
“Okay, let’s try something else,” she said aloud, and keyed in her code to open the work files, and ran sample lines from several e-mails through a mechanical translator: Arabic to English, English to Arabic. Arabic and English combined, one sentence in one language, the next every other word, the next the first language, just to see what might turn up.
Computers at the NSA were busy running the encrypted material—dozens of intercepted e-mails—through programs of various sorts, checking logarithms and structures and known patterns. It was also checking another series of possibilities that Kim had programmed.
Nothing so far.
She slumped in the chair and picked up a bottle of eyedrops from the desk. Leaning back, she dropped Visine into her dry eyes. The shift in position eased the tight muscles in her neck and she stayed there a minute, her chin pointed at the ceiling. Her eyes were closed. The room was quiet.
The agency was sometimes too crazy for her. At home there were no ringing phones, no jokes between members of the team, no one having a low, fierce argument with a spouse over a cell phone connection.
Around her, Kim heard only the breathing of her computers and above that a respectful female voice reading the headlines on the radio. It was the fourth time she’d heard the news since dinner, so she didn’t pay a lot of attention, but kept one ear open for anything new or notable. With such a blizzard of encoded e-mails, she was uneasy. Something was coming.
The newscaster said, “Fourteen people were killed when a train derailed near Munich this afternoon. A terrorist cell in the Sudan claimed responsibility.”
Kim straightened and growled at the radio, “Bastards.” All the innocents who had been slaughtered by terrorists the past couple of decades disturbed her. It was one of the reasons she’d wanted to work with codes in particular. By breaking them down, there was a chance she could stop violence before it happened.
Arabic and English sentences, written white on a black background, tumbled through her brain. What was she missing? It felt as if the key were just out of reach, just beyond her peripheral vision.
“Look to the middle of things,” said a voice in her memory. It was the voice of her first mentor, Arthur Tsosie, a Navajo who had served the United States as a code breaker in World War II.
Arthur had been stable master at the Athena Academy where Kim had gone as a shy and awkward twelve-year-old. Lonely away from her big family, but also determined not to let on that she wasn’t just as tough as the other girls, Kim had often retreated to the stables. Arthur, coming upon the bereft and weeping little girl who missed her family, had befriended her. The old man had provided a pocket of retreat for her when things had become too overwhelming.
And his stories of his adventures as a code talker, told in his lilting, soft tenor, had lit a passion in Kim that had never abated. When she proved to be gifted with both maths and languages, becoming a code breaker had been the obvious choice.
Arthur had always delivered his tidbits of knowledge while caring for the horses. Memories of him were now accompanied by scents of straw and dusty sunlight. She could see his hands, the color of pecans and gnarled into knots so the fingers looked like branches, grasping the currycomb as it moved through a pale blond mane. “The trick to seeing anythin’,” he’d say, “is to remember it’s not what it is on the outside. Code, woman, friend, dog—it’s all the same. Look through the top to the middl-a things.”
Look through the top.
Often that meant simply letting go of perceptions as they stood, to allow new angles to enter her brain. Kim let the reams of code float over the surface of her closed eyelids. The e-mails were exchanged in Arabic, or at least in Arabic script. The messages had almost certainly begun in the Arabic language, as well, although the words were now nothing recognizable in any language the computers could read.
The quirky dots and swirls of Arabic lettering moved on her eyelids, a dance. Along with computers that had been running the cipher text through programs all day, Kim and her partner, Scott, had been manually trying various approaches to decipher the code.
The Arabic letters turned into a swirling, Jasmine-and-Aladdin cartoon script, the dots exaggerated. She slammed her feet to the floor, jolting herself back awake.
“Damn,” she said. “Damn. Damn. Damn.” A sense of urgency built in her chest.
Solve the code.
The answer was right there. She could feel it. What was she missing?
Kim focused on the computer screen and punched some buttons on her keyboard to bring up the program running in the background.
From the radio on her desk came a somber female voice. “President James Whitlow endured questions from the press today regarding the Tom King-Puerto Isla scandal. Many Americans are beginning to question the connection between Puerto Isla and the current unrest in Berzhaan.”
