Текст книги "Gideon's Corpse"

Автор книги: Lincoln Child

Соавторы: Douglas Preston
сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 19 (всего у книги 24 страниц)

61

After crossing the Texas Panhandle, they stopped near the Oklahoma border so Fordyce could pick up a cigarette-lighter converter for the laptop’s AC adapter. On the long trip across Texas, Gideon had explained to the agent how he’d deduced that Blaine was the one behind the terrorist plot, and in turn Fordyce told him how he’d figured out that Gideon was innocent and the security director, Novak, was involved.

“What I don’t know,” Fordyce said, “is whether Novak was part of the plot from the beginning, or if he was paid for just the frame job.”

“From your description of his house, it seems like he’s had more money than he should for some time now,” Gideon replied. “My bet is that he’s one of the original players.” He paused. “No wonder Blaine was willing to help me, a fugitive on the lam. He probably wasn’t too happy that Alida became involved, but he must have figured that if I stayed on the loose, I’d prove just another distraction for the authorities.”

He paused again. “What I can’tfigure out is Blaine himself. Why the hell would he, of all people, want to set off a nuke in Washington? I just don’t see the motivation. He’s a patriot, an ex-spy.”

“You’d be surprised how people can change. Or what their motivations might be.”

“Alida told me Blaine was denied a Nobel Prize because of his past. Perhaps that embittered him.”

“Perhaps. And perhaps we’ll find the answer on this laptop.” Fordyce plugged in the computer and pressed the POWER button.

From the driver’s seat, Gideon looked over as the hard disk trundled, various start-up messages flashed by, then the login screen appeared.

Gideon muttered, “Like I said. Password-protected.”

“O ye of little faith,” Fordyce retorted.

“Can you crack it?”

“That remains to be seen. Look at the splash screen, it’s running the NewBSD variant of UNIX—an odd choice for a novelist.”

“Don’t forget, he’s ex-MI6. Who the hell knows what software they run?”

“True. But I doubt this is Blaine’s working machine.” He pointed at the laptop’s screen. “Check out that version number: NewBSD 2.1.1. This OS is at least six years old.”

“Is that bad?”

“It might be good—the security won’t be as strong. Didn’t you see any other computers in his office?”

“I didn’t hang around casing the joint. I just grabbed the first one I saw.”

Fordyce nodded. Then he pulled his BlackBerry from his pocket and began pressing buttons.

“Who are you calling?” Gideon asked.

“I’m accessing the mainframe at FBI Crypt. I’m going to need a few tools to do this job properly.”

Gideon waited while Fordyce typed a laborious series of commands. Then, with a grunt of satisfaction, the agent attached a flash memory stick to the BlackBerry’s USB port. “I can boot into half a dozen operating systems with this gizmo,” he said, tapping the memory stick. “Thank God this laptop’s got USB.”

“What next?” Gideon asked.

“I’m going to run a dictionary attack on Blaine’s login password.”

“Right.”

“If it isn’t too long or obscure, and if the total exhaust time on the OS password monitor is within reason, maybe we’ll catch a break.”

Gideon glanced over dubiously. “Blaine’s no dummy.”

“True. But that doesn’t mean he’s technically savvy.” Fordyce snugged the flash drive into one of the laptop’s USB ports and rebooted the machine. “This little honey can try two hundred and fifty thousand passwords a second. Let’s see just how paranoid Simon Blaine really is.”

For the next ninety minutes, Gideon drove the Jeep at precisely seventy-nine miles per hour, passing Elk City, then Clinton, then Weatherford. The sun would soon be setting, and a starry sky would fill the night dome of the prairie. As they neared Oklahoma City, without progress, Gideon began to feel increasingly restless. Fordyce, too, was growing impatient, peering at the screen and muttering under his breath. Finally, with a curse, he yanked the flash drive from the laptop’s slot and powered down the machine. “Okay,” he growled. “Score one for Blaine.”

“So we’re screwed?” Gideon asked.

“Not yet we’re not.” When the laptop rebooted and the login prompt appeared, Fordyce rattled off a quick blast of keystrokes:

LOGIN: root

PASSWORD: ****

Immediately a storm of text scrolled up the screen.

“Bingo!” Fordyce said.

