Zero Day

44

Just north of the Pond, Jeff and Daryl sat at a picnic table. He placed her portion of the ravioli in front of her, along with the plastic utensils, as she set down their coffee and two unopened bottles of water. Jeff peeled the top from his coffee and blew steam from the hot brew as Daryl took her first taste.

“Hmm. Good,” she said. “I was getting sick of bagels and rolls all the time.” Jeff nodded in agreement. He’d felt the same way, which is why he’d suggested the impromptu picnic. Watching Daryl relish her first bite, he felt pleased with himself for remembering that both of them were more than the sum of their work, even though in the back of his mind he’d hoped that fresh surroundings might inspire fresh insights.

They ate and sipped coffee in silence for a few moments longer, then Daryl said, “Do you think our Dragon Lady is your IT manager?”

“I’m curious myself. I’ll know in a bit. I haven’t been in touch with her since we messaged last night.”

“Let me know anything she’s learned.”

Jeff nodded as he took a bite. He glanced up and his eyes fell on a couple spreading a blanket in the morning sun. The air was cooler but still more summer than fall. Scattered about were other couples and individuals out walking, talking on cell phones, listening to iPods, tossing Frisbees. He wondered for a moment how different their lives would be in two weeks if he and Daryl failed. Would the machinery of this great city grind to a halt? Would the power grid collapse? He could scarcely imagine every catastrophe that was possible.

Returning his attention to Daryl, Jeff asked, “Why are you back in the city?” He’d been idly wondering about that since hearing from her. “I thought you had an important government agency to run?”

“I’m following up on something here.” Putting down her fork, she added, “And I wanted to see you.” Realizing how that sounded, she tacked on, “For a reason.”

“Other than my good looks, you mean?” Jeff said, with a grin before realizing he was actually flirting with her. He’d always found women so complicated, far more complex than the most difficult computer problem. Even gentle Cynthia had thrown him for a loop every so often. But Daryl, he was finding, wasn’t all that difficult. Her mind worked very much like his did, and she was no more geared toward failure than he was. They were on the exact same wavelength, in his view. He was completely comfortable with her. Sure, she was drop-dead gorgeous, but since she didn’t make much of her looks, Jeff realized he hadn’t either. Now, though, with the sun highlighting her golden blond hair and a smidgen of tomato sauce accentuating her full lips, her beauty was hard to ignore.

She smiled. “That, too. But there’s something we need to do that you won’t want to.”

“So you figured to pitch it to my face?” He pushed aside his unexpectedly amorous train of thought, wondering what she was up to.

Daryl hesitated, and for a moment Jeff felt a chill as the warm feeling he’d had vanished. “Fly to D.C. and meet with George Carlton. I’ll go with you,” she added hastily, taking that moment to touch him briefly on the arm.

Jeff felt a tight grip on his throat. “You’re not serious, are you?” His voice sounded foreign even to him.

Daryl pursed her lips. “I am.” She leaned forward and spoke quietly. “Nearly all the triggers are date-related, and we’re ten days out from the event. And we’ve got zilch. I’ve sent so many messages, made so many calls, cornered so many people, I’ve worn out my welcome. There is nowhere else I can go at this point so it has to be him. Carlton is the chief of counter cyberterrorism at DHS. If he wants to, he can wield a lot of clout. I’m being ignored and the security vendors are way behind the curve on this one. If he can get even one of them moving, we can spare a lot of people a lot of damage.”

Jeff’s face turned rigid. “There’s nothing I can say to him that you can’t.” The very thought of seeing Carlton face-to-face caused Jeff’s bile to rise. “And he’s not going to listen to me. We’ve a track record in that regard, you’ll recall.”

“I know you don’t believe this, but I think George respects your work,” Daryl argued, looking intent. “I’ve sensed it in how he’s mentioned your name the time or two it came up. I personally think he feels badly about not listening to you.”

Jeff gritted his teeth as he spoke, trying to hold back his anger. “‘Feels badly’? He damn well should. A lot of people died because of him.”

“Maybe. But things were so bad in those days, I doubt he could have stopped what happened. Really, Jeff. He was your boss, but only a very small fish at the CIA. His superiors would have still been studying your report while the planes flew into the Towers.”

Jeff raised his voice. “We don’t know what would have happened. He could have told someone, at least! He could have done more! At the very least, he could have tried!”

Daryl looked around to see if anyone was paying attention to them, then turned back to the conversation. “We all could have done more, except maybe you. But we have to focus on the here and now. You’ve seen this virus firsthand, in far greater detail than I have. Between the two of us maybe we can get him at least to lean on the vendors. They’re the ones with the resources to counter this.” Determined to get Jeff to see her point, Daryl refused to back off. She was desperate and willing to do just about anything to get him to join her in what she saw as their last hope.

“Excuse me.” Jeff rose and made his way to the nearby public men’s room. Inside, he scrubbed his face with cold water, fighting back the tears. Pulling out a handful of paper towels from the dispenser, he rubbed his face nearly raw. He stood quietly and drew several deep breaths, releasing them slowly. Who am I really mad at? he thought. Carlton? Or myself? The answer still wasn’t clear to him. After nearly ten minutes, he returned to the table.

“There’s this,” Daryl said, as if he’d never left. “My team has determined that the Superphreak virus propagation avoids IP addresses owned by software security vendors. Think about that, and the effort that’s gone into creating it. It’s also one of the reasons why the vendors aren’t giving this priority.”

Jeff’s voice was steady as he said, “I agree, someone’s put a lot of thought into this.”

“There’s more.” She was speaking so quietly he almost couldn’t hear her over the background buzz of conversation and traffic. “It only targets U.S. and European computers.”

Jeff was stunned. “The rest of the world is excluded?”

“Yes.” Daryl bit her lower lip and seemed to struggle for self-control.

“My God,” Jeff whispered, almost to himself. “They’re after the West then, not just the technology. It really is an attack.” There was nothing left to discuss. “You win. I’ll go.”

“Good.” She pushed the remainder of her food away. “We’re on the noon shuttle flight and are meeting him at three.”

45

Gaullist protesters marching in opposition to Arab immigration had all but closed the routes into central Paris. Labib had decided it was pointless to try to drive to his office. He’d called to tell his secretary he wouldn’t be in. Most of the staff, she told him, had done the same thing.

Labib dressed casually, left his car parked outside his house, then took a taxi as far as he could into central Paris. Once he reached the closed streets, he began walking, staying off the main arteries, clogged with demonstrators. It was a beautiful late-summer day. The morning air was invigorating, though he knew the city would by afternoon be sitting in a stifling heat.

Weaving his way down side streets and alleys, he reached the back entrance to Graphisme Courageux nearly two hours after leaving his house, where he found Michel Dufour hard at work.

Dufour nodded as Labib entered. “The front staff never arrived.”

“The French. I’ll never understand them. Where are we?”

“Just a moment. Let me finish this.” Dufour continued typing as Labib dug a bottle of water out of the small refrigerator they kept in the office. He sat at his desk and waited. Finally Dufour stopped, turned toward him, and said, “Do you want an overview of the attack?”

Labib nodded.

“I’ve kept a rough count and believe we have dispatched more than two thousand variations of our core boîtier. I’m launching something like five to ten a day and will keep sending them out through the tenth. A significant number are self-replicating, and that increases the numbers considerably.”

This was even better than Labib had dared to hope.

“In addition,” Dufour continued, “I’ve paid to have the new attacks of old boîtiers increased. The purpose is to keep the security companies too busy to pay attention to ours. About two weeks ago we launched a boîtier that blocks automatic updates.”

“Is it working?”

“As you know, we can’t be certain, but my sense is that it is.”

“What else?”

“As for our own boîtier, I’ve been spending more effort to have them encrypted and compressed. Some variants are encrypted with the activation time or codes that will be automatically published on compromised Web sites. That makes them much more difficult to decipher and should buy us enough time. I wish I’d thought of it sooner, like the noirs. I wish every boîtier had one.”

“What is done is done.”

The reality of the cyber jihad had never reached the level of Labib’s dreams or expectations. As he had once described it to Fajer, it would ideally have been unleashed on an unsuspecting West along with a major Al Qaeda attack against physical infrastructure or targets with symbolic value. But that had proved impossible to coordinate.

The lost years had not proven all bad, though. More and more Westerners were going online, depending on their home computers and the Internet to conduct business and banking. Over those years more and more banks had turned to electronic banking, since it greatly reduced their costs and increased their profits. In theory, a bank of the twenty-first century had no need for a physical office and needed precious few real employees. The profits of such an operation would be enormous, and banks throughout the United States and Europe were racing one another to be the first.

Computers and the Internet were one of the primary means for the expansion of Western culture and were instrumental to its military and economic dominance in the world. They were the means of the most powerful attack on Islam, perverting and tempting Muslims everywhere, launched since the days of the Prophet. Those who said Muslim extremists would never destroy an Internet they too relied on for communication and the spread of propaganda didn’t understand what was at stake. The Internet would be rebuilt in time, but in the meanwhile, the inflicted damage would be incalculable.

The military of the West depended more and more on computers and the connectivity of the Internet, as did Western civilian governments. In the United States nearly every government function was tied to the Internet. Social Security and the Fed, to name just two, could be accessed from the Internet. The list was almost endless, which was why Labib had elected to take a shotgun approach rather than to target specific organizations. He’d ordered a series of viruses crafted that could potentially infect every computer in America and every function tied to the Internet. He was trusting that technology would plant the electronic seed of his jihad everywhere.

The objective was to infect and destroy as much of the information and technology of the West as possible, all on the same day.

When Labib had finally devised the cyber-attack, separating what he could actually accomplish from fantasy, he had flown by helicopter and met with Fajer high in the Hejaz Mountains at the remote camp of members of their tribe. They’d consumed a traditional Arab meal consisting of al-kabsa (rice cooked with chicken in a pot), dates, hawayij (a spice-blended bread), followed by al haysa, a sweet dessert, while watching traditional dance, performed by the unmarried young women and girls of the tribe. Fajer had pointed out one of the girls, about ten years old, a fragile beauty with doelike eyes and a luminescent face. “My future wife,” he said. “I will keep her here so she is not contaminated by luxury.”

Labib thought the idea of raising a wife to form was disgusting but said nothing. Though the Prophet allowed four wives, Labib knew from personal experience that the consequences for all were not necessarily good and thought his brother knew this as well. Labib loved his wife and would never take another.

Late that night, as the camp settled into the evening, amid the smells of smoke and camel dung mixed with the sweet fragrance of cedar native to the region, the brothers sat by a dying fire as Labib told Fajer what the two of them would do for Allah.

“We will launch our cyber jihad in coordination with an Al Qaeda attack that will make the World Trade Center seem as nothing. We will destroy billions of dollars in assets, cripple the Internet on which the Western world depends, unleash floods, shut down — even destroy — power plants, including nuclear ones. Airplanes will fall from the sky. Millions of computers will be permanently destroyed, including those containing the records of pensions. The loss of key data will be incalculable. Faith will be shattered. Anger against their government will be greater than ever before. It will cause more damage than the first attack did. The West, the United States of America, will suffer a great defeat. Faith in Western technology will be crippled.

“In the Muslim world, those who have been mesmerized by false prophets will turn away, while our true brothers who have been tempted by the West for too long will rise up. In Iraq, Iran, and Syria, those fighting the infidel will be emboldened. It will take years to recover from this, years of retreat for the West. It will end with a new caliphate.”

Fajer’s eyes had blazed with fervor and Labib had never felt closer to him, or to Allah.

But now he knew some of what he had planned would not happen. There would be no Al Qaeda attack and he could not estimate in advance the full extent of the harm he would cause on September 11. He was certain it would be substantial; it might even be crippling.

Yet this was only to be the first attack. Already he and Dufour were planning a follow-up, which they would unleash before the United States had recovered from the first. Their assault from this time forward would be relentless and unstoppable.

The rear door opened and Fajer stepped in, neatly dressed in a dark charcoal Armani suit. Labib had had no idea his brother was in Paris. He grinned and stood up, taking his older brother into his arms. “As-salaam alaikum.”

Fajer smiled. “As-salaam.” He released his younger brother and greeted Dufour. “How goes it?” he asked in French.

“Excellent, I believe. We are in Allah’s hands,” the young man answered.

“Good.” Fajer found a seat. He could not remember when last he had felt so confident, so certain. Earlier that week he’d alerted George Carlton to look for any government knowledge of, or concern over, the name Superphreak, spelled with a ph. He’d received no alert and was feeling better about the security of the jihad.

“Infidels already die for Allah.” Fajer smiled warmly. “And many, many more will soon follow.”

46

As soon as he returned to his office, George Carlton regretted the half bottle of red wine he’d indulged in over a late lunch when he realized whom he was about to meet. He popped a breath mint and willed himself to be more alert.

In the years since 9/11, Carlton had experienced no guilt over his decision to sit on Jeff Aiken’s report. He’d always considered it too lurid and imprecise to have had any impact on his superiors. It would only have raised questions about the kind of operation he ran in those days, and nothing would have happened in response to it anyway. Look at that FBI agent in Phoenix. They’d ignored his repeated reports about Arabs learning to fly commercial airplanes but not wanting to practice takeoffs or landings. He’d been lucky not to get fired.

Only after he was at DHS did Carlton retrieve the report one afternoon and read it in detail for the first time since he’d received it. He’d been chilled by its prescience. In detail it had contained many inaccuracies, though it was difficult to say that the suggested targets hadn’t actually been intended, just not carried out. Of particular note was that Jeff had identified the operation as Al Qaeda.

To think that 9/11 would have been thwarted if the CIA and the FBI had actually acted on the report was fantasy. They’d had other information just as reliable and from sources better known to them, Carlton knew, and had done absolutely nothing. Passing the report up would have been pointless.

And, of course, once the attack actually took place, making certain no one who mattered knew about Jeff’s report had been vital to Carlton’s continued career. Jeff had assisted him in that regard by resigning, rather than going to his superiors.

Not that his superiors would have wanted to know such a report even existed. Carlton was sure there had been others — the Company was, after all, a big operation, and its primary mission was gathering information — and they’d all vanished as quickly as had Jeff’s.

No, all in all, Carlton felt no guilt over his actions. The federal bureaucracy was what it was. He’d have been a fool to have done other than what he’d done. Which didn’t make this meeting any easier. He knew Jeff had lost his fiancée in the Towers, and he’d dealt with him enough in the aftermath to know how emotional he was on the subject. But he liked seeing Daryl and welcomed almost any opportunity to meet with her. In fact, the more seriously he considered divorce, the more often he found his fantasies turning to the Scandinavian beauty.

Carlton smiled at the couple waiting for him and extended his hand. “So good to see you, Daryl. You’re lovely as ever. And Jeff … What can I say? It’s been too long.”

Daryl rose and shook Carlton’s hand, while Jeff ignored the offer. Carlton looked at Daryl as if to say he understood. “This way, please. Can I get you anything?”

Carlton’s corner office was spacious and elegantly appointed. His recent improvement in fortune had let him indulge himself a bit. The Persian carpet was a case in point. He’d spent $30,000 on it, though he’d told staff it was a gift from his wife, who everyone assumed was rich, but it had the effect on visitors he’d sought and had become a symbol to him of the life he soon expected to be enjoying.

Just through his door Carlton hesitated, thinking about holding the meeting from behind his enormous desk. He decided to use the small, intimate, in-office conference table instead. “Nothing then?” he said as they took chairs around the table.

Daryl was stunning as always, dressed today in a trim business suit with a brightly colored floral scarf at her neck, which set off her skin tone to perfection. Jeff, as always, was dressed as in tan chinos, Rockports, a polo shirt, and navy travel blazer. He looked much older than the last time Carlton had seen him. Carlton wondered if time had been as hard on himself.

“I’m all ears,” Carlton said, beaming at Daryl.

“I’ll get right to it then,” Daryl said. “Time is valuable and we both appreciate your agreeing to meet on such short notice. On August eleventh, CISU estimates several hundred computers nationwide were immobilized by various types of malware. There were a number of deaths. You’ll recall the auto worker and hospital deaths I spoke to you about two weeks ago.”

“I do.” Carlton assumed his serious demeanor.

“There were more than one dozen others, all in hospitals. I sent you a list of the activities adversely affected.”

“Yes, some accounting records, software in hospitals, air-traffic-control problems in New Mexico, I think, and some dams. Are those are the ones you mean?”

Jeff felt his skin crawl from merely being in Carlton’s presence. Coming here was a mistake.

Daryl nodded to Carlton. “And it was Arizona, though that’s not important. My team has been following up and we have a much better picture of what took place. I’ve asked Jeff to come because he’s the most knowledgeable on the Superphreak virus. It caused the computers—”

“Excuse me? Superphreak?” A jolt such as he’d never experienced before shot through Carlton’s body.

“That’s right. Does that mean something to you?” Carlton struggled to regain his composure, then shook his head. “We’ve concluded that most, perhaps all of these viruses,” Daryl continued, “were at least in part the creation of a hacker with the cyber handle of Superphreak, so that’s what we’re calling all of them. It’s in the report I filed with you last week.”

A report you never read, Jeff thought.

Carlton smiled and nodded. He struggled to focus on what he was hearing, but could not. In his head, all he could hear was a sound like the crashing of enormous waves. “Proceed, please,” he managed to say.

Daryl looked at him oddly. “Jeff knows Superphreak better than anyone and I’ll ask him to tell you about it in a moment, but for now my team has been able to identify four hundred and seventy-eight separate attacks by Superphreak, all occurring on August eleventh. We have reports of hundreds more that could be related, but we’re not including them unless they’re identical in operation or the word Superphreak has been found.”

