Coding Isis (34 page)

He looked around the room and pitied the people he saw. He wondered whether there was ever a good time to be in an emergency room. Eventually he found himself at the front of the queue.

‘I’d like to see Ben Naylor,’ he said. He didn’t expect to be able to see him, but it was a start, and he was being truthful, he did want to see him.

The receptionist simply typed the name into the computer. There were too many people to deal with to worry about whether she should be discussing cases with people that came to enquire. It was part of her training on how to deal with emergency situations and it worked in Chris’s favor.

‘Are you a close relative?’ she asked.

‘No. I’m just a friend. He was driving to see me, but he never showed. I saw his car on the news. Is he OK?’

‘Ben is in surgery, I can’t tell you any more than that. You can take a seat and we’ll call you when there’s more news.’

‘Can I go up?’ he asked, although he knew what the answer would be even before he had finished the question.

The receptionist looked remorseful, or at least gave a damned good impression of it. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘that would be for close family only. As you can see we’re rather busy today, if you take a seat someone will be with you as soon as possible.’

Chris felt relieved in a way. At least he knew that Ben was still alive, although he had no idea how serious his injuries were. He guessed that if Ben was in theater already, he must be in a critical condition; he knew that only the most serious of cases would be filling the operating theaters so soon after a trauma-one incident.

Chris thanked the receptionist and turned, not sure whether he really wanted to sit and wait. There was a woman blocking his path and she reached out her hand and placed it on his shoulder.

‘Are you a friend of Ben Naylor’s?’ she asked.

Chris wasn’t sure what the right answer to that question was. He guessed that they weren’t really friends, but he did feel connected to him in a way that went beyond their shared experiences. In some way he felt partly responsible for what had happened to him.

‘We have more of a professional relationship,’ Chris said. It was true, after all Chris was arrested by Ben for murder. The next question came from out of left field and knocked the smile from Chris’s face when it landed.

‘Are you Chris?’ she asked.

The woman seemed to know the answer from the look on his face.

‘Follow me,’ she said. She turned and left the ER. The woman was short but slim. She was a little older than Chris but very attractive. He didn’t feel threatened but he didn’t know who he could trust anymore. He followed the woman out into the car park area outside the large glass doors. He looked around for the woman. There were people hanging around the entrance, smoking cigarettes and talking on their mobile phones, two things that were forbidden inside the hospital area. Chris was amazed to see that one of the smokers was wearing a blood soaked bandage. It seemed to him that no matter how sick people got, they were quite happy to continue killing themselves with cigarettes, when he would have thought they would be welcoming their new-found chance at life and doing all they could do cling on to it for as long as they possibly could.

He saw the short woman heading toward a car and set off after her. She didn’t stop or look around but simply got in the car and started the engine. He walked around to the passenger side and climbed in beside her.

‘Who are you?’ he asked. ‘How do you know me?’

The woman focused on the road. ‘My name’s Margot,’ she said. ‘I’m a friend of Ben’s. I know who you are because he asked me to try to find out who’s behind your attempted murder.’

‘Do you mean the murder of Jasmine Allan?’

‘No, I mean the attempted murder of Chris Sanders.’

‘I think you’d better keep talking,’ said Chris.

‘Ben and I go way back,’ said Margot. ‘I work at the Pentagon for army intelligence. After more years than I wish to disclose, Ben contacted me and took me out for coffee. He’s a detective, so naturally he wanted something from me, but we hit it off and we’ve been dating since then. I guess you brought us together Chris.’

‘I’m sorry. I mean I’m sorry for what’s happened to Ben. I feel responsible in some way.’

Margot turned the car and headed along North Capitol. She was heading toward the Pentagon building.

‘You
are
responsible,’ she said. ‘Ben told me what happened to you, how you were arrested, but the reason he contacted me was he wanted me to pull the classified military records for a man named John Amosa. Does that name mean anything to you?’

‘No, I don’t recognize that name.’ Chris was beginning to wish he was wearing his headset, not for the first time since he left the university. At least with his headset, he could be certain as to whether he should know the guy’s name or not. But then Chris wondered whether he really wanted everything he saw and heard being fed into a system that was being controlled by the NSA. It was a chilling thought.

‘John Amosa was an ex-special forces veteran that found himself doing time for killing a man in a gym. You shared a cell with him and he tried to kill you.’

Suddenly it started to make sense. ‘I never did find out the guy’s name,’ said Chris. ‘I just thought he was a mean son-of-a-bitch with a bad attitude. Are you saying there was more to it than that?’

Margot turned the car along Boundary Channel Drive and pulled in to the underground parking. The place was dimly lit with vast rows of vehicles. Chris wondered whether the pentagon had a closing time.

Margot killed the engine and stayed in the car. She turned slightly so she could look at Chris. She seemed to be judging him, weighing him.

‘The reason Ben came to me was there was a big hole in Amosa’s military records. He figured I might be able to find out what had happened to him. As you know he served in the US Army, a Ranger in fact. He was one of the first troops in to Afghanistan in Operation Enduring Freedom. He was awarded a silver star for his part in Operation Anaconda.’

‘The guy I met didn’t look like a war hero.’

‘And what do war heroes look like Chris?’

Chris had always thought that a war hero was someone that managed not to get his ass blown off, but there were plenty of decorated soldiers that never made it home in one piece.

