Countdown

by Ruth Wind

  DO NOT OPEN ATTACHMENTS. EVER. Love, Kim.

  Something jiggled in her brain, right at the edge.

  The answer.

  It was there, then gone, like a phantom.

  “Get some sleep, Valenti,” she said.

  Please.

  Chapter 2

  Tuesday, October 5

  The following morning, Kim glared at the computer screen at work. They still had not made significant progress. Whatever clue was niggling at the edge of her brain had refused to come forth.

  Her partner, Scott Shepherd, dropped down beside her, a sheaf of papers in his hands. “Anything?” he asked. His eyes looked as red as her own probably did, and she offered her bottle of eyedrops.

  “That bad?”

  “Three-day-bender bad.”

  “Real men don’t use eyedrops. We just belt some bourbon and make it look authentic.” He rubbed his eyes. “The whole place needs new monitors, however. The refresh rate sucks.”

  Kim leaned back and pointed at the screen with the eraser end of a pencil she’d been chewing on. “What do you make of this signature file? It shows up on all of them, invisible in the e-mail itself, but running in the background.”

  He frowned at the screen, stroked his chin where he’d worn a goatee until joining the NSA. “I see it, but it’s not bringing anything up for me right this second.”

  Rolling her tired shoulders, she stood. “I feel like we’re so close. It’s driving me crazy.”

  “I know.”

  She pushed her chair under the desk, smacked his arm. “C’mon. Let’s get on the treadmills for a half hour, talk it out. Maybe there’s something we’re missing.” She stretched the muscles of her back, hard.

  “Sounds good.” He dropped the papers on her desk. “I pulled these up. Maybe there’s something else here.”

  “Last one on the treadmills is a rotten egg.”

  In the women’s locker room, Kim stripped out of her day clothes, a straight blue skirt, white blouse, stockings and low-heeled pumps. It was great to shed the uniform for stretchy shorts, a sports bra with a T-shirt over it, her comfortable Nike running shoes. She tugged her dark hair into a scrunchie and tucked her earrings into her pocket.

  Exercise would help clear the cobwebs. She tossed a towel over her shoulder and made her way into the fitness center.

  There were few people around. Although the NSA worked around the clock, this was generally a lull period. Scott had claimed a treadmill in the empty line, and she took the one beside him. She punched in numbers to get to a moderate jog and found her pace, then said, “So what’s going down? If you were a terrorist, what would you be targeting?”

  He shook his head. His jaw was grim. “The elections are a possibility.”

  The presidential elections would be held in a few weeks, and there had been a great deal of controversy over the incumbent, President James Whitlow. “Who’d be the best target?”

  “I’d kill the young, handsome one,” he said.

  Kim chuckled. “Personally dislike the guy, huh?”

  “It’s the tragedy factor—an old guy gets blown up, even if he’s a president, it’s not as big a deal as when a charming and handsome younger guy gets it.”

  “Good point.” Kim nodded. “Then again, terrorists have little love for the president, and it’s plain he’s not particularly effective at home or abroad.”

  “Especially in Berzhaan.”

  “Right. All the more reason terrorists might target him. Or maybe to get people to vote the way they want them to, as with Spain and maybe this new Munich thing. Get them to vote for Monihan.”

  Scott made a derisive noise. “I’m still having trouble taking Monihan seriously.”

  Kim wiped a lock of hair out of her eyes. “What’s the matter, Shepherd? He’s prettier than you?”

  “Nah. I’m serious here. He’s too young, and the only reason he’s so popular is because all these women are swooning over his pretty face.”

  “So, you’ve got to be old and ugly to be a good president?”

  He shot her a grin. “Adds dignity.”

  Kim rolled her eyes. “And Whitlow is so dignified.”

  “He’s a statesman of the old school, you gotta admit.”

  “Mmm. The who-cares-where-the-money-comes-from-as-long-as-I-get-elected school.” Whitlow was suspected of accepting money from a drug lord in Puerto Isla, and worse, sending in a SEAL force, which was then demolished, to cover it up. “Whitlow’s finished.”

