“Where are you from, Gretchen?” Linda asked over lunch.
“All over, actually,” Gretchen replied as she grazed on a grilled chicken salad. “Both my parents were in the foreign service, my mother as an interpreter and my father as a diplomat. I spent my childhood in Paris, Berlin, Moscow, Tel Aviv, and about a dozen other places.”
“One reason she’s fluent in so many foreign languages,” Juan said. “What are you up to, five?”
“Seven. French, Russian, German, Spanish, Italian, Greek, and Arabic.”
“Impressive,” Linda said. “The Chairman knows only three.”
“Except her Russian accent sounds like she was taught by Chekov on Star Trek,” Juan said.
Gretchen shot back, “And his Arabic makes him sound like he’s auditioning to be a member of the Saudi royal family.”
Everyone at the table laughed. After effectively being shut out of the investigation, the five of them—Juan, Gretchen, Linda, Murph, and Eric—had found an empty outdoor café where they could get a late lunch and brainstorm what to do next now that they’d seemed to hit a dead end.
“Was calling Juan ‘Chairman’ instead of ‘Captain’ his idea or yours?” Gretchen asked anyone but Juan.
From the look on their faces, Juan could see that they were wondering whether she was cleared to know about the Oregon, so he interjected, “Overholt has fully briefed her about us. She’s got a top secret clearance.”
With that, the hesitation vanished. Eric was the first to speak. “It happened organically. We all think of ourselves as partners in the Corporation, so it just made sense.”
“Do you call it the Corporation for anonymity?”
“Partly,” Linda said. “But it also doesn’t make sense to give it a specific name when it’s called something different wherever we have our assets.”
“Assets that are now depleted because of this hacker who’s taunting us,” Juan said. “If we really have just ten days left before a global financial catastrophe, how would they do it?”
Gretchen put her fork down and sat back as she considered the possibilities. “They could have planted a virus that would lock down trading at the major banks. That would cause the markets to crash. Or they could wipe out the computer data where the assets are held, causing a banking panic. There would be a run on the banks, and interest rates would go through the roof. Lending would effectively be brought to a halt. International trade would go into the dumpster. We’re talking food and gas shortages and massive unemployment.”
“The question is, who would benefit from that kind of carnage?”
“Short sellers, for one. They bet that stock prices go down and that they can make a killing when markets take a dive. Or it could be commodity owners. The price of gold would probably skyrocket because of its reputation as a safe haven, and those holding a good chunk of it could then buy distressed properties for dirt cheap prices.”
“Or it could be terrorists who simply want to cause grief in Western countries,” Linda said. “Or anarchists opposed to world trade and big business.”
“So it’s someone who’s either greedy or vengeful,” Murph said. “That doesn’t narrow it down a whole lot.”
“All we know is that it’s someone with extremely advanced computer skills,” Eric said. “I wouldn’t put it past them to be able to do some heavy damage to the financial system.”
Linda looked as frustrated by the lack of a lead as Juan felt. “So we just wait until a bank goes belly up and they make their demands?” she said. “There’s got to be something else we can do.”
“The video that you found of Munier in the car during the chase wasn’t definitive enough for us to prove that he was being coerced,” Juan said. “Even if he was, without knowing more about the hacker, we have no clue who’s behind this.”
“I’ve informed Washington about the threat,” Gretchen said. “They’re sending out a generic warning to banks, but no one can take any useful preventive measures, not without more specific info about how to spot the virus or which banks might be targeted. We’ll have to get lucky to identify the bank mentioned in the message before it’s attacked in five days.”
“Or hope whoever is behind this makes a mistake before then,” Linda said.
Gretchen shrugged. “You say Potayto, I say Potahto. It’ll still be luck on our part.”
Murph suddenly got a faraway look on his face. After a few moments, he victoriously yelled, “Potato chips!” and yanked the phone from his pocket.
“What are you talking about?” Eric asked him, as confused as the rest of them by Murph’s strange outburst.
“I’m pulling up the photo I took of the warning the hacker left. Remember Minecraft?”
Eric thought about it for a moment and then the same dawning look of excitement crossed his face. “You’re right! We missed that.” He started scribbling on his napkin.
Juan spoke for the rest of them, who were still dumbfounded by the exchange. “Would you mind sharing your blinding insight?”
“Remember in the message when the hacker was daring us to break the code?” Murph said. He read from his phone. “Go ahead and comb through the code looking for this time bomb, if you dare, but eventually you’ll have to cough up the dough to us.” He tapped on his screen and went quiet.
Juan was still puzzled. “What has that got to do with potato chips?”
“And what’s ‘Minecraft’?” Gretchen asked.
Eric showed Linda, Gretchen, and Juan what he’d written on his napkin.
Ghoughpteighbteau tchoghs!
“What is that?” Linda said after she tried sounding out the phrase. “Klingon?”
Eric shook his head. “Minecraft is a very popular video game. Whenever you fire it up, it shows a splash screen with a phrase on it. It rotates through a bunch of different phrases, and this is one of them. You know what it says?”
They all shook their heads.
“Potato chips!” Murph cried out, and then went back to working on the phone.
