Dark Zone

24

Karr chose a café 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 pressé, 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 pressé, 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 pressé 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 information on computers. That’s not what I wanted to talk to you about.”

“You probably ought to tell me the entire story from the beginning,” said Karr, “because it’s not really making any sense to me.”

As patiently as he could, LaFoote told the American about his friend Vefoures. He realized that the man would not care much for the details of their friendship, how they had served together in the army immediately after World War II and how they had both nearly married the same girl; he omitted these details and many others as well, sticking to the important facts. He put himself into the younger man’s shoes and tried to anticipate what he would like and need to hear.

Some years in the past, Vefoures had helped develop a replacement for a chemical explosive several times more powerful than Semtex, the plastic explosive originally manufactured in Czechoslovakia but now fairly common throughout the world. Four or five months before, he had been called back into service by the DST — or by someone who claimed to represent the DST — and, after a few weeks, disappeared. The French secret service did not want to provide any information when LaFoote tried to find him.

“Did not want to, or could not?” asked Karr.

“Either one. I am not sure. It would look the same to me, would it not?”

“How do you know what he was working on?” the American asked.

“I know. We were very close friends. But of course without knowing how it was made, my information would be worthless, no?”

The American’s eyelids flickered up in a way that suggested it wouldn’t be if Vefoures wasn’t supposed to be doing the work at all.

“Plastic explosive is pretty common,” said Karr.

“This is more powerful and easier to shape. The focus — how exactly would I say that?”

“Focus?”

LaFoote’s English was good, but his technical knowledge of explosives was not, and so he had trouble explaining what he believed was the most important quality of the material. There was a way to formulate and construct it that allowed its explosive force to be intensified — in the layman’s terms that were sometimes used, it could be made into an explosive lens that magnified the effect just like a lens magnified light. Of course, like a lens, it did not actually alter the inherent force, merely taking advantage of the fact that explosions had wavelike properties.

“So why is this all significant?” asked the American.

“By arranging explosives in a certain shape, you can intensify the blast.”

“Really? How?”

“You are smarter than you seem, aren’t you?” asked LaFoote. “You are trying to seem as if you don’t understand, but you do.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment.” The American grinning at him — yes, he was one of those who pretended to be a joker, LaFoote realized. But he was very serious inside. He understood fully what LaFoote was saying.

A very good operative: such a man would have made a good partner in Africa when he served.

“The material might also pass by a standard detector without being picked up,” said LaFoote. “I don’t know about such details. There are many things about it that I don’t know — as I said, I am not a technical man. I am just looking for my friend.”

“And someone wants to stop you.”

“It would seem.”

“The DST?”

“It would seem.”

“How’d they know about the meeting?” asked Karr.

“I used Vefoures’ phone to call your embassy. They must have tapped the phone. I had checked the line with equipment I thought would be good — there must have been something I missed.”

“I’m not sure why you’d contact us,” Karr said.

“There was an NSA listening station in Morocco when I was younger. And one in Eritrea. Good men. We occasionally cooperated.”

“I would have thought you’d call Central Intelligence.”

“They are close with the DST, and military intelligence.”

“And you think they killed your friend.”

“I cannot trust the DST,” said LaFoote. “They are riddled with traitors.”

“How do you know?”

“I know.”

“Ponclare?”

“I do not say he is a traitor.” LaFoote chose his words carefully.

“You trust me?”

“Perhaps.”

Karr laughed.

“There are two reasons you should be interested,” LaFoote said. “First, the explosives are so powerful that a trunk of two hundred pounds would be the equivalent of a two-thousand-pound bomb. Or, to put it another way, the amount in a small device, say the computer that you have in your pocket or a cell phone, could blow a hole in an airplane skin.”

“What’s the second thing?”

“The second is that my friend bought a one-way ticket to New York City, which he was to use next week.”