The Essential Sam Jameson / Peter Kittredge Box Set: SEVEN bestsellers from international sensation Lars Emmerich

by Lars Emmerich

  Brock laughed. “Seriously?”

  “Seriously.” Sam didn’t laugh.

  “She’s hot, you say?” Brock asked. “Maybe we’d all get along.”

  Sam elbowed him a bit too hard in the ribs. “Maybe you’ll wait in the car.” They’d commandeered a luxury sedan from the valet at an upscale condo complex near Crystal City. The board full of keys was left completely unattended, and the valet was nowhere in sight, so Sam wrote Mason McClane’s name on a yellow sticky, along with a 1-800 number that rang deep in the bowels of the Homeland building, and pasted the note on the vacant spot on the keyboard where the Mercedes’ keys were hung.

  It had taken them the better part of an hour to get out of DC, but the decidedly run-down section of highway corresponding to Maryland’s sub-par stewardship was pleasantly untrafficked, and they made good time to the appropriate Baltimore exit.

  “Her name is really Sheena?”

  “Yes,” Sam said, parking in front of an apartment complex that didn’t look entirely safe. “And I wasn’t kidding. You’re really staying in the car. I don’t want her batting her eyes at you. Or humping your leg.”

  Brock chuckled. Sam ran inside the apartment.

  She returned moments later with a passport and driver’s license in her hands. Sheena’s, evidently. Brock snatched the passport and flipped it open to view the picture. The woman looked quite a bit like Sam, though with a more vacant look in her eyes and a few more crow’s feet.

  “I’d do her,” he announced, then braced for another elbow.

  The Baltimore-Washington International Airport wasn’t crowded. It barely looked open for business.

  The familial resemblance was strong enough that Sam passed herself off as Sheena Wade without a second glance from either the ticket clerk or the more-bored-than-usual TSA guy.

  Sam paid for the tickets in silver. It was illegal to use anything other than dollars for business transactions in America, but that law was passed with the kind of hubris that never foresaw the dollar’s disintegration, and people had adapted in the few days since the economic meltdown.

  Sam’s nerves were on edge after the earlier encounters at Reagan International and at Wu’s dry cleaning. Everyone in the airport looked suspicious and conspiratorial, she thought, but she and Brock boarded their first flight — nonstop to Atlanta — without further incident.

  They detoured to the second concourse in Atlanta to enjoy a real meal of southern fried chicken, made on location right there in the concourse, a throwback arrangement that flew in the face of the trend toward the shrink-wrapped pseudo-food that most other airport restaurants served. The meal was deeply satisfying, and the Atlanta airport was much more crowded, which gave it a much less sinister vibe than BWI.

  Sam pulled her phone from her bag. Alfonse Archer had left a message. So had her deputy, Dan Gable. She called Archer first.

  “Big A,” Sam said when the FBI agent answered. “Talk to me.”

  Archer gave her an update. Henry Feng, the ringleader of the muscle squad that she’d upended in the DC airport, apparently had ties to the Triad. “The Chinese gang?” Sam asked.

  “Yep.”

  “Was he moonlighting? I mean, I’ve had nothing to do with any counter-gang ops at Homeland. How do they know about me?”

  “A solid question,” Archer said. “Moonlighting, maybe, or possibly something else. Like maybe the guy who’s got a hard-on for you rolls deep enough to buy services from a few different sets of people.”

  “A few different sets?”

  “Yeah,” Archer said. “Because the shopkeeper was Korean. It’d be less weird for my black ass to marry a white supremacist’s daughter than for a Korean to be eyeballs deep in a Triad deal.”

  Sam chuckled.

  “And,” Archer went on, “two of the four names you gave to me are known gang-bangers.”

  “Street gangs? Like, black gangs in DC?”

  “Yep.”

  Sam pondered. Three ethnic underworlds, all doing business happily together through one shill company? “Is this some kind of a joke? Those people hate each other.”

  “It’s a new thing the street crimes guys have been talking about. It’s like a little market economy. Some groups are better at some stuff than others, so they buy services from each other.”

