Arch Enemy (21 page)

M
organ was dropped off by the driver at the apartment Jakande had set up in Abidjan for the tactical team. It was a three-bedroom, populated with Soviet-style furniture. The tactical team kept it in a state of military neatness. White was sitting on the couch, shrinking under Tango's watchful eyes. Spartan snored, asleep on an armchair in the corner. Diesel was whistling in the kitchen, preparing a sandwich. Morgan's stomach rumbled.

He still had red paint on his face, mingled with dried blood from the beating he had taken from Madaki's bodyguard.

“How you doin', killer?” Bishop asked Morgan with a fist bump.

“Long ride back when you're driving,” he said. “Jakande's soldiers secured the house. They got a couple of Madaki's lieutenants. They'll have no problem finding whatever's left of his scattered forces. You guys all right?”

“Fine, except for having to look after Whitey over here.” Bishop gave Mr. White a slap on the back of the head.

Morgan pulled up a chair, dragging it close to White, so that their knees were almost touching.

“Hello there, Señor White. Have these guys been treating you well?”

He was trembling. “Wh-what are you going to do to me?” he stammered.

Morgan's mouth broke into a wolfish grin. With all the bruises and paint, he must have been a grotesque sight. “Let me tell you what's going to happen.” Morgan slapped a hand on White's knee. “We're going to be friends, you and me. Bee-eff-effs. Isn't that right, Tango?”

“That's right.”

“You're gonna come over to my house, and we're going to have a slumber party. Pizza, pillow fights. And then you're going to whisper all your secrets in my ear.”

White was sweating and wringing his hands, all color drained from his face. Morgan sat back, putting his feet up on the couch next to White.

“A lot of good men are dead because of your greed. Families driven out of their homes and destroyed. I want nothing more than to toss you in the middle of the people whose lives you destroyed and watch them tear you apart.”

White whimpered.

“But I can't do that. You're too valuable to us. I need to know what you know. And if you talk, I pinky-swear that you won't be tried in a state that allows the death penalty.”

“I have records of everything,” he said, tripping over his words to get them out. “I'll give you everything you need to bury every last person at Acevedo who had a finger in the arms-dealing pie. Drugs, too. I want to make a deal.”

“Good,” said Morgan. “We're taking you stateside. Some nice men are going to negotiate this deal with you—”

There was a knock at the door.

“Hold that thought.”

Morgan got up and opened the door. On the other side was a slender short-haired woman with a scar across her chest, her right arm in a sling.

Yolande.

“General Jakande is here,” she said, all business. “He is coming up.”

“How's your arm?”

She wouldn't meet his gaze. “It is being tended to.”

The elevator arrived on the floor and out came two heavy bodyguards in black suits. They were followed by Jakande, in his military uniform and trademark Colt .45. Yolande stood at attention with military blankness.

“Mr. Bevelacqua,” he said with a warm smile, extending a hand in greeting. “Madaki is dead and his forces are routed. I have you to thank for that. All of you,” he added, looking at the assembled Zeta tactical team.

Morgan shook the general's hand. “Thanks for saving the day.”

“We saw an opportunity to end Madaki's reign and we took it. I pressed the high command, and General Onobanjo did not have the courage to stand against us. He is a rational man, after all.” Jakande turned his attention to White. “And I see you got your man.”

“He's going to be interrogated. We're taking his whole company down. They won't be bringing guns into your country anymore.”

“Good. And we will bring Dimka's uprising under the purview of the army. With their help, we will find Madaki's remaining mines and free the people there. There will be no more slaves in Côte d'Ivoire.” He lay his hand on Yolande's good shoulder. “My operative told me of your extraordinary bravery, Bevelacqua. You have my eternal gratitude—and that of my country.”

“Maybe we can help each other out again someday.”

“I've no doubt. Just one more thing before I take my leave.”

Jakande drew his sidearm and shot White three times in the chest.

The Zeta team sprang into action. All drew their weapons, as did Jakande's bodyguards and Yolande. Weaponless, Morgan faced Jakande, who was holding his gun at his side. He could hear the heavy breathing of the team behind him, finger triggers itchy.

Mexican standoff. Morgan's least favorite kind.

Jakande holstered his Colt .45 and raised his hand. Yolande and his bodyguards put away their weapons as well. “Easy,” said the general. “I have no quarrel with any of you.”

“Stand down,” said Morgan. Bristling, the team lowered their weapons. He addressed Jakande. “Why?”

“I am a rational man, too, Mr. Bevelacqua. And when I am threatened by powers greater than myself, I know not to stand athwart them.”

“You have an army at your disposal. What power can beat that?”

“Information,” said Jakande. Morgan caught a hint of shame in his expression.

“Who? Acevedo?”

“I will not say more. The cars are downstairs to take you to the airport. Don't worry about him.” He indicated White's twitching corpse. “It will be taken care of. Just make your arrangements and go.”

“Sorry,” said Yolande, resting her hand on his arm. She followed Jakande out the door.

“What the hell was that?” said Tango.

