140914383X

by Raymond Khoury

  “I’m sorry, sir, but right now—we can’t.”

  Tomblin stared through the sculpture as he contemplated the analyst’s words. It had taken another Agency analyst more than seven years to crack its code and reveal the hidden message inside it—although one of its sections, consisting of ninety-seven characters, still waited deciphering. He’d done it in his spare time, during his lunch breaks, using nothing more than pencil and paper and a brilliant mind. Over seven hundred hours of quiet contemplation and brain gymnastics to uncover what another inspired mind had created in the privacy of his studio.

  Such was the caliber of the analysts Tomblin had got to know at the Agency.

  Tomblin wondered if the Erebus darknet site would prove as stubborn in giving up its secrets. He had full confidence in his team’s abilities to break down any barriers that prevented them from achieving what needed to be done. Now, more than ever, he needed that same determination, that same dogged pursuit of a solution—he needed a result, only he needed it fast.

  “Shut it down,” he told the analyst. “I need this done quickly. Am I making myself clear?”

  “We’re trying, sir. But even when we use the source's login credentials, the most we can do is create a fresh account using our plant as a nominator. Given enough time, we might be able to identify regular users and their locations by analyzing entry and exit patterns, but that will take days—if not longer. And if they're smart, whoever uploaded the sketches will only log in once more when they get the alert—and that's if someone recognizes you and decides to take up that offer to sell you out.”

  Tomblin closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. “That’s not good enough.”

  “I know, sir. I can tell you, whoever built it wasn’t some DoD contractor or a Naval Research brainiac out to make a fast buck. This came from true motivation, one of these crusaders who thinks protecting the Internet from Big Brother is like Orwell going to Spain to fight Franco’s fascists and managed to create a site layer which is as close to artificially intelligent as anyone's come. The site’s servers are totally virtual and self-perpetuating—they behave exactly like a virus. They move around the world from server farm to server farm, over-writing their trail as they move along. The guys over at the Bureau found Silk Road because it was physically hosted somewhere. The their cyber crimes team found the server with a little help from the NSA, they cloned it, they combed through the transaction records and used what they found as evidence to indict the guy who set it up. Whoever built this learned from that—this baby’s a couple of generations up on it. It has no physical location, no owner in law, no administrator logging into it to keep it running. It's the ghost in the machine—literally—though in this case, we didn't kill the victim.”

  “Find a way,” Tomblin insisted, his tone, though calm, leaving no doubt about his resolve. “And keep it contained. No one outside your immediate team is to breathe a word of this to anyone. And I mean, anyone.”

  “Understood.”

  Tomblin hung up and looked up from the sculpture at the bleak December sky hanging over him.

  He had a decision to make.

  The portraits were good. Anyone who knew him and Roos would easily recognize them. It was as if they were done in a professional sitting, and they looked younger in them. They’d been aged a bit, but Tomblin’s expert eye could tell it had just been layered on. They were from someone from their past. From decades earlier, maybe.

  He knew it had to be Reilly. The FBI agent had found a way to get his hands on their likenesses, and given Reilly’s recent collision with Tomblin and Roos’s past, Tomblin knew exactly who Reilly’s benefactor had to be.

  Sokolov. The slippery Russian scientist had given them up to Reilly.

  Tomblin was seething inside.

  This was all Roos’s fault. This whole mess had started after Roos had gone and helped his old buddy at the DEA with his cockamamie scheme to flush out a drug baron by brainwashing Reilly’s son—without consulting with Tomblin. A reckless, unwarranted, unilateral act that had ignited Reilly and turned him into a rabid bloodhound.

  A bloodhound who, by the looks of it, had his teeth in them already and wasn’t about to let go.

  Tomblin’s discontent intensified further when he thought about Sandman. If their assassin had done his job and finished Reilly off when he’d had the chance, none of them—not Tomblin, not Roos, not Viking—would be in this predicament. But that ship had sailed. Tomblin’s men had recovered Sandman’s body from Gigi Decker’s apartment and spirited it out unnoticed. No one would ever find a trace of the dead assassin. Not the way they’d had it disposed of. Alerts and facial recognition surveillance trawls were quickly put in place for both Gigi Decker and Kurt Jaegers, but so far, nothing had come up.

