Night Talk (30 page)

Soon after he arrived at the motel a pizza was delivered. It was almost always pizza because he liked it better than most other foods, but occasionally he told the Voice he wanted Chinese food. He never ordered the food but was told by the Voice how much to give the deliveryperson, including a tip. He didn't like the idea of giving a tip but was punished when he disobeyed because failing to tip would make him more memorable to the deliveryman.

He brought his tablet into his room. He never watched television or listened to the radio. Instead, he used the tablet this night for virtual gambling.

The instructions from the Voice tonight were more complicated and dangerous than for most other assignments. As he walked up the sidewalk toward the front door of the house he decided he would ask for more than the usual amount of virtual money to play the shots. A bonus, he thought. He would ask for a bonus for this kill.

 

56

As soon as Bob had his guests tucked away, he loaded up food and personal items in the house except for his portable TV and beer and took the stuff out to the truck. Having company told him it was time to move on, to keep on truckin' to somewhere he knew no one.

The two people he'd agreed to hide out for the night were using one of his sleeping bags so after he loaded up, he went back inside to wait until morning to move on.

Another small town? he wondered. It was easier to find people in small towns than big cities, but there were more cameras in big cities and he got tired of counting them. He decided he'd head east on the freeway and look for a town that was so poor it had few cameras. Once he got on the freeway, there were a thousand miles of desert and plenty of dusty, thirsty towns along the way.
Sounds like a plan,
he told himself.

He had a beer in his hand and a basketball game on the portable TV when he heard knocking on his front door. He didn't get visitors but a neighbor once dropped by to borrow jumper cables to start his car and another time a Jehovah's Witness tried to save his soul. Neither did their calling at night but he didn't think of that as he got off the couch and went to the door.

He opened the door to find a man in a utility company uniform holding a gadget that looked like testing equipment.

“Checking for gas leaks,” Leon said.

“Gas leak?” Bob sniffed and glanced behind him, toward the kitchen. “I don't have any leaks.”

“You soon will.” Leon pulled the hidden trigger on the weapon.

Bob was hit with a beam from the device that sent him stumbling backward. He dropped to his knees, disoriented. Leon kicked him in the face, sending Bob over, flat on his back.

Leon looked down at him for a moment and then took his foot and stomped Bob in the solar plexus.

Leaving Bob on the floor with the man gasping for breath and his legs twitching, Leon closed the front door. He went across the living room to the kitchen. He quickly checked the gas stove, turning on a burner to see if the gas was working. It was—the burner ignited.

He left the kitchen and looked down the hallway. The bathroom door at the end of the hall was open; the two bedroom doors, one on each side of the hallway, were closed. He needed to know which one held the prey.

Leon went back to Bob, who had struggled into a sitting position on the floor. Bob was still dazed and his arms and limbs weren't cooperating. He stood in front of him and took his foot and shoved Bob back down, onto the floor. Then he knelt down, putting his knee on Bob's chest, pinning him to the floor.

He pulled out a knife from a sheath and put the point on Bob's Adam's apple, applying enough pressure to penetrate the skin.

“Tell me what room your guests are holed up in.”

 

57

Greg lay on the bed with his head elevated, supported by his coat, which he'd laid over the foot rail. Ali was opposite to him, back against the headboard.

So close, but so far away. It reminded him of a story he'd read in an English class in school an eon ago about a knight and his lady love who were doomed to sleep with a sword between them for some offense they had committed. Only in his case, the issues between Ali and him were as explosive as the IED Franklin claimed he had his road mined with.

It was hard for him to imagine being on a bed with an attractive woman and not making love. Despite the strange, grinding tension of what they were up against, he still felt attracted to Ali. More than that, she ignited another feeling in him. Being around her brought home how lonely and emotionally isolated he felt because his lifestyle dominated his existence.

His relationships with women had always been strained by his total commitment to his show, a dedication bordering sometimes on an obsession as he got more caught up in both the intrigue and excitement of unraveling what he saw as a threat from the unknown. Probing the unknown, giving others the opportunity to tell the world about their experiences, were more than a job to him. They were a full-time commitment to uncover the truth.

He wondered what was going on in her head. Women and men had different paths toward sexual arousal. Did she want to make love with him? Or at least cuddle close for comfort as they faced danger together?

He shut his eyes and tried to think but questions roiled in his head on bumpy waves.
Is the NRO doing the killing? Some governmental black ops agency? The controllers? Someone else who is affected? How does Mond fit into the scenario? Bad guy? Or just a bureaucrat doing his job? Should we try to contact Mond? Try to convince him that we don't have, and have never had, Ethan's file?

His instinct said that Mond wouldn't believe him. More than that—from everything he'd been told about Mond and the interagency, it was most likely that Mond didn't want to believe him. Greg's instincts about people were usually pretty good and Mond struck him as having a brain and nervous system wrapped in bureaucratic red tape at best. At worst, the man was working for an agency that was deliberately keeping the “alien invasion” a secret from the world.

The bottom line was that he didn't trust Mond. Period.

He turned his thoughts back to Ethan, trying to get into Ethan's mind, the guy's way of thinking. Like Ali, Mond and the Aarons, he was now convinced that Ethan had intended to give him the secret file. That was bizarre, but there was no reason to believe Ethan was thinking rationally and it fit too nicely to rebut. It wasn't just that Ethan told people he gave the file to Greg. Greg sensed that he was still alive because they—whoever they were—wanted to give him enough rope to get to the file so they could retrieve it before dealing with him.

Ethan could have lied and told people he gave the file to Greg, but what purpose would that have served? He also could have intended to give Greg the file but never got around to it before demon drugs and a killer found him.

