The Adversary (A Chris Bruen Novel Book 1)

by Reece Hirsch

  “And how does that work?” Zoey asked.

  “I think you’ll appreciate this, given your skill set,” Silver said.

  “You know my work,” Zoey said, looking surprised and pleased.

  “Isn’t it riskier for us to use fake passports?” Chris asked. “There’s probably a higher chance of getting caught than if we flew private air.”

  “I won’t deny that,” Silver said. “But it’s safer for me, and that’s the deal I’m offering.”

  Chris looked at Zoey, who nodded. “We’ll take it.”

  “Good. Claude, give him back his bag—but keep the gun.” To Chris, he added, “You won’t be able to take it with you, anyway. When you reach JFK, I’ll have someone meet you to provide another one.”

  “Don’t you think I should get one, too?” Zoey asked.

  After a pause, Silver said, “Okay. Two guns.”

  “Even with fake passports, won’t they still spot us on sight at the airport?” Chris asked.

  “Not when we’re done here. I’ve arranged for the services of a couple of specialists.”

  The elevator doors in the lobby opened and out stepped a tall woman of indeterminate age with magenta hair and a long face. She wore a loose black blouse with black pants and had a large khaki messenger bag slung over one shoulder.

  The magenta-haired woman was accompanied by a lanky young man in his early twenties. He wore wire-rimmed glasses and was dressed in a retro fifties button-down shirt and jeans.

  The woman walked directly over to the conference room and pushed open the glass door with both hands. “So,” she said in heavily French-accented English, casting an appraising glance at Chris and Zoey, “these are the fugitives?”

  “Meet Sandrine,” Silver said. “She’s going to give you new appearances. Sandrine was a top hair and makeup artist for the film industry there. She did Deneuve.”

  “In what sense?” Zoey asked.

  Sandrine turned to Zoey without cracking a smile. “In every sense,” she said.

  “And this is Tomas,” Silver continued. “He’ll be doctoring your passports and taking new photos.” Tomas gazed out the windows at the Paris skyline.

  “I’ll leave you in their capable hands,” Silver said. “Good luck.” The videoconferencing screen went black.

  The pair began setting up without saying another word. Sandrine pulled a makeup kit from her messenger bag and arranged a chair from the conference room table in a well-lit corner of the room. Then she removed a tray of eyeglasses from her bag.

  Tomas unpacked an aluminum case that contained a camera, tripod, and lighting. He tacked a blue screen to the conference room wall as a backdrop for the photos. When he was done constructing his makeshift photo studio, he asked for their passports. Then he set up a kit at one end of the conference room, where he arranged his forgery tools—an X-Acto knife, a tube of glue, an assortment of pens and bottles of pigment, and that rarest of commodities, blank American passport books.

  Chris and Zoey sat at the conference room table watching the pair go about their business. Chris always found it comforting to watch true professionals at work. Before you saw the end result, you could usually tell that someone knew what they were doing just by watching how they handled the tools of their trade. Sandrine and Tomas murmured to each other in French, studied Chris and Zoey, then conferred some more. Finally, they seemed to settle on an approach and began to work in earnest.

  When Chris and Zoey stepped out of the lobby of the office tower and onto a sidewalk in the 13th arrondissement, they weren’t new people—more like bizarro versions of themselves. Zoey was wearing an elegant maroon dress with a wide black belt. She was in full makeup and her hair was blown out, styled, and glossy. In stark contrast, Chris’s unruly black hair was cut severely short and dyed blond, and he was wearing blue contact lenses, angular wire-framed glasses, and a sleek black leather jacket. He looked like the kind of person who might own an edgy Berlin art gallery.

  They were indeed in the 13th arrondissement near the massive construction site of the Rive Gauche project. Nearby was the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, with its four modern towers designed to resemble open books. Before them were the dark, sluggish waters of the Seine and, on the opposite bank, the Quai François-Mauriac with its floating nightclubs and cafes, known as péniches. They spent a moment checking each other out in their new personas.