  Sam shook her head. “Unbelievable.”

  “It gets better,” Archer said. “The other two names on the list you gave me are into some seriously weird stuff. I’m still confused as hell, and I have more digging to do, but get this: one guy’s home address is one that I’m familiar with.”

  “How so?”

  “It’s an FBI safe house.”

  Sam whistled. “That freaks me out a little bit.”

  “Tell me about it. And as it turns out, I spent some time in that same safe house last weekend, babysitting that Senator people kept trying to kill.”

  “Small world,” Sam said with a mirthless chuckle. She had a sinking feeling. Was the strange FBI safe house connection related somehow to the apparent information breach at Homeland? She shuddered at the thought. A trust problem at her own behemoth of a federal agency was bad enough. Another one at the Bureau might prove insurmountable. Together, those two agencies had enough reach to ruin just about anyone’s life.

  “I’ll keep digging and let you know what I find,” Archer said.

  Sam thanked him and hung up.

  Shit. She had a sickening realization. Her lengthy conversation with Archer had been on her work cell. If the leak at Homeland was electronic, she might have just placed herself — and Archer — in substantial risk. She cursed, shaking her head. She was tired and strung out, and through her inattention and carelessness, she’d just committed a cardinal sin.

  She grabbed a pencil and paper from her bag and jotted down several phone numbers from her cell phone directory. When she had finished, she shoved the paper into her pocket, grabbed Brock’s hand, and walked quickly to a mobile electronics store. She paid silver for a new laptop and two pre-paid cell phones, “burners” as they were called by spies and cheating spouses.

  They found a Wi-Fi hot spot, and Sam logged onto a very retro-looking message board with the humorous moniker “Screw Big Brother.” Her username was Curvy Red Bizzo.

  She opened one of the burners, turned it on, and found its phone number. Using the letter F as the starting point, she used a standard alphabetic offset codex to encode the burner number. She typed the encoded phone number into the message board, and the message became part of the ongoing conversation about spooks, conspiracies, and true lies.

  Then she used her work cell phone to dial Dan Gable. “Go to the SBB site,” she told him, “and contact me using our standard precautions.”

  She heard Dan’s gears turning through the silence on the other end of the phone. “Not this shit again,” he finally said.

  “Afraid so,” Sam said. “And hurry — Brock and I are about to board.”

  Sam hung up. She led Brock to the line at a coffee shop. As they made small talk, Sam surreptitiously dropped her work cell into the handbag of the customer in front of her in line, a large black lady. If the assholes were indeed tracking her cell phone, it was best to disassociate herself from it. She was briefly worried about the safety of the person to whom she’d just given her phone, but decided that given the large differences in bodyweight and skin color, there was little probability of mistaken identity.

  They did their best to relax as they sipped their lattes and waited for Dan to decipher her burner number.

  It took just shy of fifteen minutes. She answered her burner on the second ring. “Talk to me,” she said.

  “After you tell me why all the cloak and dagger,” Dan replied.

  She told him about the incidents at Reagan and the dry cleaning shop. “You’re trouble, you know that?” Dan said after she’d finished.

  “So I’m told. Anyway, what have you learned up north?”

  Dan had located the source of th
e telephone call that had been routed through the hidden modem in Jeffrey Santos’ DC apartment and answered by the dead spy whose cell phone Sam had liberated in the Costa Rican warehouse. “That number rings at the concierge desk of an extremely upscale condo building in Banff,” Dan said.

  “Hmm. So was the concierge just doing his job, or earning a little on the side?”

  “I can easily envision a rich guy handing a slip of paper to the concierge and asking him to make a phone call. But I could also easily envision a crooked concierge, so I looked at the phone record again. It was a long call, so they were definitely having a conversation.”

  “With one party standing at the concierge desk,” Sam said, finishing Dan’s thought.

  “Right. That’s the angle I played when I talked to the concierge on duty. But he pointed out that a dozen residents use that phone every day, to order everything from pizza to prostitutes.”

