Death of Secrets (28 page)

Of course, the attacks on Kathy and Mike while they held the
flash drive were pretty darn suspicious. Either Jakarta had lied to them about
not being responsible for those attacks – and Jacobs had no doubt the boy was
capable of lying – or someone else had done them. And if it was someone else,
the most likely suspect was Electron Guidewire, trying to get their code back.
And if that was so, then it was grounds for investigation indeed. At the very
least they might have committed attempted murder. At worst, extreme measures
like that to recover the flash drive suggested that they had something to hide.

But it all came down to whether or not Jakarta had lied to
Kathy. The most likely option was that he had, and all the other attacks had
been his fault too. He’d just needed to conceal that to get them to give him
the flash drive. And concealing it shouldn’t have been hard for him.

Hackers called it "social engineering." The trick
was, when you couldn’t manage an electronic break-in to a company through
simple programming and tricks, then you called the company up and told a
convincing lie in order to get yourself a password. As simple as it seemed, it
worked alarmingly often. And in order to use that trick, most hackers developed
a depressing ability to lie.

But most hackers were also nonviolent, and the attacks on Kathy
had been very violent indeed. So he was back to square one, with no way to
disprove Colleen's theory. One way or another, though, he needed to talk to
Tilman and Carlos about whether they were responsible for those attacks on
Kathy.

***

"Can you really do it, Colleen?" Kathy asked.

"Sure," she replied. "He’s obviously feeding the
video screen in his office a PowerPoint from his computer. We just open a
GigaStar window over the top of the slide show window, and instead of his
presentation, all those right honorable people will find themselves reading
thoughts – their thoughts, Tilman’ thoughts – everybody’s thoughts. For all I
know, the range of a real unit might be great enough to pick us up, in here.
Remember that the thing Jakarta built was just a homemade test version."

"Do you think they’ll recognize it for what it is?"
Mike asked. "After all, the output from that can be pretty confusing, from
what I’ve seen."

"Yeah, but you realized what you were looking at after a
while, didn’t you? And what’s more, Nathan Jacobs is in there. He’s seen it
once before, and he’s the one we have to convince."

Mike nodded. "Right, I get it. OK, let’s do it."

Colleen continued sorting through files. "OK then. I just
need to find out where the stinking GigaStar program is that’s reading that
input."

Mike paced as she searched, feeling the tension mount inside
him. He had no idea how long the meeting would drag on, and if it ended before
Colleen found what she was looking for, then they’d lose their best – possibly
their only – way out of this.

Kathy stood behind Colleen, reading over her shoulder. "Is
that it?" she asked, pointing to something on screen.

Colleen shook her head. "No, I already looked at that,
Kath. That’s the project source code itself – what was on that flash drive we
stole. I saw that file once before when Jakarta and I hacked in here."

Kathy was distracted for a moment, watching the meeting in the
other window. She saw one of the Representatives tucking papers into a folder
and gasped in alarm, thinking the meeting was over. But Tilman was still
speaking, so it couldn’t have completely wrapped up yet. "So you think
this file we’re looking for must be in the same place you guys looked last
night?"

"Well," Colleen replied, "that seems like the
most likely loca… no! Oh, I am so
stupid!
" Furiously she closed the
search window she’d had open, and started another. "It’s probably on his
own computer, not on the central server."

Kathy watched as Colleen typed for a few seconds, and then a
long list of files scrolled down the screen. She felt a wave of anxiety
creeping up when she saw how many they had to go through.

Colleen, however, practically leapt out of her chair.
"There it is!" she shouted, loud enough for Mike to worry about the
people in the next room. "Open sesame!"

She clicked on the GigaStar file, and in the little window
where they watched the surveillance camera in Tilman’ office, they saw the
display wall behind him change.

***

Tilman spoke on, clicking the button on his remote occasionally
for new slides. He maintained his eye contact with the audience, and felt their
positive response. He explained the reasons for the cost, and what the
government was getting for it. He chuckled to himself, thinking he might not
even need to resort to blackmail.

Around the table, Nathan Jacobs was watching the presentation,
nodding approvingly at a list that was currently on screen, displaying the
benefits of the GigaStar program. He blinked when the screen suddenly changed,
and began to show a window of plain text rapidly scrolling down.

