Dark Zone

“None.”

“None?”

“I was just on vacation. I want to work.”

“You should get some rest.”

“Screw rest,” she said.

Rubens got up from his desk and began pacing around his office. She was as cranky and feisty as ever. A good sign?

“You can send me. I’m OK,” she told him. “I know there’s a mission you need a woman agent for. Marie told me.”

“That can be done by anyone.”

“All the more reason not to worry, then,” said Lia. “I’ll get better makeup for my black eye.”

Maybe that would be the best thing for her, Rubens thought The mission itself was indeed straightforward. And Lia — Lia was Lia. She needed to be in action, to taste it.

But this wasn’t like getting up off a horse after you fell. If she were a man, would he send her out?

“Lia, for the record, let me state that I urge you to get care. You know we have plenty of people who can help,” he added.

“Help me do what?” She put her hands on her hips, face tilted forward — she could have been a gunfighter daring him to draw.

“I would feel better if you went to counseling.”

“Do we have another mission? Because I’m bored. I’m not sitting around knitting for a month until some dope of a doctor decides my inkblot test is normal.”

It was her right to be difficult, wasn’t it? Just as it was the General’s right to name his guardian and not live where his hated cousin lived.

“I should order you to see a psychologist,” Rubens told her stubbornly.

“You need me too much. Where am I going?”

“All right,” he said finally. “All right.”

He began telling her about Morocco.

24

Karr chose a cafe several blocks away, a small place tucked down an alley where his CIA shadows would be able to watch his back. He found a booth and slid in.

“You are very good,” said LaFoote. “I would almost believe that you chose this place at random.”

Karr laughed and took out his PDA, activating the bug sweeper; the place was clean.

LaFoote ordered a glass of wine. Karr ordered a fresh lemon juice, citron presse, an old-fashioned French drink that came with a large vaselike pitcher of water and a much smaller one of sugar syrup. He’d never had this before and fussed over it — all the while waiting for the two CIA men to check in by phone with the Art Room and report that he hadn’t been followed. Finally, they did just that.

“So tell me about computers,” Karr said to the old Frenchman. “I’m interested in servers that are hijacked by terrorists and used to pass messages. Where can I find a list of them?”

“My friend Vefoures was an important chemist,” answered the man. “And three weeks ago he disappeared.”

Karr didn’t know quite how to respond.

“Computers — how do you say that in French?” said Karr.

“He worked for the government for many years, always in secret. And then after he retired, he was called back several times. Most recently in January, by someone who said they were connected with the DST. But my friends at the DST knew nothing about it. And then, three weeks ago, he was no more.”

“No idea what he’s talking about,” said Johnson, Karr’s runner in the Art Room. “DST is the French abbreviation for Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire, one of the French intelligence groups under the Interior Ministry. Counterterrorism, industrial espionage, whole bunch of things.”

Karr already knew that; he’d brushed up against a DST agent six or seven months back out in North Africa.

Nasty encounter, that. Guy had no sense of humor.

Karr took the small cup of sugar water and poured a bit more into his tumbler of citron presse, fiddling with the do-it-yourself lemonade. “Takes the edge off, huh?”

“Can you help me?” asked the Frenchman.

“I think there’s a basic misunderstanding here,” said Karr. “There was a matter of computers. Someone passed along some Web addresses to a third party, who forwarded them to my boss. There were supposed to be some more. A meeting was arranged. Things went off-track. Somebody got shot. I don’t know anything about a chemist.”

A few more drops of sugar water, and the citron presse would be almost drinkable, Karr decided.

“My name is Denis LaFoote. For twenty-eight years I was an agent with the foreign service and then the Interior Ministry and the DST, the Directorate of Territorial Security. It is similar to your CIA and FBI. I served many stations. You can check me out.”

“I will.”

The Frenchman’s face blanched. “Not with Ponclare. Not in Paris.”

“Why not?” said Karr.

LaFoote shook his head.

“Ponclare?” asked Karr.

- “Head of the division responsible for Paris security, and has an overlap with some technical departments,” said his runner. “Pretty high up.”

“He is an important person in the directorate,” said LaFoote. “More important than his title makes him seem. They rearranged everything some years ago, and now they play shell games with the bureaucracy. Politics — it is all politics. He is a bureaucrat, not like his father.”

“Where do these computers come in?”

“While he was working, my friend received two e-mails from odd sources. I believe the word is domains?”

“Domains, sure,” said Karr.

Domains were a type of computer network; they were common to many people as the portion after @ on an e-mail address. They corresponded to a set of physical computers, which was how the NSA had checked them out in the first place — and why the agency was interested.

“My friend kept the e-mails,” said LaFoote. “When he disappeared, I checked them and found the addresses themselves did not exist. Then I did some more work. I had a friend with the government check and was told that they were suspicious, but he refused to give any other details.”

“Suspicious how?”

LaFoote shrugged. “I’m not a computer expert. The person who got this information for me was the son of a friend, a very good friend. The son is not quite the man the father was, but what young man is?”

“What part of the government did he work for?”

“Direction Centrale de la Police Judiciare. It is, how would you say, the public face of the Directorate for Territorial Security? They are connected. I cannot totally trust them.”

“Why not?”

“I am not sure of them. For now, let me leave it at that. I don’t want to prejudice you — I’m interested in the truth.”

“You promised more Web sites or domains.”

“No, more information. That was what was said on the call. And that’s what I’m giving you. I have no