Silver ota-1

by Steven Savile

  Konstantin didn’t look over his shoulder, not even once.

  He wanted to see how serious this person was; that meant changing the nature of the game.

  He turned the corner and stopped dead in his tracks. He had fifteen steps on the man behind him. He pressed himself up against the wall, taking a second to calm himself, center his breathing and focus before exploding into action. He counted the steps out in his head, tensing.

  As the man came around the corner Konstantin stepped into his path. Recognition flashed across the man’s eyes, followed a split second later by blinding pain. Konstantin moved instinctively. Violence was his trade. He knew how to hurt people. He stepped in close, getting right up in the man’s face, feinted as though to slap the man, drawing his eyes to the flurry of motion, and drove the heel of his shoe through the man’s knee hard enough to shatter the cap and tear the cartilage as he forced it to bend the wrong way. The man went down in the fetal position, clutching his ruined leg up to his chest and screaming.

  Konstantin stood over him.

  “You’ll be lucky to be walking in six months. Be grateful I didn’t kill you. Next time I will.”

  He left the man lying in the middle of the street. He crossed the road again, weaving between the slow moving cars. A yellow bus indicated that it was coming to a stop. Konstantin hchest an board and took up one of the window seats that allowed him to see down the length of Schlossstrasse for a few seconds as they drove past the mouth of the street. The man was still lying on the cobbles. The woman in the red dress stood over him, talking quickly into her cell phone. Konstantin couldn’t read lips but he could guess what she was saying: the job was botched, the target got away and they had a man down. It wasn’t the kind of call any operative wanted to make. There would be repercussions. Konstantin didn’t feel the slightest bit of sympathy for them. The woman looked up, and for a moment their eyes met. Then the bus carried him out of sight.

  He rang the bell and hopped off less than three hundred yards up the road.

  The last thing they would have expected was for him to double-back and switch from hunted to hunter. He walked briskly past the usual line of personality-less shops with their blind windows, then saw the bright yellow sign of a charity shop and ducked inside. It took him less than a minute to pick an oversized sheepskin coat and flat working man’s cap from the rack of dead men’s clothes at the back of the store. He paid in cash and left his own coat as a donation. He pulled the cap down so it covered most of his face and buttoned the sheepskin all the way up to the throat as he stepped back out onto the street. The entire transaction had taken less than two minutes.

  He looked, to the casual observer at least, like a different person from the one who had walked out of Grey Metzger’s apartment building less than ten minutes earlier. That would be enough for what he had in mind.

  Konstantin had always been happier as the hunter.

  He walked back toward Schlossstrasse, head down, hands stuffed in the old man’s coat. He could smell the stale flavor of cigarettes that permeated the sheepskin. It had that comfortable worn in and worn out feel. He felt the first few fat drops of rain fall. Each one seemed to release another forgotten odor from inside the coat.

  He saw the red dress before he saw anything else. It stood out like a beacon in the gray street. Konstantin leaned up against the nearest wall, positioning himself beside one of the many bus stops along the street and watched.

  Less than five minutes later the sedan pulled up alongside them, and the woman helped the fallen man up and into the car. Konstantin smiled wryly, enjoying the pantomime of pain that went with the whole maneuver. But it was the sedan’s license plate that caught his attention, or rather the zero where the location code should have been. Berlin plates, for instance, had a B prefix followed by a six-digit string of numbers.

  The zero marked the sedan as a diplomatic car. /span›

  He memorized the number. It would be something to keep Lethe busy, if nothing else. Diplomatic plates could have amounted to just about anything, but on the most basic level it meant friends in high places.

  Konstantin pulled the brim of his new cap down over his eyes as the car swept past him.

  The rain started to fall in earnest.

  He needed to find out what was on the thumb drive.

  11

  Ghost Walker

  “All right Koni, talke,” Jude Lethe said into the headset. He wiped his lips with the back of his left hand and put the empty drink can down beside the rickety pyramid of other empty cans.

