Arch Enemy (36 page)

B
ruce Ansley was having one of his headaches. This one was so bad he could barely drive straight. The night before had ended in a screaming match between him and Annemarie. Cory was sleeping over at a friend's house, but Pam had heard everything and gave him the cold shoulder that morning.

Anger was welling up in him, fueled by the pain in his head, and in his mind it found his usual targets. Annemarie, the nag. Pam, the ungrateful little brat. He'd have words with them today. Oh, he'd tell them exactly what they were.

He called in sick and turned the car around to head home. Through the headache, the familiar anxiety pestered him. The post office. He had to stop at the post office.

He opened the post office box, prepared to give it his usual glance to confirm that it was empty, and that the day he never expected had not come, again.

But this time, it was different. This time, there was a package.

He reached out, hand shaking, and took it. It wasn't large, maybe the size of a children's lunchbox. It wasn't heavy, either. But it now was his whole life and carried the weight of the world.

Dazed, he sat in his car and opened the box. Inside, in foam padding, was a smaller case made of aluminum and a letter, which he opened and read.

The day had come. He couldn't escape anymore. It was here, it was now.

At least, he thought through the pain, it would be the end.

C
enturion sat in his 1979 Buick in the parking lot of the roadside motel. He pulled up next to the van and cut the engine. No need to hide here, not now. No cameras, no electronics. And Praetorian had other things on his mind.

All he had to do was walk up to that room door and knock. It was early, and because it was winter the sun still hadn't risen and the morning was still dark. But they wouldn't turn anyone away with the kind of information he had.

He got out of the car. His shoes hit the gravel, and the moment he stood, someone slammed the car door shut against him, pinning his chest between it and the chassis, and grabbed and twisted his left arm.

“I'm clean!” he protested, wind knocked out of him. “You want money? I'll give you money.”

“I want answers.” The Boston accent. The in-your-face tone. And Centurion finally got a good look at his face.

“You've been here eyeing that room for an awful long time, buddy. What are you looking for here?”

“Dan Morgan. And I think I just found him.”

Morgan pulled on Centurion's arm harder. “You've just made this a lot more dangerous for yourself.”

“Wait! I-I come in peace.”

“You have five seconds to tell me who you are. This is not a good day to test me.”

“My name—they call me Centurion. I'm a lieutenant in the Legion.”

Morgan gritted his teeth and twisted his arm harder.

“No! I'm here to help. I want to help you stop him.”

“I'm not just going to trust you on this one,” he said. “Why today?”

“They've gone off the rails, the whole group. Praetorian, he—I guess he's always been crazy. I just never realized what kind of crazy he is. How far he's willing to go.” Morgan eased the force on his arm. “I joined the group because I wanted to do good. I wanted justice.”

Some birds cawed overhead.

“You believed in his freedom and openness crap?”

“With every fiber of my being. And I fell under his spell. Here was someone who didn't only want to talk. He wanted to do something—ambitious things. Things that could bring down the whole system. And until recently, I never had a question about the righteousness of what we were doing. About why Praetorian did what he did.”

“And you just changed your mind?”

“Would you believe it if I told you it was about a girl?”

“Oh, brother.” Morgan took some weight off the door and released his arm. “All right. Let's get inside and we'll talk.”

M
organ roused everyone who was still asleep and they all gathered in the room he was sharing with Conley. He sat Centurion on the bed by the bathroom wall and the rest sat in a semicircle around him. The Zeta operatives seemed tense, like they might jump for a gun as soon as he did anything suspicious.

Morgan was the wariest among them. This could be a trap. Praetorian was elaborate in his plans, that much he knew. But what would've been the point? He'd already sent the police after them. For all he knew, Morgan could be caught at any moment. And if Centurion came to him, Praetorian could just as easily have dispatched an assassin. “Get talking,” he said.

Centurion fussed with his hands. He seemed uncomfortable with the attention. “I'm not very good at public speaking.”

Morgan rolled his eyes. “What's Praetorian's endgame?”

“You know he has the secret government data from the prison ship,” Centurion said. “Well, that's only half the plan. He wants to deal a death blow to the US government. It'll be a two-pronged attack.”

“He's using the Ekklesia cells to carry out his plan,” said Alex.

“No. They are just a distraction.”

“Who are these cells?” asked Lily.

