She found a group of reporters she knew from international stories she’d covered before pulling the Turkish-Syrian dispute that wasn’t supposed to get as volatile as it had. Sid Wright was with the British Broadcasting Corporation and had been for the last seventeen years. He was an old hand with wars and the nations that made them. He was of medium height, wide-shouldered but dapper, and wore a hat to shade his face. FosterGrant sunglasses covered his eyes. His hair had more gray in it than brown these days, but he was still one of the best delivery guys working international news.
“Hey, Sid,” Danielle called.
The British newsman excused himself from his cronies and approached her. “Not going live with a piece of this, Danielle?”
“I managed a sound bite and a couple slugs for the evening broadcast in the States,” Danielle answered. “I’m also doing some framing for a small piece that might be used later.”
“Unless something more exciting presents itself.”
“Got it in one.”
Wright glanced up at the helicopter hovering in the smoke-streaked sky. “Something tells me that’s going to happen soon enough, love.” He reached into his pocket and brought out a pack of Players and a Dunhill lighter. “So what brings you over here? Feeling like mixing with the rabble?”
“Actually,” Danielle said, “I’d like to ask a favor.”
Interest flickered on Wright’s face for a moment. “The princess comes begging to her poor cousin? And what would that favor be?”
“I want to use one of your computers with Internet access.”
“And OneWorld doesn’t have enough of them? Or maybe they don’t have the color you fancy? I thought Nicolae Carpathia and his little media empire owned a sizeable section of cyber reality.”
“I want some privacy. That’s something I don’t think you get much of with OneWorld.” Danielle felt bad about positioning her current employer in a suspicious light, but she had to push her personal feelings out of it. Lizuca had been killed and she had to find out how much culpability she had in the young woman’s death. One way or another, she knew the information that the CIA man was being researched through OneWorld’s digital archives had come through the media corporation.
“Ah, but OneWorld does pay the money, don’t they, love? And they have all the toys.” Wright sighed. “And with all the worldwide access OneWorld NewsNet has while the rest of us are standing out in the cold, why, you’d think the CEO made a deal with the devil himself.”
“I just caught a break,” Danielle said, trying to mollify Sid’s wounded ego that she, only a little more than half his age, had netted such a plum job. “I happened to be in the right place at the right time.”
“The way I heard it,” Wright said, “they went looking for you. Had a corporate headhunter come down and raid you from FOX News.”
“What about the computer?” Danielle pressed. “Is it possible or not?”
“Oh, it’s possible, love. Anything is. For ourselves, we seem to be able to get e-mail in and out just fine for the time being. Just can’t get the news out much past the immediate area. All I’ve got is a dial-up, I’m afraid. E-mail can be dreadfully slow depending on the size of the document you want to send or receive.”
That news didn’t make Danielle happy. “I’m going to need the computer for an hour or so.” Sending the digital picture of the CIA man through a dial-up connection would take at least that long.
Wright led the way to a battered Land Rover sitting in a rubblestrewn alley. He pulled a notebook computer and a cell phone from the passenger seat, connected the two items, and punched in a phone number. Lifting the sunglasses, he looked at her as the computer booted up and logged on to the Internet server. “With you going outside your own resources this way, I have to ask why.”
“I’m an investigative reporter,” Danielle said. “Paranoia is part of my nature.”
“Is it now?” Wright’s light hazel eyes studied her. He wasn’t an easy man to fool or to see through when he chose to hold secrets of his own. “Would this have anything to do with the young woman employee of OneWorld NewsNet who was killed in Bucharest only recently?”
Danielle eyed the British reporter levelly, kept her immediate emotions in check, then lied through her teeth. “I don’t know anything about that.”
Wright waited a beat, then nodded. “Uh-huh. I see. Well, then, love, if you need anything, let me know.” He put his sunglasses back in place and walked away.
“Well, if I find out anything, I’ll let you know.” Feeling bad—a little anyway—about lying to Wright, Danielle focused on her task. If information wasn’t coming from OneWorld NewsNet, then having someone outside the system go to it would be the best choice. That someone would be Mystic, a hacker so out there that most people thought he was a myth.
During an investigative piece regarding corporate espionage four years ago, Danielle had tracked down the person who called himself—or herself—Mystic. During the two months on the investigation, Danielle had come close to unmasking the person. In the end, though, Mystic had proven impossible to ferret out. He or she was a ghost in the system. And it was possible that Mystic was more than one person, according to some of the rumors.
Still, the mysterious person had been sufficiently impressed by Danielle’s tenaciousness that Mystic had set up a connection through a message drop that she could use to contact him or her. Danielle suspected the connection was the person’s means of taunting her for not finding out their identity. Or possibly some young teenager had developed a crush on her.
Over the past four years, Danielle had used Mystic’s resources on three assignments when she couldn’t turn up information she needed. Every time, Mystic had
