Biowar (17 page)

Sitzung was the name of the street he had just crossed.

He stuffed the envelope in his pocket and went through with the transaction, withdrawing fifty Euros. He walked back along the street, looking for 27. Just as he reached number 25, two men came barreling out of the doorway, yelling and cursing as they shoved each other. Dean tried to avoid their fight, pushing toward the building as a siren sounded down the street. Two men nearby ran up to stop the brawlers, but this only resulted in a bigger tangle, and Dean had to duck quickly to escape being bashed. As he spun around, a hand grabbed him and yanked him into the building. Before he could say anything, a hand slapped itself over his mouth.

A woman’s hand. Lia’s.

Dean felt her pull off his shirt, tugging at his buttons. He helped her, sliding out of it, and doffed his shoes as well when she pointed at them. She pushed him down the hall, where a man in a suit was waiting near a doorway. Inside, Dean found himself in the fitting room of a tailor.

“God, you’re thick,” said Lia, coming in behind him. “If I didn’t have half the embassy working for me, you’d still be out there.” She shook her head. “Being tracked by a bag lady, no less.”

“My clothes were bugged?”

“I just like seeing you naked.”

She stepped aside as Dean lowered his pants to put on the suit that was waiting for him on a hanger.

“I didn’t know you spoke German,” he said.

“The Art Room claims I messed up the tenses, but I think they’re full of it. They want a full report when you’re dressed.”

“About what?”

“What happened in the castle, et cetera. By the time I got inside they’d cleared out.”

“You were there?”

“You think I’m letting you out of my sight, Charlie?” She whistled. “Nice pecs for an old dog.”

“You weren’t there,” he told her.

“I was on the wall when they carried you out,” said Lia. “I had to clamp my mouth to keep from laughing. Just like now.”

“Hey, watch it or I’ll bench-press you.”

“Anytime, big man.”

She leaned up and gave him a light kiss on the lips, pulling away long before he wanted her to.

“Who are they?” asked Dean.

“We’re not exactly sure,” said Lia. “Which is the scary part. Get dressed; we’re going to dinner. Then you’re getting your ears bobbed.”

“What?”

“Eyeglass com systems are too fragile, especially when they get smacked against a hard head like yours.”

25

The taxi pulled away before Johnny Bib could ask about being picked up again. He stood at the edge of the hilly driveway, momentarily paralyzed.

Attend to your business, whispered one of the voices in his head.

“Yes,” said Johnny Bib, and he began walking up the driveway. Johnny kept exactly twenty-nine voices in his head—twenty—nine was a particularly beautiful and useful number—and while he did not always take their advice, he did in this particular instance, following along to the back of the house and looking around for a garden. A number of tomatoes grew on stakes in a raised bed about twenty feet from the house; there were cucumbers as well and a few stunted pieces of spinach suffering in the summer heat. None of the plants had been watered now in several days, and the tomato vines had begun to yellow.

The fact that Kegan kept a garden did not mean that Johnny’s hunch of a substitution code was wrong, but he nonetheless felt disappointed. He wanted Kegan to be using a substitution code. Not because he’d thought of it, but because there was something archaic and romantic about the idea. Modern-day encryption had moved too far from the personal, Johnny Bib thought; it had become simply a mathematic problem to solve. Oh, there were still beautiful wrinkles to be discovered, surely, and untangling a scrambled fractal embedded in an encrypted video stream—well, there were still things that could thrill a mathematician’s heart. But the real romance and intrigue were gone from the profession. The heady atmosphere of the days of World War II and Enigma, the Japanese wind codes—where was that glory now?

The use of a simple substitution code—simple and yet, if properly executed, nearly impenetrable—surely that was a thing even Turing himself might have appreciated.

Johnny Bib had come here not hoping to break the code Kegan was using (if it even was a code he was using, as opposed to an encryption). What Johnny really wanted to do was get a glimpse of the romantic era of genius, to touch it and in that way partake of it. What more could a mathematician really ask for? Johnny Bib had reached the age when a mere solution to pi no longer thrilled him. No, he wanted not to solve Fermat but to understand why a right triangle was in fact right. He longed to cross the mystic threshold.

