Panic

by Jeff Abbott

  37

  ‘Y ou were very persuasive, Mitchell,’ Jargo said. ‘I’m proud of you. That was a difficult conversation.’

  ‘I don’t want him hurt.’ Mitchell Casher closed his eyes.

  ‘None of us want Evan hurt.’ Jargo set coffee down in front of Mitchell. ‘I hate to criticize, but you should have told him about us long ago.’

  Mitchell shook his head. ‘No.’

  ‘I told Dezz, as soon as he was old enough to understand. We get to work together. It’s very nice to work with your son.’

  ‘I wanted a different life for Evan. The way you wanted a different life for all of us.’

  ‘I applaud the sentiment, but it’s misplaced. You didn’t trust him, so you put him in greater danger, made it more likely he could be used by our enemies.’ Jargo stirred his own coffee. ‘You seemed to win his trust back, at least to a degree.’

  ‘I did,’ Mitchell said in a hard voice. ‘You don’t need to doubt him. Your tape convinced him. He’s got a false ID, he’s got cash, he can get back here.’

  ‘It bothers me he wouldn’t let us come fetch him. Bothers me a lot. This could be a CIA trap.’

  ‘Your contacts would tell you if he’d been found.’

  ‘I hope.’ Jargo sipped at the coffee, watched Mitchell. ‘He seemed to soften toward you, but I’m not convinced.’

  ‘I can persuade my son our best interests are his best interests. You trust me, don’t you?’

  ‘Of course I do.’ And behind the frown of family concern, Jargo allowed himself a regretful smile. What was the opening line of Anna Karenina? Bast had given Jargo a copy of the book a week before Jargo had killed him. The line was arch nonsense about every unhappy family was unhappy in its own way. The Jargos and the Cashers, he decided, were truly unique in their misery.

  He left Mitchell alone in his room and went downstairs to the lodge kitchen. He wanted quiet in which to think.

  The boy might be lying about having Khan’s laptop, but Jargo decided he wasn’t. He wanted his father back too badly. He wondered if Dezz would fight so hard for him. He thought not. That was good, because to fight for what could not be won was stupid.

  And he loathed stupidity. He’d lightened the world’s burden of two idiots today. Khan had gotten too lazy, too complacent, too self-important. Losing him, losing Pettigrew as a client, were setbacks but not a crippling loss. He could let Galadriel take over Khan’s duties; her loyalty was unquestioned, and she had no bitter offspring to get underfoot, no ego cultivated in boardrooms. Pettigrew had been slow to pay for a hit on a senior CIA official in Moscow whom he personally disliked, and whose job he coveted. Thank God Khan had no involvement with Jargo’s American properties; otherwise staying here at the lodge, under the empty black skies, would have been too risky.

  Jargo poured a fresh cup of coffee, studied its steam. The boy couldn’t crack the laptop; at least Khan had done one thing right. And Mitchell had, if words were to be believed, snared his own child into a death trap.

  He would have a Deep operative do the hit on Evan, after he had delivered the client list and Khan’s laptop. Without killing Mitchell, of course: from a distance, with a high-powered sniper’s rifle. He suspected Mitchell would want to talk to the boy alone. An attack staged on father and son, he decided, and poor Evan just stepped the wrong way and put his brains in a bullet’s path. He liked the approach because it would stoke Mitchell’s fury, make him easier to manipulate. Evan dead, Donna dead, that grief could make Mitchell even more productive in the years to come.

  But he had to prepare for every eventuality, act as though meeting Evan was a CIA trap, and seal every exit. He picked up a cell phone, made a call.

  Jargo then crushed a sedative into a glass of orange juice to keep Mitchell calm and took the doped drink back upstairs. He had a long night ahead of him.

  38

  R azur was thin, like his sharp-edged namesake. He wore a goatee dyed platinum blond and black eye-glasses and a Celtic cross tattooed on the back of his neck. ‘Evan?’

  ‘Yes. Razur?’

  Razur shook hands with him and sat down at Evan’s table, in the far back corner of the cafe. He tilted his head at Evan. ‘Your eyes look like you just smoked yourself a big chronic.’

  ‘Chronic?’

  ‘A potent joint, mate.’