Representative Harris put her glasses back on, and peered
closer at the screen. The list of benefits, many of them very worthwhile, had
been replaced by something that looked like the screen of her speechwriter’s
word processor when she was in the middle of writing. Words flowed down the
screen faster than any normal person could type – almost, but not quite, too
fast to read.

>Multiple subjects acquired

>Subject D.W. TILMAN reacquired; identified from file.

>Identified input from subject one: "Won’t he ever shut
up?"

>Identified input from subject eight: "I’ll have to
leave in five minutes if I want to make my committee meeting on time."

>Subject eleven feels boredom.

>Subject one feels confusion

>Subject eight feels confusion.

>Subject four feels curiosity.

>Subject eleven feels confusion

>Subject nine feels confusion.

>Subject two feels curiosity.

>Subject two self identifies as JULIA HARRIS.

>Identified input from subject D.W. TILMAN: "It’s
working!"

>Subject three feels confusion.

>Identified input from subject D.W. TILMAN: "They’re
falling for it!"

>Identified input from subject D.W. TILMAN: "nate has
no idea he believes carlos’s story."

>Subject ten feels confusion.

>Subject four self identifies as NATHAN JACOBS.

>Subject NATHAN JACOBS feels strong interest in object to
front.

>Subject eight feels strong interest in object to front.

>Subject JULIA HARRIS feels mild fear.

>Identified input from subject D.W. TILMAN: "Jacobs has
no idea."

>Identified input from subject NATHAN JACOBS: "It’s the
GigaStar."

>Subject NATHAN JACOBS feels outrage.

>Subject NATHAN JACOBS feels betrayal.

>Identified input from subject NATHAN JACOBS: "I’ll
have him locked away for so long…"

Tilman smiled as he concluded his speech. "So that’s it,
everyone. It’s a program that will deliver real, quantifiable benefits for the
NSA. Yes, it has some cost associated with it, but for the benefit to our law
enforcement officers, it’s more than worth it."
Still watching his audience, Tilman now squinted a little bit, and looked
around curiously. The attention he’d been getting seemed to be distracted now,
and people were no longer looking at him as he spoke. "I hope I’ve covered
most of the concerns people had, but if any of you have questions I’d be…"

He trailed off, unable to go on speaking. The room was
practically in an uproar now, as the Representatives around the table began to
mutter and whisper to one another. Tilman listened, trying to figure out what
was going on, but all he could catch was the occasional snippet:
"…something’s obviously gone wrong…" "is that thing what I think
it is?" "…It can’t possibly…" "…what is Tilman
playing…"

Finally, he saw something that was easy to interpret. One of
the Congressman flat out pointed at the display screen behind him, trying to
get a colleague’s attention. Tilman turned around to look too.

His blood ran cold. His stomach felt worse than on the bumpiest
plane ride. D.W. Tilman saw what was on his screen, and at the same time he saw
his life flash before his eyes. There it sat, his GigaStar log of the entire
conversation, right on the giant video wall for everyone to read. And read it
they obviously had. He turned back around, and saw Michael Vincent opening the
door to his office and stepping in. Mike looked bedraggled, in a suit coat he’d
been wearing for days and slacks that he’d been dragged around unconscious in.
He looked bad, but he certainly didn’t look dead. Which could only mean Carlos
had failed. Which meant there were witnesses out there who could tell the truth,
even if everyone hadn’t read it on the big screen.

Tilman shifted his gaze from Mike to the other representatives,
and back to Mike.

Vincent said, "If you don't control how the news comes
out, you lose, D.W. I think you just lost some votes."

Out at the receptionists desk, Franken was on the phone
calling the local police.

Music with a lot of bass reverberated through the air, and a
strobe light froze little flashes of time into photographs, making the whole
club look like stop motion animation. Everyone danced like their lives depended
on it.

Well, almost everyone.

Kathy Kelver sat at a table, clad in her favorite bulldog
T-shirt and jeans. Her brunette hair was tied back in a pony tail. Under the
table, her hand gripped Mike’s tightly.

She said, "I don’t usually hang out here when I’m not
working. It’s not my kind of place."

Mike asked. "Then why’d you want to come?"

