was just—”
The policeman frowned at him, then took a step back from the window. “Take that road there to the left,” he said, pointing. “We’re blocking off traffic because of the American President’s visit. Go now, before the road is completely closed.”
“Thank you,” managed Mussa, putting the van in gear and cranking the wheel to turn into the opposite lane.
67
Was there any number as perfect as 3?
Indivisible. Prime. Essential. Mystic in its many applications. Mysterious.
Very mysterious. Unfortunately.
Johnny Bib looked at the three blank pieces of paper on the large table in the center of the lab room. The pages represented the blank spots of a larger file that his team was trying to extract from the hard drive that Dean and Lia had taken from the French library. The drive had been corrupted by a power spike. It seemed to have happened as the drive was being overwritten, which was a bit of a break for the analysts, making it much easier to recover data. However, the scrubber program had succeeded in laying down its pattern more than three times over several areas — probably during an earlier session — and at least some of the files they wanted had been erased.
The recovery process in those areas was excruciatingly slow. The team used a device that looked at the magnetic recordings on the drive that were left by the very slight misalignment of the heads. These fluxes — Johnny saw them as tiny yes or no checks written on pieces of sand on a vast beach — were run through a series of programs that attempted to tease logic from them, looking for patterns that corresponded to computer language. This part wasn’t necessarily as difficult as it sounded; it was another way of thinking about encryption, after all. But the way that the computer stored files added another level of complexity, and in any event the flux reading was painfully slow.
Three large blank spots, unlikely to yield their secrets.
Three. The ultimate prime, the ultimate number.
Was that a sign that they would succeed or fail?
“Johnny, look at this,” said Blondie Jones, one of the computer geeks working on the project.
Blondie had earned her nickname a year before, when she’d come to work with her black hair dyed yellow. Her hair had since returned to its natural color, but her nickname had become permanent.
“This other set of calculations mimics the simulation we found earlier, but on a slightly smaller scale. The tower blowup. Some of the values are similar, but the impact area is closer and smaller. It wasn’t completely overwritten.”
Johnny Bib walked over to the console where Blondie was working.
“You’re sure it’s not just a small-scale model they tried first, to control the variables and get the concept down?” he suggested.
“Look at the dates. And there’s an access correlation here, when the library computer was taken over. See? We traced everything back and we found the computer used to initiate the connection. It’s part of a network, like a commercial thing or something. I think the queries originated there, but we may not know until we download everything off those drives. Right now we’re looking around. There’s a hidden file structure similar to what we’ve seen on the others. It’ll take a few minutes. Three or four.”
“Better three than four,” he said automatically. “Three is a much better number.”
He looked at the data. A smaller explosion, a smaller effect, but the result was—
Oh.
The upper stage of the tower — an easier target.
“Excuse me. I have to talk to Mr. Rubens. Find out what else is on that computer.”
68
Donohue watched as the door to the building opened. The first man out was a plainclothes officer, a bodyguard of some type. He walked to the end of the block and got into a car. As soon as he pulled away from the curb, two more men emerged from the building, followed by a third dressed in a brown suit — Ponclare, his target.
Donohue bent slightly. His joints tightened. His eyes narrowed their focus.
He squeezed the trigger; in the scope he saw Ponclare’s head burst as if it were a water balloon.
The sniper held the gun ready until the body crumpled. Then he got up and walked calmly to the door, savoring the satisfaction of a job well done.
69
The driver stopped, waiting to turn. Dean had glanced down at the handheld computer to look at the download of the bank statement when he heard the crack of a gunshot a block away. It was a sharp, loud bang, and Dean, a former sniper, realized instantly that they were too late.
“Pay the driver!” he yelled to Lia, jumping for the car.
Ponclare’s office was down the block and around the corner. As Dean started to run, a man came around the corner, walking casually, as if nothing had happened. He wore an American-style baseball cap and had a camera around his neck and seemed oblivious to what was going on around him.
Dean got a glimpse of the man’s face as he went past. Something poked at him in that moment, but he didn’t realize it for a step or two, not until he reached the corner.
Two men with pistols drawn were running down the block toward a man who lay sprawled on the sidewalk. They were yelling for their boss:
Dean turned around to get another look at the man he’d just passed. Lia, done with the cab, ran up to him, asking what had happened.
Rather than answering, Dean started to cross the street. The taxi driver had picked up another fare — the man in the baseball cap. Dean stopped to let the taxi pass; as it did, he slipped a small tracking device from his shirt pocket and slapped it against the car’s rear fender. Another taxi was coming down from the cross street; Dean ran out halfway into traffic to flag it down.
“What are you doing?” asked Lia, catching up to him.
“We have to follow him,” said Dean.
“Why?”
“Because this is the second time I nearly ran into him. The first was in London when we went to check out the room Kensworth had stayed in.”
70
Tommy Karr stared at the small metro ticket, momentarily unable to remember which way it was supposed to be fed into the machine so the magnetic strip could be read. He finally decided strip-down; the reader grabbed
