Thunderbolt

by M. L. Buchman

Three A-10 Thunderbolt II Warthogs had just been scratched from the list. Lost for no apparent reason. Perfect. The contractor she’d told Client F to hire was finally doing their job well. It bothered her that she didn’t know who the hacker or Client F were. Some pal of Ramson’s.

  If the contractor had taken out the three, forty-year-old jets worth a lousy sixty million before they’d been worn out, but killed seventy-five million dollars’ worth of CIA drones to do it, then—

  CIA drones! That was a traceable lineage back to—

  The chill ran even deeper.

  How in the world was she going to create deniability on this?

  First, pray that Clark wasn’t on the aircraft losses list.

  And second—

  An arm slipped around her waist with an easy familiarity.

  “I thought I told you, never at the office,” but she let herself lean back against Clark because she knew he wanted it. Besides, the CIA’s inner courtyard was only lit from window-spill in the descending dusk. On this chilly night it was otherwise deserted.

  “You’re so soft in this coat. Can’t help myself.”

  “You should see me out of this coat.” She did love her new Max Mara cashmere trench coat. A splurge, but a very worthwhile one.

  “How about only wearing this coat.”

  Clarissa smiled and leaned back against him a moment longer. He was learning. She’d make a good lover out of him yet.

  Time to move things forward.

  “How was the White House?” She slipped out of his grasp, then tucked her gloved hand around his elbow and led him on a slow promenade around the courtyard so that they could talk privately.

  “Roy Cole’s a sharp guy. He asks the hard questions and doesn’t mind hearing the hard answers.”

  “You like the President.”

  “More than I used to. He’s a tough man, but he’s one I can absolutely respect.”

  “Good, I’m glad.” Clarissa debated for a moment but knew the answer was “no” before she even thought about it.

  No, Clark definitely didn’t need to know that she was placing him in the vice-presidential slot of the next election. All she had to do was sweep VP Mulroney out of the way. With all her grooming over these last months, Clark would be the obvious choice to replace him.

  The opposition party was already running their campaign for next year, but Cole was popular enough that it wouldn’t amount much. The two other contenders in his own party? Well, one was a joke and the other had just had a stroke—with no assistance from her.

  Cole was a good bet. He had the nomination of his own party fully secured and a very high probability of reelection.

  How to get Mulroney out of the way?

  Her programmers hadn’t come up with anything nearly damning enough…at least that was published anywhere. She couldn’t exactly requisition the Vice President’s FBI file without triggering a lot of flags.

  Who knew where the skeletons really lay?

  She couldn’t ask Clark, even though he would know. He had too much integrity—a surprising trait in a former field agent turned CIA Director.

  One more turn around Kryptos, listening to the details of Clark’s meeting with Cole, and something vague about both Clark and herself going to an event at the White House. Right on plan: social first, business later…

  Yes. Social first…tonight. But first she had to take care of Clark.

  Damn that Chase women for doing this to her—she didn’t like being cold any more than she liked Kryptos—but there was something about it that forced her to think more clearly.

  She stopped Clark in the deep shadows inside the curve of the Kryptos sculpture.

  Leaning her back against the cold copper, she nudged him to face her directly, but kept him a step away with her fingertips on his chest.

  With her other hand, she undid the belt and three buttons of her coat.

  She shouldn’t have worn slacks, but it was too late to help that.

  Clarissa undid the single button of her Brooks Brothers wool crepe suit jacket.

  Hooking a finger through his tie, she tugged him forward into the shadows until she could wrap one leg and then the other about his waist.

  She reached up and hung on to the sculpture where the letters had been punched as holes through the thick copper. As if she was bound to the sculpture. Let him think her trapped; she was the one holding on to the power.

  Exactly as planned, he moved in the rest of the way and pinned her against the hard copper. One strong hand cupped behind her and the other clutched her breast.

  Slacks to pants, she began to move against him as he drove against her.

  Kryptos at her back. Its secrets clenched in her hands as Clark took them both upward—their breath making misty clouds in the night air.

  Codes within codes.

  Games within games.

  Yes, she had a very good idea.

  And Clark would never need to know until he was elected. Perhaps not even then.

  Yes. Kryptos was a very good place for many things.

  42

  At the knock on the Presidential Suite’s door, Senator Hunter Ramson grabbed a plush terrycloth bathrobe off the warming bar behind the door, eased the frosted glass sliding door to the bedroom mostly shut behind him, and answered it.

  He’d been expecting dinner a bit later, but this was fine. He wanted to surprise Rose by serving it to her in bed.

  The woman was gloriously insatiable today and he looked forward to just how long it would take them to eat a Trout Amandine and one of the Bistro Bis’ fine Angus strip steaks…with each other as a palate cleanser between courses.

  He opened the door with a flourish, but wasn’t ready for what was waiting in the hall.

  “Good evening, Senator,” Clarissa Reese breezed in. “I’m glad I’m not interrupting anything.”

  “You are!” Goddamn bitch of a woman had him traced. Not that it was all that hard. He wasn’t trying to hide some secret affair, so there’d been no need to be circumspect.

