Now we get to it, Maceo Encarnación thought. “From what you tell me, it seems unlikely she has survived, even if Bourne somehow managed to get her to a hospital, which he hasn’t. I have people looking; they would know if she had been admitted.”
“Bourne has resources. A private doctor, maybe.”
“From how you described the wound, no doctor could have saved her. She would have needed a full-fledged trauma team, and even then...” He allowed the thought to run its own course. “Forget her. That chapter is closed.”
Nicodemo was brooding. “But not on Bourne.”
“Of course not.”
“I don’t understand why you didn’t leave me in Mexico City to deal with him.”
“Deal with him?” Maceo Encarnación echoed. “I listened to you; we tried that once. You see how that turned out. Rebeka is dead and Bourne is still at large. Now one must create a real plan, execute it, at the conclusion of which Bourne dies. This is precisely what has been put in place. Anunciata is seeing to it.”
In many ways Dick Richards’s skills mimicked the finest watchmaker’s.
The difference was that he worked in the world of cyberspace, a place of infinite area, but without dimension. He had managed to quarantine his own Trojan and was now accessing the Core Energy network, where he had stored the preliminary codes that would activate the potent virus he had inserted like a drop of ink into its cyber heart of ones and zeros. Those codes were too complex even for his memory, and there was no way he would risk being caught with a rogue thumb drive or SD card. Besides, the attack had to seem to come from outside Treadstone, traced back to the Chinese. He could only seed the false ISP trail with a code that originated outside the Treadstone intranet.
Despite the canned air emanating from the vents in the ceiling, sweat rolled down his sides from under his arms, slid down the rills of his bent back as he sat, tensed, filled with a tremulous excitement, but also a terrible dread.
This was his big test, his ticket to the major leagues of hacking. When he pulled this off, he would prove indispensable to Tom Brick and Core Energy. This, more than anything, was what he wanted. Working for the government was soul-destroying. Other people took credit for his breakthroughs, he received a puny salary, and the president treated him like a pet dog, occasionally stroked but never allowed up on the furniture where his human masters sat in daily judgment. His transfer to Treadstone had unexpectedly improved his lot. Though Soraya and, to some extent, Peter treated him with suspicion and contempt, he could not blame them. He had been sent to spy on them. He deserved their suspicion and contempt. But he also saw their willingness to give him the credit due him, if he could prove himself loyal.
True, Brick often treated him like a dog, but sometimes not. And he paid a shitload more than the government ever did—or could. Up until now, Richards had been trying to be faithful to three masters, but the tension was tearing him apart. He could no longer live this way. He needed to choose sides.
But what about Peter? How had he managed to infiltrate Core Energy? How did he know about Tom Brick? If Richards was to choose a side, then he had to decide what to do about Peter. Should he tell Peter everything he knew about Brick, Core Energy, and the secret entity that did its bidding? Should he, on the other hand, reveal Peter’s real identity to Brick? Prior to working at Treadstone, the choice would have been a no-brainer. But now Treadstone had stymied him. He had to admit he liked it here. Unaccountably, the atmosphere was more like the private sector. There was little or no red tape, the co-directors saw to that.
On the horns of this dilemma, he continued his work, but his mind was elsewhere, so much so that he almost missed it. Some instinct, lodged in the most primitive part of his brain, the part humans counted on for survival, sent out a silent alarm that jerked him back to full concentration. Something was wrong. Immediately, he took his hands off the computer keyboard. Staring at the code he had been typing in, he felt an icy chill crawling down his spine. For a long time then, he did nothing but stare at the screen. Slowly, he drew his hands back from their position over the keyboard to rest them in his lap, as if he were a penitent, praying.
The normal sounds of the Treadstone office—hushed voices, the hum of machines, the careful tread of shoes—came to him as if from a great distance. His mobile phone ringing made him start. He picked it up.
“Richards, it’s Anderson.”
His guilty heart leaped into his throat, closing it down for a terrifying moment. “Yessir,” he eventually managed to croak.
“Made any progress?”
“The, uh, the Trojan is quarantined, sir.”
“Good deal.”
“It just...it’s proving more difficult than I imagined to get rid of. There’s...There seems to be some kind of mechanism embedded inside it.” The moment he said this, he knew it was a mistake.
“What the hell does that mean?” Anderson thundered.
He had been trying to absolve himself of any culpability when the virus struck, but it seemed he had only inflamed Anderson.
“Goddammit, Richards. Answer me!”
“I’m dealing with the problem, sir. It’s just going to take more time than I had expected.”
“Now that the Trojan’s quarantined, don’t mess with it further. I don’t want something else to be triggered.”
Oh, you fool, Richards berated himself.
“Your number one priority is to find out how that fucking thing jumped our firewall, got me?”
“Yessir.”
“I’ll be back at HQ in an hour. I want an answer by then.”
Richards’s hand was trembling as he cut the connection. He tried to calm himself, but his mind was racing so fast that gathering his thoughts was like trying to herd cats. Pushing back his chair, he got up and, on anxiety-stiffened legs, stalked to the closest window. He stood with his forehead pressed against the cool glass. He felt as if he were burning up with fever. It seemed to him now that he had leaped into the abyss without thinking anything through, without any understanding of his capacity to bear up under a life dominated by mendacity and duplicity.
With a barely audible moan, he lurched away from the window and stumbled back to his desk. He now had what seemed an impossible deadline. Anderson would be back in less than an hour. By that time, he needed to understand his situation and find a way out.
Back at his desk, he ran his hands through his hair while he stared at the screen. What was wrong? There was the most minute lag between his pressing the keys and seeing the code on the screen. Changing screens, he checked the hardware through the Control Panel, but no recent additions had been made. Device Manager produced the same results. But when he checked the computer’s CPU usage, he saw an unusual spike upward that dated back to the time he had started working. He felt a sudden rush of blood to his head. API based keyloggers added to the CPU usage as they polled and recorded each keystroke.
That bastard Anderson, Richards thought fiercely. He had an API based keylogger inserted into the software, which picked up every keystroke Richards made. The whole thing was premeditated, a setup. But how? There was only one answer: Peter Marks. Marks had betrayed him, had had no faith that he might give Tom Brick up to Treadstone.
A great rage filled Richards. He shook with the force of it. He looked one last time at the screen of incomplete virus code and thought: Fuck it. Fuck him. Fuck them all.
Without another thought, he disabled the keylogger software and continued with his code, working without even seeming to breathe. In the back of his mind, he prayed Anderson would show up early.
Almost fifty minutes later, six minutes before Anderson was due to arrive, Richards set the last section of the code in place. All he needed to do now was press the enter key and the virus would flood the onsite Treadstone servers, bringing down the entire network, freezing the communication channels, fouling the operating system itself.