To wake herself up, Kim said aloud, “Unrest in Berzhaan. There’s an unusual situation.”
The unrest wasn’t unusual, but some blamed the United States, or at least the current administration, for the trouble in the small Middle Eastern country. It didn’t matter to Kim whether the assessment was correct or incorrect—her concern was that there were terrorist cells that were determined to punish what they saw as the evil empire of the United States and make a statement by whatever means necessary.
With presidential elections coming up and the general unease about the world situation and the scandal of Puerto Isla hanging over the President, the situation offered too many opportunities.
Again she felt the urgency, that hollow sense of dread. Break the code.
On the radio, the announcer went on, “In other news, presidential candidate, Gabriel Monihan, appeared at a packed rally in New York City this afternoon, part of a ten-city election blitz that began yesterday in Washington, D.C.”
A window on Kim’s work computer popped up. In a blue box with red lettering, she read:
LEXLUTHOR: How’s the code chopping?
Kim grinned. Alexander Tanner was an FBI bomb-squad expert in Chicago who had assisted her with a case two months ago, when a young hacker used bomb schematics to encrypt messages through the upper reaches of government. Privately, Kim had been impressed with the kid, a bored seventeen-year-old with too much time on his hands and a brain that needed challenges. Lex had been the first to spot the schematics while working an unrelated case and had e-mailed Kim to ask her advice over whether the coding could be done.
Their cooperation—an NSA employee and an FBI agent—would have been unheard of several years ago. Animosity had been more the game in those days. But reporter after reporter had turned up examples of situations that could have been defused by real communication between agencies and the pressure to cooperate had become too powerful to resist. The top-level security agencies in the country were—at least officially—encouraging interdepartmental communication, including this connected link of instant messaging within the various agencies.
It was working. Sort of. The animosity between various agencies, the secretive and jealous ways they guarded their sources, the eternal race to see who would solve which problem first, would never entirely disappear.
Although she’d never met Lex in person, Kim liked his sense of humor and his breezy ways—such as using the name of a comic-book supervillain as his instant-messaging handle.
She typed:
WINDTALKER2: Hey, guy! Still chopping. You’re out late.
LEXLUTHOR: The same could be said of you.
WINDTALKER2: Trying to crack this baby. Feels big.
LEXLUTHOR: Yeah? Wanna brainstorm?
WINDTALKER2: Might be getting too scattered to think now. A.M.?
LEXLUTHOR: No can do. Big meetings.
Kim was overtaken by a yawn. She typed:
WINDTALKER 2: All right. How come you’re working so late?
LEXLUTHOR: Politicians up the wazoo in Chicago this week. Green candidate today. Prez appearing tomorrow. Monihan on Thursday.
WINDTALKER2: Bomb scares?
LEXLUTHOR: Dozens. Every lunatic in the greater metro area has a plan for saving the world. Gotta check ’em all. Been over the courthouse twenty times. The airport at least 452.
WINDTALKER2: 452? That would take a little time.
LEXLUTHOR: Well, maybe it was only six times. FELT like 452.
WINDTALKER2: Any bombs anywhere?
LEXLUTHOR: Nope. Real bombers don’t call ahead.
WINDTALKER2: Ah.
LEXLUTHOR: Hey. I looked up your picture on the company site.
WINDTALKER2: That’s creepy, Luthor.
LEXLUTHOR: Somebody told me you were hot.
WINDTALKER 2: It was probably me. I am hot, and don’t you forget it.
LEXLUTHOR: Kinda short. But then, I’m kinda ugly, so I guess we’re even.
WINDTALKER2: Short is a state of mind.
LEXLUTHOR:
WINDTALKER2: Hold on.
LEXLUTHOR: What are you doing?
WINDTALKER2: Checking out YOUR picture. What if you’re really ugly?
LEXLUTHOR: No fair going to the academy photo.
She opened a second window on the computer and ran a search for Alex Tanner, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Chicago, then clicked on the first link. Which was the Academy photo.
Kim grinned. It showed a serious-looking young man, about 21, skinny and with a nose almost too big for his face.
WINDTALKER2:
LEXLUTHOR: Damn. I’ve put on a few pounds since then.