  Tomblin had a tough decision to make, and his mind was already homing in on one of the two options open to him.

  He knew Reilly’s family was still off limits to them, due to round-the-clock FBI and police surveillance in case Reilly made contact with them. He couldn’t get to them without attracting attention.

  Which left him with one strategy—but two different variants of it. He played them out in his mind, then settled on the one that seemed more logical.

  He couldn’t not tell Roos. There was a chance Roos would get a similar call from someone who was on Erebus. Tomblin didn’t think it would come from within the CIA—Roos had been working on the outside long enough that the new analysts, like the one who had alerted Tomblin, didn’t know him. Furthermore, they were under strict instructions not to inform anyone about it. Still, a lot of ghosts from their past were skulking around Erebus. Tomblin knew that.

  He picked up his encrypted cell phone and called Roos.

  His old partner was, not unexpectedly, livid. He said he hadn’t yet heard about the drawings, which was probably true, although given how high the stakes had reached and how good Roos was at dissembling, Tomblin couldn’t be sure.

  Either way, he brought him up to speed with the analyst’s assessment.

  Roos asked, “So . . . options?”

  “I don’t know,” Tomblin said. “There’s a chance no one will sell us out.”

  “You want to count on that?”

  “Not really. And I don’t want it hanging over me like that, not knowing if and when someone does sell us out.”

  “I don’t either. So it’s only a question of time before Reilly knows who at least one of us is.”

  “That’s a fair assumption,” Tomblin replied.

  Roos didn’t say anything for a moment. Tomblin knew he was letting the thought play itself out, allowing competing scenarios to unfurl in his mind’s eye.

  “He’s gonna come after us, Gordo,” Tomblin added, his tone somber and resolved. “Sooner or later, unannounced, and unforgiving. It’s gonna happen. And I think we need to kill off that uncertainty and make it happen.”

  “You want to flush him out?”

  “Yes,” Tomblin said, already visualizing the endgame that would get rid of his problem once and for all. “On our terms. With a home-court advantage.”

  “The blind,” Roos said.

  Tomblin wasn’t surprised that his old partner had come to the conclusion he’d expected of him. “Exactly,” he told him. “The blind. I’ll set it up.”

  SATURDAY

  59

  NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, Manhattan

  Gordon Roos.

  My nemesis was called Gordon Roos.

  It didn’t even end up costing me any money. The anonymous informant on the other end of Gigi’s fiber-optic Internet link only seemed too happy to rat him out without bothering with the ten thousand dollars we’d offered. This guy just said he owed Roos some payback without specifying what it concerned, and said that if fingering him caused Roos grief, that was reward enough. He told us where we were likely to find him, then he disappeared. Given the way Erebus was set up, if he didn’t want to us to be able to contact him or trace him, we wouldn’t be abl
e to. He’d popped up, given us his good cheer, and sunk back into the murky bowels of Daland’s creation.

  Kurt and Gigi had run a check on his name, of course, to see if it was genuine. They had to dig a bit deeper than they would have with your average Joe, but they tracked him down to a house in Ocracoke, North Carolina through, of all things, a pilot’s license. They didn’t turn up the cabin up in the Blue Mountains that our mystery informant had told us about, but that didn’t surprise me. It probably wasn’t registered in his name. Which made perfect sense—given what they intended to use it for.

  I looked around the hospital room at my assembled avengers and I’ve got to say that we didn’t exactly look invincible. There was me, just barely back from the dead, still with a couple of IV lines pumping magic potions into my veins and monitors giving out reassuring little beeps that I was still alive. Kurt, who looked like he’d sprinted into a brick wall, what with the broken nose in splints and the black eyes. Although the splints and the strips across his brow and over his upper lip did have something vaguely superhero-esque about them and he did wield some potent superpowers at his computer, he was far from a lethal weapon out in the field, which is what this was going to turn into to, without a doubt. Gigi, also damaged and still nursing the aftershocks of a concussion and a noticeable bulge on her skull. Deutsch was intact—so far. I was determined to keep it that way.