  “Maybe. Unless they kill Monihan.”

  They ran in silence for a moment. Feet thumped rhythmically against the rubberized mats, and the motors whirred quietly. Kim felt her breath going deeper, expanding her lungs with oxygen—oxygen that then enlivened her brain cells.

  “They’re planning something big,” Scott said grimly. “I feel it in my gut.”

  “Me, too. If we don’t break this code, what are we going to find out in the worst way?”

  “Exactly.”

  “It’s a pretty sophisticated network,” Kim said. “So we’re looking at high-level planning.”

  “It’d be nice if terrorists were as stupid as criminals, but they wouldn’t get far in the modern world.”

  She grinned.

  They ran in companionable silence for a while. After a few minutes, Kim felt a click of endorphins, and the stress seemed to drain out of her body in a rush, as if someone had pulled a plug in her toe. “Ah,” she said, and blew out hard. “Better.”

  She glanced at Scott, who had sweat pouring down his rugged, well-cut face. “Admit it,” she said. “This feels pretty good.”

  “Yeah, Valenti, you’re as smart as you are good-looking.”

  “Sweet-talker.”

  He blotted his face. “So they say.”

  “The secretarial pool swoons when you walk through, Shepherd, along with half the cryptographers.” She gave him a sidelong grin. “Male and female.”

  “Why do you keep ribbing me about this, huh? I think you have a secret crush on me.”

  “That’s true. And you know me, I’m so mild mannered, I can’t come right out and say it.”

  He laughed. “Mild mannered. Yeah, right.” He punched the controls. “Climb some hills?”

  “You bet.” She punched in the incline numbers and grinned. It was the reason she liked working out with him—he was extremely competitive and pushed her to better levels. The hills were a point of pride. He’d grown up in Colorado, in a little ski town, and boasted terrific lung capacity. Kim had gone to prep school in Arizona, running the scorching mountain paths around Phoenix, and boasted her own great lungs.

  They’d been in some grim contests. “Six,” she said, referring to the level of incline on the treadmill.

  He nodded. They ran, breath coming too hard now for brainstorming or any other kind of conversation.

  As her body sweated, her brain awakened, ran a thousand algorithms, trying to fit the pieces together. It wasn’t exactly a one-two-three process, a conscious thing, but a running stream of numbers, letters, patterns.

  “Seven,” Scott said.

  Kim punched the up arrow on the treadmill and leaned forward the slightest bit to accommodate the greater incline. The numbers and patterns kept whirring in her head. Once her brother Jason had asked her how she came up with the answers to number problems so fast, and she’d considered it seriously for a minute. The best analogy she could think of was a visual of a bike lock with spinning wheels. She just saw them, and they whirred until the right number appeared.

  Her brain had always run patterns, looking for the ways things fit together. In the second grade, she’d been doing the newspaper Scramble every morning, and always got it right, even if she didn’t necessarily know the word. By fourth grade, even her very traditional Italian father was forced to admit his daughter was something of a math whiz. They’d had to hire a tutor to keep up with her.

  Her thighs started to burn the slightest bit, and her breath came harder
. Next to her, Scott lifted an eyebrow. His athletic arms, bared by a serviceable gray tank, were shiny. “Eight,” she said.

  “Nine,” he countered.

  She didn’t even bother to look at him, just pushed the arrow one more time. Sweat poured down her spine in a wash, and she wiped it off her forehead. Her feet clumped hard on the rubber matting, a fact she usually hated. Tonight, the sound was lost in the heavier pounding of Scott’s tread.

  The patterns whirred in her mind, and she stared into the middle distance, not seeing the white-painted cinder-block wall with its poster citing heart-rate targets, but a stream of code. Ordinarily, e-mails were a less difficult form of code to crack, because certain elements, such as headers and addresses, remained constant, and once the code could be cracked there, it fell wide open.

