Spy Who Jumped Off the Screen : A Novel (9781101565766) (33 page)

“I'm still absorbing the fact.”

“Quickly, I hope. Don't worry. You're not taking advantage of the moment, Ty. If anything, the moment's taking advantage of you.”

“I can't tell you how much better that makes me feel.”

“Let me make it easier still. This isn't just in reaction to all that's happened. It isn't even quite as sudden as it seems, at least for me. It's something that's been in the back of my mind, then the front of my mind, then all over my mind ever since I collected you that evening in Cap
d'Antibes.”

“Since you're telling me all this, I'll return the favor. That Ty Hunter, the one you sped in all by yourself to pick up on that quay, had gone up on a screen twenty feet tall and forty feet wide a long time ago. This one's real.”

“I wouldn't have him any other way.”

“That's good, because he wouldn't want you to be disappointed.”

“Somehow that hadn't crossed my mind.”

Ty studied her. “A moment ago you said it was my move. Now it's yours. Where do we go?”

“The screening room,” Isabella said. “No one will look for us there, and if they do, so what? We can screen a film and the door can be locked from the inside. What can I say? Ian was a rake. It was part of his charm.”

“It sounds very daring,” Ty said. “You're a naughty girl.”

“You haven't seen anything yet,” she told him. In the screening room's library, Isabella found a digital copy of
The Boy Who Understood Women
and, relishing the irony, brought it up on the enormous LED screen that filled the far wall. “You look so young there,” she told him, “almost callow.”

Ty slid his arm around her and drew her to him on the plush double-depth sofa that occupied the center of the luxurious theater's first row. “You're great at it,” he said, “but no more chat, okay?”

“Okay.”

After they had made love twice and fallen into and awoken from a nap, Ty looked at Isabella. His palm cupped her shoulder, then slowly descended, his fingertips tracing the smooth swell of her breast. He knew his own hands well. There were times when it had seemed to him that only his hands and his mind, the long memory that had made and kept him who he was, had survived his accident intact. Feeling Isabella's touch at his shoulder, then gently over the blades of his back, urging him toward her, he told himself it was possible she had seen past his mask and image to the simple Virginia boy he'd once been.

“You look worried,” she said.

“I am,” he told her.

“Are you worried about how this changes things?”

His senses continued to drink in her presence. “What worries me,” he said, “is that it doesn't change what we're up against.”

An hour before sunset, from bridge deck, Ty spotted
Surpass
's EC130 approaching in the northern sky.

“I was sure he would call first,” Isabella said.

“Never mind,” Ty told her.

“I can't do this,” she said.

“Yes you can.”

“‘Close your eyes and think of England'? Is what you're telling me?”

“No woman needs advice from any man on how to fool another.”

“Is that supposed to be funny?”

“Yes,” Ty said. “Just relax.”

“Now you
are
asking too much,” Isabella said, almost breaking into a laugh.

The chopper put down on the bow helipad, but it was several minutes before its door opened and Philip emerged. By that time Isabella, alone, was descending the steps that led from bridge deck to
Surpass
's bow. At the sight of Philip, she raced toward him—altogether a natural actress, thought Ty, who watched from the wheelhouse.

“Sorry,” Philip said, taking her into his arms almost perfunctorily, as if his mind were occupied elsewhere, “last-minute phone call, and I had to wait for the blades to stop in order to hear what the damned idiot was saying.”

“Not to worry,” Isabella said. “I'm so glad you're back.” She could feel the agitation within him.

“As am I,” he said, while other men, one by one, emerged from the helicopter.

Isabella, registering them, looked at Philip. “I thought you would be coming alone. You didn't say anything about bringing anyone else with you.”

On first impression the men, who were uniformly fit and dressed in matching dark trousers, shirts and shoes, resembled a combat unit. Carrying themselves more in the manner of staff than guests, they made Isabella immediately uncomfortable.

“Calm down, Isabella,” Philip said. “It's a long story. As you know, I met with the authorities this morning.”

“Yes, I do know that. The
commissaire
was here afterwards,” she said.

“I didn't know that,” Philip said. “In that case you probably already know some of what I'm about to say.”

“Which is?”

“That it is likely Ian was assassinated.”

“The
commissaire
didn't seem convinced.”

“He's a functionary. Such men do not commit themselves until they have to. Nor is it they who must live with the consequences of their indecision.”

“Get to the point. Who are these men?” Isabella demanded, raising her gaze to the silent posse behind Philip.

