Dark Zone (14 page)

“We know you’ve been through a helluva time, ma’am,” said the chief. “You’re in Navy hands now. We’ll take care of ya. Flying you direct back to the States. Not a care in the world. Leave the worrying to us.”

Lia forced herself to smile for him. Though in his thirties, he came off considerably older, ancient even—the wise old man of the sea, she thought. She climbed up the stairway to the aircraft’s rear compartment. The Orion—it was due back in the States for an equipment overhaul—boasted a large array of electronic sensors operated from consoles in the fuselage; the interior looked more like a high-tech computer lab than something that flew around the borders of hazardous airspace. The chief led her to a small lounge, insisted on giving her a blanket, and then went to “grab some grub.” She found his doting father routine a bit much to take—another sign, she realized, that she was coming out of the fog that had descended on her in Korea.

It
was
like a fog, wasn’t it? She saw it through a haze. There were bits missing—the end. How had she escaped?

She couldn’t remember all of the assault. Just being punched.

Maybe she hadn’t been assaulted.

I was assaulted.

Raped.

That was the word. Better to use it. Better to face it.

The doctor and nurses hadn’t, actually. They had a kit and they had pills, but they hadn’t actually said “rape,” had they? They hadn’t even said “assaulted,” or “attacked.” As if you could avoid the reality by not naming it precisely.

“Here now, ma’am,” said the chief, appearing with a tray. A covered bamboo basket sat in the center; it was the sort used as a steamer and held two trays. At the top was a fish dish; below were some small dumplings and fussily cut vegetables. The chief had also found chopsticks—and a bottle of Sapporo beer.

“Nice airline,” said Lia, trying to joke though her heart wasn’t in it.

“Like I said, ma’am. Navy’ll take care of you. Not a care in the world for you.”

“Thank you,” she said. And then she started to cry.

19

The British intelligence officer was polite—more than polite, under the circumstances—but Dean sensed the resentment beneath the surface. They were mucking around in his backyard and hadn’t had the decency to tip him off about it. That was the way he saw it.

Wolten drove them to a large house about twenty miles outside of London that MI5 used as a kind of guest cottage. He used the word
cottage,
but the building looked about the size of the White House. There was a fire going in the study off the entrance but no sign of whoever had started it.

“So, chaps. Who was Gordon Kensworth?” asked Wolten, going to a sideboard and pouring himself a drink.

“Don’t know,” said Karr. “How long have you guys been following him?”

“We haven’t. Drink, Charles?”

Dean passed. He leaned back in the leather club chair and felt his eyelids droop.

“Tommy?”

“Just a beer,” said Karr.

“Bitters OK?”

“If that’s what you’re calling beer these days.”

“We used to call it beer,” said Wolten. He reached down into the cupboard. “But all the nasty business with the Germans caused a change in vocabulary. Now, how long have you been after this Kensworth chap? He’s not a Russian, is he? Bosnian?”

Dean drifted off while Karr and Wolten danced. He started dreaming about Lia, wondered where she was, how she was. Then he looked up and saw Karr standing over him.

“What?” he said, struggling to open his eyes.

“Time for bed, dude.” Tommy Karr’s laugh made the old floorboards shake. “Come on. We need to get some sleep. They’ll be hooking us up to the electrodes in the morning.”

“I heard that,” said the British agent from the other room.

Two rooms had been prepared for them upstairs. Karr put his finger to his lips as they walked up the steps—then announced very loudly that the whole place was bugged and Dean shouldn’t think of saying anything. Dean wouldn’t have had the energy even if he’d had the inclination. He collapsed face-first on the bed, still fully dressed. Somehow he managed to kick his shoes off before falling into a deep slumber.

20

Johnny Bib got up from his desk, took three steps to the side—precisely three—and placed his pencil into the sharpener. Working on a problem without a sharp pencil was a waste of time. He had seen this proven over and over. He had a theory that the type of pencil was also critical—but working out the various permutations would require considerable research, and he didn’t care to spend the energy. It seemed better to just muddle through with a variety of pencils, such as those he had collected in the cup at the front of his desk, marching on through time like the point on a Euclidian line.

