by Carla Cassidy, Evelyn Vaughn, Harper Allen, Ruth Wind, Cindy Dees
The agency was sometimes too crazy for her. At home there were no ringing phones, no jokes between members of the team, no one having a low, fierce argument with a spouse over a cell phone connection.
Around her, Kim heard only the breathing of her computers and above that a respectful female voice reading the headlines on the radio. It was the fourth time she’d heard the news since dinner, so she didn’t pay a lot of attention, but kept one ear open for anything new or notable. With such a blizzard of encoded e-mails, she was uneasy. Something was coming.
The newscaster said, “Fourteen people were killed when a train derailed near Munich this afternoon. A terrorist cell in the Sudan claimed responsibility.”
Kim straightened and growled at the radio, “Bastards.” All the innocents who had been slaughtered by terrorists the past couple of decades disturbed her. It was one of the reasons she’d wanted to work with codes in particular. By breaking them down, there was a chance she could stop violence before it happened.
Arabic and English sentences, written white on a black background, tumbled through her brain. What was she missing? It felt as if the key were just out of reach, just beyond her peripheral vision.
“Look to the middle of things,” said a voice in her memory. It was the voice of her first mentor, Arthur Tsosie, a Navajo who had served the United States as a code breaker in World War II.
Arthur had been stable master at the Athena Academy where Kim had gone as a shy and awkward twelve-year-old. Lonely away from her big family, but also determined not to let on that she wasn’t just as tough as the other girls, Kim had often retreated to the stables. Arthur, coming upon the bereft and weeping little girl who missed her family, had befriended her. The old man had provided a pocket of retreat for her when things had become too overwhelming.
And his stories of his adventures as a code talker, told in his lilting, soft tenor, had lit a passion in Kim that had never abated. When she proved to be gifted with both maths and languages, becoming a code breaker had been the obvious choice.
Arthur had always delivered his tidbits of knowledge while caring for the horses. Memories of him were now accompanied by scents of straw and dusty sunlight. She could see his hands, the color of pecans and gnarled into knots so the fingers looked like branches, grasping the currycomb as it moved through a pale blond mane. “The trick to seeing anythin’,” he’d say, “is to remember it’s not what it is on the outside. Code, woman, friend, dog—it’s all the same. Look through the top to the middl-a things.”
Look through the top.
Often that meant simply letting go of perceptions as they stood, to allow new angles to enter her brain. Kim let the reams of code float over the surface of her closed eyelids. The e-mails were exchanged in Arabic, or at least in Arabic script. The messages had almost certainly begun in the Arabic language, as well, although the words were now nothing recognizable in any language the computers could read.
The quirky dots and swirls of Arabic lettering moved on her eyelids, a dance. Along with computers that had been running the cipher text through programs all day, Kim and her partner, Scott, had been manually trying various approaches to decipher the code.
The Arabic letters turned into a swirling, Jasmine-and-Aladdin cartoon script, the dots exaggerated. She slammed her feet to the floor, jolting herself back awake.
“Damn,” she said. “Damn. Damn. Damn.” A sense of urgency built in her chest.
Solve the code.
The answer was right there. She could feel it. What was she missing?
Kim focused on the computer screen and punched some buttons on her keyboard to bring up the program running in the background.
From the radio on her desk came a somber female voice. “President James Whitlow endured questions from the press today regarding the Tom King-Puerto Isla scandal. Many Americans are beginning to question the connection between Puerto Isla and the current unrest in Berzhaan.”
To wake herself up, Kim said aloud, “Unrest in Berzhaan. There’s an unusual situation.”
The unrest wasn’t unusual, but some blamed the United States, or at least the current administration, for the trouble in the small Middle Eastern country. It didn’t matter to Kim whether the assessment was correct or incorrect—her concern was that there were terrorist cells that were determined to punish what they saw as the evil empire of the United States and make a statement by whatever means necessary.
With presidential elections coming up and the general unease about the world situation and the scandal of Puerto Isla hanging over the President, the situation offered too many opportunities.
Again she felt the urgency, that hollow sense of dread. Break the code.
On the radio, the announcer went on, “In other news, presidential candidate, Gabriel Monihan, appeared at a packed rally in New York City this afternoon, part of a ten-city election blitz that began yesterday in Washington, D.C.”
A window on Kim’s work computer popped up. In a blue box with red lettering, she read:
LEXLUTHOR: How’s the code chopping?
Kim grinned. Alexander Tanner was an FBI bomb-squad expert in Chicago who had assisted her with a case two months ago, when a young hacker used bomb schematics to encrypt messages through the upper reaches of government. Privately, Kim had been impressed with the kid, a bored seventeen-year-old with too much time on his hands and a brain that needed challenges. Lex had been the first to spot the schematics while working an unrelated case and had e-mailed Kim to ask her advice over whether the coding could be done.
Their cooperation—an NSA employee and an FBI agent—would have been unheard of several years ago. Animosity had been more the game in those days. But reporter after reporter had turned up examples of situations that could have been defused by real communication between agencies and the pressure to cooperate had become too powerful to resist. The top-level security agencies in the country were—at least officially—encouraging interdepartmental communication, including this connected link of instant messaging within the various agencies.
It was working. Sort of. The animosity between various agencies, the secretive and jealous ways they guarded their sources, the eternal race to see who would solve which problem first, would never entirely disappear.
Although she’d never met Lex in person, Kim liked his sense of humor and his breezy ways—such as using the name of a comic-book supervillain as his instant-messaging handle.
She typed:
WINDTALKER2: Hey, guy! Still chopping. You’re out late.