Gideon looked at him. “Did you get into his account?”

“No.”

“Then what good is it?”

“I got into the system account. Just type rootfor both the login name and password and, presto, you’re super-user. You’d be amazed at how many people either don’t know enough or are too lazy to change the default system account passwords on these older UNIX systems.”

“Can you get into his account or his files from there?”

Fordyce shook his head. “No, I can’t. But maybe I don’t need to.”

“Why the hell not?”

“Because as super-user, I can access the standard UNIX password file.” He plugged the flash drive back in, typed a long string of commands, then sat back in his seat, beaming. He pointed at the screen. “Check it out.”

Gideon looked over.

BlaineS:Heqw3EZU5k4Nd:413:adgfirkg

m~:/home/subdir/BlaineS:/bin/bash

“That’s his account name and password, the latter scrambled with DES.”

“Data encryption standard? I thought that couldn’t be cracked.”

Fordyce smiled.

Gideon frowned. “Uh-oh. Let me guess. The government built a back door into the encryption standard.”

“You didn’t hear it from me.”

For about ten minutes, Gideon drove while Fordyce typed, sometimes pausing to peer at the screen, now and then muttering under his breath. Finally, with a withering curse, he punched the back of the seat.

“No joy?” Gideon asked.

Fordyce shook his head. “I can’t break the DES algorithm. Blaine’s a lot more sophisticated than I thought. He or someone used a hardened DES variant. I’m totally stuck. I can’t think of anything else to do.”

The Jeep fell into silence.

“We can’t just give up,” Gideon said.

“You got any ideas?”

“We can try guessing the password.”

Fordyce rolled his eyes. “My dictionary attack just tried over a billion passwords in twelve common languages, including words, combinations of words, names, and place-names, not to mention a compilation of the million most commonly used passwords. It’s the best brute-force attack program in existence. And you think you can do better by guessing?” He shook his head.

“At least we know what notto guess at. Your dictionary attack is just a dumb program. We know a lot more about Simon Blaine than it does. Look, it’s worth a shot. We’ve already got his account name, right?” Gideon thought for a moment. “Maybe he used the name of one of the characters in his books. Get on your BlackBerry, find his website, and grab the names of any characters you find.”

Fordyce grunted approval and got to work.

A few minutes later, Fordyce had compiled a list of a dozen names. “Dirkson Auger,” he said, looking at the first on the list. “Blaine really gets paid for making up names like that?”

“Try it.”

Fordyce lifted the lid of the laptop. “I’ll try Dirkson first.”

Error.

“Auger.”

Error.

“Try them together,” Gideon suggested.

Error.

“Try the names again in turn, only backward this time.”

Error.

“Son of a bitch,” Fordyce muttered.

“Do the same with the rest.”

Before Gideon had driven another fifteen miles, Fordyce threw up his hands. “It’s hopeless,” he said. “I’ve tried them all. Even if it wasone of these names, if Blaine had any sense he’d have thrown in a few extra characters to add some noise, or changed letters to numbers, or something. There are just too many variants.”

“The thing about passwords,” Gideon said after a minute or two, “is that, unless you’re using a password manager, you have to remember the damn thing.”

“So?”

“So maybe it isn’t a character in a book. Maybe it’s the name of a real person. He wouldn’t be likely to forget that. And the most obvious person would be Alida.”

“Obvious, all right. Way too obvious.” Fordyce typed in the name anyway, tried a bunch of variations. “Nope.”

“Okay, so do what you suggested a minute ago. Change some of the letters to numbers or symbols.”

“I’ll change the lto a 1.” Fordyce tried this password. “Nada.”

“Try something else. Change the ito a dollar sign.”

More typing. “Strike three,” said Fordyce.

Gideon licked his lips. “I remember reading that most decent passwords are composed of two parts, a root and an appendage. Right? So add something on the end.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. Xyz, maybe. Or 00.”

Still more typing. “This is getting old, fast,” Fordyce told him.

“Wait a minute—I just thought of something. Blaine has a pet name for Alida. Miracle Daughter. He sometimes calls her MD. Try that after her name.”

Fordyce typed. “No go. Not in front, in back, or in the middle.”

