Terminal Rage (32 page)

A young waitress with an apron came by and flashed them a smile. Julia ordered a slice of banana bread and a soy latte.

“I
’
ll have the same.” He handed back the menu to the waitress.

Julia removed her sunglasses, and the grin of a child who
’
d just discovered a secret candy empire erupted on her face.

“We did it.”

“We did indeed.” He glanced around to make sure no one was looking or listening.

The fact Sam had asked to meet her today was a clear indication the final stage of the operation had kicked in.

There was a lot he wanted to say to her. Rivers of emotions flowed through him, and perhaps through her as well. But whatever they had to say to one another would have to remain unspoken for the time being. Maybe even for good.

He searched her features, trying to read her mind. She probably wanted to know how he felt after he had pulled off one of the most daring and potentially life-threatening heists ever. To convince their government, including her own father, Senator William Price, that her abduction was part of an elaborate terrorist plot to free convicted terrorists, when in fact it was all intended to extract and execute them. Was she curious to know if at any point he had felt like he was going to break down or give up?

On his part, he was desperate to reveal down to the minutest details the stream of thoughts that had traveled through his mind when he pulled the trigger on Nabulsi and Madi. The release of retribution they had always spoken about. The culmination of many years of meticulous planning.

And to tell her how the Jordanians had ratted on the man who had recruited them, Demir Salimovic. And what Sam had to do to smoke out Salimovic and “convince” him to give up the next pig up in the chain of command.

But he too had his own set of questions for her. He wanted to know how she had managed to keep up the role of a kidnap victim coping with fake post-traumatic stress. To look her father and mother in the eye, knowing she had put them through every parent
’
s worst nightmare.

How flawless was her performance of the tormented victim trying to gradually re-assimilate into society? Or had she slipped up somehow or done something to raise suspicion? He was curious if Monica Vlasic had debriefed her, or if the FBI had decided to skip all those procedures, thanks to some more strings pulled by Deputy Director Benny Marino. And he wanted to know if she had met Alex Blackwell.

But the most pressing question on his mind was whether Julia was ready to sever ties with her old life and disappear forever.

There would be no gloating or acknowledgment of the consummate roles each member of the team had played to pull this off. No self-lauding to achieve catharsis after years of iron-fisted discipline and absolute secrecy.

Sam had been their master and commander, from the operation
’
s conception to its fanatical implementation. He
’
d hand-picked and recruited every member of his team through complex character profiling, and a six-degrees-of-separation software he had developed to plough through the list of surviving family members.

Each person on the team came with an indispensable skill or role to play. And each with a sacrifice to make. But it was Julia who had agreed to pay the heftiest price. Finding her had been a stroke of luck. Her relationship to Mark Price made her the best leverage they needed to get into the building. And being the daughter of a US senator with deep links to the FBI brought the plan full circle.

As strong as the urge was to express his gratitude to her today, he knew there was no way he could. But he hoped she would see it in his eyes. They had in the past exchanged many silent conversations, and this would be no different. He had told her on every possible occasion during the planning years how grateful he was, but expressing it now out loud would have a different flavor.

The waitress placed the steaming coffees on the table, then deposited two plates of toasted banana bread with a small bowl of honey and a sculpture of butter. Julia drizzled the honey on her slice like strands of golden silk. The rich butter melted on impact and was absorbed in the fluffy, deep russet-brown surface of the toasted bread.

Sam sipped his coffee and felt her staring at him as if she wanted to say something but was hesitating. The rules about what they could and couldn
’
t speak about in public had been clearly laid out in the past. So she must have been actively filtering whatever was on her mind.

Finally, she spoke. “What
’
s next for you, Sam?”

Sam had agreed with the rest of the team that once the mock kidnapping and the building siege were over, there would be a waiting period while he cashed out the money. When he had accumulated enough to pay each member their designated share, he would meet up with each one of them and then complete the rest of the operation on his own. He
’
d already paid the other five men, and Julia was his last stop.

“A trip to Europe. And based on what I find there, perhaps I
’
ll need to go somewhere else to finish this. I think I
’
ve got about another year left. Maybe less.”

“I meant—what next, after all of this is over.”

“Oh.” Sam sighed and dropped his head for a brief while, looking straight at the foam of his hot beverage. For the last six years, his singular focus was the mission and the end game. He hadn
’
t yet pondered life after it.

“A new start, I guess.” He raised his head and sank deep in her eyes.

“Sam, it
’
s been a long time holding on to this one thing.”

“Yeah,” he said. “We
’
ll need to cleanse ourselves first—” He stopped himself before saying too much and glanced at the children playing in the courtyard.