"Say goodbye, I guess," Kathy replied. "I’m
probably not going to see a lot of John anymore, now that I’ve quit. When she goes
on break she’ll come out and talk."

Mike said, "He’s a friend. It’s not like you
have
to say goodbye just because you don’t work here anymore."

"John isn’t exactly the kind of person to hang out at
fundraisers and conventions, Mike. But it’s not just them. This is kind of an
end of an era for me."

Mike nodded. "Me too."

Kathy gripped his hand tighter. She still didn’t know what to
say to him about Tilman. Losing a friend was always hard. Losing one this way…

Mike quickly went on, "And Nathan. He resigned at the NSA.
He told me he never could figure out whether Tilman was duping the people above
him at the agency, or they knew all along."

After a pause, Colleen said, "It would have been the end
of an era for all of us if that code had survived. I’m not sure what’s left of
privacy right now, but whatever
is
left, I want to keep it for a while.
No such luck if the government was reading our thoughts."

Mike frowned. "The program is still sitting there on EG's
computers. Sure, D.W.’s going to end up in prison. But anybody else there could
take it and use it. Once you let the genie out of the bottle, you can’t stuff
it back in."

Colleen gave them both a wry grin. "I’m not so sure about
that."

"Why?" Mike and Kathy asked in unison.

"Carlos killed all the people who made the code work. They
can’t reproduce it. And whatever else might be said about Jakarta, his efforts
to sabotage EG's code were real, I watched him code them in. He fixed their
source code so that if a password wasn’t entered once every 24 hours, the
program self-destructed.

"I already let that happen. GigaStar is gone, except for
this."

Colleen chuckled, and reached inside her purse. She pulled out
the flash drive that had given them so much trouble. "This is the only
clean copy of the code. It’s the only one that doesn’t need Jakarta’s
password."

Kathy laughed out loud. "I suppose you won’t be giving
that to anyone, will you?"

Colleen beamed. "You read my mind."

***

If you enjoyed
Death of Secrets
, the sequel,
Life of Secrets
, will be published June
1. Learn more at:

www.bowengreenwood.com

Or
read a sample chapter, starting on the next page!

Life
of Secrets is the follow up to the Amazon-bestselling political suspense
thriller Death of Secrets:

A
double life. A secret from her past. Betrayal from every side.

Alyssa
Chambers is rich and privileged by birth, but a criminal by choice. She steals
secrets from the powerful and influential, and sells them to whoever pays — and
they pay very well. But when someone assassinates a Presidential candidate in
an office Alyssa just robbed, she’s framed for the murder and everything goes
up in smoke. Now she’s running for her life, hunted and alone. The last man she
can trust is the one she can’t stop betraying. To survive, clear her name, and
uncover the assassin, she must face the truth about her past, the truth about
her family, and the truth about her Life of Secrets.

A beautiful woman hung by her fingertips 100 feet above the
ground. Far below her was a dark alley, but she did not look down. At four in
the morning, when the night is blackest and human reflexes are slowest, she
gripped the side of the building, muscles on fire from continuous strain.

She wasn’t falling off but climbing up. And she was nearly
at the top of the building. One last reach would get her to the roof, but it
was a long reach. She stretched for the edge of the roof, but couldn’t quite
make it. Wedging her toe into a chipped-out hollow in the brick, she used that
leverage to raise herself an inch or two farther.

The fingers of her left hand wrapped over the parapet. Her
right hand soon followed. That done, it became a simple matter of muscle
strength. She pulled herself up far enough to lean over the edge onto the roof
and dropped forward onto it. Success!

Alyssa Chambers rose lightly to her feet on top of the
building. Silently, she padded across the empty roof, toward a maintenance door
in the center. The moonless night wrapped around her like a cloak as she
walked.
 
Anyone watching would have seen
little more than a shadow that may have moved.
 
Clad in black fatigues, Chambers blended into the dark like a whisper in
a crowded room.

Her raven-black hair was darker than the sky itself.
 
She moved with a lithe grace of a dancer, and
her head scanned from side to side constantly, alert for danger.
 
The only break in her lines came from the
bulky set of night vision goggles she wore on her face, and the pistol – its
long, fat, sound-suppressed barrel almost like a sword – strapped to her back.

