Mariposa (3 page)

Chapter Five

Lion City, Texas
Talos Corporate Campus

Footsteps echoed hollowly down the Buckeye main hallway to the central instructor lounge. Fouad Al-Husam was alone. The building seemed deserted.

He had finished his afternoon class teaching regional Farsi and Arabic to a select team of Haitian troops destined to serve as mercenaries in Middle Eastern theaters.

Normally, at the end of each day he returned to his apartment in Lion City and ate dinner alone. His free time he mostly spent reading or watching Islamic history on cable, hungry for another place, another time.

Remembering his strange return to the hot, pure air of the Hejaz—his visit to Mecca.

This evening, he had reserved the central computer annex for half an hour to conduct academic research over the Talos infranet.

The Haitians had surprised Fouad with their intelligence and devotion. Talos was paying for their education. They sent more money home to their families each month than many in Haiti earned in a lifetime.

They reminded Fouad of the Janissaries he had commanded in Turkey, it seemed an age ago—but was just two years.

Two eventful, deceitful years.

It could be said about Axel Price that he was a powerful man, a strange man, even perhaps a corrupt man, but he paid generous wages and maintained strict military discipline in his company and his people.

Fouad was ten times better paid now than he had ever been as an agent.

The Buckeye main lounge surrounding the annex was also empty. Evening classes resumed at eight.

The annex—a smoked glass hexagon on the north side of the lounge—served both faculty and advanced students. It gave access to online instructional materials and teacher/adviser briefings, as well as a host of information services equal or superior to anything available to CEOs of other major American corporations.

Of course, all searches were logged.

The classrooms in Buckeye radiated in eight spokes from a central rotunda, forming a wagon wheel. Three similar wheels in other quarters of the campus were devoted to particular collections of Talos customers.

Each was named after a regional butterfly.

Axel Price loved butterflies. He had the largest collection in the world—hundreds of sealed glass cases, so it was said—but showed it to no one.

Price's other hobby was collecting rare antique cars. They were kept in a huge garage near the Smoky, his ranch and principal residence.

Fouad's fingerprint and arm chip logged him into the annex. The lock took a small DNA sample from his skin oils. Micro-PCR and pore sequencing technology within the lock took less than ten seconds to confirm his genetic identity and compare it with the information on the chip.

The annex's glass and steel door unlocked with a smooth click and slid open. Had he been denied, alarms would have sounded throughout the building.

The chip also enabled Talos to track him anywhere on the ten thousand acre campus. Every few feet, the chip was queried by sensors imbedded in walls and sidewalks, grass, and asphalt. Millions more sensors were scattered over the training fields and surrounding lawns, gardens, and tracks, maintaining a tightly woven net of constant surveillance.

Around Lion City, planes and helicopters had dropped enough sensors to saturate the entire area with the thin disks, two centimeters in diameter—one or two per square yard.

All in the interest, so it was said, of preventing illegal Mexicans from causing trouble.

Fouad carried ice in a cup from the cafeteria to cool his hands. He applied it briefly to his forehead. Within any of the campus buildings, Talos security could record his heart rate, blood pressure, and body temperature for face, hands, and feet. The ice in the cup reduced his blood flow and brought his stress profile more in line with normal activity.

The hexagonal space was equipped with three chairs. There were no tables or monitors. The entire room served as a display. The neutral gray walls were equipped with hundreds of tiny lasers.

Fouad sat in the middle chair.

In a few minutes, a general ripple in the dataflow would pulse through selected servers regularly utilized by the Talos infranet. That would cause no damage, but it might give him a few minutes of deep, unfettered access into the corporate goody bag—without the access being logged.

The ganglion of Talos's network had a specific pattern of behaviors outside of its recorded design specs—what Jane Rowland called "excess personality." During a universal dropout and reacquisition of external servers, the Talos library would likely suffer a "momentary lapse of confidence," as Jane had described it, and—like an infant looking around to see where Momma was—it
might
open a point of entry for a technician to check up on all systems.

This point of entry would be brief, but it would require neither an identifier nor a password other than the original programmer's—which was known to Spider/Argus but not to anyone at Talos.