  Half a world away, Konstantin Khavin sat in a dingy Internet cafe nursing a straight black coffee. He looked over his shoulder three times in as many minutes. Jude could see the stern-faced Russian through the blurry pixilation of the webcam. He enjoyed watching other people while they sat in front of computers, especially when it was so obvious that they were lost in space.

  “What do you need me to do?” Konstantin asked, eying the screen as he would a viper.

  “I’ll need the IP address of the terminal you’re using,” Lethe explained, knowing it was going to sound like double-dutch to the big man.

  “And in a language I understand?”

  “I’m going to take over your computer from here. It’ll be just like magic,” he said, grinning.

  “You can be a complete ass, Lethe. Did anyone ever tell you that?”

  “If you’re going to do anything, do it all the way, eh? What say we hack this computer, then, shall we?” He talked Konstantin through the process, directing him through the control panel into the network settings until he found the computer’s unique Internet address. In less than a minute Konstantin read him a string of numbers.

  “Perfect,” he said. He tapped in the digits and triggered a string of commands that allowed him to take remote control of Konstantin’s machine. He didn’t use the operating system’s built-in helper. His code was much more invasive. “I’m sending you a piece of code, Koni. All I want you to do is execute it, and we’ll be cooking with gas.”

  “Just tell me what to do.”

  “Click on the smiley face when it pops up. It’s as easy as that.”

  Konstantin did as he was told. A second terminal window opened up on the bank of monitors in front of Lethe. In it he saw exactly what Konstantin saw. “Fantastic. Okay, plug the USB stick in. I’ll take it from here.” A few seconds later he was moving the cursor and launching a browser to explore the contents of the thumb drive Konstantin had recovered.

  Of course it was never going to be that easy.

  In the digital heart of Nonesuch Jude Lethe stared at the encryption key that froze his screen. His grin turned feral as the image on the screen shivered and broke up. The terminal window closed, the connection severed. This was his world. He’d built an entire ghost network that allowed him to come and go through the mainframe corridors of power at will. The ghost network data-mined Ministry computers. If he so chose, he could fire up webcams from hundreds of the laptops used by politicians and high ranking civil servants just to see what they were doing then and there. An eleven-digit encryption key wouldn’t take long to break through, no matter who built it. People were predictable; they used family pets, nicknames, favorite books, things that were memorable. Some tried to be clever and used random number strings. Either way, it didn’t matter to Lethe.

  He reestablished the connection.

  This time he didn’t try to crack the encryption over the remote connection. He ran a cloning program, making a perfect copy of the small memory stick, encryption and all.

  “Got it.”

  “So what does it say?” Konstantin asked.

  Lethe had been so focused on the screen he had forgotten the Russian was on the line. “No idea, but I’ll find out.”

  “Do you need anything else from me?”

  Just give me two seconds,” Lethe said, punching in the command that would erase the memory stick. Most people didn’t realize that erasing something on a computer was pr
etty much the same as using an eraser on a block of legal paper: you could pull off the top sheet and use the edge of the pencil to highlight the impression left on the page beneath. Or, in other words, deleting a document didn’t take it away. Not if you knew how to go snooping through digital files. Of course if Lethe wanted something gone, he could make it happen. He had designed his own data shredder. It wasn’t perfect, but without the restructuring code he didn’t believe there was a programmer in the world who could put Humpty together again.

  To finish the job he uploaded a virulent piece of code that would inflict a whole world of hurt on the first machine that tried to unravel it. It was his parting gift.

  “Okay,” he muttered, “it’s all rs, Koni.” He didn’t tell the Russian the drive in his pocket was now worse than useless. He figured it was better for the big man to think he was protecting untold secrets in case someone over there picked him up. The less he knew the better. Lethe’s grin was fierce as he kicked the chair back. It twisted slightly as it glided on its small wheels. He killed the connection and pulled the Bluetooth set out of his ear.

  The room was floor to ceiling with server racks and drives, ribbon connectors, USBs, and trailing wires that seemed to have fused together into some sort of grotesque Transformer.