  ‘Oh.’ Evan shook his head. ‘No. You want a coffee?’

  ‘Yeah, black. Largest they got.’

  The cafe was grimy and funky, but not too busy, a line of computers on one side of the metallic wall, young people Web-surfing while downing juices, teas, and coffees. Evan got up and ordered the drink from the barista. He sensed Razur’s gaze on him the whole time. Evaluating him as a series of problems to be broken down into his constituent parts and solved. Or maybe revisiting the marijuana theory and deciding Evan’s request was the result of reefer madness. Evan came back to the corner table and set a steaming cup in front of Razur.

  The hacker took a cautious sip. ‘I’m told you’re being raked over by nasty people.’

  ‘The less you know the better.’ Evan didn’t want to get into the details of the Deeps or their entanglement with the CIA.

  Razur gave a thin smile. ‘But you’ve gotten their dirty secrets.’

  ‘Yes. On a laptop. But I can’t get past the password.’

  ‘I won’t either,’ Razur said. ‘Without the cash.’

  Evan handed him a laundry bag from the hotel. Razur peeked inside at the money.

  ‘Count it if you want.’

  Razur did, fast, under the table, where the bricks of cash wouldn’t draw attention. ‘Thanks. Sorry I’m not a trusting soul. You got the system?’

  ‘Yes.’ Evan brought the laptop out of a shopping bag he’d found in the back of the Jaguar.

  ‘I’m not really into breaking the law, I’m into technical challenges, showing up the bastards who think they’re so smart but they aren’t. Savvy?’

  ‘Savvy.’

  Razur popped open his own sleek laptop, revved it up, cabled it to the Ethernet port of Khan’s machine. ‘I’ll run a program. If the password can be found in a dictionary, we’re in.’

  He clicked keys. Evan watched as words began to rapid-fire scroll on a screen, faster than he could read them, throwing themselves against the gates of Khan’s laptop fortress.

  After a few moments Razur said, ‘No joy. We’ll try it with alphanumerics thrown in at random and variant misspellings.’ Razur slurped at his coffee. Watched the slow, solemn rise of a status bar as millions of new combinations attempted to speak the open sesame of Khan’s laptop.

  ‘Hey, do you know much about handhelds?’ Evan asked.

  ‘Not my specialty. Low-powered buggers.’

  Evan pulled Khan’s PDA out of his pocket, used his thumbprint to open it.

  ‘Biometric security,’ Razur said. ‘What have you got on your to-do list, stealing a nuclear weapon?’ He laughed.

  ‘Not today. What are these programs? I don’t recognize them.’

  Razur studied the small screen. ‘My. I’d like to play with these. This one’s a cellular interference program – it would emit a signal to jam any cell phone in the room. Should we try?’ He grinned mischievously, eyeing the several customers chatting on their phones. Tapped the pad without waiting for Evan’s answer.

  Within ten seconds everyone was frowning at his or her phone.

  ‘Ah, I think I just broke a law.’ Razur tapped again and the phone service seemed to return as the customers re-dialed and started their conversations again.

  ‘And this one’ – Razur tapped it open, studied the program with a frown – ‘it’s like what I’m using on your laptop. But specialized. For keypad alarm systems. Most have only a four-digit password. Patch into the alarm system and it would decipher and activate the code.’

  ‘You mean it would give me the code of an alarm system on the screen so I could enter it?’

  ‘I think that’s what it’s designed to do. H
mmm. This one copies a storage card or a hard drive. Compresses the data so it would fit on this PDA.’

  ‘You couldn’t copy a whole computer hard drive using this, though, could you?’

  ‘No. Not this. Too small. But another PDA, or a set of files, sure.’

  Maybe my mother used an approach like this to steal the files from Khan, Evan thought. ‘It would be fast?’

  ‘Sure. If you grab other files along with it, no problem. Grab a whole folder, it’s faster than searching and grabbing for files. If you can compress it, all the better.’ He handed him back the PDA, his eyebrow raised. ‘You steal this from the spooks?’

  ‘Spooks?’

  ‘Spies.’

  ‘You don’t want to know.’

  ‘I don’t,’ Razur said.

