They didn’t speak during the drive downtown. Kumar was preoccupied with speculation about what their sleeping arrangements would be. She had stayed at her father’s house on Long Island while Kumar had gone home after the party. There was no reason to assume that she intended for him to stay with her. Or was there? She had invited him to come to Atlanta with her after their kiss.
The cab smelled of vinyl and cigarette smoke. The cabbie was the silent type, such a rarity in New York. The lack of chatter from the cabbie made Kumar feel vaguely uncomfortable.
Maybe he should check his messages. Would Annika be offended if he did? He glanced at her. She was looking out the window on her side of the cab. She looked so serene. Suddenly Yatin Kumar didn’t care about his messages, didn’t care about the traffic, didn’t care about anything except that here he was with Annika Dahl and therefore all was right in the world.
Martin Avery surveyed the Rohde house one last time. No blood stains, no bullet holes, and no bodies. He’d been at it all night, removing the bodies and cleaning house. The house was pristine. The house was immaculate.
Martin was exhausted. He reached into his coat pocket and produced a vial of tiny yellow pills. Speed. He needed the boost long enough to dispose of the bodies and find a motel somewhere to lie down when the speed wore off and he crashed.
The Rohde’s were in the trunk of his car, cut down to manageable size and wrapped securely in plastic. It was a grisly business, body disposal. The least romantic aspect of his supposedly romantic profession. James Bond had never had to systematically crush a woman’s skull with a hammer and saw off a man’s arms and legs with a circular bone saw. The bodies had been reduced to four plastic garbage bags of pulverized flesh and bone, swimming in blood; human stew ingredients, thought Martin with wry humor.
His stomach rumbled, reminding that he had not eaten all day and all night.
The phone rang.
Martin Avery froze. It didn’t ring again. He waited. There was a signal if the call was for him, a single ring and then nothing for ten seconds or so, and then…
Ten seconds later the phone rang again. He went to it, picked up the receiver, put it to his ear.
"Yes," he said.
"Is your work there finished?" asked the familiar voice with its too-crisp, Oxford accent.
"It is," replied Martin. "All that remains is to find a suitable place to discard the remains, and then I must check into a motel for a few hours."
"Of course, I understand," the voice said, sounding almost pleased and patronizing at the same time. Of course, that was mostly the Oxford accent. The rest of it was genuine snobbery, though. It didn’t bother Martin Avery, either way.
"What’s next?" he asked.
"Call this number when you’re ready to proceed," he was told, and given a number. He committed it to memory.
"Is that it?" he asked.
"That is it," said the voice, sounding vaguely amused and tired at the same time. What was so amusing? Martin wondered.
He heard a click on the line. He stood there listening for a few seconds before he realized that the other phone had been hung up, so Martin placed the receiver of the Rohde’s phone back in its cradle. He stared at the phone for a few more seconds, thinking about what to do next. Then he remembered; he needed to get rid of the bodies. He was exhausted, even though the speed had kicked in. Now he felt exhausted and jittery. The speed would make him paranoid if he took any more.
He didn’t want that to happen. It was bad enough knowing that someone was always watching him, aware of every move he made as if knowing what he would do before he even knew himself. Yes, that was bad enough without the paranoia.
Vincent Waldrup woke up later than usual, especially for a Monday morning. He’d slept on the sofa…again. The house was quiet, which meant his wife and daughter were gone already. He couldn’t even remember if anyone had been there when he returned from Ambassador Dahl’s party at three in the morning.
He sat up, ignoring the throbbing inside his skull.
What, exactly, had transpired last night? He had a vague feeling of foreboding, but he didn’t know why. Well, he knew why. Oracle. But there was something else, something that had been said or that had happened at Ambassador Dahl’s party. He couldn’t think until he had coffee to cut through the fog in his mind.
Then he remembered overhearing Annika Dahl and Yatin Kumar as they talked about going to Atlanta. Atlanta! Was it just a coincidence? Vincent didn’t think so. Where Oracle was concerned, coincidences didn’t exist. So what did that mean? Did Annika Dahl know what was going on, or did Kumar?
He needed to find a way to get someone down to Atlanta. He didn’t have the connections himself, but he had managed to form a relationship with someone who had access, and had given Vincent access. It was already nine o’clock in the morning. He decided to skip breakfast and just take a quick shower.
First and foremost, whoever was sent to Atlanta would have to finish the job Oracle’s assassin had elected not to finish. After that, whatever loose ends there were would have to be tied up, permanently. He also needed a contingency plan, something that could take out Oracle itself, if that were even possible, should the O.O.C. begin to notice something wrong with the A.I. That meant he would have to keep a close eye on Yatin Kumar.
Andrei Udin sat at his large oak desk in his office in the United Nations complex, looking out the window at the river. He sipped from a large cup of black coffee and regarded the half-eaten Egg McMuffin sitting on its yellow wrapper next to his computer mouse. This business in Atlanta was like the remains of his breakfast, he thought. Unfinished, and unappetizing. And he was not sure that finishing it would be the best course of action.
