Ark Storm (23 page)

Gwen unbolted, unlocked her door and let him in.

“Just passed your neighbor,” he said. “Nearly sideswiped me. Woman in a hurry.”

“With cause!” exclaimed Gwen.

Dan raised a finger to his lips. He pulled her close, kissed her hard, then whispered in her ear.

“Come outside with me.”

Raising an eyebrow, she followed him out. They stood on the deck, leaning against the wooden rail, gazing into the darkness. The moon was full but the sky was cloudy; stratocumulus scudded across the curve of the sky at great speed switching the moonlight on and off like a lamp. When exposed, the moon was circled by a white corona. It should have been beautiful. Gwen could smell the salt of the ocean and the sweat of her own fear.

“What do—” Dan paused, took hold of Gwen’s arms. “You’re trembling.”

“Something else happened.”

Quickly, Gwen told him about Leo growling, her flight, her collision with the man in the darkness.

“Fuck! You see him?”

Gwen shook her head. “He was big, built. That’s all I know. He grunted when I kicked out so he’ll have a good bruise where I hit.”

“He could have killed you.”

“He didn’t try. I got the feeling he didn’t want to. He ran off quickly enough.”

Dan nodded, face grim. “What about Marilyn?”

“I think he was about to go in there and I disturbed him.” Quickly, she filled him in on what Marilyn had told her about the electrician and his van. He nodded, taking it all in, the crease between his eyebrows deepening, with anger or just concentration Gwen couldn’t tell.

“Nothing stolen?”

“Not a thing. No trace anyone had even been in.”

“A pro then. And he might have been after Marilyn if she ID’d him earlier in the day.”

“Anyway, as you saw, she’s hightailed it out to her sister’s in Sacramento.”

“So now we just have to worry about you. First thing, don’t say anything you wouldn’t want the bad guys to overhear in the house,” said Dan.

“Why?”

“If nothing’s stolen maybe something’s planted.”

“A listening device?” guessed Gwen, voice rising with outrage.

“Exactly. I’ve got a sweeper here.” He pulled out a foot-long rod that looked like a radar gun.

“Called Palladium. We keep it at the
Reporter
. There’s a lot of people’d like to steal our stories or ID our sources.”

“And you can just walk out with it?”

“My Ed, the truly loathsome but sometimes useful MackStack, has one at home. Tad paranoid but with what he’s seen and heard I can’t blame him. He lives fifteen minutes from me.” Dan shrugged. “He owes me.”

“OK. Sweep away.”

He turned to move. Gwen followed him. He paused.

“Do something for me. Come in with me, put on some music, not too loud, anything.”

Gwen eyed him. “Sure. But why?”

“Can I explain everything later? Sooner we get this done, the better.”

“OK,” replied Gwen, not exactly happy, wanting to know, impatient as always, but she was out of her depth here and Dan seemed to know what he was doing. The crooked smile was gone, replaced by a hard seriousness she had rarely glimpsed in him. He stood there in his jeans and t-shirt, hair tousled. Despite all that was going on, she wanted him, wanted to reach out, kiss his lips, take his hand.…

Instead, she followed him back into her home, put on Jason Mraz, and watched him.

Dan dropped to his knees beside the closed door. He took out what looked like a small medical microscope with a tube and an inner light, put it to his eye, and peered at the lock. After about a minute, he straightened up, put his finger to his lips as Gwen opened her mouth to speak.

Next he pulled out a pair of headphones and, radar-gun-like scanner in hand, began to move around her sitting room. He regularly got down on hands and knees, fingers probing under tables, inside and under lamps, in her desk drawers, behind her TV, under the sofa, under and in almost every object in the room. It was oddly intimate, and utterly thorough, this silent probing. The man clearly knew what he was doing.

After forty minutes, Gwen saw him pause then move toward her desk. Carefully, he picked up her table lamp. He turned to her, pointed to it, and offered her his headphones.

She slipped them on and heard a high-pitched wailing sound. Dan took back the headphones and continued his search for another five minutes. Then he removed his headphones and gestured outside.

He replaced his kit in the briefcase and followed her out onto the deck. They leaned back against the table, a foot apart, looking out to sea. Every so often the moon would emerge, the crests of waves silver, then disappear behind the clouds again, drawing darkness down upon them.

