Spyder Web (20 page)

‘Maybe. If we had that information ahead of time, we might be able to simulate a legitimate government access into Moy’s computer.’

Kang smiled. ‘Good. Then once you have acquired the ciphers, the final payment will be transferred into your account.’

‘We still have no way of knowing when the next transfer will take place,’ Parnell objected, ‘or what the access codes will be.’

‘Those details aren’t your concern anymore. Just make sure that you’re ready when the time comes.’

Axton pressed his luck once more, placing two taxis with fresh drivers around the corner from the high-rise. New watchers inside the building informed him when Kang left Parnell’s office and boarded the lift. Kang made no other stops in the building. He hailed a taxi as he walked out to the curb. One of Axton’s cars picked up the fare. The driver almost choked when Kang directed him to a hotel; it was a serious statement about the man’s confidence that he wasn’t being followed.

Kang remained at his hotel for the rest of the day, ordering room service for an evening meal before retiring. He rose early the next morning, checked out of the hotel, and hired a taxi to Heathrow Airport, where he caught a flight to New York.

Within an hour of Kang’s departure, Axton found himself summoned before Sir Daniel Long, the head of British Intelligence.

‘Good afternoon, Axton. Do sit down.’ Long ignored Axton’s disheveled appearance. Having once been a field agent, he understood completely. ‘I believe some congratulations are in order. Bravo to you and your team on the Kang surveillance.’

Axton acknowledged Long’s praise with a curt nod. ‘We know where he went, sir, but we haven’t discovered what he was up to. Why did he visit this consultant, Parnell? Skimming off a few pounds from his operational fund, perhaps? No, he’s running some kind of operation, but I’ll be damned if I can figure out what it is.’

‘Actually, your surveillance has shed some light on one aspect of this mystery.’ Long opened a file folder on his desk and pulled out a report that Axton had filed from Hong Kong. ‘A few months back, you observed a meeting between Kang and a Hong Kong national.’

‘Wu Zhusheng,’ Axton recalled.

‘Precisely. The transcripts from your report indicated that Wu had acquired some new technology from the Moy Electronics Corporation. I think that you’ve uncovered Wu’s source.’

‘Parnell is selling industrial secrets?’

Long nodded and closed the file. ‘We’ve got no proof of that charge, but we have heard Parnell’s name before. It seems he’s a rather capable fellow who provides his clients with a wide range of services.’

‘Some of which might not be legal, I presume.’

‘That implication has been made,’ Long replied. ‘This is the first real evidence that Parnell might be stealing fire.’

Axton, too, knew the ancient Greek legend of Prometheus, the titan who stole fire from the gods and illuminated the world. He paid the ultimate price for that technology transfer.

‘Where do we go from here, sir?’

‘We expand your surveillance operation to include the home and offices of Ian Parnell. He’s been positively linked with a known agent of a foreign country, which is enough to justify the warrants. Get me a list of what you’ll need to do the job.’

After his meeting with Axton ended, Long placed a call to Jackson Barnett, his counterpart at the CIA.

‘Hello, Daniel,’ Barnett said with a slow drawl, ‘to what do I owe the pleasure of your call this morning?’

‘We’ve had an interesting development in the technologytransfer case. I believe that we’ve discovered who provided Moy’s designs to the gentleman in Hong Kong. The seller is a business consultant here in London.’

‘Very interesting.’

‘There’s more. The Chinese agent working with Moy’s competitor, a fellow by the name of Kang Fa, just spent the day in London and he met with this consultant. We don’t know the substance of their conversation, but I find the connection unsavory. Kang is currently en route to your side of the pond. Your staff should have his flight and passport information shortly.’

‘If I recall your dossier on Kang, he’s a man of considerable talent.’

‘He’s no choirboy. If he’s involved, then the Chinese are after something big, and it appears that they’re using industrial spies to do the job.’

‘I would appreciate your sending me what you can on this consultant. I’d like to pass it on to the FBI for their part of the investigation. Maybe they can find the link between Chicago and London and tie these pirates up. I’ll notify the FBI about Kang’s arrival so they can roll out the welcome mat. Thanks for the help, Daniel.’