  Lethe reached over for the remote and cranked up the volume on his iPod. It was hooked into an expensive speaker rig. Even at quarter volume the speakers had enough power to deafen every living thing within one hundred yards of Nonesuch. Musically, Jude Lethe was born out of his time. The jazz refrain of Hue and Cry’s “I Refuse” faded into Stuart Adamson’s powerful Dunfermline burr as it came up screaming “In a Big Country.” The entire playlist was all mid-80s but avoided nerve-jarring pop jingles and focused on iconic tunes like “Love is a Wonderful Color” and “Sixty Eight Guns.” These were the songs that defined a generation.

  He cracked his knuckles and stretched back in the chair, enjoying the dead singer’s voice as he sounded his battle cry. He leaned across for the alarm clock on the shelf above the computer, checked it against his watch, and set it for forty-five minutes time to make things interesting. He put the clock back on the shelf and turned his full attention back to the screen.

  Lethe triggered a string of commands, his fingers moving with staccato-grace across the keyboard. Without knowing anything about the woman who had built the encryption he was running in an algorithmic darkness like a blind mouse.

  That was just how he liked it.

  It didn’t take him anywhere near the full forty-five minutes to unlock the cloned disc. The encryption wasn’t meant to deter a stubborn investigator, only to put off prying eyes.

  The woman’s codename was Ghost Walker. Her real name was Grace Weller. All of the documents were signed GW. There was enough information hardcoded into the file system for Lethe to know as much about the woman as her own mother by the time he’d finished digging. Even his cursory scan revealed enough for him to know Grace was anything but an unfortunate girlfriend in the wrong place at the wrong time. Asar as Lethe could tell she’d engineered herself into exactly where she wanted to be. Her machine was registered as property of Her Majesty’s Government, which meant she was almost certainly with MI6. The fact that the tech boys still insisted on properly registering their bulk licenses for various software was mildly amusing. There had been a time back in the ’90s where the core government offices developed their own database, accounting and word processing software rather than buy in services. Now, like the rest of the known world, they paid the Great God Microsoft a small fortune for the privilege of keeping the nation’s secrets electronically.

  Given the extent of the dossier Grace had assembled on Grey Metzger, Lethe figured he was what Six liked to call a “person of interest.” That was a euphemism for prime suspect for something or other. In this case Lethe had no idea what for, but the answer was almost certainly buried within the hundreds of pages of words and numbers he’d just unlocked. He’d find it. It was what he did. The others might flex their muscles and work up a sweat playing soldiers, but what happened in this little room beneath Nonesuch was every bit as vital as all of the running about and fighting that went on up there in the “real world.”

  Judging by the creation dates of the various files, Grace had been working Metzger for the best part of three years.

  Lethe sat back in his chair, processing what, exactly, that little nugget of information meant in terms of the big picture. He thought of life as a huge, multi-million-piece mosaic, each tile offering an action, a reaction, an interaction, a person, a place, an event, and it wasn’t until all of the tiles were laid down that this thing called life began to make sense. He figured that the whole life flashing before your eyes at the end really just meant for once you could see the entire mosaic instead of just those few tiles closest to you.

  That Grace Weller had been following Metzger for three years meant one thing in terms of the big picture-for three years Metzger had been doing something worth watching.

  Lethe browsed quickly through the files, scanning for key words that caught his eye. They were surveillance reports on Grey Metzger, logging his movements for almost two and a half years. There were hundreds of low-res and high-res photos taken in smoky bars, lecture halls, beside national monuments, at digs, in cafes and restaurants, shaking hands, kissing, hugging. What he wasn’t doing was trading any suspiciously wrapped packages or meeting men with briefcases on park benches while the fog set in. It was a life in pictures. Metzger’s life, to be precise. It looked decidedly normal.

  There was a comprehensive journal that covered everything from contact lists, emails, phone numbers, and logs of phone calls in and out. Grace had shadowed his life with a thoroughness that bordered on the obsessive.