“People like your daughter and her friend. People who were fed up. Who were leading meaningless lives in a system they no longer had faith in. People who wanted to be part of something greater than themselves.”

“Why don't these people ever join Habitat for Humanity or something?” said Karen O'Neal. “Why does it always have to be terrorism?”

“Praetorian has a way of bringing people to see things as he does. There's something about him. A strange and powerful charisma. It doesn't matter why they joined in the first place. He will convince them that they did the right thing. They—at least most of them—will join the team as if this had been the plan all along. And they'll love him for it.”

Lily snorted in disdain. “People are not that stupid.”

“I've seen it done on a smaller scale,” said Centurion. “You'd be surprised how much you can convince someone to do, thinking that it's the right thing.”

“I would know,” Alex said. Morgan winced.

“What's their plan?” he asked.

“They're planting what they think are smoke bombs at various national landmarks. It's supposed to make a point about national security. Except the bombs Praetorian is giving them will be real explosives.”

“No,” Alex cried out. Then she whispered, “Simon.”

“But you said that's a sideshow,” said Morgan. “A distributed attack gets every counterterrorism government agency working on overdrive, resources worn thin.”

“Exactly,” said Centurion. “It's the perfect moment to deliver his real blow. I take it you know that Praetorian let himself get caught?”

“Yes,” said O'Neal. “He wanted to get the secure data through the ship's computer system.”

“That's only half the plan. You see, he didn't come back alone from the prison ship. He brought someone else with him and left the evidence to blow up and sink to the bottom of the ocean.”

Morgan furrowed his brow. Not good. “Who?”

“In the early eighties, the Soviet Union began a program to embed sleeper agents in the US. They were brought in as children, posing as Bosnian refugees. Nine children. They would grow up here until they were adults, raised to follow whatever orders came to them, when they came. There was one man who was responsible for all of them.”

The image of the old Russian prisoner came back to Morgan. “Sergey.”

Centurion nodded. “Kuklovod.”

“Was that his name?” asked Morgan.

“No. It means—”

“Puppetmaster,” said Karen O'Neal.

“Excuse me,” said Lily, “but
who
?”

“He was a KGB agent, responsible for this program. The only one who knew the identities of the nine sleeper agents in the US. He was caught by the CIA in 1992. Subjected to interrogation and torture over this entire time. He never broke.”

“And now he's with Praetorian,” said Lily. “Is he talking?”

“More than that. He's collaborating.”

“What's his plan?” asked Conley.

“Praetorian is keeping his cards close to his chest,” Centurion said. “Nobody but he and Sergey know the identities of the sleeper agents, or what they're supposed to do. But whatever it is, it's going to be big.”

“How do we stop him?” asked Morgan.

Centurion shrugged his narrow shoulders. “Heck if I know. But I'll tell you this. Show people who he is, and his followers—the cells—will abandon him.”

“How do we do that, if we don't even know who he is?” said O'Neal.

“Because I know his name. His real name. Park Jeongwoo. Look for him, and you'll find out who he is.” He looked out the window, blinking his eyes in a nervous tic. “I need to go. He'll notice if I'm missing for too long. I'm already taking a huge risk being here.” He gathered his coat. “Find the sleeper agents. Find the cells. Don't let him win.”

Morgan opened the door for him. As he walked out, Morgan put his hand on his shoulder. “Just one question. Why did you come to me?”

“He told me about you,” Centurion said. “He seemed to respect you. He never respects anyone. I think it says something about who you are.”

Morgan watched through the window as Centurion pulled out and drove away.

“This place isn't safe,” he said. “We have to move out.”

“T
hat's him,” said Lily. She saw the white Lexus when it turned into the parking lot, mostly because she couldn't help looking out the window, waiting for Scott to arrive.

Another day, another motel. Different color carpet, different wallpaper, but everything else just about the same. Lily pined for Europe, where any old roadside inn might be up to a few hundred years old, each carrying its wonderful little idiosyncrasies.

Morgan, Conley, and Alex were out trying to buy cars from dealers who weren't particular about documentation. O'Neal was tapping at her computer in the other room. She wasn't much of a people person, but on hearing this she came to the door that adjoined the two bedrooms. It made Lily wonder what kind of reputation Scott had among those who knew something about cybersecurity.

Lily opened the door before he could knock and threw her arms around him.

“I hadn't had a welcome like that since my dog died.”