“Big man flexing his muscles,” said Bishop.

Morgan looked down at the body. They had him. They had what they needed to bring down Acevedo. And it had slipped through their fingers yet again.

“I need to call Bloch,” said Morgan. “I need to know what the hell is going on.”

Bishop handed Morgan a tablet computer and pointed him to a bedroom. Morgan sat down at a desk with the computer and hailed Bloch.

“Good Lord, Morgan, what is on your face?”

He told her what Jakande did.

“That is troubling,” she said.

“He double-crossed us. This can't stand.”

“This can and will stand,” said Bloch. “If White is dead, there is nothing else to be done. We will not act hastily in reprisal. Jakande may still be a valuable ally.”

“He just shot our witness!”

“This is not for you to decide. We will conduct an investigation. In the meantime, we cut our losses and look forward. It's time for you and tactical to go to the airport.”

He sat back in his chair, exhaling. “At least after all this it'll be good to go home.”

“You are not coming home.”

“What?”

“You have a new mission. In Ireland. We'll brief you on the way.”

“I
can't believe you,” said Simon.

The dining hall was bustling with the dinner crowd, red-faced students coming in ravenous from the cold. Alex tossed a curly fry in her mouth and, before even swallowing, took a bite of her burger, searing hot and juicy.

Simon sat across from her at one of the square tables, agog at what she had been telling him, and not in a good way.

“This is what we were working for,” she said through a full mouth of hamburger.

“You're back in.”

She swallowed with effort. “I caught a real break with Hillary Chen.”

“What about getting your life back on track?”

“I meant it,” she said. “I really did. But don't you get it? It's happening, Simon. We're going to do it.”

“
You're
going to do it,” he said. “I want no more involvement in this insanity.”

He got up and stormed off.

“What about your food?” Alex asked, but he didn't stick around long enough to hear it.

She shrugged and took the onion rings from the tray he had left. More for her.

 

The reporter, Francine Krynick, didn't want to meet over coffee. After Alex gave her the bare bones of her findings, she insisted they get together in one of the private study rooms in the dorm basement. They sat across the beech table from each other. The room had windows to the computer lab that led into it, but it was soundproof, which was one of its main virtues.

Francine had wild frizzy hair, which she didn't try to contain at all so that it ended up sticking out in every direction, some locks curled and some not. She wore, over manic-looking eyes, glasses, square, thick black oversized plastic frames, which she pushed back up when they slid down her face every couple of minutes.

Alex finished relating everything that had happened thus far, ending on her conversation with Hillary Chen.

“That's quite a story,” Francine said finally, looking over her notes. “I have . . . questions.”

“I would imagine.”

She asked more about the party at the frat house. Alex described it in minute detail, being careful to omit Katie's name.

“How did you get access to the visitor logs at the health center?”

“I think we'd better skip that one.”

“Illegal then?” Francine shook her head as she jotted down a note on her pad. “They'll come after me to find out how I came by it.”

“They will. Will that be a problem?”

Francine laughed. “I'll get word out on the blogosphere. The more the university hounds me for this, the more people will come to my side. And, not incidentally, the more people will read my article and know my name.”

Alex knew then she'd made the right choice with Francine. Something she'd learned from her father: sometimes, it's better to have a selfish person who will benefit from helping you than an honorable one who won't.

“To be clear, this girl you're talking about is
not
willing to talk, not even off the record?”

“No,” said Alex.

“But”—Francine shuffled through her notes—“Hillary Chen will speak to me on the record?”

“I can guarantee it.”

“And you?”

“I don't want my name anywhere on it,” Alex said. “As far as your article is concerned, I don't exist. Are we clear?”

“Which means I get full investigative credit.”

“Right. Cite me as an anonymous source if you'd like. But that's all. The more you take credit for, the better.”

“Not gonna take issue with that.”

“So you're in?” Alex asked.

Francine might as well have been salivating. “Are you kidding me? This kind of story could take me on the interview circuit
and
land me a book deal
and
get me an internship at the
New York Times.
Let's get this ready for the next issue.”

M
organ reclined in the seat of the empty Gulfstream jet after his gourmet meal. After a hell of a couple of days, it felt damn good to stretch out in luxury for a few hours, rest his weary legs, and apply cream to the mass of mosquito bites that covered most of his skin. He glanced out the window, clouds white in the moonlight far below. They must be somewhere over Spain. He pulled down the blind. He didn't care for heights.

He closed his eyes for a rest, but that didn't last for two minutes before the flight attendant cleared her throat and set a computer in front of him. “A little dessert, sir.”

The screen came on and resolved into the Zeta War Room as seen from around the big screen. Kirby was sitting like he owned the place, at the head of the table. Shepard was in his usual seat at the far end, on the side. Almost every inch of the table was strewn with reams of paper that seemed to have their own chaotic order.

“Whoa, that's not a great angle for you,” said Shepard. “Look at the size of those pores.”

“How about we get to the point? I'm missing precious sleep for this.”