“None since August eleventh? That’s encouraging,” Carlton said hopefully.

“I’m afraid not,” Jeff heard himself say. “It’s the opposite, in fact.” For an instant he wanted to strike the man.

“It sounds as if the danger has passed,” Carlton countered. “If I’m not correct, you’re describing a date-activated virus.”

Daryl said, “Yes, but in nearly every case we’ve determined that the date in some part of the affected computers was off by one month. They actually read September eleventh.”

For a moment Carlton felt no sensation at all in his body. It was as if he were being prepped for an operation, and the anesthesia had been released into his bloodstream. Only the day before he’d planted in Fort Dupont Park a copy of Daryl’s latest report, which he hadn’t bothered to read.

Daryl was still speaking. “… that all the infected computers are to be triggered on that date. We’ve drawn the obvious conclusion but have no proof. We’ve been focused on learning about it, deciding its scope, and persuading the vendors to act.”

Carlton cleared his throat. “If I recall correctly, you believe this is a Russian hacker, interested in financial gain.”

“Not quite,” Jeff corrected. “In fact, we’ve found no hint of a desire for financial gain. Financial and other records are targeted, but the effect is destruction, not theft. And Russians are well known to hire out to all comers.” He stared at Carlton to make certain he’d made his point. This was meaningless but he’d promised. “I learned from Daryl just this morning that Superphreak is programmed to avoid the IP addresses of security vendors and is only targeting U.S. and European computers. The viruses are also employing very sophisticated rootkits. I’ve been working nearly three weeks on Superphreak and I still don’t have a handle on it. In my case, the computers were infected with two viruses, one cloaked, both very destructive. One was meant to erase all data, the other to destroy the operating system. The second succeeded before the first was finished, but I haven’t been able to rid the system of the viruses.”

“We need signatures and patches,” Daryl said. “To get them we need the vendors to take this threat seriously.”

“They aren’t cooperating?” Carlton raised his eyebrow.

“Not particularly. Their honeypots haven’t turned it up because it’s ignoring them, and the rootkits are hiding them from detection on their customer systems.” Daryl paused and looked closely at Carlton to be sure he understood the significance of what she was saying. In a firm voice she said, “I need you to lean on them.”

“I don’t know how much influence I can have, if US-CERT is having no effect.”

“It can’t hurt, George, and we haven’t much time.”

“What about other agencies? The FBI?”

Daryl nodded. “The increase in computer-related incidents hasn’t gone unnoticed. I understand a report was placed on the president’s desk two days ago. He’s referred the matter to the FBI and asked for a detailed report next month.”

“That’s it then,” Carlton said.

“It’s not enough, George. This is all happening so fast there isn’t time for this kind of leisure in responding. Clearly they don’t understand the extent of this thing or the president would not have asked for a report; he’d have demanded action. You know how this works, we all do. They’ll want to prove everything is connected and not random. They’ll require solid evidence, not indicators. They’ll be more concerned with covering their backs than with dealing with this hot potato. And the FBI is hardly the right agency to deal with this kind of threat.”

“Who is, in your opinion?”

“The Division of Counter Cyberterrorism. That’s you, George. That’s why we’re here.”

Carlton was sweating now. He licked his upper lip. For long seconds he remained motionless. All he could think was Superphreak!

Jeff leaned forward. “You’re not going to sit on this too, are you?” Daryl looked sharply at him but Jeff paid no attention to her; his eyes focused on Carlton like lasers.

Carlton drew himself up. “I’ve never sat on anything important. Despite what you think, Jeff.”

Jeff laughed, the sound coming out more like a sharp bark. “You make me sick! I gave you the World Trade Center Towers as targets, the Pentagon, for God’s sake! I gave you the names of five of the hijackers and you did nothing!”

Carlton seemed to recoil. “It’s true, but you gave me a lot of unrelated information as well. But that’s not the point. I passed the report up. I can’t be held responsible if no one believed you.”

Jeff shot to his feet. “You son of a bitch!”

Daryl stood up, taking control. “Jeff! Leave this room now! I’ll take care of this from here.”

Jeff stood immobile, then abruptly turned away and walked stiffly out the door. Carlton leaned back, removed a handkerchief, and wiped his brow. “Thank you. I thought he was going to assault me.”

“But he didn’t,” she said. “Are you all right?”

Carlton drew a deep breath, still staring at the closed door, then slowly released it. “Yes. You see how emotional he can be, though.”

“I don’t want his anger to temper my message,” Daryl warned. “I need for you to lean on the security vendors, to get as much of the government moving on this as possible.”

“You think it’s that serious?” Carlton struggled to regain some composure. He was finding it impossible to get his mind on track.

“I think in eleven days we’re going to wish to God we’d done something more. You can be absolutely certain people are going to ask questions. At the least, we need to show that we did everything we could.”

“Yes, yes,” Carlton hurried to reassure her, “I understand and agree. I’ll see to it at once. Today, in fact.”

“Thank you.” Daryl gazed at Carlton, who’d behaved oddly for most of this meeting, and wondered if she could trust him. “I’m going to see to Jeff now. He’s in no state to be left alone.” She rose. “I guess I asked too much bringing him here. I apologize for that outburst.”

“It’s all right. I respect how he feels. I just wish he could see my position.”

A grateful Daryl shook Carlton’s hand, then left his office. For once, he didn’t check out her ass the minute she turned her back to him.

Carlton staggered over to his desk. His mind was whirling. How could I be so stupid? he thought. Frantic, he replayed his last conversation with Fajer. He had to act, had to do something!

Jeff wasn’t outside Carlton’s office or in the lobby. Instead, Daryl found him leaning against her car in the parking lot, staring in disbelief at his BlackBerry.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

Jeff looked up at her, stunned. “I just received a message from the IT manager’s assistant at the law firm in New York. Sue Tabor was found murdered this morning. She was in a hotel room with the firm’s managing partner. They’d both been tortured.”

47

Brian Manfield spent the day in two different movie theaters. He’d found them to be as safe a refuge as there was when on a mission. Movie theaters were dark, with a large room to disappear in. They also had several exits; the police would have to be certain the man they wanted was inside to cover them all.

And he liked American hot dogs. He’d been told the very best were sold at baseball games, but he’d never attended one. He found it difficult to believe any could be better than those he’d enjoyed that day.

Manfield’s mind had not been on any of the movies that played across the screen, though. Instead, he’d relived the experiences of the previous night. Extracting the information from them had not been difficult. Threat alone had been sufficient to learn everything they knew. Once satisfied, he’d slit both their throats before taking a shower.

They were long dead as he dressed, making certain no blood was on his clothes. The hallway had been clear when he’d left the room, and there was no security camera to avoid. A clerk had been at the front desk, but Manfield had turned his face and was on the street within a moment.

He finished his third hot dog of the day and wondered what they put in them. They had to be unhealthy, but he didn’t care. Wonderful. He glanced at his watch. It was time.

Outside, the city was beginning to slow from the bustle of the day. He walked eight blocks to the Hotel Luxor, glad to stretch and get the exercise, then positioned himself in the shadows of the alley across the street, checking first to make certain he had the alley to himself. Removing the pistol, he screwed the silencer onto it, then slipped it into his right jacket pocket. He had a good description, but it could apply to any number of men. He’d need to be certain first. From here he could cover both directions to the hotel. He hoped the man would be back soon.

There was much to do and, as always, little time in which to do it.

48

The two-bedroom apartment was spacious and well lit, with a southern exposure. It was new, and empty of all furniture, which only heightened the sense of size. It was everything Boris had promised.

“It will be like living in a gymnasium,” Ivana said.

The building manager who was showing it to them smiled agreeably.

From his wheelchair, Vladimir said, “It will fill up fast. My stuff will take up an entire bedroom.”

“Everything is to European standards,” the building manager said. “High-speed cable in every room. It’s all very modern.” He was a short, unshaven man, the kind of “new” Russian who’d secretly become rich in the last decade.

Down a hallway they heard laughter. “It seems a bit noisy,” Ivana said.

The man shrugged. “Not so much. We do have a few lighthearted types, but it is not an issue. They are reasonable. You will find this as quiet as any such building in Moscow.”

“When is it available?” Vladimir asked. If he wanted silence, they would have to move to a dacha in the country.

“Now, of course. Today. I will need your decision and the deposit if you decide to take it, before you leave. I have others scheduled to see the apartment later.”

“Perhaps we could have a moment to talk in private?” Ivana said.

“Of course. I’ll return in ten minutes.”

Ivana walked about the open space, stepping briefly into each room. “What do you think?” she asked her husband, who was sitting in the middle of the living room in his wheelchair.

“It will do. It’s expensive, though.”

“You said you wanted more room. You said you have the money. I can keep looking, but this is the first suitable place I’ve found in six months.”

Vladimir said nothing as he fumbled a cigarette out of a package and lit it. “I’d like to take it. I don’t think I can stand our place any longer. I feel like I’m suffocating there.”

Ivana thought of the rent, more than she made in an entire month. She couldn’t possibly make the payment on her own. “Can we afford it? Really?” She still wasn’t certain her husband was telling her the truth.

“Yes,” Vladimir said irritably. “I wouldn’t say take it otherwise. Why don’t you listen to me?”

“And what if State Security comes crashing in some night? What then?” Her grandfather had vanished in that very way. It had been the worst night of her life, one that came back to her again and again in her nightmares. She’d watched her grandmother wither away and die the following year.

“That won’t happen. I’m not working for the Mafia. How many times must I tell you? I’m not breaking laws.”

“You have. You used to brag to me about it.”

“That was a long time ago. It was stupid of me to do that, and I don’t think there were laws about it then anyway.”

“But you were glad to do it. I remember how you told all your computer friends. Then I learned hackers used what you learned and ruined computers or stole records. It was terrible. It’s like you are a burglar or something. I want an honest life, Vlad. After all I’ve done, haven’t I earned one?”

Vladimir lit a cigarette. “Yes, you have. Believe me, I’ve told you everything.” Ten minutes later he counted out one thousand euros into the sweaty hands of the manager.

49

Jeff and Daryl said little on the shuttle back to New York City. Daryl had taken a window seat and stared morosely into the early-evening sky. Jeff withdrew into his own thoughts, trying to make sense of the murders.

Torture suggested someone wanted information. What could an IT manager know that would be of interest to anyone? Or the managing partner of a law firm? It made no sense, unless it was a psychopath. Difficult as it was to believe such people existed, he knew they did.

He couldn’t help but wonder if the murders were connected to Superphreak in some way. No one killed anyone over a virus, but this was no ordinary virus. The idea struck him as ridiculous, yet plausible at the same time, causing him to feel even more disoriented.

As soon as the plane landed, Jeff called the IT Center directly at Fischerman, Platt & Cohen. He’d tried several times before boarding with no luck. This time Harold answered. He was clearly distraught and could scarcely speak, but managed to convey that he was still working his way through backups.

“I’m going to the law firm,” Jeff said to Daryl as they walked toward ground transportation. “Want to come?”

“If you think I can help.”

“I do. And I’d like you to come.” He could use the emotional support, he realized.

Traffic as they entered the city was heavy as it made the transition into the weekend. The feel of Manhattan was different as night descended, it seemed to Jeff. Or perhaps that was due to the murders. Suddenly, his world seemed darker than it had been since 9/11. With a certainty that startled him, he grasped the connection. What had begun that terrible day in 2001 was continuing; events that had cost him so much then were now poised to engulf his world again.

He placed a hand on Daryl’s shoulder, which seemed thinner and more vulnerable than ever. “We need to be careful,” he warned her, seated with him in the back of a cab.

She turned to face him.

“There may very well be a connection between Superphreak and the murders.”

Daryl looked at him as if he’d just slapped her. The car bobbed as it hit a dip, then droned as it crossed a bridge with a metal surface. Jeff held her gaze. “I don’t believe this is simply about hackers. It’s clear to me it’s something much bigger.” Her eyes grew round as she took in what he was saying.

A few moments later they arrived at the offices of Fischerman, Platt & Cohen, taking the elevator to the IT Center. Perhaps three associates were at their desks. Otherwise the office was darkened and empty. Compared to when he’d first arrived, it seemed all but abandoned to Jeff.

They knocked, then entered. Harold was there, his young face set with determination. He looked up from his computer screen with watery eyes. “Any luck?” Jeff asked. He’d expressed his condolences by telephone earlier when he’d asked Harold to stay over that day.

“Yeah. I think I’ve located it.” Harold looked tired, but determined to do all he could to help. He’d had a crush on Sue. She’d been smart, knew computers, and treated him like an equal. Her death left him feeling empty.

“Good. Show me, then let us get to work.” When he introduced Daryl, Harold waved at her without interest. “How are you doing?” Jeff asked as Harold typed, even though he knew Sue’s young assistant had been devastated by her murder.

“I’m glad you gave me something to do. Sue always ran the show here and gave me instructions. I was lost.” He looked at Jeff. “I guess I should be looking for a job or something.”

“Probably. How’s the firm taking the losses?”

“Pretty bad. Things weren’t looking so great, now this. Some people…” Harold’s voice trailed off and he stopped typing. Jeff placed a comforting hand on his shoulder. “Some people aren’t so nice, you know?” Harold continued, his voice wavering. “They said, ‘Good,’ when we got word, as if Sue and Mr. Greene had it coming for messing up. I just hate them!” Harold finished typing while choking back tears.

“Go home, Harold,” Jeff said, squeezing his shoulder. “Get some rest. Thank you for your help. I know how much Sue valued you and what you did. Try and remember the good, okay? It will help a little.”

The young man nodded, looked at Daryl in farewell, then gathered his knapsack and left.

“What are we doing?” Daryl asked, as Jeff sat at the monitor.

“I’m trying to find out what got Sue killed.”

Harold had left the computer open in one of the chat rooms Sue had visited. But Jeff found that he couldn’t really concentrate. Always in the past he’d been able to put from his mind any concerns he had. In fact, he’d buried himself in work after Cynthia’s death primarily to block the pain.

But he found he was still stunned at the murder of Sue Tabor and Joshua Greene. He’d liked Sue. She’d been attractive, bright, and dedicated. He’d even come to like Greene, though it was now more apparent why he’d dropped by the IT Center so often. Still, he’d never pressed Jeff unreasonably for results as his clients often did. He’d seemed to understand the enormous job with which Jeff had been tasked. He was horrified at the thought of both of them tortured and murdered. Neither of them had deserved what was done to them.

The extent of the evil he and Daryl were confronting threatened to overwhelm him. Memories, both real and imagined, of Cynthia and the awful death she’d suffered crowded his mind. But when he turned toward Daryl, the sight of her quietly working at Harold’s computer, her attention totally focused on the screen in front of her, had an unexpected calming effect on him. She’s right, Jeff thought, and she’s exactly the person I want by my side. Turning back to his own screen, he gave it his full attention.

His time on Sue’s computer was both tedious and unproductive. If Jeff had thought anything would jump out at him, he’d been mistaken. Shortly before midnight, Jeff and Daryl left the law offices. Daryl suggested they eat but Jeff shook his head. “No. I’m not hungry. I’ll join you if you want, though.”

“I’m not really hungry, either,” Daryl said.

Both of them were resisting feeling defeated, in over their head. “Let’s walk,” Jeff said. Instead of taking a cab, the couple strolled to the Hotel Luxor, which Jeff had picked because it was only a few blocks from where he’d be working. The night was pleasantly cool after the closed space of the IT Center. Servers had this habit of warming every space they occupied, and their constant electrical workings charged air in ways that were unnatural. It was good to be outside again, and Jeff wondered for a moment if he wasn’t throwing his life away working in closed rooms.

At the hotel he held the door for Daryl, then collected his key from the night clerk, who’d been reading the paper. The pair rode the elevator to his room.

Across the street Manfield spotted them at once. It had been a long seven hours to wait. He hated stakeouts but they were, he knew, essential to success. The street had been quiet for more than an hour before he’d noticed this particular man. As Manfield watched the man enter the hotel, he was nearly certain he was the one. The man had done all right for himself, Manfield allowed, as he waited for them to take the elevator. The blonde with him was quite a dish.

When the couple vanished through the closing doors, Manfield rushed across the street, ran toward the elevator, stopped, then muttered to himself. Spotting the night clerk, he behaved as if he’d just had an idea. “Listen,” he said, as he approached the counter, “wasn’t that Jeff Aiken I just saw? We were supposed to meet for drinks, but I was late. He’d mentioned he was staying here, so I tried to catch him.”

The clerk was elderly, with a thick thatch of white hair and pale blue eyes. He’d been a doorman here before his legs gave out. “I couldn’t say, sir. Would you like me to check if your Mr. Aiken is a guest?”

“Would you?” Manfield said with a warm smile. “That would be great.”

The clerk checked the computer. “Yes, he’s a guest.”

“Wonderful! What room and I’ll just pop up?”

“Oh, I can’t give you the room number, sir.”

“But I already told you,” Manfield protested. “We’re old friends and I just missed him for drinks. He’s expecting me.” It had worked in the past and there was no harm trying.

“I’ll be glad to call him if you like. You can speak and make whatever arrangements you want.”

Mansfield turned pensive. “Well, I’d hate to awaken him at this hour if I was wrong. He can be quite a bear.”

“Perhaps you’d like to leave a message then?”

“No, no. I’ll just give him a ring first thing. Perhaps he’ll have time for breakfast. You’ve been most helpful.”

As Manfield left, the clerk stared after him, wondering what that had been all about. Certainly not what the man with the English accent claimed. He considered calling the guest and informing him, but the man was right about one thing. People hated being awakened at this hour. Instead, he turned back to his racing form.