“First off, your lock’s picked,” announced Dan.

“How d’you know?”

“Tiny scratches. The usual key wears deeper scratches into the lock over time. A picker will leave tiny, faint scratches. You’ve got that.”

“Bastards,” hissed Gwen.

“There’s more.”

“Something to do with that wailing banshee sound in the headphones?” asked Gwen, glancing across at Dan.

“Ghost on acid is how I think of it. It screams like that near a bug. The closer it gets, the more it screams. You’re bugged. Light fitting.”

“Shit! Let’s get rid of it!”

“No. We’re safer if we leave it. Whoever’s done this is highly sophisticated. We don’t want to alert them that we’re onto them. Might make them take a more serious step, plus, we can use their bug to plant misinformation.”

“How d’you know they’re sophisticated?”

“Because of the device,” replied Dan. He got up and started to fidget with a loose shard of wood on her deck rail.

“And?”

“It’s a GSM device molded into the base of the light—with dental paste, I reckon. It’s the kind of device that belongs to the Specialist Surveillance Equipment category,” he held up his hand, “which, before you ask, means it is generally only released to governments and law enforcement agencies and those with special connections. In other words, Boudy, it’s a high-tech attack.”

Gwen got up, dragged her hair back into a ponytail. She was too agitated at that point to ask him how he knew so much.

“I hate the thought of someone listening in to me, to everything I do or say in my own home.”

“It stinks. But you’ve no real choice.”

Gwen nodded. “So we leave the bug, so Messenger, assuming it is him, doesn’t know we’re onto him?”

“Yeah. And that way we can plant false leads, cover you, make you continue to seem like the innocent academic.”

“Assuming I want to continue this charade.”

“Do you?”

“Fuck yes! Someone was on his way to attack Marilyn, broke in here, may or may not have killed Al Freidland and Elise, probably did—”

“All good reasons to walk away.”

“Not again. I won’t pretend I’m not frightened, but fear keeps you alive, gives you an edge. I want to catch this fucker. However sophisticated, however scary they are.”

Dan nodded. “You think it
is
Messenger?”

“Who else?”

Dan nodded. “All points to him. He has the funds to get hold of this stuff and the people to do his dirty work.”

Gwen gave a savage smile. “Hey, seeing as I have to live with a fucking bug, let’s return the favor.”

“What, bug Messenger?”

“Yeah. I’ll get into his office, or wait, even better, there’s a Falcon party he’s hosting at his home this Sunday. I’ll go in, plant something then. He’d probably speak more freely at home too.”

“True. Less likely to run bug sweeps at home as well.”

“Question is,” Gwen asked, giving Dan a long, level look, “is where can we get hold of a bug?”

“I think I can answer that.”

“Thought so. And, for that matter, how d’you know all this stuff? You’re very teched up for a journalist,” she remarked.

“Hey, I’m not the enemy here,” replied Dan, frowning. “Besides, you’d be surprised how much journalists know about this stuff, as you call it.”

Gwen blew out a breath. “Sorry, I’m rattled. I get bitchy. But I’d still like to know how come you do know all this stuff? You looked like a pro in there, Dan. This is clearly not some one-off.”

“I was in the military, Gwen,” replied Dan by way of answer.

“So I recall. But I didn’t think they taught you about bugging.” Gwen pondered as Dan stayed silent. “Unless, of course, you were in Intelligence, or maybe even Black Ops, I think it’s called.”

“If I were I couldn’t tell you anyway.”

“So were you?”

Dan laughed. “As it happens, no. I was just your regular Marine Corps kinda guy. But I’ve been around people who were, picked up a thing or two.”

“But then you’d have to say that, wouldn’t you.”

“So why’d you ask?”

“To see if I could spot a lie.”

“And could you?”

“No. Which either means you’re telling the truth or you’re one smooth bastard.

60

NATIONAL COUNTERTERRORISM CENTER, TYSON’S CORNER, VIRGINIA, TUESDAY AFTERNOON

Chief Canning sat at the head of a long oval table so highly polished that he could admire his bald pate in the reflection. Streamlined. He liked streamlined. Efficient and fast.

