Raider

by M. L. Buchman

  “Yeah, just double-check,” Jeremy grimaced.

  “Remember, this is Miranda. She’s never going to do less than that.”

  “I’m never going to do less than what?”

  They both would have launched out of their seats if they weren’t wearing their seatbelts.

  “Yeah, what?” Holly’s grin was feral and malicious. They each held a pair of airline trays. Andi carried another and a basket of sodas.

  “We were just saying that you’d never—”

  “—cut corners on an investigation,” he cut off Jeremy.

  “Okay.” Miranda accepted the statement at face value. She was the only one who did.

  Holly rolled her eyes.

  Andi snickered.

  Miranda handed him a tray with a large portion of steaming lasagna, prosciutto-wrapped asparagus, a crusty sourdough bread roll, and a side of fresh apple pie with ice cream, before sitting beside him.

  “Which reminds me.” Miranda began cutting up a small skirt steak. She turned to Holly, “Why wouldn’t I be safe around Andi?”

  Holly barely balked, “Just something Mike said. Ask him.” Then she picked up a roasted Brussels sprout with her fingers and ate it.

  Andi’s eye roll clued him in that it had been her and Holly’s conversation, not his, that Miranda had caught some part of.

  He kicked Holly’s shin under the table.

  Jeremy squeaked in surprise.

  To cover that it was his kick that had gone astray, Mike flipped over the card he’d drawn.

  Ace of Spades.

  Of course.

  53

  “Of course you had a tracer waiting for any attack this time,” Clarissa breezed into the twins’ office.

  Because if they hadn’t, she’d take them the fuck apart.

  Heidi’s eyeroll told her that was a real “Duh!” statement.

  Fine, bitch. Have your bit of fun.

  It was a good thing she’d had a driver or she might have killed somebody getting from the Vice Presidential house to the CIA New Headquarters Building.

  She had no plan in place for Clark’s unexpected demise. He was only twenty years older than she was, he should still have plenty of good years in him—politicians went senile long before they aged out of office. Actually, they never aged out, even if they went senile.

  That someone would cut out that link she’d built so carefully over the years—

  She didn’t know what she’d do to them, but she’d start by fucking killing them, then she’d switch to lower priorities like cutting off their balls and those of every single male relation. She wasn’t Jewish, but that Jewish God of the Old Testament understood a thing or two about retribution.

  Heidi was on her feet, leaning forward over Harry’s shoulder.

  The rest of their night-shift teams would be in the cubie warren outside the office, wired up on Red Bull and pizza. Clarissa had long since learned to keep the CIA Cyber Security Center and Cyber Attack Division well stocked with both.

  In the twins’ shared office, there was just the two identical stations.

  To her surprise, Harry’s was as neat as a pin while Heidi’s was the kitschy one.

  A red scarf with yellow stripes was draped across the top of her monitors. An ornate wooden wand rested on a pewter stand between the pair of keyboards. A blondely perfect witch Barbie doll perched sidesaddle on her broom in a pristine Bewitched box. That Heidi was a brunette was obviously irrelevant. Or perhaps not as there was also a line of slowly aging boxed Hermione action figures.

  “Why the boxes?”

  Harry didn’t even look up. “Value drops by half or more if you take them out of the boxes.”

  “They’re worth something?”

  Heidi this time, “A pristine set like that, with the Barbie, is probably about a thousand dollars.”

  Well, at least it was high-quality kitsch.

  Clarissa moved in to lean over Harry’s other shoulder.

  Too bad she understood nothing of what she was looking at, but that didn’t matter. She was here to motivate the shit out of Harry, not replace him.

  As she watched the lines of computerese flowing through the multiple windows on every screen—some at a crawl, others so fast she could barely see any patterns—she was reminded that there was a reason she liked this place.

  It wasn’t her world, but she could feel the CIA’s heartbeat here.

  HUMINT (Human Intelligence) still had its place—barely. Agents in place, image analysts, and all the rest of their ilk.

