Athena Force 10: Countdown Read online

  The folder for Oracle mail was labeled simply Delphi. It only received e-mail sporadically, and always from the same place. Tonight, it showed one new message.

  Tonight, Kim fervently hoped for some information about Q-group, and she clicked on the folder. The e-mail read:

  To: [email protected]

  From: [email protected]

  Subject: q’s

  1. Intelligence reports Q’rajn definitely tied to Berzhaan. CIA has tracked operatives overseas. FBI reports activity within the United States, links to Berzhaan terrorist community.

  2. Two names emerging in connection with current activities: Fathi bin Amin Mansour and Hafiz abu Malik Abd-Humam, both natives of Berzhaan.

  -Mansour is prodigiously intelligent. Advanced degrees from Oxford in chemical engineering and European history. Mother and two brothers killed in guerilla raids by the Kemini rebels four years ago, for which he holds the West responsible. He is connected to several bombings. His whereabouts are unknown. See attached photograph, taken in London, 2001.

  -Abd-Humam is an associate of Mansour’s father, a professor without overt terrorist ties. Appears to be a devoted family man, religious but not overtly so. He has protested Western (particularly U.S.) involvement in Berzhaan politics and has written papers supporting self-determination for his country. His connection is not yet known. There are no known photos at this time.

  Delphi

  The attached photo showed a man in his early fifties, impeccably dressed in a dark business suit. His face was dominated by large, dark eyes and an intense expression, and Kim imagined that he generally received more than a cursory second glance from most women.

  Kim copied the e-mail into a word-processing program, removed all header information and printed a copy. Then she destroyed the e-mail, both through the delete key and a more sophisticated function designed to erase it entirely from the hard drive. If she were investigated or hacked, there would be no trace of Oracle on her computer.

  Taking the paper from the printer, she sipped her hot chocolate, thinking. Maybe the names themselves would offer a clue toward the code pattern.

  Were there possibilities in the names? Abd-Humam was a common surname, but it had religious overtones: servant of the high-minded. Mansour was a very common name. She scowled, trying to remember. She was fluent in Arabic, as well as Italian, French, and—through a lovely triangle of events the year she was twelve—Navajo. But one didn’t remember everything.

  With a pad of paper and a pencil, she scribbled more notes, played with possibilities, fixed the English, then the Arabic letters in her mind. Something for the wheels to spin around as she slept.

  She rubbed her eyes wearily. Q’rajn was a very dangerous organization, as they’d proven more than once with all the usual—though no less horrifying—earmarks of fanaticism: suicide bombings and death threats and displays of bravado in villages across the Middle East. They always faded away before they could be captured, though the CIA had been lucky in nabbing a key player last summer. He’d not given up much information, but his background and connections had provided some genuine leads and links to terrorism in Berzhaan.

  “Okay, let’s try something else,” she said aloud, and keyed in her code to open the work files, and ran sample lines from several e-mails through a mechanical translator: Arabic to English, English to Arabic. Arabic and English combined, one sentence in one language, the next every other word, the next the first language, just to see what might turn up.

  Computers at the NSA were busy running the encrypted material—dozens of intercepted e-mails—through programs of various sorts, checking logarithms and structures and known patterns. It was also checking another series of possibilities that Kim had programmed.

  Nothing so far.

  She slumped in the chair and picked up a bottle of eyedrops from the desk. Leaning back, she dropped Visine into her dry eyes. The shift in position eased the tight muscles in her neck and she stayed there a minute, her chin pointed at the ceiling. Her eyes were closed. The room was quiet.

  The agency was sometimes too crazy for her. At home there were no ringing phones, no jokes between members of the team, no one having a low, fierce argument with a spouse over a cell phone connection.

  Around her, Kim heard only the breathing of her computers and above that a respectful female voice reading the headlines on the radio. It was the fourth time she’d heard the news since dinner, so she didn’t pay a lot of attention, but kept one ear open for anything new or notable. With such a blizzard of encoded e-mails, she was uneasy. Something was coming.

  The newscaster said, “Fourteen people were killed when a train derailed near Munich this afternoon. A terrorist cell in the Sudan claimed responsibility.”

  Kim straightened and growled at the radio, “Bastards.” All the innocents who had been slaughtered by terrorists the past couple of decades disturbed her. It was one of the reasons she’d wanted to work with codes in particular. By breaking them down, there was a chance she could stop violence before it happened.

  Arabic and English sentences, written white on a black background, tumbled through her brain. What was she missing? It felt as if the key were just out of reach, just beyond her peripheral vision.

  “Look to the middle of things,” said a voice in her memory. It was the voice of her first mentor, Arthur Tsosie, a Navajo who had served the United States as a code breaker in World War II.

  Arthur had been stable master at the Athena Academy where Kim had gone as a shy and awkward twelve-year-old. Lonely away from her big family, but also determined not to let on that she wasn’t just as tough as the other girls, Kim had often retreated to the stables. Arthur, coming upon the bereft and weeping little girl who missed her family, had befriended her. The old man had provided a pocket of retreat for her when things had become too overwhelming.

