White: A Novel (6 page)

“I hope I didn’t keep you,” Sirad said, striding into the room. She wore black running tights and a bright-yellow slicker, which she had unzipped to reveal a formfitting white turtleneck underneath. Melting snow dripped off her clothing, forming puddles on the palace-sized Oushak carpet beneath her feet. “I was running in the park.”

“There’s a blizzard out there,” Trask reminded her. He tried, as always, not to stare.

“I know,” she said. “Beautiful, isn’t it?”

Sirad dabbed her face with a towel as Mitchell carefully laid the beautiful three-barreled rifle on a velvet serviette. The only sound in the room came from steam radiators hissing against the frigid air outside.

“Did they tell you why we brought you in?” Mitchell asked. He looked elegant as always, resplendent in custom-tailored wools and hand-tooled wing tips.

“Something about an attack on the Quantis system,” Sirad said. She nodded to the others at the table, all Borders Atlantic executives. They shared troubling history—this unlikely assembly—but Sirad managed to put it out of her mind.

“There’s a possibility that our algorithms have been compromised,” Mitchell told her. “That someone has discovered the existence of a trapdoor.”

“Impossible,” Sirad argued. “Quantis is a hard system, impervious to intrusion. We’re certain of that.”

She walked across the room, pulled out a chair, and sat. Under normal circumstances, she would have used her thinly clothed physique to improper advantage, but here in the boardroom, beauty actually worked against her. Power at Borders Atlantic revolved around intelligence and wit. Standing there in a film of moistened Lycra rendered her naked in an oddly uncomfortable way.

“We’re certain that it is impervious to every intrusion
we
could think of,” Mitchell agreed, “but impervious is a relative term. Someone apparently thinks it worth the effort.”

“Where did you find it?” Sirad asked. She ran the towel over the back of her neck, then draped it over her shoulders, covering nipples that had hardened conspicuously from the cold. “Are they trying to tap our data streams or going after the encryption rubrics themselves?”

“Neither,” came the reply. Sirad turned toward Dieter Planck, the company’s chief security officer. The squat, dimple-cheeked German sat just across the table from her, wrinkling his nose beneath frameless oval glasses.

“They haven’t completely shown themselves yet,” a second man said. Sirad knew the mathematician by his first name only: Ravi. “One of the systems auditors discovered a suspicious shadow about four o’clock this morning.”

“A shadow?” Sirad shrugged. “Systems auditors find probes all the time—everything from wiseassed kids hacking in from Encino to European competitors. All futile. What makes you think any of them can legitimately compromise our system?”

“They made it all the way to the mainframe firewall,” Ravi said. The soft-spoken Indian wore a sky-blue Members Only jacket and a cheap oxford shirt buttoned to the top. No tie. “This shadow suggests a very sophisticated cloaking protocol that is designed to look like one of our own audit incursions. It’s no kid from Encino.”

Sirad ran the towel over her face.

“To get to the firewalls, they must understand our encryption protocols,” she said. “That means it’s possible that they know our ability to tap consumer data streams.”

“That’s right,” Mitchell said. He opened the breech of his Dremmel and looked down the pyramid-stacked barrels. “Unfortunately, there’s something else. You haven’t heard the worst.”

NINETY-TWO . . .

Jeremy’s arms had begun to burn with the push-ups. The pain gave him focus, but nothing could keep his mind from traveling back to that Irian Jaya jungle.

Once GI Jane turned toward French, things had happened very quickly. The Delta sergeant stepped up behind one of the Americans, pushed the muzzle of his Mark IV up behind the man’s head, and pulled the trigger.

BOOM!
The .223 caliber rifle had echoed through the clearing.

One of Mahar’s Indonesian buddies jumped up and ran as if his feet were afire, stumbling with his hands cuffed behind his back and the burlap bag over his head. He took four or five steps before slamming into the satellite dish and knocking himself back to the ground. One of the SEALs walked over and grabbed him by the arm, but the man struggled, pleading in a language that made no sense to Jeremy.

One hundred five . . .

The SEAL dragged the man back to his original position. Jeremy could see through his scope that the captive had wet himself. A dark splotch spread out through his crotch and down his pant legs.