  “Yeah, I imagine,” Sam said.

  “But I took a chance and mentioned the name Slobodan Radosz. Maybe it was just indigestion, but the guy definitely got a weird look on his face. So I’m going to do some digging into his background while I’m waiting for his shift to end, and then I’m going to have another conversation with him.”

  “Sounds good,” Sam said. “Listen, Brock and I have to catch our flight to Rome. Let’s use the FBB bulletin board to initiate contact. Don’t use a burner more than once, and for God’s sake, don’t call back to Homeland.”

  Dan agreed. “I was just thinking as you were talking,” he added. “We’re looking for people with enough computer savvy to steal zillions in electronic currency. Maybe they don’t actually have anyone on the inside at Homeland. Maybe they’ve just found a back door into the computer network.”

  Sam nodded. “I thought of that. Either way, it’s the same result for us. We have to behave as if everything is compromised.”

  “What about McClane? He told us to keep him in the loop.”

  “I’ve got it,” Sam said.

  “I’m sure you do,” Dan said with a knowing smile in his voice. “I don’t know how you haven’t been fired yet.”

  “Because of my tits,” Sam said. “I’m demographically useful.”

  Dan laughed, they said their goodbyes, and Sam and Brock took a seat in the waiting area for their flight. It was scheduled to last nine hours, and traverse fifty-six hundred miles of the earth’s surface. Sam hoped it also afforded them a little bit of rest. She had the feeling that they would need it.

  She and Brock glanced up at the television at the same time. “Monopoly Man is back,” Brock said.

  The cartoon character, lifted from the cover of the world’s most popular board game, danced in an affected style, rolling his top hat across his shoulders and clicking his heels together. Sam had first seen the cartoon character several days earlier on the television in General Mike Hajek’s office, when she first began her investigation into the banking collapse, and she’d seen several new videos since that first one. She had subsequently discovered that Archive’s team had put the videos together to calm the human herd, and had found a way to hijack air time to broadcast the videos on just about every satellite and terrestrial station.

  “You’re being naughty again,” the cartoon character said, pointing a gloved index finger at the camera. “Hurting each other and breaking things. Tsk tsk.” He waved his finger in the air. “You must know that you only win this fight by not fighting. Not fighting at all.” The cartoon character placed his hands on his hips. “They may have guns, but have you forgotten who has the power?” The last word repeated in a dramatic echo. “You!” Monopoly Man pointed at the camera again. “You have the power! So start acting like it. Be calm. Trade with each other. Make new agreements. Smile.” He spread his arms wide. “Does that sound so hard?”

  The character danced around again, twirling his hat on his finger. “Be good, my friends. Make it a nice day!” And then he was gone.

  Brock chuckled. “I’m not much for propaganda of any flavor, but the cartoon guy makes a solid point.”

  “Oh, shit,” Sam said. “I just had a troubling thought.” She pulled her burner from her pocket and dialed.

  9

  Trojan and Vaneesh clicked away at adjacent terminals in the dark computer room in the basement bunker at the Lost Man Lake Ranch. Except to use the restroom and load up on coffee, neither had moved in what felt like eons. Their eyes were red and bleary, but they wore looks of deep concentration. Neither had spoken in over half an hour.

  Trojan’s cell phone rang. Sam Jameson. “You sound awful,” she said. “You haven’t slept in a while, have you?”

  “Occupational hazard,” Trojan said.

  “You wouldn’t happen to have access to a burner phone, would you?”

  Trojan laughed. “Who do you think you’re talking to? Of course I have a burner. I’ll call you back.”

  He did so. When Sam picked up, Trojan put her on speaker, and the two computer ninjas filled her in on their progress to date. Vaneesh spoke of his plan to make it appear as though the thieves’ algorithms were still functioning properly, and to merely re-appropriate the funds into friendly accounts.

  “Prepare for some serious federal oversight,” Sam said. “I can’t imagine we’ll let you out of our sight after you gain control of that much stolen money.”

  “Understood,” Vaneesh said. “It’s not a done deal yet, anyway.”

