“We feel otherwise.”
A hissing sound came out of the laptop. Behind where the elders sat, an aquarium wall had lowered, and a giant Burmese python spilled out, and slithered across the floor. Wolfe had encountered a Burmese python while in the army, and knew it was lethal. Jumping into the air, the python burst through the laptop’s screen, courtesy of the elders’ dark magic.
The python landed in his lap. Wolfe grabbed the snake before it could wrap its body around his throat. It was six feet long, and incredibly powerful. Falling onto the floor, he wrestled with the beast, knocking down furniture and causing all sorts of noise. Finally he got the python’s head between his powerful hands, and squeezed until it went limp.
The laptop had fallen on the floor. Its screen was facing him, and he saw the elders nod their approval.
“Good-bye, Major Wolfe,” the middle elder said. “Stay in touch.”
The picture became a pinprick, then disappeared. Wolfe stared at his hands. The python had vanished. In its place was one of his shoes, which had been lying on the floor.
“Bloody arseholes,” he said.
18
Liza was furious. Peter had been gone for hours, and hadn’t responded to her calls or texts. She knew that her boyfriend had mood swings, and often took long walks to clear his head. There was nothing wrong with that, but it wasn’t right that he didn’t stay in touch, especially after the attack at the theater last night.
Fuming, she sat at the kitchen table. Peter was a psychic, and he was also a flake. He hardly seemed to care about her feelings, or what she thought about their relationship. There were times when she wondered if he’d been raised by wolves.
A pad of paper sat on the table. On it she’d written the words
She pulled out her BlackBerry to try and learn more. To her surprise, her Google search turned up nothing but a vague reference on Wikipedia. She decided to call in reinforcements, and dialed Snoop.
“Hey, it’s me,” she said. “You at home?”
“I’m sitting at the bar at the Waverly Inn watching the beautiful ladies,” Snoop replied.
“I have a favor to ask. Can you meet me at Peter’s place?”
“I’m game. The girl I was hitting on just blew me off.”
“Her loss. Do you still have that hot laptop you told me about?”
“Hot isn’t the word. It’s steaming.”
“It can’t be traced back to you, can it?”
“Not in a hundred years. What have you got in mind?”
Liza stared at the pad. If the Order of Astrum was sending assassins out to kill people, then some government agency had to know about them.
“I want you to hack a government mainframe,” she replied.
“Yipes. Which one?”
She had to think. Secret Service? No. CIA? Not them, either.
“FBI,” she said.
“Now you’re talking. I’ll grab the laptop from my apartment.”
“Thanks, Snoop. I owe you big time.”
Liza ended the call. She assumed that breaking into the FBI’s computer was a federal offense, punishable by jail time, waterboarding, and who knew what else, yet she had no qualms about doing it. Peter was in danger, and she was going to find out why.
She fixed a pot of coffee while waiting for Snoop. When it came to hacking, Snoop had few peers. At fourteen, he’d gotten caught downloading a hundred thousand music files off the Internet, which he’d distributed to his entire high school class. At sixteen, he’d been tagged for breaking into a dozen Fortune 500 companies. At nineteen, he’d hit for the cycle, and been arrested for hacking three government servers deemed impenetrable. When a judge had asked him why he’d done it, Snoop had replied, “Because they’re there, Your Honor.” Snoop had never hidden his past. If anything, he was proud of his accomplishments, and boasted that there wasn’t a computer in the world whose defenses he couldn’t penetrate. Liza hoped he was right, because it was the only way she was going to find out what was going on.
The front buzzer rang. She bounded down the hall and opened the door.
“That was fast.”
Snoop entered with a shoulder bag draped over his shoulder. His hair hung in his face like a shaggy dog’s, and his purple sneakers were untied. They walked down the hall to the kitchen. Taking a Dell Latitude laptop from the bag, he placed it on the table.
“So who’s our target?” he asked.
“I told you-I want you to hack the FBI.”
“I thought you were kidding.”
“Afraid not. Is that a problem?”
Snoop picked up the coffee mug Liza had set for him, and sipped the steaming brew. “Depends on what your definition of problem is. Is spending ten years of your life making license plates inside a federal prison a problem?”
“You can back out if you want to.”
“Me? Back out? Never. But we need to take precautions. The FBI doesn’t screw around. Once they realize we’ve hacked their computer, they’ll come after us.”
“I thought a hot laptop couldn’t be traced.”
“It can’t be traced to me, but it still can be located. The FBI has developed a special tracing system which allows them to lay an invisible thread into a hacker’s computer,” Snoop explained. “That thread lets them pinpoint a hacker’s location anywhere in the world. I found out the hard way when I was in college. I wanted to find out what the FBI knew about Roswell, so I hacked their computer. Ten minutes after I’d signed off, an SUV with tinted windows pulled up to my dorm, and four guys in black suits came and arrested me.”
“The men in black ran you down? Come on, be serious.”
“I am being serious.”
Liza drank her coffee. Snoop looked nervous. That was hardly like him.
“Look, I don’t want you to get in trouble because of me,” she said. “Just show me how to get into the FBI’s mainframe, and I’ll take care of this myself.”
“That could take years. I’ll get us in, but on my terms. Deal?”
“Deal.”
Snoop drained his cup and returned the laptop to his shoulder bag. “There’s a sports bar on Second Avenue called Ball Four that has Wi-Fi and roasted peanuts. We’ll go there.”
“Why not use the Internet here? It’s secure.”
“Nothing’s secure on the Internet. Besides, I like peanuts.”
He left the kitchen before Liza could reply. A moment later, the front door banged open. She got the hint, and hurried to catch up.
Ball Four had all the charm of a college frat house. Liza got two Cokes and a bowl of roasted peanuts from the bar, and brought them to the corner booth where Snoop sat typing. His boyish features were a study in concentration, his fingers a blur.
“Someday, you’re going to have to explain how you hack a computer,” she said.
“Hacking isn’t as hard as you think,” he said. “Most passwords use lowercase letters, and the numbers zero through nine, or thirty-six total characters. A five-character password has a total of sixty million possibilities. I can run a sixty-million simulation on my software program in five minutes.”