  But even in the most backward of countries, data…revealed. It could be hidden, altered, even faked. However, the underlying truth was always out there, somewhere in the data.

  She needed to come down here more often, especially when all the Old School agents and former field spies were pushing a human-driven agenda. This was both the present and the future. Here is where shit happened.

  That was definitely food for thought. If only she could trust the Tweedle Twins, they’d be useful assets in ensuring her path to the White House.

  But she glanced at Heidi’s station with its too cutesy paraphernalia, and Harry’s with just a wedding photo—in full Harry Potter regalia. Even the minister had no compunction, dressed in a long beard and equally ornate gray robes.

  They probably lived by some bizarre code of wizard’s honor, despite being the two top cyber-guns at the CIA.

  No, she couldn’t trust them with her personal plans. But with national security…

  “We’re through a three-satellite jump,” Heidi told her without turning from the screen. “The signal didn’t hand off to the Russians, or the Chinese for that matter. It appears to have come to ground at an antenna farm in Gölbaşi, south of Ankara.”

  Clarissa stood up. “That means that—”

  She spoke slowly enough one of the twins would feel obliged to cut her off before she was forced to turn it into a question. Exposing her own ignorance was never a good thing.

  “Right,” Harry did it for her, so pup-dog pleased to know the answer. “Siberkume. The Turkey Cyber Security Cluster. They’re running a five-year-old SVR supercomputer, not even a petaflop machine. It was out of the TOP500 before they even turned it on.”

  Heidi stood and leaned back against her desk, idly picking up the vine-covered wooden wand, and fooled with it for a moment before speaking.

  Clarissa stood up as well so that she kept her clear height advantage—except she’d pulled on sneakers instead of heels. It would have made them the same height if Heidi wasn’t slouching.

  “You’re right, Clarissa. Up until now, they’ve only had two targets. Disrupting Greece—which is such a disaster anyway, I don’t know why they’re wasting the effort—and internal Turkish security. They’re spending most of their resources tracking and arresting their own citizens. They’ve managed to climb their rank of prison population per capita from nineteenth worldwide to third, behind only us and Russia. They’re roughly tied with Ukraine now.”

  She swished her wand as if sweeping all those people aside. Maybe Heidi wasn’t as pushover as Harry appeared. But why had she chosen to lead the security division and Harry chosen attack division?

  “I did a little digging around last night, just in case it actually was them.” Heidi flicked the wand to point over her shoulder. “They have a laughably small foreign attack division. Twenty, twenty-five at most. The majority of the code that comes out of there… Meh!” Again a flick of the wand, brushing it aside as garbage. “Except—” She tapped her wand on Harry’s head as if snapping him from his coding reverie.

  “This guy’s code is tight,” Harry turned on like a piece of clockwork. “He doesn’t know about blocking any tracers, or even having alarms to tell him that we’re peeking. But the primary code itself is world-class. Heavy enough that it probably takes two guys to run it properly.”

  “Trash it.” Then maybe she could get back to sleep. Or move on to the problem of what to do about accelerating Clark�
�s ascendancy.

  “Not that simple,” Heidi waggled that damn wand at her. “Besides, our trace was a generic tracker. It reached the Siberkume firewall, then purposely degraded without giving any sign it had been there. We need him to open the door from the inside one more time,” she did a swish-and-flick motion, “if we want to get all the way in.”

  She must have read how close Clarissa was to grabbing it and jamming it through one of the gibberish-filled computer screens. She hung it carefully back on its pewter stand.

  “Besides, they’re after something. If we just shut them down, we’ll never know what and they’ll come after it again, maybe from some angle we don’t catch next time.”

  “All the more reason to crush them first.” Then Clarissa though about some of the other possible targets that would fit Turkey’s agenda, such as the complete destabilization of NATO. “How much more important than crashing Clark’s plane?”