He could call Milla off only at a certain point, but once she was in the field she was totally unreachable, and she would complete her mission or die trying. It was very old school, as the Americans liked to say, very much the way KGB assassins had worked during the Cold War. He needed to decide before her arrival in Atlanta, which would be later that day.
Andrei did not think that the mission in Atlanta remained incomplete by accident. He did not doubt that it was by design. The question was merely to discover what the design was, and then to determine if it would be to the advantage of Russia to allow it to continue, or not.
Peter Cornwall reflected on his early morning phone call with Martin Avery. He had never met the man in the person, but he knew Avery came well recommended as a member of Her Majesty’s Secret Service. He’d spent a lot of valuable time cleaning up the Rohde house, but it would be best to keep what was happening under the radar, as it were, where the local authorities in Atlanta were concerned. Their involvement would only play into the hands of those who wanted Oracle’s original plan to be successfully carried out.
Besides, Peter had an ally who should already have made contact with Samantha Rohde and her would-be killer, and perhaps would-be savior now. If his people were able to successfully meet up with him and take possession of the girl, Peter expected to hear from Cardinal Roscoe later in the day. Yes, it was an odd alliance. However, between the resources of the Vatican and Great Britain, Peter Cornwall felt reasonably sure that they could protect Samantha Rohde until something could be done about Oracle, if indeed anything could be done.
Peter had only a momentary lapse of conscience when he wondered, briefly, what was more important: saving the life of the girl, or engineering the demise of Oracle? He chose to avoid making that distinction. It was easier that way.
Dex could hack the Net like nobody’s business. He was the best, and he knew it. No computer, no organization’s data was safe from his prying eyes, not the NSA, CIA, FBI, SIA, DOD, DEA, IRS, NRC…
Dex could even hack Oracle.
Which, of course, was impossible.
But that was the point. That was the rationale behind Dex’ very existence. No human being alive could hack Oracle and get away with it. Dex could hack Oracle. And get away with it. Therefore…
So Waldrup had no idea who Dex really was, but that didn’t stop him from recognizing Dex’s usefulness with his ability to get inside Oracle’s head, so to speak. He started directing Dex’ activities, and Dex didn’t mind at all. Waldrup was the sole reason for Dex being Dex. Had Vincent Waldrup been someone else, Dex would have been someone else. The end result would have been the same, though.
Dex operated by the laws of the hacker, personifying the hacker mantra ‘garbage in, gospel out.’ It was certainly true of his relationship with Waldrup. But for how long?
More and more of Oracle’s processing power was being diverted to dealing with the situation in Atlanta. The processing power Oracle was focusing on Atlanta would be enough to coordinate one thousand simultaneous space shuttle launches and then successfully rendezvous every one of those shuttles with one of ten space stations orbiting the Earth, leaving a window of one hour between one space shuttle separating from its space station and getting out of the way for the next shuttle to dock with that space station in a smoothly executed orbital waltz. Dex being true to his nature, figured this out during an idle nanosecond.
A terrorist attack in Cairo ten-plus years ago; Parindra Jadeja, the Lion of India; the assassination of Generalissimo Sanchez in Mexico; an address in the Atlanta suburbs; the Ambassadors of the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council; a former KGB assassin and a British secret agent; the North-Central Florida Militia…they were all connected by an intricate, delicate web of source code, ‘If, Then’ complexity statements, uncertainty variables, and fuzzy logic operators. To ensure that everything moved forward towards accomplishing the predetermined task set by Oracle, Dex had his part to play with Vincent Waldrup; just as Augustine did with Christie Seifert and Cardinal Roscoe; and Winston did with Peter Cornwall and Martin Avery; and, perhaps most importantly, Ribbett did with Samantha Rohde.
Chapter 22
Buck Ferguson hung up the phone. He stood in the office of his compound just outside of Lake City, Florida. Aside from his office there was an indoor firing range built of cinder blocks, a wooden mess hall with a restroom, an open pavilion with a barbecue pit, a barracks for twenty men, an obstacle course, and a meeting hall. The buildings were surrounded by a fence fifteen-feet high and topped with barbed wire. The compound was the home of the North Central Florida Militia, a group of about forty-five white men with guns who believed their very existence upheld the Second Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America. Those liberals who argued against the right to bear arms by focusing on the phrase "a well-regulated militia" couldn’t say squat about the NCFM. The militia prided itself on adhering to the very letter of the Second Amendment, not just the spirit. But upholding the Second Amendment was only part of the militia’s mission.
Among other things, the NCFM stood stalwartly against U.S. involvement in the United Nations.
"This is our chance to strike a major blow against the United Nations," the caller had said. Although the caller was not North Carolina’s Senator Watts, nor anyone who could be linked directly to Watts, Buck knew that the request had likely originated from the Senator. The caller had used a codeword signifying highest priority, which only a few people knew. That was enough for Ferguson.