“This is your debrief for your next mission,” said Kirby. “Our analytical team has gained access to the data on Dominic Watson's hard drive.”

“Yeah? What did you find?”

“Chat logs and forum posts,” said Shepard. “Thousands of pages' worth. We've been piecing together the story while you were off tramping in the jungle. Here, I'm sending them to you now.”

A folder full of text files popped up on the screen. Morgan opened a file at random. It was a chat log for a conversation between a
capt_omega
and
trackoverflow
. It was mostly gibberish, peppered by the odd
ha-ha
or
lol
.

O'Neal trudged in from the lower right corner of the screen with another ream of paper in her hands, two or three hundred sheets' worth, her light frame bent under their weight. She slammed it down on an empty corner of the table, adjusted her glasses, and swept her bangs out of her eyes. “Here's the last of the trickster convos.” Morgan looked through the files Shepard had sent and saw that it was spelled
Trixxter
. “Hi, Morgan.”

“Karen. Any of you care to fill me in on why I'm going to Dublin?”

“When we first made contact with Watson, he was spooked,” she said, rifling through papers. “He wouldn't say what it was that had gotten him scared, but I got the impression it wasn't Acevedo. He said he wanted to disappear. We promised to make that happen if he—” Her voice faltered, her gaze was cast down. “If he did this for us.”

“We knew that Watson was on a number of electronic security forums,” broke in Shepard. “People who get together to talk about hacking. Mostly about how to stop it. That's what most of this is.”

“I found a conversation he had saved on his computer,” said O'Neal, holding up one of the packets and setting it back down in its original place. “That's packet number 27D, for the viewer following us at home. A couple months ago, one of them, a guy whose handle is
tridentkatana
—yeah, I know—shared with the group a security breach he had found in major networks. It could allow a hacker to see certain off-limits information in databases.”

“What are we talking about?” said Morgan. “User passwords?”

“That's what he figured at first,” said Shepard. “He took it to the group because he wanted their help figuring out if it really was what he thought it was. They could stand to make a lot of money from big tech companies like Google that pay rewards for this kind of thing.”

“And was it as bad as they thought?”

“Turns out it was worse,” said O'Neal. “It was a vulnerability hidden in the programming language of all the major encryption protocols. I'm talking about something that could give a hacker free range over all encrypted communications. I'm talking government, major corporations, private e-mails. Anything. They were calling it Blackrot.”

“Their little circle was sitting on the biggest tech story of the decade,” said Shepard. “This could shake the bedrock of Internet security.
Everyone
would scramble to protect their data. Connections would be down for days, possibly weeks. Banking activities would halt. The stock market would take a nosedive. We're talking major panic.”

Morgan's brow furrowed.

“But wait, it gets worse,” he continued. “Because this gives them access to government communications as well. Watson's group found out that exploiting this breach leaves a signature. And they were finding that signature everywhere. This means someone has been using the Blackrot vulnerability to get where they're not supposed to go. And I mean
everywhere.
For months, at least. Not only e-mails but banking and secret government databases.”

“Do we think this had something to do with Watson's death? That it's the same people that attacked me at the apartment?”

“Show him,” said O'Neal.

“About a month ago, Watson got this message.” It popped up on Morgan's screen.

 

Being followed. They are on to us. Trust no one.—Meatatron

 

“Meatatron was Guillermo Santos, native of Albuquerque, New Mexico,” said O'Neal. Shepard showed him the picture. “Killed in a car accident two days after that message was sent.”

“He wasn't the only one,” said Shepard as he cycled through the photos. “Philip Sykes, handle
tridentkatana
. Killed six days later in Liverpool. Asphyxiated by a carbon monoxide leak in his apartment. Elizabeth Nguyen, handle
Trixxter
.” The screen showed a chubby woman in glasses and bobbed hair. “Killed three weeks ago in New Jersey. Hit her head and drowned in her own bathtub.”

“And Quentin Ferguson, AKA Captain Omega.” Thirtyish, black, shaved head. “Killed two weeks ago, right here in Boston.”

“Did he have a connection to Dominic Watson?” Morgan asked.

“They were friends,” said O'Neal. “Like, in real life.”

“You found evidence that they met on the computer?”

“No,” said O'Neal. “I knew them personally. I was at Fergie's funeral.”

Ah.
Her reaction finally made sense.

“That's how we first made contact with Watson,” she continued. “Dom told me he was spooked. Fergie'd come up to him a few days before he died. They had gone silent in the forum. But Fergie had found out all their names as an exercise, and he knew that the others had died. He told Dom, and Dom became desperate for a way out. He confided in me about some things, although most of it I'm only learning now.”

“And now he's dead,” said Morgan.

O'Neal seemed stricken anew with grief and guilt at the reminder.

“Yes,” said Shepard. “But we caught a break. There's one left. Séamus Quinn, alias
trackoverflow
. He lives in Dublin.”

“That's where I come in?” asked Morgan.

“This is the last member of their circle,” said Shepard. “Someone is killing them off for what they knew. If we are to get to the bottom of this, we need that last man.”