Joe Ledger: Code Zero Part 2

Conrad Building North Nineteenth Street Arlington, Virginia Friday, April 15, 2:09 p.m.

Someone had taken a can of red spray paint and used it to write a message on the wall.

The only action is direct action.

U+24B6.

"What's that supposed to mean?" wondered Top.

"I know that phrase," said Lydia. "I read it somewhere-"

It was Bug who answered. He could see the image via our helmet cams. "The top line, that's a catchphrase from the anarcho-punk movement."

"Punk?" I asked, but Bug had more.

"That's computer language," he told us. "Unicode. It's the codepoint for circle-A."

We all knew what that was. A capital A surrounded by a letter O. The international symbol for anarchy.

"The h.e.l.l we into here?" asked Bunny.

I didn't have an answer for him.

We never found Mother Night.

We sat Reggie down with a police sketch artist and someone who knew how to work an Identikit. The problem was that Reggie never saw Mother Night when she wasn't wearing big, dark sungla.s.ses and a kind of Betty Page haircut that he thought might have been a wig. She had lots of piercings in her ears, nose, and lower lip, and a couple of scars on her face. Her skin was darker than normal for an Asian, so he speculated that she might be part black. Her accent was European, but Reggie couldn't pin it down even after many audio samples were played for him.

The sketch and the Identikit picture did not resemble each other all that much, which is pretty common with descriptions by people who are not trained observers. Even so, the pictures of Mother Night were sent to every law enforcement and investigative agency in the country, and to a fair number of our friends overseas, including Interpol and Barrier.

All of the laptops at the suicide site were trashed, of course. No surprise there. But when the forensics teams searched the residences of the dead men they struck gold. Reggie's copy of VaultBreaker was hidden behind a false section of wall in one man's apartment. And that's where we caught our first break. The encryption on the software could not be hacked without the attacking hardware being hijacked to leave a signature on the disk. That signature included notations on the number of times the disk was read as well as critical information about the computer being used. It also uploaded a destructive virus to any attacking computer unless a separate piece of decryption software was preinstalled. When Bug a.n.a.lyzed the disk, he announced that the encryption had not been hacked.

Mother Night's team had not yet accessed the VaultBreaker software.

As lucky breaks go, that one was ma.s.sive. That's when my nuts crawled back down from inside my chest cavity.

The second break we caught was that the drives had stuff on them that the bad guys really did not want us to have. Names were named. In North Korea, in Iran. And, we discovered, in China.

And in a few other places whose political stability took a serious kick in the n.u.t.s.a.c.k once Mr. Church turned over the data to the State Department. And, with reluctance, to the Veep and his Cybercrimes team.

The effect of all this was pretty dramatic.

Heads rolled. Literally in North Korea, I believe.

People went to prisons and gulags. Some were disappeared. Governments denied official involvement. All players were disavowed and labeled as rebels, dissidents, enemies of various states. Blah, blah, blah.

What mattered to me was that the power grid stayed on, the missiles remained in their silos, and all of the microscopic monsters slumbered in their test tubes at places like the Locker.

The farther we got from that day in Arlington the less the DMS was involved. It became part of yesterday's box score. We moved on to other fights, other wars, other horrors.

And in doing so we believed that we had won an easy victory, kicked all kickable a.s.ses and put one in the win column for the good guys.

There's being wrong, and then there's being wrong.

This was the other kind.

Interlude One Donleavy Building Forty-third Street and Fifth Avenue, 58th Floor New York City Six Years Ago The young woman sat on the edge of her seat, knees together, hands in her lap, briefcase open on the other guest chair. She was twenty-three years old but already had a Ph.D. in computer science and masters in cybernetic engineering and software engineering. She'd graduated from high school at thirteen and was courted by scouts from every big-ticket science school from Cal Tech to Harvard.

The interviewer read her name off the top of her resume.

"Artemisia Bliss," he said, p.r.o.nouncing it slowly, savoring it. "Real name?"

"Real name," she agreed. "My father is a professor of genetics, specializing in the hybridization of ultrarare plant species. My mother is an a.s.sistant curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and she is one of the world's foremost authorities on Baroque art. She discovered two lost paintings by Artemisia Gentileschi, the seventeenth-century Italian who was-"

"-the eldest child of the Tuscan painter Orazio Gentileschi," finished the interviewer.

Miss Bliss blinked, confused. "Did you look that up after I scheduled this interview?"

"No, I happen to know something about art."

The interviewer left it there. Left it for her to ponder whether that statement was true or not.