Long scribbled a note of the request for his secretary. ‘All part of our agreement. The report on Parnell will be in your hands by the end of the day.’

April 9

Spring’s arrival was not only apparent in the weather, but in the attitude of Ann Arbor’s inhabitants. The student body let out a collective howl and took to the outdoors for recreation and a change of study venue from the libraries and dorm rooms they’d occupied for the last seven months. The academic year was nearing an end and a sense of new beginnings filled the air.

Nolan Kilkenny guided his freshly washed and waxed 1968 Mustang into the parking lot of the MARC building. The Acapulco blue pony car glistened with a finish that seemed almost liquid. It still had the magic for turning heads on the street and garnering whistles from passersby. Kilkenny parked next to the Grin’s faded yellow VW microbus.

‘Morning,’ Grin called out from the VW.

Kilkenny switched off the Mustang’s engine and set the parking brake. ‘Having a little morning tailgate, I see.’

Grin sat in the open door of his van with his legs dangling out. Kilkenny could see a thin layer of mud covering his hiking boots. With one hand, Grin held out a well-worn canvas tote bag. ‘Nothing but Mother Nature’s finest. Have a taste.’

Grin’s harvest contained a variety of nuts, wildflowers, and berries, some of which Kilkenny had a difficult time identifying. ‘Did you get all this tromping around in the Arb this morning?’

‘Naw, it’s still early in the season, though I did find a few goodies out there. Most of this comes from my favorite bulk munchy store. My little nature walks are pretty much for the soul until mid-May.’

Kilkenny dug into the bag and pulled out a handful of dried fruit and nuts.‘I’m looking forward to harvesting that strawberry patch near my grandfather’s barn.’

‘Just remember me when that crop comes in.’

‘Will do,’ Kilkenny agreed as he bit into a dried apricot.

Grin and Kilkenny ate quietly, enjoying the earlymorning calm before the working world forced them indoors. Kilkenny pulled out a thermos of juice from his workout bag, splitting the last two cups with his friend.

As the clock approached eight, the MARC parking lot began to fill with other employees, including Nolan’s father. The elder Kilkenny parked his red Ford Explorer nearby and walked over. ‘Morning, boys, I see you’re enjoying the sun on this glorious day.’

‘You bet. Care for some organic munchies?’

Sean peered into Grin’s bag and, finding nothing that he could identify as food, returned it. ‘No thanks. When you have your heart set on a chocolate cream-filled doughnut, granola just won’t do. Actually, to change the subject, have you had much luck tracking those strange signals on the network?’

Nolan shook his head.‘Not much, but Grin and I have a few theories about what’s causing it.’

Grin picked up on Nolan’s lead. ‘It’s really a strange phenomenon. For the past few weeks, we’ve been picking up this intermittent signal traffic. It’s like someone’s on the line, running inside our own transmissions. It might just be some signal rebounding that we’re getting over Nolan’s high-speed data line, but I haven’t been able to nail it down yet.’

Nolan drained the last of his juice and snapped the cup back on the thermos bottle.‘Fortunately, when Kelsey designed this experiment, she anticipated that we might want to monitor performance at various points in the process for troubleshooting and fine-tuning. Grin and I plan to check the signal traffic at several different points to see if we can isolate the source of the anomaly.’

‘Sounds like a reasonable plan,’ Sean agreed. ‘Are these signals dangerous to any of the other equipment?’

Grin shook his head. ‘No, not that I can see. The signals are low-voltage ones, like the rest of our communications traffic, so we’re not dealing with a power spike that could do some real damage. Nolan’s processor seems to be fine, same with the Cray. I’d write something like this off as an open data connection to the network, but there aren’t any that I can find, and campus sure hasn’t billed us for any time. It’s just one of those strange puzzles that drives you to solve them just for the sake of solving them.’

‘Well, you boys can keep chasing these anomalies as long as it doesn’t interfere with our project schedules.’

‘It shouldn’t, Dad. Grin and I are going to spend a couple hours this morning jury-rigging a laptop to act as signal filter on our network lines. When it pops up again, we should be able to isolate it.’