LEXLUTHOR: The same could be said of you.
WINDTALKER2: Trying to crack this baby. Feels big.
LEXLUTHOR: Yeah? Wanna brainstorm?
WINDTALKER2: Might be getting too scattered to think now. A.M.?
LEXLUTHOR: No can do. Big meetings.
Kim was overtaken by a yawn. She typed:
WINDTALKER 2: All right. How come you’re working so late?
LEXLUTHOR: Politicians up the wazoo in Chicago this week. Green candidate today. Prez appearing tomorrow. Monihan on Thursday.
WINDTALKER2: Bomb scares?
LEXLUTHOR: Dozens. Every lunatic in the greater metro area has a plan for saving the world. Gotta check ’em all. Been over the courthouse twenty times. The airport at least 452.
WINDTALKER2: 452? That would take a little time.
LEXLUTHOR: Well, maybe it was only six times. FELT like 452.
WINDTALKER2: Any bombs anywhere?
LEXLUTHOR: Nope. Real bombers don’t call ahead.
WINDTALKER2: Ah.
LEXLUTHOR: Hey. I looked up your picture on the company site.
WINDTALKER2: That’s creepy, Luthor.
LEXLUTHOR: Somebody told me you were hot.
WINDTALKER 2: It was probably me. I am hot, and don’t you forget it.
LEXLUTHOR: Kinda short. But then, I’m kinda ugly, so I guess we’re even.
WINDTALKER2: Short is a state of mind.
LEXLUTHOR:
WINDTALKER2: Hold on.
LEXLUTHOR: What are you doing?
WINDTALKER2: Checking out YOUR picture. What if you’re really ugly?
LEXLUTHOR: No fair going to the academy photo.
She opened a second window on the computer and ran a search for Alex Tanner, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Chicago, then clicked on the first link. Which was the Academy photo.
Kim grinned. It showed a serious-looking young man, about 21, skinny and with a nose almost too big for his face.
WINDTALKER2:
LEXLUTHOR: Damn. I’ve put on a few pounds since then.
WINDTALKER2: Good thing.
LEXLUTHOR: We’re all geeks at 21. Check this link out: www.oaksidetelegraph.com/article00364.htm
WINDTALKER2: Yeah, yeah, Luthor. It’s probably a link to Heath Ledger.
But Kim clicked on the link, which took her to a newspaper site, and a headline that read, “Bomb Squadron Safety Record Vetted.” Beneath it was a photo of a man in a black T-shirt that showed off very nice shoulders, a good chest and excellent arms.
Kim raised an eyebrow. His hair was cropped to show a well-shaped head, high cheekbones and, yep, that aggressive nose. Which was a lot sexier on a thirtysomething face.
And he had that mouth, a Denzel Washington mouth, with an overbite and a full lower lip that looked very sexy.
Kim had a weakness for lips like that.
WINDTALKER2: Okay.
LEXLUTHOR: Okay, what?
WINDTALKER2: Okay, you won’t shame me. I’ll have coffee next week.
LEXLUTHOR: Not sure I can handle the exuberance, babe.
WINDTALKER2: Babe? What century are you?
WINDTALKER2: Hang on….
WINDTALKER2: Something coming up on my decryption.
The computer was making a soft, double beep that meant something had been noted in a special file. When she opened it, she frowned.
WINDTALKER2: Hmm. Odd.
LEXLUTHOR: Que?
WINDTALKER2: It’s an odd signature file.
LEXLUTHOR: Not my area, kiddo. I’ll let you get to it.
WINDTALKER2: K-O.
LEXLUTHOR: Next week.
“What am I missing?” she asked herself, peering hard at the screen.
And if she didn’t find the answer, who was going to die because of it?
A small musical noise told her an e-mail had arrived in her personal in-box. It brought the total to twenty-eight, and Kim remembered she’d meant to check the box. Her eyes burned and she knew she needed to get to bed if she was to have any brain at all the next day, but her little sisters were always wounded if she didn’t respond, so she dutifully opened the folder marked “Family.”
“Shit!” she said aloud.
There were two messages from her mother. One was—Kim sighed—an e-mail hoax that had been around for years, about people flashing their headlights erroneously.
The other…
TO: [email protected]
FROM: [email protected]
SUBJECT: Sunday dinner
Hi, honey. I’ve been on the phone all day and the girls finally stole it from me. Don’t forget, next Monday is the Columbus Day parade and your sisters’ hearts will be broken if you don’t show up to watch them tap dance on the police float. I was going to have our big meal that day, but nobody wanted to shift the tradition, so we’ll just do it Sunday, as always. Try to come for both, huh? Bring a friend if you want. Maybe your big handsome partner??
Love,
Mom
Below the message from Eileen was a list of twenty-seven e-mails, repeated over and over down the length of the window. Each carried her sister Lynda’s e-mail address, [email protected], and the same subject line: LOOK WHAT I FOUND ONLINE! A paper-clip icon sat beside each one.
“Lynda, Lynda, Lynda,” Kim said, and opened her virus protection software to isolate and examine the virus. “How many times I gotta tell ya not to open attachments, kid?”
When the box was cleared, she examined the isolated virus. It turned out to be a relatively benign form that simply replicated and sent e-mails to every address on an account. Not such a big deal if the infected computer was the personal machine of a teenage girl, but costly and damaging if it was the mainframe of a big corporation.
The fact that she did have a teenage sister was one of the reasons Kim kept her e-mail accounts so rigidly separated.
She sent her sister a warning message with instructions to remove the infected files from her own computer. In capital letters, she typed:
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 particu
larly 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?”