  Evan watched the status bar slowly inching its progress. Please, he thought, crack. Give me the files. But they weren’t just files: they were a lifetime’s worth of secrets, the financial trails of terrible deceits, the record of lives snuffed out for dirty money. He had one hand to play with Jargo, and it was on these files.

  Razur lit a cigarette. ‘I could hack a porn site while we’re waiting. Cover up the tits with pictures of prominent politicians. I’m very antiporn these days. I’ve gone all Victorian.’

  Evan shook his head. ‘I want your opinion on an idea of mine. If we crack the password, but the files on the laptop are encrypted, would that keep you from copying them to another computer?’

  ‘Possibly. Depends on how they’re encrypted. Or if they’re copy-protected.’

  ‘The program to de-encrypt the files has to be on this laptop, right? I mean, you would need to edit files, so you would have to decrypt them first, make changes, and lock them back up.’

  ‘Yes. If the unlocking program’s not on the laptop, it needs to be in a place where it can be downloaded easily. Otherwise it’s like a lockbox without a key, worthless. If your bad guy stashed a custom program on a remote server, I’ll dig through his cache, if it hasn’t been erased, to track it, or I’ll have to hack into his service provider.’ Razur grinned. ‘I detect an evil idea about to take flight.’

  ‘So we could decode the files,’ Evan said, running a finger along the smooth edge of the laptop, ‘and hide a copy. On a server where I could retrieve a copy off the Web. Then we encrypt the hard drive of this laptop again, using the same locking software and the original password. I give the bad guys their encrypted laptop, they might believe I never, ever saw the files. It’s like returning a locked box to them that I never had the key for. So they think I’m no longer a real threat to them.’

  Razur nodded.

  ‘Or even if they kill me, the files could still be used to cut off the balls of said bad guys. It would be my ace in the hole.’

  ‘No guarantees,’ Razur said, ‘that I can even break this system open.’

  ‘Then I think I need a Plan B.’ Evan toyed with the possibilities. He smiled at Razur. ‘I’m going to need a bit more help from you. Of course I’ll pay extra.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Tell me, do you play poker?’

  FRIDAY MARCH 18

  39

  T he men caught Evan at Heathrow Airport early Friday afternoon. He made an effort to look like any young tourist. He wore fresh-pressed khakis and a new black sweater, tennis shoes, and sunglasses bought from Razur. His hair was still CIA-short but now it was platinum-white, courtesy of Razur’s much-tattooed girlfriend. The men let him approach the British Airways counter, buying a round-trip ticket to Miami, paying with cash, even let him glide through security. He used the South African passport he stole from Gabriel a lifetime ago. He was nearly to his gate when the agents came up on both sides of him, said, ‘This way, Mr. Casher, please don’t make a fuss,’ with cool politeness, and so he didn’t. Suddenly walking next to him and in front of and behind him were six British MI5 officers, and they boxed and steered him with grace.

  No one around Evan realized he had been plucked into custody.

  The agents escorted him into a small, windowless room. It smelled of coffee. Bedford stood at the end of a conference table. Then Evan saw Carrie on the other side of the room. She rushed to him, embraced him. ‘Thank God, thank God.’

  She held him for a long minute, tight, and he gave in to her embrace, being careful of her hurt shoulder.

  ‘I thought you were dead,’ she said into his neck.

  ‘I’m sorry. I tried to stop your car but you didn’t see me. I was too far away. But I knew you were alive. You’re okay?’

  ‘Yes. British intelligence had a team following us. They found me after the blast. Took me to a safe house for questioning.’

  She pulled back from him, kissed him quickly, put her hand on his cheek. Giddy in her relief. ‘What’s with the Sting look?’

  He shrugged. Bedford came forward, put his hand on Evan’s shoulder. ‘Evan. We are all tremendously relieved that you’re alive and well.’

  Another man sat next to Bedford: clipped hair, good suit, a face bland as air. ‘Mr. Casher. Hello. I’m Palmer, MI5.’

  ‘My counterpart, of sorts,’ Bedford said. ‘Not his real name. You understand.’

  ‘Hello,’ Evan said. He ignored Palmer’s outstretched hand, shrugged his shoulder out from under Bedford’s grip.

  ‘Evan?’ Carrie eased him into the chair next to her. ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘My problem is with you,’ Evan said to Bedford. ‘You delivered us into the hands of a murderer.’

