Dark Zone (25 page)

Mussa decided he could concede on that point. Getting rid of LaFoote was important: it was the last loose end that needed tying up. If Donohue didn’t do it, someone less dependable would have to.

“Well, of course. That is to be expected. And expenses will be covered,” added Mussa, suddenly feeling generous. “Reasonable ones, of course.”

“That’s already figured into the fee. But the sentiment is appreciated.”

The line clicked off. Pleased with himself, Mussa dropped the phone out of the car, then backed up to make sure he crushed it with his tire as he got back on the highway.

45

Lia adjusted the elastic band at the back of the night-vision glasses, twisting it so that it held tight against her hair. Most of the other ops loved the device, which looked like wraparound sunglasses and was only slightly heavier, but she could never get it to sit right on the bridge of her nose.

A light came on in the office where Dean was. Lia slipped the setting on the small, boxlike A2 rifle she held in her hand to burst fire; she could get three bullets almost instantaneously into the target, which was marked out with a cursor in her glasses. They’d picked up the gear at a small shop in town; Desk Three had literally hundreds of weapons and equipment caches stashed around the world.

“There’s one man inside the room with him,” she told the Art Room.

“We know,” said Sandy Chafetz in the Art Room. “We can hear him. He’s saying something to the other man—the person in the office is the manager and the other is a guard. He needs to retrieve something.”

“Where is Charlie?” asked Lia. The Art Room would be watching his location via an implanted radiation device accurate to within a few inches.

“Behind the desk,” said Chafetz. “The big desk on the right.”

Probably the manager’s desk, Lia thought. If he came back to get something, that’s where he was going.

“Diversion coming, Charlie,” she said, grabbing the small grenade she had clipped to the collar of her shirt. She pulled the pin and threw the grenade over the roof of the nearby charity building. The grenade was a miniature “flash-bang”—a special grenade that exploded with a very loud boom and a flash of light, often used as a diversionary tactic during hostage rescue operations. The grenade exploded in midair with a loud
whap.

“All right, Charlie, your move,” Lia whispered.

When Lia’s grenade exploded, one of the men in the office began to shout and ran out into the hallway.

The other leaned forward over the desk from the front, pulling open the top right-hand drawer.

Dean, no more than two feet away, tensed his leg muscles, preparing to spring.

“He’s right over you, Charlie,” Lia whispered. “Shoot him.”

The desk creaked under the man’s weight. The second grenade seemed louder, and the man jerked back but then reached again for whatever it was he wanted. A second grenade exploded outside and the man in the hall yelled, apparently for him to come.

“He wants him to hurry,” said the translator. “He’s the guard and he’s worried about being away from his post.”

The man on the desk took something from the drawer and ran out.

“Lia—can you see what he got?” Dean whispered. His voice felt hoarse.

“You’re OK?” she asked.

“I didn’t see what he took.”

Lia saw a shadow moving through the building. She froze, paralyzed—she had wanted to follow, she had to follow, but she couldn’t.

What held her back? Fear?

Fear.

No,
she told herself. She had to stow the A2 or it would attract attention. She went into the shadows at the side of the roof and grabbed her backpack rather than the A2’s case—there was no time to stow it away properly, and she certainly didn’t want to be without it. Her hands trembled as she climbed over the side to the drainpipe and shimmied down ten feet before dropping to the ground. She ran across the alley and made it to the side of the building just as a guard crossed on the street. The manager was behind him, carrying whatever it was he took from the office.

“Lia—give us the feed from your glasses. We’ll enhance it,” said Chafetz. The feed had to be enabled by the operative because the signal it transmitted to an overhead satellite network was easily detected.

Lia clicked the button at the back of the glasses. She increased the magnification as well, watching the man as he walked to a small Fiat across the street, the guard looking around warily as he got in.

“Charlie, he’s getting in a car,” said Lia.

“Yeah, I’m coming. Wait.”

“You see what he’s carrying?” Lia asked her runner.

“We have an image. It’s a phone coupler device—it’s an old-fashioned modem, used to put on telephone handsets. You see a laptop?”

