Unacceptable Risk (19 page)

"American?"

"Yes. He was of Iranian descent but born in America with many connections in the Middle East. He seemed very involved and the plan had something to do with computers, and of that I am certain. And then it had to do with this brain science. This American had lost a lot of money in the stock market and was hungry to make it back."

"Why were you meeting? Why get everybody together?"

"Some of the others, the Saudis and the American, they knew more than I. They were not believing so much about the science. They wanted proof. And so Gaudet, Girard, whatever his name is ... told them he'd give them proof. There was a man who worked for governments. He is like a man hunter, maybe a terrorist hunter, and some of these investors, they are afraid of him. So they say to use this science of the brain to kill him. And Gaudet tried this but did not succeed. So then he says he will use it on a company instead. A pharmacy company. Make the executives start killing each other. He promises this."

"Just to prove to these investors that the technology would work?"

"Yes. And I believe it will."

The questions continued for a half hour, but Baptiste learned nothing more of substance, just rumors of Gaudet's exploits, many of which he had already heard, none of which were confirmable, and none of which really mattered. Alfawd, as might be expected, knew nothing of the details of the brain science. Baptiste was about to leave when he thought of another question.

"Did they talk about any other investment opportunities?"

"No. But the American told me privately that there was."

"Why did he do that?"

"He needed loans and I was going to lend him some money. He was desperate to convince me, but still he would not tell me details."

"What about these other investment opportunities?"

"He said it was in medicine. He said Gaudet was trying to get hold of something that would be like making gold. It wasn't this brain technology, not exactly. Maybe related, though. It had a name. Chaperone. A very valuable item."

Barely able to contain his excitement, Baptiste questioned him further, but Alfawd revealed nothing more, even when electrocuted until his heart stopped.

Baptiste left in a hurry. No reason to test the hospitality of the Turks. The same words kept moving through his mind, unbidden:
Markets. Investment opportunities.
And last but not least:
Retirement.

Baptiste walked from his office down Gambetta, turned up Rue de Tourelles, until he was satisfied that he had no obvious tail; then he hopped a cab to the Saint Jean-Baptiste de Belleville Cathedral, where he took a stroll through the main sanctuary and then various hallways, then out a side door to a nearby restaurant. He made his way inside the eating establishment to a familiar public phone with good privacy except for people passing to the rest room, and these did not remain long enough to overhear a conversation.

"Are the Americans getting any closer?" he asked Figgy without preliminaries.

"Of course. They have Bowden. What I don't know yet is whether Sam has gotten with him in narrowing down the various samples he sent to Northern Lights."

"Will Sam share this with you?"

"I think he will, and I don't think he'd lie to me. But I'm pretty much at an impasse with Sam until he talks with Benoit Moreau. I told you this."

"That won't work. I want Chaperone in my hands before anyone talks with Benoit," Baptiste emphasized.

"What happened with Alfawd?"

"Nothing. He knew that Gaudet wanted Chaperone and that Gaudet figured he could make money with it."

"The Americans aren't going to trust me after this Alfawd business. Sam will be furious," Figgy speculated.

"Make it sound like an innocent mistake. We were closer to Turkey, so you decided to send us. He was in South America."

"Don't be ridiculous. He'll know I was pandering to you and screwing him. It's not complicated."

"You've known him a long time. He may forgive you."

"Back to the money. How much will Chaperone be worth?"

"I have no idea. A lot. I can envision a heated negotiation between our buyer and the French government. France has the better legal claim, but they will negotiate a cheaper license if someone else has it as well. We sell to the high bidder in any case, but on a completely confidential basis," Baptiste theorized.

"Nice words. I hope it works."

"It will work. And you will get a handsome fee even if all we do is succeed in delivering Chaperone to France. I need your reaffirmation that you are committed to this," Baptiste prodded.

"Oh bullshit. Once I say I'm in, I'm in. You don't need me to repeat on a weekly basis that I'm going to screw one of my oldest friends."

"Just be sure you're the first one to get to Bowden's journals. Update me daily. In text. You understand?"

"Type. Type. Type. What a drag," Figgy complained.

* * *

Sam flew home while Michael continued to recuperate in an anonymous safe house in Rio with Yodo, Grady, a team of security men, and a sizable contingent of local police, whose job was to hunt Gaudet if and when he came back after Bowden. They went over the security rules and reaffirmed that Bowden would not be without his security for any reason. It seemed to Sam that Gaudet was like a building wave, every day his strength grew and every day he became more deadly. More to the point, he sensed a certain measure of desperation in Gaudet's acts, an aspect of the man that was utterly familiar and more than a little problematic.

The plan was for Sam to go to LA first, then meet Grady and Bowden in New York City. Sam's LA offices were the best place on the globe for him to direct the hunt for Gaudet. Still, for a few moments he tried to forget about Gaudet—his obsession—and let his mind rest. He drove down the freeway in the dead of night, feeling the Blue Hades, his Corvette, and its power, the way it rolled over the pavement, the suspension stiff, the turning responsive, the torque awe-inspiring— flawless—everything fine-tuned. He wondered if Grandfather had ever felt the poetry in anything mechanical. Probably not. An absurd thought, really. A few moments in a sliding turn at the racetrack could never touch his soul the way sitting with Grandfather at Universe Rock had. And yet the sliding turns were good.

