He stood in the lobby while he waited, a little wobbly on his knees from the muscle relaxers, but he felt good.
He actually found himself more relaxed now than he had been the day before.
“What the hell, Wicks?”
Todd jerked back into reality, spun around, and found himself face-to-face with an angry-looking Gavin Biery. Behind him, the two security men stood at the reception desk.
Shit, shit, shit.
“Wha-what’s wrong?”
Biery said, “You know what’s wrong! You always bring doughnuts! Where are my damn doughnuts?”
Todd sighed all the air out of his lungs, but he felt sweat forming on the back of his neck under his suit. He forced a toothy smile. “It’s almost lunchtime, Gavin. Usually I’m here a lot earlier.”
Biery replied, “Where is it written that doughnuts are just for breakfast? I’ve enjoyed many a bear-claw lunch, and more than my share of apple fritters for dinner.”
Before Todd could think of a funny reply, Gavin said, “C’mon up to IT and let’s take a look at the new toy you brought me.”
Wicks and Biery stepped out of the elevator on the second floor and headed toward Biery’s office. Wicks would have loved to have dropped off the drive and then left immediately, but he always went up to IT to talk shop for a few minutes with Gavin and some of the other Hendley IT staff. He did not want today to appear any different than normal, so he agreed to the quick visit to the computer department.
They’d made it only a few yards when Todd saw a tall young man with dark hair heading toward them.
“Hey, Gav. I was looking for you.”
Biery said, “I leave my department for five minutes a week, and that’s when I get a visitor. Jack, this is Todd Wicks, one of our hardware vendors. Todd, this is Jack Ryan.”
Todd Wicks extended his hand, had already begun greeting the young man, when he realized he was face-to-face with the son of the President of the United States.
Instantly panic washed through his body, his knees locked, and his back stiffened.
“Nice to meet you,” Ryan said.
But Wicks was not listening. His mind was racing with the realization that he was doing a job for Chinese intelligence against the workplace of the son of a man who went to war with the Chinese in his first term, and was now back in the White House.
He stammered out a “Nice to meet you” before Biery told Ryan he would call him when he was free.
Jack Ryan, Jr., headed back to the elevator.
As Gavin and Todd continued up the hall, Todd Wicks put his hand against the wall to steady himself.
“Crap, Wicks. You okay?”
“Yeah. Fine.” He recovered a little. “Just a little starstruck, I guess.”
Gavin just laughed.
They sat down in the office and Biery poured coffee for them both.
“You didn’t tell me the President’s son works with you.”
“Yeah. ’Bout four years or so. I don’t make a point of saying anything about it. He doesn’t like a lot of attention.”
“What does he do here?”
“Same stuff most all the other folks who aren’t in IT do.”
“Which is what, exactly?”
Biery said, “Financial management, currency trading. Jack’s a good egg. He’s got his dad’s brain.”
Wicks was not going to tell Biery he’d voted for Ed Kealty in the last election.
“Interesting.”
“You really are starstruck. Hell, you look like you just saw a ghost.”
“What? No. No. Just surprised. That’s all.”
Biery looked at him for another moment, and Todd did his best impersonation of someone who was calm, cool, and collected. He caught himself wishing he’d popped a fourth Valium before getting out of his car. He tried to think of a different line of small talk, but fortunately he did not have to.
Biery opened the plastic box containing the hard drive and said, “There she is.”
“Yes, that’s it.”
Gavin took the board out of its protective sheath and looked it over. “What was the deal with the delay?”
“Delay?” Wicks asked nervously.
Biery just cocked his head. “Yeah. We ordered this on the sixth. Usually you guys get off-the-shelf items to us in a week.”
Todd shrugged. “It was on back order. You know me, buddy, I get it to you as fast as I can.”
Biery just looked at the salesman. He smiled while he shut the box. “‘Buddy’? What, you trying to butter me up? Sell me a few mouse pads or something?”
“No. Just being friendly.”
“An ass-kissing is a poor substitute for a box of doughnuts.”
“I’ll remember that. I hope your system wasn’t inconvenienced by the back order.”
“No, but I will install the hard drive myself in the next day or two. We need the upgrade.”
“That’s great. Really great.”
Biery looked up, away from the component that Wicks knew could get him thrown in prison. He asked, “You feeling okay?”
“Fine. Why?”
Biery cocked his head. “You seem a little out of it. I can’t tell if you need a vacation or if you just got back from one.”
Todd smiled now. “Funny you say that. I’m taking the family down to Saint Simons Island for a few days.”
Gavin Biery suspected his vendor had started his vacation a little early in his head.
Biery finished his meeting with Todd Wicks, and within twenty minutes found himself sitting in the conference room off Gerry Hendley’s office. Where the other seven men in the room looked crisp and clean, Gavin looked like he’d climbed the stairwell up to the ninth floor on his hands and knees. His pants and shirt were wrinkled, except where his significant paunch pulled them tight, his hair was unkempt, and his baggy eyes made Ryan think of an old Saint Bernard.
Jack told Biery about the NSA’s discovery of the connection between Iran and the drone attacks, going into detail about how the pilfered data was exfiltrated to a command server at the Qom University of Technology.
Instantly Biery declared, “I’m not buying that for a minute.”
Rick Bell said, “You’re not? Why not?”
“Think about it. Whoever managed to break into the secure Air Force network and exfiltrate the data back out would most definitely hide the origin of the attack. There is no way in hell the Iranians would have put a line of code in the virus that sent data to a drop point in their own borders. They could put that server anywhere on the planet and then use other means to get the data there.”
“So you don’t think Iran had anything to do with this?”
“No. Somebody wants us to think they did.”
“But,” asked Ryan, “if it wasn’t the Iranians, who—”
“It was the Chinese. No doubt in my mind. They are the best, and something like this took the best.”
“Why the Chinese?” It was Caruso asking. “The Russians are good at cyberstuff, too. Why can’t this be them?”
Gavin explained: “Here is a good general rule of thumb for you guys to keep in mind when it comes to cybercrime and cyberespionage. The Eastern Europeans are damn good. The Russians, Ukrainians, Moldovans, Lithuanians, and so on. They have tons of great technical colleges, and they train computer programmers of high quality and in high numbers. And then, when these kids get out of school… there are no jobs over there. No jobs over there except in the underworld. Some get recruited in the West. As a matter of fact, Romanian is the second most spoken language at Microsoft’s headquarters. But still, that’s a small subset of the total number of the East and Central European talent pool. Most of the rest go into cybercrime. Stealing banking info and hacking into corporate accounts.