The End Game (28 page)

48

Chelsea, New York City

“So what the hell do we do with them?”

I leant back against the back of the banquette, interlaced my fingers behind my head and blew out some of the frustration, anger and impatience festering inside of me.

The three of us were sitting around a corner table in the large brasserie-style restaurant across the street from Gigi’s apartment, printouts of the hand-drawn sketches of Frank Fullerton and Reed Corrigan that Deutsch had emailed Kurt staring implacably up at us.

I couldn’t take my eyes off Corrigan’s face. I couldn’t believe I finally knew what he looked like—well, thirty-odd years ago, but still. It was something. It was more than something.

It would lead me to him.

It had to.

Kurt and Gigi didn’t know where the portraits had come from. Kurt hadn’t been privy to that side of the story when I first roped him into helping me track down Corrigan. I had firewalled it off from him, just as I’d kept his involvement secret from all the others who’d been involved. Right now, though, given how much they’d stuck their necks out for me and how deeply enmeshed we were in everything that was going on, I felt I owed them the full story.

I told them “L+D” were Leo and Daphne Sokolov. Leo was a brilliant Russian scientist who’d invented a incredible, world-changing piece of technology while working for a secret lab in Russia back when the USSR was still intact. With commendable insight, he decided his invention was too dangerous to hand over to his Soviet minders. He contacted the CIA and arranged for his defection, promising to hand over his invention to our government instead. What he didn’t tell them was that he’d already decided he didn’t trust them with it any more than he did the Soviets. Once they’d whisked him and his wife Daphne safely out of the Russia and brought him onto US soil, he also gave his CIA minders the slip. Leo and Daphne had lived in Queens in anonymity for over thirty years until an unfortunate outburst at an anti-Russian demonstration outside the Russian Consulate in Manhattan a while back had blown Leo’s cover.

I had been instrumental in rescuing him and Daphne from the Russian agents who wanted him and his technology. I also agreed that the technology was too dangerous to hand over to any government, even ours, and I got my connections at the Vatican to help me set them up with a new life outside the US. For that, Leo and Daphne were immensely grateful, and they hadn’t failed in expressing it before we parted company. We had another connection, too. Their CIA minders had been none other than Reed Corrigan and Frank Fullerton.

Hence the drawings—portraits of what Corrigan and Fullerton looked like back in 1980, when Leo and Daphne last saw them. I didn’t know who had drawn them up, but they were good, clean sketches showing two clearly identifiable faces.

Kurt shook his head. “Well, the obvious thing would have been to digitize them, then compare key features with the CIA employee database. But they closed that door.”

“I doubt you could have got anywhere near the full roster anyway,” I said. “And these guys are probably off the books.”

Gigi threw up her hands. “I hate this. Ever since I got into their deep archive, they completely reconfigured the firewalls. I can’t clone a valid authorization; I can’t create a new one. I’ll get in eventually, but I need more time.”

“Which is not something we have,” I said.

It was supremely frustrating. I had him, had as good a forensic sketch artist’s rendition of a suspect I’d ever seen, but I had nothing against which to run it.

Kurt tapped the drawings with two fingers. “Why doesn’t your friend at the Bureau run with them?” he asked. “She could give them to your boss, get him to show them to the CIA, say they’re from a witness they’ve got in protective custody. That’ll get them worked up.”

“No,” I said, “they’ve stonewalled every request I put through from day one. The party line is that Reed Corrigan does not exist. Period.”

“Bastards.”

“Yep,” I said.

Gigi waved her favorite waiter over—Theo, an aspiring stand-up with a slightly psychotic gaze who, he gleefully informed us, was excited about an audition he’d just done for a part on
Louie
—and ordered us some fresh coffees and three slices of an apparently life-altering raspberry cheesecake.