50

George Carlton stretched out in his first-class seat and stared at the back of the seat in front of him. It had been a hectic day since his disturbing meeting with Jeff Aiken and Daryl Haugen. First he’d attempted his emergency phone number to Fajer al Dawar. The Saudi had insisted on his accepting it, and Carlton had repeatedly refused before relenting. He’d distrusted having the number at all, feared any direct connection, but had finally settled on memorizing it. Until now, he’d never used the number.

That afternoon he’d paid cash for a prepaid cell phone, then bought long-distance minutes. He’d called Fajer and had after several attempts been forced to leave the cell phone’s number and a message that the man call him at once. Then he’d stayed away from his office, pacing in a shopping-mall parking lot, waiting on the return call.

Their conversation had taken place late that afternoon and had done nothing to resolve Carlton’s concerns — though candidly, he had to admit his reluctance to speak frankly over an open line probably made that impossible. But there just had to be a plausible explanation other than the one he’d concluded. Finally, he’d insisted on a face-to-face meeting, telling the Saudi it was most urgent.

Fajer had replied, “I’m only too glad to meet with you. But you must understand, I am in Paris now on business. I cannot possibly get to the United States for another month at the earliest. I assure you there is no need for concern.”

“Then I’ll come to you,” Carlton had answered. “I’ll call this number when I touch down tomorrow. Be certain you answer it.”

A hectic few hours followed as Carlton instructed his assistant to contact the travel office and arrange his priority departure. The young man had been surprised at the request since from what he could see his boss never did anything on impulse. “What do I say is the reason?” he’d asked.

Carlton had given this only cursory thought. “I must meet with my European counterpart at once. Set up a meeting first thing Monday morning, but I’m leaving tonight. I don’t want to meet suffering from jet lag.”

He’d then spent half an hour poring over reports, searching for some justification for this abrupt trip. He finally located one that might make the case. In any event, he didn’t abuse travel privileges. His boss might not like it, but Carlton figured he could sell it if it came to that.

On the airplane sleep wouldn’t come. He’d had two double Scotches since takeoff but they’d had no effect. Only now, as Carlton turned his head and stared into nothingness, did he realize he’d neglected to tell his wife he was leaving the country.

51

There had been a moment when Jeff and Daryl left the law firm, as they’d walked those few blocks to the Hotel Luxor, when Daryl knew she should have taken a taxi to her own hotel. She’d waited for him to say something, to thank her for her help, to arrange to meet the next day, but instead he’d walked to his hotel talking the entire time about what he’d just learned. She’d meant to say good-night, but for the first time since they’d met, she sensed, on some emotional level, he needed her to stay.

“Now we know Sue was ‘Dragon Lady,’” Jeff said as they stepped onto the street relieved at last to have some concrete information. “I traced her back two weeks to her first posting with it. She’d put up more than a dozen since the first, listing an e-mail address for Superphreak to contact her at.”

“What came of it?” Daryl asked.

“Nothing, from what I can see. There were a lot of crackpot replies but only a handful read as if the writer had had dealings with this Superphreak guy.”

“What did they say?” she asked, hoping this was good news.

“He’s supposed to be some kind of hacker legend. A few years ago he found two vulnerabilities in Windows Vista shortly after it was released. He posted the details before Microsoft learned of them, so it was months before they released the patches.”

“That’s not protocol. He was supposed to advise Microsoft.”

Jeff snorted. “Sure, but by publishing earlier he gained credibility with the cracker community as someone who doesn’t go totally by the rules. Since then, though, he’s become pretty reclusive.”

Despite herself, Daryl found herself intrigued by the hacker’s obvious brilliance. Why can’t people like that use their brains for the common good? she thought. “What do the hackers say about him?”

“He’s Russian, so we had that right. And he’s a genius in writing certain viruses.”

Daryl grimaced. “That’s no surprise.”

“Lately his specialty has been rootkits.” Since Jeff had first confirmed Sue had made indirect contact with Superphreak, he’d had an idea and decided now was the time to approach Daryl with it. “You know, it’s occurred to me that if we could talk to him and convince him, by hook or by crook, to give us all the rootkits and variants he’s written, we’d be weeks, even months, ahead of this. The vendors could do a rush job on signatures and patches.”

“Then I’ve got good news for you. We’ve got a name.” Daryl was grinning.

“How?”

“My team has been hard at work tracing the usage of the word Superphreak. We didn’t have much luck in an open search but got lucky in the NSA’s archives of closed hacker forums and chat rooms. We found a key post from several years ago when a hacker was chatting with Superphreak and called him Vlad. Then we searched for a Vlad and came up with over a dozen, but only one of them with a post related to the same technical data discussed in Superphreak chats. His last name was in the e-mail address in the forum posting: vkoskov@zhtskky.ru. There was only one hacker forum posting using this account, but our search found it, which is why they say that everything you ever did is somewhere on the Net. After that it was simple.”

“I would think he’d have been more careful,” Jeff said.

“This was several years ago. I don’t think he was giving security much thought then. His name appears to be Vladimir Koskov, and I have an address for him in Moscow.”

“Do you think it’s valid?” Jeff wanted to believe this was their first real break, but it seemed too easy, too simple.

“Probably.” Daryl nodded. “Or at least I think it’s where he was living when he registered that first e-mail account.”

Jeff paused a moment. “Someone should pay him a visit.”

“I’ve already made the request, but it will be weeks before I get a response through channels, and even then it might not be a positive one. They have to go through the embassy in Moscow, and I’ll be told they have better things to do.”

“We don’t have weeks!” Jeff exclaimed. “Hasn’t anyone figured that out yet?”

“Sure. You and me. That’s about it. And the people we work with.”

At that moment they reached the Hotel Luxor. They entered the lobby, where Jeff retrieved his key, and she went with him upstairs, all without either of them acknowledging what they were doing.

“Drink?” he said when they entered the room.

“Yes. Bourbon, if you’ve got it.”

Jeff opened the minibar, dug around, then produced a bottle of Jim Beam. “I can get ice, if you’d like.”

“No need. And I’ll drink it from the bottle, so forget about a glass.”

He laughed, handed her the small bottle, then dug out a beer. He popped the top, held it out for a toast. “To getting this asshole.” She smiled wanly and they drank. The beer tasted good going down, and for a second he considered drowning himself in an ocean of pilsner. But he knew that was no answer, having drunk his fair share in the months after Cynthia’s death. And for the first time since this while ordeal began, he had some good news to hang on to, maybe even act on. Suddenly, he was also aware that a beautiful woman, one to whom he was very drawn, was sitting there with him in his hotel room. And he was happy about it. He sat in a chair beside the small breakfast table and looked directly into her serene face.

“I haven’t missed the fact that you’re here in my hotel room,” he said, finally understanding that though Cynthia was still with him, she was now only a memory, albeit a lovely one no one could ever take from him. She’d been perhaps the most practical person he’d ever known, and he knew that she’d approve of where he found himself now.

Daryl sat on a nearby armchair, sipped her drink, and said, “I thought maybe you figured there was a cord connecting me to you, or something.”

“It’s the ‘or something.’” He drank again, his mind back on their immediate problem. “I was thinking about what you said before, about backtracking to find out the identity of Superphreak. I bet that’s how they found Sue Tabor. I traced the e-mail address she used, and it was registered in her name with the law firm address. There’s so much on the Internet now if you know where and how to look.”

“Of course. With that, they could have found a photo, even located some bio information on her.”

Jeff nodded. “‘The Internet: Friend or Foe?’” he intoned. “Sounds like a bad evening-news segment.”

Daryl gave a small smile. “So you really think that whoever is in back of this avalanche of viruses killed her? There are dozens of people working on this.”

“Sure, but her they knew. And all they need to do is just slow things down. There isn’t a lot of time left, remember? They wouldn’t know how important she was to our effort, but if they’re of that mind-set, where’s the harm in killing her? What do they have to lose? And she was the one asking about Superphreak. No one else was.”

Daryl shivered. “It gives me the willies, if you’re right. This means they have assassins available to kill people.”

“If I’m right, it looks like they do. But we can’t know that for sure.”

Daryl took another pull on the bottle. “Okay, killing her might make some sense, but why kill her boss? He was just a lawyer, for God’s sake! You start down that path, where does it end?”

Jeff shrugged. “Because they were together.”

“You mean he got caught at the wrong place at the wrong time?”

“Probably.” Jeff thought back to his meetings with Joshua Greene. The man didn’t deserve his fate. “Consider what we’ve discovered up to now. We have dozens of variants, most encrypted and buried within operating systems protected by rootkits. So far nearly all of them are triggered by the date September 11. And look at all the targets, including the ones we know and the possible ones. We’re talking Wall Street, banks, the Fed, Social Security, to name a few. How about the power grid? You know how sensitive it is to tweaking, and it can be down for weeks, months even. You mentioned a nuclear power plant crashing. And there has to be a whole lot more I haven’t even thought of. Not to mention that response systems require using the Internet, and systems that route the Internet might be killed off.”

Despite himself, Jeff found his anger rising. “For me the deciding point was when you said that the variants were targeting IP addresses for the United States and Europe. Given that, plus the number of people who must be involved, this attack is every bit as real as flying planes into buildings. The potential loss of life and economic meltdown is tremendous. It’s what they were after on 9/11. They didn’t pick the World Trade Center by accident. They knew how much disruption it would cause. It’s as if they’re after what makes Western civilization what it is.”

Daryl nodded. “We’ve become so dependent on computers the Western economy would grind to a standstill if what we think is true. When computers only replaced what we did by hand, it wasn’t so bad. You can always go back to doing it manually. Those hospitals I saw were forced to return to old procedures. They don’t have enough staff to handle all the paperwork, and no one working there now remembers how it was done. They had to reinvent the system and made a lot of mistakes in the process.”

“But in too many cases, computers are doing things we can’t do by hand,” Jeff pointed out. “You’ve got computers instructing other computers. We can’t replace that with a human being. And once we rebuild, we’ll still be stuck with an Internet system, and a host of computers, we can’t trust.”

Jeff finished his beer and opened another, but with a shake of her head Daryl refused another bourbon. “If you transfer what’s happened to Fischerman, Platt and Cohen to any number of similarly sized businesses,” Jeff said, “not just us but the world will go into a depression unlike any we’ve ever previously experienced. I can’t imagine the level of unemployment and the resulting social implications.”

“It could be the zero day to end all zero days,” Daryl agreed. “This time, we don’t really know how extensive this’ll be, until zero day.”

“And it’s been going on for months, at least. Have you ever heard about an operation of this scope before?” She shook her head again. “Let’s face it, we aren’t even in the position of the little Dutch boy putting his finger in the dike. We can do all we can for the next ten days and a cyber Apocalypse will happen regardless. There are so many variants, with such a high level of sophistication, we’ll never solve this, not in time.” Jeff’s face hardened as he made his decision. “We’ve got to get to the source so we can start on the countermeasures.”

“Koskov?” Daryl said, her eyes opening in disbelief. “But we aren’t secret agents. I wouldn’t know how to go about it. I’ve sent my request. That’s all I can do.”

The two stared at each other while a feeling of sadness bordering on despair slowly crept over each of them. Wordlessly, Daryl reached out to Jeff. He took her in his arms and held her tightly. This had been a long time in coming. He kissed her lightly on the forehead for the first time. His lips moved down her cheek. Then their lips met. He felt her stir and they kissed more deeply; it was as if a wall between them had suddenly vanished, as if they were one. She gripped him fiercely and the tenderness turned to passion. He ran his hands along her body, and then she murmured, “Get the light, Jeff. I’m really very shy.”

52

Two hundred and seven hours to go, Fajer al Dawar thought. After so long, so many frustrations, and so many disappointments, not much time was left until all the work would be realized. “Allahu Akbar,” he muttered.

In these long months since he and Labib had launched their cyber jihad, Fajer had found himself increasingly torn asunder. The part of him that he thought of as Arab relished his role as warrior for Allah. The destruction of the West was the holy goal of all Arabs, he believed. The Prophet had decreed that Islam would, by force of arms, be the one true religion of the world. America and the West were the only significant obstacles to accomplishing that. And they were weak. Like an infant dependent on its mother’s breast, the West now fed on computers and the Internet. Take them away and they’d be helpless.

Fajer would show them that Arabs were strong, that there was no God but Allah. For all his personal wealth and power, he was secretly certain that Westerners despised him. The women he bought pretended enthusiasm, but he knew they looked at him with contempt because he was an Arab and a Muslim, just as did the men with whom he did business. Without his money the West would condemn him to the most menial of places. Soon, very soon, he would set all that right.

George Carlton stepped off the plane at Charles de Gaulle Airport and punched in Fajer’s number. Answer, you bastard, answer!

“Oui?”

“I’ve arrived. Where do we meet?”

“How was your trip, George?”

“Fine, just fine,” Carlton grunted. “Where do we meet?”

“You know the Notre Dame Cathedral?”

“Of course.”

“Take a taxi to the left bank of the river, immediately opposite the cathedral. You will see a small park just east of the famous Chat Noir cabaret. I will be seated there awaiting you. Say in one hour? And do not be so agitated. There is no reason. You have wasted a trip to a most beautiful city. Perhaps after you have had some rest, I can show you the sights.”

Carlton clicked off the phone.

It seemed to Fajer that fall would come early to Paris this year. He sat on a bench at the small park and smoked a Habana cigar as he waited for the American. The triangular park touched the street beside the Seine. On the other two sides the expanse of grass and trees touched three-story apartment buildings, with two narrow alleys running away at an angle. Notre Dame loomed just across the river. Fajer wondered idly how it would look remade as a mosque.

Carlton had been useful over the years, but never so much as in these last few months. Until two weeks ago, Fajer and Labib had known with certainty that no one in the U.S. government who mattered had detected their jihad. The information had allowed Labib to launch ever more sophisticated malware into the electronic maze of the Internet. He’d been willing to risk creating a far larger pool of hackers than he’d originally contemplated; today ten times as many viruses and variants were in the ether as they’d intended, all thanks to George Carlton.

Fajer had not been surprised at the ease with which the American had been seduced and bought. His experience in business was that all Westerners were for sale. It was merely a question of finding the price or that lever unique to the individual. It wasn’t all that difficult. With government officials, it was even easier.

All and all, Fajer was pleased with Carlton, but this sudden meeting was troubling. Two weeks before the American had passed on information that told him US-CERT was targeting their viruses. Fajer had been agitated at the news, but Labib had assured him it made no difference at this point. Still, it was disturbing.

Two Frenchwomen walked by Fajer on their way to work and he eyed them appreciatively. He had to admit the women of Paris had a certain grace and fashion sense he’d never seen elsewhere. It was as if the women in London and New York aped their French sisters.

Fajer wondered for a moment what it would be like in Paris on September 12. Though the bulk of the attack was against the United States, many of the viruses also targeted European computers, and of course the entire structure of the Internet would be under attack. Would he notice anything from this same bench? Would there be chaos in the streets? Or would the damage be confined to office buildings and financial institutions? He’d planned to be home in Riyadh for the event but now reconsidered. Why deny himself the pleasure of witnessing disaster firsthand?

A taxi pulled to a stop fifty feet away, and he saw Carlton climb out. Paying the driver, Carlton looked about, squinting in the morning sun, spotted Fajer, then walked toward him. The man was still wearing the suit he’d flown in and had not shaved. He looked angry.

Fajer stood as Carlton approached. “Good morning,” he said, extending his hand.

Carlton ignored it and dropped to the bench. Fajer joined him.

“Did you have a good flight?”

“No,” Carlton almost shouted. “Tell me what’s going on, Fajer! What have you got me into?”

Americans, Fajer thought with disgust, always in a rush. “I’ve already told you. You supply information from time to time and are well paid for it.”

“What about this Superphreak you’re concerned with? What’s that?”

Fajer examined his cigar for a moment. “It is part of the financial operation I told you about last summer.”

“How?” Carlton glared at the Arab.

“Are you telling me the name is now of interest to your government?”

“I’m telling you nothing. I’m demanding answers.”

“I already told you. It’s distasteful, but I’m compelled to fulfill a family—”

“Cut the bullshit. This is an operation, isn’t it?”

“Operation? I don’t know how you are using the word.”

“As in a ‘mission,’” Carlton said, nearly as if talking to a child. “You’re involved with people planting viruses on the Internet, viruses meant to cause harm, not collect financial information. It’s some kind of attack, isn’t it?”

“Tell me what you know.” Fajer had not expected this, not now, not when he and his brother were so close. He could not imagine what had roused this man’s suspicion.

“No, Fajer, you’re going to tell me,” Carlton demanded. “I told you once but I don’t think you were listening. I may be a little bent but I’m no traitor. I’m getting reports about the planting of a massive number of viruses in computers all over America. They’ve all got the name Superphreak in them, and that’s the same name you’re suddenly interested in. I insist you tell me what’s really going on.”

Fajer drew a discreet, calming breath. “It’s as I told you. The man who created these things apparently uses that name. I have only just learned about it and thought it a more effective means for you to detect this financial business I told you about.”

Carlton looked about them out of habit. “I’m no fool, Fajer. You’re destroying me.” Carlton realized he was sweating and fought the urge to run his bare hand across his forehead.

Clearly the American knew more than he was letting on. The Arab dropped his cigar to the ground and stepped on it with his shoe. “Come with me. There are too many eyes for this to take place here.” He stood and began walking through the small park into one of the two narrow alleys. Carlton reluctantly followed, hesitating before entering the confined space. “What else is it you know?” Fajer demanded.