‘Sounds like a good plan, just don’t let it turn into a sacred quest. I’m speaking from experience in dealing with obsessive problems,’ Sean Kilkenny admitted with an embarrassed smile. ‘I recall once that Nolan and I nearly tore down my Jaguar because of this annoying rattle. It turns out that I took the car out only on sunny days, when I’d wear sunglasses and set my regular ones on the dashboard. My own glasses were rattling right there in front of me, in plain view. I couldn’t believe it.’

Kilkenny and Grin spent the first few hours of the morning jury-rigging a laptop computer to act as a signal filter for monitoring the network lines inside the MARC lab. When they finished, a bundle of thin wires fed out from a port in the rear of the laptop to the network switchboard at the base of the Cray. The duo then returned to their regular duties, waiting to see if the anomaly resurfaced.

‘Nolan, you got a second?’

Kilkenny saved the file he was working on and turned toward Grin’s station. ‘Yeah, what’s up?’

Grin tapped on the network diagnostics monitor. ‘Our anomaly has returned, and I’m up to my eyeballs with something over here. Can you try to pinpoint it?’

‘Sure thing, boss.’

Kilkenny tapped the space bar on the laptop and brought the portable computer out of its energy-saving hibernation.

The laptop passively scanned each of the network lines, much like picking up a second phone to listen in on a conversation. The first signal Kilkenny locked into was the internal communications line between the Cray and the optical processor. A window popped up in one corner of the flat active-matrix color screen displaying the same information currently shown on the Cray’s monitor.

‘Well, that one’s my project.’

Kilkenny instructed the monitoring program to filter out the first signal and to continue scanning the remaining lines. The next few lines were either unused or carrying network updates, which appeared as intermittent signal traffic, but not the type of anomalies that they were experiencing. Kilkenny moved on to the next line, which displayed a system log-in screen for an underground Ann Arbor Web server.

Kilkenny just shook his head in disbelief. ‘Guess what, Grin? It looks like some hotshot is using the university’s network to surf the Net.’

‘You’re kidding me. I wonder how that got bounced all the way up here.’

‘Well, I’m going to isolate the line so we can trace it back.’ Kilkenny filtered the line from the network bundle.

‘Hey, Nolan. That squirrelly signal we’re chasing just disappeared. You want to check that line again?’

Kilkenny switched the line filter off and on several times, and each time the mysterious signal reappeared and then disappeared.

‘Well, it looks like this is our anomaly,’ Kilkenny agreed. ‘I thought for sure we’d find something echoing across the line from the optical processor. Still, it seems strange that campus would route a signal up here; we are a little out of the way. In any event, Kelsey will be happy that her processor isn’t causing the problem.’

Grin walked over and sat beside Kilkenny. ‘I’ll be damned. How’d he tickle an outside line from campus?’

‘I take it that that’s not supposed to happen very easily?’

‘Hell no, or we’d have every student with a modem logging into the network and making long-distance calls for free.’ Grin leaned back in his chair and grabbed the phone off the lab bench. ‘Outside lines are accessible only to the system administrator. All other communications are regulated within the network. If this isn’t Carl, the people down on campus are going to be very annoyed.’

Grin dialed the number of his counterpart at the university’s Main Computing Center, Carl Moynes. The phone rang several times before Moynes’s deep voice filled the receiver. ‘Computing Center.’

‘Yo, Carl. Grin here up at MARC. We’ve got a little problem you might be able to help us out with. You got a few minutes?’

‘I’ll make the time,’ Moynes agreed cheerfully. ‘What can I do for you, old buddy?’

Grin punched a button and switched the phone into speaker mode. ‘Carl, I’m putting you on the speaker so my compadre Nolan Kilkenny can listen in.’

‘Fine by me,’ Moynes replied.

Grin smiled; Carl Moynes was a good man. ‘We’ve been tracking a peculiar signal on the network lines for the past few weeks, a real odd one. We originally thought it was something rebounding from that new processor we’re testing.’

‘I’ve been reading about that, a very radical piece of hardware. How’s that going anyway?’

‘The processor?’ The question caught Grin off guard. ‘It’s fine, but back to our problem. We wired up a signal skimmer so we could take a look at what’s passing over the lines, and we’ve found something that might interest you.’