“I didn’t, no.”

“I’m going to follow him,” said Dean. She heard him grunting, wrestling with something.

“How are you going to follow him?” she asked.

“On the bike. Describe the car.”

“Blue Fiat. Can’t see the plates. Just starting, driving west. Don’t come out on this block—the guard is watching.”

“Right. OK, good.”

Lia’s heart felt as if it were trying to stomp through her chest. She took a breath, then headed back toward the roof to retrieve the case she’d left behind.

The bicycle Dean had appropriated was an old single-geared type and, while sturdy, would not be confused with a racer. Dean huffed as he turned back toward the road where the car had headed. He had only a vague idea of the roads in the area, and the runner’s directions weren’t particularly helpful.

“Just tell me where there are pay phones around,” Dean said, pedaling furiously. He hit a rut and nearly did a header.

“Why do you think he’s going to a pay phone?” asked the runner.

“Well, for one thing, you’d never look for a data call from one, right? And I’m going to bet you’ve checked over phone lines in this city a million times for some connection with these guys and come up empty.”

For another—he was taking a wild guess and couldn’t think of anything else.

“Take a right,” said Chafetz. “Then a quick left—there’s a new set of stores near there.”

Dean took the turns, slowing as he started to run out of breath. He saw a man walking on the street ahead with a briefcase and a small box shaped like a dumbbell—the phone device he’d seen in the office.

“I see him; he’s on this block,” said Dean, pedaling past. “He’s going to one of the phones.”

“Charlie, this is great,” said Telach, breaking in. “But we need more time to map the pay phones out so we can intercept the call.”

“He hasn’t dialed yet,” said Dean, watching as the man pulled a laptop out and booted it up. It took almost a minute for the laptop to run through its start-up routine; as it did, the man got the phone device ready. “Looks like he’s almost ready to call,” said Dean finally.

“We still need another minute,” said Telach.

Dean swung the bike around without looking—and nearly got flattened by a bus he hadn’t even heard. He rode back in the direction of the man, who was just putting down his briefcase.

“Hey!” Dean said.

“No, speak French,” said Chafetz. “Tell him you’re lost.”

A translator jumped on the line and gave Dean a few phrases, telling him how to say that he was lost and he was looking for the medina.

The man responded by pulling out a pistol.

“Sixty seconds more,” said Telach.

“English? Do you speak English then?” said Dean.

The man lifted the pistol.

“Why are you holding a gun at me?” said Dean.

“Get out of there, Charlie!” yelled Chafetz.

The man said something in Arabic.

“He says go or die,” said the translator.

“Oui,
OK. Yes, yes, I’m going,” said Dean. He held his hands out at the man and gestured again that he would go. He grabbed the bike and started to back up—then seemed to lose his grip and drop it.

The man said something in Arabic. Charlie grabbed the bike and turned around, pushing the pedals in earnest now.

“We’ve got it covered,” said Telach. “Good going.”

“Give me directions back to Lia,” Dean said.

The drainpipe pulled away from the house as Lia grabbed it to climb back up, so she decided it would be easier to go around to the next building and climb up the fire escape. When she reached the second floor she saw that someone was near the window, and waited for a few minutes until deciding she could pull herself up on the other side without being seen. Lia did the same on the third floor, scrambling onto the roof.

She retrieved her gear, unloading and stowing the gun in its case and then pulling the strap over her rucksack. As she rose, there was a noise on the roof behind her. Lia swung around, not sure if it was Dean; a shadow appeared across the way near the fire escape ladder, then disappeared. Lia sprinted after it, pulling a small Glock handgun from her waistband as she crossed the roof. She reached the edge in a few bounds and bolted over the side, jumping down the ladder to the next landing, where the figure had just descended. The shadow tried to escape through the window, but Lia grabbed hold, pulling it out and sticking the pistol in its face.

The face of a nine-year-old-boy, shaking like a leaf, eyes like acorns.

She stared into them, saw his fear.

Is that how I looked to them? Is that how I look to everyone, now?

