confound whoever was tracking her, and then she went back to work attempting to break the encryption. She entered the final command. And sat back to wait. If she didn’t miss her guess, this was the last layer of protection inside this server. If she’d sent the right commands, and if she’d been in time to beat the countermeasures, she ought to see names, addresses, phone numbers and credit card information on her screen when the hourglass went away.
The wait was agonizing. Each second that ticked by was one closer to Gabe’s possible death. The idea of all that vibrant energy, that intelligence, that sex appeal, being snuffed out made her faintly sick to her stomach. She had to get through.
The computer screen went dark. Her heart dropped into her feet. Damn!
But then a small, rectangular window opened in the middle of her screen. Would the server administrator please enter a valid password?
She sagged in relief. A simple password block? No sweat. She typed in the standard protocol for bypassing a password request. This shouldn’t take more than a minute or so. She couldn’t believe how many people thought their computers were actually safe because it took a password to get to the data. Every twelve-year-old hacker wannabe in the world knew how to get past that.
The screen flickered. And lit up.
Hot damn! She’d done it. A system administration screen opened in front of her. Quickly she entered the handle, Glory Seeker, into a search field. And moments later, the screen began to erode. Data melted off of it like butter off a hot knife.
C’mon, c’mon, she urged the search engine. Just a name. A lousy name, and then the whole damn server could implode for all she cared.
The search window began to melt.
But then a name flashed up in the reply box. For no more than a second. But it was enough. Tito Albadian. In New Jersey. And then it was gone.
Rapidly, she accessed the Social Security administration and broke into the system through a back door she could drive a Mack truck through. No record of a Tito Albadian in New Jersey. She frowned. Maybe she was looking in the wrong place. She tried the Immigration and Naturalization Service and got an immediate hit. She called up a copy of the guy’s work permit. Using an illegally obtained police code, she requested a picture of this Albadian guy.
A laser printer behind her spit out a sheet of paper.
“I’ve got a name, folks,” she announced. “Could a couple of you help me look for known associates of this guy?”
Every pair of shoulders hunched higher around their ears. Hackers were nothing if not competitive. Over the next several minutes, assorted curses and crows of triumph were heard. Finally, Dynamo shouted out, “Gotcha!”
Diana moved over behind him as he traced a credit card number to a driver’s license in California and called up a picture of the owner. “Way to go!” she congratulated him.
He sat back, rolling his shoulders. “Man, that was close. I had a counterhacker on my heels the whole way.”
“Same thing’s happening to me over here, too,” CrystalMeth spoke up. “But I’ll beat the bastard.”
One by one, the hackers, some working alone and some working in teams, broke into Internet server systems all over the world and harvested names and faces from the participants in the Q-group chat room. In all, fourteen faces printed out on the printer to go with the handles of the Q-group chat members. Undoubtedly, not all of these guys were part of an active Q-group hit squad. Some of them were innocent people, just looking to connect with a few immigrants like themselves and going about their lawful daily lives. But some of them were here in Washington, right now, planning to assassinate Gabe Monihan. Of that, she had no doubt.
Diana picked up the sheaf of printed photos and took them over to the copier machine in the corner. Quickly she made a duplicate set of the pictures and stapled them together. She put a yellow sticky pad on them and scribbled the name, Owen Haas. How she was going to get the pictures to him, she had no idea. But she had faith he’d know what to do with the pictures once he got them. He was a sharp cookie and hadn’t missed her veiled warning to him that someone was out to get Gabe Monihan today.
What she really needed to do now was run these names and pictures through the Oracle database. It was plugged into computer systems that these hackers didn’t even dream existed. She scooped up both sets of the pictures and her purse and headed for the door.
“You guys are the best. I won’t forget this,” she called out as she exited the cafe.
And was grabbed around both upper arms by a pair of powerful men, one on either side of her.
She struggled in the men’s grasps to no avail. “Hey!” she shouted. “What do you think you’re doing? Let go of me!” It was women’s self-defense 101. Make a very loud stink if someone tried to snatch her. Most kidnappers, rapists and murderers weren’t looking for a troublesome public confrontation.
Several people on the sidewalk were staring at her, and a couple of passersby looked as if they were reaching for cell phones. Three cheers for civic-minded citizens!
“Sorry ma’am,” one of the men intoned, deadpan. “We can’t let you go.”
“Why the hell not?” she shouted back at him, still trying to draw attention.
“You’re under arrest.”
10:00 A.M.
“I’ m what?” Diana exclaimed.
“You’re under arrest, ma’am.”
“And you might be who?” she demanded of the men holding her.
“Army Criminal Investigation Division. If you’ll come with us, ma’am. We need to ask you a few questions.”
She cursed under her breath. She so did not have time for fun with CID right now. Gabe would be inaugurated in a scant four hours. “Look fellas. Can I take a rain check on this? I’ll be happy to talk to you later this afternoon. But right now I have extremely urgent business to take care of.”
“That’s what we’d like to talk to you about ma’am,” one of them replied stolidly.
She cursed under her breath. Their questioning could take hours. She thought fast and yanked back hard on the guy’s hands. She didn’t break their grip on her, but in the ensuing tussle, she managed to drop one of the photocopied sets of pictures on the ground and kick it behind them. It was the best she could do. Maybe someone inside the cafe would see Owen Haas’s name on the photos and get them to him somehow. It was a long shot, but it might be all she had.
Capitulating abruptly, she walked forward rapidly, all but dragging the Intelligence officers away from the Chaosium Cafe and the sheaf of papers on the ground. She stuffed the remaining set of pictures into her purse.
“Where to, boys? Do you have a safe house around here somewhere or are we going for a ride?”
The poor guys seemed confounded by her abruptly cavalier attitude. “Uh, our car’s right here.”
They stopped beside a black sedan and put her in the back seat.
She groused, “Sheesh, aren’t you going to handcuff me or anything? I’m a pretty dangerous character, you know. Us desk-jockey analysts are real beasts.”
The driver rolled his eyes at her in the rearview mirror but didn’t rise to the bait. She caught the other guy eyeing her surreptitiously and grinned. “Whatchya staring at, Sergeant? Haven’t you ever been inside an Internet cafe before and seen how the other half live?”
The guy glared. “I’m a captain, not an enlisted schmuck.”
She leaned back in her seat. “Dunno that I’d be casting aspersions on enlisted personnel, Captain. They’re the backbone of the Army. They outnumber commissioned officer schmucks by something like twenty-five to one.”
The guy scowled at her openly. She definitely had him off balance now. Of course it probably helped that she was in full punker makeup, and he knew she was an officer. The guy was no doubt having a hard time reconciling the two in his mind. The car pulled to a stop in front of the Pentagon and the two men escorted her inside. They