He sat back in his expensive leather chair and pretended to study the psychological evaluation on this woman that had just been hand-delivered to him. In point of fact he was looking past the pages at Miss Bliss. She was, he was quite sure, the most beautiful woman with whom he had ever had a conversation. Possibly with the exception of Dr. Circe O'Tree, who was a young but brilliant counterterrorism a.n.a.lyst he occasionally consulted. Dr. O'Tree was a mix of European ethnicities, with some emphasis on Irish, Scottish, and Greek. Artemisia Bliss, unlike the scholarly couple that had adopted her, was pure Asian. Vietnamese and Chinese. She was slender, but not skinny. Not like many of the Asian women the interviewer had known. Miss Bliss was in no way a stick figure. Excellent nutrition had given her height and curves. Exercise toned her and gave her the posture of a dancer. And a lottery-winning set of genes gave her an IQ of 192 and the ambition to use it.

The IQ test was not a fluke or an error. Miss Bliss had first been tested at age nine and scored 187. Everyone concluded that she was a prodigy; but the growing body of evidence on intelligence testing indicated that a childhood IQ of 180 might only translate to an adult score of about 115. However, new developments have come up with much more accurate and flexible tests based on multiple dimensions of intelligence, including a.n.a.lytical, interpersonal, logical, memory, musical, spatial, linguistic, philosophical, moral, spiritual, intrapersonal, bodily, and naturalist. The information in Miss Bliss's a.s.sessment had been drawn from that kind of exhaustive testing, and it deeply pleased the interviewer. He made a note to have his computer people try to hack the records of the adoption bureau in Beijing. There were people he worked with who would probably want to put eyes on any siblings or close cousins. Intelligence levels of that kind were distressingly rare.

The interviewer riffled the pages, pursed his lips, and pretended he wasn't looking at Artemisia Bliss. He had an IQ of 198, and halfway through this session he was wondering how many n.o.bel prizes their kids would earn. As he saw it, supergeniuses should be allowed to mate only with each other. The fact that the supergenius gene pool produced someone like Artemisia Bliss was, to him, proof that the universe as a collective whole was working to make it happen. It was an evolutionary imperative.

He placed the evaluation facedown on his desk and laid his palms flat on top of it.

"What do you know about us?" he asked.

She gave him a brief smile. There and gone.

"I know only what I was allowed to know," she said. She leaned ever so slightly on the first "know."

The interviewer decided to play along. "Which is?"

Miss Bliss raised a few fingers of her hand in a way that was meant to indicate the interviewer, the office, and everything a.s.sociated with it. "That this is an interview for a possible position in a government think tank."

"But...?" he prompted.

"But ... this is window dressing for something else."

"Oh?" He wanted to smile, but didn't. "Please explain."

Another flicker of a smile. It was a trademark with her, he noted. Less than a second in duration, meant to convey a bit of warmth but also to show that she was aware that these hoops were all necessary. She didn't like them, but she'd jump through them with grace because there was a nice reward at the end.

"This is not a government office."

"You're sure about that?"

"Yes."

The interviewer pursed his lips. Miss Bliss was very composed, in a tailored linen suit in a pale charcoal, with a salmon blouse. Three earrings in each ear, which told the interviewer that she took some time for leisure and fun-a single pair of functional studs would have indicated a loner-but her mind tended toward order. She wore silver rings on two fingers of her left hand and gold rings on three fingers of her right. Perhaps an indication of qualities of her right and left mind. Her glossy black hair was pulled back at the temples with scarab-shaped clips; the wings prevented her hair from falling into her face. A sign of purpose and confidence. The interviewer filed it all away in his mind.

"Then walk me through it," he suggested.

A more pedantic person would have ticked it off on her fingers as she explained. Miss Bliss did not. She said, "There is a soldier sitting outside the building."

"Soldier?"

"He's dressed like a FedEx guy, truck and all. I got here early and stood outside to finish my coffee before I came in. Maybe three minutes. The whole time the man looked at maps on a GPS." Before he could ask her to elucidate, she held up a single finger. "A FedEx man working in Manhattan wouldn't need a GPS even if he could get a clear signal. There are so many businesses compacted into each few square blocks that deliverymen would work a tight region. He'd know it backward after a day."

The interviewer almost flipped her file open to check her birth date to make sure she was really only twenty-three. Instead he merely said, "Continue."

"Sure. The big tip-off is the fact that he has a wire behind his ear, like the Secret Service wear. It was on the pa.s.senger side at least, so it wasn't too obvious, but he has a tan and the wire is white. At the very least he should have been wearing a flesh-colored one. It spoiled the whole effect."

"You're very observant."

Her mouth twisted into momentary irritation. Like the smile, it was there and gone. The interviewer appreciated it. His compliment had been deliberately weak and obvious, and her irritation showed that she wasn't the kind of person to seek compliments like a puppy wagging for treats. She was giving information and did not appreciate a pointless interruption. He gave a small gesture with his hand to indicate that she continue.

