The old man shut off the tape. 'Up until now you were a useful tool. Watching you, they had a good idea of exactly how close anyone was to Zimmerman.'
'The same reason you were watching me?' Gideon looked pointedly at the gunman by the door, the one with the bruised neck. 'Why you broke into my house—'
The old man steepled his fingers. 'You've managed to scare elements into the open that would've otherwise remained hidden. You're close enough to Zimmerman now that the IUF is nervous.'
Gideon shook his head. 'That doesn't make sense. I've been playing catch-up since this whole thing started —'
'Why do you think your own government hasn't debriefed you?'
Gideon sat there and looked into the old man's steely eyes. He wasn't sure what he'd meant by that. 'Why should they?'
'It's standard procedure when a civilian gets as close as you have to sensitive information. Instead, they've made a point of ignoring you and allowing you to be a loose cannon. They should have brought you in as soon as you hired Morris Kendal. But they're desperate enough to believe you'd be more useful stirring things up.'
Gideon stood, his chair crashing to the ground behind him. 'What the hell do you know about Kendal?'
It was now Ruth's turn to grab his arm and try and calm him down. The other guy, the Lincoln's driver, took a few steps toward the table until the old man held up a hand to stop him.
'Kendal became a threat to the IUF as soon as he began working with the government.'
Gideon stood there, speechless.
'Why don't you pick up your chair?'
'What do you mean, 'working with the government?' '
'When Morris Kendal started asking your questions to his contacts in the CIA, they brought him in. We only know this because, by that point, we were already watching Kendal's movements.'
'But when he met me—'
'We believe he was there to encourage you to go after Zimmerman. To make sure the loose cannon went off in the direction they wanted.'
'Why kill him, then?'
'Sit down,' the old man said.
Gideon backed up and righted his chair. 'Why did they kill him?'
'Sit.'
Gideon finally sat.
'Morris Kendal carried out contract security assignments for various Arab and African delegations. It's almost certain that he had seen a number of the people who're working on Zimmerman. If he started working with the U.S. Government directly, the IUF believed it would only be a matter of time before Kendal led the government to them.'
'He knew—' Gideon said. 'He told me that this International Unification Front was involved.'
'Kendal was in a position to know things much more damaging than simply the IUF's involvement.'
'Like what?'
Ruth looked up at the old man and said, 'Why are we here? What do you want? Who are you?'
'What I want is to prevent Zimmerman's knowledge from falling into the hands of the IUF. Seeing how things have progressed, my secondary goal is to discover what they have gotten from her, how they are using her.' The old man looked at Gideon. 'I also want to punish those responsible for the death of Mr. Kendal. He was, I think, a friend of mine. I tried to steer him away from dangerous waters. I probably failed him by not being imperative enough.'
'What do you want from us?' Gideon asked.
'Your help,' the old man said. 'Between the both of you, you know something that the IUF believes is dangerous enough for them to come after you. We know that they were watching Ruth, and that there was one of their people in the restaurant—'
'Oh, shit,' Ruth whispered.
'In a position to hear your conversation.'
'Why should we trust you?' Ruth asked him. 'Why should I help you hunt down my sister?'
'Because the other players in this game would gladly execute her to prevent her knowledge from being propagated.' He turned to face Gideon. 'It was your own government that used that Daedalus computer to lure Dr. Zimmerman out into the open. They would have shot her down the way they shot down you and your brother.'
'What do you want from us?' Gideon asked. His mind was already racing over what he and Ruth had said.
'Your conversation in the restaurant. What was it about?'
Gideon glanced at the windows of the living room. Shadows blackened the shades. It was dusk outside, soon to be night.
'I can't believe—' Ruth started.
Gideon grabbed her low on the arm, below the old man's line of sight, and—he hoped—out of view of the other guy who was currently pacing around the room, behind the old guy. He squeezed.
Ruth stopped talking and looked at him.
'On a condition,' Gideon said. 'You tell me why everyone's after Zimmerman. What does she know that's so important?' He could feel Ruth tense up, but she didn't interrupt.
'There are two reasons. One's provincial to the NSA, the other is more of a universal threat. The first reason, the provincial one, is that Dr. Zimmerman was involved in all the security architecture installed on the NSA's computers over the past five years. She knows what they were protecting against, which is almost as important as how. The NSA's security procedures have filtered through to a series of agencies. As long as Dr. Zimmerman is out there, none of those systems can be considered secure. Both the NSA and the CIA are behaving right now as if all their operations are compromised to some extent.'
'That's a provincial reason?'
The old man nodded. 'Provincial and transitory. It will take a few months for them to reconstruct their security, no matter what happens with Zimmerman. That kind of intelligence information is devalued the moment the target knows you have it. There's more . . . Have you heard about information warfare?'
'I probably heard about it on Nightline once.'
The old man chuckled. 'The agency that Dr. Zimmerman works for was intended to be completely passive. It listened. It would gather in signals intelligence from everywhere it could, landline, radio, satellite, Internet— almost every type of electronic signal generated on this planet will pass through its computers. However, as strong cryptographic methods became prevalent, available to individuals and organizations, the agency was forced to become a more active gatherer of intelligence.'
'What do you mean, 'more active' ?'
'One example—they have one program, the community's nicknamed it the 'shadow.' It's a virus that hides on a host system and does nothing but monitor keystrokes and hide the information in a buffer on the victim's hard drive. Whenever the victim makes contact with the Internet, the virus transfers the buffer's data back to a repository where the information can be gathered. A system can seem incredibly secure, and still be vulnerable to that kind of program. It's very hard to defend against.'
'They can do that?' Ruth asked. Her voice seemed to carry the same sort of unease that Gideon felt. 'Isn't that illegal?'
The old man chuckled. 'Many of their current intelligence-gathering methods come from the repertoire of the last wave of hackers. They have a program that can crack eighty percent of all passwords—and it just relies upon the weaknesses of human nature, the tendency to make passwords actual words.' He shook his head. 'The line between information intelligence and information warfare disappears once you don't stop at simply listening to a target system. And there're other, more active, measures they use. . .'
'Like what?'
'I have little access to that kind of information,' he steepled his fingers again. 'But try a little thought experiment. Take the shadow virus—change it a little. Now every personal computer nowadays keeps track of the nation it lives in, so it can operate in the proper language, use the correct currency and measurement units . . . Let's just say that this virus will only copy itself to a computer that identifies itself as Iraqi, or Iranian, or Chinese.
