Dark Zone (26 page)

“Let me know if they come up with anything. I’ll be upstairs.”

At the very moment Rubens was asking about him, Johnny Bib was hovering over the shoulder of a cryptologist who’d been shanghaied into serving as a computer operator, trying to track the different queries onto the Web site they thought was being used to send codes through the terrorist network. The tracing work was done by a small program the techies called Spider Goblin 3. It was an extremely sophisticated version of the so-called spy programs used by commercial Web sites to track interested visitors to their Web sites. Spider Goblin 3 spat out a list of different nodes on the net showing where requests for the information had come from; this list was then compared to earlier captures of information to see if there were any matches.

There were literally thousands, as a typical request for a Web site might pass through twelve or more “nodes” on the World Wide Web network as it made its way to and back from the place where the information was kept. The difficulty wasn’t that all this information was impossible to obtain—it was there for the taking. The question was what significance it had. Working on the theory that a computer used for one bad purpose might be used for another—as if it were a car owned by a gang who robbed banks and gas stations—Johnny Bib decided to look at the contents of the computers used in accessing the site. The trick was choosing which ones to examine.

Fortunately, this could be placed in the hands of a complicated mathematical formula, which Johnny and his team had compiled the day before. It had involved a great deal of probability work, and thus much of it had been designed by the team’s statisticians—a fault, Johnny Bib believed, since statisticians were by nature imprecise and even messy. They were willing to live with errors in their work, which they classified as “inevitable.” For Johnny Bib, nothing was inevitable. Unknown, perhaps, but not inevitable.

But even a mathematician sometimes had to compromise by rounding off. Numbers existed in the real world, after all.

“Yo, Johnny Bib, Johnny Bib,” said Tristan Young. “Looky, looky, looky.”

Johnny Bib practically hopped across the room to the console where Tristan was working. Twenty-three years old, Tristan’s real calling was string theory and “real” cryptography, but he had been pressed into service in the computer area by a personnel shortage.

“Look at this,” said Young. “Looky, looky, looky.” He pointed to a solid screen of alpha numerals.

Johnny stared for a few seconds but could not discern a pattern. “Assembler code?” he guessed.

“No, no,” said Tristan. “French and German car registrations. Watch.”

Tristan hit a few keys and the wall of digits transformed itself into a list, punctuated at regular intervals by gibberish.

“Wonderful work,” said Johnny Bib. “And where is the computer?”

“A dentist’s office in a town near Marseilles, France.”

“It accessed the Web site after it was changed?”

“Right before.”

“Before?”

“Then again, like, oops, my clock is a little fast. Heh, heh, heh.”

Johnny Bib straightened and considered this.

“The phone number for that bulletin board that was called from the pay phone in Morocco was in this same town,” added Tristan.

“Very good,” said Johnny Bib. “Very, very good.”

“Looks like the dentist’s computer has been hijacked,” added Tristan. “We think there are other computers, spread out across the country, that are used for various chores. There are several Internet accounts associated with the owner of the phone that was called, which of course turns out to be a name we cannot find in any other record.”

Johnny Bib looked at the registration numbers. Not one on the first page was prime.

Interesting. A coincidence probably, but interesting. A sign, definitely, that they were on the right track.

“We’re checking the registrations and tracing the other computers one by one. The whole nine yards, heh, heh, heh,” added Tristan.

“Why is it nine yards?” asked Johnny.

“Don’t know.”

“A significant mystery,” said Johnny, nodding. “Keep me informed.”

47

They caught the last possible plane to Paris that night, an old Boeing 737 operated by a Spanish airline Dean had not only never heard of but which also apparently operated only one aircraft—this one.

The plane sat at the gate for nearly an hour after they boarded. Dean took out the World War I book he’d “borrowed” from the British and read about a wounded German calling to the Marine for help in the dark. The author wondered whether he should put the German out of his misery or take him prisoner. Doing either involved great risk, since he’d be exposing himself to anyone hiding nearby, as well as to the man himself, who might have a concealed weapon. The writer spoke honestly and simply of his uncertainty.

Something similar had happened to Dean in Vietnam: he’d come across a North Vietnamese soldier lying in the brush, stomach full of blood. The man babbled something in Vietnamese; Dean thought he was begging to be killed.

Dean’s job was to kill the enemy. He wasn’t squeamish about it. He’d taken down a Vietcong officer (or at least someone suspected of being one) just a few hours before. But for some reason he couldn’t bring himself to kill this man.

What had stopped him? To this day he couldn’t say.

Did war stay the same, or did men?

Lia curled her body tight against the comer of the seat, wedging herself next to the window.

All
I
need to do is sleep, she told herself. Sleep will cure this.

It didn’t, though. The few hours’ dozing on the plane left her restless and stiff, and every bit as confused and scared and unsure as she’d been before.

Lia had trouble finding the ATM at Charles de Gaulle Airport, even though she’d been at the airport dozens of times just in the past two years. It turned out to be only a few yards from the gate where she exited. Then she couldn’t remember the PIN on the ATM card she was carrying, even though the support team always set the PINs on her cards to the same sequence. It took a monstrous amount of effort not to start kicking the machine, to calm down, to ask the Art Room for help.