I gave my face a good rub and looked across the restaurant. It was packed, as usual. Was there a single trendy eatery in Manhattan that wasn’t? The morning espressos and croissants had long given way to after-work beers and mojitos. Watching the constant tide of people gliding by outside the restaurant, on their way home from work, maybe tired, maybe fulfilled, maybe looking forward to a nice meal and a cuddle in front of the TV, maybe about to spend an evening alone trawling through social media apps on their phones while eating cereal out of a box, I couldn’t help but envy them, all of them. Normalcy of whatever kind felt like such an alien concept for me right now. This obsessive search had taken over my life and flipped it over and inside out.

I thought of my dad, of my mom and Faye, and of Tess. Whatever negative effects Dad’s death had on me, it had also ensured that I didn’t marry young. In fact, the more I thought about it, the more now felt like the right time to talk to Tess about tying the knot.

Though now would have to wait. Perhaps indefinitely.

As Theo brought the coffees and cake, I turned and noticed Gigi giving me a mischievous little self-satisfied grin. I looked at her curiously, but she just held my gaze and said, “Jake Daland.”

Which totally threw me, since I’d never mentioned him to her or to Kurt. I almost did the full Kramer double-take—eyes popping, electrocuted limbs, the works.

She grinned. “What? Did you really think we wouldn’t know about something like that?” Then, off my continuing surprise, she said, “Settle down, G-Boy, and lend me your ears. ’Cause Daland might just be the key to your salvation.”

The velvet rope outside the nightclub’s entrance had only just been set up and nobody was lining up as yet. It was still early for a Manhattan night spot, which suited Sandman fine. He wasn’t there to party. At least, not in the traditional sense, and only if he couldn’t avoid it.

There were two men milling around outside, two bouncers in black suits over black shirts and black ties to add a splash of black, the whole look accessorized with the ubiquitous clipboards and earbuds. One was beefy, the other supersized—easily two hundred and fifty pounds. Sandman was not in the least intimidated. Like any fighter worth his salt, he knew that size really didn’t matter.

He noted the security cam over the club’s entrance as he walked up to them and flicked a small gesture to the bigger of the two to come aside for a chat. The bouncer seemed put out and somewhat bemused by the request; he shuffled over on beefy, lumbering feet that couldn’t have moved with less interest.

Sandman flashed him a Homeland Security ID card—a real one—then pulled out his phone and showed him a screen grab of the two targets that seemed to be accompanying Reilly as he left the club.

“I’m trying to ID these two,” he told him. “They were here Saturday night. You know who they are?”

The bouncer tilted his face to one side and grimaced as he gave Sandman a once-over that was overflowing with disdain. “Dude, seriously. This club—it’s like a church. Sacred ground, sanctuary. People who come here, they know they can be who they want or what they want without anyone giving them a hard time. You understand what I’m saying, brother?”

Sandman shrugged with a bored roll of his eyes. “I think you’re saying you don’t plan to be helpful in this matter.”

The big man moved in closer and was suddenly right in his face. “I guess I’m saying you need to—”

His face froze on that syllable, then quickly morphed into a shock of wide eyes and round lips as he howled with pain from the testicle lock Sandman had him in. The assassin squeezed harder, almost sending the bouncer to his knees.

The big man tried to push Sandman off him, but Sandman had already calmly pocketed his phone and used his other hand to stab the bouncer’s throat with a quick jab using the outstretched tips of his fingers, causing the bouncer to gasp for air and eliminating all resistance.

The other bouncer saw this and darted toward them to help his buddy. Sandman didn’t react and waited until the man was within range before spinning around and whipping out a kick, catching him just above the knee. He didn’t intend to cripple the man, he just needed to tame him, which was why he spared his fragile cartilage and tendons. The bouncer fell to the ground without realizing how much long-term suffering he’d been spared.

“Let’s try this again, shall we?” Sandman asked. “I need to know if you and your friend here know these two. If you don’t, I’d appreciate a friendly introduction to the joint’s manager who might be able to help me with my enquiry. A copy of Saturday night’s CCTV footage would also be useful as I imagine they grabbed a cab and it would help to know which one it was. Does that sound doable to you?”

