Читать книгу Calculated Risk - Stephanie Doyle, Stephanie Doyle - Страница 8

I’m dead now. You know what to do, G.G.

S abrina Masters stared at the e-mail displayed on her computer screen and released a deep breath. Arnold was gone.

A true believer in the art of science and math, he’d been a mentor. Certainly, he’d been one of her few intellectual equals. But more importantly, he’d cared about her. More, she knew, than her own father ever had. At least Arnold always looked out for her.

Her head fell forward because it seemed too heavy to hold up. She could feel the tears well behind her eyes and wanted to stop them. But she decided that Arnold deserved a few tears.

He’d been alone in the world. No wife, no children, no family to speak of. He’d made the computer his wife. The work his child. But the computer wouldn’t cry and the work wouldn’t mourn for him.

She wondered if he realized now that he was gone that there had never been anyone truly significant in his life. If he did, if that knowledge somehow made him sad, she hoped he at least knew how heartbroken she was.

You know what to do, G.G.

The old nickname brought a smile to her lips. G.G.: Girl Genius.

Sabrina glanced at the number typed at the bottom and instantly memorized it, plugging it into her brain alongside every other piece of information that she’d ever stumbled across. Sometimes she wondered if one day her head might fill up to such a capacity that it would simply explode from the strain. The gruesome image did nothing to improve her mood.

“I don’t know if I can do this, Arnold,” she stated aloud to the almost empty room, in the practically empty house that was her home in an out-of-the-way, nowhere town in Pennsylvania.

Briefly, she entertained the idea that as a ghost he might be able to answer her. She waited a beat. Nothing. If there was a heaven and Arnold was in it, he was trying to strike up a game of chess with Einstein. Probably convinced that he could beat him, too. The last thing Arnold would care about after his death would be the fate of the nation. Not when he barely had cared about it when he was alive.

You and me, G.G. We’re a lot alike.

He used to tell her that all the time. She’d always thought he was talking about their strange intellect. But maybe he wasn’t. The idea that they had more in common worried her. In fact, it frightened her.

Sabrina slipped her hand into the back pocket of her jeans to extract her cell phone. She dialed the number Arnold had given her and waited.

“Hello?”

“Is this Assistant Director Krueger?” she asked, somewhat surprised. Arnold must have given her the CIA director’s personal cell phone number as a way to cut directly to the chase.

“Yes?”

“Arnold Salinski is dead.”

“I know. Sabrina Masters?”

“Yep.”

There was a pause on the other end of the phone. Then, “We should talk.”

She could practically feel the weight of this moment and the impact it was going to have on her life.

“Yep.”

The night was bitterly cold, as it should be in January in Pennsylvania, but the sky was as clear as glass. Krueger had chosen Gettysburg to meet. A full moon glowed over the frozen battlefields adding a touch of eeriness that, quite frankly, it did not need. The place was spooky enough in broad daylight. Sabrina wished she’d told Krueger to meet her at a damn diner in town.

Shaking off the creepy factor, she focused on the clandestine meeting ahead. Following the winding drive through the various memorial sites scattered about in the woods, she stopped at the third one. The name Cowan etched in stone caught her eye.

She bounced out of the Jeep and shut the door behind her, glancing around the area as she did. The wind caught her hair and sent it flying about in a bad imitation of Medusa. She wished she’d thought to bring a hat. Her ears were going to freeze. Forcing her hands into the pockets of her down-feather coat, she hopped up and down a few times to keep her circulation going and, if she was honest with herself, to keep her nerves at bay.

He materialized out of the trees like a ghost and once again Sabrina was reminded why CIA operatives were often called spooks. Because she didn’t know what Krueger looked like, she wrapped her hand around the Colt Defender inside her pocket. A girl couldn’t be too careful.

“Krueger?” she asked.

“Masters?” he wanted to know first.

She nodded, then he stepped closer to her. Apparently, he knew what she looked like because his shoulders seemed to relax slightly. He was a hair over six feet and had a broad build. His face was deeply lined, probably a combination of stress and age. He wore jeans, a ski jacket and sneakers. And a hat. A practical man, she decided. And a prepared one.

“We’ll talk in your car,” he suggested.

Secure enough to release her hold on the gun, she opened the door, got back inside and leaned over to unlock the passenger door. He lifted himself into the seat.

“I checked your record. You were fired from the CIA almost ten years ago,” he began.

“You’re not the most subtle fellow, are you?” Then she admitted what he already knew. “I was.”

“Willful insubordination.”