Margot continued. ‘I believe that it was in Afghanistan that Amosa got involved with the CIA. As you may know the rangers and the CIA worked closely together during those first few months. It appears that he was given an honorary discharge and then recruited to a special unit run by a CIA officer called Joshua Tully.’

‘I don’t like where this is going,’ said Chris. ‘I knew Joshua was a man to be wary of, but are you suggesting that Joshua tried to have me killed?’

‘We don’t know for sure. Ben wanted to warn you about this connection. We know that Joshua was involved in a government project that used mind-control techniques to create assassins. We believe he might have resurrected this project with some new recruits he gathered in Afghanistan. It’s possible that Amosa was one of Joshua’s killers and he activated him to try to have you killed in prison.’

‘Do you know I work for Joshua now?’ asked Chris.

Now it was Margot’s turn to be shocked. ‘I didn’t know that,’ she said. ‘When I told Ben about the link to Joshua, he said he thought he knew where he was, but he didn’t say anything about you. Joshua is a very dangerous man, Chris. Are you sure you know what you’re doing?’

Chris felt he had fallen in to the biggest hole and it was only a matter of time before the walls started to cave in on him. He couldn’t see a way out of this mess.

‘I’m in deep shit,’ he said.

Margot put her arm on Chris’s shoulder. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I don’t think there’s anything I can do to help you. Have you heard the expression
keep your friends close, and your enemies closer
?’

‘Sure I’ve heard that. Was it Machiavelli? Or Sun-Tzu, the Art of War? I think every military guy reads that book at some point in their career.’ Chris remembered Don Vito Corleone saying something like this in the Godfather, but he resisted the urge to do his Marlon Brando impression.

‘Well,’ said Margot, ‘I think that’s what Joshua’s doing. He’s decided the best place to keep an eye on you is inside his own operation. That’s probably what’s keeping you alive.’

Chris was quiet. Had he done enough to safeguard himself? He’d certainly put things in place in the computer systems to help him, should he need them, but would they work? Was he prepared to gamble his life on it? He didn’t seem to have much choice.

‘Can I give you a ride home?’ Margot asked.

‘I’m not sure I’m a safe guy to be around at the moment. I’d rather keep my distance from people, and if Joshua suspects that I’ve found out about him, things are likely to get a lot worse for me. I think I’ll take the Metro.’

Margot nodded, she seemed to understand. She worked in the intelligence business after all.

‘Don’t talk to anyone about this,’ said Chris. ‘I’m going to figure something out. I’m on the inside and I want to stay there until I’ve made things right.’

He opened the car door and stepped out.

‘Give my regards to Ben when he wakes up,’ he said.
If he wakes up
, he thought.

‘Be safe,’ said Margot.

As Chris rode the Metro home, he wondered about whether he should be going back at all. Was it best to just disappear? That would probably make things worse for Michelle. Maybe Joshua would jump to conclusions that if he disappeared, he must have somehow found out the truth and that would not end well for anyone. There was no other way out, he needed to use his access to the computer system to stop what Joshua was doing. This was just another computer problem to solve, although the critical success factor was far higher than any other problem he had tried to tackle before. From now on, he was going to live his life as normal as he could, but he would need to work hard to put his changes in place without being discovered. He wondered whether he should try and destroy the computer systems by creating some type of worm or virus, but he was pretty sure that would fail. They’d have backups, they’d get everything working again and as soon as they traced it back to him he’d be dead. Probably the best he could hope for would be to put something in the system to safeguard himself and Michelle, a kind of safety net. If he could get deep enough in the target acquisition system he could probably stop the drones from being able to fire on him. It was a hell of a long shot, but his best chance of survival. He thought about his car at the hospital and whether he should leave it there and get it tomorrow. He looked at his watch, it was nearly eleven, he’d been gone over two hours and Michelle would be getting worried. He decided to get the car later.

Michelle dropped Chris at work and then went on with Wyn to collect his car from the hospital. He’d told Michelle that he’d met Ben at the hospital and had gotten a ride from him. He didn’t want her to worry and more importantly he didn’t want her to change her behavior and alert anyone that might be watching that she knew what was going on. He felt bad for lying but it was for her own safety and he knew she would understand eventually.

He sat at his desk and started to work at his computer terminal. Maynard had seen him and had been friendly enough. How could these people be so two-faced? Both Maynard and Joshua were friendly and good to work with, but he couldn’t help but wonder if they had meetings in which they discussed whether to kill him, or even
when
to kill him. Chris was used to the pressure of deadlines and the need for his programming to work the first time it ran, but his current work was a new experience for him. He needed to ensure that it was covert enough to avoid suspicion. For this project, working the first time without error could mean the difference between going home for dinner with his wife and getting a bullet in the brain.

He continued work on his security switch program, his first step in a long journey. He wanted to be able to sign in as Joshua, something he knew would get him the access he needed to other parts of the system that were currently off limits to him. He had thought of trying to get access to the system as Maynard, but he suspected that Joshua was not so much the hands-on type and would sign in to the system less frequently than Maynard which would improve his chances of being able to sign in as that user without being discovered.

There was no news on the state of Ben, although the report on what reporters were calling the
Beltway Pile-up
were pretty horrific and it was the worst traffic accident D.C. had experienced in the last five years. Three had died and many were still in critical care. Poor bastards. Police hadn’t even started to determine the cause of the crash and that part of the Beltway was still closed causing major congestion in the north-east of the city.