Carlton glared at the man. “These viruses. They’ve got the name Superphreak, all right. What you didn’t tell me was they’re triggered to go on September 11. Does the date sound familiar to you?”

“My God!” Fajer said, feigning shock. “The idiots! My friend, I know nothing about this. I think it’s someone’s idea of a bad joke. The people doing this are Arabs, I’ve made no secret of that. One of the computer experts writing the code surely picked that date for its symbolic value, but these are not terrorists, I assure you. They are simply thieves. You can relax. Everything is fine.”

For the first time since his meeting with Daryl and Jeff, Carlton felt doubt. Could Fajer be right? Was that all this was? Some Arab hacker filled with a bit of zealousness had picked 9/11 just to make a point?

“I told you,” Fajer continued smoothly, “that the code is being planted in thousands of computers and will be triggered to execute at the same time. As I understand it, a virus that is not functioning is harder to detect, so they want them all to launch on the same day. Some zealot picked that date for its irony. You know how young men can be. I’m sorry it has caused you this needless worry.”

Carlton struggled to remember what he’d been told and what he’d read. “These viruses — they destroy financial records, they don’t steal them.”

Fajer pursed his lips. “They’ve sent out a great many. I suppose some might have interacted with certain computers in a destructive way or more might have been destructive in application, but I assure you that is not their purpose. They are not meant to destroy the computers.”

Now it came back to him. How could he have forgotten? He’d been a fool for ever trusting this slick Arab son of a bitch. “What about airports?” Carlton demanded. “And dams? These Superphreak viruses are interfering with them, and that has nothing to do with finances. How do you talk your way out of that?”

Fajer sighed. “I don’t, my friend, I don’t. You should have just taken the money.” With that he drew the shafra from the small of his back and plunged it deeply into Carlton’s stomach as if punching him, then pulled it across his midsection with savage force. He watched the American drop to the ground with scarcely a sound, move his mouth like a fish out of water. Carlton’s eyes slowly rolled up as he struggled to breathe, lying in a growing pool of red.

“You should have taken the money and kept your mouth shut. No one would have known. And there is nothing you could have done to stop this.” Fajer wiped the knife on Carlton’s clothes, then put it away.

Fajer’s cell phone rang. “Oui?” The Arab listened, then gave rapid instructions in English. By the time he’d finished, George Carlton was dead.

53

The sun had already been up for some time when Jeff awoke. In the bathroom, he washed his face quietly.

Returning to the bedroom, he sat at the desk chair, where he could see Daryl clearly. In this time of exhibitionist tattoos and body piercing, with the supposed equality of the sexes, it seemed to Jeff that many women were just mimicking drunken sailors on shore leave in their expressions of independence. One of the consequences, he believed, was that men of his generation, and those of the one coming up, seemed no longer to respect women or hold them in the esteem they once had.

He’d always admired Daryl’s fine mind and hard work as a professional. He’d been aware of the chemistry between them from the first moment they’d met. But since Cynthia’s death he’d been hollow, unable to react to any woman in an emotional way. Sure, he’d had relationships, but his heart wasn’t in any of them. He’d thought that part of him had died with her. Now he realized that it had not. His attraction to Daryl had been so gradual, so natural, awareness of it seemed to have snuck up on him like the first breath of spring after a particularly harsh winter.

Daryl lay now with her head on a pillow, her face turned toward the morning light entering through the blinds. She looked as calm and innocent as a five-year-old child taking a nap. Her elegant, lean body was stretched out, only partially covered by a white sheet. Her right breast rested against the bed; the other was half-covered by the sheet in a provocative manner, as if a photographer had posed her. Under the cover was the rise of her hip, then the delicate line of her legs. It was a breathtaking sight.

Daryl licked her lips. “You’re staring at me,” she said without opening her eyes.

“Maybe.”

“No maybe about it. You’re embarrassing me.”

Jeff crossed his fingers. “I’ll stop.”

She rolled on her back, then kept turning until she stopped on her left side. Her back, Jeff decided, was as beautiful as the rest of her. “Promise me something,” she said, her voice soft and low.

“Anything.” He uncrossed his fingers.

Daryl jerked her head toward him and opened her eyes. “Careful what you say there, dude.”

“Anything.”

“It’s pretty simple, actually. Don’t worship me, okay?”

Jeff laughed. “You mean like a goddess or something?”

“More like an object of beauty or something. Okay?”

“I see,” Jeff said, though he wasn’t sure he did. “All right then, to me you are a hag. We need to turn out the lights to do it or put a paper sack over your head. Better?”

She grinned. “Perfect. Don’t look, I’ve got to use the bathroom.”

Jeff closed his eyes, then peeked the moment she stepped off the bed. Amazing.

Once Manfield was satisfied Jeff Aiken and the blond woman weren’t coming back out anytime soon, he’d gone to his hotel and slept five hours. He’d returned to his position at six that morning, where he waited patiently. It had been a risk, he knew, but he’d been too exhausted to maintain the watch any longer. He was reasonably certain his target had not left while he’d been gone.

“Now what?” Daryl asked. She was scrubbed and dressed, though in yesterday’s clothes and still felt grubby. “Go to the police?”

Jeff had considered that at some length. “I can’t think why. Would you believe our story of cyber terrorists attacking the United States, unleashing assassins to murder computer programmers and managing partners of law firms?”

She couldn’t help but laugh a little at the description. “When you put it like that, I guess not. So what do we do?”

“Eat. I’ve done enough thinking on an empty stomach. Maybe we’ll come up with an action plan over an old-fashioned American breakfast.”

“Meaning?”

“Coffee and bagels haven’t been doing me much good lately. Time for some bacon and eggs. I know just the place.”

Officer Jerry Kowalski moved to the corner of the intersection as far from the dirt and dust as he could manage. The overtime for covering street construction was welcome, but he hated the noise and grime. He was wearing old shoes and an unofficial pair of trousers close to the official blue of his standard uniform. Better they took the beating than the ones he wore on duty.

He idly wondered if he could get away with wearing one of those surgical masks that people wore in Japan and Hong Kong. He decided he’d look stupid, and his uncle, the sergeant, would ream him out good, and the union would bump him to the bottom of the overtime list. As his uncle often said about the force, “Better not to stand out.”

The jackhammer started up again and he slipped in his earplugs. Noise. And dirt. What a mess.

Then, across and down East Thirtieth Street, for the third time he spotted the same guy hanging out in the alley. His partner had told him not to ignore his instincts. “If you’re drawn to something, there’s a reason. Don’t talk yourself out of it,” he’d say, then tell Jerry to stop staring at the babes and, for a change, try looking for illegal activity or scumbags up to no good.

In Jerry’s opinion this guy really stuck out. For one, he was neatly dressed in a blue windbreaker, tan pants, and very white sneakers. Not the typical alley cretin living out of his shopping cart. For another, though he moved from time to time, he was pretty cool about it all, trying to be discreet without being obvious. The guy had to be up to something.

The first time Jerry spotted him all he’d seen was some subtle movement where it shouldn’t be. It was as if he was waiting for someone. Yeah, Jerry thought, waiting in a skanky alley for his date. Something was going down for sure, though just what he couldn’t decide.

Across the street from the alley was the Hotel Luxor, and Jerry figured that someone in there had something to do with why the guy was waiting. With nothing better to do he’d run down in his mind the possibilities. The guy could be a process server in a divorce action or lawsuit; that struck him as pretty logical. The guy was dressed too neatly to be a panhandler, but upon reconsideration, he was also dressed too neatly to be a process server. Those guys were usually pretty ratty.

He could be a jilted boyfriend — that was the one Jerry liked best. The guy was waiting for his girlfriend to get off work so he could corner her and have a few words. Or, Jerry thought, maybe she was shacked up with some guy and what the man in the alley had in mind was something other than a few words.

Just then the doorman opened the doors and out of the hotel walked a stunning couple. The blonde was lovely, while the guy looked as if he could be a model or something. Both were trim, fit, looking the way everybody secretly wanted to look.

Across the street the guy in the alley stirred, and Jerry’s eyes went straight to him. Alley guy started across the street, not looking as if he were moving fast, yet covering the distance to the other side quickly, moving to intercept the couple. Jerry froze for a second, not certain what he should do. He spotted the guy slip his right hand into his jacket pocket.

“Don’t be a spectator,” his partner was always telling him. “You want to watch crime, watch Law and Order on TV.” Jerry moved toward the couple, not even realizing that as he did so, he placed his hand on his gun.

Alley guy was picking up his pace and Jerry could see he was angling to reach the sidewalk just behind the couple, his hand coming out of the pocket now. Jerry felt the hair on the back of his neck stand up and his skin prickle. A man in an alley, a couple, people walking back and forth on the street. Nothing was odd about the movement itself, Jerry saw it a thousand times a day on patrol, but this was different. He knew it. Jerry drew his weapon.

Jerry himself was almost across the street, about thirty feet in front of and to the left of the laughing couple. Alley guy was maybe twenty feet away from them, still in the street but almost to the cars parked along that side. His hand was in view now and Jerry saw the pistol with the big nose on the barrel. A silencer, he knew, never having seen one in action before, but the entire gun looked just like one with a silencer they’d shown his class at the academy.

“You!” Jerry shouted. “Drop that gun! Freeze!”

On the sidewalk, Jeff heard the officer and turned toward him. The uniformed man was pointing his gun behind them, yelling at someone. Jeff looked and saw a man just reaching the parked cars, a gun in his hand. The man turned toward the cop and Jeff heard three pops like subdued firecrackers, sensed rather than saw the officer struck with bullets. Then the officer’s gun fired in a loud explosion, then fired again, and again and again as he tumbled onto the pavement, landing on his back.

Jeff pushed Daryl forward without thinking. “Run! Run!” he said as the pair broke into a sprint down the street, then around the first corner.

Jerry felt the bullets striking him across the chest like heavy blows. Alley guy had been incredibly fast. Jerry cursed himself for missing him. The only bullet he’d fired that was even close was the first, but he knew it had gone high and wide. The others had gone into the cars or pavement as he lost his balance and fell. Shit!

The cop had come out of nowhere. Manfield had seen him standing watch over the construction site and assumed he was some kind of traffic officer, which, in England, were always unarmed. Even if he was armed, Manfield had decided that with the noise and traffic it was unlikely the cop would even see what he was up to. If he did, it would all be over before he could respond.

Spotting the couple coming out of the hotel, Manfield had focused only on them. His instincts told him to kill both of them, but the man first, since he was the target. He moved across the street as quickly as he dared, drew his weapon, then heard the cop. He couldn’t believe the man had actually been watching him. Spinning, he’d shot him three times in the heart, saw him topple over, then had taken off after the running couple, ignoring the gunshots in his direction as they weren’t even close.

At the corner he turned and saw they were already well down the street. He looked back and saw the officer flop over on his back. He was talking into a communication device of some kind. At the construction site, the workers had stopped; it was silent. They were staring straight at Manfield and pointing.

Pursuing the couple meant drawing the police to him, and a running gunfight in midtown Manhattan made no sense. Manfield ran back up the street, then disappeared into the alley. Along the way he wiped, then ditched, first the pistol, then his windbreaker. Emerging on the other side, he flagged down a taxi. “Trump Tower,” he said, then sat back in the seat and watched for trouble.

Fifteen minutes later he paid the driver, then entered the lobby of Trump Tower. There he drew out his cell phone and punched in the numbers. After several rings a man answered. Manfield quietly explained what had just happened. He listened, then turned off the phone and put it away. He walked the five blocks to his hotel, ridding himself of the knife and the cell phone along the way. In his room, he showered, changed, then checked out.

Outside, Manfield walked three blocks to a taxi stand. There he drew out his single die and rolled it into the palm of his other hand. Four. He went to the fourth taxi in line. “Driver, take me to Newark Airport.”

“Certainly, sir,” the dark-skinned man said as he got out to place Manfield’s luggage into the trunk, ignoring the shouting of the other drivers. As they sped off, Manfield sat back in his seat and replayed the events of that morning, wondering where he had gone wrong. It was the police officer, he decided. He’d made the assumption the man was incompetent. That had been his mistake.

On East Thirtieth Street, Officer Jerry Kowalski sat on the curb, still sucking in air when his uncle, the sergeant, arrived. “What the fuck happened?” he demanded. Jerry told him.

Afterward the sergeant said, “Shit! Fifteen years I been a cop and never fired my piece once. You’re on the force — what? — two years and you’re in a gunfight. And you didn’t hit shit, you know that?”

“Yeah, I know.” Jerry didn’t need to be reminded.

“At least you did something smart.”

“What’s that?”

“Your wore your fuckin’ bulletproof vest like I told you, that’s what. You struck two cars. Before you leave today I want a report. The owners are gonna be screaming about this.”

54

At the ticket counter, Jeff paid to be upgraded to business class, since first class was closed. The flight left Newark at seven thirty that evening. Two hours out, they had dinner and shared a bottle of wine. Having talked it through before takeoff, they had nothing more to do until they reached Moscow. Daryl was in the window seat, covered with a blanket, her head wedged between the seat and the wall, sound asleep.

Jeff looked at her tenderly, realizing that he was more concerned for her personal safety than his own, or the fate of the world, for that matter. Was he right to bring her along? But was leaving her behind any safer? He just knew he couldn’t bear the thought of losing her.

Jeff booted his notebook and for a few minutes tried to lose himself in Mega Destructor IV, but it was useless. His current world was too real for him to find release in one of fantasy.

He went online and checked the news. He could no longer consider any disaster without wondering if it was the Superphreak virus. A chip-manufacturing plant in Taiwan had shut down overnight. No deaths, but management wasn’t commenting on the cause. An entire office building in downtown Austin, Texas, had lost all power. More than thirty people had been trapped in elevators and had to be manually extracted. The building was evacuated by using the emergency stairs. A commuter plane had crashed in Kansas with seventeen dead. Which, if any, of these was Superphreak? How many others had occurred Jeff didn’t know about? How many had died?

Then a New York Times article caught his eye. Until now he’d wondered why no one was putting this all together. He and Daryl had the advantage of being on the inside, but it had been more than three weeks since the attacks started. The failure of the U.S. government security agencies to come on board was inexcusable, but how hard could it be for the media to start connecting the dots? Or at least to ask the right questions?

And there it was. Using the local computer-related hospital deaths as a hook, the reporter wrote about a series of unusual incidents nationwide. These included some Jeff already knew about but several he did not, including the apparent destruction of a Midwest bank’s database, the unscheduled shutdown of two more nuclear power plants, and the loss of several significant Internet routing systems.

“A source within the White House,” the article said, “confirms that the president has already directed that a national security assessment report be submitted to him as quickly as it can be prepared. The source would neither confirm nor deny that the many incidents are related nor comment on another report that they are part of a coordinated effort directed against computers worldwide.”

That, at least, is something, Jeff thought as he closed the computer, put it away, then leaned back in his seat. They still haven’t put it together but are starting to. When someone finally did, Jeff couldn’t help but wonder how much damage the reaction itself would cause.

He listened to the engines for several minutes, then glanced over at Daryl again. This is crazy, he thought for the hundredth time since hearing the shots. We’re not secret agents.

Earlier, once they’d been satisfied no one was chasing them, Jeff had grabbed a taxi and had them dropped off at Central Park. He’d found a large open field, and from there, convinced he could see anyone approaching, trusting the outdoors rather than a closed space, he and Daryl had discussed what to do.

“Do you think we should go to the cops?” she asked, even though, when she’d suggested this earlier, in Jeff’s hotel room, they’d dismissed the suggestion. But bullets fired from an assassin’s gun now gave weight to what then had seemed a far-fetched scenario.

“No. They wouldn’t believe us. We might be detained as witnesses or even suspects, and there’s no time to lose right now. If we don’t put a stop to this, no one will. There’s simply too much at stake to take such a chance.”

Sue’s face was tight with anxiety. They stood in silence for a long minute.

“Do you think the cop is dead?” Daryl finally asked. “What happened to the other man? The one who was chasing us.”

Jeff shook his head. “I don’t know about the cop. He went down. The other guy ran to the corner, but it didn’t look like he chased us past that.”

“Who do you think he is?”

“The same guy who killed Sue and Joshua Greene.”

Daryl nodded. “Me too. But why us?”

“Sue and Greene were tortured. Sue must have told him who was helping her.”

“Maybe we should get a gun. I mean, if it’s up to us to defend ourselves.”

“In Manhattan? And, trust me, I’d be more a threat to us with a gun than anyone else. I’ve never so much as shot one.” He scanned the park and saw no one approaching them.

“You should warn Harold — that’s his name, right?”

“Good thinking.” Jeff called the IT Center and reached Harold, who’d had no trouble accepting the need to disappear. He’d told Jeff he was already considering it and had just the place.

Daryl sat on the grass. Thirty feet away, a young couple were helping their child learn to walk, clapping with pleasure every time he managed three or four steps. Jeff started working his BlackBerry with his thumbs. “I’ve got us on a flight to Moscow, leaving from Newark tonight. You got your passport?”

Daryl looked at him with excitement. “Never leave home without it. Are you thinking what I think you’re thinking?”

“Our problem isn’t that someone’s trying to kill us. Our problem, Daryl, is that in nine days Muslim terrorists are going to unleash an enormous, sophisticated attack on the Internet and the United States. And we’re the only ones in a position to do something about it. If you’ve got a better idea, I’d like to hear it.”

