Athena Force 7-12

by Carla Cassidy, Evelyn Vaughn, Harper Allen, Ruth Wind, Cindy Dees

  She took a circuitous route through Old Town, passing the pub where George Washington used to go to hoist an ale and the shop where Paul Revere’s silver had been sold when it was new. And, of course, the ice-cream shop that made the best hot fudge sundaes this side of the Potomac. She turned down a tree-lined residential street of narrow town houses, dating back some two-hundred-fifty years. After one last check in her rearview mirror to make sure no one was behind her, she turned into a driveway beside one of the historic homes. A tall, iron security gate swung open silently. Only one Oracle agent at any given time was allowed into the town house that acted as their headquarters. Agents were required to park behind the house. Had another agent already been inside, the gate would not have opened and she’d have had to come back later. Delphi was nothing if not fanatical about secrecy.

  She parked her car and hurried up the steps to the back door. A simple key lock got her inside the enclosed porch. But then the real security measures started. A retinal scanner checked her eyeball with a tiny red beam of light. Next, she entered a security code into a number pad and swiped one of her normal-looking credit cards with its secretly embedded computer chip. Last, she announced her name and password sentence to a state-of-the-art voice recognition system. And finally, a heavy steel door disguised as a regular porch door unlocked, granting her access to the interior of the house.

  She stepped inside, moving quickly past the kitchen and down a narrow hallway toward the front of the house. Tonight she needed the full Oracle database. And that was housed in the library.

  She stepped into a large room that dominated the entire front half of this floor. It was lined to the ceiling with shelves crammed with books on every subject under the sun. She’d love to just sit in here for a year or so and do nothing but read. Stripping off her duster, she dropped it into the nearest chair and moved to the desk at one side of the room. An innocuous-looking computer monitor and keyboard stood on top of it. And in fact, it was innocuous. This system was purely for controlling access to the actual Oracle mainframe. In and of itself, it had no real functionality.

  She booted up the computer and entered the triple passwords required to get into its operating system. Then, she placed her hand flat on the system’s perfectly normal-looking mouse pad, which proceeded to light up and scan her palm print. The computer screen announced that she was, indeed, Diana Lockworth. A quiet swish on the other side of the room heralded the slow glide of a pair of bookcases as they slid backward on hidden tracks and then moved to the side behind the other bookshelves. A computer terminal and a half-dozen monitors lined the secret alcove. The Oracle mainframe.

  Diana moved over to the hidden computer terminal and logged on. She typed in the reference number of the threat analysis Delphi had sent her and, in the blink of an eye, the computer displayed the full text of the report on the center monitor. She read it quickly.

  Oracle had made a careful analysis of the tactics used by the Q-group in its Chicago attack and determined that the plan had to have been developed by…holy cow!

  She blinked in disbelief. The CIA? No way. That bunch would never stage a terrorist attack against Americans, and certainly not on their home turf.

  Except this was one of the great strengths of Oracle. It was dispassionate. It ignored the beliefs and value judgments that humans injected into their analyses and it looked purely at facts. Of course, the flip side of that coin was the intuition and leaps of logic the human mind could make that Oracle could not. Reluctantly, she conceded the point to the computer. Technically it was possible that the CIA had trained the Q-group terrorists. The idea made her gut clench, but she read on.

  The Q-group attack closely matched a training scenario the CIA had developed more than a decade ago that had proven to be highly effective and difficult to neutralize. Oracle was 97.4 percent certain that this very scenario was the basis for the Q-group’s tactical plan in Chicago. Lovely. She read on grimly.

  Furthermore, the original CIA scenario was not aimed at taking over an airport or large public space. It was designed to assassinate an individual, specifically a political figure protected by a team of highly trained bodyguards along the lines of a Secret Service detail. An extravagant explosion with maximum loss of life was used to cover up the true target of the attack.

  Like Gabe Monihan. No wonder Oracle thought he was going to be killed! She continued reading, her jaw tight. If, in fact, the Q-group’s mission in Chicago had been to kill Monihan and not to protest U.S. involvement in Berzhaan, which was almost a certainty according to Oracle, they were 89.9 percent likely to try again within a year. The Q-group was extremely motivated by patriotism and zealotry, and Oracle noted that such people rarely gave up if a first attempt at a goal that furthered their cause failed.

  She scrolled down to the next page. And jumped as a sound intruded upon her concentration. She frowned. Nobody else should be here if she was in the building. The noise came again. It sounded like something hitting the front door. Was someone knocking on it? Who in the world would be at the door at this hour? A nosy neighbor? The Army? The CIA? Q-group?

  She stood up to check it out. Then leaped for the library door as a massive sound of rending wood came from the vicinity of the front hallway. She looked out and saw splinters of wood lying on the floor, and great cracks splitting the wood trim around the door.

  Ohmigod. Somebody was forcing his way into the building!

  She raced for the desk and smacked the button on the access computer that closed the book panels, then jumped for the library door again. A ponderous swishing noise began behind her. Hurry, hurry! she begged the panels. She should’ve brought her service pistol with her. But who’d have guessed there’d be a break-in here of all places? She slammed the library door shut and locked it as a great tearing sound on the hallway side of it announced the failure of the front doorjamb.