  Not in this case. The agency had collected hundreds of e-mails over the past several weeks, as many as fifty in a single day, but in spite of their best efforts with computer algorithms and sophisticated code-breaking software, they’d made no headway.

  “What…” Kim gasped, “are we…missing?”

  “Network,” he growled. “Some network angle.”

  Her breath was growing ragged, and her thighs were burning. She ran five to seven miles a day, as well as lifting weights and practicing kung fu for strength, but the hills were always killer. Licking salt from her upper lip, she slid a glance toward her partner to see how he was holding up.

  Sweat soaked his shirt and his streaky blond hair, but Kim only needed that one glance to know he’d hit his stride. Back straight, breath heavy but even. It was easy to see him running up some forested mountain trail at ten thousand feet, his powerful body in perfect condition. Like an ad for a sport drink.

  “Uncle,” she said, and pushed the arrows to bring the incline down to a more normal level.

  “Thank God,” he said. “I thought it was going to be me this time.”

  “Damn,” she said, and blew out a heavy breath. “One of these days, Shepherd, I am going to kick your high-altitude butt.”

  “Yeah, yeah, Valenti.”

  She wiped her face. As if the towel wiped away a layer of confusion, the answer to the signature was suddenly plain.

  “It’s a virus,” she said.

  Chapter 3

  Scott wiped his face with a towel. “What is a virus?”

  “That’s what the signature is, a virus mark. It’s using the virus to encode the messages, the same way a virus works to infect computers.”

  “I’m not following.”

  “It’s a lot more confusing to say it than it is in action. When you get a regular e-mail virus, it comes in through your e-mail program, right? Then goes out through the addresses in your address book.”

  “Okay.” He lifted the towel to his mouth.

  “This is working the same way. The guy writes his message, adds the signature line, and it goes through the e-mail systems, bouncing here and there and everywhere, gaining a layer of corruption—in this case, encryption—with each bounce.”

  “Jeez. So how do they decode it?”

  “There’s obviously a key at the other end.”

  A slow grin broke on his angled face. “Let’s go find it.”

  It was the break they’d been looking for. Within twelve hours, Kim and Scott had broken down the e-mails and sorted them into two piles so that they could each run decryption possibilities.

  The most logical place to look was the source of the virus itself. Most encryption was “private-key,” that is, it used the same key to encrypt the message as would be used to decrypt it. While there was such a thing as “public-key” encryption, where the encoding key was different from the decoding key, it was very slow and would be too noticeable for an e-mail virus. By examining the virus, they were able to crack the code itself.

  Which left another layer: the e-mails had been written in Arabic and had to be translated into English so the bulk of the messages could be read by the team.

  Even then, there were missing pieces of information, but pointers clearly indicated there was trouble on the way. It looked as if it would be centered around Chicago.

  “We’ve gotta call Dana,” Kim said.

  “You want me to make the call?” Scott asked.

  Kim gave him a glare. “No way. He can be a bastard all he likes, but he can’t stop me.”

  Scott lifted a shoulder. “Why subject yourself to such a jerk? He’s old school, no point in banging your head against the wall.”

  “Because dealing with me means he learns, over and over, that women are in this organization to stay.”

  “Suit yourself.” He waved a file. “I’ll get this copied.”

  Despite her bravado, Kim had to brace herself before she picked up the phone. Dana Milosovich was a fifty-something CIA diehard, who thought women should be secretaries, whores or wives. Not operatives. Not code breakers. He had not forgiven Kim for an incident last spring, when she’d beaten him to the draw on an important case.

  Too bad.

  On the other end of the line, the phone rang. “Milosovich.” His voice was as gravelly as five miles of bad road, no doubt from decades of smoking contraband Cuban cigars.

  “Hello, Dana. It’s Kim Valenti, from NSA. You have a minute?”

  “A short one.”

  “Thanks for your graciousness.”

  “Don’t mention it. What is it?”