He placed his hand on her shoulder, stared into her eyes and, summoning his most empathetic smile, said. “They are here to see that no harm comes to you.”

“I should have thought we have enough crew for that.”

“Humor me,” Philip said.

Isabella drew a deep breath. “I appreciate your concern, Philip. I really do, but I feel quite safe here with Jean-François and Crispin and everyone else. And with you, of course. Even if it wasn't an accident, why would the people responsible want to harm me? I have nothing to do with his business.”

“You're asking me to read the minds of madmen,” Philip said.

“Or are you worried about yourself?”

“That's entirely unfair. I can take care of myself. You know that.”

“You're right. I'm sorry,” Isabella retreated.

“It's just a precaution and just for a few days. They won't be in your way. You won't even know they're here.”

“Where did they come from?”

“They're from one of the security services associated with my former job. This is a bit of spare change for them.”

“Do they speak English?”

“They do, all of them.”

“And do they understand that I'm their boss, that they're at all times to do as I say and not the reverse?”

“The reverse wouldn't occur to them. Believe me.”

“You must be even more confident than I'd thought,” Isabella said as notes of laughter rose into her voice, “to be willing to leave your girlfriend alone with six gorgeous Slavic men.”

Philip regarded her with an intensity that was unfamiliar to her, determination and hurt balanced in his eyes. “I trust you, darling,” he reminded her. “I left you with the number-one box-office star in the world, didn't I?”

“Who's turned out to be a milquetoast,” Isabella bluffed.

Philip's countenance came alight. “Has he? I'm surprised. But that's not important. What's important is that you please, right now, trust me.”

Chapter Forty

Bingo Chen said, “Ask
me a question.” It was almost midnight, and the young man had just roller-skated into Oliver Molyneux's makeshift office and seated himself, with his legs crossed, in order to tighten the loose striped lace of his right red-and-yellow plastic skate.

“I'll bite,” Oliver said. “Do you have a particular question you'd like me to ask you?”

Bingo nodded. “‘When was the last time you earned your name?'” he suggested.

“Consider it asked. We're short on time.”

“Not more than ninety seconds ago,” Bingo answered.

“What did you find, exactly?”

“An open back door in the source code.”

“The source code of what? Frost's iPhone?”

“The iPhone?” Bingo asked with manifest incredulity. “We're in deep hack mode. That phone was just the starting gate.”

“That much I get,” Oliver said, “but not having been born digital, I'd appreciate a clear and concise explanation in English.”

“What can't happen can,” Bingo said.

“Nor am I in any mood for the I Ching,” Oliver objected.

“Delilah ran all the computers with which the iPhone had been in contact. Of course, there was nothing. Your man's a prick. At the same time, Jonty ran the phone numbers. Nothing obvious there either—well, except that one was to a bank. Big deal, right? Right! You know Finagle's law?”

“I must have missed it,” Oliver said.

“‘Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity,'” Bingo said. “The asshole calls a bank. Don't know who he talked to, don't know what he said. But it's a bank in Vienna, and he doesn't live in Vienna, and Jonty, who loves films, is immediately thinking
The Third Man,
Orson Welles, and all kinds of intrigue and shit—that nothing's quite what it seems. So he zooms in to take a closer look, a much, much closer look indeed.”

“Are you telling me he went in through a back door in the source code of the bank's computer?”

“Faster than John Dillinger or Bonnie and Clyde could have robbed it,” Bingo said, “and a lot more quietly, of course. It's an old trick. Someone inserts a back door—”

“Who would do that?” Oliver interrupted.

“
We
might,” Bingo said stoically. “Or it could have been some black hat. Anyhow, as I said, it's an old trick. Whoever's computer it is hires some IT security boys to take it out, which they do, but when they recompile the compiler, they have to use the computer, so there it is back in again, but this time not apparently so. I tell you, Jonty Patel is, no effing question about it, a Knight of the Lambda Calculus.”

“What in hell is a Knight of the Lambda Calculus?”

“Your numero uno hacker fraternity. Some say it's imaginary, others that it's real, but it's always the same, isn't it? ‘Those who talk don't know and those who know don't talk.' What the Knights Templar were to the old church, the Knights of the Lambda Calculus are, pretty much, to the new. But that's beside the point. It turns out that there are no accounts in this particular bank under Frost's name or any conceivable variation of it, but—and it's a whopping-big ‘but'—the bank's computer has been in touch with computers using the very same encryption key that Frost used in his previous line of business, as well as with computers that employ the very same key he does now.”