  Someone tried the doorknob at her hip.

  “Over here,” a male voice called out.

  She checked behind her. The panels were about halfway closed. She threw her shoulder against the wood door to bolster it against whatever assault was about to come. She gasped as a sharp object burst through the wood beside her head. An ax! That answered how they’d gotten inside the front door so easily. Brute force, indeed. A second ax blow thumped through the door near the doorknob. This interior door wasn’t made to withstand an assault like this. It would splinter into matchsticks in a matter of seconds.

  She certainly didn’t need to get a finger cut off or her head cleaved in two in a fruitless attempt to hold the door together. She backed away from the door as axes chewed through it like cardboard. The secret panels began their ponderous slide forward into place. She looked around frantically for a weapon. Nothing. She tipped over a delicate Queen Anne chair and stomped on it, breaking off a leg and scooping it up in her hand. It wasn’t much, but it was better than nothing.

  An arm reached through a jagged hole in the wood for the lock, and she jumped forward, bashing it with her makeshift club. A howl of pain and the hand withdrew. Diana jumped as she heard three sharp spits in quick succession. Crud. A silenced pistol.

  The bookshelves behind her shut with a soft pop. And the hallway door exploded inward.

  She backed away from the entrance quickly, her hands heading skyward, as four masked men burst into the room. She dropped the chair leg and, hands on top of her head, announced immediately, “I’m unarmed.”

  She stood motionless as two of the men headed for the computer at the desk and the other two rushed over to her. They grabbed her arms and yanked them behind her back, slapping on a plastic restraint and pulling it painfully tight around her wrists. She stood passively as one of the men frisked her roughly and thoroughly. But she did flinch when one of the men across the room pulled out the computer’s component tower from its cabinet inside the desk and took out a baseball bat. He swung violently at the computer. Pieces of plastic flew everywhere. Another swing and the tower split open. A third swing an
d pieces of circuit board and wire went flying. A swift yank and he pulled the entire hard drive free of its mooring.

  He grunted, “Got it. Let’s go.”

  A voice snarled in her ear, “Back off, bitch.”

  And then something hard and heavy smashed into the back of her head.

  5:00 A.M.

  Something scratchy rubbed her cheek. She moved her head slightly and groaned as pain throbbed outward from a point at the back of her skull. Man, that hurt. She sat up carefully. Her wrists were tied together behind her back. It felt like a set of plastic handcuffs.

  Dang, her head throbbed something fierce. How long had she been out? She looked at the mantel clock at the far end of the room. Ten minutes, maybe. Oh, Lord. Oracle! She whipped her head around to check the bookshelves. Piercing pain shot down her neck. Oww. The panels that hid the Oracle mainframe were still intact. Thank God.

  The first order of business was to get her hands free. She climbed awkwardly to her feet, a bit of a trick with her hands tied behind her back. Cautiously, she stepped into the hall. The entire front door frame hung askew, the wood and metal ripped out of the walls. She headed for the kitchen, praying it actually contained some kitchen implements, like, oh, knives.

  She found what she needed in a drawer beside the sink. Turning to face away from the drawer, she fished around with her fingers until she grasped the handle of a paring knife. It took some maneuvering, but she worked the blade between her wrists and sawed at the tough plastic until it burst free. She rubbed the circulation back into her hands and hugged herself to stretch her aching shoulder muscles. First order of business: clear the building and make sure the intruders were gone.

  Scooping up the biggest butcher knife in the drawer, she ran upstairs and checked the conference room and equipment lockers that took up most of the second floor. She’d never been to the third floor, but she went up there and cleared the plush offices and single, small bedroom that turned out to be housed there. Empty. And interestingly enough, the computer workstations in them were undisturbed. The intruders had specifically targeted the computer in the ground-floor library. Had the Oracle Agency been breached? Its security broken? How else could anyone have such specific targeting information on where Oracle could be found?

  She sat down at the desk in the largest office, facing the street. The phone still worked. She dialed the emergency number she’d memorized years ago but had never had occasion to use. Until now. The direct contact number for Delphi. Her curiosity to hear the voice of her employer almost overrode her urgency to report the break-in. The phone rang once. A second time. And then the receiver clicked.

  An answering machine intoned a standard “leave your name and phone number at the beep” message. The female voice sounded like the same one the phone company used to announce its various automated messages. Drat. No help at all in learning more about Delphi.

  She left a quick message describing the break-in and declared her intention to stay here and guard Oracle until help arrived. She hung up, staring at the dark, blank computer screen before her. Who were those four men? They were all tall, fit and strong. Efficient. Focused tightly on their mission. Pros for sure. She closed her eyes and replayed the break-in again in her head, allowing the tiny details to flow past her mind’s eye. These men were distinctly different from the guy who’d broken into her apartment. She compared the two attacks. The man at her house had been slighter of build. Trained in classical martial arts. He’d relied on speed and skill rather than sheer brawn.

