I managed to talk my way out of it. Hey, and thanks for getting those pictures to Owen Haas. He says thank you, too.
Fantasy Man replied, Is that Haas guy really in the Secret Service?
She smiled. These poor hackers were having a hard time wrapping their brains around the idea of having helped stop an assassination attempt on the President-elect. It went just enough against their principles to help the government that they weren’t sure they liked what she’d had them do. But, they also didn’t condone murder. It was a heck of a moral pickle for them to find themselves in. She grinned to herself. It was good for them.
She typed rapidly, Look, I’ve found the guy who gives the orders to the Q-group. His handle is DiscoDuck, and he’s online right now. I’ve got to track down who he is. Immediately. Are you in?
Another lengthy pause.
Please, please, please play ball.
And then Fantasy Man typed back, What server is he using?
She sagged in relief over her keyboard and typed in the necessary information. In a matter of minutes, a half- dozen hackers had joined the hunt, circling in on their prey as a group. With so many hackers coming at him from so many directions at once, DiscoDuck didn’t stand a chance.
But what was odd was the guy seemed to have taken no precautions to protect himself from this sort of attack. Apparently, he wasn’t overly familiar with the power of the Internet and what a good hacker could do with it.
Just a couple of minutes into the hunt, Fantasy Man fired off a message that he’d found something. Diana headed to the Web address he specified to take a look. She frowned as lines of programming code scrolled down her screen. He’d run into a firewall, a barrier between the Internet and a private computer network. And it was a big, nasty firewall. As tough as anything she’d ever seen.
The rest of the hackers joined them, and everyone began flinging their strongest, most creative protocols at the electronic security system. This was what hacking was all about. Except this firewall wasn’t going down without a fight. The server they were assaulting began throwing back counterhacking commands, and it turned into a pitched battle to defend her own computer while trying to break into the other guy’s.
In desperation, she pulled out a couple of government protocols she’d been careful never to reveal to her hacker friends, since they were designed to get into the very systems these guys most loved to invade-government computer networks. Implacably, her special protocol chipped away at the firewall in front of her.
The way her protocol was bulldozing through the layers of protection in this firewall, she’d almost guess this was a government network they were breaking into.
And then she was in.
She stared in stunned disbelief as a round logo popped up on her computer screen on a navy-blue background. Holy cow. The Central Intelligence Agency? DiscoDuck was operating from inside the CIA computer network?
She typed furiously, trying to narrow down the search parameters. Maybe get a directorate within the CIA from which the e-mails were coming, or even capture the name of this operator. But her break-in must have triggered some sort of warning. Within a matter of seconds, DiscoDuck signed off, severing the connection to the Internet and her search.
The other hackers reacted with varying degrees of disgust and dismay.
She typed quickly,
Hey, thanks anyway, guys. I owe you.
Fantasy Man typed back dryly,
Nah, that Monihan guy owes us. And we’re not going to let him forget it, either.
Diana grinned. She’d relay that message to Gabe the next time she saw him.
The other hackers backed away from the firewall, and she pretended to do the same, as well. Once they’d all cleared out, she opened up a file she’d never used before. It was written by an FBI computer programmer for the purpose of intercepting and opening e-mails when the Bureau did surveillance on members of the government who’d come under suspicion. She seriously was not supposed to have a copy of this program, and she’d never even hinted at its existence to her hacker buddies. They’d have a field day with it if they ever got their hands on it.
She loaded the program and watched it run.
It took a few minutes, but eventually, an e-mail log to Disco-Duck popped up on her screen. She gazed down through the mail headers of hundreds of e-mails dating back for nearly a year and nothing out of the ordinary caught her attention. Damn. She didn’t have time to open all these up and read them!
The e-mail intercept program indicated that these were the nonencrypted files available. Would she like to see the encrypted messages, as well? She typed in an immediate yes command.
This program didn’t decrypt the mails themselves, but she could at least look at the captions the authors had attached to their posts.
Another long list of message titles scrolled down her screen. And immediately, something odd leaped out at her. The same word kept appearing, over and over. Safe. Safe? What the heck did that signify? Was this person involved in a safety program of some kind? Maybe it was a code name for a CIA operation DiscoDuck was involved in?
But then she got that niggling feeling in the back of her head again that she was forgetting something important. She closed her eyes and wiped her mind blank. She let the word safe float across her mind’s eye. She visualized it in various fonts and scripts, trying to place it in the context of books, newspaper and magazine articles, or even on a computer screen.
And suddenly it came to her where she’d seen it before. In small, unobtrusive print at the bottom of a title page in a book. Above the phrase, “The Society for the Advancement of Free Economies.” A California-based small press that had published several of Thomas Wolfe’s political and legal treatises. From what little she’d read of his deadly dull books, they professed nothing overly radical or alarming. He’d argued in the one book she’d managed to slog partway through that terror could only be effectively fought with terror and lawful societies would never defeat lawless societies, or something like that. Prophetic words a decade ago. And completely ignored, apparently, given recent past history. Could that be the same “S.A.F.E.” that DiscoDuck’s e-mail referred to?
The more she thought about it, the more convinced she became that she was on the right track. Safe wasn’t a word at all. It was an acronym for an organization or operation of some kind.
She stared at her computer speculatively. So DiscoDuck and this S.A.F.E. operation came out of the CIA, huh? Well, it made sense. Whoever was controlling Dunst might have known him from his CIA days. And the Q-group’s operation in Chicago had CIA training stamped all over it. For that matter, the break-in at the Old Town Oracle facility had classic CIA operation stamped all over it, too.
Abruptly, she recalled Oracle’s analysis last night that indicated someone highly placed within the government was probably behind the attacks on Gabe. Was this the person she’d been searching for? She pulled up the list of names Oracle had generated of people in positions of power who might have had access to the information that had been passed on to Gabe’s attackers. Who on that list was in the CIA?
Two names leaped out at her. Collin Scott, an assistant Director of Operations and…Joseph Lockworth. Surely not. Her brain rebelled against the idea of Gramps killing anyone. Except he’d been Director of the CIA. Of course, he’d ordered people killed on his watch. Why not order an incoming President killed?
Darryl and his Cadillac from hell had picked her up immediately after she contacted her grandfather. After he’d offered her a ride in his private car. Could it be? Had her own grandfather set her up to be killed?
She thought back to the times he’d bounced her on his knee, doing the same horsey-riding rhyme over and over for her. How he’d convinced her father to send her and Josie into the Athena Academy, which had probably saved both of them from ruined lives. How he’d come to visit them a couple of times a year, dropping in at the Academy without notice, pulling them out of their classes and taking them out to lunch at some outrageously expensive restaurant. He hadn’t replaced their mother, but he’d by golly kept a close eye on them and done whatever he could to help them after his daughter-in-law failed them.
For that matter, most of the arguments she ever remembered Gramps having with Mom had to do with Josie and her. The one thing that had stuck in his craw was that Zoe would abandon her children. Gramps was a stickler for family taking care of family. That couldn’t all have been an act. It just couldn’t. He wouldn’t set up his own granddaughter to be kidnapped or murdered.
DiscoDuck had to be this Scott guy.
But then the question arose of how in the world an active member of the CIA could get away with setting up Gabe Monihan to be killed. The Agency monitored its employees with nearly paranoid intensity. And that perennially