  “You look nice,” Chris said.

  “I haven’t worn this much makeup since I was fifteen,” Zoey said. “They sized us up pretty well, don’t you think?”

  “How so?”

  “They figured out what we’re like and then they went in the opposite direction. Look at me. They’ve turned me into an anchorwoman!”

  “And me, I’m some sort of Teutonic fashion victim hipster.”

  “I do miss your hair,” Zoey added. “Almost everything about your old appearance said ‘buttoned-down lawyer.’ But your hair always said to me ‘mad scientist.’”

  “Good to know,” Chris said. “Not the message I was trying to send.” Chris pulled a thick stack of dollars and euros that Silver had provided and performed a rough count. “Shall we get a taxi to the airport and see how good a job they did?”

  It felt good to be back in the hunt.

  EPISODE 6

  CHAPTER 35

  They managed to check their bags on the Air France flight at Charles de Gaulle without incident, but as the queue of travelers slowly advanced toward the security station, Chris grew anxious. Zoey was two spots behind him in line. They weren’t standing together because, in their new guises, they were an unlikely pair that might attract suspicion.

  The security clerk, a tired-looking woman in a blue uniform, extended her hand. Chris gave the clerk his passport and boarding pass and tried not to watch her as she examined them. He didn’t like that she actually seemed to be attentive to her work. The clerk’s eyes darted to the passport, then to Chris’s face, then back to the passport. After a moment, she pulled out a green marker and made a cryptic symbol on the boarding pass.

  When Chris reached the X-ray screener, he wasn’t pulled out of the line, so apparently the mark merely signified the clerk’s review. Chris glanced back to check on Zoey’s progress. He was alarmed to see that she was being escorted from the line to undergo enhanced screening. Zoey was led over to an area next to the X-ray machine by a woman security clerk. Zoey walked slowly to the area where more thorough inspections were conducted. From the other side of the security zone, he watched as Zoey was frisked. There was nothing that he could do to help her. He could only hope that it was just a random screening and that she hadn’t been identified from the watch list.

  Zoey sat in a plastic chair, and the woman security clerk removed her shoes and wiped them with cotton swabs. The swabs were then tested for bomb residue. The woman clerk was speaking to Zoey—another bad sign. Then he saw Zoey laugh and make a gesture toward her shoes as she put them back on. They were talking about Zoey’s shoes, a strappy pair with high heels that she never would have worn otherwise. She was going to make it through security.

  A few minutes later, Chris and Zoey were gliding on an escalator through a clear plastic tube suspended over a sunlit atrium. Charles de Gaulle Airport had a Jetsons retro-futuristic look. Jet packs and shiny silver jumpsuits would not have seemed out of place. Chris started to relax a bit. Unless they were pulled off the plane at the last minute, it appeared they would make it to New York.

  As they flew over the Atlantic, Zoey leaned in close to Chris and said, “Now that we know each other a little better, will you tell me what happened to make you stop hacking as a teenager?”

  “It’s not very interesting,” Chris said.

  “Oh, I think it probably is,” she said. “Come on, I told you my story.”

  Exactly, and that’s why I still don’t entirely trust you.

  “It’s a long flight, and you know how persistent I can be,” she said, drawing in closer.

 
“I got arrested, okay? And I never hacked again.”

  “From that day forward, you used your superpowers for good, not evil.”

  “Something like that.”

  “But that still doesn’t explain why you’re so sensitive about it,” Zoey said, fiddling with the headphones that hung around her neck. “Someone got hurt, didn’t they?”

  There are moments when life becomes very binary. For Chris, there was life before he clicked that Enter key in the summer of 1987, and there was life after. But his memory of that pivot point was actually very different from the gauzy, slo-mo car crash version that was his recurring dream. It had all happened so much faster at the time.