  And his stories of his adventures as a code talker, told in his lilting, soft tenor, had lit a passion in Kim that had never abated. When she proved to be gifted with both maths and languages, becoming a code breaker had been the obvious choice.

  Arthur had always delivered his tidbits of knowledge while caring for the horses. Memories of him were now accompanied by scents of straw and dusty sunlight. She could see his hands, the color of pecans and gnarled into knots so the fingers looked like branches, grasping the currycomb as it moved through a pale blond mane. “The trick to seeing anythin’,” he’d say, “is to remember it’s not what it is on the outside. Code, woman, friend, dog—it’s all the same. Look through the top to the middl-a things.”

  Look through the top.

  Often that meant simply letting go of perceptions as they stood, to allow new angles to enter her brain. Kim let the reams of code float over the surface of her closed eyelids. The e-mails were exchanged in Arabic, or at least in Arabic script. The messages had almost certainly begun in the Arabic language, as well, although the words were now nothing recognizable in any language the computers could read.

  The quirky dots and swirls of Arabic lettering moved on her eyelids, a dance. Along with computers that had been running the cipher text through programs all day, Kim and her partner, Scott, had been manually trying various approaches to decipher the code.

  The Arabic letters turned into a swirling, Jasmine-and-Aladdin cartoon script, the dots exaggerated. She slammed her feet to the floor, jolting herself back awake.

  “Damn,” she said. “Damn. Damn. Damn.” A sense of urgency built in her chest.

  Solve the code.

  The answer was right there. She could feel it. What was she missing?

  Kim focused on the computer screen and punched some buttons on her keyboard to bring up the program running in the background.

  From the radio on her desk came a somber female voice. “President James Whitlow endured questions from the press today regarding the Tom King-Puerto Isla scandal. Many Americans are beginning to question the connection between Puerto Isla and the current unrest in Berzhaan.”
/>   To wake herself up, Kim said aloud, “Unrest in Berzhaan. There’s an unusual situation.”

  The unrest wasn’t unusual, but some blamed the United States, or at least the current administration, for the trouble in the small Middle Eastern country. It didn’t matter to Kim whether the assessment was correct or incorrect—her concern was that there were terrorist cells that were determined to punish what they saw as the evil empire of the United States and make a statement by whatever means necessary.

  With presidential elections coming up and the general unease about the world situation and the scandal of Puerto Isla hanging over the President, the situation offered too many opportunities.

  Again she felt the urgency, that hollow sense of dread. Break the code.

  On the radio, the announcer went on, “In other news, presidential candidate, Gabriel Monihan, appeared at a packed rally in New York City this afternoon, part of a ten-city election blitz that began yesterday in Washington, D.C.”

  A window on Kim’s work computer popped up. In a blue box with red lettering, she read:

  LEXLUTHOR: How’s the code chopping?

  Kim grinned. Alexander Tanner was an FBI bomb-squad expert in Chicago who had assisted her with a case two months ago, when a young hacker used bomb schematics to encrypt messages through the upper reaches of government. Privately, Kim had been impressed with the kid, a bored seventeen-year-old with too much time on his hands and a brain that needed challenges. Lex had been the first to spot the schematics while working an unrelated case and had e-mailed Kim to ask her advice over whether the coding could be done.

  Their cooperation—an NSA employee and an FBI agent—would have been unheard of several years ago. Animosity had been more the game in those days. But reporter after reporter had turned up examples of situations that could have been defused by real communication between agencies and the pressure to cooperate had become too powerful to resist. The top-level security agencies in the country were—at least officially—encouraging interdepartmental communication, including this connected link of instant messaging within the various agencies.

  It was working. Sort of. The animosity between various agencies, the secretive and jealous ways they guarded their sources, the eternal race to see who would solve which problem first, would never entirely disappear.

  Although she’d never met Lex in person, Kim liked his sense of humor and his breezy ways—such as using the name of a comic-book supervillain as his instant-messaging handle.

  She typed:

  WINDTALKER2: Hey, guy! Still chopping. You’re out late.

  LEXLUTHOR: The same could be said of you.

  WINDTALKER2: Trying to crack this baby. Feels big.

  LEXLUTHOR: Yeah? Wanna brainstorm?

  WINDTALKER2: Might be getting too scattered to think now. A.M.?

  LEXLUTHOR: No can do. Big meetings.

  Kim was overtaken by a yawn. She typed:

  WINDTALKER 2: All right. How come you’re working so late?

  LEXLUTHOR: Politicians up the wazoo in Chicago this week. Green candidate today. Prez appearing tomorrow. Monihan on Thursday.

  WINDTALKER2: Bomb scares?

  LEXLUTHOR: Dozens. Every lunatic in the greater metro area has a plan for saving the world. Gotta check ’em all. Been over the courthouse twenty times. The airport at least 452.