Had Kegan? The man worked with microbes and DNA. What was DNA but a marvelously effective and powerful encryption? Surely the intersection of math and biology would yield something stupendous, something soulful, something ...
Godlike
was the only word.

And so now, directed by another of his inner voices, Johnny went to the back of the house. He avoided the crime-scene tape on the porch and tried a rear window, which he found unlocked. Johnny stepped through, nearly tripping on the curtain but finally maintaining his balance enough to hop into the center of the small room, a sort of den at the back of the house opposite the kitchen.

The house had a central hallway running down the middle, dividing it perfectly in half—an excellent condition, Johnny thought, walking to the library at the right side. He noticed that the wainscoting in the corridor divided the wall precisely at the three-sevenths spot; if this was significant he couldn’t decide, but it certainly felt like a good omen, and he practically bounced into the library. He knew from the photos that there were over 10,000 volumes here, but his immediate interest was confined to a small section of the third shelf from the window on the right side. Johnny walked to it now, tilting his head slightly to survey the titles on the spines. He was just pulling the book out when his voice directed his attention to the right.

The shelves at the bottom, said the voice.

Johnny had heard this voice before. It had a slightly French accent; he thought of it as Descartes, though of course he was not so crazy as to believe it was
really
the great French philosopher and mathematician.

One of his students, perhaps.

“These shelves?” Johnny asked aloud.

At the bottom, repeated the voice.

Johnny bent down, then realized that the voice was referring him to a small section of books one case over. There were three books on cancer and its various forms. Next to them were much older texts, collectors’ items from the looks of them. He slid along the rug and started to tug one out; when he did he realized there were several books behind them, along with a three-ring binder.

The books were battered. One was an old herbalist encyclopedia. Two were written in French and appeared to be alchemy texts. The last was a book by Aleister Crowley on magic spells.

“Superstitious garbage,” said Johnny Bib. “What do we make of this?”

None of his voices responded. He opened the notebook and began to read.

26

The helicopter bucked toward the green blanket of fronds, its nose ducking down as if the pilot had decided to try landing on the top of the trees. Karr, sitting in the ancient Huey’s right front seat, watched with growing curiosity as a cleft opened ahead. A waterfall spewed off to the right, a stream dropping a good hundred and fifty feet. The newly risen sun flashed off the water, its glare making the liquid seem like fire flowing from the white heart of the earth. The chopper pivoted and followed the path the water had taken, wrenching itself to the northwest, heading for the border with Myanmar.

“Nice morning,” said Karr.

“Buh,” said the pilot.

“Lot of trees,” said Karr.

“Buh,” repeated the pilot. He seemed to speak neither English nor any of the known dialects of Thai. In fact, based on their conversation since leaving Chiang Mai about a half hour ago, Karr had come to the conclusion that the man’s vocabulary consisted of exactly one word:
buh.

“Military camp far?” asked Karr.

“Buh.”

“Just ahead, huh?”

“Buh.”

“You from around here?”

The pilot didn’t answer. Instead he pushed hard on the yoke and threw the Huey into another sharp turn, descending at the same time. The helicopter seemed to move backward, then straight down, then both together. The skids brushed up against some of the treetops. Red clay appeared before them. The noise of the engine caught up and dust flew in a fine mist; the helicopter had touched down.

“You were beginning to make me think I oughta put on my seat belt,” said Karr.

“Buh.”

“Nice flying with you,” said Karr. He held out his hand to the pilot, who looked at him quizzically. Karr gave him a shoulder chuck and popped open the door, sliding out into the dust storm with his two rucksacks of gear and a long case containing his rifle. The two Marines he’d borrowed from the embassy at Telach’s insistence pushed out of the back of the helicopter, gathering their own gear. Both men were dressed in plain khaki uniforms that did not have insignia, though anyone looking at them would spend all of three seconds guessing they were American.

And maybe another millisecond more figuring they were Marines.

The Huey revved and left them standing in the swirling dust.