The notion Ali threw onto the table earlier, that Greg had the file but just didn't know it, was sounding more reasonable to him. Also that Ethan might have sent the file to him via e-mail so deeply encrypted that it would take another hacker to break in and read it. He was reasonably sure that Ethan, like so many high-tech mentalities, didn't always understand that the average person's technical skill on computers was limited to clicking on icons and getting hopelessly lost when the link went nowhere.

From the call-ins to the show before he was barred because of his tone and language, it was obvious that Ethan was wound up tight with idealism and that he saw Greg's talk show, which reached millions of people, as an outlet to expose the wrongs he believed the government was doing.

If Ethan sent the file to Greg's personal or show e-mail, it was a certainty Mond had it. Not only did the government have full access to his e-mails even before they physically seized his computers at home and at the office, once they had the computers in their possession, they had another shot at anything they'd missed.

Ali was convinced that Ethan would have gotten the file to him in a way that made it difficult for even government computer experts to find. Great. If Ethan was so clever that people who knew what they were doing couldn't find the file, how would Greg have found it?

“Could Ethan have sent me the file other than by e-mail?” he asked Ali.

“If you're thinking he sent you the actual file, I would say that was unlikely. He most likely would have sent you a link that took you to it because the file itself may be enormous. He could get a link to you in any number of ways.”

“Attach it to my Facebook page? As a text message or tweet?”

“Those and many other ways. It could be an express link or he could have gotten clever and provided only a clue to a link or hid the link in a message that's on an entirely different subject.”

“Hidden in a Viagra spam, a message from an online retailer offering me a discount on the next best-seller, written on a sign in the background of a selfie of Ethan on the beach?”

She groaned. “I think Ethan was cleverer than that, but I do like the link printed on a beach sign. Obviously, he needed to get it to you so you'd recognize it yet it would fool an expert.”

“Good luck on that. You have any idea as to how Ethan would pull that off?” he asked.

She sighed. “Not the foggiest. Ethan didn't think like ordinary people and he didn't hack like ordinary hackers. How he could get it to you without immediately tipping off government experts is beyond me.”

Greg didn't know enough about the strange world of hacking to even start imagining ways Ethan might have done it.

“How does hacking work?” he asked Ali.

“How does it work?”

“I'm trying to get into Ethan's head, at least the technical part of his brain that enabled him to hack into my bank account and send me a file that I don't know I have.”

“It's all about vulnerabilities in the system you want to enter and take control of, exploiting a weakness, an opening. You've seen
Star Wars,
the original movie?”

“Who hasn't?”

“Remember how the rebels fought the empire's planet-killing space thing? It was the largest man-made thing in the universe, but there was a tiny opening someone neglected to seal. Something like an air vent but it's outer space. That's how a hacker goes after the system of a corporation or the government. They're looking for that door that someone forgot to nail shut. Ethan was capable of taking it farther than most hackers.”

“Because he had access to the big NSA computer?”

“That helped but so did the Aarons, and they needed to team up with Ethan. You have to appreciate that there are few people on the entire planet, even with help from the Aarons, who could have used the NSA's super-quantum code-breaking machine to hack into a system as secure as the NRO's. That alone took a special talent that Ethan had, something I mentioned before.

“Ethan wasn't just a hacker, he wrote programs. Once he got a foot in, he would rewrite the program to make it do what he wanted. So he wasn't just capable of getting into the program and using it, he could manipulate it. As I said, hacking is done by taking advantage of flaws in software or flaws in the humans who put the pieces all together. Once Ethan learned how the software was made, there would be no stopping him from entering and plundering, if that's what his objective was.”

“I imagine that it would have been a piece of cake for a pro like Ethan to crack my bank account,” Greg said.

“For a world-class hacker like Ethan it would have been easy, especially when you consider that he had the resources of the NSA's super-encryption-breaking computer to do it with, not to mention he had NRO assets, too. With computers from the world's two most important spy agencies, he probably could have broken into any system on the planet.”

“Or broken into a system that originated in a galaxy far, far—”

“Please. We have enough problems with our earthly menaces. We don't need to import any from Planet X.”

He leaned up to meet her eye. “We don't have to worry about alien invasions. The bugs will take care of that.”

“Come again?”

“H. G. Wells,
War of the Worlds
; the Martians kicked our butts, but microscopic bacteria killed them. So there's hope. But getting back to Ethan, he sat at home and used his computer to access the site he stole the files from?”

“Yes. I know he did a lot of his work from home and he had a much more powerful processor than this tablet to do it with. I don't know what type of access the Aarons had arranged to the NSA program. But to really understand Ethan you need to realize that hacking, cracking, whatever you want to call it, isn't just science or mechanics, which most people think it is, but an art form.”

“An art form,” Greg told the ceiling. “So Ethan wasn't just a hopped-up guy with a computer, he was the Michelangelo of geeks.”

“Exactly, sans the sarcasm. As his mother said, he was a self-taught prodigy when it came to hacking. Like a child sitting down at a piano and suddenly putting out brilliant Chopin, when Ethan's fingers went onto a computer keyboard they took him to places with locked doors and he started unlocking them. It's like plotting your way through a maze, a labyrinth with intricate combinations of paths that make it difficult to find one's way or to reach the exit because some roads lead to dead ends and others keep taking you back to where you started.

“I also don't know anyone who could do what Ethan did for the NRO. I'm talking about the legitimate work he did. He was able to quickly learn the language that created an NRO file, no matter which one was used. I had a Spanish teacher who escaped from a North Korean gulag and came to America. He never had a lesson in English or Spanish. He learned Spanish, English and other languages well enough to teach them without having formal instruction himself. He said the key was his ability to mimic languages. He was a savant when it came to spoken languages, just like Ethan was one with computers. Ethan had a reputation of being able to crack the esoteric computer languages other programmers created for fun to stump other geeks.