Julia kept her eyes fixed on him, and once again he could feel the warmth of her gaze touching his skin. Before the operation had started in Rome, she had told him something that came back to him now. There were two things about him she knew for certain. The first was that she could trust him with her life. And the second, which contradicted the first, was that no matter how hard she tried, Julia had never been able to understand how Sam
’
s mind functioned.

He extended his hand to touch hers and rubbed her soft fingers gently, then spoke in a low voice.

“We all lost something precious and sacrificed a part of our humanity to get to where we are today, Julia. I am not claiming I suffered or gave more. But I started this, and I need to end it.”

Sam moved his plate aside and handed her the leather envelope. Inside it was everything she needed to start her new life. A new identity, prepared by Albert, the Greek crew-member who used to work for Interpol before his own family was massacred in the attack. An Irish passport, birth certificate, and driver
’
s license. The keys to a condo purchased in her new name, in the unremarkable town of Freiburg in the southwest of Germany. A safe house to lie low until she decided where on earth she wanted to vanish.

She gasped and put her hand on her mouth to mask whatever emotions were rippling through her now.

He picked up his iPad and switched it on. He had purchased a prepaid data SIM card to connect it to the internet a few days earlier. The connection was strong.

Julia
’
s face betrayed a symphony of emotions. Sam struggled to look away. He wanted to absorb her features and her stunning eyes. This could be the last time he would look at them.

In a few minutes, he would pay the bill and they
’
d each go their separate ways. That had been the plan all along. They did of course have protocols to contact one another, especially to warn of imminent danger. But by and large, their relationships were meant to end. Now however, he was questioning this decision with every fiber of his body.

There had been a point during the long years of planning this operation when Sam felt things for Julia he knew were dangerous and could undermine everything. They were both burned-out souls, no longer capable of loving or being loved, he
’
d thought. Every single person on that operation had been living on borrowed time. But somewhere in the midst of all the darkness, he felt emotions for her that he had never thought would vibrate through his beating heart again.

Sam had resisted. But whatever self-restraint he had been able to practice back then was impossible to summon now, when the prospect of never seeing her again appeared to matter. The lump in his throat was like a cork capping the intense emotions swimming through his body.

But who was he kidding? Whatever faint hope was radiating through his heart now was cruel and misleading. No one knew what the future held for him. When it was time to descend into the final and most dangerous chapter of the operation, he didn
’
t want to drag Julia down with him. He had taken her far enough.

“Julia. The transfer was processed this morning.”

She took out a small security token from her purse, with the logo of a private bank in the Cayman Islands, which Sam recognized. Kenji, the Japanese financial expert on the team, had helped set up the accounts for each one of them.

She navigated on the iPad to the bank
’
s website, then logged in and entered her security details, including the unique access code from her token. He studied her face as she stared at the life-changing figure of twenty five million dollars under her name.

Silent tears ran down her cheeks. “Thank you.”

Sam had imagined this moment many times before. How each member of his crew would react once they were paid and realized it was all over. The overpowering immensity of how their lives would change. Money had never been the principal motivation for any of them. If it was, he wouldn
’
t have picked them. But Sam knew that the wealth each of them now possessed was the only safe way they could restart their lives. It had been six years in the making. A long buildup that required Herculean patience.

The waitress placed the bill on the table. Sam paid in cash, and both he and Julia stood up. For a few seconds, he absorbed every bit of her for one last time. Her deep caramel eyes always spoke volumes, well before her lips uttered a single word. Her bronzed skin. Her soulful voice. And all the things she knew about him and accepted without judgment. If there was one woman in the world who could share the rest of his life with him, he was staring at her. And he was about to let her go. Julia was just as wounded, and just as tainted, but his feelings for her were far stronger than him.

“This is it, Julia. We need to start living again. To be alive again.”

He hugged her hard for a few sweet seconds before they let go of each other, then turned and walked away in opposite directions.

TWENTY-SEVEN

Tuesday, October 10, 2012—1:00 p.m.
Washington, District of Columbia

T
o the general public, the Chastleton was a historic apartment block at the corner of Sixteenth and R. But for people in the know, it was speckled with discreet units used as meeting facilities for the CIA. Perfect for off-the-books matters that could not take place on official US government property.

Blackwell stopped to admire the imposing Gothic façade of the Chastleton. A few minutes before that, he had walked past yet another Gothic landmark, the Church of the Holy City at the corner of Corcoran and Sixteenth. He realized how much his perceptions had changed over time. All those years working in the DC area, never once had he noticed any of the impressive buildings in the Sixteenth Street Historic District. When you work for the Bureau, DC
’
s architectural beauty is not exactly the sort of detail you stop to ponder.

Robert Slant had given him precise instructions on what to do and where to go for the meeting he had set up for him. One more favor to satiate Blackwell
’
s obsession with Sam Morgan.

