The Sixth Idea (16 page)

“Speaking from experience?”

“Nope. Grace may have been running from killers half her life, but she's never been a damsel in distress. And I've never been accused of being a white knight.”

“Are you kidding? You're the second best cop on the force after me. Truth, justice, the American way.”

Z
ero studied the faces of his four numerically named colleagues. A week ago, those faces had been animated with confidence and excitement. Today, their expressions were a grim mélange of despair, desperation, and fear. Zero felt all those things, too, but anger trumped every other emotion. Although they were all equals in this legacy venture, he was first in command and things were suddenly starting to fall apart—under
his
watch. How had such a thing happened with unlimited resources and the finest talent at their disposal?

Since it was inconceivable that his own leadership ability was the issue, he placed the blame squarely on the shoulders of the other men. He folded his hands together tightly on the table and tried to keep his voice even as he addressed them. “We have a monumental disaster on our hands, gentlemen. We've lost two people in the field and two physicists have disappeared into thin air. Lydia Ascher is
still a liability, even more so now that she's involved with the two Minneapolis detectives working with Monkeewrench on the murders of Spencer and Luntz. We've all heard the audio from their conversations—they're getting too close for comfort. Of course, we're dead in the water now in that regard, because the detectives aren't using their cell phones anymore, and I wonder why?”

Three, a skinny, fussy man with a wispy mustache, spoke up. “Monkeewrench. They found our wiretaps—”

“Of course they did. That was a rhetorical question,” Zero snapped. “For now, forget about Monkeewrench and the detectives. The only thing we need to worry about is keeping this project safe and out of the hands of maniacs. You all understand what is at stake.” He paused, letting that sink in before he continued. “We need to fix this and fix it fast.”

“Who is killing our people?” Two spoke up. “We weren't anticipating outside interference, and aside from keeping our systems secure, that's our biggest problem right now.”

Zero nodded, reluctantly conceding the point—high-level assassins were difficult and dangerous to retain, and even more difficult to replace, and their roster was down by two. “We need to find out, and we need to take care of it. And we need to stay invisible while we do it. We're in crisis management mode now, and we goddamn better do this right.”

T
here was a time long ago in Harley Davidson's life when he'd never aspired to be wealthy or successful or educated—all the things he was now. At sixteen, he'd never aspired to anything except finding a family, and that meant earning the right to fly colors as a Hells Angel, riding free on the open road without a care in the world, surrounded by a band of brothers—a family, for the first time in his life.

But his brothers in the Angels hadn't turned out to be the kind of family he'd had in mind, and the love wasn't unconditional—there were serious strings attached, prices he wasn't willing to pay. If it hadn't been for an old biker named Del, he probably wouldn't be alive right now, hacking into an Interpol server—all in the name of justice, of course. And even if he had survived, without Del, he probably wouldn't have gone to college in Atlanta, wouldn't have found his
real
people—Grace, Roadrunner, and Annie.

He hadn't thought about Del in a long time. But it seemed appropriate this Christmas, especially with half of Monkeewrench missing, which for some inexplicable reason was hitting him with melancholia. He'd always thought he loved the holiday so much because it was the perfect time to go way over the top and spread his embarrassment of riches. But it really wasn't that at all. Sure, Roadrunner could be a real pain in the ass sometimes, especially when they were working on a program together; and Annie was a supreme diva who loved to punch his buttons whenever the opportunity presented itself. But they were his family, his only family, the kind that did give you unconditional love, and he missed them being together as a unit.

“Harley? Are you busy?”

“Oh, hell yes, I'm over here committing all sorts of egregious cybercrimes that could put me in prison for a long time. What's up, Gracie?”

“I'm doing an autopsy on the malware that took Spencer's website down. It's the same variant that corrupted the Chatham's server.”

Harley got up from his chair and covered the distance to Grace's computer station in a few Herculean strides. He crouched down and stared at her screen for a few minutes, then popped back up. “That's a Stuxnet hybrid, like the one that wiped out a bunch of Iranian nuke centrifuges a few years back. A totally surgical virus.”

Grace looked up at him. “And a virus that originated with our government. Of course, the Stuxnet genie is out of the bottle now and anybody can riff off it.”

“Sure. So what's the timeline on the virus?”

“The infection started not too long after Spencer's website went live. He was on somebody's radar a few months ago. But the
Chatham's server didn't get compromised until the day he was murdered.”

“Jesus. Spencer was a dead man walking. They gave his computer cancer, put it in remission, and when the time was right, they killed the website. And him along with it.”

“And his friend Wally Luntz. And they tried to kill any video evidence that would indicate Spencer's murder was anything but a simple tourist mugging gone bad.”

“So who is ‘they'?”

Grace sighed. “I still can't trace the source.”

“Goddamnit, this is turning into a real ball of vipers—” Grace and Harley both looked up abruptly when an angry alarm went off on Harley's computer. All their computers had very specific alarms—gentle pings or bells or chimes to indicate new incoming information, new connections made by the Beast, and a myriad of other harmless activities their computers engaged in while they weren't being monitored by their users. And then there were the loud, angry klaxons that warned them whatever they were working on was putting their system in peril of a potential security breach. It was a safety measure they'd put into place to conceal their illegal intrusions.

“Shit, that's my Interpol hack,” Harley huffed, running across the room and initiating a self-destruct on the program he had executed.