“And that surprised you?”

“It surprised me, but Nevada even more so, probably because the first of those keys is fairly esoteric, which, considering they were dealing with nuclear arms and all, it effing well should have been, and the second . . . damned, I shouldn't say this, but I will: Nevada, on behalf of our employer, is one of the guys who designed and inserted that back door precisely so that fellows like you, with your insatiable curiosity and incomparable knowledge of and instinct for what's in the best interest of our country and its allies, could, when circumstances necessitated, drop in and . . . how should one put it, snoop.”

“Can you give me an executive summary?” Oliver asked. “My head's spinning.”

“But of course,” Bingo replied. “Come over to my workstation.”

Bingo, on skates, was already before the semicircular panel of terminals when Oliver arrived in the room next door. On the central screen were the split images of Delilah, Jonty, and Nevada. “Delilah first,” Bingo said.

“Good evening, Commander,” she said.

“Good evening,” Oliver replied.

“From my perspective it's important to remember that we're talking about many degrees of separation, which makes some things more probable and others less. You're familiar with disambiguation?”

“The butterfly effect,” Oliver asked, “the idea that just a slight change in the initial condition of a dynamic system can effect a very large change in that system's behavior over the long term? Yes, I'm familiar with it.”

“In a very real sense,” Delilah said, “that is what we're dealing with here. But we have to be careful when retracing the steps back from the ultimate variations to the initial variation. It's an epistemic question, isn't it?”

“Are you trying to tell me that you can make a good guess but not be certain of it?”

“More or less,” Delilah replied. “The Viennese bank's computers talk to thousands of other computers all over the world all the time. It's a constant conversation, almost no element of which is of concern to us. But this much may be: Sometime yesterday funds began to flow into and out of a few of that bank's newer accounts at a vastly accelerated velocity.”

“Were these large transactions?”

“No, and that's the point. Individually they were small, always under ten thousand U.S. dollars, even when denominated in euros. But they were rapid—seconds apart, in some instances even less—and there were a great many of them. In aggregate we're talking about plus or minus, probably plus, one hundred million euros.”

“Where is that money now?”

“Alchemized,” Delilah Mirador said. “Most of it was wired to gold brokers. Where that gold has gone could be anybody's guess, gold bars being much harder to trace than currency.”

Oliver shot a pensive look into the webcam. “Something's missing, isn't it?” he said.

“How did you know?”

“It's a matter of scale.”

“You're correct,” Delilah said. “Almost all the moneys that were moved into those Viennese accounts had recently passed through, although not come directly from, a larger list of accounts, based in Geneva, Zurich, Liechtenstein, Singapore and elsewhere, which have also experienced a spectacular rise in both inflow and immediate outflow since yesterday.”

“Can you estimate how spectacular a rise?” Oliver inquired.

“It would be a rough estimate: in the tens of billions of U.S. dollars.”

“Now we're cooking with gas,” Bingo said. “Over to you, Jonty.”

Jonty Patel nodded, wiped his brow with a bandanna, then said, “It's late for you guys, isn't it? I'll come straight to the point. From the phone's logs, we took away nada.”

“That's too bad, although not unexpected. Frost's cautious to a fault.”

“But from the provider's logs,” Jonty resumed, “we picked up a number for one Andrej Melinkov in Moscow. Apparently Melinkov was Frost's Russian number two during his last days in the disarmament game, so no surprise there. What is surprising is that on further investigation this Melinkov, a former soldier and still nominally a civil servant, has apparently been looking at properties, mostly in the South of France, he ought not to be able to afford. And one of those Viennese accounts Delilah mentioned spit money into an account whose number, at least, was on his laptop.”

“How the hell did you get into that already?” Oliver asked.

“I would like to be able to say that I'd planted a little daemon, but the damned laptop wasn't switched on. I took a chance that a man with so much at stake would back up his files in the clouds somewhere. The fortunate thing is, I found him in the second service I tried. I almost had a geekgasm!”

“Those things are meant to be encrypted, aren't they?” Oliver said. “That was fast work.”

“Thank you. The best ones use the same encryption standards banks do.”

Oliver smiled. “While you're at it,” he said, “you couldn't just add some zeroes to the left of the decimal point in my bank account, could you? And maybe some offsetting entries, the way the Bank of England does, so that there won't ever be anything there to cry foul?”