Sabrina winced at the description It was a phrase that never failed to irritate her. It was on the tip of her tongue to remind him that she had been barely out of her teens when she’d been given that label, but she held back. That’s not what this was about. Besides, the description wasn’t inaccurate. Or at least hadn’t been at the time. But that was ten years ago. People change. She was sort of hoping she was one of them.

“And here all this time I thought it had been my attendance.”

He didn’t smile. “As you know, Arnold has selected you to continue his project.”

“I do.”

“What do you know about it?”

Sabrina shook her head. “Not much. I know he was working from a secure location. Even he didn’t know where he was. I know it was important. I know that he thought I was the only one who would understand what he was doing.”

“You really believe that’s true?” Krueger asked her.

“I don’t think I’d be sitting here right now if you didn’t believe it was true.”

Reluctantly, the senior agent nodded. Sabrina could tell he was pissed, though. It was there in the clench of his jaw and the way his mouth turned down into a deep scowl, entrenching the crevices of his face.

But his anger didn’t make sense unless…A few pieces of the puzzle she’d been playing with fell into place and quickly she understood. She smiled at Arnold’s audacity even from the grave. “This isn’t about me continuing his work. You’ve lost access to it, haven’t you?”

Krueger said nothing. He didn’t need to.

“Arnold wasn’t a team player,” Sabrina remarked. It was something that the CIA should have known.

“For sixteen years he worked under contract for us,” Krueger spat in reply. “But that was the only arrangement he would agree to. He never wanted to work officially for the United States government. I guess he thought it would corrupt him.”

“Don’t take it personally,” Sabrina told him. “Arnold wouldn’t have worked for any government. He didn’t believe in sides. He didn’t believe in ideology. He believed in science. He believed in math. You guys paid him the most, and gave him the best opportunity to pursue his work. That was all that mattered to him.”

He turned to her, his scowl still in place, and she knew he was lumping her with Arnold. She twisted a little in her seat. “What do you want from me?”

“What I’m about to tell you is—”

“Classified,” Sabrina finished. “Spare me the security and national interest lecture and get to it.”

Krueger looked down at his hands, then turned to her with an extremely serious expression on his face. “Get to it? All right. Ms. Masters what if I told you some very important people in the Company believe you may be the key to bringing down one of the most dangerous men on the planet?”

She allowed a moment for the words to sink in. This is what she wanted. What she’d imagined when she first read Arnold’s e-mail. This is what she’d been waiting for, for almost ten years. This was a new beginning for her. And it wasn’t until now, until she actually was confronted with it, that she knew how precious, how important that beginning really was to her.

But Krueger didn’t need to know any of that. Instead she offered him a flippant response, one that he probably expected.

“Does this mean I’m going to get my job back? Because I’ve got to tell you, these days it’s hell finding work for a genius.”

“The project Arnold was working on was known as Deep Throat,” he explained, his tone flat. “It was an ingestible isotope. A variation on lithium-6 that targets the epidermis. When it’s digested it breaks down over time and a body’s exposure to sun’s ultraviolet rays and emits a pattern of low-level radiation that can be detected by a high-powered X-ray machine contained in a satellite. Once the target is identified, the satellite’s computer continually sends a series of Global Positioning coordinates that allow us to track the movements of those who have been tagged.”

Sabrina absorbed the information. “Radiation? How can you distinguish between the targets and every cancer patient undergoing treatment in the world?”

Krueger shook his head. “All I know is that the pattern is distinct because of the nature of the isotope. Only Arnold knew all of the logistics of how it worked. But it does work. It has been the single most significant breakthrough in the war against terrorism. You’ve read about the many failings of the intelligence communities in the past few years. Our human intel is weak. We can’t infiltrate cells because often all the members are blood related. We can’t turn them with money because of their strident belief in their cause. When they stop using modern technology, like cell phones and computers, and they go underground to live in caves, they’re all but invisible to us. This project has changed that. All we needed to do was tap their food source. Terrorist cell leaders will have their food tested for poison before eating anything, but the isotope was undetectable.”

“No symptoms?”

“Possibly some nausea or vomiting a few days after ingestion, but nothing that couldn’t be explained by an outbreak of the flu or dysentery, which is not uncommon given their typical living conditions.”

“Okay. Go on.”

“As I said it was working. We were getting daily updates from Arnold on known terrorists and their locations throughout the world. The group didn’t matter. We targeted leaders in Hamas, Hezbollah, the IRA, Al Qaeda, you name it.”

“Why am I suddenly getting nervous?” Sabrina asked rhetorically.