  And then her memory registered something new about his masked face. The skin around his eyes had been nut-brown. Not Caucasian. But the men in the library, at least the two who jumped her, showed glimpses of fair skin. One of the men had pale blue eyes. Caucasians for sure. She’d been certain the first attack at her home was the Q-group. But this second attack? It didn’t have any of the hallmarks of having been executed by the same people. Then who in the world were the second intruders?

  A snippet from the Monihan report popped into her head. The Q-group bombing had mimicked a CIA exercise. Was it possible? Had a group of CIA agents just broken into Oracle’s headquarters? An ex-CIA agent had been in Berzhaan a year or two back, making deals with some Q-group rebels. He’d been caught working with a Q-group cell in Baltimore just after the Chicago O’Hare incident. In fact, Kim Valenti had been part of the raid resulting in his capture. What was his name?

  She turned on the computer in front of her, accessed the Internet and typed the access codes for Oracle. Nada. It was locked down tighter than a drum. The destruction of the access computer in the library must have triggered some sort of alarm. She turned off the computer on the desk in front of her and headed downstairs, back into the library. The access computer in there was a shambles. She went over to the mouse pad and tried to activate the secret panels. Nothing. There had to be some other method to get to the Oracle terminal. But darned if she knew what it was.

  She needed the identity of the American agent who’d worked with the Q-group, but it was at home, along with her cell phone with Kim Valenti’s phone numbers in it.

  As she waited for someone to show up to guard Oracle or at least fix the front door, something else came back to her. One of the men said something to her right before he knocked her out. She frowned and tried to remember the growled threat. He told her to back off. In a distinctly American accented voice. Since the Q-group was comprised entirely of Berzhaani natives, that pretty much ruled out the Q-group as the second set of attackers.

  Back off. Of what? Her assailants had made a tactical mistake. They’d in essence told her she was correctly on the trail of something or someone big. Big enough to send in thugs to stop her and Oracle. Of course, the attack might have nothing to do with her investigation and could be related to some other pot Oracle was stirring. Except her gut said otherwise. The timing of an attack on her home computer and then an immediate attack on Oracle was just too big a coincidence to be random. She jumped to the next logical conclusion. Oracle had to be right. The Q-group was working with someone else. Someone who’d staged this attack on Oracle’s headquarters. But who?

  She was startled just a few minutes later to hear the rumble of a truck not only coming up the street, but stopping in front of the house. She moved to the front window and peered outside cautiously. A man carrying a carpenter’s belt in one hand was headed up the sidewalk. She grabbed her leather duster coat and threw it on, hiding her knife in its folds as she headed out of the library.

  “Can I help you?” she asked around the remains of the front door.

  “I’m here to fix your door,” he replied impassively. “Wouldn’t want all your Greek antiquities to be exposed to the cold air and get damaged.”

  Greek antiquities—Delphi. Whoa. It hadn’t been more than fifteen minutes since she reported the break-in to Delphi. And there was already a repairman here? She stepped back into the library and closed the door. Quickly she pulled out her cell phone and dialed Delphi’s emergency number again. She waited impatiently for the answering machine’s beep.

  She said with quiet urgency into the phone, “Hi, it’s me again. I don’t mean to be dense, but a repairman already showed up at the house to fix the door. That seems awfully fast to me. I just wanted to verify that this guy is who he says he is before I let him in. Call me back—”

  The line clicked. Someone had just picked up the phone. Another click as some sort of electronic device connected. And then a strangely modulated voice spoke in her ear. “If the repairman made a reference to Greek antiquities, then he’s legitimate.”

  The voice was neither male nor female, human nor inhuman. Computer generated, or maybe run through a scrambler. Damn. No clue as to Delphi’s identity.

  Diana blinked. “Uh, okay then. Should I stick around until he’s done and lock up, or may I leave?”

  A pause, and then the strange, disembodied voice asked, “Do you have somewhere pressing to go?”

  “Yes. I think I may
have a lead on who’s backing the Q-group. Or at least I may know someone who has a lead.”

  Another pause. “Then by all means, go ahead and leave. You don’t have much time to stop these people.”

  Even through the filter of the electronic voice alterations, Delphi’s concern was clearly audible. A chill raced across her skin. It could not be a good thing if her employer, whose stock-in-trade was global-scale crises, was so worried.

  Delphi’s urgency latched on to the back of her neck and clung to her with sharp talons as she drove back to her house. Fortunately, no one appeared to follow her or otherwise attempt to assault her between Alexandria and Bethesda. When she got home, she did a quick walk-through to verify that nobody had been inside since she left. The hairs across doorsills and other signals she’d left behind were still in place.

  She retraced her steps to the kitchen and put a pot of coffee on to brew, then pulled out her thick folder of newspaper clippings on Gabe Monihan. She sipped at a mug of strong, hot coffee while she spread out copies of the Chicago Tribune for the week immediately following the October Q-group attack. Kim Valenti’s name appeared several times as the heroine who’d worked with FBI bomb squad member Lex Tanner to stop the terrorist’s plans. The headlines all shouted about the attempted terrorist bombing in Chicago and Gabe Monihan’s brush with death. Pictures of the presidential candidate splashed just beneath the headlines.