“Don't kid yourself. That sort of thing's been done,” said Jonty Patel matter-of-factly.

“More than once,” Bingo embellished.

“And more often than anyone would like you to know, but that's a conversation for another day,” Jonty said. “Right now Nevada's got one more juicy little tidbit for you.”

The hyperphotogenic Nevada Smith smiled. “Just this,” he said. “In that cloud of storage, we found a photograph album, snaps of family, I'm supposing, and/or friends, harmless stuff, but lots of it. Also some photographs of the properties in Saint-Tropez that Jonty just mentioned. I have no idea why, but for some reason it all just seemed too pat, too neat. So I drifted back a little and then, for the sheer hell of it, took the scruffy approach and subjected it to steganalysis.”

“No need to pause,” Oliver said. “I'm familiar with steganalysis.”

“Then you know that it's nothing more than a format for hiding data within images or within other files that don't appear to be encrypted, often files of enormous size.”

“Which is how it differs from cryptanalysis?”

“Yes, essentially, for the purpose at hand,” Nevada continued. “I applied various steganography algorithms to the various photos and, to my astonishment and annoyance, came up blank. That's when it struck me. All of a sudden, I had this crazy thought: What if I'm right? What if Melinkov had more information to store than he could trust to his memory? Where would he hide it? If he's in league with Frost, who as far as I can tell is a fastidious son of a bitch and never colors outside the lines, he would be used to taking the cautious approach. Nor would he slip up by disguising a document as a photograph. He would know that either he would escape scrutiny entirely or that, if he were scrutinized, it would be by people like us, on whichever side, people who would run the same algorithms I did until one or another cracked the code or they all came up empty. So I asked myself that question and immediately answered it with another question of my own: What if steganographically encoded data were buried not in a picture or even text but within variations of white background or black keystrokes that would be imperceptible to the eye?”

“And what did you come up with?”

“On Melinkov's computer, zilch,” Nevada said in a voice absent of regret, “nothing but the idea itself. It was when I applied that same idea to some mundane-appearing documents in one of Frost's computers that my cock stood straight up.”

“I'm sure that must have been a reassuring sight,” Bingo told him.

“There've been women who've thought so,” Nevada parried. “You'll be a better judge of what they mean than I, Commander, but what I found appear to be tracking numbers.”

“Let me guess,” Oliver said. “Those numbers are for parcels on a Claussen ship.”

“That's right, the Claussen
Wayfarer.
”

“That ship's route began at the top of the Black Sea, did it not?”

“Correct, in the Strait of Kerch, to be exact.”

“And the parcels would have remained on board through a stopover in Istanbul, during which other parcels were unloaded and still others taken on.”

Nevada said, “I can't speak definitively about other parcels. If you want me to go in that direction . . .”

“Hold your horses,” Oliver said. “Just tell me that those parcels remained on board at Istanbul.”

“That's what the record shows.”

“The next port of call was Naples, wasn't it?”

“The parcels remained on the ship there, too.”

“That's where you're wrong,” Oliver said. “The labels and crates remained there, but the merchandise they contained came ashore, disguised as something else entirely. That's where it vanished and the trail went cold.”

“With all due apologies,” Nevada said, “I think you may be only half right.”

“What makes you think that?”

“Let me put it somewhat differently,” Nevada continued. “If whatever it was he was shipping
was
permanently offloaded in Naples, why would he have been following or have kept, at any rate, the tracking numbers of three new parcels that came aboard there?”

Stunned, Oliver stared into the webcam as he considered the implications of Nevada Smith's revelation. From a recess of his memory, a line from his school days' reading surfaced:
“Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”
The astronomer Carl Sagan had penned it in regard to the possibility that there might be life in outer space—but oh my, how perfectly it described Philip Frost's deception. “What were those parcels?” Oliver asked after a moment.

“All I know is that they went by the same basic code: ‘engines and turbines,'” Nevada said.

“Do you know where they are now?”

“Not precisely, but they can't be very far. The ship arrived in Gibraltar early this morning. It's only just been offloaded.”

“Did it put in to any ports between Naples and here?”

Nevada's smile filled the screen. “Apparently not,” he told Oliver.

“Do we know who if anyone has taken delivery of these ‘engines and turbines' here?”

Nevada nodded. “It would seem that the freight service to which their bill of lading was addressed did so several hours ago, but the fixed address we have for that—Cardigan & Sons Transport—appears to be an office suite rather than an actual depot of any sort. I can try to drill deeper.”