That password was "Nick72TuringHorta."

The original programmers had created and then concealed such portals, perhaps to allow them to make last-second upgrades and improve their chances of getting the rich Talos contract. Or perhaps because they did not trust Talos any more than the Bureau did.

The blip would be brief and the system would easily recover, so no technician would come calling, but Fouad would be there, ready and equipped with a new way to steal and export data.

He sipped from the melting ice and waited.

Chapter Six

Spider/Argus
Tyson's Corner, Virginia

Jane pressed ENTER.

The ripple began to run its course. For the next ten seconds, Talos servers would try to access their familiar gateways, and fail.

She sipped her white tea and noted with satisfaction that Nabokov now had an opening—a receptive command node in the Talos infranet, awaiting instructions from a local programmer.

Jane could not get information out of that portal—no one she knew of could breach the Talos firewalls from outside—but if Nabokov was in place, for the next five minutes, the campus servers just might become an open book for him.

The infranet returned a simple bit acknowledgment it was being inspected.

Technician on duty.

Then a little gong went off—a simple oriental
chang.

Jane sat upright.

That spooky presence again, in a place it definitely did not belong. She swiftly drew a number in the air, then a slash, initiating her visual dialer.

"Give it a miss," she murmured. "Don't go in."

The Spider/Argus call center connected her to Alicia Kunsler in Quantico.

Kunsler picked up on the first droning buzz. "Hey, Jane. He's in?"

"He's in, but here's a hash query search—a patch on the portal. He may be tagged. Something else strange—an analog signal has been laid over the feed, available through the firewall—which would be doubly peculiar, but not really, because it isn't coming from Texas. It's coming from a source I can't trace."

It's coming from that watcher who always knows where I am and what I'm doing.

"Analog? Who in hell sends analog?"

Jane looked over the diagnostics and pathways. Names popped up, hypotheticals:

San Luis Obispo.

San Francisco.

Corpus Christi.

Pendleton Reserve.

"Could be random garbage from a discontinued coastal junction," she said. "A ghost from a TV show or something. It's just odd it popped up now. I don't like it. I think they've made him."

"Recommendations?"

"Yank him, whether he's got what he came for or not."

"Shit. You know there's no way I can reach him. Can you?"

"No," Jane said.

"Then he takes the risk."

Kunsler hung up.

Jane's machines automatically extracted the analog signal, cleaned it up, and played it through her earpiece.

It sounded like a young boy weeping.

Her hands went cold. She cradled the tea mug for warmth.

When she suddenly felt she was about to get dizzy, she let out her breath with a low, agonized whoosh.

Chapter Seven

Talos Campus

Fouad leaned back in the chair.

He had carefully planned his masking search—downloading updates to Yemeni academic and literary e-journals, accessing slow, ancient university servers half a world away.

He had been watching the friendly, scampering images of network busyness flow around him. The incongruity of manic cartoon characters in full battle gear was not lost on him.

The images flickered and froze.

A black rectangle appeared, seeming to hover about a foot from his face. A simple green cursor blinked on its upper left side.

Fouad reached into his shirt pocket and removed the four-pronged connector in its plastic packet. To an untrained eye, it might have looked like a thumbtack.

He stripped off the plastic and shoved the tiny prongs under the cap into his forearm. Then he clamped a digital sensor to the plug, raised his arm to eye level, returned his attention to the screen, and keyed in the six-number technician identifier.

Almost immediately, without knowing whether he was in or not, he ran his true thirty-line search code, memorized months ago under Jane's tutelage.

The figures began to scamper again. They sped up—and then the records he sought floated into view in ranked folios.

The folios opened and pages began to flip. He caught a few frames as they flew past—financial records for accounts in Singapore, United Arab Emirates, China; transactions with federal employees in Virginia; payments to anonymous vendors in Idaho, California, Iran, Iraq, the new state of Arabia Deserta.

Then, lists of Web news organizations and other media, accompanied by figures that seemed to represent the amount of corporate debt owed to offshore institutions.

