the key, but he had no idea to which lock.
He had his suspicions, but they were essentially groundless. This case of mistaken identity was only serving to reinforce them. They were looking for whoever came to claim the information on the thumb drive. Who would have known it was there? Her handler? If she was an agent, it made sense-but then why would an agent from one of the Secret Services have latched on to Grey Metzger? Until yesterday there had been nothing remotely interesting about the man.
While the woman disappeared into the antique jewelers, the second ghost set of steps followed him across the road.
Konstantin didn’t look over his shoulder, not even once.
He wanted to see how serious this person was; that meant changing the nature of the game.
He turned the corner and stopped dead in his tracks. He had fifteen steps on the man behind him. He pressed himself up against the wall, taking a second to calm himself, center his breathing and focus before exploding into action. He counted the steps out in his head, tensing.
As the man came around the corner Konstantin stepped into his path. Recognition flashed across the man’s eyes, followed a split second later by blinding pain. Konstantin moved instinctively. Violence was his trade. He knew how to hurt people. He stepped in close, getting right up in the man’s face, feinted as though to slap the man, drawing his eyes to the flurry of motion, and drove the heel of his shoe through the man’s knee hard enough to shatter the cap and tear the cartilage as he forced it to bend the wrong way. The man went down in the fetal position, clutching his ruined leg up to his chest and screaming.
Konstantin stood over him.
“You’ll be lucky to be walking in six months. Be grateful I didn’t kill you. Next time I will.”
He left the man lying in the middle of the street. He crossed the road again, weaving between the slow moving cars. A yellow bus indicated that it was coming to a stop. Konstantin hchest an board and took up one of the window seats that allowed him to see down the length of Schlossstrasse for a few seconds as they drove past the mouth of the street. The man was still lying on the cobbles. The woman in the red dress stood over him, talking quickly into her cell phone. Konstantin couldn’t read lips but he could guess what she was saying: the job was botched, the target got away and they had a man down. It wasn’t the kind of call any operative wanted to make. There would be repercussions. Konstantin didn’t feel the slightest bit of sympathy for them. The woman looked up, and for a moment their eyes met. Then the bus carried him out of sight.
He rang the bell and hopped off less than three hundred yards up the road.
The last thing they would have expected was for him to double-back and switch from hunted to hunter. He walked briskly past the usual line of personality-less shops with their blind windows, then saw the bright yellow sign of a charity shop and ducked inside. It took him less than a minute to pick an oversized sheepskin coat and flat working man’s cap from the rack of dead men’s clothes at the back of the store. He paid in cash and left his own coat as a donation. He pulled the cap down so it covered most of his face and buttoned the sheepskin all the way up to the throat as he stepped back out onto the street. The entire transaction had taken less than two minutes.
He looked, to the casual observer at least, like a different person from the one who had walked out of Grey Metzger’s apartment building less than ten minutes earlier. That would be enough for what he had in mind.
Konstantin had always been happier as the hunter.
He walked back toward Schlossstrasse, head down, hands stuffed in the old man’s coat. He could smell the stale flavor of cigarettes that permeated the sheepskin. It had that comfortable worn in and worn out feel. He felt the first few fat drops of rain fall. Each one seemed to release another forgotten odor from inside the coat.
He saw the red dress before he saw anything else. It stood out like a beacon in the gray street. Konstantin leaned up against the nearest wall, positioning himself beside one of the many bus stops along the street and watched.
Less than five minutes later the sedan pulled up alongside them, and the woman helped the fallen man up and into the car. Konstantin smiled wryly, enjoying the pantomime of pain that went with the whole maneuver. But it was the sedan’s license plate that caught his attention, or rather the zero where the location code should have been. Berlin plates, for instance, had a B prefix followed by a six-digit string of numbers.
The zero marked the sedan as a diplomatic car. /span›
He memorized the number. It would be something to keep Lethe busy, if nothing else. Diplomatic plates could have amounted to just about anything, but on the most basic level it meant friends in high places.
Konstantin pulled the brim of his new cap down over his eyes as the car swept past him.
The rain started to fall in earnest.
He needed to find out what was on the thumb drive.
11
“All right Koni, talke,” Jude Lethe said into the headset. He wiped his lips with the back of his left hand and put the empty drink can down beside the rickety pyramid of other empty cans.
Half a world away, Konstantin Khavin sat in a dingy Internet cafe nursing a straight black coffee. He looked over his shoulder three times in as many minutes. Jude could see the stern-faced Russian through the blurry pixilation of the webcam. He enjoyed watching other people while they sat in front of computers, especially when it was so obvious that they were lost in space.
“What do you need me to do?” Konstantin asked, eying the screen as he would a viper.
“I’ll need the IP address of the terminal you’re using,” Lethe explained, knowing it was going to sound like double-dutch to the big man.
“And in a language I understand?”
“I’m going to take over your computer from here. It’ll be just like magic,” he said, grinning.
“You can be a complete ass, Lethe. Did anyone ever tell you that?”
“If you’re going to do anything, do it all the way, eh? What say we hack this computer, then, shall we?” He talked Konstantin through the process, directing him through the control panel into the network settings until he found the computer’s unique Internet address. In less than a minute Konstantin read him a string of numbers.
“Perfect,” he said. He tapped in the digits and triggered a string of commands that allowed him to take remote control of Konstantin’s machine. He didn’t use the operating system’s built-in helper. His code was much more invasive. “I’m sending you a piece of code, Koni. All I want you to do is execute it, and we’ll be cooking with gas.”
“Just tell me what to do.”
“Click on the smiley face when it pops up. It’s as easy as that.”
Konstantin did as he was told. A second terminal window opened up on the bank of monitors in front of Lethe. In it he saw exactly what Konstantin saw. “Fantastic. Okay, plug the USB stick in. I’ll take it from here.” A few seconds later he was moving the cursor and launching a browser to explore the contents of the thumb drive Konstantin had recovered.
Of course it was never going to be that easy.
In the digital heart of Nonesuch Jude Lethe stared at the encryption key that froze his screen. His grin turned feral as the image on the screen shivered and broke up. The terminal window closed, the connection severed. This was his world. He’d built an entire ghost network that allowed him to come and go through the mainframe corridors of power at will. The ghost network data-mined Ministry computers. If he so chose, he could fire up webcams from hundreds of the laptops used by politicians and high ranking civil servants just to see what they were doing then and there. An eleven-digit encryption key wouldn’t take long to break through, no matter who built it. People were predictable; they used family pets, nicknames, favorite books, things that were memorable. Some tried to be clever and used random number strings. Either way, it didn’t matter to Lethe.
He reestablished the connection.
This time he didn’t try to crack the encryption over the remote connection. He ran a cloning program, making