He strode into the lobby of the building. An older blind woman with a service dog stepped out of the elevator and brushed past him and smiled. The remnants of her deep, old-world perfume reminded him of a history teacher he used to have a crush on. He took a deep breath and inhaled every bit of the nostalgic nectar all the way up to the second floor. When he thought about it, this woman could very well have been his history teacher, older now. And blind.

The apartment door had been left open. Inside, the shutters were all rolled down, and only a dim floor lamp was switched on.

The furniture was the sort purchased in bulk by the federal government—cheap and without style or imagination. As his eyes adjusted to the low light, he could make out a figure of a man sunk in an armchair. Across from him was an identical chair, where Blackwell assumed he would sit.

“Come in, Alex.”

The casual voice threw Blackwell off a little. Mostly because it didn
’
t seem to come from the direction of the seated man. Like a ventriloquist who could bounce his voice around the room like a yo-yo. And the texture of the voice didn
’
t quite match the sterile vibe of the room and the conditions of the meeting.

Danny Zimmerman was a rogue hacker who had turned mainstream. In Blackwell
’
s mind, hackers were awkward types, with little charisma. This guy on the other hand looked nothing of the sort. He had angular dark glasses matching his jet-black hair. With his business suit and necktie, he looked like a banker or even an earnest young professor who taught at one of the DC area universities. But not a hacker. And definitely not an NSA spook.

Zimmerman had been arrested a few times in the past for hacking into government facilities in Israel. When the Israelis had given up trying to lock him up and throw away the key, they decided to recruit him to channel his code-breaking skills to the service of the Mossad. He had worked for five years as a freelancer for them before he was lured to the NSA to serve his other country. Dual nationals like Danny were a rarity in the intelligence community, which had strict rules about these things. But rules were made to be bent for those whose skills were exceptional.

This wasn
’
t going to be a long meeting. Danny Zimmerman
’
s expertise as a cryptanalyst was why the US had struck the deal with the Egyptians in return for Nabulsi and Madi. As part of the agreement to release the convicted terrorists, the NSA had bowed to pressure from the White House and loaned Danny to the Egyptians to help them break into Leviathan, a software application developed to conceal the illegally acquired real estate assets accrued by a member of the Mubarak family. Leviathan and the dirty, laundered money it cloaked were orchestrated under the shady cover of an offshore corporation called the Aswan Group.

After the revolution, a copy of Leviathan on a flash drive had fallen into the hands of the Egyptian army by way of an insider, who had also tipped them off on how the software functioned and its impenetrable security features. Unlocking it could deliver to the draining Egyptian coffers as much as seven billion dollars.

Sam Morgan had used the Exertify hostage standoff as a cover to break into the offices of the Aswan Group, also shared by another company called Balmoral Westwood. Both companies were nothing but fronts for the illegal activities of the same member of the Mubarak family who had commissioned Leviathan.

Whatever Sam had taken from the safe of the office of these companies had to be connected to Leviathan. Sam was a software developer, and coincidence was no longer an acceptable part of the explanation in Blackwell
’
s mind. He hoped what Danny Zimmerman could tell him about Leviathan would in some way get him closer to the man he
’
d become obsessed with.

It had taken Robert Slant a few weeks to set up this meeting. The official story was that Blackwell was curious and wanted closure after negotiating a bedeviling case. Just to scratch an outstanding itch. Not an uncommon outcome for anyone working a criminal investigation. Slant had warned Blackwell not to do or say anything to raise Danny
’
s suspicion. Although the meeting was unofficial, they had no idea to what extent Danny would report back to the NSA.

“Thanks for meeting me. I
’
ll make this short.”

“We
’
ve got all the time in the world.”

“Last November I negotiated with a man who broke into the mid-town Manhattan office of an off-shore corporation, the Aswan Group.”

“Yeah, and he
‘
borrowed
’
a few items from their safe.”

Blackwell nodded. “I understand our government loaned you out to the Egyptians to help them crack a piece of software.”

“Leviathan.”

“Yes, that
’
s it. An application that cloaked the illegal assets of the Aswan Group, I believe?”

Zimmerman answered with another question. “And you
’
re curious how that panned out, right?”

Once again, Blackwell nodded.

Danny leaned forward and his face caught the light to reveal his finer features now—olive skin, jade-green eyes and a cleft chin.

“It took me twelve hours to wrap my mind around the damn thing. A fine piece of coding.”

“Could you tell who designed it? Did they leave a signature or anything like that?”

“No. But whoever built it was talented—kudos to them.”

“You mean more than one person designed this?”

Zimmerman hesitated for a beat as if his own CPU was processing how much he cared to reveal.

He shook his head a few times.

“This wasn
’
t a group effort, just one very focused architect. Whoever wrote this poured their heart and soul into it over months, possibly a year or two.”