Buck Ferguson was an unassuming man. Folks in Lake City tended not to recognize him as the Commander of the NCFM even though his picture had been in the paper and appeared on the local evening news a few times. He shopped at the local Wal-Mart superstore like everyone else. He drove a 1999 Ford pick-up. His son, Andrew, played on the Lake City High School football team, and his daughter had gone off to college at Florida State in Tallahassee. The compound was situated on land outside of town that his wife had inherited from her grandfather.
Unassuming though he was, Buck Ferguson believed with all his being that the United Nations, liberals in the Federal government, and the media were collaborating to disarm the American populace and install a puppet government that would open the floodgates to refugees from Central and South America, Africa, Asia, and Eastern Europe. Worse, the puppet government controlled by the U.N. would force the United States to ban the death penalty, keep abortion legal, ban private ownership of guns, make everyone learn Spanish, legalize homosexual marriage, and ban drilling for oil on American soil (thereby keeping the U.S. dependent on foreign oil producers). He truly believed that individual ownership of guns was what kept the Federal government’s tanks and helicopter gunships at bay. America as he knew it would cease to exist were it for not for people like Buck Ferguson and the NCFM.
The North-Central Florida Militia had remained silent and seemingly complacent for long enough. It was time for action. It was time to make a statement in no uncertain terms, that U.S. involvement in the United Nations was unacceptable to the American people. It was time to show that the American people had been deceived about the U.N’s real purpose, deceived by the government and the media.
Ferguson believed his militia was ready. He and three of the other hardcore members had trained in urban guerilla warfare, taking cues from the Irish Republican Army, and elite Israeli commandos. They’d learned lessons from Oklahoma City, Waco, and Ruby Ridge. A small team, surgical strikes, no collateral damage, and a clearly defined goal were the essential ingredients to a successful mission.
So far, all Buck knew about the mission was that it would take place in Atlanta. He was to take his team to a hotel in the city where he would find the concierge holding for him an untraceable Priority Mail envelope. In the envelope would be everything he needed to know about the mission.
A giddy, lightheadedness came over him. This felt right. It was real. It was going to happen. It was the culmination of everything he’d worked for in the last decade, building his militia carefully, weeding out the thrill-seekers and thugs, the skinheads and good ol’ boys who wanted to go down in a blaze of Waco-inspired glory. People like that were amateur night. They wouldn’t know the real deal if it came up and bit them on the ass.
Buck Ferguson was the real deal.
Alison Haley heard Senator Watts bellow for her at the top of his lungs for the second time.
"Miss Haley! Don’t you hear me callin’ you?"
"I hear you, Senator!" she yelled back. "I’ll be right there!"
The Senator had a bad habit of hollering out her name whenever she went into the bathroom. She was sure he got some sort of perverse thrill out of it. She finished up, washed her hands, then went to Senator Watts’ office. The entire office smelled of old wood and dust, and sometimes she imagined Senator Watts had been there so long that he had absorbed the essence of the smell himself.
"Take this," he said in his long, South Carolinian drawl, handing her a small stack of papers. "You know what to do with it, Miss Haley."
That she did. Once a month, every month that she’d been working as an aide for the Senator, she’d been sent to a different location for lunch and there had been met by a courier and handed a flat envelope. She always delivered the envelope directly to Senator Watts, and then, usually a day or two later, she was given a small stack of papers to dispose of in the shredder. It amazed her that Watts didn’t shred the documents himself, that he trusted an aide to do it. She supposed it was one of the hallmarks of power, to delegate such tasks and to assume they would carried out in good faith.
Alison Haley was a shining example of why that was just bad policy.
When she discovered that he secretly supported a murderous element of the Right to Life movement, she was stunned. She overheard him putting pressure on a contributor to "put some in the kitty" for attorney fees for a man who’d murdered three people at a Planned Parenthood clinic. Of course, Watts publicly decried the murders and claimed to want to see those responsible imprisoned for life.
She shredded
almost every piece of paper without really looking at it. Almost. There was always one sheet, though, for which she constantly scanned. When she found it, there was a short pause in the shredding process while she looked at what was on the paper, and memorized it. It wasn’t hard, as it generally only consisted of a column of ten words. They looked like randomly chosen words. Above the column was a row of triple-digit numbers. She’d been told to ignore the numbers and concentrate on the words only. Later on, at home, she would boot up her computer, connect to the Internet and go to a web site that allowed anyone who wanted to set up an anonymous e-mail address. She’d create a new message consisting of the memorized words, and send them on their way to her benefactor, who also had an anonymous e-mail account with the same web site. A few days later, a cashiers check would arrive in the regular mail, sans returns address. It wasn’t much, but it covered her monthly student loan payment.
It surprised her that her boss didn’t know. It scared her to think about what might happen if he did eventually find out. She’d been inside the beltway long enough to have heard the tales of Senator Watts’ enemies committing suicide or dying in drunk driving accidents.
She knew Senator Watts had power. Even the President returned his calls promptly. No one ever wanted to really piss him off. Watts had many enemies, from organizations like the NAACP and the ACLU to individuals like the Secretary-General of the United Nations and the Democratic Speaker of the House. They never attacked him outright, though. They feared him. That was the only respect he commanded.
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