WINDTALKER2: Good thing.
LEXLUTHOR: We’re all geeks at 21. Check this link out: www.oaksidetelegraph.com/article00364.htm
WINDTALKER2: Yeah, yeah, Luthor. It’s probably a link to Heath Ledger.
But Kim clicked on the link, which took her to a newspaper site, and a headline that read, “Bomb Squadron Safety Record Vetted.” Beneath it was a photo of a man in a black T-shirt that showed off very nice shoulders, a good chest and excellent arms.
Kim raised an eyebrow. His hair was cropped to show a well-shaped head, high cheekbones and, yep, that aggressive nose. Which was a lot sexier on a thirtysomething face.
And he had that mouth, a Denzel Washington mouth, with an overbite and a full lower lip that looked very sexy.
Kim had a weakness for lips like that.
WINDTALKER2: Okay.
LEXLUTHOR: Okay, what?
WINDTALKER2: Okay, you won’t shame me. I’ll have coffee next week.
LEXLUTHOR: Not sure I can handle the exuberance, babe.
WINDTALKER2: Babe? What century are you?
WINDTALKER2: Hang on….
WINDTALKER2: Something coming up on my decryption.
The computer was making a soft, double beep that meant something had been noted in a special file. When she opened it, she frowned.
WINDTALKER2: Hmm. Odd.
LEXLUTHOR: Que?
WINDTALKER2: It’s an odd signature file.
LEXLUTHOR: Not my area, kiddo. I’ll let you get to it.
WINDTALKER2: K-O.
LEXLUTHOR: Next week.
“What am I missing?” she asked herself, peering hard at the screen.
And if she didn’t find the answer, who was going to die because of it?
A small musical noise told her an e-mail had arrived in her personal in-box. It brought the total to twenty-eight, and Kim remembered she’d meant to check the box. Her eyes burned and she knew she needed to get to bed if she was to have any brain at all the next day, but her little sisters were always wounded if she didn’t respond, so she dutifully opened the folder marked “Family.”
“Shit!” she said aloud.
There were two messages from her mother. One was—Kim sighed—an e-mail hoax that had been around for years, about people flashing their headlights erroneously.
The other…
TO: kvalenti@rsme.net
FROM: eileenvalenti@dearbornhosp.org
SUBJECT: Sunday dinner
Hi, honey. I’ve been on the phone all day and the girls finally stole it from me. Don’t forget, next Monday is the Columbus Day parade and your sisters’ hearts will be broken if you don’t show up to watch them tap dance on the police float. I was going to have our big meal that day, but nobody wanted to shift the tradition, so we’ll just do it Sunday, as always. Try to come for both, huh? Bring a friend if you want. Maybe your big handsome partner??
Love,
Mom
Below the message from Eileen was a list of twenty-seven e-mails, repeated over and over down the length of the window. Each carried her sister Lynda’s e-mail address, lyndavalenti2@rsme.net, and the same subject line: LOOK WHAT I FOUND ONLINE! A paper-clip icon sat beside each one.
“Lynda, Lynda, Lynda,” Kim said, and opened her virus protection software to isolate and examine the virus. “How many times I gotta tell ya not to open attachments, kid?”
When the box was cleared, she examined the isolated virus. It turned out to be a relatively benign form that simply replicated and sent e-mails to every address on an account. Not such a big deal if the infected computer was the personal machine of a teenage girl, but costly and damaging if it was the mainframe of a big corporation.
The fact that she did have a teenage sister was one of the reasons Kim kept her e-mail accounts so rigidly separated.
She sent her sister a warning message with instructions to remove the infected files from her own computer. In capital letters, she typed:
DO NOT OPEN ATTACHMENTS. EVER. Love, Kim.
Something jiggled in her brain, right at the edge.
The answer.
It was there, then gone, like a phantom.
“Get some sleep, Valenti,” she said.
Without dreams.
Please.
Chapter 2
Tuesday, October 5
T he following morning, Kim glared at the computer screen at work. They still had not made significant progress. Whatever clue was niggling at the edge of her brain had refused to come forth.