Much had happened since Jeff had first set foot in that Manhattan law office. In some ways it was a lifetime. He’d gone from a significant, if relatively mundane, job to realizing that his life was on the line, though he was still just a small part of the solution to a much bigger and more important problem. But there was more. He finally understood where he’d gone wrong in the weeks and days leading up to 9/11. He’d been too passive, too trusting. He’d looked to others for solutions.

Now he understood he should have raised holy hell. When Carlton had ignored him, he should have gone up the chain and kept going up until someone listened. If that had not been possible, he should have gone public, no matter what the risk to his career.

He’d known he was right and he’d known what needed to be done. If nothing else, a public disclosure of what he’d found might very well have frightened the terrorists off, caused them to delay their attack. Who knew what would have happened then?

That was the true source of his anger, he realized. Some part of him had always known he’d sold himself short and, in so doing, had doomed more than three thousand people, including the woman he’d loved.

That was all changed. No more would he sit back and play the guilt-ridden victim.

And there was Daryl. She was risking everything without a second thought. His feelings had come on him slowly, but what he’d thought no longer possible was now a reality. He had to do this, for both their sakes. And for the sake of the three thousand he’d already failed.

“Let me make some calls.” Daryl pulled out her cell phone and began with her office. Satisfied that they were now safe, Jeff led her to a sidewalk vendor as she talked. Buying black coffee and doughnuts, he laughed at the absurdity of it all and the sudden realization that getting shot at in real life was nothing like being one of the shooters in the video games he played. This was for keeps.

By noon Daryl tucked away her phone. “I’ve got my team on it. I’ve told them I’m going to be traveling this week, trying to run down Superphreak. They think I’m joking. I’ve got some odd news too.” Jeff raised his eyebrows. “I couldn’t reach George Carlton. I wanted an update on where DHS is on this. They told me he left the country yesterday in a rush, something about an appointment in Paris.”

Jeff wrinkled his brow. “What do you think?”

She shrugged. “I left a voice mail for his assistant, telling him I’d be out of touch for a few days, asking them to please take some action on Superphreak, not that it will do any good. The guy had taken the weekend off, which tells me everything I need to know about how urgent they think this is.”

Exasperated, Jeff said, “What about the vendors?”

“No real change. We told them again it was avoiding their honeypots, and a few said that they would look at generating some signatures for the samples we have, but that’s way too little way too late.”

Jeff sighed. “I checked the temperature in Moscow. It’s colder than here. We should do a little shopping while we can. And get some cash. Credit cards don’t work everywhere.”

They’d made it to Newark with time to spare. At an airport hot spot, Jeff booked them into the Moscow Metropol Hotel for three nights. “Gotta love the Internet,” he said as put away his laptop.

Waiting to board, Daryl said, “How are we going to find Superphreak?”

“You’ve got an address. We’ll give it to a taxi driver.”

“Okay. Let’s say it’s that easy. We find him, then just ask him to turn over the viruses he’s created? That doesn’t sound like much of a plan.”

“We can always pay him.”

Daryl brightened. “Money’s good. That might work.” Then with a sinking heart she added, “If he’s not a fanatic or something.”

“That’s possible. But he’s a Russian and I’ll bet he’s a gun for hire.”

“Unless he’s Chechnyan.”

Jeff frowned. “Yes, there’s always that.”

55

Brian Manfield marveled at how he could use his British passport to enter Russia. For a moment he recalled how he had infiltrated Russian lines in Grozny, first as a dirty-faced waif, worming his way close enough to use his knife, then later dressed as a Russian soldier on guard duty. Now he stepped off an airplane and handed the authorities a piece of paper, and they stamped it and all but gave him the keys to the city. Amazing.

Somewhere, he knew, was a file under the name Borz Mansur, presumably with a grainy photograph of him as a gawky teenager. But no one in Russia had any reason to connect him with the distinguished British representative of SAS, London.

The trip had been exhausting. He’d taken Czech Airlines from Newark to Prague, then flown from the Czech Republic directly to Moscow. With luck this Russian business would be quickly over and he could go home.

Outside he took out his die, then put it away and got in the first taxi in line. He wanted to do nothing to attract the attention of authorities here in Moscow. Airport security watched for anything out of the ordinary. He stuck with English in speaking to the driver: “The Golden Ring Hotel. You know it?”

“Oh, yes, sir! Very nice hotel. You will like. Very pretty womens stay there in bar.” The driver had not shaved in three days. He was middle-aged, with a dark complexion. “I can give you name of special one. Very nice. College girl, looking to meet handsome English gentleman.”

“No, thank you.”

They drove for a few minutes, then the driver said, “Nice boys and young men too.”

“No, thank you. I’ll keep the offer in mind.”

“Here,” the driver said, never taking his eyes off the road. “Take my card. You call me for anything, anytime, okay? I make your stay very good indeed. Very special.”

Manfield glanced at the card as he moved to put it into his pocket, intending to toss it as soon as he checked in. Stopping, he read the name on the card. Vakha Dukhavakha. A Chechen. “How are you, my brother?” Manfield asked in Chechen.

With astonishment the man met Manfield’s eyes for the first time in the rearview mirror. “I am good, Allah be praised,” he answered in the same language.

“Praise be to Allah, my brother.”

The car sped along the wide Moscow street toward the city center. Finally, Vakha said in Chechen, “You look the perfect English gentleman.”

“We are all two faces in this world, my brother.”

“Yes,” Vakha agreed, his voice sounding sad. “If I can help you, only say the word.”

Manfield thought. He’d taken the first taxi. Then the driver turned out to be a Chechen brother. The odds of that were not so long. Many of the taxi drivers in Moscow were Chechen. Should he be suspicious? At times Allah handed you a gift. A few minutes later the taxi pulled up before the Golden Ring Hotel.

“I must check in,” Manfield said. “Wait for me.” He handed the man some of the rubles he’d acquired at the airport.

“I will wait. Keep your money, my brother,” the driver said, waving the rubles off. “I will be there.” He indicated a spot just down the street.

As Manfield checked in, he said to the clerk in English, “I’m expecting a package.”

“Yes, sir. Just a moment.” The young man returned with a wrapped box the size of a laptop. “Here you are, sir. It arrived earlier today.”

In his room Manfield washed, then changed into casual clothes. He opened the package and removed the pistol. This time it was a Russian Makarov .380, the Soviet equivalent of the German PPK. Included was an extra magazine, already full. He checked the automatic and found a bullet in the chamber and the magazine filled. In the package was a folding knife with a single four-inch locking blade. This one was Swiss and a bit larger than he was accustomed to, but of high quality.

A message on a slip of paper was written in Russian. “No photo available. The name is Vladimir Koskov, late twenties, in a wheelchair. Destroy all computers.” Finally there was the fully charged cell phone, which he turned on. He placed the items into his pockets, memorized the address, then tore up and flushed the message.

Thirty minutes after arriving, Manfield left the hotel, spotted the taxi, and entered the backseat. He gave the driver an address. “Drive carefully. I wish to attract no attention.”

“I understand.”

56

Ivana Koskov was satisfied with the bedroom. She’d been able to buy a new IKEA bedroom set and was thrilled. They finally had enough room for her things and a bed big enough for the two of them. Vladimir had suggested twin beds, but she was determined to continue sleeping with him. In the corner of the room was an unoccupied place where she mentally placed a baby crib.

Their old living room furniture was to be delivered the next day, so that room was still empty. She’d carefully written their new address on tape that she’d placed on every piece of furniture and on the boxes containing their odds and ends so there’d be no mistakes. She trusted her father, but had no idea whom he’d bring to work with him the next day. Her father was staring out the window. “You can just see the river from here,” he said.

Ivana went into the small, second bedroom. She had bought a proper workstation for Vladimir and earlier, with a cousin and her father, had moved his main computer. Vladimir would be moving in this night, and tomorrow she and her father would finish moving in the rest of his computer equipment.

Once he was set up here, there was no rush to move anything else from their old place. She had the week. Her best friend from work, visiting family in St. Petersburg, had lent her an aging Lada to help with the move. Ivana’s plan was to be completely installed in the new apartment by the end of the next weekend. She was thrilled at the idea.

Even Vladimir was coming around. Having his own room in which to work was too inviting. Ivana was certain that the change in environment, the more open space, and a baby on the way would bring back the young man she’d always loved with such devotion.

“You’ve done well,” her father said.

Ivana smiled. “Thank you. I found it, but Vlad is paying.”

The man grunted. There’d been no vodka that day, and for that she was grateful. Tonight would be different, though. “Let’s get your man then. We’ll finish up his things tomorrow while you are at work.”

“Thank you … Grandpa.”

“Ded? What are you talking about?”

Ivana touched her stomach. “It was confirmed Friday. Don’t tell Vlad. He doesn’t know yet.”

“Grandpa! I like the sound of that.” His eyes grew warm. “Have you decided on a name if it’s a boy?”

57

Jeff had been surprised at how much the Metropol Hotel resembled the office building for Fischerman, Platt & Cohen. As he examined the art deco motif, he decided they’d been built around the same time and had been influenced by the same architectural style. The coincidence was eerie. Yet the building could not have been better located. It was across the street from the Bolshoi Theater and just a short walk from the Kremlin, not that they’d have time to take in the sights.

In their room they showered and changed, discussing plans as they could.

“I’m for just going to the address tonight,” Daryl said. “If it’s a business, or someone else is living in the apartment, we might as well find out. Then we can start fresh in the morning.”

“I agree.” Winging it like this held a certain excitement, but he couldn’t help second-guessing his decisions. Events were sweeping them along. It was reassuring to have Daryl’s steady presence. He didn’t think this was something he could do alone. “We don’t have much time. Ready when you are.”

Jeff had dressed in gray running shoes, dark wool slacks, a long-sleeved wool shirt, and a lined black leather jacket he’d bought in Manhattan. A pair of gloves was tucked into the jacket’s pockets, along with a black watch cap. Daryl came out of the bathroom and laughed. The only difference in their attire was that her leather jacket was a dark brown, and instead of a watch cap, she had a scarf folded into her jacket pocket.

Downstairs the couple asked for a taxi with a driver who spoke English. It was apparently not an unusual request, as the doorman merely gestured and one of the waiting cars pulled from the line and drove to the entrance.

As they slid into the backseat, Daryl asked the driver, “Do you know this address?” She handed him a slip of paper. The man glanced at the paper, nodded, and drove off.

“I can’t believe we’re here,” Jeff said, watching the trees and buildings whip by outside the car.

“It is surreal,” Daryl agreed. “Let’s think about what’s going to happen if we meet Superphreak. Any thoughts on how to handle the approach?”

Jeff shook his head. “We’ll just have to play it by ear. Some things you just can’t plan ahead for.”

58

Manfield instructed Vakha to stop one block short of his destination. He paused before getting out. Having the taxi waiting for him when he finished was inviting. The last thing he wanted was to come out of the building with someone in hot pursuit and nothing to do but flee on foot. Russia might no longer technically be a police state, but it remained a heavily policed one.

But keeping Vakha here meant exposing him to information he’d rather the man didn’t have. Still …

“Wait,” Manfield said. “I will likely be ten minutes or so. Do nothing to attract interest, but watch where I enter and move closer when the ten minutes are up. Allah be with you.”

“And with you,” the driver said.

Vakha Dukhavakha had been born in Moscow of Chechen parents. His father had served in the Great Patriotic War and been swept up in the army purges that followed victory. Released at Stalin’s death, he’d remained in Moscow for the remainder of his life, a bitter, angry man.

An only son, Vakha inherited from his father an absolute hatred of the godless Communists. Vakha had watched the collapse of the Soviet Union with emotions bordering on ecstasy. In the years since, he had, from time to time, been of service to the so-called Chechen Mafia in the city. This Englishman masking his true Chechen self was intriguing, obviously up to something. Vakha had instinctively offered him his assistance. Brothers could do no less for one another.

He eased the car forward.

Manfield found the apartment building without difficulty. Not trusting the elevator, he decided to take the stairs to the third floor, passing the open door of the concierge without being observed.

The stairway was ripe with the smell of boiled cabbage, potatoes, and onions. It brought back a wave of childhood memories, when he’d lived happily in Moscow with his mother. The steps creaked loudly and he dismissed any thought of approaching the door silently. The target would be accustomed to the sounds of foot traffic outside. What would attract his attention would be the sudden absence of sound, especially in an unexpected way in the hallway.

As he reached the third floor, Manfield hesitated only a moment before walking directly to Vladimir Koskov’s door, while placing his hand on his gun.

Vakha watched as another car stopped outside the same building the Englishman had entered. A slender woman got out, followed by an older, heavyset man. Russians. She removed the wiper blades, put them into the car, then locked it up. Both of them went into the building without hesitation.

The moment they disappeared, a taxi turned the corner behind him, drove down the street past him, then stopped at the same place. Another couple got out of the car, foreign and handsome. They gave the driver money, faced the building as if uncertain about what to do, then went inside.

Curious. The Russian couple might very well live there or be visiting. But the foreign couple was too much of a coincidence for Vakha.

The moment the couple was out of sight, the taxi drove off. Vakha engaged the gears and slowly moved his taxi even closer to the building.

Vladimir Koskov thought the old apartment looked naked, even with the various moving boxes stacked here and there. The place was still crowded, but without his primary computer and monitor, it was as if the major part of the apartment had already been moved. It was like an enormous chasm.

How many years had he worked here? For how long had this cramped space been the center of his world? More than he could recall offhand. He couldn’t remember ever seeing this little room so empty.

Vladimir was organizing what was left for the next move since Ivana had promised he’d be up and running in the new apartment that night. The rest of this would come over the next day, and he could get completely set up then.

He had prepared a sketch of the small bedroom that would be his new office, drawing where everything would be placed. He had to admit that having more room was going to be nice.

He lifted his head. Someone had been walking outside and stopped. He heard a knock at the door. Many times, most in fact, Vladimir didn’t answer the door. But this was moving day; it might be Ivana’s cousin, or even her father, without a key. Vladimir wheeled his chair to the door, leaned well forward to reach the handle, and turned it.

“We’ll take the stairs,” Ivana said to her father. “The elevator is too unpredictable.”

Sasha grunted his agreement and led the way up the stairs, his daughter immediately behind him.

Jeff paused at the open door just inside the entrance, assuming this was the concierge, or whatever it was the Russians called the downstairs occupant. He reasoned whoever it was likely served as some sort of spy for the police, especially for matters out of the ordinary or involving foreigners.

Beside him, Daryl shook her head and pointed to the elevator. She tugged his sleeve and headed toward the doors. At the elevator, she punched the button; the doors crept open, as if they had been waiting for them. They stepped in and pushed the button for the third floor.

“No need to bother anyone,” she said to Jeff quietly. “Besides, the concierge might call ahead, and we wouldn’t want that.”

“You’re right. There’s a lot to this secret-agent stuff. I wonder if there’s a book I can access online?”

Daryl rolled her eyes.

Once the handle turned and the door opened even a crack, Manfield kicked it as hard as he could. The door struck the footrests of the wheelchair and bounced back at him, nearly slamming shut. Manfield threw his body against the door, pushing it and the wheelchair back until the door was open all the way.

State Security! Vladimir thought, frozen in place. He sat wide-eyed then reached for the wheels of his chair as if meaning to move. Before he could speak, Manfield pressed the muzzle of the gun against the young man’s chest and fired once.

Vladimir let out a sound as if he’d been punched hard in the chest. His mouth opened to cry out but no sound came.

There’d been no silencer, which had distressed Manfield, so this was the best he could do. Pressing the barrel of the gun against the body had muffled the sound of the single shot, but not the way a silencer would have.

With his foot Manfield closed the door behind him, shoving the dying man and his chair aside, and made his way to the computers, noting at once the large open space in the middle. One of them had been moved. He spotted the boxes and realized that the man had been moving.

The way this had played out, Manfield didn’t have much time. The Russian neighbors might mind their own business and ignore the muffled shot, but someone could just as well call the police militia. He had to work quickly.

Manfield seized the first computer tower and yanked at it, struggling to free it from its cables, trying to decide how best to disable it permanently since he couldn’t easily get at the hard drive. He looked about the room and found a heavy screwdriver. Setting the tower down, he braced it with his foot and pried the side loose. Inside were various printed boards. He jerked one out, then another. These he set on the floor and snapped into the case pieces. Taking the heavy screwdriver, he stabbed at anything inside that looked substantive.

He stood and stilled his breathing. He heard nothing. Satisfied, he turned to the next tower.

Sasha recognized a gunshot. “Stop!” he said, freezing in his tracks on the last step before the landing of the third floor.

“What was that?” Ivana asked.

“A gunshot.”

“My God! Vlad! They’ve come for him!”

Her father stepped back and reached for his daughter. He was unarmed; neither of them could do anything about what was happening in the apartment. His concern was for her safety.

Ivana tore from his grasp and bolted up the last step onto the landing. “Ivana! No!” her father cried. “Stop!”

Instead, the young woman ran to the door and pushed it fully open. A man across the room was struggling with the computer, but what drew her eyes was Vladimir’s lifeless body, slumped to the side in his wheelchair, a large patch of blood spreading across his chest, running down toward the floor.

“Vlad!” she cried out. “Vlad!” Rushing to the chair, Ivana took her husband’s head into her arms.

Across the room, Manfield had freed the second tower and thrown it to the floor. He was attacking it with the screwdriver when Ivana rushed into the room. He drew his gun, glanced at the sobbing woman holding the dead man, then turned his attention to the tower. He fired into it, once, twice, three times, the shots sounding like enormous explosions in such a small area. He turned to the woman, and a burly older man appeared in the doorway.