“Sit,” he told the assembled team of four. The Arabist, Pauline Southward, bidden by him from her office at Fort Meade, walked in, made it five. She was sporting a battle-red suit and a beige silk shirt. She looked martial, and delicious. Canning’s assistants, Del Russo and Peters, both jumped up to bring in another chair for her. Moira Zucker, a new recruit to the Sheikh Ali team, eyed Southward through her red-framed glasses. Her look was half quizzical, half hostile.

“OK,” said Canning, stifling a smile of amusement. Southward with her prim prettiness, her fit body and razor mind was converting his cynics, some of them anyway, he thought, noting Zucker’s reaction.

“Let’s start with the intercept known as Project Oscar; the threat to rain down the vengeance of Allah on the State of California. Do we have anything?” Canning asked.

The roomful of officers shook their heads. The room hummed with murmured nos.

“Nothing. No further intercepts picked up,” said Southward. “Not relevant to this anyway.”

Zucker leaned forward, spoke in a gravelly voice, the legacy of throat polyps that she wouldn’t have dreamt of removing. She could have earned a decent living wielding a late-night phone line.

“Before Nine-eleven there was stock market activity. A big short was taken out on the Dow. If there were to be an attack, a major attack somewhere in California, the Dow would plunge again,” she declared. “Since you pulled me onto the team last week, I’ve been searching for any suspicious-looking big shorts on the Dow. Anything out of pattern. Hell of a lot of stuff to wade through. Nothing leaps out so far.” Zucker was a treasury specialist, financially sophisticated. Increasingly finance was an essential tool used to track terrorists, to follow their networks.
Follow the money.
It told its own tale, very often labyrinthine, and it was Zucker who picked her way through the maze.

“Someone’s always shorting the Dow,” replied Chris Furlong, at fifty-three the oldest officer present. Furlong wore his world weariness like a badge.

“A big short, coming out of the Middle East,” countered Southward. “That would narrow it down.”

“Big short is good, Mideast is irrelevant,” declared Zucker. “Trades can come outta anywhere.”

Southward shrugged, like the barb was nothing to her.

Canning spoke. “I’ll talk to SEC. See if they got anything. Ms. Southward, you talk to your colleagues at NSA. Get them to input into the software the word
short
and
Dow
, see if anything comes up.”

Before Southward could reply, Del Russo interjected.

“Might try
short
and
NASDAQ
as well,” he said. “Worth trying a number of indices.”

“Good point,” noted Canning.

Zucker twisted her face and gave Del Russo a “duh” look, like he were stating the blindingly obvious. He stared through her till she looked away, then turned to Canning.

“Thank you, sir.”

So Del Russo did have a brain, thought Southward, not just a lantern jaw.

*   *   *

After the meeting wound down, Canning rang the head of the SEC, asked her about any big shorts on the Dow.

“Sounds like a long shot,” she replied, “no pun intended.” “But I’ll ring all the district commissioners. See if they have anything.”

*   *   *

Ten minutes later, the head of the New York Office of the SEC rang.

“Chief Canning, Troy Bergers here. You want to know about any big shorts?”

Canning popped a Tums. His dyspepsia was playing up again. Counterterrorism wasn’t the most restful of postings. For thirty years, since he entered West Point as a skinny teenager, he’d never done restful and his digestion bore witness. Now he was a desk warrior, but his purview was still life and death, albeit at one remove.

“I do,” he replied chewily.

“Listen up. Two of my people have been looking at an insider trading ring. In connection with that, they dug up the fact that a series of shorts have been put on.”

“On the Dow?”

“No. Much more specific. On the three big California property casualty insurance companies. And it’s not actually shorts, it’s more specific still. Put options. Six-month duration.”

Canning felt a roaring in his ears. On his hoax/fire spectrum this one had gone to ignite. He managed to keep his voice impassive. “Is that so? Who’s behind these puts?”

“We don’t know that yet. We’ve got as far as a series of nominee companies. We’d dearly like to find out who is behind the nominees, but we don’t have the evidence of criminal activity we need to justify a court order.”

“Maybe we can help with that,” mused Canning, thinking,
more than one way to play that one.
“Can I have one of my people call you?” he asked. “Moira Zucker. She might help bust through the nominee walls.”

“Sure. Tell her to ask for Special Agent Ange Wilkie.”

“Will do. You know any more about these puts?” asked Canning. He got the sense that Bergers was holding out on him.