"Inside the lobby, the menu of offices was wrong," she said. "There are a lot of insurance companies and similar firms here, and they comprise nearly seven eighths of the office s.p.a.ce. When the government rents office s.p.a.ce it tends to do so in larger chunks. This was the only such office. However, if an organization-federal or private-wanted to have an office for interviews in the right zip code in Manhattan, they might rent something like this. It's expensive without being a clear misuse of taxpayer dollars. The waiting room is a bit careworn, which is a nice touch, but there's some old cigarette smoke lingering, and government offices have been smoke-free for years."

He nodded, considered making a Sherlock Holmes joke, decided against it because it might weaken him in her eyes, and instead asked, "Anything else?"

She smiled now, a full smile that was beautiful but not warm. "You never bought that suit with a government paycheck. No government pencil pusher is going to wear an H. Huntsman just to sit behind a desk. Same goes with that watch. A Rolex Daytona? Seriously? That costs about the same as a semester at Harvard. So, no ... this isn't a government office." Her smile changed, became a bit shy. "Besides, I know who you are, and this," she said, reaching over and nudging the bra.s.s nameplate holder, "isn't you."

The nameplate read Michael Chang, Ph.D.

The interviewer had to clear his throat before he asked, "Are you certain about that?"

"Yes, because I know who you are. I have six of your books, including the latest one, Filamentous Bacteriophage: Biology, Phage Display and Nanotechnology Applications. You're wearing that same suit in the author photo."

He said nothing. It took a great deal of effort to control the expressions that wanted to twist his face into a mask of great delight.

"You're the man Scientific American called 'DARPA's real-world mad scientist,'" Miss Bliss said. "You are Dr. William Hu."

Part Two.

Mother Night.

The opinions that are held with pa.s.sion are always those for which no good ground exists; indeed the pa.s.sion is the measure of the holder's lack of rational conviction. Opinions in politics and religion are almost always held pa.s.sionately.

-BERTRAND RUSSELL, Sceptical Essays.

Chapter Six.

Gulhane Park.

Eminonu District.

Istanbul, Turkey.

Monday, May 2, 3:37 p.m.

I skated the edge of the Mother Night thing again on a rainy afternoon in a lovely park in Istanbul. They don't get a lot of rain in that part of the world, and if the skies above hadn't been dark, the conversation I was having might have taken place indoors.

My friend, you see, doesn't appreciate bright sunlight. She can deal with it if she has to, but she doesn't like it. Call it an allergy to the sun if that works for you.

Even in the gentle drizzle, Violin wore a hat with a floppy brim, and sungla.s.ses, and she kept her hands in her pockets. Ghost sat on the ground with his head in her lap, letting her pet him and play with his soggy ears. Few people ever get that close to Ghost without losing important parts. But he has a thing for Violin. For her, and for Junie.

It's all pretty complicated.

For him. Not for me.

Violin had once been my lover, and a pretty intense one at that, but things had changed. I'd changed. Maybe the world had changed. Now I had Junie in my life and Junie was my life.

What did that make Violin?

Certainly not a sister. That was too inbred a concept for me.

Comrade in arms, I suppose, though that definition was far from accurate.

We drank bitter coffee out of cardboard cups, pretending that we couldn't still smell gun smoke and spilled blood. Three hours ago we'd cleaned out a nest of Red Knights, and our nerves were totally shot. Well, mine were. I still get a case of the shakes every time I see one of those saw-toothed freaks. They are human, of course, but they're from a different genetic line called the Upierczy. An evolutionary spur that dead-ended, resulting in them being just enough different from normal humans to appear inhuman. Or nonhuman. However that's supposed to be conjugated. Freaks works for me. They are the reason we have legends of vampires. Pale, immensely powerful, and they have a real taste for O positive; but they don't sleep in coffins, they don't turn into bats, and you don't need a stake to kill them. A nine-millimeter bullet in the brainpan works nicely, thank you.

Today we'd killed five of them.

I took two out, one with bullets and one with a knife in the eye socket. Yeah, that works pretty well, too. Ghost crippled one of them, and Violin finished the job. Then she tore the remaining two to shreds. Violin was not an enemy you'd want to have. And in a lot of ways she, and the other women of the covert ops team Arklight, were much scarier than the Red Knights.

That was a handful of hours ago and now we were pretending to be ordinary folks out for the day in a light rain, enjoying the soggy park with their waterlogged dog, drinking coffee. It was all I could do to keep my teeth from chattering.

Funny thing was that I hadn't come over here to hunt vampires. I was tracking a shipment of fissile materials that had been covertly purchased by a splinter cell of the Seven Kings. We'd torn the Kings down a few years ago, but it wasn't dead. Even though at least half of the Kings were dead-Hugo Vox, Sebastian Gault, and Bin Laden for sure, and maybe one or two others-the rest had eluded us. Rumors were afloat in the seas of international terrorism that the Kings were regrouping. If they do, I think I'll quit and get a job kicking Siberian tigers in the n.u.t.s.a.c.k-I'd be safer and have a better chance for retirement.

"When are you going back?" asked Violin, trying to make it sound casual.

"Tonight."