Her partner, Scott Shepherd, dropped down beside her, a sheaf of papers in his hands. “Anything?” he asked. His eyes looked as red as her own probably did, and she offered her bottle of eyedrops.
“That bad?”
“Three-day-bender bad.”
“Real men don’t use eyedrops. We just belt some bourbon and make it look authentic.” He rubbed his eyes. “The whole place needs new monitors, however. The refresh rate sucks.”
Kim leaned back and pointed at the screen with the eraser end of a pencil she’d been chewing on. “What do you make of this signature file? It shows up on all of them, invisible in the e-mail itself, but running in the background.”
He frowned at the screen, stroked his chin where he’d worn a goatee until joining the NSA. “I see it, but it’s not bringing anything up for me right this second.”
Rolling her tired shoulders, she stood. “I feel like we’re so close. It’s driving me crazy.”
“I know.”
She pushed her chair under the desk, smacked his arm. “C’mon. Let’s get on the treadmills for a half hour, talk it out. Maybe there’s something we’re missing.” She stretched the muscles of her back, hard.
“Sounds good.” He dropped the papers on her desk. “I pulled these up. Maybe there’s something else here.”
“Last one on the treadmills is a rotten egg.”
In the women’s locker room, Kim stripped out of her day clothes, a straight blue skirt, white blouse, stockings and low-heeled pumps. It was great to shed the uniform for stretchy shorts, a sports bra with a T-shirt over it, her comfortable Nike running shoes. She tugged her dark hair into a scrunchie and tucked her earrings into her pocket.
Exercise would help clear the cobwebs. She tossed a towel over her shoulder and made her way into the fitness center.
There were few people around. Although the NSA worked around the clock, this was generally a lull period. Scott had claimed a treadmill in the empty line, and she took the one beside him. She punched in numbers to get to a moderate jog and found her pace, then said, “So what’s going down? If you were a terrorist, what would you be targeting?”
He shook his head. His jaw was grim. “The elections are a possibility.”
The presidential elections would be held in a few weeks, and there had been a great deal of controversy over the incumbent, President James Whitlow. “Who’d be the best target?”
“I’d kill the young, handsome one,” he said.
Kim chuckled. “Personally dislike the guy, huh?”
“It’s the tragedy factor—an old guy gets blown up, even if he’s a president, it’s not as big a deal as when a charming and handsome younger guy gets it.”
“Good point.” Kim nodded. “Then again, terrorists have little love for the president, and it’s plain he’s not particularly effective at home or abroad.”
“Especially in Berzhaan.”
“Right. All the more reason terrorists might target him. Or maybe to get people to vote the way they want them to, as with Spain and maybe this new Munich thing. Get them to vote for Monihan.”
Scott made a derisive noise. “I’m still having trouble taking Monihan seriously.”
Kim wiped a lock of hair out of her eyes. “What’s the matter, Shepherd? He’s prettier than you?”
“Nah. I’m serious here. He’s too young, and the only reason he’s so popular is because all these women are swooning over his pretty face.”
“So, you’ve got to be old and ugly to be a good president?”
He shot her a grin. “Adds dignity.”
Kim rolled her eyes. “And Whitlow is so dignified.”
“He’s a statesman of the old school, you gotta admit.”
“Mmm. The who-cares-where-the-money-comes-from-as-long-as-I-get-elected school.” Whitlow was suspected of accepting money from a drug lord in Puerto Isla, and worse, sending in a SEAL force, which was then demolished, to cover it up. “Whitlow’s finished.”
“Maybe. Unless they kill Monihan.”
They ran in silence for a moment. Feet thumped rhythmically against the rubberized mats, and the motors whirred quietly. Kim felt her breath going deeper, expanding her lungs with oxygen—oxygen that then enlivened her brain cells.
“They’re planning something big,” Scott said grimly. “I feel it in my gut.”
“Me, too. If we don’t break this code, what are we going to find out in the worst way?”
“Exactly.”
“It’s a pretty sophisticated network,” Kim said. “So we’re looking at high-level planning.”
“It’d be nice if terrorists were as stupid as criminals, but they wouldn’t get far in the modern world.”
She grinned.