Blackwell was trying hard to temper himself to avoid coming across as overly eager, so he muted his voice and spoke casually. “Any ideas who designed it?”

Now no longer holding back, the geek in Zimmerman seemed eager to let it all out like a gushing waterfall.

“An outsider, for sure. No one from the security or defense sectors. Whoever commissioned this made a conscious decision to hire someone out of the radar of the security world.”

“Like?”

“Impossible to tell. The underlying architecture reminds me of a group of West Coast programmers out of UCLA. Their work was popular in the late nineties.”

UCLA. What are the odds?
“Are they still around?”

Zimmerman shook his head. “Just like all trends, they faded into oblivion. Shame. You don
’
t see that sort of attention to detail any more. Everything
’
s done in India or Romania now.”

“So did you crack it?”

Zimmerman instinctively looked around before he spoke, even though they were in the privacy of a closed apartment. It made Blackwell instantly uneasy. As if there were other people tuning in to this conversation.

“It was too late. The data within Leviathan had been deleted. Or auto-destroyed, to be more precise.”

“How?”

“Leviathan was designed to authenticate itself with a remote verification server before it could function.”

Blackwell was silent as he considered what Zimmerman had just said. He had almost committed to memory the report filed by Finn Simmer, the FBI
’
s Legat in Cairo. He had tried to understand every detail about how Leviathan worked.

What he did know was that if someone tried to access it and entered an incorrect login code three times in a row, the software would self-destruct, deleting its valuable data. Then it would alert the “verification server” that Zimmerman had just mentioned. Any time someone tried to load a copy of the software after that, the verification server would send an immediate kill command to destroy the data. It would keep doing it with every successive copy seeking verification.

Blackwell didn
’
t know much about computers, but he was a master of logic.

“Hypothetically, you could break into the remote server and bypass the fail safe, right?”

Zimmerman shook his head, his mouth opening in a massive grin, the likes of which Blackwell had never seen. “Believe me, I tried. But it was impossible. There was no physical server. Just a badass ghost application weaving in and out of one remote machine after the other. When I first tried, it was Greenland. The second time it was Hawaii, the third Manila. You get the picture.”

“So whoever designed this made it impenetrable?”

“Pretty much. Even if we could foretell where the next remote server would be and somehow silence it, each local copy of Leviathan would know this and would then proceed to cannibalize itself and destroy the data anyway. Exactly how I would have built it—with a tertiary security implement.”

“In other words, you couldn
’
t beat it.”

Zimmerman sighed, making no effort to conceal the offence he had taken to Blackwell
’
s questioning of his skills. Then that wide open-mouthed grin again.

“Maybe with unlimited resources and an open-ended timeline, we could have tried to outsmart it. But my guess is it was always meant to be foolproof. There are times when even the best hackers need to take their hat off and pay respect to the architect.”

“Pay respect to the architect.” Blackwell repeated the words once out loud, and then many times in his mind.

Sam was the architect. Not just of Leviathan, but this whole affair.

“So all those properties worth billions are locked in a freaking flashdrive purgatory?” Blackwell remembered Slant
’
s warning and made a note to dial his interest down a notch to avoid revealing a more than healthy concern for the matter.

Danny stood up and began pacing around.

“It
’
s gone, Mr. Blackwell.”

“Define
‘
gone
’
?”

“Somebody got to it first and entered the incorrect access login that destroyed the data. That kind of gone. Whoever entered those codes must have known the result of their actions. So I
’
d say it was intentionally sabotaged.”

“By whom?”

“No clue. But—”

“What?”

“Every time Leviathan is successfully verified by the remote system, a simple text file of the last ten login attempts is placed on the local version of the software. These logs are not affected by the destruction of the data bank that occurs after a breach, and remain there indefinitely.”

“And this means what, in human terms?”

Danny chuckled and stopped pacing around.

“It means I was able to tell when and from which location Leviathan was breached—November seventh, exactly four days before I got to it.”

One day after Sam escaped from the building, Blackwell thought.

“Where did it happen?”

“Downtown Philly”

“Precise location?”

“Public Wi-Fi hotspot. A Starbucks on South Broad Street. And before you ask, yes, we checked nearby closed-circuit cameras”

“And?”

“Nothing.”

Blackwell stood up, guessing the meeting was about to end.

“Any theories who would want to destroy it?”

“No clue.”

“I guess that
’
s it then. This was sort of helpful. Thanks.” Blackwell nodded at Zimmerman and headed to the door.

“Not so fast, Blackwell.” Zimmerman was a few inches behind him, breathing down his neck.

“There is one more thing you might find intriguing.”

The NSA hacker had seen through Blackwell
’
s feeble attempt to conceal the extent of his obsession with the case. Which made him even more compelled to get the hell out of there fast.