Gideon sighed. Maybe Fordyce was right. “Just keep trying all the variables.” He concentrated on the road ahead while Fordyce typed quietly beside him, trying one variant after another.

Suddenly the FBI agent gave a whoop of triumph. Gideon glanced over and saw a fresh welter of text scrolling up the screen.

“You got in?” he asked in disbelief.

“Damn right!”

“What was the password?”

“ A1$daMdee. Kind of sentimental, don’t you think?” And Fordyce settled in to browse the computer’s files as the skyline of Oklahoma City came into view.

62

Twelve hours later they were crossing Tennessee. Fordyce slouched in the passenger seat, nose buried in the laptop. For twelve hours, he had been poring over it, browsing its many thousands of files, with no hits; nothing but book drafts, endless chapter revisions, correspondence, outlines, movie treatments, notes, and the like. The computer seemed completely and totally devoted to writing—and nothing else.

Gideon glanced over. “Any luck?” he asked for about the thirtieth time.

Fordyce shook his head.

“What about emails?”

“Nothing of interest. No exchanges with Chalker, Novak, or anyone else up at Los Alamos.” It seemed more and more likely, Fordyce reflected, that there had been another computer in Blaine’s office that Gideon had failed to grab. But he didn’t say anything.

In the background, Gideon was listening to NPR, which—as usual—was spewing a mixture of news and speculation about the impending nuke attack on Washington. The investigation had managed to keep the presumed N-Day—today—a secret, but the massive movements of troops, the evacuations of Washington, and all the other preparations in major cities around the country were garnering frantic media attention. The country was in a state of intense and escalating anxiety. People knew that things were coming to a head.

Anxiety and outrage ruled the airwaves. A parade of self-appointed experts, pundits, talking heads, and politicians offered their conflicting views, one after the other, excoriating the stalled investigation and offering their own insights. Everyone had a theory. The terrorists had abandoned their plan. The terrorists had shifted their attack to another major American city. The terrorists were lying low, biding their time. The terrorists were all dead from radiation poisoning. The liberals were to blame. The conservatives were to blame. The terrorists were communists, right-wingers, left-wingers, fundamentalists, anarchists, bankers, you name it.

It went on and on. Fordyce couldn’t help but listen with a kind of repulsed fascination, wanting to ask Gideon to turn it off yet unable to.

He glanced out at the road ahead of them. They were approaching the outer suburbs of Knoxville. He stretched again, looked back down at the laptop. It was incredible how many files a writer could generate. He was about three-quarters through them, and there was nothing to do but keep going.

As he opened the next file—something called “OPERATION CORPSE”—he was jolted by the sudden whoop of a siren and flashing lights in his rearview mirror. He glanced over at the speedometer and saw they were still going seventy-nine—in a zone where the speed limit had just dropped to sixty.

“Oh shit,” he muttered.

“No driver’s license,” said Gideon. “I’m dead.”

Fordyce laid aside the computer. The cop whooped his siren again. Gideon put on his blinker, slowed, eased over into the breakdown lane, and came to a stop.

“Play it by ear,” said Fordyce, his mind working fast. “Tell him you had your wallet stolen, that your name is Simon Blaine.”

The cop got out of his car, hitching up his pants. He was a state trooper, big and square, with a shaved head, knobby ears, mirrored shades, and a frown on his thick lips. He came up, tapped on the window. Gideon rolled it down.

The trooper leaned in. “License and registration?”

“Hello, Officer,” Gideon said politely. He reached over into the glove compartment and rummaged around, pulling out the registration. He handed it to the cop. “Officer, my wallet was stolen at a rest stop back there in Arkansas. As soon as I get back to New Mexico I’ll be getting a replacement license.”

A silence while the trooper glanced over the registration. “Are you Simon Blaine?”

“Yes, sir.”

Fordyce hoped to hell the guy wasn’t a fiction reader.

“You say you have no license?”

“I have a license, Officer, but it was stolen.” He had to engineer this one fast. He pitched his voice in a confidential tone. “My dad was a state trooper just like you, shot in the line of duty—”

“Please step out of the car, sir,” said the trooper, impassive.