“No, it doesn’t,” Gretchen said.
“Actually, it does,” Eric said, “but it uses a nontraditional spelling taken from odd pronunciations in English.” He scribbled again and showed them a new word.
Ghoti.
“You might have seen this one.”
Juan nodded, getting it now. “That spells out fish. Pronounced like the gh in tough, o in women, and ti in nation.”
“And Ghoughpteighbteau tchoghs! spells out potato chips in the same way,” Eric said, and wrote down the equivalents.
Hiccough. Though. Ptarmigan. Weigh. Debt. Bureau. Pitch. Women. Hiccoughs.
“When you said, ‘potayto/potahto,’” Murph said to Gretchen, “it made me think of that Minecraft phrase. I knew a hacker of this skill level wouldn’t leave out a signature. Reputation is everything to them. They want people to know who was responsible for an epic hack.”
“I’m still missing something,” Linda said.
Murph read the sentence again. “‘Go ahead and comb through the code looking for this time bomb if you dare, but eventually you’ll have to cough up the dough to us.’ The hacker was leaving us a clue. It’s in the different pronunciations of the same letter combinations: comb versus bomb, through versus cough and dough. He wasn’t just being cute.”
“I know you’re leading us somewhere with this,” Juan said. “What’s the punch line?”
Murph showed his screen to Eric, who nodded and said, “The hacker used an acrostic code. Normally, they’re easy to detect. You take the first letter of each sentence or the first letter of every third word, or some other variation, to spell out a message.” He scribbled on his napkin yet again.
“But this hacker was more subtle,” Murph said. “He used an acrostic that was itself encoded. The code is spelled out by the first letter of each sentence. I’ve i
terated through a bunch of different pronunciations and this is the only one that makes sense.”
Eric passed the napkin around with a new gibberish word above plain English words.
Tiaideaughow.
Nation. Plaid. Bureau. Tough. Low.
Juan sounded out the pronunciation in his head, then looked up at Murph. “Shadowfoe?”
Murph nodded. “He’s notorious in the elite hacker community. ShadowFoe came up with some of the nastiest worms and viruses to hit major companies. No one knows who he is, but he’s considered the cream of the crop.”
Gretchen seemed stunned by the information. “Oh no.”
“You know who it is, don’t you?” Juan said.
She swallowed. “Interpol received an anonymous tip last week, but we didn’t think it was credible. It gave the location where ShadowFoe is operating from and said he was planning to release a new virus that would attack banks.”
“Why wasn’t it taken seriously?”
“Because it came with a picture. A twenty-eight-year-old Albanian named Erion Kula. He’d been on our radar already because of some credit card database hacks, but we knew him by the handle Whyvern, not ShadowFoe. We figured that one of his competitors was trying to frame him by falsely identifying him.”
“Where is he?”
“The tip said he’s working from Vlorë Castle on the Albanian coast.”
“Then we go get ShadowFoe and persuade him to give us back our money,” Juan said. “I’ll call Max and tell him to prepare to set sail for Albania as soon as we get back to Palermo.”
“I’m coming with you,” Gretchen said. “You may need someone who’s an accounting expert to sort out whether he’s giving you good information.”
Juan paused for a moment as he thought about the implications of having her aboard the Oregon and then realized she was right. She could prove helpful, both for her financial expertise and her connections to Interpol and the CIA.
“All right,” he said. “I’ll have Max set up some quarters for you.”
“Thanks. But there’s one other thing you should know, another reason we thought the information wasn’t credible.”
“What’s that?”
“We thought whoever sent the tip was trying to lure us into a trap. If we had sent in Interpol agents, there could have been a nasty scene.”
“Because of the Albanian government?”
Gretchen shook her head. “Vlorë Castle was built by the Venetians in the fifteenth century and refurbished five years ago by its owner, a businessman named Dalmat Simaku. He’s also thought to be one of the biggest crime bosses in the Albanian Mafia.”
FOURTEEN
Juan had the Oregon sail the minute they stepped on board in Palermo. Slowing only to pass through the Strait of Messina between Sicily and the Italian mainland, they pushed forty-five knots the entire way and made the three-hundred-and-fifty-mile trip to Albania in less than eight hours.
By the next morning, the Oregon was holding station in the Adriatic Sea ten miles from Vlorë Castle, which clung to the end of a rocky peninsula studded with low shrubs and wild olive trees. The terrain reminded Juan of the California chaparral near Santa Barbara. The castle had been built as a fortress, guarding the entrance to a natural harbor, where an Albanian Coast Guard station now stood five miles away on the other side of the peninsula from the Oregon. Vlorë had a commanding view from its perch on the rugged coast, its thick stone walls rising fifty feet above the water.
Openings in the rim were spaced to allow cannons and archers to fire from protected positions, both toward the sea and at the gravel road that led up to an iron gate sealing the entrance. Instead of a single structure, the castle was more like a wall surrounding a village of ten stone buildings scattered around a central yard. The broad wall had a walkway down the middle to allow for patrols of two or three men, side by side, who could look over the stone battlements at the ocean on one side and the central courtyard on the other. Round twin towers flanked the front gate, where the road ended.
