Blue Warrior (27 page)

43

Pearce’s cabin
Near the Snake River, Wyoming

10 May

M
yers’s body craved a good run, but her common sense told her to stay put and out of sight. Heaven only knew what kind of resources may have been deployed to find her. Even George Clooney owned his own spy satellite these days, but at least he was putting it to good use keeping tabs on African warlords. By now her disappearance had raised alarms with whoever was behind the Tanner suicide. She had to assume they were still looking for her.

Neither she nor Ian had slept in the last few days as they applied digital brute force to the vast data sets she had proposed in their search for the identity of Tanner’s blackmailers. In lieu of sleep, Myers resorted to periodic yoga stretches and body-weight exercises to keep the blood flowing and her muscles taut, fighting the inertia of countless hours of software writing and data analysis. She found a couple of crates and rigged up a crude standing desk to do her computer work. She’d read recently that sitting for more than three hours per day increased heart disease by sixty-four percent, among other pathologies. Sitting, apparently, was the new smoking.

Myers checked the clock on her computer. It was almost time for Ian to check in. She’d passed on her assigned data analyses as they were completed over the last two days, but she still kept crunching data sets,
following other leads that popped up. There was no question in her mind that the person or persons behind Tanner’s death were political, and most likely American, though international criminal syndicates had been known to play powerful roles in American political life, especially at the state and local levels both in the past and recently.

The one solid conclusion she had reached was that her old friend was as clean as she thought he had been. She’d known Tanner and his family for years and knew him to be an honorable judge and wonderful father and husband. But Myers was after his killer or killers, so she went after his records hammer and tongs, pulling out all of the stops, digging down to the subatomic level. To her great relief, she found absolutely nothing. With Ian’s help, she had been able to secure Tanner’s FBI background checks—as president, she’d only been briefed on the glowing summaries—and discovered that the FBI couldn’t believe his pristine personal and professional life. More than one of the FBI’s interviewees had referred to him as “Saint Vincent.”

Meyers had even managed to find one of Tanner’s fourth-grade report cards posted on the Internet—someone had found it at a garage sale and put it up, inappropriately, on Pinterest. Even then, according to his teacher, Tanner was an outstanding young gentleman with impeccable manners, social skills, and high academic potential. Taken together, her inability to find any dirt likely meant that the blackmail “evidence” used against the esteemed jurist had to have been manufactured out of whole cloth.

For a brief period of time she began to wonder if Tanner’s death was somehow pointed at her, some kind of payback for a slight—real or imagined—committed by her while in office; but she’d been out of office and out of the political loop long enough that she eventually dismissed the idea. What would be the point now? Besides, if these people were powerful enough to get a man of Tanner’s character to put a gun in his mouth and blow his own brains out, she knew that they could have just as easily come after her with whatever “evidence” they had concocted against him.

Her monitor dinged. Ian was checking in. “Here, Margaret.”

“Good to see you, Ian.” Myers saw that he looked as tired and baggy-eyed as she did. The two of them had hardly slept the last two days as they sorted through the mountains of data they had compiled. “What do we have?” Myers asked. She had forwarded her findings to Ian and he had spent the last two hours cross-referencing their results.

“There is a lot of outrage in American politics, isn’t there?”

“Yes, unfortunately. Some of that is ginned up by the politicians themselves to rally votes, but mostly it’s bad policies by a failed government that’s hurting millions of Americans fueling that rage.”

“I don’t know if this is the right list or not, but based upon everything we discussed and the search results we have generated, there are four congressmen, three senators, and five corporate CEOs that rise to the top of the outrage list. These are some very hated people.”

“Then those are our targets. Any connections between them?”

“Funny you should ask that. There is one senator and one CEO that are very closely connected. Both go by the surname Fiero.”

“As in, Senator Barbara Fiero?”

“Précisément. Her husband’s name is Anthony. These are very rich people, by the way.”

“I’ve met Senator Fiero. She is many things, including extremely intelligent, ambitious, and beautiful, but the one thing she is not is a computer programmer. She isn’t our super hacker.”

“Maybe she has her own private Edward Snowden in the NSA,” Ian joked.

“Edward Snowden wasn’t in the NSA. He worked as a private contractor for the NSA. That’s a big difference. What do you know about the senator’s husband?”

“A little mysterious, that one. He’s a private hedge fund manager with many international connections.”

“Is he a computer guy? Or does he have access to one?”

“He’s not a computer guy, but he appears to be connected to a very savvy data outfit known as CIOS. It’s a first-rate shop. The best, really, run by the best software engineer in the business. Answers to the name of Jasmine Bath.”

“Better than you? That’s hard to believe, given what I’ve seen you do and what Troy has told me about you.”

“I’m no slacker, but I don’t have the background and experience she’s had in the TAO. She is to computer spying what Peyton Manning is to your American football.”

“So CIOS and this Jasmine Bath computer genius could mount an operation like the kind we’re talking about?”

“With the kind of cash the Fieros have? Absolutely. And if they really are using her to turn the kinds of decisions we’ve talked about, then they’re even richer than what we think, I’m sure.”

“How so?”

