The Kafir Project

by Lee Burvine

  "Any more thoughts on that message back at the hotel?"

  "Not really. It said if I knew the history, I'd know where to find him, or her. It's like a riddle, or a code. Herodotus's main work is called The History or The Histories. So okay, I get the reference. I've even read it. That doesn't give me a location. And the bit about the library at JPL? It sounds pretty straightforward. But then, what would be the point of the riddle? It just doesn't make any sense."

  "JPL, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Isn't that near LA?"

  "Between Glendale and Pasadena. So what, are we supposed to meet in a library there tomorrow?"

  "If that's the message, we have a choice to make. Lawrence Livermore will be there the day after tomorrow. The meeting with this Herodotus person may not. We can shoot straight down the I-5 and be in Los Angeles in about six hours."

  Something about it didn't feel right to Rees. "The message said if I knew the work I'd know where to find this person. And I don't know."

  "Sometimes you can't know. You make your best guess."

  "Normally I'm fine with guesses," Rees said. "That's how most hypotheses start. But if Herodotus was working with Fischer, then he or she is very likely a scientist. The message said I'd know, not guess. A good scientist wouldn't conflate the two terms."

  "The message was specific. The JPL library."

  "Yes, but I still don't think-"

  "Dr. Rees, I apologize if I didn't make this clear before. I want to hear your input, but I'll be making the decisions."

  Rees sat there a second before he realized his mouth was hanging open. He shut it, and reminded himself that Morgan was a federal law officer going to extraordinary lengths here to help him. He wondered if he'd lost sight of that because of her gender and felt a hot stab of embarrassment.

  After an uncomfortable length of silence, Morgan said, "By the way, I agree with you. We're going to Livermore."

  Rees got the point. "You just wanted me to know who's in charge."

  Morgan didn't reply, which in this case worked as good as a yes.

  He remembered a question he had for her. "How do you know about this quantum computer program? You're not with the NSA too, are you?"

  "I know for the same reason I knew Edward Fischer was working for DARPA. There were security leaks and I was called in. One of the quantum computer scientists had a gambling addiction, owed the wrong people. He needed money, and the Chinese wanted the technology."

  "What happened to him?"

  "We disappeared him. It's like he never existed now." Morgan's face looked cold, emotionless.

  "Jesus, really?"

  "No. But I was curious to see how far you thought we'd go."

  Rees shook his head. An interesting character, Morgan. He liked her. Under other circumstances he might ... what? See her a few times, and then let her know that he didn't really do the whole intimacy thing? Yes. Most likely, that's what he'd do.

  Or maybe not this time.

  "So then, you've seen the quantum computer?" Rees asked.

  "Not the hardware, no. I signed off on the new security system. Got to know some people there. We'll ask around about Fischer. You think he worked with them at least once already?"

  "I'm thinking he had to. If his research at Fermilab was built on this," Rees lifted the green notebook, "he would've needed solutions to these equations only a quantum computer could generate."

  "So you think he wasn't finished? That's why he was coming back?"

  "I don't know. At our meeting out there by the pier, he mentioned data. Massive amounts of it. Maybe an ordinary supercomputer couldn't process it. With any luck, someone at Livermore can tell us the details."

  A bump-bump of the front and back tires across an expansion joint told him they had just finished crossing the Bay Bridge. Rees had crossed a lot of bridges today and wondered how many more were yet to come.

  About forty minutes later they pulled off the freeway in Pleasanton. Livermore was still one town away.

  Morgan steered them through a residential neighborhood that, at least at night, looked just like a thousand other neighborhoods to Rees.

  Mostly one story homes. Not big, not small. The parked cars they passed weren't Beemers and Mercedes, but there weren't a lot of old beaters around either. Middle America. Welcome to the burbs.

  Rees had grown up in a neighborhood like this one. About eleven hours northeast of there, near Salt Lake City. Reminders of that part of his life always evoked mixed emotions. And thoughts of his sister, Anna. Thoughts he had no time for right now.

  "This is it," Morgan said as they slowed. She had apparently kept the address of one of the quantum computer scientists from her investigation at Livermore.

  They pulled into the driveway of a house near the end of a cul-de-sac, behind a Honda Civic already parked there. Lights were on inside.

  "Shouldn't you have called first?" Rees asked, as they climbed out of the rent-a-car.

  Morgan frowned. "What, and ruin the surprise?"

  He followed her as she walked to the door and rang the bell.

  The sound of something breaking came from inside, followed by a muffled Goddamnit spoken in a higher register. Then footsteps.

  The door opened.

  A young woman, mid-twenties, stood there in sweats and a T-shirt. A shocked expression on her face.

  "Kerry! What the hey?" She smiled broadly. "Why didn't you call?"

  Morgan smiled right back. "Wanted to surprise you."

  The two women hugged.

  "I freakin' hate surprises," the other woman said. "Like you didn't know."

  Rees watched as the hug lingered. The women separated, still making eye contact.