Gideon moved to comply, fumbling with the doorknob while he continued talking. “Routine traffic stop, two guys, turned out they’d just robbed a bank…” He continued fumbling. “Damn door…”

“Out. Now.” The man brought his hand to rest on the butt of his sidearm, as a precaution.

Fordyce could see that this was already going the wrong way. He took out his shield and leaned over Gideon, showing it to the trooper. “Officer?” he said. “Special Agent Fordyce, FBI.”

The trooper, startled, took the shield and examined it through the mirrored shades. He handed it back to Fordyce, making a show of being unimpressed. Then he turned to Gideon once again. “I asked you to step out of the car.”

Fordyce was irritated. He opened his door and got out.

“You remain in the car, sir,” said the trooper.

“Excuse me,” said Fordyce, sharply. He walked around the front of the car and approached the trooper, staring at his shield. “Officer Mackie, is it? As I said, I’m a special agent from the DC field office.” He did not offer his hand. “My associate here is an FBI technical liaison. We’re traveling undercover. We’re both assigned to NEST, working on the terrorist case. I’ve given you my name and shown you my badge number, and you’re welcome to check out my affiliation. But I am sorry to say you are notgoing to see any ID from this gentleman and you’ll just have to accept that. Do you understand?”

He paused. Mackie said nothing.

“I said, do you understandme, Officer Mackie?”

The trooper remained unmoved. “I will check out your affiliation, thank you. May I have your identification back, sir?”

This wasn’t acceptable: the last thing Fordyce wanted was for Millard to learn he was two-thirds of the way across the country in Simon Blaine’s Jeep. But… If the man needed the identification back, it meant he hadn’t noted his name. Fordyce took another step toward the trooper and lowered his voice. “No more of this bullshit. We need to get to Washington, and we’re in a big-time hurry. That’s why we were speeding. Because we’re traveling undercover, we can’t slap a siren on the vehicle or travel with an escort. Call in my ID, check it out—no problem. You do that. But in case you haven’t been listening to the news, there’s a crisis going on, and my associate and I sure as hell can’t wait around while you check us out.” He paused, scanning the man’s face to see if he was penetrating that stolid exterior.

The state trooper remained more or less impassive. A tough one. Well, so be it. He raised his voice to a shout.

“And I might just add, Officer, that if your activities blow our cover, you’ll find yourself at the bottom of the Mariana Shit Trench. We’re on a critical mission and you’ve already wasted too much of our time.”

And now, finally, Fordyce saw the man’s truculent, brick-like face flush with fear and anger. “I’m just doing my job, sir, you’ve no business talking to me like that.”

Fordyce eased off abruptly, exhaled, laid a hand on the man’s shoulder. “I know. I’m sorry. We’re alljust doing our jobs—in a tough situation. I’m sorry for speaking to you sharply, Troop. We’re under a lot of stress here, as you might imagine. But we really do need to keep going. By all means, call in my name and badge number, check it out—but please don’t hold us up.”

The man straightened. “Yes, sir. I understand. I think we’re done here. I’m going to radio your plate number ahead and let everyone know you’ll be coming through on official law enforcement business, so you can exceed the speed limit at least as far as the state line.”

Fordyce gave his shoulder a squeeze. “Appreciate it, Troop. Very much.” He slipped back into the passenger seat and Gideon took off. After a moment, Fordyce said, “Father a state trooper shot in the line of duty? Fucking lame. Lucky I was around to pull your fat out of the fire.”

“You had the badge, I didn’t,” Gideon said. Then he added, grudgingly: “Still, you did good.”

“Damn right.” Fordyce frowned. “Lot of good it’s going to do us. We’re, what, seven hours out of DC and we still don’t have a clue what Blaine’s up to. This laptop is as clean as the driven snow.”

“There’s got to be something in there. You can’t plan a huge conspiracy like this and not have it leak into your work in some way.”

“What if we’re wrong? What if he’s innocent, after all?”

Gideon fell silent. Then he shook his head. “For personal reasons, a huge part of me wishes he was. But he’s behind this. He has to be. Nothing else makes sense.”

With a weary sense of futility, Fordyce went back to OPERATION CORPSE. He knew what he’d find, the same thing he’d found in all the other endless files: the straightforward work of a dedicated and prolific writer.