“One of the areas of great concern to both the CIA and the FBI is the fact that there are terrorist cells operating within the United States. With the success of Deep Throat, we felt confident in allowing some terrorists on our watch lists to enter the country so we could follow them and let them lead us to these cells where we could monitor their activities. No one of any consequence. No planners, as we call them. Without leadership and direction these cells can lie dormant for years. Allowing the infiltration of low-level grunts, we would be able to locate the cells without a great risk of precipitating an event.”

That’s why she was nervous. They got greedy. “Let me see if I got this. You let some of the bad guys in the country—bad guys you hope don’t have the brains to plan anything. Only now Arnold is dead and you can’t see them anymore. And you didn’t think to have, oh, I don’t know, a backup plan in case something did happen to Arnold? Forget his heart, what if he tripped and hit his head or something?” she asked incredulously.

“The level of security he has in place goes much further than we anticipated or were led to believe. Regardless, it’s not like we had much of a choice. Deep Throat advanced us years in the war against these killers. At a moment’s notice, we could locate and destroy anyone who was tagged and anyone close to those who were tagged. You think Israel has just been guessing real good when they fire those missiles from helicopters at moving cars. It was worth the risk to have the data when all we had to do was agree to Arnold’s terms.”

Sabrina could well imagine what those terms would be. “An isolated location. No people. An endless pot of coffee and a single server?”

Krueger nodded. “The download of data from the satellite was encrypted, using an encryption code that Arnold himself wrote, and transmitted to his computer only. Data transmissions to us were always done in person. We would send an agent daily to pick up the various sets of coordinates for each terrorist that had been tagged. When the agent showed up yesterday Arnold was already dead. Naturally, the computer is password protected. And when the agent checked—”

“He saw that it was booby-trapped, too,” Sabrina finished. Arnold defined the word paranoia. “You can’t move it. And if you try to hack into it, it will blow. Any chance you can redirect the data transmission from the satellite…?”

Krueger shook his head slowly.

“Okay. I get it.” And Sabrina now understood exactly what Arnold was telling her in his last e-mail.

It’s time for you to come home, Sabrina. You’ve been gone too long. They’re going to need your help. If you’re reading this, it’s because I’m dead now. You know what to do, G.G.

“You want me to hack his password and figure out a way to decrypt the data so you can find your missing bad guys.”

“That’s part of it,” Krueger said somewhat stiltedly.

Her eyebrows arched. “That’s a pretty big part if you ask me.”

“There is another element you bring to the table. There is another party in this war who, so far, we have failed to tag. A player who we believe would be as interested in Arnold’s data as we are.”

It didn’t take much brainpower to figure out who that was, and she had more than her fair share. She had been out of the game a long time, but there were only a few players who could avoid the great and mighty reach of the CIA. One was obvious, the other not so much. She was guessing it was the dark horse.

“Kahsan,” Sabrina breathed. “You still haven’t caught him.”

“No,” Krueger answered flatly. “We know he was responsible for the hotel in Milan. We know he took down the plane over Turkey. We know these things, yet we can never get close enough to take him out. Forget tagging him, we’ve never gotten a decent read on his movements to know what food source to go after. He’s got to be taken out. There are thousands of terrorist groups, small insignificant bands of fanatics who believe in something so strongly they are willing to kill and die for it. Terrorist attacks, by any group, are a headline story. Kahsan gives these minor groups an opportunity to play on the world stage. And he doesn’t give a damn about the cause. For him it’s only about the money.”

“So what’s your plan?”

The senior agent breathed in slowly, then exhaled, giving his words gravity. “We want you to contact him. We want you to tell him about Arnold’s project. We want you to tell him that, for a price, you can give him access to the location of known terrorists that are currently operating within the United States.”

Sabrina listened intently, trying to see the endgame as Krueger did. She knew Kahsan was a mercenary without followers. The terrorists operating inside the country were killers waiting for a planner. As a group they were little more than a loaded gun until someone came along and pulled the trigger. As long as Americans ended up dead, it really didn’t matter who that person was. Putting the two of them together would be a volatile combination.

If Kahsan could claim that he controlled a terrorist cell inside the U.S. then every anti-American group in the world would be offering him money to mobilize them. It would no doubt be his biggest payday to date. His greatest infamy.

“You’re serious?” Sabrina tried to wrap her mind around the dangers of actually letting Kahsan inside the country. Then she thought about the flip side of the argument and what stopping him might do for the war on terror. Then she thought about something more basic. “Why me?”

“Your résumé is perfect.”

“Really? No typos?”