The metaphor wasn’t exactly right, was it? Points did not march. Someone—a mathematician—might imaginatively trod over the points, but they wouldn’t get up and walk by themselves. Not in Euclidean space, at least.

Johnny considered this as he went back to his desk. The metaphor wasn’t right; the numbers weren’t right; the conclusions were nonexistent. Kensworth did not exist in the time and place called London, and this person named Vefoures was a French pensioner who also didn’t seem to exist, at least not lately.

Which told him something. But what?

Johnny Bib had been working on this question since nine or ten in the morning, and it was now past five in the evening. If there was an answer—and surely there must be an answer—he couldn’t see it.

Perhaps some music would help. Johnny Bib sprang from his chair as the thought occurred to him and went back over to the credenza—three steps—and turned on the stereo. He selected the Thelonious Monk disk and went back to his seat, hoping to be inspired.

Inspiration did not knock. William Rubens did.

“What do you have for me, Johnny?” asked the Desk Three director, leaning in the open doorway. “Anything?”

“Numbers,” said Johnny Bib. “Vefoures’ bank account. Very nice digits: five-four-five euros.”

“Only five hundred and forty-five euros?”

“Lives on a pension.”

Rubens went over to the table in front of Bib’s desk, where the data the rest of the team had been sorting through had been carefully assembled. Johnny had sent most of them home for a break; the relief team had taken a break for pizza and would be back in a half hour or so.

“Nothing at all?” said Rubens.

“Little,” said Johnny Bib.

“You’ve checked the servers on the Web sites?” Rubens asked. He was standing over the pile of information on the disk arrays in the servers, so obviously he knew the answer as well as Johnny. Johnny therefore declined to answer.

“The list we were given—did they check out?”

“There are only two computers. One was compromised by the French several months ago. The other is off-line and has been for the last day. Nothing of note.”

Rubens pulled over one of the two laptops on the table and tapped into the team’s dedicated computer. The NSA had used a special program to infiltrate computers used as servers in a network. The program could read what was stored on the disk arrays that fed into the computer and in fact could reveal just about everything on any drives accessible from the local network. The trick was to do it without being noticed, which at times could be complicated.

“The computer that’s off-line—where is it physically?” asked Rubens.

“We’re not sure,” said Johnny Bib. “Clearly, it’s part of another network.”

“And you can’t trace it?”

“We are working on it. It doesn’t appear to have been used in a while. We think they swapped computers every three to six months. It fits other patterns.”

“This model here. What does it do?”

“Predicts ocean wave patterns,” said Johnny Bib. “It had been erased. Most likely it was put there by a geology student. They say it relates to earthquakes and tsunamis. I doubt that was used.”

“But it’s in the area of the computer that was hidden from the local user.”

Johnny Bib looked at his boss. Rubens could be so linear at times. Just because the program was there
now
didn’t mean that it had been there when the terrorists or whoever had hijacked part of the computer started using it. It had clearly been erased, probably before the computer was taken over. It was difficult to tell without having the physical disk. And even then, it might not be knowable.

Of course it would. If you could come up with the right formula.

The drives had been accessed remotely and used for several purposes. One was to store programs and information that had mostly been erased and overwritten; the simulation was among the few things that remained more or less intact. There was a collection of photographs and a fractal generating engine that were probably both part of an encryption program. The computers had also been used to redirect requests on the Internet, making it difficult to trace where a particular query or e-mail, say, had come from.

Johnny Bib’s team had been able to recover a list of Web sites that the two computers were used to access, looking for similarities. Statistically, the most common hits were of a weather site. Though this was perhaps to be expected, the analysts had nonetheless checked the weather site carefully in case it was being used to pass messages. One of Johnny’s team members believed the forecasting systems might be a sophisticated means for encrypting data; so far, they hadn’t been able to come up with a plausible model on how this could be true.