“Caleb?!” the American on the left called out. There was no mistaking his nationality now. Jeremy recognized the accent as Deep South, Alabama or Georgia.

“Sit still, Frank,” the albino said. He spoke calmly, almost indignant.

“I think these bastards are gonna ki-ll us,” Frank squealed. “You gotta do somethin’, man! They’re gonna kill us.”

GI Jane knelt next to him and said something too quiet for Jeremy to hear. The man shook his head violently back and forth and tore at his flex cuffs.

“Run, boys! They’re gonna kill us all!” Frank yelled. He tried to gain his feet but tripped and fell facefirst into the dirt.

One hundred twenty . . .

One of the Indonesians leaped up, too, but he made it just a couple of steps before tripping over one of the dead dogs and crashing back to earth.

BOOM!

French shot Frank where he lay on the ground. Then all hell broke loose.

“THE WORST?” SIRAD
lifted an eyebrow. “What could be worse?”

“Our inner perimeter firewall is a quasiphysical backstop,” Ravi reminded her. “Deliberately discrete from other fail-safes. In order to get to it, the intruders must already have compromised our keystone algorithms, which means they have cloned or stolen blueprints for our number generators.”

Sirad sat back in her chair. Algorithms—the armor that protected Quantis’s entire encryption system—were based on what in the past had always been randomly generated prime numbers, very large prime numbers of up to 155 digits. Until recently, randomness—the great limitation of encryption theory—had been “made up” by computers using stochastic variation in physical noise from sources such as office keyboards, city traffic, and wind. Despite their best attempts, however, no computer had produced true randomness. Borders Atlantic’s new “number generators” had changed that.

“It’s possible that someone may already have tapped our data streams,” Planck suggested. “That means outside interests may understand the truth about our interactions with the Saudis. That, of course, could prove catastrophic.”

The truth. Sirad knew that the real point in offering the world secure communications was to let Mitchell listen in. Though everyone from rival corporations to foreign governments believed their conversations and data transmissions safe, Borders Atlantic rummaged freely through their most intimate secrets like a burglar in the panty drawer.

“How?” Sirad asked, turning to Ravi. “Quantis has been up and running, commercially, for just twelve months. Your mathematicians calculated that it would take the most powerful computers several years just to map it.”

Jordan Mitchell answered for him.

“Only one thing matters at this point: we’ve been compromised.”

“Fortunately, they don’t have everything they need to get in,” Ravi added. “So far, we’ve identified four separate intrusions . . . none of them terminal. They seem to be probing the system’s parameters, kind of like stumbling around in a dark room, looking for the light switch.”

“Who?” Sirad asked. “Is this corporate?”

“We don’t think so,” Dieter said. “Conventional hacks target peer-to-peer networks, like the Sober.c or Bizex worms. Intrusions of this sophistication would have required equipment and science we know to exist only among governments.”

“And few of those,” Ravi agreed. “The U.S. has it, of course, as well as the UK, China, and India.”

Sirad nodded. She knew that U.S. intelligence agencies had shared technology with the Brits. India wrote the majority of the world’s computer software. China stole it.

“We fully expected tests of our firewalls,” Mitchell said, “but nothing this extensive, well camouflaged, or sophisticated.”

The room seized quiet for a moment before another man—Hamid—raised his hand as if in an elementary school classroom. As the company’s chief financial analyst, he better than anyone knew the downside of a successful compromise of the Quantis encryption system.

“There’s something you haven’t considered,” he offered. “As of yesterday, Borders Atlantic held nearly sixty-seven percent of the world’s cell phone market. Even
rumors
of a successful intrusion could jeopardize market dominance and cost this company billions. We need to keep any investigation very close to the vest.”

Sirad looked troubled, and not by the malicious look from her former lover. First the terrorist attacks on the Mall of America, Disneyland, and Atlanta, and now cyberattacks on America’s highest-profile commercial encryption technology. It had been more than three years since 9/ 11 without a single domestic incident. What was going on?

“We need to find the people behind these intrusions, and we need to do it now,” Mitchell said. His voice sounded firm but neither accusatory nor panicked. “Sirad, this is your program, but you’ll need to coordinate closely with the seventeenth floor.”