She slid a card into the electronic reader on the door.
Alyssa’s card was special, however.
 
Two
wires ran from the card to a black box the size of a pack of cigarettes, which
she held in her hand.
 
A small digital
display on the box scrolled through numbers before locking in on a set of
six.
 
Calmly, she opened the door.

Her radio earpiece came alive.
 
"I see you're in.
 
You have 30 seconds."

Two blocks away and ten stories down, her co-conspirator
Gunter Hauptmann reclined in a white Ford Econoline van, idly watching displays.
 
His relaxed posture was deceiving; Gunter was
fully alert.
 
His role in the operation
was to monitor the target's defenses.

It certainly wasn't accurate to call Gunter and Alyssa
coworkers, but they worked together from time to time on jobs like this.
 
Both were freelancers, and their paths
crossed rarely.
 
But they had worked
together before.
 
When Chambers needed an
electronics expert, she called Gunter.

She had never revealed her name and was a bit surprised when
he disclosed his. But she checked him out, and indeed Hauptmann was his real
name.. His past was even more checkered than hers – an ex-con who hadn't
learned his lesson.

He adjusted his long legs, resting the heels of his combat
boots on the edge of the console in front of him.
 
His gaunt frame hung totally slack, as if he
were at home watching television.
 
Not a
single blond hair on his head was out of place.
 
The only sign of tension he showed was to rub a hand over the two-day
growth of stubble on his chin.
 

Three hours ago Gunter had run a wiretap into the phone line
used by the target's alarm system.
 
Now
he sat and watched the readout, waiting for the alarm to summon the police. It
never did.

The first keycard opened the doors lock. Now it was time to
turn off the alarm. Barely inside the door, Chambers wired another small
electronic box into the alarm's keypad, and calmly let it do its work.
 
In moments it beeped, and she knew the alarm
would not be summoning anyone any time soon.

She continued down the stairs, never for a moment relaxing
her guard.
 
The alarm was disabled,
true.
 
But someone could still show up by
chance. Alyssa’s particular skill set had made her a wealthy woman; she had no
desire to part with any of her
 
riches by
becoming careless at this point.

Suddenly she heard muffled voices. It was impossible to make
out words, but the implication was clear enough. The floor below her was not
empty.

Her briefing had indicated it would be.

That meant one thing had already gone wrong. What else might
follow?

She walked quickly but never made a sound as she made her
way through the darkened maintenance space on the top floor.
 
One floor down – on the ninth story – were
the executive offices of the building.
 
Her target was there.

Her feet padded noiselessly over the dusty floor.
 
Apparently no one came to the tenth floor
very often; it was really more like a maintenance attic. Its purpose mattered
little to Chambers – people could come here as often as they wanted, so long as
they didn't do so in the next ten minutes.
 
She descended to the ninth floor.

At the landing, she waited behind the door. She stood
completely still, frozen, listening. And on the other side of the door, she
heard the gentle slap of footsteps.

They were coming nearer.

Nearer. Nearer. She had three choices. Keep standing still.
Head back up the stairs. Reach for the pistol strapped to her back.

She chose the first one, keeping so still she barely even
breathed.

Step, step, step.

And then the footsteps began to recede.

She took her first breath in what felt like an hour and
listened.
 
When she could no longer hear
the footsteps, Chambers cracked the door open the barest bit and peeked out.

At the far end of the hall, she saw a man turn a corner.
Once he was out of sight, she opened the door and moved quickly down the hall.

Not only was there more activity on the ninth floor, there
was more light also.
 
Apparently a few of
the office workers had left their lights on.
 
Alyssa slipped off her low-light goggles.

A few of the office workers had left their lights on. From
one of those lighted offices, Chambers heard the sound of typing.

She paused for a long time just outside that door, wondering
how to proceed. The building was supposed to be empty. It was three in the
morning. No one was supposed to be here!

She could leave, of course. She could turn around, go back
to the roof, climb back down…

No. The thought barely even passed through on its way to
being rejected out of hand.

