Midnight Sun (104 page)

Once recovered
,
he joined the FBI
,
and after o
nly
six
years
in
the
Bureau
,
he
was
nearly
killed
by
a
single
bullet.
That
incident
had
occured
twenty
-
four
months
ago
when a former Soviet spy working with the Sons of the Sword Muslim terrorist group had blasted him in the chest. While he survived and the enemy agent died, the bastard's shot had
taken
one
of
Hogan's
lungs.
A
subsequent
staph
infection
took
his
spleen
and
half
of
his
liver
and
had
caused
serious
damage
to
his
already
arthritic
joints
by
the
time
the
doctors
had
gotten
it
under
control.
No one had e
ver
been
able
to
verify
whether
he
had
gotten
the
infection
from
the
dirt
that
entered
his
blood
stream
where
he
landed
by
that
remote
Ohio
rail
bed
or
from
the
ten-month
hospital
stay
he
had
endured.
He
was
pretty
sure
he
had
gotten
it
in
the
hospital,
but
there
was
no
proof.
Regardless of who was at fault
,
he
was
alive,
which
he
figured
was
better
than
the
alternative.

No
matter
his
ailments
and
the
constant
pain
and
discomfort
he
endured
from
all
his
broken
bits,
he
would
be
damned
if
he
was
going
to
let
the
terrorists
rob
him
of
his
retirement
twice.
Now
he
was
in
charge
of
the
teams
that
did
what
he
physically
could
no
longer
do.

The
phone
on
his
desk
sounded
with a
special
ringtone
reserved
for
only
a
couple
of
people.
He
knew
it
was
important,
either
from
one
of
his
units
in
the
field
or
from
Andy
Fleiss,
information
technology
specialist.

“
Hogan.
”

“
Paul,
this
is
Andy.
”

“
Yeah
? W
hat
’
s
my
favorite
nerd
up
to
?
”

“
Weird
stuff
.
sir,
really
weird.
Can
I
come
up?
”

“
Yeah,
I
’
ll
be
waiting
for
you.
”

Four
minutes
later
,
Andy
Fleiss
entered
Hogan
’
s
office
without
knocking.
Andy Fleiss was in his mid-thirties and looked every bit the part of a serious nerd with unruly locks of wavy brown hair, dark eyebrows
,
and a long
,
narrow face comically accentuated by soda-bottle black horn
-rimmed
glasses and a plastic pocket protector stuffed with writing and calculating tools. He could recite from memory the entire code of the base Linux Kernel, could count to infinity in binary
,
and spoke fluent Tolkein Elvish
,
in addition to half a dozen real
-
world languages used by both humans and computers.

That being said, outside of work
,
women actually fawned over the man, something Paul Hogan had never really believed until
he
went out to dinner with him at a ritzy DC restaurant shortly after arriving in
the
capital when
they
both were promoted. Fleiss, outside of work, shed his nerd-by-day look, popping in contacts in place of the glasses and donning tasteful shirts and sport
jackets that rendered him a quite remarkable likeness of the famous British actor Hugh Grant when he was at his heart-throb pinnacle in the nineties.

Today
,
though,
Fleiss
was all nerd as
he
stormed
to
the
desk
and
quickly
spread
several
sheets
of
paper
across
it
without
regard
for
any
work
Hogan
may
have
been
doing
.

“
O
kay,
Andy,
what
am
I
looking
at?
”

“I printed out these emails that I though
t
seemed significant,” Andy said
. The
energy in his voice
seemed to
indicate
that
whatever he saw should be obvious to anyone
.

“Andy,” Hogan
said
,
“t
his
looks
like
the
crap
that
clutters
my
inbox
every
morning.
”

“Exactly,” Andy replied. “These are printed copies of spam emails sent
from
generic user accounts. The kind of thing you probably routinely delete from your email account without looking twice.”

“
Why
are these any different?”