Sirad nodded. All security operations ran through what was known within Borders Atlantic as the Rabbit Hole. Dieter Planck’s cadre of scientists, mathematicians, and former special operations specialists rivaled most governments in terms of assets and sophistication. The fact that Planck had proven a nemesis to Sirad would complicate matters, but no more than she could handle. He struck her as a tense, incomplete man. A nuisance.

“Yes, sir,” Sirad agreed. She caught Dieter’s threatening smile and held it.

“I want to know the instant you have something,” Mitchell said, standing. Trask had already started toward the door, reinforcing Sirad’s belief that the officious chief of staff really could read the boss’s mind. “I want to know immediately if you get any unusual questions from our overseas contractors. And I want you to use all means necessary to end this. Do you understand?
All
means necessary.”

With that, Jordan Mitchell walked out of the room.

“Meet me in my office: twenty minutes,” Dieter said, standing to leave as well. Ravi, the systems engineer, gathered his stack of papers and shoved them into a cracked vinyl folder.

Sirad nodded, dismissing his authoritative tone. This had been a morning full of news, nearly all of it bad. At least she had the blizzard to cheer her up.

ONE HUNDRED THIRTY . . .

Jeremy watched through his mind’s eye as the second Indonesian starting yelling, making no particular sense through his fear and the burlap mask. He managed to run farther than the others had before taking two rifle rounds in the back. The first Indonesian tried again to escape but met a similar fate as GI Jane barked out orders to French and his assaulters.

Seizing on the confusion, Caleb wrenched violently, shaking the burlap bag off his head before jumping to his feet. A SEAL moved to within arm’s length to stop him, but the pale-white captive kicked out with his right leg, a well-practiced martial arts move that dropped the SEAL in his tracks. Caleb quickly knelt down, picked up the rifle with his hands still cuffed behind his back, and fired a half dozen rounds.

Jeremy just stared at first, unable to believe his eyes. It looked as if the albino had practiced this move a thousand times. He was no amateur.

The rest of the task force dove for cover as Caleb lay down suppressive fire and ran for the jungle. By the time Jeremy could draw his crosshairs, the American had already disappeared through the vegetal wall.

Shit!
he scolded himself. This operation had been weeks in the planning, with input from at least half a dozen agencies. No one would want to report back that someone had escaped. Especially an American.

One hundred forty-three . . .

French and one of the SEALs ran after Caleb as Jane walked over to Mahar. She knelt directly in front of him and barked out something in the terrorist’s native tongue. By inflection, Jeremy understood it to be a question.

Mahar said two words, obviously not what she wanted to hear. GI Jane pulled a semiautomatic handgun out from under her BDU blouse, placed the barrel right between his eyes, and
Pop!
shot him dead. The terrorist fell backward, folding grotesquely over his legs. A stream of blood spurted straight up out of the wound, then eased to a dribble.

GI Jane wasted no time moving on to her next gruesome task. She reached into the right thigh pocket of her BDU trousers and produced a pair of black steel pruning sheers. While the assault team watched the jungle for any sign of Caleb, she walked from body to body, kneeling down, spreading open the fingers of each man’s right hand, and expertly clipping off their index digits.

All fingers—excised between the second and third knuckles—went into a Ziploc freezer bag, which she tucked back into her BDUs.

“Burn it!” GI Jane called out, motioning toward the huts. The assault force dragged the bodies to the larger of the huts and tossed the corpses inside. Each shack got a Thermit grenade, which flashed white against the new rain.

Within seconds, the entire compound vanished into a conflagration that caught the generators, gas cans, even the aluminum satellite dish, in its grip. Jeremy heard a couple rifle shots from the jungle, and then French and the SEAL emerged emptyhanded. Jeremy watched as the task force gathered around GI Jane, then . . .

Brrring . . . brrring . . . brrring . . .

Jeremy stopped his push-ups as a phone interrupted the jungle flashback.

“Hello?” he answered.

“No names,” a voice said on the other end of the line. “Do you know who this is?”

Jeremy did. He sat on the edge of the bed breathing heavily but said nothing more.