  “You may want to close the door.”

  “Not until you’re on the other side of it, Reese.”

  She waggled her fingers at him as if shooing the door closed. Then she sat on the couch, exactly where Rose had been waiting in just his tie when he’d arrived this afternoon.

  Somehow it felt as if she knew even that and had been purposeful in her choice of seat.

  Out of options, he let the door swing shut. A quick glance toward the bedroom revealed no changes. He’d left Rose sleeping. “We’ll need a nap now to regain our energy for later, dear.” And they had, until the soft knock had woken him. Hopefully, she’d stay that way.

  Out of options—short of calling the hotel detective to remove a Division Director of the CIA—he let the door swing.

  He chose a narrow loveseat that would keep Reese’s back to the bedroom door.

  “We have a problem, Senator.”

  “What have you screwed up now?”

  “Touchy. Touchy. Touchy. Perhaps I should say that we each have a problem.”

  “What’s yours other than being a manipulative bitch and a—”

  She raised a hand palm out. “This is probably not the moment to say something that you might regret later, Senator Ramson.”

  He could think of a lot of things to say, but she was right, none of them were nice.

  “I’m in a position to help you with a problem and I’m hoping that in exchange, you can help me with a problem of my own.” Reese made a show of re-crossing her legs.

  Rose had long since taught him most of the little tricks that women used to grab a man’s attention. Subliminal until you learned to see them, then they became laughably blatant.

  The bikini girls at the beach who had learned to throw one shoulder back to emphasize their chest.

  Bar babes crossing their legs at the ankles before leaning their elbows on the bar to emphasize their asses.

  A woman who began speaking normally, but gra
dually spoke softer and softer to drag you in until you were practically nuzzling her neck to hear her.

  Reese’s obvious move had no power over him. Instead, he wanted to smile.

  So he did.

  It earned him an uncertain frown.

  Just let her try to read him. Rose had taught him better than whoever had trained this bitch.

  But then she shrugged ever so slightly. Not enough to shift her breasts enticingly, but more to herself.

  He waited her out, but she didn’t make him wait for long.

  “You want something. You want it badly. Not only can I help you get it. I can help keep you there. But I need to know what you have in exchange for me.”

  “Could you be a little less cryptic, Ms. Reese?” He turned to inspect the mantelpiece clock, an elegant example of Swiss woodwork and engineering. “My dinner should be arriving shortly.”

  “I can. And can you shove your dismissive impatience up your ass long enough to actually listen?”

  He made a show of considering. Actually, he did consider.

  Stupid people weren’t put in charge of CIA divisions, no matter who they were screwing.

  He hadn’t been able to discover much about her online, before a virus had irrecoverably eaten his computer.

  Ah!

  A virus that may have been launched because he’d searched for her background. He’d finally just had a friend at the FBI send over her file. It was thick. And had included her time as a baby agent running one of the CIA rendition sites in Afghanistan. Not working at, but “running.” Agent in charge of torturing information out of America’s enemies right at the beginning of her career.

  Driven, ruthless, and not stupid.

  He wondered what demons drove her. Those hadn’t been in her file.

  But she was apparently desperate enough to talk frankly.

  Swimming in shark-infested waters could be very dangerous, unless you were a bigger, badder shark yourself.

  Hunter Ramson waved for her to toss the first bit of bait.

  43

  The old ARPANET was too slow for serious research. It was a precision tool. For just looking around, Daemon knew that her standard layers of security were plenty sufficient.

  She’d spent a few hours earlier fooling around with the GPS satellites…but nothing satisfactory came of it.

  Her mandate was to make the A-10s appear faulty and ineffective.

  Hacking and shifting the satellite signals wasn’t hard.

  All pretty standard military code once you ducked through the Air Force Space Command’s firewalls. No frills. No prettiness. Just “I’m going to do this task and I’m not going to look at anything else.” She wondered why they didn’t all shoot themselves for writing such boring shit.

  Major yawn.

  They fully documented their code though, which was mega-handy. Saved gobs of time.

  But there was no way to localize the effect of GPS distortions. The twenty-seven active satellites were always on the move. And location receivers aboard aircraft or in cars were constantly recalibrating across the ever-shifting array of visible sats. That meant, to misroute an A-10, she’d have to misroute everything in the area. She tinkered for a few minutes with the five backup satellites, but they were of no more use than the primaries.

  Daemon had cut the connection to reduce pingbacks and traces while she considered other possible approaches.

  Mum had always said it was better to think of something else and let an idea cook away in the background. Sometimes they’d hack something stupid, like a Walmart. Other times they’d just play Adventure—the original text-only version.

  Mum had always been the best to hang with…until they caught her.

  She’d grown up as Mum’s “Little Daemon,” especially after the movie came out with Nicole Kidman cast as the lead in The Golden Compass—Mum looked a lot like Nicole. She’d even dyed her hair to match.

  Daemon herself looked more like Taylor Swift, except in need of a few more inches of height…

  And a few less pounds.

  And blonde looked stupid on her.