  Morgan gestured to Rees. "Danni, this is--"

  "Gevin Rees!" The woman's eyes popped. "Holy shit! Dr. Gevin Rees. Wow. So nice to meet you."

  She offered her hand and Rees shook it. She had dark skin and Asian features. And despite the rather exotic effect, something about her seemed instantly familiar. Some people were just like that. Rees found himself automatically returning her huge smile.

  Morgan made the formal introductions. "Dr. Gevin Rees, this is Dr. Danielle Harris, who will insist that you call her Danni. She's one of the world's leading experts in Quantum Computation Language, QCL. She actually studied under its inventor, Bernhard Omer."

  Danni was still beaming. "Man, I watch all your specials. I saw the spot you did on the new Cosmos. That was radical."

  "Thank you," Rees felt disoriented and flattered at the same time.

  After a moment of quiet, Morgan said, "Can we come in?"

  "Whoa, yeah, sorry. Come in. It's a mess, but, yeah." Danni stepped aside to let them by.

  Rees saw something flash again between the two women as Morgan passed Danni in the doorway.

  He made a mental note. Whatever level he'd thought his ability to guess someone's sexual orientation was at? He needed to downgrade it a notch or three.

  * * *

  SABEL PARKED DOWN the street from where the rent-a-car carrying Rees and the woman had stopped.

  The mission had changed. In mid-flight, as it were. The Office wanted Rees taken in alive now. They caught a break there. Sabel could have killed Rees in the hotel, and he was about to do just that. The instant he finished using him as a human shield.

  It just hadn't worked out that way.

  They say everything happens for a reason. Maybe it does. Or maybe it's just dumb luck. Sabel was all right with it either way.

  He'd picked them up leaving the Mark Hopkins. Rees might have recognized the white van, so that required quickly stealing this old Toyota. Not his idea of a sweet ride, but it would do.

  Sabel exited the car and crept in close enough to watch as Rees and the woman entered a second woman's house.

  He'd need to determine if anyone else was in there now and get a basic layout of the place. He texted the address back to the Office for data analysis.
In a few minutes he'd be ready to take care of business.

  It was a fairly straight shot back to the freeway. From there he would get Rees to a safe house and finish the job. Get the information that the client wanted. The location of the copied data and recovered artifacts. Also more info on the other two scientists involved.

  Then again, he might be asked to let the Specialist do that last part. It was the Office's call on that one.

  Sabel figured Rees was better off with him, though. He would make short work of it. The Specialist, on the other hand might just make it linger.

  Rumor had it he enjoyed that kind of thing.

  CHAPTER 12

  "THIS WILL ONLY take a second," Danni said.

  Morgan watched her scoop up shards from a white glass vase off the white linoleum tile with a whisk broom and dustpan. Apparently Danni had been washing the vase when the doorbell rang, and tried to set it aside too quickly.

  Danni tended to rush things.

  Morgan hadn't seen her since the Livermore investigation and their brief but mostly satisfying entanglement. About a year and a half had passed since then. And even under these bizarre circumstances, she felt happy to see Danni again. Surprisingly happy.

  Not that it had ended badly. But Danni wanted children one day. One day soon in fact.

  Morgan had very different ideas about parenthood. She thought it would be like having extra sets of little arms and legs growing out of you that you couldn't control, but through which you could still feel every single painful injury. Everything from a scratch to an amputation without anesthesia.

  Gee, what fun, and no thanks.

  And so they called it a fling and went on along their separate, unconnected paths. Until now.

  "Sorry about that." Danni emptied the dustpan into her garbage and stowed it under the sink. "Let's go into the living room." She took two steps, then stopped. "Oh, you guys want anything? I have beer and beer. If you're hungry, there's lasagna I can heat up."

  Rees surprised Morgan by requesting one of those beers. Morgan declined. Danni grabbed one for herself and led them to the living room.

  Morgan removed her coat and sat on the couch next to Rees. Danni took the easy chair across from them.

  The living room looked exactly the same as when Morgan had last been here. African tribal art decorated the walls, along with some hanging knit sculptures by a Cornell math professor friend that accurately represented hyperbolic space. Beautiful and eclectic. Like Danni.

  Danni was eying Morgan's service piece. "I thought I felt the hardware. You're on the job, right? What's the deal?"

  "It's about Edward Fischer." Morgan said matter-of-factly. The last thing she needed was to get Danni upset. Or worse, excited.

  Danni shook her head. "Oh, yeah. Man, that's horrible. They don't call it high energy physics for nothing. It's surprising something like this didn't happen sooner."

  "Yes," Rees said, "except something like that still might not have happened."

  "All riiiight," Danni set down her beer. "Well, that sounds all dark and mysterious like. So, there's more to the story?"

  Morgan gave Rees a hard stare and regretted not instructing him to let her handle all the disclosure here. "Yes, there's more. But I don't want to drag you into this deeper than we have to. Just tell me, was Fischer using the quantum computer at Livermore and if so, what for?"