  “Two attacks would indicate—”

  “Three,” Harry spoke up as he rattled at the keys. “I’ve been rolling back through the satellite logs. Historically, the GPS satellites get just a few hundred hack attacks each week.”

  A graph resolved on his screen.

  There was a sharp curve upward. “Here it jumped to a thousand a week, then a thousand per day. That rolled along for three months.”

  Just over a week ago, it cliffed back down to previous levels.

  “What happened there?”

  “The first successful hack. He—”

  “Or she,” Heidi put in.

  “—or she,” he acknowledged with one of those mushy smiles from sitcoms and people with brains made of primordial ooze, “found her or his way in. No need for more testing. That same signature occurs just three times: the initial success, the one we told you about yesterday, and the Vice President tonight, morning there in Turkey.”

  “The question is, what’s coming next?”

  54

  “Why can’t I have a Spitfire? She gets her Sabrejet.” Jeremy was back to dealing Gin Rummy.

  Miranda found the game a little too predictable. With four players, by the third time around the table, she’d know what everyone was collecting. And then it was over before an accurate proof of count could be attained. It was an unsatisfying game in two ways.

  Poker was a game of skill, but calculating odds was only a narrow slice of it. The game also included the need to read and manipulate others’ emotions. The latter left her out of that game.

  A game needed an arbitrary variable, perhaps more than one in order to function properly and avoid the pitfalls of over-simplicity or being dependent upon a specific skill.

  “You mean other than the Messerschmitt Bf 109?” Andi zinged back along with a four of hearts. She had a spade straight and probable eights.

  “The Me 109, as the Allies called it, did record the most aircraft kills in WWII, including many Spitfires,” Miranda appreciated Andi’s clear knowledge of aircraft history. It showed that she hadn’t merely flown for the military, but had loved doing so enough to really understand its history. At least its aviation history.

  “Besides, if you put in the Spitfire, what’s to stop us debating some of the truly groundbreaking aircraft like the JN-4 Jenny biplane that reshaped World War I and post-war aviation? Or the VS-300.”

  “What’s that one?” Mike picked up an eight, not seeing the conflict with Andi, and laid off a three that Jeremy snatched up quickly.

  “First practical helicopter,” Miranda and Andi said in unison.

  Would the rapidity of Jeremy’s selection indicate an emotion? Speed correlated to intensity of emotion much the way an aircraft’s speed capability corresponded to the thrust-to-weight ratio of its engines. If humans were aircraft…

  Miranda looked down at her lists of aircraft.

  Mike would be…like her Mooney M20V Ultra that he typically flew. Very fast, but only within the confines of its category. He was truly brilliant in his category of people, though weak in technical areas that might be represented by a more sophisticated aircraft. Not that Mike was unsophisticated, but…

  The whole thing began to break down in her head, so she moved on before it dissolved completely into random neuron firings.

  Captain Andi Wu flew rotorcraft. Top military rotorcraft. Again, as she’d shown in the field, extremely good in her one specific helicopter. Only time would tell how she did in other areas. It was as if she was a helicopter herself, Miranda smiled, one a little bit prone to crashing.

  She herself? Miranda put little tick marks next to the F-86 Sabrejet and the Cessna Citation M2. Most comfortable alone might be the Sabrejet part of her. The Citation might be…efficiency?

  Miranda inspected her notes with some surprise.

  Metaphors. These were metaphors. But she sucked at metaphors.

  Maybe she finally understood them. Like a coded cipher, one symbol standing in for another…

  If Holly was an aircraft? Or Jeremy?

  She scanned her whole working list of over seventy-nine aircraft she’d listed as being potentially useful for the game. Cargo planes like the Condor that Holly had ridden across Russia? A gunship like the one that had almost killed Jeremy?

  Maybe if she tried switching them: Holly the gunship, and Jeremy the cargo plane.

  No. She just didn’t understand how they aligned either way.

  She tried adding basic parameters to each of the aircraft: speed, passenger and cargo capacities, combat and ferry distances. Then she rescanned the list, with little more insight.