“Why was the page with the Paris weather updated ninety-seven times on the seventh and the twelfth?” Rubens asked. “Every other day is ninety-six times.”

Johnny Bib looked up from his desk. “The actual site?”

“Yes, the site. Not the computer that accessed it. The actual Web site.”

How he had missed that? And with a prime number as a clue, no less.

He all but grabbed the file out of Rubens’ hands. “We’re trying to figure that out now,” he told his boss. “Right now.”

It was some measure of Rubens’ dread of the process that he showed up at the attorney’s office a full half hour before the appointed time. The lawyer, a specialist in elder care law, had been recommended by Rubens’ personal attorney, whose own expertise did not extend to that area. Used to law offices that were nothing short of palatial, Rubens had been shocked the first time he came here. Located in a two-story building that had only recently been converted from a house, the lawyer’s office consisted of two rooms. The waiting room featured an L-shaped couch covered in corduroy so worn that the couch’s support springs showed through. Across from it sat a desk that Rubens supposed a receptionist was meant to use, except that he had yet to see or speak to one.

The door between the reception area and the lawyer’s office was as thin as it was flimsy. Even if she’d had a quieter voice, it would have been impossible not to overhear her talking with the people inside—clearly a violation of lawyerly ethics as well as common sense, thought Rubens as he sat down.

And yet his personal attorney called Ellen McGovern one of the best elder law practitioners in the state.

McGovern certainly had a steady stream of clients. The couch sagged with three middle-aged women, each wide enough to fill a cushion by herself. A young man in his early twenties hovered by the door. Rubens folded his arms protectively and tried to smile as he declined an offer from one of the women to share her bit of the couch.

Rubens tried very hard not to overhear the story unfolding inside, but he would have had to stuff his ears with wax not to. A woman in her sixties had been granted custody—it sounded more as if she had been stuck with it—of her two grandchildren when they were two and three. She’d raised them for ten years, then had a stroke that left her paralyzed. Who should take care of them now? A foster family appointed by the court? A nephew and niece who had volunteered? The grandmother?

As dire as the circumstances seemed, Rubens realized they weren’t all that far from the tangled arrangements that had governed his own childhood—albeit with the great difference money might make. He pretended not to have heard anything as the people left. Everyone seemed to be engaged in a similar conspiracy, the women on the couch casting their eyes on the carpet as each one was called in and exited in her turn.

“So, Mr. Rubens, how are we this evening?” asked McGovern when it was finally his turn. He checked his watch as he sat; amazingly enough, it was only five minutes past the appointed time.

McGovern pushed a small box of cough drops toward him as she pulled out the file. “Want one?”

“No thank you.”

“Diet?”

“Hardly.”

McGovern laughed, then reached for the cough drops.

“How is the General?” she asked, turning to him.

“As poor as he’s been,” admitted Rubens.

McGovern nodded. She swung around in the chair, facing him. “Do you mind if I speak, well, still as a lawyer, but maybe one who’s taking a broad look at things?”

“Don’t you always?”

She smiled and reached to her head, poking a strand of her long hair back behind her ear. Rubens decided that she had been pretty in her youth. There were glimmers of it left in her forty-something-year-old face. But it had to poke through considerable fatigue. The brown knit sweater and gray pants she wore did little to define her body, and she gave no evidence that she cared to have it defined. Her desktop was covered with photos beneath a layer of glass; Rubens surmised that the children there were hers, though there were no photos of a husband and she did not wear a wedding ring.

“Alzheimer’s is a very difficult disease,” she told him. “It’s very hard for a patient’s family to deal with, extremely frustrating. People want to make their peace with someone and they’re prevented from doing so. That’s not easy to bear.”

“Rebecca had her chance a long time ago.”

“I meant you.”

“Me?”

“When someone we’re close to—someone we love and respect—is sick, our judgment clouds. This case, the whole procedure really, when it goes to court it’s going to seem very ... antiseptic at best.”