Her ears told her the sound of typing was little more than
two feet from the door. Her experience told her that a person using a computer
was likely to be looking at the screen, not at the floor. So she lowered
herself to the floor and poked her head around the door just far enough to peek
into the room

From this position she could barely see black hair above the
laptop screen. Surely the man could not see her. She drew back, stood up,
ducked into the office next door to think. The only solution that presented
itself was to wait. Which she did, and did some more, and kept doing, checking
her watch obsessively every 20 seconds.

Finally the typist got up and walked out of his office.
Alyssa had no idea where he was going, nor did she care. This was her chance to
reach her goal.

Just as she was about to sprint for it, she heard footsteps
toward the far end of the hall.

Whoever had walked around the corner earlier was coming
back. The hallway wasn’t likely to remain safe for long. But if she kept
waiting all night, eventually the staffers and consultants would be back in the
office…

Taking a desperate chance, she raced past the typist’s
office and popped through the next doorway. She waited behind the wall,
listening as the walker went by. She couldn’t see him, but she could see his
shadow on the ground as he peeked into the typist’s office.

She waited for the walker to finish his route. She heard him
open and close the stairwell door through which she'd entered. Next, she heard
the typist return to his office. Once the typing resumed, Alyssa padded
silently on to her destination.

Her eyes swept the hall.
 
Nothing moved.
 
Nothing made a
sound.
 
Chambers followed the hallway
carefully.
 
She knew exactly where she
was going.
 
Reaching a corner, she found
the penthouse office and delicately turned the doorknob.
 
It was unlocked, meaning she didn't need her
key-card spoofer again.
 
The smallest of
sighs escaped her lips, and she whispered a complaint she'd spent her life
trying to avoid: "Too easy."

Entering the office, she scanned her surroundings to look
for potential threats.
 
Having gotten
this far, she didn't expect any, but she looked anyway. The shocking thing was
that the rich, royal blue carpeting showed fresh footprints. Perhaps the walker
had been in here.
 
If so, his potential
return would pose a threat.

The walls were lined with contemporary paintings –
originals, not prints. Each corner of the room held a bronze bust, but she
didn't take the time to examine them. The room's most prominent feature was the
exorbitant teak desk in the center.
 
Chambers
went to it immediately.

She moved around behind the computer and deftly unscrewed
the gray metal case.
 
Opening the machine
up, she made a few very quick changes inside and then screwed the case back
together.

Chambers looked at her watch again as the machine beeped and
whirred.
 
She’d been in here far too long
already.
 
While the operation didn't
require a firm time limit, every added minute only increased her risk.

With a few key presses she went to work on the computer,
bypassing security systems and tweaking the way it ran.
 
Once she'd done that to her own satisfaction,
any of the owner's passwords or security programs wouldn't matter anymore. She
could copy files from the hard drive to her own disc with impunity.
 
This she did with a practiced eye.
 
Years of work in this business had given her
excellent judgment about the kinds of computer files likely to be interesting
to the people who hired her.

She made one last modification, putting in a little program
of her own behind. It wasn’t part of what she’d been hired to do, but it was
standard operating procedure, something she did on every job. She left a
keylogger, a spy program that could tell her everything the user typed. It was
insurance. Alyssa Chambers worked in a dangerous business. If she ever got
caught, prison loomed large on her horizon. For that reason, she always looked
for leverage over her employers, just as her father had taught her.
 
Tracking every keystroke provided awesome
leverage.

Once finished, she took her drive out of the computer.
 
The next morning, the computer's owner would
have no idea what had transpired.
 
The
computer would boot up the same as always, with no indication that it had been
modified in any way.

Back in the hallway, Alyssa walked briskly toward the same
stairwell through which she'd entered.
 
On the ground floor of the building was a service door leading to an
alley.
 
That was her egress.

She strode briskly out of the alley and onto the street,
ignoring passersby.
 
In her baggy black
clothes, she simply looked trendy, rather than suspicious.
 
The two blocks to Gunter Hauptmann's van were
covered in moments, and less than fifteen minutes after her climb to the roof,
Alyssa Chambers was on her way home, two million bucks richer.
 
Although Gunter owned the van, she drove. Her
route took her right by the front door of the building she'd just broken
into.
 
Etched on the glass door was a
slick, agency-designed logo of the kind so common among political campaigns.

It read, "Rich West for President."