Manfield knew he was out of time. He’d done what damage he could and had killed the target. He bolted for the doorway, pointed the pistol at the man, then, when he did not move, shot him once, pushed his body aside, and climbed over him as he scrambled out the door.

In the hallway Manfield turned to his right to run from the building when the elevator doors opened. For an instant, he saw the same couple he’d tried to kill in New York. He couldn’t imagine how they’d managed to make it to this very place in Moscow so quickly, or why they were here. It was like seeing an apparition, and it momentarily stunned him.

Manfield had no time but he had a bullet to spare, so as he reached the stairs, he aimed the gun at the couple and snapped off a shot. He sprinted down the stairs and a moment later was in the street.

Vakha pulled the car to a stop and Manfield jumped into the rear seat. “Away from here, brother! Quickly!”

Vakha pressed the accelerator and sped off.

59

Fajer and Labib were approaching the final week of jihad, and Fajer could hardly contain his excitement. Soon he would be rewarded for his time and money, and America brought to its knees.

Apparently content with the condition of her hair, the lovely Hungarian he’d been watching stood, the subdued light striking her body to perfection. Fajer was certain she’d studied the pose — and was glad she had. She moved slowly toward him, then his cell phone rang.

“This is Greta,” the voice said. “I have news.”

Greta, oddly, was the name of an English- and Russian-speaking Chechen assassin Osama bin Laden had given Fajer. The man had come highly recommended, and though he’d missed one of his targets in New York, he’d killed the most important one. He would be calling from Russia. The assassin spoke in English, the only language they had in common. Fajer wondered for a moment if the whore spoke English and decided she did.

“Go ahead.”

“The man is no longer a problem. He had three computers. Two are destroyed. But he was moving, and the third was gone. I believe it is at his new apartment. Is it important?”

Fajer thought about that for a moment. The woman sat on the side of the bed, smiling. He took her head with his free hand and lowered her face to his groin. She understood at once. He almost hissed as she took him in.

“I prefer you disable it as well. Can you reach it?”

“I can try. If I can manage it without great risk, I will.”

“That will do.”

“There’s something else.”

Fajer listened carefully, forcing himself to concentrate as the woman skillfully performed her service.

“Interesting,” he said when Greta was finished. “In that case, finish them or destroy the computer. Both, if you can, but one or the other for certain.”

Fajer dropped the cell phone to the floor and cursed his own weakness as the whore moved her head up and down, up and down.

60

“Are you all right?” Daryl asked, pushing open Jeff’s jacket as she leaned toward him. She sounded frightened even as she struggled to stay calm.

Jeff held his hand against his shoulder. The bullet had creased the flesh and it was starting to bleed. It stung like hell, and of course, the new jacket was ruined.

“It just hurts. You’re certain it was him?”

“Absolutely,” she said breathlessly. “He wasn’t shooting at me, so I had a better look.”

The shock of being shot suddenly washed over Jeff, and he collapsed to the floor.

“He’s gone, he’s gone,” Daryl murmured, as she helped Jeff to his feet. Almost embarrassed by his near faint, Jeff shook his head hard and gave his complete attention to Daryl, who was still looking at him with great concern. “He ran down the stairs, after he shot you. And that man over there too, I think,” she said, indicating Sasha, lying splayed in the hallway.

Sasha was still breathing, but his life was draining out. At the doorway appeared a hysterical young woman, standing as if torn between two terrible choices. Jeff was holding his shoulder, blood seeping between his fingers. No one spoke.

Finally, the woman threw herself across the man lying in the hallway and sobbed uncontrollably, muttering words of endearment in Russian. Jeff looked into the apartment and saw a man in a wheelchair, dead. Could he be Superphreak? he thought. Or was Superphreak the dead man in the hallway?

“Vladimir Koskov?” he said.

The young woman looked up from the now dead man, as if seeing them for the first time. She said something to them in Russian, something dreadful, as if she’d uttered a curse.

Daryl answered. “We don’t speak Russian. We came to see Vladimir Koskov. We mean neither him nor you any harm. What happened here?”

The young woman switched to English. “You are not State Security?”

“No. We’re Americans. We’re looking for Mr. Koskov.”

Ivana, tears running down her face, looked into the apartment. “He is dead.” She looked at Jeff. “The man shot you? Why?”

“He tried to kill us in New York City yesterday,” Jeff said. “And now here. We don’t know why.”

The woman looked around and gathered herself. “We must leave, unless you wish to be arrested. The militia will be here any moment and they will arrest all of us. It is their way. Hurry!” She rushed toward the stairs, Jeff and Daryl following.

In the lobby, a small group had gathered. Spotting Ivana, they asked questions all at once. She rushed through them, telling Jeff and Daryl to hurry, then ran into the street. She opened the door to her car, ignoring the continued questions, and told the couple to get in. In the distance they could hear the clarion sound of a police car. They jumped in and Ivana pulled away from the curb.

Vakha saw the three pile into the car and asked, “What do I do?”

“Follow them,” Manfield said. He could not believe his good fortune. The only witness to the shooting and the couple he was to kill all in the same car. Allah was truly on his side. “And don’t lose them. This is important.”

The woman drove the Lada like a maniac, weaving down narrow streets, then breaking out of the residential blocks onto Tverskoy, heading toward the Kremlin.

“Who are you?” Ivana demanded.

“My name is Daryl Haugen. This is Jeff Aiken. We’re Americans.”

Jeff moaned beside her. The pain was suddenly much more intense. His face was pale and sweat now beaded his brow.

“You already told me that,” Ivana snapped. “You are American agents?”

“No,” Jeff said, grunting in pain. “I’m a private computer consultant.”

Daryl hesitated. “It’s complicated. I do work for a government agency, but Jeff and I are in the same line of work. I’m not an agent like you mean.” Daryl began dabbing at Jeff’s forehead with her scarf.

The car made a sudden turn to the right, shooting passed the Bolshoi Theatre. “What’s going on?” Ivana shouted. “Tell me or get out of the car!”

“We think Koskov—”

“My husband.”

“I’m sorry,” Daryl murmured, cutting her eyes toward Jeff. He nodded his agreement that Daryl should continue talking to the young woman. “But we think your husband created special viruses and sold them to very bad people. And they’ve killed him because of it. Now the same man is trying to kill us.”

“Viruses?” Ivana slowed down, but was still going faster than the rest of the traffic, as she wove back and forth between cars. Horns honked, drivers raised their fists, some cars were forced to swerve away. “I warned him about that,” she said quietly. “He was always so secretive about his work. What kind of bad people?”

“Terrorists. Muslim terrorists.” Jeff could scarcely believe his own words. This was all so unreal. He lifted his hand and looked at the blood for an instant.

“What would they want with viruses?” Ivana asked.

“These are very sophisticated ones,” Jeff said. “And very special. They destroy computers.”

“Vlad wasn’t like that,” Ivana insisted. “He used to be, but not anymore. He told me he’s been building viruses for a European security company to test against their software. They kept asking for more sophisticated ones, so he said he built some very tough viruses, with encryption and cloaking characteristics. He said they were very pleased.”

“They lied to him,” Daryl interjected. “They’re using the rootkits he designed to launch an attack against America and Europe. It’s going to hurt, even kill, a lot of people if we don’t stop it.”

“Vlad is dead. So is my father. I can’t help you.” Ivana’s face was set as she made another sharp turn, the tires squealing as the car leaned violently to the side.

The sudden movement made Jeff’s shoulder throb. “Easy,” he cautioned.

“What do I care? My husband and father are murdered. What do I care?”

“We’ve lost people we cared about too,” Jeff said. “Other people are dead and more are going to die if we don’t stop this. Your husband was used. His work has been put to a very, very bad purpose. You can’t leave it like this. You just can’t.” As he spoke, Ivana placed her hand on her stomach. Could she be pregnant? Jeff wondered. Maybe that was the way to get through to her.

“Think of the future,” Jeff said. “Did your husband keep records?”

Ivana was now crying, her face streaked with tears. “He kept all his work in an external drive.”

“The police will be at the apartment by now,” Daryl pointed out.

“Not there,” Ivana said, shaking her head. “We were moving. The drive is at our new apartment.” Ivana swerved the car left, then right, her jaw clenched shut.

Jeff thought. “As long as you have it, you’re in danger. That’s why they killed your husband; it’s why they’ll keep trying to kill you and anyone else around it. Give it to us. They’ll know we have it, and you’ll be safe. Please,” he added, his voice hoarse with desperation, “the lives of thousands depend on you.”

Ivana started to tell them to go to hell, then placed her hand over her stomach again. She paused to think. “There is an expression that should be Russian. Perhaps you know it. ‘The enemy of my enemy is my friend.’ So I help you.”

61

“Excellent,” Manfield said as the car they were following came to a stop. The taxi driver had been skilled in keeping up.

Vakha eased his car to a halt, then sat idling as they watched Ivana exit the Lada, followed by Daryl and Jeff. With Ivana leading the way the three entered one of the newer apartment buildings that had sprung up about Moscow in the last decade.

“The same as before,” Manfield said. “Ease up to the front. I won’t be long. Thank you, my brother.”

Vakha grunted, then watched the assassin exit his taxi. Once again he wondered what he was up to. A Chechen who looked and behaved like the perfect English gentleman. There was a story in that, but Vakha was sure he would never learn it.

The man paused at the Lada, looked inside momentarily, then entered the apartment building. Vakha engaged the clutch and crept slowly toward the front entrance.

With every passing moment Ivana’s despair gripped her more tightly. In a few short minutes she had lost her father and husband, the two most important men in her life. She’d seen how the gunman had looked at her, had noted the muzzle of the weapon paused for an instant on her heart before swinging to her father. She’d nearly died. She wished she had.

The doors to the elevator opened on the ninth floor. “This way,” she said to the Americans. At her new apartment she fumbled with her keys before opening the door, turning on lights as she entered.

Not even an hour ago Ivana had stood here with her father filled with dreams and hope. Now it was all gone. At least she’d told him about the baby, she could be grateful for that. She tried to take some solace from his having died knowing that.

“It’s in there,” she said, indicating the small bedroom that was to have been Vlad’s office. “It’s in a box, I think.”

Jeff squeezed Daryl’s shoulder and went to find the external drive. He needed to do something about his arm soon. Blood was dripping on the floor.

Daryl looked about the stark apartment. It was growing dark outside and the city lights sparkled through the large living room window. “I’m so very sorry for all that’s happened.”

“This was to be our new home. We’d worked so hard to afford it. Now…”

“I understand.” Daryl did. She looked at the young women warmly. “Thank you for helping us. You are doing a great service to the world.”

“The world?” Ivana said bitterly. “What do I care for that? My world is all but dead.”

One-handed, Jeff dug an external drive from the bottom of one of the boxes. He looked for another, then carried it into the living room.

“We need to do something for you,” Ivana said matter-of-factly. “You’re bleeding everywhere.” She went to the kitchen, knelt, and dug around, returning in a few moments with bandages and tape. “Here. Take that off.”

Daryl helped as Jeff removed his jacket. Ivana tore the sleeve above the wound, dabbed away blood, placed a large bandage across the wound, front and back, then taped it in place. “This will hold you for a bit,” she said as she finished. “You should see a doctor, but if you do, he will know what this is and report you.”

“Thank you. I’m sorry to ask, but is it possible to boot the computer to confirm the information is here?” Jeff asked. Daryl gave him a withering look. “I know the timing isn’t good, but I need to be certain. I wouldn’t want to come so far and not leave with the information.”

“It’s there,” Ivana said. “Vlad told me he kept all of his work in the external drive. It was an old habit with him. And he only had one.”

“I think we should go,” Daryl said, then turned to Ivana. “You must have family you can go to. Your mother?”

“Ahh!” Ivana said, putting her hands to her lips. She had not thought about her mother once. “My poor mother! Someone will have called her from the building, if only to warn her the militia might come.” She took out her cell phone. “I need to call.”

Manfield stepped off the elevator on the eighth floor. He’d seen the address on the boxes at the apartment and noted it along with the apartment number. Once the Lada had stopped here, he’d known where his targets would be.

He checked the door to the stairwell. It did not lock from either side. Excellent. He went up the final flight of stairs two at a time, slipping a fresh magazine into the pistol as he did. This would all be over in the next few minutes, and he was glad. He had missed the couple in New York and that bothered him. He was still puzzled at how the American couple could have come here, to the very place he had been sent, but reasoned they were after the information he was being ordered to destroy.

On the ninth floor Manfield eased the door open and saw the hallway was clear. He placed his hand on the Makarov. Now, he thought. Now.

The assassin stepped into the hallway and began examining the doors for numbers, moving with athletic grace, humming softly to himself.

Ivana spoke intently into her cell phone, fighting back tears. Jeff took Daryl aside and whispered, “I’d really feel a lot better if we knew the drive actually has the information.”

Daryl nodded. “So would I, but this isn’t the time. We can confirm it at the hotel. If it doesn’t, we come back here and check the computer. Okay?”

“I guess.” Jeff hefted the drive. This entire situation was ludicrous. Twice now he’d narrowly escaped death at the hands of a brutal murderer. In New York, with its violent reputation, he hadn’t been certain, but in Moscow there was no doubt. The man had murdered two people just seconds before attempting to kill him. If that bullet had been just a few inches to the left, he’d have died in that elevator. But I’m committed to this, he reminded himself. This time I’m not going to let anyone down, especially myself.

Ivana was still talking to her mother, the words coming out between sobs. Daryl, who was standing beside her, looked to Jeff as if to say, Be patient.

Jeff thought for a moment. Were they safe? Did the killer know about this place? Had they been followed? The way the young Russian had driven it didn’t seem likely, but he couldn’t be certain. What he wanted, desperately, was for him and Daryl to be gone, out of Moscow, out of Russia, home, in America.

In the hallway he heard loud voices.

Manfield was moving steadily down the hallway when he heard the group get off the elevator, laughing loudly at some joke. He turned to see them clearly.

There were five men, out to celebrate from appearances. Two were holding bottles of vodka by the neck as if wringing a chicken. Others had unopened bottles tucked into the pockets of their jackets. Three of the men wore old army field coats. Veterans.

Manfield hesitated, then decided to stall until they had entered an apartment. He knelt as if to tie a shoelace.

Ivana took the cell phone from her ear and turned it off. “Neighbors are with my mother. She already knew. She thought I was dead, too, so I’m glad I called. I must go.”

“We have to go too,” Daryl said.

Ivana opened the door, then reached for the light switch. Outside, a group of men she’d seen before in the building were approaching, laughing boisterously. She stepped into the hallway, then to the side so Daryl and Jeff could leave the apartment.

At that moment Ivana spotted Manfield behind the men, moving slowly toward her, his piercing blue eyes glued to her. She started to speak, but nothing came out. Daryl and Jeff moved into the hallway, which was suddenly crowded as the drunken men reached the doorway. One eyed Ivana and Daryl appreciatively. One said something in Russian.

Jeff followed Ivana’s gaze and spotted Manfield. “Run!” he shouted. He turned to his right, pulling Daryl with him, but came up against one of the revelers, who took offense. Pushing Jeff hard against the wall, he spoke in an angry, guttural voice, smelling heavily of vodka, his eyes bloodshot and watery.

Ivana was petrified. She could not take her eyes away from the man who had murdered her husband and her father. She knew he wouldn’t hesitate to kill her and her unborn child.

Manfield was still moving slowly toward her, waiting for the group of men to move and give him a clear shot. Then he heard the American call out and saw the pushing match with one of the Russians. He didn’t want to shoot, didn’t want a massacre, since that would only heighten the militia’s attention, but there was no choice. He raised the pistol and aimed at Ivana.

A second Russian had joined in and shoved Jeff hard too. The external drive clattered to the hallway floor. Daryl was trying desperately to separate the men, explaining in English that it was all a misunderstanding, that they had to stop this and leave them alone.

The moment Manfield fired, the men moved as a group and bumped into Ivana, who went down. The sound of the pistol in the hallway was deafening. The men turned toward the sound and spotted the weapon. Ivana was on the floor, masked from Manfield by a forest of legs.

Those holding Jeff turned their drunken attention to the shooter. Amazingly, Daryl thought, not one of them ran or even moved as if to run. Instead, angry and growling, as a single body they advanced on the man with the gun, shouting accusations in Russian. She turned to Jeff, who crumbled to the floor.

“The drive,” he gasped. “Get the—”

Instead, Daryl tried to pull him up and away from the group, away from danger.

On the floor, Ivana held her hand to her head, feeling a sharp pain, trying to stop the flow of blood that was streaming from her temple. She staggered to her feet, her free hand finding the external drive. She grabbed it as she stood up, swaying, her vision a misty pink.

The men rushed Manfield. For an instant he considered running. Instead, he shot the first man in the chest. The group didn’t hesitate, their liquored minds not grasping the significance of what was occurring. He shot another. This whole thing was senseless. Why didn’t the men run away? Or fall down to beg for mercy?

But the second bullet had the effect Manfield was after. The other three came to their senses, stopped, reached for the two staggering men who were shot, one collapsing to the floor. The others scrambled to get away from Manfield, pulling the second wounded man with them, shouting obscenities at him. In all the tumult they blocked the assassin’s view of his targets though, so Manfield moved forward and to the side of them.

The Russian woman, he realized, had been hit, but not fatally. She was on her feet, one hand to her bleeding head, swaying to stay upright, looking like a drunk who’d just been in a bar fight. The two Americans were moving quickly away from him down the hallway, their backs turned. Manfield pointed the pistol to kill them when one of the now fallen Russian men tried to rise up. From the floor a powerful hand seized his arm. He’d put the men completely out of his thoughts in his single-minded desire to kill and had moved too close to them. One of those he’d shot, half-sitting, half-lying on the floor, had hold of his arm and was twisting it down and out of its socket in a practiced move, forcing Manfield to bend nearly to the floor. He screamed in pain as the Makarov dropped from his hand. He let out a cry, the words springing from his childhood, coming out in Chechen. “Help me!”