He really didn’t need him to reply.

“How do you know about Daland?” I asked, still stumped.

Gigi glanced at Kurt, then gave me a relaxed grin. “I like to know who I’m working with. And the CIA might have shut me out, but the FBI’s servers . . .
pu-lease
.”

I was still trying to process the relevance. “You know about this guy?”

Gigi glanced at Kurt again, this time a bit less comfortably, then turned back to me. “He came on to me once. At Comic-Con. Back in his Hidden Lynx days. The guy’s a total sleaze. I mean, he was dressed as Aquaman. Talk about lame. I had to pry his greasy claws off my hips.”

I appreciated Gigi’s honesty, but needed a cogent plan, not hacker crew reminiscences. “Again, Gigi—the point is?”

There was that grin again. “Oh, padawan, you still have so much to learn. You guys think you took him down? You only scratched the surface. They’re not called onion networks for nothing. The top layers might have been peeled away and dropped in the trash compactor, but there are deeper layers underneath it, built from an entirely different architecture, and they’re still fully functional. One of them’s called Erebus and that’s the one we need to get into.”

I knew a little about Erebus. The name was from Greek mythology, the god of darkness and shadows. It was a deep darknet site that had attained almost mythical status with our cyber geeks at the Bureau. As far as I knew, no one knew who’d built it or who ran it.

“Erebus?” I asked. “That’s Daland?”

“Yes. It’s the dark underbelly of Maxiplenty. The VIP area. We’re talking deep, deep darknet. But neither of us can access it. No one from the outside can. It’s so watertight it’s genius. You need a personal invitation from a site maven. On top of that, they use a three-stage access sequence. Each and every access permission is generated by multi-level cryptography starting with an asymmetric keyset based on a one-time algorithm. The unencrypted code is then used as the key for a symmetric cypher which, when combined with a separate code sent via text message, results in a single-use, time-sensitive password. The network is impossible to hack using a brute force attack. There are no back doors. The virtual server hubs are constantly moving around the world—Estonia, Chile, Lebanon, you name it—mirroring themselves without trace then overwriting the origin server’s code so it vanishes into thin air. Even if you could locate a server, the core code will have moved before you get a chance to clone it or get inside and upload a worm. It’s a thing of beauty, really. Daland is one hell of a programmer.”

I may have caught three words of it. Kurt didn’t exactly look overjoyed either, but—I’m sure—that was for entirely different reasons.

“Don’t worry, Snake. I appreciate relativity—in both its general and specific incarnations—but that doesn’t mean I want to screw Einstein’s brains out.”

I wasn’t following any of this. “Gigi, seriously. What the hell are you talking about? How does that help us?”

Gigi seemed to notice that Kurt’s eyes were now alive with possibility.

“I swear to God, Snake, I thought you were dead,” she told him, in a weird voice that I took to be some kind of fair approximation of one of the actors in that movie. Then, in her normal voice, she added, “Tell him, Sensei.”

Kurt smiled. “We need to speak to Daland. He can tell us how to get into Erebus. Then we can post the sketches and ask if anyone recognizes them. Maybe offer a reward. Or just see if there’s anyone there with a grudge against them. By the sounds of it, these assholes might have one or two out there.”

“Why would anyone on Erebus know them?” I asked.

“Seriously, G-boy,” Gigi said, “you don’t know who hangs out in the deep levels of the Darknet?”

“Drug dealers, hired guns, human traffickers, child porn sickos? Friends of yours?” I asked.

“Well, them too,” Kurt said. “But it’s also where you’ll find retired Eastern Bloc spies with shitty pensions, wet-work contractors, ex-Special Forces operatives looking to monetize their antisocial skill sets, drug cartel lieutenants with an eye on climbing up the food chain, gallant security consultants for noble African dictators . . . you name it. And if there’s one place where someone may have come across these two, it’s in Erebus.”