  Daemon briefly considered tracking down Haggador II and having some serious cybersex while they ransacked a village of Irish maidens or French monks or something.

  But she was getting itchy for the real thing and that would just make it worse.

  Never having met Haggador II in the meat world, Daemon was left to wonder how much of that prowess was real and how much imaginary. With her luck, it would be some snot-nosed fifteen-year-old or a prepubescent girl. Definitely not worth bursting the bubble to find out.

  Time for a different kind of distraction.

  Maybe…

  She slid online again and went looking.

  There was some code she’d been meaning to look into. A churn-and-burn job she’d done a couple years back. She’d left a hidden alarm on the outer shell folder, which had pinged her a couple of times. But since the core had never squawked, she’d ignored it.

  Time to go see who was being nosy.

  Tinker to Andrews, up the coast and into Wall Street. A satellite jump to the London financial market, which was already showing the severe stresses of the last few years’ political chaos and were bound to crack soon.

  She made a mental note to go back and lay down some buckets to pick up a few bits of the inevitable falling pieces. Nothing much, just a few million pounds here and there when it finally broke.

  A right at Stockholm and a left at Geneva.

  Crimea had always been a wide-open gateway even before the Russians swept in. A pal had spent a couple summers programming games there…and come away with a very sultry Ukrainian wife.

  He’d clued her in.

  Now it was a total playground so snarled in the conflicting code of gamers, Ukrainian spammers, and Russian hackers ghosting IP addresses that if you could dump someone in it, they’d never find their way back out.

  After laying a trap deep in the maze, she punched once more across the Atlantic on undersea fiberoptic.

  Back in Washington, DC, Daemon made a small mistake, not that it would matter. She’d shot straight into the backdoor she’d left at the CIA’s Langley computer without laying another disconnect trap.

  Three directories before she reached the folder that had been pinged, a trace latched onto her.

  A total shitstorm of pingbacks, sniffers, and code imagers latched onto her signal.

  What the fuck?

  Her attempts to retreat back across the ocean to Crimea didn’t work.

  This couldn’t be happening.

  The sniffers were already there ahead of her, tracing her signal backward through the snarl. They barely slowed down for the one trap she’d set.

  So not possible!

  No other cutouts on this signal.

  The attacker was on the move and chasing her ass.

  And not in a good way.

  Rather than trying to salvage her original link, she jumped onto another terminal and sent a course-correction command to the initial trans-Atlantic satellite that had gotten her from Wall Street to London.

  It fired all of its yaw thrusters and spun the antenna out of alignment with the ground stations.

  Twenty-two thousand miles above the equator in geosynchronous orbit, the satellite tumbled, cutting the connection.

  It also threw billions of dollars of international market trades onto a significantly slower backup connection, which would take hours to clear. Significant price changes were going to be sabotaging several fortunes before the day was out.

  It would be hours, perhaps days before they got the satellite restabilized and back online. Didn’t matter as she’d only needed a few more seconds to finish collapsing her back path.

  She spent half an hour double-checking that nothing had gotten into her system, or even traced back to Tinker Air Force Base.

  Nothing.

  She was clean.

  Daemon blew out a breath and slumped back in her chair.

&
nbsp; Shit but that had been close. She held up a hand and watched it shake, before dropping it back in her lap. Damn close.

  Is that what it felt like when they tracked you, Mum? So sorry.

  What had she seen?

  No code grab. There hadn’t been time to do that, so she had nothing to inspect.

  Something might have been caught by the Crimea trap, but they’d have that staked out now. It wasn’t worth the risk to go check.

  But there was a signature to it: a style.

  Which meant it wasn’t military—they were always so forthright.

  Definite Black Hat tactics.

  Tactics that she’d seen before, though not in a long time.

  Oh… Oh, yes!

  The aggression. The flair. The unmitigated speed of the thing meant that the security counterattack code had been very small, very lean.

  Wizard Boy.

  He always coded clean and efficient, nudging every tick of the processor clock for all it was worth.

  And wherever there was Wizard Boy, there was Witchy Lady.

  This was going to be fun.

  She needed to let them cool down for a while before she came back at them. But when she did, it would be from so far sideways they’d never see it coming.

  In the meantime, they’d given her the answer she’d been looking for.

  Small. Lean. Fast.

  Keep it simple.

  She logged back in across the ARPANET, because speed wasn’t essential for this task.

  This was gonna be awesome.

  She’d toss it in as a bonus.

  Mum had always said that the beauty of being predictable—like her attack every six hours—was that it made it so much juicier when you were unpredictable.

  Once she had it set, Daemon popped a soda and sat back to watch the show. Tapped into the OC-3 Internet backbone at Tinker Air Force Base, she had a hot feed to a front row seat.

  44

  “Where the hell you going, Chaser?” Flight Leader “Tomahawk” radioed him.

  Lieutenant Tom “Chaser” Stevens had certainly earned his tag last night. The other guys just didn’t get the power of speaking Korean in Korea. Some guys had learned Japanese before shipping over, but A-10s weren’t stationed in Okinawa; they were at Osan Air Base in South Korea.