Grace dashed after him, and the thirty feet of maple flooring between their stations seemed like a football field. “Are we secure?”

Harley let out a heavy sigh. “We're good. Safe.” He reached over to his printer, which was spitting out paper. He scanned the pages for a few moments, then passed them to Grace. “Natalia Smirnova's Interpol file.”

S
o what do you think?” Gino asked as Magozzi hopped into the sedan.

“Jefferson County pulled out all the stops. I don't think we could have done much better.” He gestured at all the squad cars surrounding the motel, at the policemen and -women making rounds of the property, inside and out. “Nobody in their right mind would go anywhere near this much police presence. Plus, the media's going to be all over this place in a heartbeat, which is another great deterrent. They might not know what the story is, but twenty-some cop cars surrounding a little cinder-block motel is going to grab some attention.”

Gino nodded and made a careful turn onto the highway. The roads had been cleared, but there was still an icy sheen of snowpack that the salt hadn't eaten away yet. “Yeah. Lydia's going to be okay. The only problem is, Jefferson County—hell, no county—can keep
this kind of thing up for long. We've got a bigger problem, and that's hanging the sun on this thing, because until we do, our happy hunters are still out there hiding in the dark and our fair heroine is under grievous threat.”

Magozzi arched a brow at him. “Good God, what cable channel are you watching now?”

“No channel. Helen's reading
The Mists of Avalon
. Aloud.”

Magozzi grinned. He loved these little glimpses into Gino's home life. “Well, except for the first part, which was all cop speak, it was kind of poetic, Gino. It's bad, but still.”

“Yeah, well, exhaustion has a tendency to warp my mind.”

Magozzi grabbed one of the cell phones Harley had given them. “I'll call Monkeewrench and let them know we're going to drop off Lydia's book. Maybe they have something new for us.”

Harley answered on the first ring.

“Magozzi?”

“Hey, Harley, I've got you on speaker. Gino and I are heading back to the city.”

“Stop here on the way in.”

“We were planning on it.”

“Good. Drive safe and see you soon. Bye.”

When Magozzi hung up, Gino gave him a sidelong glance. “You've never had such a short conversation with Harley in your life.”

“Something's up.”

Once they hit the freeway, the roads cleared up. The plows had been busy and the snow had finally stopped. Still, it took them a good hour and a half to drive to Harley's.

Magozzi and Gino had become inured to the spectacle of the Summit Avenue mansion over the years, but no matter how many times you'd seen the place decked out for any given season, the Christmas pageantry always took your breath away. Especially at night, when thousands of tiny lights twinkled in the trees like a galaxy of stars.

They didn't have to knock; Grace and Harley opened up the big double doors and ushered them inside. Magozzi didn't like the way both their eyes were coursing the yard beyond the front steps. He also didn't like the fact that Harley was wearing his weapon. Grace was never without her gun and he and Gino were used to that, but Harley didn't possess her level of paranoia and rarely carried. Especially in his own house, which was more secure than most banks.

“Come in, guys,” he said, closing and locking the doors behind them.

“What's wrong?” Magozzi asked, looking directly at Grace. Her blue eyes were dark and vigilant and decidedly troubled.

“Is Lydia Ascher all right?”

“She's in protective custody.”

Grace's posture relaxed, but only slightly. “Good. Let's go sit.”

They followed Harley to a sunken seating area lined with bookshelves that were crammed with everything from priceless volumes to paperback fiction. He poured four glasses of wine from a decanter and sank into a leather sofa. “We found out a little bit more about Natalia Smirnova, your chinchilla lady. McLaren already told you she was a Russian national—we found out she was former KGB, only they don't call themselves the KGB anymore. Interpol registered a
death certificate for her three years ago, but no record of who filed it. And that's all we could get on her before we had to sever our connection and cover our tracks, but we'll keep working on it. So what was an ex–KGB agent doing in Alvin Keller's house?”

Magozzi stared down at the garnet red wine in his glass. It reminded him of blood, which made his stomach churn. But still, he took a sip. You never turned down wine at Harley's because you might never again in a lifetime get a chance to sip a rare vintage like the ones he always offered. “She was either looking for something or she was there to kill him. Or maybe she was there to kidnap him.”

Nobody said anything for a long time. A grandfather clock in the corner of the room gently ticked down the minutes.

“How far do you want to take this?” Grace finally asked quietly.

Magozzi looked at her abruptly. “I don't want you or Harley to take any more risks. Period. This is starting to blow up.”

Grace narrowed her eyes at him. It was about as emotional as she ever got. “And we don't want you two taking any more risks, but it's what we all do. Everybody in this room is going to follow this through to the end, you know that, Magozzi. Whoever is behind this will go down. Hard.”

“Amen,” Harley said, getting up to refill his glass. “In a big-ass fireball. This is total bullshit. The way I'm seeing things now, innocent people are getting killed so a bunch of limp-dick bureaucrats can try to get their hands on some nuclear Viagra. Fuck them. Did you get any IDs on the two vics at Lydia Ascher's house?”

“One was her elderly neighbor. He went over there for dinner and walked into a bad situation. The man from the airport is a John Doe. No prints on file.”

“Shit,” Harley mumbled. “You got
anything
new we can work with?”

Magozzi suddenly felt the bulge of Lydia's paperback in his coat pocket, the last thing left of her family legacy that hadn't been stolen. “Might be a long shot, but yes.”