OPERATION CORPSE was a ten-page outline for a novel, apparently one Blaine had never written—at least, not by that title. Fordyce rubbed his eyes, began skimming the synopsis, then stopped. As he stared at the screen, he felt his heart just about do a flip. He blinked once, twice. Then he went back to the beginning and began again, more slowly this time.

When he reached the end, he looked over at Gideon. “Oh my God,” he said in a low voice. “You aren’t going to believe this.”

63

Gideon tried to focus on the road as Fordyce began to talk. “There’s a book proposal here, just ten pages. It’s titled OPERATION CORPSE.”

Gideon eased off the accelerator, slowing down to eighty so he could devote more attention to Fordyce. “A book proposal?”

“Yeah. An outline for a thriller.”

“About nuclear terrorists?”

“No. About smallpox.”

“Smallpox? What does that have to do with anything?”

“Just listen.” Fordyce paused, gathering his thoughts. “You need to understand some background first. The outline explains that, as a human disease, smallpox was completely wiped out in the wild back in 1977. All remaining viral cultures held in laboratories were destroyed… except for two. One is currently at the State Research Center of Virology and Biotechnology in Koltsovo, Russia. And the other is at USAMRIID, in—” Fordyce paused for effect—“Fort Detrick, Maryland.”

Gideon felt himself go cold. “No shit.”

“The outline tells the story of a gang that plans to steal the smallpox from Fort Detrick. They want to get their hands on it and threaten to release it—in order to blackmail the world. They want a hundred billion dollars and their own small country—an island in the Pacific. They plan to keep the smallpox as protection, a guarantee of sorts, on their island and live out their lives in luxury and comfort.”

“So far, I don’t see the connection.”

“The rub is howthey’re going to steal the smallpox: by creating a fake Islamic terrorist plot to detonate a nuke in DC.”

Gideon glanced at the agent. “Sink me.”

“And here’s the kicker: they fake the terrorist plot with an irradiated corpse—left in an apartment in New York City, made to look like it was killed in a radiation accident involving a nuclear bomb core. And the apartment is salted with phony evidence linking the man to radical Islamists and a jihadist terror cell.”

“Chalker,” Gideon said.

“Exactly. Not to mention a calendar with the intended date, and a burned map of Washington with potential targets.”

The wheels in Gideon’s mind began to turn. “Fort Detrick is only forty miles from Washington.”

Fordyce nodded. “Right.”

“So the threat to DC will have drawn off most of the soldiers at Fort Detrick.”

“Exactly,” said Fordyce. “Not only will the nuclear threat empty Fort Detrick of soldiers, but it’ll also strip away most of the security from USAMRIID, leaving the smallpox vulnerable.”

“Unbelievable,” said Gideon.

“In the outline, they have an inside contact who’s given them the codes to get into the vault where the virus is. They walk in, punch in the codes, open the biosafe holding the smallpox, take out a few frozen cultures, and walk out. The smallpox cultures are stored in these cryogenically sealed disks that are so small they can be hidden in your pocket.” Fordyce tapped the laptop. “It’s all here—in a book outline Blaine wrote six years ago. And get this: it says here the idea for the book was based on an actual covert operation launched by the British during World War Two, called Operation Mincemeat. British intelligence floated a corpse off the coast of Spain. Supposedly, it was the body of a high-level Brit officer drowned in a plane crash. In the pockets of the corpse were secret documents indicating that the Allies were going to invade Italy through Greece and Sardinia. But the whole thing was a plant—a scheme to misdirect the Germans from England’s true invasion plans. And it totally fooled the Germans, all the way up to Hitler himself.”

There was a brief silence as Gideon processed this. “British intelligence,” he murmured. “MI6. Just like Blaine.”

“The only difference,” Fordyce went on, “is that Chalker wasn’t a corpse.”

“Even alive, he was damn effective,” said Gideon. “Even a massive dose of radiation takes time to kill. They must’ve kidnapped him, kept him locked up, and performed God only knows what kind of brainwashing on him.”

“That dog crate in the lab we found,” Fordyce said. “It probably wasn’t for a dog, after all.”

“So those crazy rantings of Chalker about being kidnapped, experimented on, weren’t so crazy after all.” Gideon paused. “They framed him for being a jihadist—just like they framed me.”

