitors, but Lia realized it was an unfortunate choice—she was Asian-American, and she undoubtedly didn’t look anything like a Corina or a Jacobs.

Then again, she didn’t look like a DeFrancesca, either.

“Jacobs.” Lia patted her blouse as if looking for her name tag. “Must’ve left my jacket inside.”

“Jacobs?” said the woman.

“I was adopted,” said Lia. That much of her story was true, though the particulars she spun from it now were fiction. “Chinese Jew, New York City, over-the-hill hippies, yada-yada-yada. Pretty interesting around the holidays. Let’s. not tell anyone I smoke, okay?” She stomped on the cigarette. “Please?”

The name was on the list the guards had; Lia saw the woman frown when she spotted it.

“That’s how I got into viruses,” said Lia. She walked toward the truck. “Because, see, my birth mother was HIV positive, which was why I was put up for adoption. I think she might have been a prostitute or something.”

The female guard rolled her eyes and prodded her companion—whose eyes had been pasted on Lia’s chest the whole time—to resume the patrol.

Lia took out her handheld computer as the Jeep drove off. She put her thumb on the sensor at the rear, waiting for the machine to recognize its owner and wake up. When it did, two taps on the menu in the left-hand corner brought up the map of the site with the black spots of the surveillance net and her own position marked out. She turned, still on camera, made as if she were going back to the courtyard, then twisted back into the clear area.

“They’re coming back,” hissed Rockman in her ear. “Probably make you repeat the whole story.”

In two steps, Lia had reached the wall. With the third, she had vaulted to the top, grabbing on the ledge and swinging upward. She nearly lost her balance but managed to slide her other arm far enough over the top to pull herself up and over as the Jeep returned. Lia fell to the ground, cursing, but sustaining no bodily injuries.

Her panty hose remained intact as well—her luck was starting to change.

“All right. Have the helicopter at the rendezvous in fifteen minutes,” she said, starting back toward the nature area.

“Better make it twelve,” said Telach. “You have less than a half hour to get to Kennedy Airport.”

7

Rubens made it down to the Art Room just in time to see Lia board the helicopter, a “sterile” civilian Sikorsky S80 leased by the NSA for domestic travel. The helicopter had a cam in the passenger compartment, which Rockman was feeding onto the large screen at the front of the situation room. The camera was mounted low enough to provide a tantalizing glimpse halfway up Lia’s skirt.

“Still keeping a prurient eye on our people, Mr. Rockman?” said Rubens as he walked toward the row of desks at the front of the room. The room had two levels; at the back were three rows of computer consoles and other communications gear used to tie into various systems during complicated operations. The front section of the room, arranged stadium-style, had three rows of desks with machines devoted directly to the agents in the field, although they, too, could be tied into the backup and support systems. It was possible to obtain real-time intelligence on nearly any spot on the globe here. Some came from in-place sensors; the Art Room could tap directly into the NSA’s exhaustive resources, looking or listening to raw radio transmissions, for example, or piping them through automated (and not always completely accurate) computer translators. It had real-time access to satellite data from the military reconnaissance office known as DEF-SMAC (for the Defense Special Missile and Astronautics Center) and the Air Force Space Command, as well as a system of Navy satellites used to track ships on the ocean. More important, Desk Three could launch its own “temporary” sensors from in-place satellites or drone aircraft stationed around the globe. These were controlled via a satellite system in a suite across the hall, eliminating the logistics problems the CIA had encountered in its earlier Predator program.

For Rubens, improving what the CIA did was absolutely critical; he considered the agency his primary rival, a bigger enemy on any given day than terrorists or a foreign government. Desk Three had been carved out of traditional CIA real estate, and the agency constantly looked for ways to reclaim it.

“Do we have Kegan’s files yet?” Rubens asked Telach.

“Working on it,” Telach answered. “May take a bit of time to see what, if anything, is significant.”

“Mmmm,” said Rubens. He was due for a meeting in Washington, D.C., in an hour.

“Tommy Karr is on his way to Kegan’s house,” Rubens told Telach. “He should arrive at Stewart Airport in Newburgh in a few hours. He’s already contacted the state police who are handling the case.”

“I still think the FBI should have gone with him,” said Telach. “This is more their field.”

Rubens frowned at her but said nothing.

“My bet is a lovers’ quarrel,” said Rockman from his desk at the left-hand comer of the front row.

“A twenty-two in the back of the head isn’t a spur-of-the-moment thing,” said Telach. “Besides, if they knew each other, we’d know who the victim is. Which we don’t.”

The Art Room supervisor continued, updating Rubens on what at the moment was a baffling and open-ended operation. Immigration records as well as missing persons reports were being checked, but Rubens didn’t think that the dead man would be identified anytime soon. At the moment, finding Kegan remained the best bet for finding out what was going on. The NSA, with some help from the FBI, and vice versa, was scouring financial records and checking on Kegan’s various associates and assistants. One man appeared to be missing—a D. T. Pound, who at twenty-two held not one but two Ph.D.’s. A multidisciplinary team of researchers headed by an eccentric mathematician—John “Johnny Bib” Bibleria—was hard at work scouring intercepts, reading papers, and thumbing through databases in an effort to track him down.

“Very good,” said Rubens finally, convinced that Telach was doing her customarily thorough job. “If you find any information, as opposed to theories, that will be useful for Tommy, let him know. I have a meeting in Washington.”

Roughly two hours later, Rubens stepped from his nondescript Malibu and headed toward the side entrance of a building on K Street in the shadow of Capitol Hill. Looking slightly dowdy in the row of fancier accommodations devoted to lobbyists, the building bore no outward sign of its importance, though a true insider would realize instantly that its very ordinariness was a dead giveaway. A pair of men in rumpled brown suits watched Rubens enter and, though they knew him by sight, nonetheless directed him to the large desk at the center of the lobby, where he was asked to look into a retina scan and speak his name. A light on the desk shielded from his view blinked green, and Rubens was allowed to proceed to the row of elevators at the side. Rubens pressed the middle button next to the middle door, holding his thumb there long enough for the scanning device inside to get a good read of his thumbprint. It matched it against the retina and voice information recorded and checked earlier and then delivered the car to his level.

The K building—it had no other name—had been taken over by the Office of Homeland Security some months before. It was used primarily for high-level meetings of the type Rubens was now late for, though there were also a number of offices upstairs belonging to different departments in the country’s newest bureaucracy.

Rubens did not particularly care for Homeland Security. While the lower rungs of the department were generally effective, he found the upper echelons amateurish and lacking in clout. In short, they were no threat to the NSA or Desk Three. He intended to do everything he could to keep it that way.

The elevator doors opened on the basement conference level. A security guard shanghaied from the Coast Guard stood at ramrod attention across from the door, not even acknowledging Rubens as he passed down the hall to a maze-like entrance to the main conference room. The baffle was but one of the myriad protections against bugging installed in the room; it was a low-tech precaution against laser or other direct beam communications. Copper shielded the entire level; there were a variety of passive detectors to find clandestine transmissions as well as active disruptors or jammers in place to defeat them. Even Rubens’ encrypted phone connection with the Desk Three network would not work here.