Lily gave a playful slap against his round face. “Arse.”

“H-hi,” O'Neal stammered. “I'm Karen. I do computer stuff, too—I'm an analyst. A big fan of your work.”

Lily watched with amusement as Karen tried to finesse the situation with the social graces of a jackhammer. She waved Scott inside and shut the door.

“What's your area?”

“Data crunching,” she said. “Probabilistic models and machine learning, mostly. As applied to defense and intelligence. I've actually been running an algorithm now that I'd like your input on.”

“Maybe you can fill me in first,” he said, setting his case down on the bed. “Lily said you needed my help pretty desperately.”

“Well, I wouldn't say
desperately
. . .”

They sat opposite each other on the beds and O'Neal gave him the rundown, tripping over her own words, with Lily adding the occasional aside in edgewise.

“So, to be clear,” he said. “We're looking for a handful of sleeper agents no one's heard from in twenty or more years, an unknown number of terrorist cells, and a guy no one has been able to find, ever, except on the one occasion when he wanted us to?”

“That's the gist of it,” said Lily.

He drew his computer from its sleeve and booted it up. “Let's get to it then.” He set up the laptop on the table across from O'Neal's. “I'm going to log in through our system.”

“I am setting up search parameters to identify him by his name,” said O'Neal. “That's Park Jeongwoo.”

“I'm going to use my computer to relay access to our systems to you,” he said. “You can load your parameters onto our algorithms to run on our servers to speed up the process by, oh, some five thousand percent.”

“You're kidding me,” she said. “You can
do
that?”

Lily couldn't help feeling a twinge of jealousy. “I'm just going to sit here and watch, then.”

“So here's what I was thinking,” O'Neal said. “Park is one of the most common family names in Korea, so it doesn't narrow the search down much. But the given name is a little better. Korean given names are combinatorial. There's a huge number of possibilities, so there's relatively few of each particular one. Once we narrow it down by name, we exclude any extreme ages—we'll pin the center to thirty-five and let the program search out from there. All that, plus a connection to the US and any known association with criminal activity, hacking, or computer science, although these with low inferential weight.”

“Sounds good,” he said. “We could also put in web activity related to the name in general. If he's good at hiding, it might not point directly at him, but he might be associated with weird patterns, like a drop-off in recorded activity when he learned how to use encryption and proxy servers in the Internet. Usually happens around age fifteen or so.”

“
Genius
.”

Lily could only imagine.

Morgan pulled into the motel in his newly acquired 1978 Camaro, which cost him double the asking price for cash only, immediate delivery, and no questions asked. The chassis was dented, scratched, and faded, but the salesman didn't know what the car had under the hood. With a little refurbishing, Morgan could have sold the car for four times as much.

Conley pulled in with the bulky van to his left. On the right, Alex brought her new motorcycle to a stop with a drift on the gravel.

“Don't make me regret this,” Morgan said as she took her helmet off.

Lily opened the room door to admit them and introduced Scott, who was too engrossed in his computer to pay them any attention beyond an introductory wave.

Conley brought in a bag of burritos they had picked up on the way back. “Anyone hungry?”

Alex took one and picked up one of the idle computers. “I'm going to see if Simon answered my message.”

“Conley,” said Morgan, drinking water from a bottle. “We're going to need some serious help with this if we get any information. I mean FBI grade help. Do you think you can get in touch with Lisa?”

Conley took a phone outside to make the call.

“This is suggestive,” Scott said from his computer. “Park Jeongwoo. Born to a family of wealthy Korean immigrants to the US. We have records of his birth and early hospital visits. Nothing beyond that. Nothing medical, school, all missing. It's like he stopped existing. No record of a death, either.”

“Do we have an address?” Morgan asked.

“In Boston.”

“I'll go,” said Lily. “I'll need a car.”

“Karen, Scott,” Morgan said. Any luck identifying those sleeper agents?”

“We're running the search,” Scott said. “But we haven't narrowed it down enough.”

“Keep trying. We also need to find somewhere safer for you to work. Motels are anonymous, but I don't like how exposed they are.”

“I have a furnished apartment in New York,” Scott said. “We could set up camp there.”

“Dad,” said Alex, computer on her lap. “I have a message from Simon. It looks like he's in Washington, DC. He's given us a way to track him.”

“Then that's where you and I are going.”