  Danni sat up like someone just ran electricity through her spine. "Hold on. Somebody murdered Edward Fischer? That's what this is about? It wasn't an accident?"

  Don't get all worked up about this. Please, Danni. "Honestly, the less you know the better," Morgan said.

  "Hey, don't go all Colonel Jessup on me here." Danni dropped her voice a couple registers. "You want the truth? You want the truth? You can't handle the truth!"

  "That's a terrible Jack Nicholson and I'm serious about this, Danni." Morgan saw her struggling with it. She had a scientist's natural curiosity. Plus she was damn stubborn.

  Danni dropped her head. When she looked up, she appeared more collected. "Okay. You want to know if Edward Fischer worked with my lab." She paused. "Because someone freakin' killed the greatest scientist of our time. But we're not gonna talk about that part."

  Morgan shot her a warning look. "Danni."

  "All right, all right. I'm going with it. Just give me a little to work with, okay?"

  "We have reason to think Fischer used the quantum computer at Livermore," Morgan explained. "And that he might have been planning to do so again."

  Danni nodded. "Okay. Well, I can tell you that if he did, it wasn't connected to anything I had access to."

  Rees set his beer down and leaned forward. "There was work going on with the quantum computer even you didn't have access to?"

  "Just once, yeah. A thing in partnership with DARPA. We weren't even told the name of the project, but I'm pretty sure I overheard it a couple times. Project Coffer, or something like that."

  "Could that be Kafir?" Morgan tried over-enunciating. "Kaa-feer. Sound like that?"

  Danni tilted her head and seemed to think back. "Yeah. I suppose it coulda been."

  Rees had scooted so far forward, Morgan feared he would slip off the front of the couch. "What does that mean, kafir?"

  "It's Arabic," Morgan said. "It means unbeliever. I saw that word on a notepad in Fischer's office when I interviewed him once. I didn't understand how it could be connected to his work. I still don't. But clearly it is somehow."

  Rees looked elated. "Well, that has to be it, then. The same DARPA project from Fermilab was ongoing at Livermore. Fischer was here." He turned to Danni. "Are there records? Can we find out what he was doing?"

  Rees's excitement had infected Danni. Her eyes sparkled with it now. "Well, yeah. Yeah. At the lab. But that stuff would be on contained infrastructure. Isolated. No lines in or out."

  "So that no one can access it via the internet," Morgan explained.

  Danni nodded. "We'd have to physically go there to look at the records. But the thing is, I never did get clearance for that project. I wouldn't be able to access it even locally."

  An idea flashed into Morgan's mind along with a ray of hope. She leaned in toward Danni. "What we did, you and I. Is it still there?"

  Danni smiled. "I did it. You just thought of it. But, yeah. It's still there. I kinda liked knowing I had it."

  Even without an internet connection, hacker programs like the one called Flame could be piggybacked in on flash drives to attack or steal data from an isolated computer. So as part of Morgan's work plugging leaks at Lawrence Livermore, sophisticated anti-spyware had been installed.

  And something else.

  A backdoor in.

  Morgan had Danni write one into a subprogram, so she could access the system clandestinely, and spy on their data thief. In the end, that's how they found him. And now it might come in very handy again.

  At that moment, a sound came from the direction of the kitchen.

  CHAPTER 13

  SABEL SCOUTED THE house and yard, and quickly determined where the target sat along with the two others. He quietly broke into the garage, and entered the home through an unlocked door into the kitchen.

  Unfortunately, he'd lost the only suppressor he brought with him, so killing the two women was going to make a racket. The neighbors would hear it. Some might even be stupid enough to step outside and have a look see.

  He'd have to get Rees out of there quickly, maybe change cars again.

  Sabel made his final approach through the kitchen, gun ready. Something cracked under his left shoe.

  He stopped.

  He tried to remember if he'd seen carpeting when he looked in from the backyard. Or was it a wood floor in there? He wasn't sure. That made it difficult to assess how well that sound might have carried.

  He kept still, and listened.

  Stone quiet in there now. The conversation had halted.

  They heard.


  Sabel calculated the new scenario.

  Enough time had already passed for the armed woman in there to draw her weapon. Narrow doorway from the kitchen to the living room. Her shot would be perfectly framed by the space he came in through.

  He, on the other hand, would have to sweep his gun through as many as forty-five degrees one way or the other, while he tried to pick out the armed target from three people.

  Sabel figured with his skills that put the odds for who got off the first shot at about even.

  Not good enough.

  He backed up toward the door he just entered by. Whatever the hell he stepped on, a piece of it must've got stuck in the sole of his shoe. It crunched again when he set his left foot down.

  He had reached the door, though, and didn't need to go any further. He opened it behind him to provide a retreat into the garage if necessary. Then he crouched low and aimed his SIG Sauer up at the narrow entrance to the kitchen.

  Let her come.

  Effectively he'd reversed the tactical factors to work in his favor. Before the woman could swing her weapon left and right, then drop her sights down this low, Sabel would get a clean head shot in.