They ran in companionable silence for a while. After a few minutes, Kim felt a click of endorphins, and the stress seemed to drain out of her body in a rush, as if someone had pulled a plug in her toe. “Ah,” she said, and blew out hard. “Better.”
She glanced at Scott, who had sweat pouring down his rugged, well-cut face. “Admit it,” she said. “This feels pretty good.”
“Yeah, Valenti, you’re as smart as you are good-looking.”
“Sweet-talker.”
He blotted his face. “So they say.”
“The secretarial pool swoons when you walk through, Shepherd, along with half the cryptographers.” She gave him a sidelong grin. “Male and female.”
“Why do you keep ribbing me about this, huh? I think you have a secret crush on me.”
“That’s true. And you know me, I’m so mild mannered, I can’t come right out and say it.”
He laughed. “Mild mannered. Yeah, right.” He punched the controls. “Climb some hills?”
“You bet.” She punched in the incline numbers and grinned. It was the reason she liked working out with him—he was extremely competitive and pushed her to better levels. The hills were a point of pride. He’d grown up in Colorado, in a little ski town, and boasted terrific lung capacity. Kim had gone to prep school in Arizona, running the scorching mountain paths around Phoenix, and boasted her own great lungs.
They’d been in some grim contests. “Six,” she said, referring to the level of incline on the treadmill.
He nodded. They ran, breath coming too hard now for brainstorming or any other kind of conversation.
As her body sweated, her brain awakened, ran a thousand algorithms, trying to fit the pieces together. It wasn’t exactly a one-two-three process, a conscious thing, but a running stream of numbers, letters, patterns.
“Seven,” Scott said.
Kim punched the up arrow on the treadmill and leaned forward the slightest bit to accommodate the greater incline. The numbers and patterns kept whirring in her head. Once her brother Jason had asked her how she came up with the answers to number problems so fast, and she’d considered it seriously for a minute. The best analogy she could think of was a visual of a bike lock with spinning wheels. She just saw them, and they whirred until the right number appeared.
Her brain had always run patterns, looking for the ways things fit together. In the second grade, she’d been doing the newspaper Scramble every morning, and always got it right, even if she didn’t necessarily know the word. By fourth grade, even her very traditional Italian father was forced to admit his daughter was something of a math whiz. They’d had to hire a tutor to keep up with her.
Her thighs started to burn the slightest bit, and her breath came harder. Next to her, Scott lifted an eyebrow. His athletic arms, bared by a serviceable gray tank, were shiny. “Eight,” she said.
“Nine,” he countered.
She didn’t even bother to look at him, just pushed the arrow one more time. Sweat poured down her spine in a wash, and she wiped it off her forehead. Her feet clumped hard on the rubber matting, a fact she usually hated. Tonight, the sound was lost in the heavier pounding of Scott’s tread.
The patterns whirred in her mind, and she stared into the middle distance, not seeing the white-painted cinder-block wall with its poster citing heart-rate targets, but a stream of code. Ordinarily, e-mails were a less difficult form of code to crack, because certain elements, such as headers and addresses, remained constant, and once the code could be cracked there, it fell wide open.
Not in this case. The agency had collected hundreds of e-mails over the past several weeks, as many as fifty in a single day, but in spite of their best efforts with computer algorithms and sophisticated code-breaking software, they’d made no headway.
“What…” Kim gasped, “are we…missing?”
“Network,” he growled. “Some network angle.”
Her breath was growing ragged, and her thighs were burning. She ran five to seven miles a day, as well as lifting weights and practicing kung fu for strength, but the hills were always killer. Licking salt from her upper lip, she slid a glance toward her partner to see how he was holding up.
Sweat soaked his shirt and his streaky blond hair, but Kim only needed that one glance to know he’d hit his stride. Back straight, breath heavy but even. It was easy to see him running up some forested mountain trail at ten thousand feet, his powerful body in perfect condition. Like an ad for a sport drink.
“Uncle,” she said, and pushed the arrows to bring the incline down to a more normal level.
“Thank God,” he said. “I thought it was going to be me this time.”
“Damn,” she said, and blew out a heavy breath. “One of these days, Shepherd, I am going to kick your high-altitude butt.”