The other man he’d shot grabbed for the gun, aimed at the assassin, then emptied the clip into his body. As Manfield crumbled to the floor with a look of disbelief, the one who’d grabbed his arm spit on him, then said in Russian, “Chechen scum!”

Outside, in his idling taxi, Vakha saw none of this. Instead, he spotted the young Russian woman stagger out of the building, holding one hand to her head, blood streaming down her clothes. She managed to get into her car and drive off quickly just as the American couple exited the building. They paused, looked for the car, spotted his taxi, and ran toward him.

“Do you speak English?” the woman said.

“A bit,” Vakha answered, watching the building for the Englishman out of the corner of his eye.

“Take us to the Metropol Hotel. Hurry!” The couple scrambled into the rear seat.

Vakha hesitated, still waiting, but no one else emerged from the building. Then he heard the wail of militia cars and engaged the clutch. By the time the police arrived, he was well clear of the area and had decided he’d done enough for the Cause for one night. If the Englishman was still alive, he was on his own.

62

Jeff climbed from the shower, his skin dripping with hot water, and angled his body so he could see the wound without its bandage. It was an angry red, but had stopped bleeding. Since it hadn’t been stitched, there’d be an ugly scar, but they’d not risked a doctor. Instead, when they’d arrived back at the hotel Sunday night, Daryl had retrieved their key from the desk and taken him directly to the room.

Leaving him alone, she’d gone to the hotel shop, where she bought cotton, bandages, and tape. Back in the room she used an airplane-size bottle of vodka from the minibar in the room to sanitize the wound, then bandaged it. “It doesn’t look serious,” she’d said, “but I’m no expert. It’s up to you.”

“No doctor. We can’t risk it.”

“Here,” she said, handing him two pills. “Take these. They’ll help with the pain and let you sleep.”

Jeff hadn’t asked what they were. He’d taken them with gratitude, cleaned up in the bathroom, then stretched on the bed. Eighteen hours later he awoke. Daryl ordered room service for him, gave him two more pills, and he’d promptly slept all night again. Only now, after he dried himself and left the bathroom, was he beginning to feel normal. He’d had no idea how exhausted he’d been.

He opened the curtains to reveal brilliant morning light. He couldn’t say that Moscow had much of a view, but he could make out the onion-shaped domes of the Kremlin. He lifted the note Daryl had left for him. It said not to worry, that she expected to be back with good news. He’d had no idea what she meant, but tamped down the initial flutter of worry he felt and relaxed, knowing he could trust her. He ordered breakfast, then turned the television to International CNN. He wasn’t expecting to come across any mention of the shoot-out in the apartment-building hallway, but wasn’t sure he was relieved or frustrated when he didn’t. He lay on the bed to wait for Daryl, for breakfast. Room service woke him. He’d dozed off. He was just finishing breakfast when he heard the key in the door and looked up to see Daryl enter carrying packages, her face aglow with excitement.

“I see Rip van Winkle has decided to join me. Good for you. Ready for some news?”

“We’re about to be arrested and thrown into a gulag.”

“Cynic,” she joked. “No, I think that was the one bullet we did manage to dodge.” She laid the packages on the unmade bed and took a chair opposite him. “I know where Ivana Koskov is.”

“How’d you manage that?” They’d discussed the problem briefly Sunday night. Thanks to shootings at both locations, neither of them could return to the apartments to try to learn where Ivana was. She had the drive. But before they could come up with a solution, Jeff had nodded off, the pain and fear caused by his wound finally catching up with him.

“I called colleagues at NSA,” Daryl said, her face shining with excitement. “As luck had it, one of the attachés here actually works for the NSA. My contact spoke with him yesterday and he sent one of their Russian-speaking operatives out to make inquiries. I don’t know how he did it, but he reached Ivana’s mother. Ivana is in Milan, Italy, staying with a friend. I have the address and a telephone number. We’re booked out of here in about four hours.”

“Amazing!” Jeff looked at his companion with continued admiration. “I never would have thought it possible.”

“I’ve also got some pain pills here if you need them, along with Band-Aids, which should be all you need now. And”—she rose to go to the bed, where she removed something with a flourish, then brandished it like a toreador’s cape—“I found this in your size.” It was a leather coat. “I had to trash the other one. You look very sharp in leather, I might add.”

Jeff was amazed at her efficiency. “You’re just full of surprises. Any word from your team?”

Daryl’s face, which had been alive with pleasure, fell. “Nothing good, no. I spoke to them a few hours ago. Microsoft and Symantec finally got fully on board, but it’s probably too late.”

“What about DHS?”

“I’d almost forgotten. Are you ready for this? George Carlton was murdered in Paris.”

“Murdered?” Jeff said, shocked. “How?”

“Stabbed to death. In broad daylight. DHS is stumped over it. He was there on a spur-of-the-moment thing, supposedly to meet with a counterpart, but she knew nothing about a meeting. They don’t really know why he was in Paris.”

Jeff wrinkled his brow in thought. “Do you think it’s connected to what’s been happening to us?”

Daryl shrugged. “It does seem odd. Not at all something that would happen to George.”

“Dead! It’s hard to grasp.” Jeff despised the man, but he’d never thought of killing him. Disgraced, held to account, yes, those he could imagine — but dead?

Daryl broke into his thoughts. “We should get going. It’s a direct flight and we’ll be in Milan later today. With luck we should see Ivana tonight and get the external drive.”

“If she took it with her.”

63

The Lufthansa flight from Moscow to Milan was just under four hours. From the moment he’d stepped on the German plane, Jeff had felt as if he were already out of Russia.

He’d slept so much since being shot he couldn’t nod off during the afternoon flight. Daryl spent her time on her laptop working on Superphreak, but Jeff was too mentally spent to give it any thought.

If someone had told him a month ago that he’d be on the run from assassins with a beautiful new lover, that he’d be shot at and wounded, that the fate of the Western world lay with him, he’d have told them they were crazy. But here he was and he had to admit there was something to be said for it. He recalled that the young Winston Churchill, upon being sent to South Africa to cover the Boer War for a newspaper, had written after his first combat experience, “Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result.”

Well, he’d been winged, if that was the word for it, but he understood what Churchill had meant. It was exhilarating and he’d never felt more alive. He’d had no idea that “saving the world” could be so exciting. On the other hand, he knew, had he been seriously injured, he’d feel very differently.

Daryl folded her laptop, then slipped it into its case. “You’re staring at the back of the seat in front of you,” she said. “You do know there’s no television screen there, don’t you?”

“I’m thinking.”

“About what?”

“My life has been pretty exciting these last few days.”

She laughed. “That’s excitement I could do without. Or don’t you think so?”

Jeff grunted. “I wouldn’t change a thing, actually.” He looked at her with open affection, and she returned it. “Learn anything?”

“Superphreak?” The warm expression faded from her face. “Not much. The viruses we’ve got are nothing special. The rootkits and encryption’s a bitch, though. I don’t know why I wasted my time on it. Do you think there’ll be enough on this external drive to be any help?”

“It’s a long shot,” Jeff said, taking her hand. “But what else is there?”

Deciding to skip registering at a hotel, Daryl and Jeff took a taxi directly from Milan’s Malpensa Airport to the address they had for Ivana in the central part of the city. It was nearly an hour before they stepped out with their luggage and paid the driver.

The street was wider than was typical for an Italian city, though still cobblestoned. A row of graceful trees flanked the sides, bordered by narrow sidewalks. The buildings were of a rough brownstone and, from the weathering Jeff could see, were at least two hundred years old. “Is this it?” he asked, every door looking the same to him.

“Yes. Number 346.” Daryl stepped up and knocked on the aged wooden door.

After a long pause, they heard footsteps approaching. The door opened six inches and the plain face of a woman in her middle years showed itself. Daryl spoke in Italian, but before she finished, the women interrupted, saying, “I’m sorry, but I don’t speak Italian.”

“English?” Daryl said.

“Yes.” The woman looked them over. “My guess is you’re the American couple from Moscow, come to see Ivana. Am I right?”

“Yes,” Daryl said, her face reflecting her surprise. “How did you know?”

The woman shrugged. “Ivana’s mother called after she spoke with the man from the embassy. She was afraid she’d made a mistake and wanted to alert her daughter. And, of course, Ivana told me about you. Let me see the wound, please,” she said to Jeff, who stood surrounded by their luggage.

Jeff didn’t understand what she meant at first, then he pushed his jacket and shirt off his shoulder and exposed the bandages to the woman.

“That’s good enough for me. Come on in. I just put on a pot of coffee. My name’s Annie, by the way. What are yours?”

Annie led them through the entryway, telling them to put their things down near the front door, then showed them into a sitting room. “Have a seat,” she said. “I’ll be right back.”

They sat side by side on matching chairs and glanced about the ornate room. It had high ceilings and rough-plastered walls that gave a sense of strength and restfulness. The ceiling was decorated with a lavish painting now long faded. The furniture was of dark woods, mostly carved, and brightened with colorful fabrics. On the floor was a Persian rug.

“Very nice,” Daryl said, and Jeff nodded his agreement.

Annie returned a few minutes later with coffee and cookies on a tray, which she placed on a nearby table. She took her seat and poured, offering sugar or milk as they liked. Annie was perhaps forty-five years old, stout, and with plenty of short gray hair that showed no sign of being colored. A self-assured woman, she was dressed simply in gray slacks and a light blue sweater, with no jewelry of any kind.

“The cookies are delicious,” she said, referring to the tray. “When I’m alone, I dip them in the coffee. Marvelous.” She took a bite, glancing at the coffee as she did. “I’m spending some time here with my brother before returning to America. He’s retired from the U.S. army. It’s my first visit to Italy. I’m tempted to stay longer. It’s lovely. But you don’t want to hear that.” She shrugged. “Let’s see, where to begin. Ivana arrived here yesterday. She had no idea you were alive until her mother called. She was sure the gunman had killed you.”

“He’s dead. Those men in the hallway killed him,” Jeff said.

Annie nodded in approval. “Ahh. She’ll be glad to hear that. When I first met her, I never could have imagined she could be so tough. These Russian women…”

“How is Ivana?” Daryl asked. “I saw her go down and there was a lot of blood before she fled.”

“She’s fine. The wound wasn’t serious, though there was initially some bleeding. She had a terrible headache when she arrived. But she’s okay. Physically, anyway.” Annie sighed. “She spent a lot of time on my computer and didn’t want to be bothered. She’s very good with them.”

“When might we see her?” Daryl asked.

Annie folded her arms. “What do you want with Ivana? Don’t you think she’s suffered enough?”

“To be frank,” Daryl said, “what we really want is the external drive she took with her.”

“And why would you want that?”

Leaning forward, Jeff told Annie who they were and what they did. He explained about the concentrated virus attack and how Ivana’s husband had provided the essential cloaking portion of the virus. “If we can get his information, we still have five or six days to get it into the hands of experts who can prepare signatures and patches and distribute them while there’s still time.”

Annie looked stunned. “Do you really think it’s as catastrophic as all that?”

“They tried to kill us in New York City and again in Moscow,” Jeff said. “They killed the woman I was working with on the virus and her boss and even sent the same gunman to Moscow to kill Ivana’s husband. He tried to kill Ivana and us as well. I’d say that they certainly think they have something to protect.”

“Yes, I understand,” Annie said, turning quite sober.

“It’s important we speak with her,” Jeff said.

Annie set her cup down. “I understand and I believe you. But Ivana isn’t here, and neither is the external drive you want.”

64

Dufour checked the front door to the offices to be certain it was unlocked. The visitor could arrive at any time. Dufour stood at the entrance and scanned the room. The employees had been gone for more than an hour, leaving behind their usual mess. It looked like what it was, a busy graphics company. It would arouse no suspicion.

He returned to the back office, leaving the doors between the rooms open, something he’d never before done. In the room from which he and Labib had launched the cyber jihad against the West, Dufour said to the two men, “I’m going to stay up front. She could come any minute. Are you ready?”

Labib was seated at his usual computer, but this evening he was ashen. He merely nodded. Fajer was half-sitting, half-leaning against a table. He was calm and, as always, in command. “Yes. We are ready. Be certain she is alone and lock the door behind her before she sees us so she has no escape.”

“It will be done.”

The e-mail had arrived early that morning. Someone claiming to be the wife of the Russian, Superphreak, said he had been murdered and demanded to know what Dufour had involved him in.

At first he’d been startled by the message. He’d forwarded it to Labib, busy on the computer behind him. “Read this. What should I do?”

Labib read the message, then picked up his cell phone and called his brother, explaining about the e-mail. Fajer listened, then told him, “Ask what she wants. Get more information from her.”

Dufour had rapidly typed and sent a message. It became apparent that the woman knew little about what her husband had been doing. He told Labib as much.

“Assure her we are on her side.”

Dufour wrote that they themselves had been in danger. They deeply regretted her loss. Was there anything they could do for her? How did she get his e-mail address? Her reply was electric:

“Read this,” Dufour said without bothering to forward the message to Labib, who came and read it over his shoulder.

“What do you think she has?” Labib asked, his voice rising a bit in excitement.

“That crazy Russian might have backed up everything on an external drive. It could be all the work he did for us, every rootkit we’re using, even some of the viruses.”

Labib didn’t have to stop and think. “Try and get her to come to Paris with the drive. Or at least tell us where she is.”

Dufour and Ivana exchange several more e-mails. She refused to say where she was and seemed hesitant about coming to Paris. By that time Fajer had arrived and Labib showed him the messages. He grunted. “Looks as if the Chechen did the job. I wonder if he’s still after her.”

“Haven’t you talked to him?”

“No. No one’s answering the cell phone he got in Moscow. I don’t know what to make of it. If you can get her here with the drive, though, that threat will be finished. The Chechen won’t matter. We’ll see to her. Dufour?”

“I’ve told her she is in great danger, that it is essential we see the information she has, that we can protect her.” He looked up for approval. “I also told her that her husband was a great man and we were honored to work with him. I suggested we meet in a park or somewhere neutral, but she refuses. She says if she comes, she’ll come right here, so I’ve given the name of the company and our address. It was the only way. She’s just a woman. There will be no problem.”

Fajer agreed. “Any reply?”

The computer pinged. The three men gathered before the monitor and read:

Fajer straightened up and smiled. “Excellent. We’ll have a reception waiting for her.”

65

“She isn’t here? But her mother told us she was staying with you,” Daryl said.

“She was here until lunch. But she’s gone now.”

“What happened?” Jeff asked. “Did she think she was in danger?”

“No, not that.” Annie shook her head. “She used my computer to access the external drive. Apparently Vlad even ran his e-mail from there. She contacted one of his Internet friends and told him her husband was dead.”

“Which friend?” Jeff asked, trying to recall all the cyber handles he’d seen. My God, he thought, just when I thought things couldn’t get any worse. He and Daryl exchanged a worried glance.

“I’m not even certain she told me the friend’s name,” Annie said. “I know I didn’t think it was my place to ask.”

“What did she learn?” Daryl asked, ignoring Annie’s attitude.

“She was told that Vlad had been working for a company in Paris, possibly run by Arabs. That it must have been them who had her husband killed.”

“Did she give you any names, or an address?” Daryl asked.

“No.” Annie’s expression remained unyielding.

“What’s Ivana up to?” Jeff asked, raking his hand through his hair, desperate to find a way to recover the disk.

“It was all crazy,” Annie said, shrugging. “She was writing these e-mails, pacing back and forth waiting for answers, drinking coffee. Then her mother called and they talked. Not long after that she was back on the computer. Then she packed and left.”

“For where?” Daryl asked.

“Paris, of course.”

“Why go there?” Jeff said, recalling for an instant that Paris was where Carlton had been murdered.

“She told me she had the address where the men worked. They told her if she brought them the external drive, they could protect her.”

“She believed them?” Jeff said, stunned at the thought.

“No, she didn’t,” Annie said, sitting back in her chair, eyeing them both evenly. “I don’t think you understand what’s going on.”

“Doesn’t she realize this is probably a trap?” Daryl asked incredulously.

“I think she knows that. She’s planning on it. I tried to stop her, but she wouldn’t listen. She can be very, very determined once she sets her mind on something.” Annie paused. “She took my brother’s gun with her.”

Jeff looked at Daryl, then back to Annie. “We need to see that computer.”

66

It was nearly two in the morning when the airplane from Milan landed at Charles de Gaulle Airport outside Paris. Jeff and Daryl took a taxi from the stand and gave the driver the address for Graphisme Courageux.

The driver looked at it, then in French said, “This is a business. It will be closed.”

Daryl answered. “We know. Go there anyway.”

The man gave a very Gallic shrug, then put the car into gear.

“Do you think we’re in time?” Jeff asked.

“Annie said she took the TGV train to avoid airport inspection, for obvious reasons. I looked at the schedules, and we’re arriving at about the same time.”

“Do you really think she means to try and do it?” Jeff asked.

Daryl recalled Ivana and tried to see the angry Russian as an avenging angel. “Annie does — and after what they did to her family, I don’t doubt it.”

Ivana Koskov stepped from the taxi two blocks from the Graphisme Courageux office. She had the driver point the way for her, paid him, then stood watching as he drove off and was well away. She lit a cigarette.

