you soon. I’ll be driving a blue Ford pickup.”
Honestly, she didn’t want to be driving in this weather or this car anyway. At last she gave in. “Thanks. Seriously.”
“I’m on my way out the door. I’ll keep Pat’s phone with me. Call me if you run into any trouble. And let me know when you get to Lindberg’s.”
“Okay.”
She hung up and stared out the windshield at the blinding snow.
Five miles to go.
At this speed, fifteen minutes. Maybe twenty.
As long as the stupid car didn’t stall out along the way.
35
The Schoenberg Inn
Elk Ridge, Wisconsin
Lower level, north wing
Cassandra Lillo had almost missed locating the radio transmission wires in the duffel bag that Alexei Chekov had dropped off with her team, the bag she’d had Becker drive toward the base in order to lead Chekov away from the hotel. The transmitter was very high end. Chekov obviously knew his stuff.
And now.
Now.
She knew from monitoring the police dispatch frequency that the sheriff’s department had found the knife with Chekov’s prints, the one she’d had Ted deposit in the snow beside the Pickrons’ house immediately following their meeting with Alexei.
And they already had the helmet that Becker had left in the water this morning before daybreak. On the police radios one of the officers had mentioned that the strap was buckled. How could Becker be so stupid? How could he make a mistake like that! He might be good at stopping loggers and whaling ships, but he was not proving to be especially gifted in this current line of work. Cassandra could only guess that, if the cops were thinking at all, the buckled strap would be enough to tip them off.
And now a deputy, Bryan Ellory, was unaccounted for, and even more fascinating, an FBI agent who was investigating the Pickron killings had been found beside the Chippewa River.
He’d been pulseless and unresponsive when the EMTs found him; however, from her scuba diving days, she knew the old adage that “you’re not dead until you’re warm and dead” was buttressed by an awful lot of medical research. Cold water immersion, as well as extreme hypothermia, slow the body’s metabolism, and in numerous cases, clinical death had been reversed thirty, forty, even up to eighty minutes after it had occurred.
But whether or not this man would survive, she was intrigued by his presence here because she actually knew him. Patrick Bowers was the federal agent she’d met last year in San Diego-in fact, he was the one who’d caught her when she was working on an earlier project.
But her stay in prison had been relatively short-lived, and she had nothing against Bowers personally. He’d just been doing his job and she’d just been doing hers, but she knew that he typically worked serial homicides, so she found it informative that he’d been assigned to the Pickron murders.
Agent Bowers might recover, he might not, but in the meantime, the FBI’s involvement was something to keep an eye on.
And use to her advantage, if possible.
Law enforcement is like a bull with a ring through its snout. You can lead them wherever you want, if you know the kinds of things they look for.
Which she did.
Her father had taught her all about that.
The original plan had been to keep the police focused on Donnie and only later direct the investigators’ attention to Chekov. Admittedly, however, law enforcement had moved a little faster than she anticipated. Prudently, she’d been prepared for that contingency. An international assassin in the area was just too big a carrot to pass up.
At first, she’d intended for Clifton to disable Alexei but keep him alive so they could time his subsequent “suicide” appropriately. But when Alexei showed some skills and so easily overpowered Clifton White, she’d decided it would be more profitable to let Chekov go free, and then direct law enforcement toward him while he was on the run. It would be less work for her, less of a distraction. This way it would make for a good old-fashioned manhunt and galvanize law enforcement officers, keep them occupied longer.
Let Chekov lead the bulls around for her.
With only one good arm left, Clifton hadn’t been of any further use to her.
She’d had to put him down.
Something else her father had taught her to do well.
And now it was time to move forward.
Cassandra’s partner had explained it all to her last month. “To hack into a computer system with a USB stick you just insert code that’ll automatically execute when it’s plugged into a computer. Two approaches. One: leave a Trojan horse that’ll spread to any additional USB memory device that’s connected to the computer, and from there-”
“Spread computer to computer every time a memory stick is inserted.”
“That’s right. And have them transmit back information. That’s why the military has banned USB jump drives from use on all its networks-but the computers still have USB ports. In this case, we’ll do option two: a self- replicating algorithm that’ll move through the system at the root level until it finds the files we need. We’ll just need one USB device, strategically placed.”
She already knew that computers respond differently to external hard drives than they do to portable USB devices. Every hard drive has a different individualized code, a sui generis fingerprint that allows programmers to identify when and where a drive is used. But, if you know the fingerprint of another drive, it allows hackers to mask the true identity of a drive by overlaying the original code on top of its own.
So you can stay hidden.
Even in plain sight.
And there was no better person to do that than her partner.
While she listened to the police dispatch channel, she studied her computer monitor, looking over the submarine information Becker had accessed and downloaded from Donnie Pickron’s home computer.
Clicking to the Department of Defense’s Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communication System, or JWICS, Cassandra confirmed that the USS Louisiana would be ideally positioned in the Gulf of Oman at just the right time, 03:00 GMT.
That’s when her partner’s algorithm was set to register the signal. That’s when they had to send the transmission-not a minute earlier, not a minute later. No hack goes unnoticed forever, and the sub’s computers would eventually notice the discrepancies in the code and respond with countermeasures.
Yes, countermeasures in some areas, but carelessness in others.
After all, the United States military doesn’t just subcontract weapons systems to civilian contractors, but also hires private security firms and civilian companies for less mission-sensitive services.
Logistics.
Food service.
Custodial services.
No one in the Navy is excited about cleaning the heads or emptying the leftover raw sewage that hadn’t been deposited in the ocean from a 150-crewmen sub after three months at sea.
And so, the US Naval Forces Central Command in the Persian Gulf used a private firm, Khdmat Tjaryh at- Tnz?yf al-B?ryn, the Commercial Cleaning Service of Bahrain, to clean their heads and drain their waste storage tanks. Since those areas were located in the sections of Ohio Class submarines that were designed to allow for
