01-01-00 (41 page)

The armed stranger took one step toward the mahogany tree where Joao hid. The Maya slowly began to crawl around the trunk to remain out of sight, coming around the other side, taking advantage of the opportunity to catch his quarry sideways.

He lunged from behind the shield of moss and tangled vines with the speed of a jungle cat, the blade pointed at the neck. The stranger reacted like a worthy warrior, pivoting on his left leg, avoiding Joao's initial strike. The blade missed its intended target and the Mayan chief had to settle for a blow with his shoulder into the man's stomach.

Joao heard the quick expulsion of air as he landed on top of him. The man's weapon flew off as both figures rolled over the leaves for a few moments before separating.

The man reached for his side arm, but Joao didn't give him the chance to use it, slashing his knife down and across the stranger's neck, the blood rhythmically jetting from the deep cut spraying him.

The sentry fell to his knees, collapsing face first, his life over.

Joao leaned down to hide the corpse in the foliage behind the mahogany before resuming his hunt.

3

EM activity filled Susan Garnett's system, the vertical bars of the digital meter dancing on her screen, jolting up and down the decibel scale according to the intensity of the activity in each 10-MHz-wide frequency channel, from 900 MHz to 1 GHz. Like yesterday, the electromagnetic activity began before the official start of the global event, which lasted fourteen seconds, as expected. Susan watched the single EM pulse across all frequencies at the end of the event, before all returned to normal.

“That was it?” asked Celina, standing behind Susan and Cameron, a big gun in her left hand. Petroff stayed back, in the background, but very much alert, keeping an eye not just on the trio by the glowing computer hardware, but also on the deserted site.

Susan nodded without turning around. “Good things come in small packages. Let's see what was dumped tonight.”

She went to the bottom.

“What do you think?” she asked Cameron.

The archaeologist shrugged, the glow from the color screen washing his sharp features, as well as the purple lump on the side of his face. “Looks about the same, and the date hasn't changed.”

“Let's clean it up with the averaging program. Then I'll perform a
DIFF.
” She typed a few commands and let the system take it away, returning seconds later with,

She went to the bottom.

“Doesn't appear to be that much different from yesterday's,” she mumbled.

“It may be different enough to get a match,” offered Cameron.

Susan tilted her head from side to side, not certain if she bought that. “Let's see just how different it is.”

She launched the
DIFF
program. The hard drive whirled for a minute as her C+ + script compared the two large files. The system displayed:

Susan frowned. “Less than point zero three percent. Not much of a difference.”

“I see the difference, but how do you read the other lines?” asked Cameron.

“The first file, from December seventeenth, GMT, is compared against the second file, from moments ago. Any zeroes in the first file that changed to ones in today's file will be noted under the
DIFF
_0 category. Likewise, any ones in the first file that changed to zeroes, will be noted under the
DIFF
_1 file. The sum of the two represents all of the zeroes and ones that switched states between yesterday's dump and tonight's, likely as a result of the narrower search.”

“So now we run the map comparison program, right?”

“After I connect with Reid. No sense in us trying to run these comparisons when the FBI's computers can do it so much quicker.” Susan turned around. “I'm going to dial into the FBI now,” she told Celina, who gave her a nod, her eyes barely acknowledging her request. Like Petroff, the slim terrorist seemed preoccupied with her surroundings. Obviously something terrible must have happened to the missing members of their team that now the surviving terrorists seemed on edge.

Susan remote-logged into the FBI system and started an Internet chat with her boss.

“Watch how you answer that,” warned Celina from behind.

Susan sighed. Preoccupied or not, the female terrorist
was
paying close attention.

Susan suspended the Internet chat but kept the connection open to share files. She reviewed the contents of tonight's captured virus, verifying that the mutation sequence looked just as it had in previous days and also that there was a 260-byte section of undecipherable code that was different from any other captured virus. She added this code to a file that contained the 260-byte sections from the other files, displaying them on the screen back to back.

“And it's always in the same location,” she said, pulling it up on the screen. “Starting at byte number 367 to byte number 627 of the virus. Here's the string from the first day that we captured the virus, which corresponds to the second daily event. There are eight bits in a byte, or 2,080 bits in 260 bytes. That's what follows, arranged in rows of 71 bytes each, except for the last row.”