The streets were quiet at this time of the morning. She’d always imagined coming to Paris, but never like this. All she’d brought with her from Milan was a shoulder bag with a change of underwear, some toiletries, the external drive, and, of course, the heavy gun.

On the speeding train locked in the restroom, she’d hefted the weapon several times. It was a revolver so she’d had no difficulty seeing that the gun was loaded. She’d looked but she could find no safety. She was certain all she had to do was point the thing and pull the trigger.

Ivana did not doubt her ability to kill these men. She just wished she could be certain that she’d hit what she aimed at. If she knew she’d killed them, whatever happened to her afterward didn’t matter.

For a fleeting second she thought of the baby growing inside her. If she lived, she hoped the French authorities would let her mother raise the child. If they didn’t, it would grow up in France, and that had to be better than living in what Russia was and was becoming. And if, as she feared, she died? She pushed that thought from her mind.

Dufour fell asleep about midnight. Labib had joined him in the front office, keeping a silent vigil through the windows. Behind both men, sitting in the hallway in a chair he’d pulled from the back office, sat Fajer, fingering the shafra.

Fajer had considered using a gun, but such a weapon would be loud and the Paris police were notoriously efficient. No, a knife would do. There was no reason to be suspicious of the ease with which they had drawn her to them. She was, after all, only a woman.

A light shower had fallen in Paris shortly after midnight. Couples had scurried from doorstep to doorstep on their way home. Now the streets on the Left Bank were nearly clear of life. The rain had left the cobblestones slick with patches of water that reflected the streetlights.

Ivana drew a deep breath, walked toward the shadows on the right side of the street, then moved slowly toward the address she had for Graphisme Courageux. She shifted her shoulder bag well back behind her left arm and firmly gripped the revolver in the pocket of her light jacket.

For a second she realized she was likely walking to her death, but she pushed the thought back. Some things you had to do, and this was one of them.

As she crossed a narrow street to the block where the address was, a taxi came up behind her. She turned and watched as it slowed, then stopped about twenty feet from where she was standing. The American couple she’d last seen in Moscow, the handsome young couple she’d thought dead, emerged from the vehicle. The taxi drove off, and the couple, spotting her, ran toward her, the man holding the shoulder where he’d been shot.

“Ivana,” the woman shouted. “Don’t do this.”

“Stay back,” Ivana warned. “I have a gun. I don’t want to hurt you, but you aren’t going to stop me.”

“It won’t bring your husband back,” Daryl said. Ivana looked frail for such determination. A large bandage covered one side of her head, and her face was pale.

“You have to be Russian to understand why I must do this.”

“The external drive. Do you have it with you?” Jeff asked, thinking of the hundreds of thousands, even millions, of lives that might be at stake.

“Of course. I may need to show it to them to get close. Now go away from here.”

“Give us the drive and then we can all talk about what to do next. Please,” Jeff pleaded.

“No. I need it. Walk away.”

“Let us call the police,” Daryl said

“Why?” Ivana said, seeming genuinely perplexed. “How do I prove these men killed Vlad and my father? Think about it. Everything was done by computer. It was a virtual killing, except for the blood of my family.”

“The assassin is dead,” Jeff said.

“How do you know?”

“We saw it,” Daryl said. “Those men in the hallway managed to kill him.”

“Good. Very good.” Ivana’s voice was hard, and bitter.

“Ivana, please…,” Daryl begged.

“Enough! Turn and leave, or I will shoot you too. I mean it!” Ivana drew the pistol from her pocket and pointed it at them. “Go!”

Jeff took Daryl’s sleeve and drew her back. “We’ll wait,” he said.

“Good. If I miss one, you can kill him.” Then Ivana turned and walked briskly away from them, returning the revolver to her pocket.

Jeff and Daryl watched as the slim woman paused at a door, tried the handle, then entered without hesitation.

“Keep an eye on that door,” Jeff shouted at Daryl before running toward it, then turning right down the alley.

Daryl moved toward the door herself, uncertain what she should do. A long minute passed. Then she heard a gunshot.

Dufour was startled from his sleep when the bell over the front door chimed. He jumped to his feet, nearly losing his balance. They had left the night-light on so as not to attract the attention of the police patrol, who were used to it. The front office was almost entirely in shadows.

Only then did he see the woman, standing just inside the door.

Labib also rose from his chair. “You startled us,” he said.

“I’m sorry, I don’t speak French,” Ivana said.

“English, perhaps?” Labib said, switching languages, moving slowly toward her.

“Yes, English is fine. My name is Ivana. Are you the men I e-mailed earlier today?”

Dufour had gathered himself by now. “Yes, I am Xhugo. It is a pleasure to meet you in person,” he said in heavily accented English. “Allow me.” He moved toward her, closed the door, then locked it, all the while smiling.

Ivana shifted her place slightly so he could not reach her, pretending to look scared. Could these men really be the killers of her husband and father? It didn’t seem possible. The man nearest her appeared to be a teenager, while the other, though older and clearly an Arab, looked as if violence was far beyond him.

“We are sorry for the loss of your husband. But you are safe now, here with friends. We greatly respected his work. You have the external drive?” Labib asked, coming from around the desk into the waiting area where Ivana stood.

“Yes. I have it.”

“Show us,” another voice said from behind the Arab. Ivana looked and a taller Arab stepped from the shadows. Though the office was darkened, a light from outside caught his face fully for just an instant.

Yes, she thought, here is the killer. “I have it right here.” From her pocket she drew the weapon.

Jeff ran down the alley, then turned left at the next opening. He found a series of back doors; all the public entrances and exits to the businesses faced the street. These were unmarked, from what he could see, in an alley with almost no artificial light. He moved urgently along the doors as quickly as he could, listening, looking in where possible. His sense had been that Ivana had entered not quite halfway down the block; he rushed past the first doors, then slowed as he estimated the location.

Then he heard the gunshot. Running to the next door, he heard a second, then a third, shot from behind it. He tried the handle but the door was locked. Pressing his shoulder against the door, he pushed as hard as he could. Stepping back, he heard a fourth, then a fifth shot. He rushed the door. As he struck it with his good shoulder, the lock gave and he tumbled into the back office.

“Gun!” Dufour shouted in Arabic when he saw the weapon clearing her hand. He pulled away from Ivana, though part of him said he should rush her before she could fire. The young woman pointed the gun at him and shot once, striking Dufour squarely in his chest.

It was as if he’d been hit with a heavy hammer. The air rushed from his lungs as Dufour fell back and toppled to the floor.

“Get her!” Fajer shouted in Arabic as he moved forward. Labib rushed Ivana, reaching her just as she swung the gun toward him and fired, the shot winging over his left shoulder. He grabbed her in a sort of tackle and the two of them struck the wall beside the door heavily. Ivana moved the gun against the man’s side and pulled the trigger. The explosion was loud and Labib screamed as he released her and began to fall, clutching at her clothing as he did.

Across the entryway Fajer was cursing his own stupidity as he launched himself at the Russian woman. He should have brought a gun. With a sinking heart he saw Labib fall, but by then he was only two short steps away, the shafra held aloft, ready to slash across the woman’s throat.

Labib was gripping Ivana’s jacket as if clinging to a lifeline. She pulled the trigger a fourth time, the bullet striking the Arab in the side of his head. He fell to the floor, a loud gurgling sound coming from deep in his throat.

Ivana could see the third man, the one with the killer’s face, almost on top of her. She managed to raise the revolver and fire the final two shots. One went into the floor, the other missed him widely to the left. She saw the flash of the blade and knew she was dead.

Jeff rushed through the back office, down the short hallway, and entered the front office as Ivana fired the sixth and final shot from her gun. He sensed one man lying to his left, a second moaning, lying almost at the woman’s feet, and saw the motion of the third man as he stabbed at Ivana.

“Stop!” he shouted as he rushed at the man. Instinctively, Fajer turned toward the sound, causing his knife to strike Ivana on the shoulder. She screamed.

Daryl heard the shots in rapid succession. Hesitating at the entrance, not sure what to do, she had no idea if Jeff had found the back way in. Then she heard the struggle at the door and Jeff’s voice shout, “Stop!”

Without thinking, she ran the few short steps to the door and threw herself against it. The door flew open and she sprawled into the entryway, just beside the startled Fajer and screaming Ivana. When she saw Jeff leaping across the short distance from the desk at the fair-skinned Arab, Daryl threw herself at him as well.

Where had the devils come from? Fajer wanted to know.

One moment it was the three of them against the little woman, the next Dufour was dead, his brother dying. His own attack had been thwarted, but he could not return to the woman until he had killed the man. But as he whipped his blade in front of him, the front door exploded open. In rushed a blond apparition that threw itself at him, too. He didn’t know which threat to respond to, and in that moment of indecision, Jeff flew into him, bowling the man over, crashing hard with him into the wall.

Ivana grabbed her shoulder. The pain seared her flesh. She let herself fall to the floor, where she curled into a tight ball as she felt the bodies struggling above her.

Jeff smelled the fear as he struck the man. The pair of them grappled for the knife. All the while the man was swearing in Arabic. Determined as he was, Jeff was stronger; if he could avoid getting disemboweled, he’d have the better of the Arab in seconds. He twisted the man’s wrist again, so hard he expected to hear the snap of bone. The Arab grunted in pain. Jeff heard the knife clatter to the floor and a moment later felt hands seize his throat and begin to squeeze like a vise.

Daryl was grabbing at the Arab, trying to find some way to help Jeff, when she saw him put his hands around Jeff’s throat. At her feet lay the knife he’d had. She reached down and picked up the strange-looking weapon.

Beside her, Jeff grunted. Daryl grimaced, then plunged the knife into the Arab’s stomach.

Fajer had never before experienced such pain. Releasing the man, he clutched at his side, pulling away from everyone. The blond woman held in her hand his knife, the one that he realized had taken his life.

Blood flowed from him in a torrent. He prayed in Arabic as he attempted to stanch it. Within moments he became lightheaded, then sleepy.

The jihad, he thought. It is unleashed whether I live or not. This is Allah’s will.

He swayed on his feet, then toppled over, falling across the dead body of his brother Labib.

67

Jeff watched the Arab die without emotion, then checked on the other Arab lying on the floor. He was dead as well. The third man was also lifeless.

“Jeff!” Daryl said. “Are you all right?”

“Yes. I’m fine. You?”

“Me too. I think he stabbed Ivana, though.” She squatted down beside the Russian woman, who was still curled in a ball. “Let me help,” Daryl whispered.

“We have to get out of here,” Jeff interrupted her. “The police will arrive any second.” He checked the floor, slippery with blood. Spotting the external drive, he grabbed it and thrust it into his pants pocket. “Let’s go. Now!”

Already they could hear the siren of a Paris police car. He helped lift Ivana, who moaned and winced at the touch of his arm around her. “I can walk,” she murmured in halting English.

The three of them hurried out the back and into the alley. “Wait a minute,” Jeff said. “Daryl, put pressure on the wound. I’ll be right back.” He rushed off. When he returned, he was carrying their two travel bags, which they’d left on the street. Moving as quickly as they could, they fled the death and chaos.

Five blocks away, they stopped at a fountain and washed as well as they were able to. Daryl removed Ivana’s bloody jacket and threw it away. Jeff reached for his undershirt, tore most of it off, and tied it against her wound to stem the bleeding. Then Daryl took her jacket off and slipped it over the Russian.

“Let’s flag a taxi while we can,” Daryl said. “We look presentable enough. It will take the police a few minutes to figure out what happened.”

Jeff moved to a wider street, where he spotted a taxi stand and waved.

“Act like we’ve been nightclubbing,” he said. “We don’t want to be especially memorable, at least not for the wrong reason.”

A moment later the car approached and the three entered, all laughing. Despite her pain, Ivana put a smile on her face.

“Where to?” the driver asked in French.

Daryl thought for a moment. “The Hilton.” She looked at Jeff and shrugged. They must have a Hilton somewhere.

“There are five,” the driver said. “Which one?”

Daryl thought for a moment again. “The one by the airport.”

The driver audibly sighed. “Which airport? There are two with Hiltons.”

“Charles de Gaulle.” That, Daryl decided, should be far enough away.

Daryl checked them into a suite, then helped Jeff bring Ivana to their room. Removing the shower curtain, Jeff spread it across one of the two beds and helped Daryl lay the Russian there.

As Daryl began removing Ivana’s clothing, Jeff went back downstairs, asked the desk clerk where he might find an all-night pharmacy, and walked the two blocks to it. There an Arab clerk rang up his collection of bandages, Tylenol, and tape.

“Here,” Jeff said as he entered their room. The wound was still oozing blood from around the wet towel Ivana had pressed to her shoulder. “I’ll be in the business suite if you need me,” he said, to give the women privacy as Daryl closed and taped the wound.

The business suite was open twenty-four hours a day. A sleepy young woman smiled and asked him to enter his room number and name on the sign-in sheet as she gestured toward any of the free computers. Jeff had the room to himself. At one of the computers he connected the precious hard drive and scanned it for content. Separating the source code and executable files, he zipped them, then uploaded the files by FTP to a secure drop site. He sent an e-mail to Daryl’s office alerting them to its presence, even though she’d be calling in a few minutes. The simple process seemed anticlimactic to him after so much running and so many deaths. He felt let down and stupefied, didn’t move from his seat for a few minutes.

When he returned to the room, Daryl had finished. Ivana was sipping from a cup and gave Jeff a weak smile before collapsing onto the pillows. Within minutes she was asleep.

“It’s off,” he said. He still couldn’t believe that part had come so easily. After all the blood, there should have been more to it. He was exhausted and imagined Daryl must be too. He tentatively examined his shoulder. The wound had bled a little again, but otherwise didn’t feel too bad.

Daryl nodded. “I’ll call the office, then take a shower.”

Later, Daryl and Jeff lay in bed, speaking in whispers. “Does she need a doctor?” he asked.

“I don’t think so. She wasn’t cut very deeply, and the bleeding’s stopped. She won’t go to one, anyway.”

Jeff said nothing for a long time. He felt Daryl’s deep, steady breathing and decided she’d fallen asleep. Almost to himself he said, “We were very lucky.”

“Yes, we were,” she murmured.

“You don’t have to leave just yet,” Jeff said at the airport the next day. Daryl was back at the hotel, in contact with her office.

“I do,” Ivana said. “I have a father and husband to bury.” She was dressed in clothes Daryl had bought that morning and looked exhausted. “And my mother needs me.”

Jeff took her arm and drifted with her to a wall away from the busy concourse. “I’m sorry for everything that’s happened.”

“It was not your fault. It is fate. You helped kill the assassins. I am in your debt.” She looked at this American and wondered how he could have done such things. He seemed so gentle.

“Is there anything else I can do?” Jeff didn’t want to let Ivana go, for reasons he couldn’t fathom. She’d shown a toughness he’d never imagined possible for someone who was so clearly not usually a violent person. He wondered for a moment what the world would think if they knew the whole story. Would they condemn her husband for what he’d done? Or laud her for risking everything to undo it? He doubted that in all his life he’d ever meet someone like her again.

“Nothing.” Ivana leaned forward and kissed him lightly on the cheek. “God bless you both.”

“Did she get off?” Daryl asked as Jeff entered the suite.

“Yes. She hid the pain very well, I think.”

“She’s a tough lady.”

“That would describe her. For sure…” Jeff’s voice trailed off. “Any progress with saving the world?”

Daryl looked tired, but had that determined look he’d grown to know when she was on a mission. “The code is encrypted, but NSA’s working on cracking it full-time, I’m proud to say. My team at US-CERT is spreading the word to the security vendors. When NSA has clean code for us, we’ll disseminate it to the vendors, then they’ll get the signatures ready and released, in quick time.”

Jeff thought back to the small space where, for all he knew, three dead bodies still lay soaking in blood on the floor. “Did you get a look at that office?”

“Not really.” Daryl shook her head. “It all happened so fast. It was terrible, just terrible.”

For the first time since all this had started, Jeff saw Daryl’s face start to crumble. He took her into his arms and held her as close as he could. After a moment he said, “I was thinking about the virus attack. Altogether it was just three men, and perhaps four computers. That’s all it took.” He paused. “There’s only four days to go.”

“I know,” she said softly against his chest.

Jeff thought back to the day he’d first walked into the law firm and met with Sue Tabor and Joshua Greene. It was as if a lifetime had passed since then. For years he’d focused on Internet and computer security, for years he’d anticipated just such a coordinated attack against the fragile infrastructure of the West. When it came, it hadn’t originated from a rogue nation nor had it taken substantial resources. It had come from a small back office in Paris. And it had not been stopped by a firewall or antivirus software. In the end it had taken the two of them, risking everything and nearly coming up short. It seemed incredible to him.

How long could they stay lucky? This very minute in Singapore, or China, or at any American college campus, some geek could be developing or releasing a destructive virus that used a newly discovered zero-day vulnerability to spread — a new virus for which by definition they had no protection on the always-lagging antivirus signatures, one against which no superheroics could save them.

In the end the Arabs had been unlucky, nothing more. No great feats of software engineering had saved the West. And if it hadn’t been for Ivana’s single-mindedness, he and Daryl would never have found the Arabs or would have been too late. Even now they might not have done enough.

He held Daryl more tightly. At least, finally, he’d found this. The coming days were uncertain. There’d be little time to think about the two of them. But whatever happened from here on, he believed, nothing would change that it was now we instead of I, and some consolation was to be found in that.

“Will this do enough good, do you think?” she asked.

“Some. Better than nothing.” He met her eyes. “All we can really do now is wait. Together.” Daryl nodded. “Wait,” he said, his voice flat. “But know that if not this time, then next.”