He approached the massive outside door of his new LA offices buried in a gated building complex that was largely an office building and data center. Sam put his face up to a camera, aligning his brow with a molded piece of plastic. A computer identified his retina while a plastic pad transmitted his fingerprints to a different portion of Big Brain's memory. Within a split second Big Brain matched the finger to the eye and let him in. Inside, it was very close to the old office in layout, except slightly more spacious.

Harry was all over the place, dissipating his considerable excitement by sprinting around the office and culminating in a flying leap into Sam's arms. He tried to lick Sam's face, but for most of the strokes Sam held him just out of reach.

Jill started right in. "Important news, in case you haven't heard. A massive, fatal shooting incident at the offices of Northern Lights Pharmaceuticals. Two employees went berserk and started killing colleagues. No official explanation for the violent behavior, but it sounds like the soldier vector all over again. One of the shooters died from extensive seizure activity."

"That confirms it, then," said Sam.

"Just before the guy died, the medics got a brilliant idea and gave him a powerful immunosuppressant. It slowed the seizure activity and they figured that if they had administered it sooner, it might have staved off an immune reaction. A carbon copy of the incident with your neighbors."

Sam saw a certain tension in Jill's body.

"What is it?"

"It doesn't matter."

"It does to me."

"It's nothing anyone can help. Gaudet knew where our old office was and now he may discover this office. He just about killed Grady even though she was surrounded by our security. That's new for us as far as I know. And these vectors are so insidious. They rob you of your mind and all you have to do is breathe them and they're irreversible. It's ugly."

"It is ugly. That's why we have to catch him."

"I don't know why the government isn't doing more."

"Don't sell 'em short. Hiring us is something. They've got stuff all over the world and they're working on this. They just aren't telling us. Michael agreed to make himself our bait in New York. And guess what? We're probably the government's bait."

"Don't tell me that. Should we tell the Feds?"

"Oh, we'll tell them, but it won't help. Saying we think he'll do something is like saying we think Islamic extremists will blow things up. They know that. They just don't know what the hell to do about it, and they're not going to talk about it officially.
I'm
afraid to turn on the TV news."

"We found a computer worm expert," Jill said.

"And?"

"You should hear it directly. He's under contract with the government to come up with worst-case scenarios."

"Let's get Grogg in here."

Grogg came in, sighing under the weight of his considerable bulk. Sam had offered numerous times to hire the plump and balding man a personal trainer, but his Buddha belly kept growing and the muscle mass kept shrinking. Grogg wore glasses like Coke bottle glass but wouldn't consider sight-correcting surgery or contacts. Claimed it might ruin the image. Despite Grogg's quirks, Sam was fond of him.

"How goes our computer worm research?"

"It goes in galloping gigabytes."

Jill got Jacob Rand on the speakerphone. His company was called IT Defense.

"For purposes of our analysis," Jacob began, "we've assumed someone with a lot of money and a workforce of, say, twenty experienced programmers. They'd have to know security. There would be other personnel, network engineers, and the like. We are assuming a lot of money, resources. The attack we envision would require a powerful computer worm that would confine itself largely to U.S. computers and would corrupt data, and in many cases effectively destroy hardware. They would choose a widely used software application. As an example they could use Windows SMB file sharing—"

"You mean like Windows SMB/CIFS," Sam interrupted.

"Exactly. This service is on by default on many corporate installations and a lot of private ones as well. We figure they will discover a previously unknown vulnerability in this or some other common program, a weakness that has never been exploited. They are there and when they find it—bingo! At first we won't know what the hell is happening, because we won't have seen the computers go flat on their ass in precisely this manner.

"The way into a system will be via mail worm mode or an infected Web server mode that can infect a browser. The Nimbda virus demonstrated the effectiveness of a mail invasion for crossing firewalls. It didn't go into a guy's computer and use the address book application indiscriminately. It only replied to incoming mail. It was slow and insidious. A good worm would not waste time mailing to Hotmail accounts and the like, but instead would limit itself to only certain addresses—the ones that inflict the most damage. For example, if it invades a corporation's computer system, it would not send out e-mails to other computers within that system. That way you won't have twenty people all comparing notes and realizing that they all have the same peculiar e-mail in their in box. The virus only needs to get into one corporate computer to infect the entire corporate intranet. Once in, it just goes from one computer to the next, munching the data on the hard drives and/or frying the drives themselves. It would be careful to filter out IP addresses that weren't associated with the U.S. That way the bastards could work from a foreign country with impunity and unharmed.

"We figure in the U.S. there are eighty-five million computers in businesses and about that many in homes. Using these techniques with the right research, we guess they could get as many as fifty million computers. It would do at least one hundred billion dollars in damage and send the stock market plummeting."

Jacob went on to describe how the virus would systematically destroy a computer system, step by step, and the techniques it would employ. Sam got the idea quickly and, in fact, had imagined such things himself, just never with Jacob's morbid precision.

"So the upshot," Jacob concluded, "is that a good virus would in the end go through a comprehensive erase routine while it was showing the operator a virus protection screen that indicated an ongoing virus scrub—you feel good while they sodomize your computer. In about a third of the machines we examined, the motherboard would also become inoperable."

"So, they really could kill hardware that would take days or weeks to replace?"

"Afraid so."