Fordyce tapped at the keyboard. “Let me read you something. It says in this proposal that, since it’s been forty years since smallpox was seen in the wild, most people alive today have no resistance to it. It would scythe right through the human race. Check this out.”

Variola major, or smallpox, is considered by many epidemiologists to be the worst disease ever to afflict humankind. Depending on the strain, the mortality rate can run as high as one hundred percent. Variolais as infectious as the common cold and spreads like wildfire. Even those who survive are physically scarred for life and often blind as well.

Smallpox causes one of the most frightening and terrible deaths known. It commences with high fever, muscle pain, and vomiting. A rash develops, covering the body with hard, distended pustules, often forming on the tongue and palate. In its fulminating form, the pustules merge to form a single pustule-like covering to the victim’s entire body. The blood leaks out of the vessels into the muscles and organs, and the eyes fill up with blood and turn bright red. The symptoms of the disease are often accompanied by acute mental distress in which neurological changes cause the victim to suffer an overwhelming feeling of suffocating terror, a dread of impending doom. All too often, that fear becomes reality.

The World Health Organization has stated that a single case of smallpox appearing anywhere in the world would be a “worldwide medical emergency of the highest order” and would require “a complete and total quarantine of the infected region combined with an emergency ‘ring of vaccination’ program as containment. It seems likely that significant military force would be required to implement an effective quarantine of infected areas.”

When Fordyce finished reading there was silence in the car, the humming of the tires filling the space.

“So Blaine had an idea for a novel,” said Gideon. “He worked out all the details, wrote the proposal. It was going to make a terrific thriller. And then he realized it was too good to waste on a book. He decided to do it—for real.”

Fordyce nodded.

“I bet he went for it when he met Chalker and realized what a golden opportunity had just fallen into his lap. I mean, what better scapegoat for his irradiated corpse than a nuclear scientist at Los Alamos who’d converted to Islam?”

“Yes,” said Fordyce. “And another thing: I’d bet we’re dealing with a larger group here—not just Blaine. Novak’s in on it, and there must be others. This isn’t the kind of thing you can pull off solo.”

“You’re right. And I’ll bet one of those others is—or was—an airplane mechanic.”

“But here’s what I don’t get. Without a real nuke, how did they irradiate Chalker?”

Gideon considered this. “There are other ways. The most obvious would be with the radio-isotopes used in medical diagnoses.”

“That stuff’s easily available?”

“Not easily. But it is available to those with the right licenses. The thing is, medical isotopes aregenerally fission products of uranium or plutonium, the result of controlled criticality reactions. Of course, they’d have to calculate radioactive isotope ratios based on medical radioactivity, due to the fission yields driving these isotopic ratios.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“What I mean is, it could be done. You could fake a nuclear core accident by leaving traces of medical radio-isotopes in just the right ratios. Not only that, but medical radio-isotopes could have been used to irradiate Chalker, as well.”

“What about the U-235 they found on Chalker’s hands?” asked Fordyce.

“If you had an inside contact at Los Alamos—like Novak, say—that wouldn’t be difficult. All you’d need is a few nanograms. Someone could obtain that amount by simply swiping the tip of a gloved finger on a piece of U-235. The glove would bring away many nanograms of material that could then be transferred to Chalker’s hands with a mere handshake.”

“So why didn’t anyone consider the possibility this was faked?”

“It’s so improbable,” Gideon answered. “So…outré. Would you ever have guessed?”

Fordyce thought about this a moment. “Never.”

“Blaine must have rented that Queens apartment, supposedly for Chalker. No wonder Chalker said it wasn’t his place—chances were he’d never been there before. They probably kept him in that basement cage until he was suitably disoriented. Then they irradiated him, put a gun in his hand, and stuck him in Sunnyside with an innocent family. All for blackmail, for money.”

“If you’re talking smallpox, for a whole hell of a lot of money, no doubt.”

Gideon shook his head. “Jesus, that’s cold.”

They flashed past a sign announcing they were entering Virginia. Gideon slowed further.

“N-Day is here,” said Fordyce, glancing at his watch. “And we’ve got maybe five hours to figure out how we’re going to stop this thing.”