Krueger stared her into silence. “Arnold told us that there was a key to breaking his encryption code and he promised us that upon his death we would be given that key. What he sent to us in an e-mail was your name. His idea of doing us a favor I suppose.”

And me, Sabrina thought. He thought he was doing her a favor, too.

“We considered your history. The CIA’s Youth Adoption Program recruited you when you were sixteen. You trained for years to be a field operative, but you were fired when you failed to perform up to standard. Your father works for the NSA, but the two of you are estranged. For the past ten years you’ve wandered about the country using your unique skills to make big scores at various casinos in Las Vegas and Atlantic City. That is, until the owners caught on to you and barred you from their establishments. Now you sell secrets to tabloid magazines to make ends meet. You have no particular political allegiance. No husband, no boyfriend. No family at all. And if your bank account information is accurate, not a whole lot of money. You do, however, have a connection to Arnold Salinski that is easily traceable.”

Sabrina smiled weakly once she realized the intent of his little bibliography. “You’re right. It’s a pretty good résumé for a traitor.”

“Exactly. We want you to convince Kahsan you’re willing to sell him access to Arnold’s data.”

“What’s going to make him think—”

“He’ll have access to the same information about you that we have. And he’ll learn through channels that the CIA is planning to pick you up and take you to Arnold’s computer. That will be confirmed by you. You’ll explain that you’ve been contacted by us. You’ll tell him that once you know the location of the server, you’ll pass it on to him. You’ll let him know that he needs to meet you at the location with five million dollars in bonds on hand and that once you have it, you’ll hack through Arnold’s password and decrypt the data he needs. He doesn’t have to know how unlikely either task is.”

“What about the agents he’ll assume are with me?”

“He’ll know that’s his problem to deal with.”

“But you’ll have a whole team of people on the ground ready to take him out when he comes,” Sabrina added.

“No,” Krueger countered. “Not a team.”

She tried to imagine a legitimate reason for that, but when she failed, she asked, “Uh… Why not?”

“For one, if he thought this was a trap, he wouldn’t get anywhere near it. We know he has sources inside the Company. It’s just one of the ways he’s managed to elude us for so long. A job this big, this important, would get out to everyone despite its classification. We want him to tap those sources and come up blank.”

“And the other reason?”

“What we’re talking about is a huge risk,” Krueger stated slowly, clearly willing her to understand. “What we’re talking about is not something that if the president knew about it, he would or could agree to.”

“Shit,” Sabrina hissed. “This is the part where you tell me you have to cover your ass.”

“Not my ass. The president’s ass. The American people don’t want another attack in this country. They certainly would not appreciate the idea of their government agencies willingly allowing key terrorists to move freely about inside our borders.”

“You think?” she drawled.

“This is a highly offensive maneuver, but one I think is necessary. There are only three people who are aware of the plan I laid out. The director of the CIA, you and myself. It must remain this way. As far as everyone else in the agency is concerned your only mission is to decrypt the data. An agent will pick you up to take you to the server’s location. You will convince that agent that it was your idea to lure Kahsan into the open. Regardless of what happens from that point forward, your mission stays the same. If it looks like we’re pulling the plug, you must convince that agent to continue to work with you. Or you operate on your own. The agent is expendable, do you understand? Kahsan is the primary target. He’s the only thing that matters.”

Sabrina processed that. “What if I make contact with Kahsan and he has me kidnapped before your agent comes?”

“You don’t know where the computer is. Kidnapping you makes no sense. He has to have you and the computer together for this to work. Once there, either you or the agent will take him out on sight.”

“And if I fail, and somehow Kahsan gets the data and meets up with the other bad guys and boom!, the White House ends up as toast, then what?”

“Then the CIA will disavow all knowledge of any plan to bring him into the country and you’ll be known as the worst traitor in American history since Benedict Arnold.”

“You guys suck,” Sabrina muttered.

“It’s not going to come to that. Without you he can’t get the data, without the data he can’t get to the cells. Besides if something does happen to you…”

“You make that sound like a broken fingernail, when what you mean is if he kills me.”

“If something does happen to you…we’ll still have a bead on Kahsan that we’ve never had before. And I personally will see to it that he doesn’t leave the country alive.” Krueger sighed. “I know what we’re asking is a lot.”

There was the understatement of the century. Sabrina pulled her hand through her hair and thought about what she’d been doing the same time last night. She was pretty sure she’d been in the middle of a hot bath and a whiskey. Now she was being recruited as bait for one of the most frightening killers on the planet. Life certainly had some interesting twists.