She found Dean on the taxi line.

“You look tired,” he told her.

“As if you don’t,” she snapped.

He didn’t say anything else.

“Concorde Lazare,” she told the taxi driver when they got in. The man started telling them in French what a nice place it was.
“Oui,”
she said. Then she switched to English. “Just drive there, though, OK?”

Dean turned and gave her a dirty look. “Excuse us,” he said in English. “My friend has not had much sleep. I apologize for her.”

Lia thought she, too, should apologize, but it was much easier not to say anything at all.

48

Many people say they would like to die in their sleep, but wasn’t that a bit of unexamined foolishness? To die in one’s sleep meant to have no chance to set one’s affairs straight—to have no chance, really, to rage against the coming of the darkness, to hold out, to gasp a few breaths, to resolve to be brave one final time: to meet the ultimate fate with courage, the only real asset one took into old age.

To die in one’s sleep meant to slip into the next life as a passive victim, and Denis LaFoote had never been in his whole life a passive victim. Something deep inside him rebelled at the whisper of death. He found himself struggling as if under deep water and pushed himself toward the surface. He was dreaming and then he was not dreaming—strong hands pushed against him, weighty arms that belonged to a man of flesh and blood, not some nightmare summoned from the dark places of his past. LaFoote pushed upward, calling on the muscles of his once-athletic shoulders and arms to help. The seventy-one-year-old man pushed and shoved toward the light above. He could feel himself choking, but he did not give in; he wasn’t tempted by the sweet warmth he began to feel around his eyes, the lull of more sleep.

“Non!” he shouted.
“Non
.”

He did not give up, to the bitter end.

Patrick Donohue sat at the edge of the bed after it was over. It had been some time since he had chosen to kill a man so personally, and he needed a moment to adjust.

Not to get over it, simply to adjust.

The old man had proven stronger than he would have guessed, but there were many benefits to having killed him with no weapon other than the pillow. For one, it was possible that a country coroner might completely miss the fact that his death was a homicide. The struggle had dimmed that possibility, as he’d had to push down heavily on the man’s arms and chest with his body, which would leave telltale marks. But the chance had been worth taking.

Given that the coroner was likely to see the obvious, Donohue decided to supply a motive. He went to the old man’s dresser, looking for his wallet. There were only thirty euros in the wallet; he took them. Then he rifled through the drawers quickly, finding nothing of any worth. In the living room, there was a strongbox with old franc notes—a considerable sum, well over two hundred thousand, which would translate roughly into forty thousand euros if taken to a bank. Donohue scattered a few around to make it clear that he had stolen them, then stuffed the rest in his pockets.

He made his exit from the house carefully. There was a policeman or some sort of official watching from a car up the block, who could only be avoided by using the windows at the back of the house. He’d seen the man arrive shortly after LaFoote, which added interest though not particular trouble to the job.

A half hour later, just outside of Paris, he called one of the numbers Mussa had given for reporting on the job.

“Done,” he said.

49

When Tommy Karr woke up in the Paris safe house, he discovered two messages on the telephone number he had given Deidre. Both had been left the day before. One asked if he was “up to anything” the next day, and the other said that she would be outside the Picasso museum at 11:00 a.m., adding that she wouldn’t mind continuing their tour. The museum wasn’t that far from her residence, and she made it sound as if it was a casual idea, but Karr suspected a more elaborate plot.

Which he wholeheartedly approved of.

But duty came first.

The Art Room wanted him to try pushing up the meeting with LaFoote, who according to his CIA shadow had returned home and not stirred since. Karr called the retired French agent but didn’t get an answer.

“You sure he’s inside?” Karr asked Telach.

“Our CIA friend hasn’t seen him leave,” she answered. “It’s still early. Maybe he’s sleeping.”

“It’s also possible he gave Sherlock the slip,” said Karr.

“Should I have him knock on the door?”

Karr thought about this for a moment. He didn’t want LaFoote to think he didn’t trust him. If he was home and wasn’t answering the phone, obviously he’d draw that conclusion, no matter how the CIA officer tried to cover his appearance at the door.

And if he’d slipped away?

Well, good for the old codger then. Sending the CIA agent to play vacuum-cleaner salesman wasn’t going to help.

“Nah. Just have him hang out. I’ll check back later.”

Karr caught some coffee—the French seemed to insist on far too much milk—then paid a visit to some of his CIA friends to get their opinions of Ponclare and his department.

Overworked and underpaid.

Which made the fact that he had a very nice apartment in the Marais area of Paris—the ultra-chic section, not the old Jewish quarter—more than a little interesting.

Karr did a little more checking. Ponclare’s family had once been very well off but had lost nearly everything by the time of World War II; the war finished off whatever small assets they had. As Rockman had told him, Ponclare’s father had been a renowned French citizen, honors all around—but few francs in the bank, or at least so it seemed. Ponclare more or less had followed in his father’s footsteps.

But over the last four or five years—since coming to Paris—Ponclare had managed not only to buy the expensive apartment but also to repurchase two of the family’s estates. The French themselves had been interested in this, according to a rumor the CIA hands told Karr, but it wasn’t clear if there had been a formal investigation.