  “How long?” Sam wanted to know.

  “I can’t really give you an estimate. The old hacker saying is that the code doesn’t work until it starts working, and it’s impossible to predict that breakthrough moment. Could be hours or days.”

  “How about the virus delivery?”

  Trojan piped up. “Slow going. NSA is pretty damn good. But I’ve found a few weaknesses that might be exploitable, and I have a few trial versions floating around, probing NSA’s system.”

  “How are you doing that, if Vaneesh isn’t done with his part yet?” Sam asked. “The virus isn’t complete, is it?”

  “You’re right,” Trojan said. “It’s not. But the virus will instruct the host computer to run the file transfer protocol in the background to download a script at a particular IP address. When Vaneesh is done with his algorithm, he’ll upload the script to the specified IP address, and we’ll be in business. The virus will just download the executable code onto the host computers, and they’ll start stealing the Bitcoin back.”

  “Very clever. You have a bright future,” Sam said. “Listen, I have a hunch that things might have become a little more urgent. Is the old man around?”

  Archive took the phone from Trojan’s hand and pulled his eyes away from the carnage on the television screens in front of him. “I need some good news, Special Agent Jameson,” he said into the phone.

  “I’m afraid I don’t have any,” Sam said. She explained the events that led her to believe there was an information breach at Homeland. “The snatch squad was on us at Reagan incredibly quickly. They had to have mobilized within an hour of our flight reservations.”

  “That’s disconcerting,” Archive, “but please forgive me. I don’t see the connection to our operation here in Colorado.”

  “Trojan took a Homeland transport flight from DC to Aspen.”

  Archive felt the color drain from his face.

  “Also,” Sam went on, “we have to assume that they’ll be smart enough to trace the origin of the virus that Trojan and Vaneesh are getting ready to release. When you steal the money back, my hunch is that you’ll find yourself in the middle of a serious shit storm.”

  Archive mulled. He mentally inventoried the provisions at the ranch. Though it ran counter to his politics and sensibilities, he’d reluctantly agreed that an armory was a necessary evil. He now wondered whether it was sufficiently provisioned to hold off a coordinated attack of any size.

  He also thought of the two dozen people holed up at the ranch house. Very few had any military experience, and none we
re seasoned combat troops. Most had never even fired a gun before.

  “Can you send reinforcements?” he asked.

  “I’d send them if I had them,” Sam said. “And given the strong probability of a security breach at DHS, it would be a bad move for me to request anything through the home office. Brock and I are going to be out of the country for a while, so we won’t be much help to you, either. I’m afraid you’re on your own for physical security at your enclave.”

  Archive bristled a bit at Sam’s terminology — in his mind, ‘enclave’ connoted a cult hideout or polygamist colony — but he got her message loud and clear. “We’ll do what we can. How can I get in touch with you if I need to?”

  “I’m getting rid of this phone as soon as we’re done here. I’m afraid you’re going to have to wait for me to get in touch with you via Trojan’s burner.”

  “I understand,” Archive said. “Thank you for the warning, and please travel safely.”

  He ended the call, then immediately picked up his land line. He speed-dialed the NORTHCOM commander. General Williamson picked up on the fourth ring. “I don’t have much time,” the tired-sounding general said in lieu of hello.

  “I understand. I’ll get to the point. The ranch is about to become the next Fort Knox, and I’m going to need some help defending it. There’s been a security breach of some sort at Homeland, and our position might already be compromised.”

  It took the sleep-deprived four-star a moment to process what Archive said. “Fort Knox?” he asked.

  Archive explained their plan to stop the ongoing theft of digital currency, and explained that his computer experts were about to have an enormous sum of Bitcoin under their control. Williamson understood Archive’s security concern immediately. “It’s clearly a significant national security issue,” Williamson said. “I don’t have anyone to spare, but I’ll find a way to reinforce your ranch. My forces will have to take it out of hide somehow.”

  “I’d be grateful,” Archive said. “And you know I’d never ask anything like that for personal reasons.”