Juan had a detailed view of the castle courtesy of a drone, circling far above and using its high-definition camera. He was watching the feed on his cabin’s wall screen while he poured coffee that Maurice had brought him. So far, the only movement he’d seen was four guards, who lazily patrolled the grounds.
He answered a knock at his cabin door. “Come in.”
Max Hanley entered with Gretchen, who was carrying her own cup of coffee.
“Good,” Juan said as he took a sip from his cup, “you found the mess hall.”
“More like five-star dining room,” she said in wonder. “Private work is treating you all well.”
Max regarded him with a raised eyebrow.
“What?” Juan asked. “I know that look and it makes me worried.”
“Gretchen told me something very interesting on the walk from the mess hall,” he said with obvious enjoyment.
“I was telling him about our mission to Moscow,” she said. “No classified details, of course. Just that you and I were married for three weeks during the operation.”
“You left out that little bit,” Max said to Juan. “That it was for a mission.”
Gretchen looked from Max to Juan in surprise and then laughed. “You mean you thought the two of us were married for real?”
“Someone wasn’t very clear on that.”
Juan nonchalantly took another sip of coffee and with a smile said, “Did I forget to mention that part?”
“Yes, you did.”
“We were both married at the time to other people, but the operation called for a couple, so Juan and I were tapped for the job. Mr. Gabriel Jackson and his wife, Naomi.”
They had never worked together again until now, and Juan was still wary about how the past might affect the present mission.
“Just when you think you know a guy . . .” Max said with a sly grin.
“Maybe he’s had other wives that even I don’t know about,” Gretchen said.
Juan shook his head. “Just two.” To change the subject, he said, “Why don’t I show you the op center and get this show on the road.”
Gretchen held his eyes for a moment, then said, “Lead the way.”
They left Juan’s cabin and walked down the corridor to the Oregon’s Operations Center, the command hub buried deep in the ship’s center where it was protected by the armored hull. Gretchen gaped as she entered.
A giant view screen at the front of the room displayed the same overhead camera feed of Vlorë Castle that had been piped into Juan’s cabin. As opposed to the bright daylight of the morning sun outside, the charcoal-colored op center was bathed in a soft blue glow from the latest computer monitors that were at every workstation. With touch screen displays, slick control systems, and sound-deadening rubber floors, the high-tech facility would have been beyond the starship Enterprise.
Gretchen walked right over to the rotating chair that sat on a pedestal in the middle of the room.
“This must be your position,” she said to Juan.
“We call it the Kirk Chair,” Max said. “Controls in the armrests let Juan operate nearly every aspect of the Oregon, if needed, including driving the ship.”
“With the expert crew that I have,” Juan said, “that’s rarely necessary.”
He gave her a tour of the different stations, starting with Eric Stone at the helm and Mark Murphy at the weapons station. Linda controlled radar and sonar, and Max took up his position at engineering and propulsion.
“And this is Hali Kasim,” Juan said, introducing the slim Lebanese American wearing a headset. “He’s our communications officer. This is Gretchen Wagner, on loan from Interpol and the CIA.”
“Oh, do you speak Arabic?” she asked.
“Not a lick,” Hali said. “Born and raised in Philadelphia. My parents believed in i
mmersing me in American culture. Sure would come in handy sometimes if I did.”
“I’d be happy to give you some lessons if we have time.”
“We might be a little busy for that if your intel pans out,” Juan said.
He moved on to the last workstation, where a strikingly handsome man wearing a generous mustache and a cowboy hat casually thumbed a pair of joysticks that were maneuvering the unmanned aerial vehicle above the castle.
“Here we have George Adams, our resident helicopter and UAV pilot,” Juan said. “Don’t bother telling him how good-looking he is. He already knows.”
He shook her hand. “Call me Gomez.”
“Gomez Adams?” Gretchen said. “As in the Addams Family?”
He grinned and winked at her. “That’s what I get for going out with a woman who looked like Morticia. She’s gone, but the nickname stuck.”
“What’s our status?” Juan asked him.
“The Wasps have about an hour on station before their batteries are drained,” Gomez said, referring to the foot-long drone that was circling above the castle. The gimballed camera on its underside had a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree field of view. “I’m rotating them out every hour to recharge so that we have eyes on the castle at all times.”
“Any chance they’ve been seen?”
“I doubt it. I’ve got them flying about a mile above. No way they’re loud enough to be heard from that distance. I’m recording the whole time so that we can look back if we need to.”
Juan peered up at the screen. One of the buildings in the castle’s central yard had the long and narrow look of a barracks, with a satellite dish and microwave antennas mounted on the roof. Five large cars were parked near the gates, indicating that there could be twenty or more people in the compound.
“Any movement?” Juan had been watching for only the last ten minutes.
“About a half hour ago, we saw two men come out of that multistory main building with the smoke coming out of the chimney,” Gomez said, referring to the structure at the opposite end of the yard from the front gate. “They were carrying what looked like trays to that barracks-style building in the center with all of the electronic gear. They went inside, and, two minutes later, two different men came out with empty trays.”
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