“This isn’t about blackmailing individuals. They’re extorting whole industries. Imagine how much money they could solicit from the entire banking industry, or the entire oil industry, if they could deliver legislation that would save those industries tens of billions of dollars in taxes and regulatory expenses. And then imagine the stock picking they could do, knowing months in advance that these sectors were about to benefit from huge changes in favorable legislation or court rulings.”

“I’m still not buying it. You’re talking about the next Democratic nominee for the presidency. The senator is already quite wealthy thanks to her husband, and she’s already one of the most powerful politicians in Washington. Why would she play these kinds of games?”

“When is anyone ever satisfied with the money and power they already have?”

Myers didn’t have an answer for that. Time wasn’t their friend and they had limited resources. They could start digging into the six other candidates they had generated as well, but that would only put them further behind. She’d gotten as far as she had in life by learning to trust the people around her, and Ian clearly thought the Fieros were the two best suspects to pursue.

“Okay, then. Those are our targets. The Fieros and CIOS.”

“Targets? Are we talking wet work?”

“No, but they’ll wish it was wet work when we’re through with them.”

“Best be careful with CIOS. Bath will have every security precaution in place, as well as the means to retaliate against us if she thinks we’re coming after her in any way, wet work included.”

“Agreed.” Myers frowned.

“Problem?”

“It’s hard to imagine Barbara Fiero would be caught up in something like this. But as I think about it, maybe it’s not so far-fetched. She has a reputation for being the luckiest woman on the Hill. She always seemed to know exactly the right place to be or the right vote to cast or the right person to meet at just the right time. If she has the kind of extreme insider information we’re talking about, that would explain a lot.”

“Knowledge is power, Margaret. You of all people should know that.”

“They say genius is seeing the obvious. Clearly, I’m no genius or I would have seen through her earlier.”

Myers remembered Fiero during the NSA hearings held by her committee in the Senate. She was one of the few Democrats on that committee adamantly in favor of the NSA’s domestic spying program. One of the Democrats asked the NSA straight up, “Are you spying on Congress?” Fiero interrupted the question and said, “That’s a national security question that shouldn’t be asked in a public forum. But I, for one, support the NSA’s security programs both here and abroad, and I for one wouldn’t care if they were listening in on my telephone conversations, because I have nothing to hide.”

The gall of the woman, especially if what they now believed about her actually turned out to be true. She should have seen it.

“Ian, now we have to go on the offense. Are you still with me?”

“To the bloody end.”

“Thank you.”

Myers hoped that Ian’s words weren’t prophetic. They divided up tasks and went back to work.

44

Maersk Oil Pumping Station
Tamanghasset Province, Southern Algeria

10 May

T
he sobbing Algerian was twenty-three years old, clean-shaven and close-cropped. The knees of his Maersk oil coveralls were soaking up the Danish engineer’s blood on the cement floor, seeping from the headless corpse a few feet away.

“Are you a woman? Quit crying!” Al Rus shouted in Arabic. He slapped the young man’s face.

The Algerian fought back his desperate tears, gasping for breath, trying to stem the tide.

Al Rus hit him again.

“Are you a Muslim?”

The boy’s eyes sparked with hope. “Yes! Yes!”

“Then why are you helping these Crusader dogs rape your country?”

“My father. He is not well. We needed the money—”

“Thieves steal because they need money.”

“I am no thief. I was only an apprentice to that man.”

“You are no Muslim.”

“I am of the faithful!”

“You swear it?”

“I swear it!”

“Why should I believe you?”

“I repent!” The young man turned his head and spit on the corpse of his dead Danish friend.

“You will stop helping the Crusaders?”

“Yes, yes, a thousand times, yes! Mercy. In the name of Allah,” the boy whimpered.

Finally, Al Rus nodded. “Yes, I believe you have repented of your thievery. But I think you are weak in your faith. You are no Salafi. I think you will turn back to your thievery and burn in the fires of hell in the next life.”

“No! I am strong in my faith. You will see.”

Al Rus nodded again. “Yes, we will see.”

He stepped over to an interior door and pushed it open. On the floor, a woman. Naked, bruised, bloodied. But still very much alive.

Al Rus held out the knife handle. The Algerian glanced at the woman, a friend, and then at the knife.

Salvation.

The young Algerian stood up unsteadily on trembling legs and took the knife. It shook in his hand. He glanced back up into the Norwegian’s merciless face.

Al Rus’s satellite phone rang. He pulled it from his belt. Saw the number. Nodded to the Algerian, then to his men, and stepped outside into the burning sun to take the call.

It was already hot, and not yet noon.

“Yes, of course. I have been waiting for your call,” Al Rus said in English. It was Guo.

The woman’s screams echoed from the pump room. He ignored them, focusing on Guo’s instructions. Didn’t notice her screaming suddenly choking off, like a needle lifted from a record.

“I understand.” He snapped off the phone. One of his fighters, a Chechen, approached him. “Here’s your knife.”

Al Rus took it, wiped the bloody blade on his pant leg.

“Did you take a video?”

“Yes. Of course,” the Chechen said. “It will be posted shortly.”

“Good. There is still one more lesson for the others. No one is fooled. ‘A dog always returns to its own vomit.’” Al Rus hated secularized Muslims worse than devout Jews, or even Christians.

The Chechen glanced back at the pump house, nodding in agreement.

Al Rus smiled. “And then we have a new mission.”