  Chris was sixteen years old and sitting at the computer in the bedroom of his best friend, Josh Woodrell, also sixteen. It was late afternoon, but the curtains were drawn to cut the glare on the screen, and the room was lit only by the techno moonglow of the monitor. The junior member of their little computing club was fourteen-year-old Dylan Nunn, who sat cross-legged on the floor in front of an interrupted game of Risk, the fate of the free world teetering in the balance. The three friends had spent the past six hours downing Mountain Dew and Skittles while toggling between Risk and desultory attempts at hacking on Josh’s computer.

  Dylan was a genuine math and computer prodigy and already the most brilliant coder of their group. But he was still two years younger than Chris and Josh, which allowed them to treat him like he was their dim-witted assistant. Dylan was a hyperactive Ritalin kid with an intense bug-eyed stare. He accepted their juvenile abuse because he was just glad to be hanging out with the older, cooler kids. Since Dylan was probably the only person in a fifty-mile radius who would have considered Chris and Josh cool, their little social pecking order worked. Dylan looked up to Josh in particular, which meant that when matters were put to a vote within their triumvirate, Chris was usually in the minority.

  When Chris clicked that key, his green monitor screen filled with an imposing seal warning him that he was about to view classified Department of Defense data. As he scrolled through directories with headings like “X-13 Helicopter” and “Graywolf Missile,” Chris slowly lifted his hands from the keyboard as if they had just become weaponized.

  “Holy crap,” he said. Chris was thrilled to claim the bragging rights that went with accessing the database, but he was also frightened. And the more he examined the data, the more frightened he became. These were state secrets and probably critical to national defense. From a less forgiving, adult point of view, what he was doing might be called treason.

  “What is it?” Josh asked. He was sprawled faceup on his bed, stretching his back after hours hunched over the keyboard.

  “You know that Department of Defense system that you were trying to crack?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, I’m in.”

  Josh shot up in bed. “Awesome! So what did you find?”

  “Very Tom Clancy–looking stuff. Like here,” he said, pointing at the screen. “This looks like the specs for some kind of stealth helicopter.”

  “Let me see,” Josh said. After examining the screen for a moment, he added, “Anybody have friends at the Russian embassy?”

  “Don’t even, man,” Chris said. “Don’t even.”

  Dylan was bouncing on his toes and peering over Chris’s shoulder. “This is so, so cool,” he said. “So very cool.” Dylan always seemed to walk a fairly fine line between geek enthusiasm and mania. Josh and Chris sometimes worried about him.

  “We need to log off now,” Chris said. “I never thought we’d actually get in. You realize what this means, don’t you?”

  “That we are ninja cyber warrior gods?” Dylan offered.

  “No,” Chris said. “This is not like the high school’s system, or that department store’s. This is the Department of Defense. They probably have a sniffer program running. They’re going to know that we’ve been here. Maybe they know already.”

  Josh sobered up fast. “And they’re going to trace this to my IP address.”

  “As long as we’re in, can’t we just look around a little?” Dylan pleaded. “Give me something to decrypt.” Dylan was the best of the three at encryption, so he was always looking for an opportunity to show off.

  Chris immediately logged off and hit the power switch on the computer. The three of them sat in Josh’s dark, silent bedroom for a few minutes, half expecting to hear sirens pulling up in the driveway.

  “I think I’d better get home,” Dylan said. “Mom’s making a special dinner.”

  Josh turned to Chris. “You’d better get out of here, too. There’s no point in sticking around.”

  “We’re all in this together,” Chris said.

  “Hey, they’ll probably never know we breached their firewall,” Josh said. “And we’re damn sure not going back.”

  Chris raced home on his bike, trying to imagine how his parents would react if the FBI showed up at his front door. When he arrived, Chris went straight to his bedroom and threw himself on the bed. He stared at his posters for the Replacements and the Pixies, waiting for his pulse to slow. When you’re sixteen, every slight or triumph seems life changing, but Chris knew that this was more than an adolescent fever dream. If their hack was detected by the DOD, then his life truly would be changed forever. All he could do now was wait to see if the knock at the door came.