  And then, seven months ago they made contact.

  It was all there in her report.

  She had seduced Metzger, ingratiating herself into his world.

  They had become lovers.

  There was something incredibly cold about the way she reported it all, like there was no emotion in any of it. Getting close to Metzger was a job, and she was determined to do it to the best of her ability. Lethe wondered what it would be like to live your life that way, disassociated from even the most intimate of things, reducing everything to assignments and lies.

  Looking at the paperwork, she had moved in with Metzger three months ago-four months after first contact-but her surveillance hadn’t stopped. If anything it had become even more detailed. Midway through the autumn she had noted her fears that Metzger was involved with someone she called Mabus.

  There was something familiar about the name. Lethe stared at the screen. “Mabus,” he said, tasting the sound of it on his tongue. He’d heard it before. He didn’t know where, but he’d definitely heard it before. He said it again and a third time as if it might be a charm. It was. He hadn’t heard the name before, he’d seen it. And he knew exactly where.

  Mabus was the name Nostradamus had given the third Antichrist. Napoleon, Hitler and finally Mabus. He switched screens and ran a search for Mabus, cross-referencing it against Nostradamus. The results were pretty much what he had expected, page after page of theories, conspiracy and crackpot, about the rise of the Antichrist, the Mabus Code, the Mabus comet and so much other stuff and nonsense.

  Lethe read the original quatrain, Century 2, Quatrain 62:

  Mabus will soon die, then will come

  A horrible undoing of people and animals

  At once one will see vengeance, one hundred powers, thirst,

  Famine, when the comet will pass.

  It wasn’t exactly damning stuff-comets, the undoing of animals, powers thirsting. It was all pretty vague.

  Most of the articles he found turned Mabus around and called the damned man Sudam, and much as the Hister of Nostradamus’ earlier quatrains was reinterpreted to mean Hitler and Napaulon Roy became Napoleon Bonaparte, they turned Sudam into Saddam. It was a small step, then, to declaring th
e execution of Hussein the beginning of the end that Nostradamus had foreseen.

  He came across another quatrain, Century 8, Quatrain 77:

  The anti-christ very soon annihilates the three,

  twenty seven years his war will last,

  The unbelievers are dead, captive, exiled;

  with blood, human bodies, water and red hail covering the earth.

  Reading through the stuff it was fairly obvious that all of the so-called prophecies were vague enough that absolutely any and every meaning could be shoe-horned into them neatly enough if you were determined to impress a certain interpretation. A twenty-seven-year war of vengeance for the death of Saddam Hussein? Hussein transformed into the martyr for the Arabic world? Instead of ensuring peace, could cutting the head off that particular snake usher in the End of Days? There were enough people out there that seemed to think so. They pointed at the escalating nature of the terror attacks that had plagued the West following his execution in the last days of 2006, but that didn’t mean they were right. Hell, it didn’t mean they were anything other than kids in their back bedrooms with a few books and a crush on Armageddon. That was the joy of the Internet- it gave everyone a voice even if they had nothing to say.

  Still, the very notion sent a chill running down the ladder of Jude Lethe’s spine.

  For the next hour he immersed himself in Grace Weller’s world. From what he could gather from her reports, this particular Mabus was-at the time of writing pheeast-very much alive and well, a fact which jarred with the Hussein theory.

  He couldn’t shake the feeling that all of this went back to Masada and whatever Grey Metzger and the others had found there. But what tied the archeological dig at the home of the Sicarii assassins, the herald of the Antichrist and thirteen suicides together? One thing was for sure, whatever it was, Grace Weller believed Metzger was up to his neck in it. She’d been putting the case against him together for three years. That meant this thing had been going on even longer. All the way back to ’04 and the dig at Masada, perhaps? He needed to know more about the woman and what she was working on, and that meant using the ghost network to dig through Six’s files. But first he needed a smoke to clear his head. It was going to be a long night.