  Bedford went pale. ‘I’m sorry. We’ve looked at every moment Pettigrew’s spent in the Agency for the past fifteen years and still haven’t found the connection to Jargo.’

  ‘I know where you can get the accounts linking Pettigrew and Jargo. And maybe, just maybe, I’ll give it to you. But you and I have to make a deal.’

  ‘A deal.’

  ‘I don’t think you can keep me alive, Mr. Bedford. You’re so worried about showing your face you don’t know who to trust. I’m not waiting to be shot by Pettigrew, Part Two.’

  Carrie asked Bedford, ‘Could I talk to Evan alone?’

  Bedford measured the chill in the room and gave a quick nod. ‘Yes. Palmer, let’s you and I talk outside, please.’ They shut the door behind them.

  Carrie took his hand. ‘How could you let me believe you were dead? I’ve spent the past twenty-four hours grieving.’

  ‘I am truly sorry. But I didn’t know who other than you and Bedford I could trust. Clearly Bedford doesn’t know either. I wasn’t going to phone in and walk back into the arms of another Pettigrew.’

  ‘How did you get information tying Pettigrew to Jargo?’ she said.

  ‘I got resourceful.’

  ‘Will you give it to me?’

  ‘No. If I hand it over, my father is dead. I need your help. I have to get out of here.’ Evan spoke in the barest whisper. ‘If Jargo gets word that the CIA has picked me up, he’ll call off trading me the files for my dad.’

  ‘You really have the files.’ She sounded stunned.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I can’t go against Bedford. You’re not thinking straight.’

  ‘I’m so far down the rabbit hole now… I can’t trust anyone. Jargo not to kill me, Bedford to protect me. You to love me.’

  ‘I do love you.’

  He was suddenly afraid the poker face he’d worn the whole day would crack. He closed both his hands around hers. ‘I want to forget everything. I want us to have a normal life. But that’s not going to happen while we’re still down the rabbit hole. I have to take the fight right to Jargo, and I’ve got a way to stop him cold, but I need your help. I have to get to Florida. I need you to stay here, out of harm’s way.’

  ‘Evan…’

  Bedford opened the door. Walked in without waiting to see if their conversation was done. Palmer and one of the MI5 officers followed him into the room, the officer carrying Evan’s luggage. He set it down and left, shutting the door behind him.

  Carr
ie mouthed, He won’t let you go.

  ‘Evan,’ Bedford said. ‘What do I have to do to regain your trust?’

  ‘It’s gone. You’ve got leaks, and those will get me and my dad and Carrie killed. Now we can talk about a deal or you can let me go.’

  ‘You’re not going anywhere, Mr. Casher.’ Now Palmer spoke. ‘Would you open your bag for us, please?’

  Evan did, deciding to let them think they were still in charge for another minute. He saw the bag had already been searched. It held only a few clothes that he had bought and a few thousand in American cash. He had left Khan’s gun with Razur.

  ‘Your carry-on, please,’ Palmer said.

  Evan opened up a small briefcase bag. Palmer reached in and pulled out a laptop computer.

  ‘What’s this?’ Bedford held up the computer.

  ‘A laptop.’

  Bedford opened up the laptop, powered it on. ‘It’s pass-worded.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Enter the password, please, Evan.’

  ‘I don’t know it.’

  ‘You don’t know your own password.’

  ‘That’s Thomas Khan’s computer.’

  ‘How did you get it?’

  ‘Doesn’t matter,’ Evan said. ‘I did what I said I promised, which is get the files my mother stole. Khan is Jargo’s moneyman. Or was. He’s dead.’ Evan raised his hands in mock surrender to Palmer. ‘It was self-defense. In case you’re prosecuting me.’

  Palmer shook his head.

  Evan turned to Bedford. ‘Here’s the deal. Let me go get my dad. I guarantee I’ll still give you what you need to take down Jargo, but my dad and I, and Carrie, if she wants’ – he turned to her, and she nodded – ‘we vanish on our own terms.’

  Bedford sank into his chair. ‘Evan. You know I can’t agree to your request.’

  ‘Then I get a lawyer and I talk a mile a minute about CIA officers carrying explosive devices into Kensington bookshops. Your choice.’