  That moment in Josh’s room was the culmination of a long, hot summer that had started out deadly boring but grew steadily more interesting as it went along. Chris’s family lived on a cul de sac among horse farms near the entrance to Mount Diablo State Park. His father, Frank, was an accountant for one of the Big Six accounting firms (back then there were six). Frank was a sort of throwback to the gray flannel corporate men of the fifties—genial, confident, and with an unhealthy respect for authority. His mother was a modestly successful photographer, who had turned one of the bedrooms into a studio and showed her work at local street fairs. Gazing out his bedroom window, Chris would watch as a parade of horseback riders and bicyclists headed into the state park. Up to that point, his childhood had been fairly uneventful, maybe even idyllic, but you only recognize that in retrospect—after something has happened to break the spell.

  At sixteen, Chris was pimply faced and gawky. He was already over six feet tall, and skinny as a mantis. He didn’t have a summer job, his junior year of high school was still weeks away, and he spent most of the long days in front of his computer—playing games and coding. U2’s “The Joshua Tree” was on the radio constantly, but Crowded House’s yearning “Don’t Dream It’s Over” was the song that he most associated with that summer.

  Chris met Josh Woodrell when he moved into the house three doors down. Chris had seen him riding his ten-speed around the neighborhood for a week or two before they finally spoke. Chris’s father had ordered him to mow the yard to get him away from the computer. Josh stopped his bike in the driveway and waited for Chris to shut off the phlegmy roar of the lawnmower.

  After some introductory remarks mumbled gruffly at one another, Josh asked, “So what are you into?”

  “Computers mostly,” Chris offered, not expecting much of a reaction. His sweaty forehead was plastered with tiny green shards, and the smell of grass cuttings rising from the lawnmower’s bag was humid and yeasty.

  “Do you have one?”

  “Yeah, a Commodore Amiga 500.”

  Josh held his nose and grimaced.

  “So you’ve got something better?”

  Josh paused for dramatic effect. “An Apple Macintosh SE. Eight megahertz, 68000 processor, one megabyte of RAM.”

  “What, are your folks rich or something?”

  “Nah, not really. My teachers told them that school wasn’t challenging me intellectually, so I was able to guilt them into springing for it.”

  “Nice move. I’ll have to try that,” Chris said.

  “You ever done any hacking?”

  “A little bit.” Even this modest statem
ent was an exaggeration.

  “You ever gotten into the school’s system?”

  “No, you could get busted for that.”

  “Yeah, I know. That’s sort of the point.”

  Chris left the lawnmower in the middle of the yard and spent the rest of the afternoon in front of Josh’s Mac. They passed most of July and August that way, their early summer tans fading. Josh brought Dylan into their circle a few weeks later, saying, “This twerp is a genius, but we must never tell him that, okay?”

  Josh Woodrell had lank, dark brown hair and electric blue eyes that seemed to be fueled by a more volatile power source than everyone else was using. Josh and Chris became instant friends, not because they were particularly similar in temperament, but because they were the smartest people that they knew. Josh, in particular, was learning at a sprinter’s pace that summer. He never just bought one book, he bought ten at a time, mostly science fiction, but also history, science, biology, and chess manuals. And he always seemed to be restocking.

  Because they were, after all, teenage boys, there was a competitive element to the hacking. Josh led Chris to take greater risks in the virtual world, goading him into attacking ever more secure systems, targeting more sensitive and valuable information. But Chris found it difficult to express reservations, because Josh was always willing to take the leap himself, and Chris did not want to be left behind.

  It took two days for the FBI agents to call on Josh, and the dreaded knock on Chris’s front door finally came the day after that. It was 6:30 p.m. on a Wednesday night and everyone was just sitting down to dinner, all of them sluggish from the long, hot day—with the exception of Chris. Chris was an enervated wreck because he had called Josh’s house the day before and been tersely informed by Josh’s mother that Josh could not speak with him. He thought he knew what that meant. All day long he had agonized over whether he should come clean to his parents, but he still clung to the desperate, deluded hope that the knock at the door wouldn’t come.