Fouad could get only a general impression of all the corporate and international connections: banks, holding companies, big investors—many of whom worked for the oil cartels—and several chairmen and CEOs of the International Financial Protection Organization, organized a few years ago to oversee the distribution of the huge U.S. debt.

More lists followed: heads of state and government ministers from the Middle East, Singapore, Jordan, United Arab Emirates, Beijing; lobbyists, lawyers, and licensed foreign representatives working for China and Russia.

They comprised just a few of the hundred or more names that had apparently received a direct invitation from Axel Price himself.

Three retired generals, an admiral, and the new chairman of the Federal Reserve were also invited.

Joining them would be political agents from nearly every nation that used Talos services or held American debt. Conspicuously absent was Israel—which seemed more than odd, given Talos's many past contracts there.

A line of question marks was followed by the designation: "HR undecideds." Fouad could not pause the flow; HR might refer to the House of Representatives, members of congress.

Many of the modern masters of world finance, politicians, world leaders, and even a few prominent military figures were about to come together at Price's call, a gathering of eagles and moles—and weasels.

But where and when?

Fouad tried to pick out the location and date, and then realized he already knew.

Price was sponsoring a big gathering in Lion City in two weeks. Ostensibly he would be showing off the Talos Campus and hawking his wares: reviewing cadres of mercenaries, along with spectacular displays of new security and military equipment in which Price had made substantial investments.

Something else flick-paged by—a cluster of references to MSARC. Mutual Strategic Asset Recovery and Control. The central MSARC computers were supposedly buried deep inside mountains in Switzerland.

All part of the new world economic order.

The acronym seemed to him reminiscent of Mutually Assured Destruction, MAD, the working strategy of the decades-long nuclear stalemate during the Cold War.

Perhaps it was meant to be. Just as the split-second decision whether to launch nuclear weapons was once regarded as too important to hand over to mere humans, the challenges of international finance were now too fast, too big, and far too complicated to entrust to flesh-and-blood managers.

The tipping point for another, even deeper decline might occur in hundredths of a second.

More flickering pages, then multiple references to "Jones," either a man or a network possibly linked to MSARC.

All throughout, like obsessive-compulsive little fruit flies, buzzed sections of text from a rambling treatise by Price himself about "fiat" currency and its strategic disadvantages.

Fiat currency—currency defined by a government rather than backed by physical assets—was a pejorative among believers in the gold standard.

The area around his spiky interface began to grow warm. Terabytes of data were now flooding from the open Talos servers into Fouad's arm.

Too long a connection might actually sear a blood vessel, but this was important.

Axel Price was not the man Fouad would ever visualize at the center of a high-powered conference on international finance. He was not trusted in Europe. His connections to Israel had long since grown stale, mirroring the return of a general disenchantment with Jews inside the extreme American right.

Any connection between Price and MSARC would be very interesting in some circles.

The button was causing pain.

The dataflow abruptly ended with a cartoon grunt face—a Talos security guard in full armor and regalia raising night-vision gogs, spinning his assault rifle, and winking.

Done!

The black square of the maintenance window closed.

Records of Fouad's access instantly vanished.

All the data—the reason for his entire mission—now suffused through his blood, downloaded at the source of the plug into thousands of microscopic data stores, amalgams of protein and silicon called
prochines
. The prochines would spend the next hour exchanging data with their blood-borne fellows, performing a kind of bio-backup, until millions of copies spread throughout his body.

Security at Talos was comprehensive and superb, but so far, nobody knew about prochines, nor, had they known, would they have been able to detect them without drawing and analyzing enough blood to kill him.

Fouad needed to get this information out of Lion City quickly. Given the conditions of constant surveillance and the county-wide blanket of sensor chips, and given that his contract did not allow for vacations or travel outside of the campus, the original plan had been for him to be informed of a family emergency within the next few weeks—the timing to be widely separated from this intrusion, in the unlikely event it were ever detected.

But the conference was scheduled to begin in fourteen days. He needed to communicate with his handlers immediately.

And there was only one way he might succeed at doing that, undetected—something almost as antiquated as carrier pigeons, of which he had none.

Fouad left the cage, which locked its door behind him with a confident, steely
chunk
.