“You’re sure he’ll come?” She wanted to know.

“Reasonably sure. Our profilers tell us the man is an egomaniac. It’s not just money, but the attention that will follow if he pulls this off that will attract him. It’s a hell of a carrot. If he doesn’t come, of course we’ll still give you an opportunity to get through Arnold’s password and decrypt the data.”

“Oh joy!” she squealed facetiously. “I still have that opportunity.”

“Sabrina, may I call you that?”

Unbelievable. They were here discussing what was possibly the riskiest plan of the century to capture one of the most dangerous men ever, and he was worried about etiquette. Strange as it seemed in that instant she both lost a little and gained a little respect for him.

“Sure.”

“Sabrina, why did you call me?”

Good fucking question. Because Arnold told her this was a chance to get back in the game. Because she thought she was ready to get back in the game. But Krueger was offering her a chance to be quarterback in the Super Bowl. She didn’t know if she was ready for this.

So she ignored his question and asked him one of her own. “What if I say no? What happens?”

His answer was too quick. “We’ll put plan B into place. We believe there might be someone else who can perform the same role we’re asking you to perform, but because of your previous training you were our top pick.”

“Who?”

He hesitated.

“I need to know. I need to know whose head is going to be on the proverbial chopping block if I pass.”

“You’ve heard of Sal Ploxm….”

“A hacker?” she blurted. “You’re going to use some virus-spreading geek to catch Kahsan? Do you even know who he is?”

“We’re following some leads. He’s had success hacking into some of the most secure networks. That and the fact that he works outside the law, we believe he’s the next logical choice.”

Sabrina considered him for a moment. The CIA was resorting to an insubordinate ex-agent and a hacker. One thing became crystal clear. “You don’t have anybody on your staff who can hack through Arnold’s password, let alone decrypt his code. Not even close. You know that your project is over and that this… is a last-ditch attempt to salvage something from it.”

He didn’t deny it. “The radiation patterns will fade eventually and no, we don’t believe anyone can access the information in time. We have enlisted cryptologists from every department in the government to work on one of Arnold’s predecessor programs in an attempt to see if anyone could come close. No one has. Not even your father. As far as we’re concerned the project is a write-off. The FBI has sent agents out to the last known location of those people we’ve tagged. If we lose them somehow, then we’ll merely revert to our previous methods—good old-fashioned legwork—to find them again. But in the meantime, the lure of this data might be our only opportunity to push Kahsan out of hiding. We’re going to take it.”

“Arnold thinks I can do it,” she suggested. “If you gave me a chance—”

“We don’t have that kind of time. As I said, Kahsan is not without resources. We have to move quickly and we have to make it look real. Salinski’s death will leak. There’s no stopping that. This has to go down like a well choreographed ballet.”

He reached into his pocket and pulled out a slip of paper. “It’s a list of Web sites that he uses where you should be able to make contact. I need to know now if you’re in.”

If she wasn’t, then the job would go to Sal Ploxm, a virus pirate who got off on infecting systems that were deemed foolproof. Apparently, there was no firewall that could stop him. A hacker with more balls than brains as far as she was concerned. If he was that talented, he’d be making more money and fewer headlines. The fact that she knew his name meant he got off on the rush. A hacker like that had to have one hell of an ego.

Was this the person she wanted responsible for heading up a mission to take down Kahsan?

Then she chuckled softly. Hell, she thought. Who would have thought that she should be the person to take him down? Who was she but a drifter, a cheat and an ex-operative?

Sabrina focused on the stone burial monument directly in front of her windshield.

Cowan.

She didn’t know who the poor son of a bitch was, but he’d died for something. He’d believed in something. His country, his family, who knew. He gave his life in what Lincoln called the last full measure of devotion. For too long Sabrina had only been devoted to herself. Frankly, she was growing bored.

“Don’t you want to know what you get in return?”

Of course he would be expecting her to ask that. It’s who he thought she was.

“Absolutely,” she lied.

“There is a sizable bounty on Kahsan’s head. If you agree, if your work leads to his capture or death, you would be entitled to it.”

She glanced at the monument again. Cowan hadn’t done it for the money. In fact, she was embarrassed they were having this conversation in front of his grave. What if he was somewhere shaking his head at her, more than a little disappointed in this new breed of American hero.

Without a word, Sabrina took the slip of paper from his hand and shoved it in her pocket.

“Just one more thing,” Sabrina said, catching his arm before he could leave. “This agent that you’re sending. The one I need to convince…make sure he or she is damn good.”

“Only the best.”