  Deutsch said, “It’s a trap.”

  The light outside was fading fast, courtesy of us being just two days away from the winter solstice, and the encroaching darkness was mirroring the somber mood on her face.

  “Of course it’s a trap,” I said. “That’s what I was hoping for.”

  “You were hoping for a trap?” Kurt asked, his emotive range limited by the gauze socks stuffed up his nostrils.

  “They’re watching,” I told him. “They’re watching everything. Even Erebus. Especially Erebus. This was bound to generate a rise in them. It had to. It was always going to be more likely than getting a shout from someone real who knows them.”

  Kurt, despite his cloaked face, still managed to convey deep concern. “So . . . you’re not going to go, obviously?”

  I looked at him like he was speaking Urdu.

  “You’re going to go?” he asked, incredulous.

  “There’s a difference between going in blind and going in prepared,” I told him. “I don’t intend to go in blind.”

  “But surely you don’t need to.” He swung his look over at Deutsch. “Why don’t you call it in and get a SWAT team up there and arrest the guy? You’re FBI. You know what’s going on. You know the whole story. You’re a witness to all this. That’s got to count for something, doesn’t it?”

  “Calm down, Snake” Gigi said. “She may know the whole story, but it doesn’t mean it counts for squat in terms of evidence. Which, from what I gather, is nonexistent,” she said, turning to Deutsch.

  “Correct,” Deutsch said. “All they have right now is Reilly,” she told Kurt, “wanted for murder, with a lot of evidence to support that.”

  “Everything else, everything about Roos,” I added, “it’s just a story, a fairy tale—my overactive imagination. Any court-appointed defense attorney with a mail-order law degree would walk all over it in the opening seconds of a preliminary hearing, assuming we ever got that far. Assuming they let any of us live that long.”

  “So you’re going to go after him,” Kurt said. “In your current condition. Knowing it’s a trap.”

  “Like I said. I don’t plan on going in blind.” I looked over at Deutsch. “And I think we have a couple of surprises we can use to our advantage.”

  “You’re nuts,” Kurt protested. He flicked an outraged glance at Deutsch. “He’s nuts, right? And you’re OK with that? You need to do something.” He turned back to me, gesticulating wildly now. “I mean, look at you. You just had a heart attack, for Christ’s sake.”

  “‘Sudden cardiac arrest,’” I corrected him with a half-smile. I straightened up. “Look. I didn’t start this. Hell, I didn’t even know I had a son until they came after him and maybe, in some perverse sense I can actually be grateful for that. But I’m not. He was living happily with his mom and they took that away from him. Then they killed a lot of people, ending with my own partner. So I don’t care if Annie here said she had enough evidence to bring Roos in. We’re past that. Besides, even if we had a halfway decent case, there’s no jail that’s going to hold these people. They’re connected enough to make some kind of deal or get some kind of pressure applied and they’ll be back out there in no time, with us all in their crosshairs. Which I’m not comfortable with. No, there’s only one way this is ending, and that’s with me making sure they get what they deserve and they don’t live to bother any of us or anyone else for that matter, any more.”

  I glanced around the room.

  Deutsch’s expression was focused and grim. She held my gaze and looked like she was about to say something, then seemed to decide against it and just gave me a slight, reluctant nod. Kurt and Gigi didn’t have anything to add either. They just looked at me with settled eyes and even expressions that told me they understood what I had to do. It also told me they were prepared to do what they could to help me.

  I pulled the sensors off my chest. The monitors started beeping. Then I reached over to the IV bags, and slipped them off their stand. “Let’s go.”