Lia pushed the boy away, then went down to the street. Dean was waiting on his bike.

“What were you doing?” he said.

“Making mistakes,” she told him brusquely, brushing past.

46

Rubens sat in one of the empty seats in the Art Room’s theater-style layout, staring at the screen saver on the computer monitor in front of him. A multicolored object floated across the screen, morphing into different forms as it came to each edge of the viewing area. The changes seemed random but were actually determined by a pair of complex mathematical formulas whose results only
looked
random when viewed over a short period of time. If you stared at the screen long enough a pattern would begin to emerge.

Intelligence gathering worked like that. Seemingly random bits of information had to be stitched together from a wide variety of sources to reveal themselves as something generated by a purposeful formula. This was, in Rubens’ opinion, the reason that those trained in mathematics and cryptography were so good at intelligence work: they knew there were formulas behind what others saw as unrelated information flitting through the universe.

But there was also a danger that truly random events might be misinterpreted as being part of a nonexistent pattern. Or worse, unconnected strands might be erroneously connected, leading the analyst in the wrong direction.

Was that happening now? The man Dean had followed had used an antiquated analog coupling device to send a very short piece of information to a computer bulletin board in France. The technology was so old—it dated from the mid-1980s—that under other circumstances the NSA wouldn’t have bothered paying any attention.

Ninety seconds after the transmission, the weather site on the World Wide Web that Rubens had discussed with Johnny Bib had been rewritten, two minutes ahead of normal schedule.

According to Johnny Bib, the change was doubly significant not only was it outside the normal pattern of updates, but it also didn’t alter a temperature as the other ones had. Instead, it involved a forecast three days ahead.

The change was subtle: “cloudy” became “thunder-storms.” At the regular update time, the old prediction was restored.

Surely this meant something ... or was it a simple programming mess-up?

The potential intersection of the two Desk Three missions—one to find missing atomic material, the other to find a chemist who might have made explosives for terrorists—was both tantalizing and frightening.

But was it a pattern or a non-pattern, meaningful or random noise?

“Boss, Lia and Charlie are clear. You want them back here?” asked Telach.

“No. Have them go to France. Tell them ...”

He paused, not knowing exactly what to tell them.

“Have them go to Paris, spend the night, relax a little,” he said.

“Relax?”

“If nothing specific develops, they can back up Tommy Karr. Let’s let Lia catch her breath for a few hours. Contact Tommy—I want him to see if he can get more information from Monsieur LaFoote on the Web sites that were used to transmit instructions. Why wasn’t his friend suspicious? Or was he? What else does he know about the e-mails or domains ? See if he can find out what computer his friend used to go on these sites, that sort of thing. And check if there were others.”

“He did already try. I’m not sure how technically competent the old guy is, let alone how much he really knows. Tommy worked him over pretty well while they were watching the police search the house. There are two more CD-ROMs, and possibly some information about an account that Vefoures had that we haven’t been able to track down on our own. Otherwise—well, you know Tommy. He’s everybody’s best friend. I don’t know that LaFoote is holding back too much else. Certainly not about computers.”

“Have him try anyway. LaFoote may not know he knows. Where is Tommy?”

“Tommy went back to Paris to dump the information on the disk for us, and LaFoote stayed back in Aux Boix, where he lives. We had a CIA agent follow him back to his house. He was still there last time I checked. I told Tommy to get some rest. He’s supposed to meet LaFoote at nine p.m. their time.”

“All right. Let Tommy get some rest,” said Rubens. “But when he checks in, have him try and move up his meeting with LaFoote.”

“You don’t want the CIA agent to get involved, right?”

Rubens gave her a withering look. “Do you feel he would succeed where Tommy wouldn’t?”

“I just wanted to check. It does seem—”

“Like a random pattern that doesn’t actually cohere?”

“I was going to say wild-goose chase.”

Rubens got up from the console. “What is Johnny Bib doing?”

“His team has the servers under surveillance,” said Telach. “They’re trying to trace anyone who accesses these pages.”