  They…

  She looked up from her notes.

  The dirty dishes were gone and all of the plane’s cabin lights were turned down except one spreading a soft light over the black table.

  The seats were empty except for Mike sitting two over. He had a beer bottle. By the lack of any condensation on it, and the way the rippled bottom of the once-damp label crinkled as he idly twisted it back and forth, she’d estimate that it had been empty long enough to dry even from the inevitable condensation.

  “Where is everyone?” Then she could see them, stretched out on the couches, blankets pulled over them. “Why didn’t they use the bedrooms?”

  “Didn’t want to mess up someone else’s sheets? Maybe. What are you working on so hard?”

  Miranda had to look down to remember. “I’m not sure. It’s either the new card game or else I’m working on metaphors.”

  Mike slouched deeper and crossed his feet on one of the other chairs.

  “Okay, I’ll bite. Give me door number two.”

  “I,” Miranda looked around. “The only doors I see are to the bedrooms in back and the wing emergency exits. None of which have the number two on them that I can see. At least not from here.”

  Mike smiled at something. The light was low enough that his eyes were in shadow. She was comfortable with him like this. “Tell me about your metaphors.”

  So she did.

  He nodded in easy agreement at his pairing with the Mooney. “Makes sense. Fast at what it does. Good with people. A nice team plane. And I like that it moves fast but not too fast. Not overly complex like your new jet. A simple pilot’s plane. That’s a good fit for me. Who’s next?”

  She hadn’t seen most of those parallels. But Mike did move fast, but not too fast. He was always there when she needed him to be, but he never left her feeling overwhelmed the way Holly or Jon did. Talking to Jeremy was like…talking to an extension of herself. He appeared to bother others at times, but she never minded him.

  Mike nodded. “Holly as an AC-130 Gunship is intriguing.”

  “But?” Miranda could actually hear his hesitation.

  “Since I’m sleeping with one and have ridden through a battle in the other… Actually, I’ve sort of battled both of them. But I think there’s a better match for her.”

  Miranda studied her list, but didn’t know what it might be.

  Mike pointed, “The Warthog. A-10 Thunderbolt.”

&nbs
p; Miranda squinted at him. “I thought Holly was beautiful?”

  “She’s gorgeous, though don’t tell her I said that. But a Warthog is the loveliest sight in the world to a soldier on the ground needing close air support. The A-10 may be lethal from on high, but its true role is getting down and dirty close-up. And both craft are tough as hell.”

  She liked that. She wished it was a prettier plane, but everything else fit. Miranda noted that down.

  Mike glanced over at the couch where Jeremy had gone to sleep. “Jeremy is like, I don’t know, the Condor or a C-5 Galaxy that he flew that time. He carries a massive load around in his pack, and his brain. And it’s as if he’s never quite sure what to do with it.”

  “It’s not a very reliable aircraft. Even with the C-5M Super Galaxy upgrade, it barely maintains a sixty-two percent average mission-capable availability rate.”

  “Good point. Well done on the metaphor front, Miranda. Hmm…” He stared up at the ceiling.

  She looked aloft to see what was written there before she could stop herself.

  “How about the MH-47G Chinook? A high-capacity workhorse. Fast—the fastest military helicopter out there before the S-97 Raider. Not a lot of personal defenses—which absolutely fits, though I think he’s learning. Yet for all that, it’s smooth handling, and does incredible things under the protection of others—like this team.”

  Miranda made note of that pairing as well.

  “And Major Jon Swift…” Mike stared up into the darkness.

  She’d forgotten about Jon.

  Mike opened his mouth, closed it, then just shook his head.

  “What?”

  “I was going to say that he’s like Jeremy’s Spitfire, but I think that’s unfair to him.”

  “Why?”

  55

  He couldn’t have shut his mouth one sentence sooner, could he? Crap!

  Mike finally satisfied Miranda’s need to complete things with the explanation that Jon Swift and the Spitfire were both superior fighter craft in any era.