  I swung my feet off the bed and pushed myself to my feet. I felt dizzy—I’d been laid out for more than two days. I steadied myself against the bedside table, shut my eyes, and sucked in a few deep gulps of air. I let it go deep into my chest, and again, several big lungfuls, enjoying the sensation despite the tingling around my rib cage. Then I opened my eyes and padded over to the electrical socket and unplugged the monitor just as the nurse came rushing in.

  “What are you doing?” she asked, her shocked eyes like saucers.

  “National Security,” I told her, using Deutsch’s new favorite catch-all, get-out-of-jail-free card. I gave the nurse a dead serious look to make sure it sunk in, then I gestured at the IV bags that I was now holding. “I’ll keep these in as long as I can, but I’ll need whatever else you can give me as pills or injections to keep me going. Enough for forty-eight hours, tops. Then I’ll be back here and I’ll stay as long as you need me to. Deal?”

  60

  Nelson County, Virginia

  Almost four hundred miles southwest of the hospital the Cessna Skyhawk broke through the low cloud cover and banked left as it positioned itself for a landing.

  There was no tower here at Oakridge Field Airport. In fact, there was no airport either. It was just a privately owned tract of farmland on which an eighteen-hundred-foot landing strip had been fashioned out of the flat turf, and nothing else. To get to his hunting cabin, Roos normally flew in and out of the Eagle’s Nest Airport in Waynesboro, which was fifteen miles south of there. That was more of an actual airport than Oakridge, with an asphalt runway—cracked, but still more of a runway than the trail he was about to land on. It was also just as near, by road, as Oakridge was to the remote corner of mountain that was home to Roos’s retreat. Eagle’s Nest had no tower either, of course, but at least it offered hangars and tie-downs if the weather turned nasty. It also had a wind indicator, which would have been useful at Oakridge, given the crosswind that was currently buffeting the small prop plane. For today’s purposes though, Roos preferred a more discreet arrival. He knew the owner of the Oakridge strip and had called him to make the arrangements. He knew no other aircraft would be there and knew the man was solid enough to keep Roos’s being there that day a secret. If all went well, he’d soon be flying out of there without incident very soon, in time to settle back in and enjoy a quiet Christmas Day’s fishing out in the Gulf Stream.

  If all went well.

  As he approached the strip, he could feel the crosswind coming from the northwest and he scanned the ground to look for clues that would tell him if the wind direction on the ground
was the same as it was up there. He spotted a thicket of trees swaying under the wind’s influence and quickly compared it to what the dial on his instrument panel was showing. They were more or less similar.

  He drew on his considerable experience to maintain his wings level while keeping the plane’s nose facing the wind at a skewed angle to the runway’s centerline. It was disconcerting to watch—an aircraft crabbing its way down to a runway with its nose pointed off to one side, almost like it was flying sideways. The runway, he could see, looked like it was mostly clear of snow. The field’s owner had cleared enough of it to allow him to land. It looked like someone had run a razor down the white field that surrounded it.

  Just before the flare, Roos applied opposite rudder to correct the crab while using opposite ailerons to keep the wings level. The plane aligned itself just as its wheels touched down with a barely audible squeal.

  He taxied to a stop by the old farming warehouse where three black SUVs and eleven hard men were waiting for him. He killed the aircraft’s single engine and, without more than a nod, he got out, walked over, and climbed into the back of one of the cars.

  If all went well he’d soon be driven back to his Cessna with one less major worry on his mind. He’d greet the New Year in a state of calm, his mind free to focus on new opportunities.

  If all went well.

  Which, given that it concerned Reilly, was—Roos knew—not at all a given.

  SUNDAY

  61

  New York City

  We had shopping to do.

  Some of it was Kurt and Gigi’s doing. They had some ideas—good ideas, ones that would help us. They went out to stock up, mainly at the B&H Superstore by Penn Station, and came back to Deutsch’s place with a couple of large bags. Given what I knew about them in terms of their love of tech toys I was surprised they didn’t bring back a GoPro and a selfie stick. But what they did bring back would come in handy, no doubt. We needed all the help we could get.