  WINDTALKER2: 452? That would take a little time.

  LEXLUTHOR: Well, maybe it was only six times. FELT like 452.

  WINDTALKER2: Any bombs anywhere?

  LEXLUTHOR: Nope. Real bombers don’t call ahead.

  WINDTALKER2: Ah.

  LEXLUTHOR: Hey. I looked up your picture on the company site.

  WINDTALKER2: That’s creepy, Luthor.

  LEXLUTHOR: Somebody told me you were hot.

  WINDTALKER 2: It was probably me. I am hot, and don’t you forget it.

  LEXLUTHOR: Kinda short. But then, I’m kinda ugly, so I guess we’re even.

  WINDTALKER2: Short is a state of mind.

  LEXLUTHOR: I might be in your area next week. You up for a cup of coffee or something?

  WINDTALKER2: Hold on.

  LEXLUTHOR: What are you doing?

  WINDTALKER2: Checking out YOUR picture. What if you’re really ugly?

  LEXLUTHOR: No fair going to the academy photo.

  She opened a second window on the computer and ran a search for Alex Tanner, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Chicago, then clicked on the first link. Which was the Academy photo.

  Kim grinned. It showed a serious-looking young man, about 21, skinny and with a nose almost too big for his face.

  WINDTALKER2:

  LEXLUTHOR: Damn. I’ve put on a few pounds since then.

  WINDTALKER2: Good thing.

  LEXLUTHOR: We’re all geeks at 21. Check this link out: www.oaksidetelegraph.com/article00364.htm

  WINDTALKER2: Yeah, yeah, Luthor. It’s probably a link to Heath Ledger.

  But Kim clicked on the link, which took her to a newspaper site, and a headline that read, “Bomb Squadron Safety Record Vetted.” Beneath it was a photo of a man in a black T-shirt that showed off very nice shoulders, a good chest and excellent arms.

  Kim raised an eyebrow. His hair was cropped to show a well-shaped head, high cheekbones and, yep, that aggressive nose. Which was a lot sexier on a thirtysomething face.

  And he had that mouth, a Denzel Washington mouth, with an overbite and a full lower lip that looked very sexy.

  Kim had a weakness for lips like that.

  WINDTALKER2: Okay.

  LEXLUTHOR: Okay, what?

  WINDTALKER2: Okay, you won’t shame me. I’ll have coffee next week.

  LEXLUTHOR: Not sure I can handle the exuberance, babe.

  WINDTALKER2: Babe? What century are you?

  WINDTALKER2: Hang on….

  WINDTALKER2: Something coming up on my decryption.

  The computer was making a soft, double beep that meant something had been noted in a special file. When she opened it, she frowned.

  WINDTALKER2: Hmm. Odd.

  LEXLUTHOR: Que?

  WINDTALKER2: It’s an odd signature file.

  LEXLUTHOR: Not my area, kiddo. I’ll let you get to it.

  WINDTALKER2: K-O.

  LEXLUTHOR: Next week.

  “What am I missing?” she asked herself, peering hard at the screen.

  And if she didn’t find the answer, who was going to die because of it?

  A small musical noise told her an e-mail had arrived in her personal in-box. It brought the total to twenty-eight, and Kim remembered she’d meant to check the box. Her eyes burned and she knew she needed to get to bed if she was to have any brain at all the next day, but her little sisters were always wounded if she didn’t respond, so she dutifully opened the folder marked “Family.”

  “Shit!” she said aloud.

  There were two messages from her mother. One was—Kim sighed—an e-mail hoax that had been around for years, about people flashing their headlights erroneously.

  The other…

  TO: [email protected]

  FROM: [email protected]

  SUBJECT: Sunday dinner

  Hi, honey. I’ve been on the phone all day and the girls finally stole it from me. Don’t forget, next Monday is the Columbus Day parade and your sisters’ hearts will be broken if you don’t show up to watch them tap dance on the police float. I was going to have our big meal that day, but nobody wanted to shift the tradition, so we’ll just do it Sunday, as always. Try to come for both, huh? Bring a friend if you want. Maybe your big handsome partner??

  Love,

  Mom

  Below the message from Eileen was a list of twenty-seven e-mails, repeated over and over down the length of the window. Each carried her sister Lynda’s e-mail address, [email protected], and the same subject line: LOOK WHAT I FOUND ONLINE! A paper-clip icon sat beside each one.

  “Lynda, Lynda, Lynda,” Kim said, and opened
her virus protection software to isolate and examine the virus. “How many times I gotta tell ya not to open attachments, kid?”

  When the box was cleared, she examined the isolated virus. It turned out to be a relatively benign form that simply replicated and sent e-mails to every address on an account. Not such a big deal if the infected computer was the personal machine of a teenage girl, but costly and damaging if it was the mainframe of a big corporation.

  The fact that she did have a teenage sister was one of the reasons Kim kept her e-mail accounts so rigidly separated.