“Put two of these landing areas together and you’d have almost enough room for a half-court game of hoops,” he said.

“It’s forward base. What’d you expect, O’Hare?” asked Chafetz.

“Have a good nap, Sandy?”

“Dreamed of you the whole time.”

“Where’s the reception committee?”

“Clearing up ahead, on your right. They’re watching you.”

He turned and glanced at his Marines, who’d shouldered their rucks. The men carried early-model M16s identical to the weapons the Thai forces used—another bit of fussy misdirection that would fool no one, but Karr had decided there were better things to do than waste his time arguing with the Marines’ captain, who, after all, was himself only following someone else’s orders.

“You guys ready?” Karr asked the Marines.

“Locked and loaded,” said the shorter of the two men, Horace Foster. Both men were lance corporals, but Foster had enlisted a few days earlier than his companion, Jason Gidrey, and therefore considered himself spokesman for the unit.

“Locked and loaded is the only way to travel,” said Karr.

“I thought these guys were friendly,” said Foster.

“Friendly’s
a relative term,” said Karr. “Smile; we’re being watched.”

Karr walked through the gap in the trees, treading down a path too narrow for a good-sized horse. He saw movement on his right, then in front—a pair of kids in fatigues totting M16s jerked up to challenge him.

“Heya,” he said. “Yo, Chafetz, what are my words?”

A linguist back in the Art Room relayed the Thai phrase for “hello,” which sounded something like
“sa-wut dee.”

It had about as much effect on them as buh. The two men, members of the Thai Army, squared their rifles. Foster and Gidrey twitched behind him.

“You sure I didn’t say, ‘Shoot my butt off’?” Karr asked Chafetz as he walked toward them. He edged his hands out in as universally nonbelligerent a manner as possible.

“Their major’s en route,” said Chafetz. “It’ll be okay.”

Another Thai appeared behind the two men as Karr sauntered down from the landing patch. Though the man wasn’t wearing any insignia, he was clearly a superior—older and with a more purposeful frown.

“I’m Tommy Karr,” said Karr in English.

The man said nothing as Karr approached, but the Deep Black op interpreted the fact that he hadn’t been shot at yet as a good sign. The Art Room had sprinkled a vessel’s worth of bugs around the jungle camp before sunrise and was also getting an optical feed from a CIA Huron “Eyes” asset; they’d at least know who to come after if he got waxed.

“Tommy Karr,” the agent repeated when he was close enough for the M16s to poke him in the chest. “These are Foster and Gidrey. How’s it goin’?”

“Commander Karr,” said the Thai officer in a thick accent. “I am Major Sourin.”

“Major.” Karr dropped his gear and stuck out his hand, but Sourin didn’t take it. Instead, he spun on his heel and headed into the thicket.

“Here we go,” Karr said to his Marines. “Keep your eyes open for a steak joint. I’m starving.”

Sourin’s camp consisted of two huts, a large tent that appeared to be American surplus circa 1945, and a number of dug-in positions. He had forty-five men divided into two platoons, with a handful of aides serving as a headquarters or command unit. His weapons were old and had seen considerable use before most of his soldiers were even born. Sourin’s force had nothing heavier than 60mm mortars dating from World War II.

One thing it did have, however, was two command laptops and a supposedly secure connection back to the Thai regional command. The unit’s node had been used to send the E-mails found on Kegan’s system—but did that mean the message had been sent from here, or that the system had been compromised? The laptops used dial-up modems over the command’s fiber optics landline, which ran through the jungle back to the territorial capital, which meant that the Art Room had to wait until they were physically connected to look at them. Thus far, only one of the computers had hooked in, and then only for a few seconds, so the Art Room hadn’t had enough time to completely search the hard drive,

Karr had a solution—a dongle that would plug into the modem ports and flush the drive back to the Art Room via a satellite connection. The only problem was getting it onto the laptops.

Karr spotted the units sitting on a small folding desk next to the briefing table in the command tent when the major led him inside; one of the major’s orderlies sat a few feet away, and there was no easy way to grab it without doing so in plain sight.

An option Karr considered but rejected for the time being.