  “We’ve been following some suspicious e-mail activity related to the Q’rajn. My partner and I broke the code this morning and it appears to be pointing to plans for a terrorist attack in Chicago.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Looks like a bomb. Maybe a truck, something to do with the bridges over the river or a freighter on the lake. They’ve created a virus code to encrypt the e-mails, which we’ve broken, but on top of that, the cell is using another layer of code substituting one group of activities for another. We haven’t entirely sorted that part out, but we’re pretty sure the site is Chicago.”

  “We’re way ahead of you, Valenti. Our operatives have been following the same cell. They’re Berzhaanian rebels, and were planning to stage an event to draw attention to the situation in their county.”

  Kim scowled. “Right, but we—”

  “Two key members of Q-group were killed in Berzhaan yesterday. We feel certain they’re no longer an immediate threat, and in fact recommended that Homeland Security step down to a level-yellow alert.”

  “What were their names?”

  “Whose names?”

  Kim pressed the eraser end of a pencil into the spot between her eyebrows. “The Berzhaanians who were killed.”

  “Oh, let’s see. Ahmed bin Hoshel and Sabrout Al Javid El Thakur.”

  Not her guys, but she paused and double-checked her notes before she spoke. No. Not the same names she had received from Oracle, but she couldn’t reveal that source. “Hmm. They may very well have been leaders in Berzhaan, but the e-mails we’ve examined have all originated within the U.S. It’s a different cell.”

  “You don’t know that. They could have coded it from anywhere.”

  “Not exactly,” Kim returned. Patiently, she thought. “There are ways to track addresses, but it’s more a matter of a pattern of exchange. The IP addresses are American. It looks like it’s out of the Chicago area somewhere, as well.”

  “Is that so.” He coughed, a rattly, gray sound.

  “Don’t know how to help you, missy.”

  “I’m asking you to check out the possibility of a terrorist attack in Chicago.”

  “It’s done. The FBI has been over the city with a fine-tooth comb. Without a lot more information, I don’t see why we need to be wasting more man-hours and causing more unrest.”

  Kim could read between the lines: there was a lot riding on this election, and the incumbent Whitlow needed things to appear stable, even if they weren’t. “Look, Milosovich, I know you don’t like me, but how’re you going to feel when a bunch of civilians get blown up b
ecause you want to piss in my cornflakes?”

  “Give me something a little more substantial, and we’ll get right on it, sister.”

  Scott came back, dropped a file on his desk opposite hers and raised an eyebrow. Kim rolled her eyes. “How about I give you names?”

  “What names?”

  “Two people associated with the terrorist cell we think is planning this attack on Chicago. They’re based just outside of the city.”

  “Let me have ’em.”

  “Not without a guarantee that I can have some cooperation.”

  “What do you want?”

  “Whatever you’ve got on these men.”

  A short pause. She heard him rattling something. Maybe a canister of pens. “All right. Let me have ’em.”

  With some reservations, Kim said, “Fathi bin Amin Mansour and Hafiz abu Malik Abd-Humam.”

  Milosovich broke into a ragged, wet chuckle. “That loser? Abd-Humam is running a tire store downtown. He’s been here since his college days. Fathi Mansour…don’t know him.”

  “My intelligence says he’s a professor with no known terrorist ties. But we both know that doesn’t mean anything.”

  “I’ll look into it, see what we’ve got, but I wouldn’t hold my breath. I’m telling you the cell was castrated when the leaders were killed in Berzhaan.”

  “Hope you’re right.”

  “You know, Valenti, your arrogance pisses me off. I’ve been doing this since before you were born. You hotshot kids come in here with all your jargon and think you can save the world in five minutes flat, but it doesn’t work like that.”

  Kim struggled with an array of answers, from the unprintable to the compassionate. He was an old man on his way out. He knew it and resented it. She could understand that, but not at the risk of human lives. “I’m sorry to have taken up so much of your time, Mr. Milosovich,” she said finally. “You’ll let me know if you turn anything up.”

  “You got lucky once, that’s all,” he said. “You broke a code.”