Cutting Edge

49

Through halls where emperors had dined, and in the ballrooms where the Congress of Vienna had once gathered and danced, a lone Coast Guard rescue swimmer wandered, lamenting his past and in search of a future.

So close, yet so far.

That was the thought resounding in DeBolt’s reengineered brain as he wandered through the Hofburg Vienna. He had crossed an ocean, spanned a continent, zeroed in as best he could. But here, amid an endless expanse of gilded halls and crystalline fixtures, he had hit a cold and hard stop.

All around him was his only lead on how to find Dr. Atif Patel: the World Conference on Cyber Security. DeBolt had come here straight from the train station, and in a trash bin near the conference entrance he’d found a discarded lanyard like the one real conference attendees wore. He had put it around his neck with only a glance at the printed name and corporate affiliation. No one gave him a second look.

He’d checked the events calendar for the conference before arriving — it was available online, and fortunately had not yet been taken down by a hacker with a sense of humor. Patel’s only remaining appearance was scheduled for tomorrow morning. DeBolt didn’t want to wait that long. The problem was, he had not been able to uncover where Patel was staying, where his credit cards had been used, or what his mobile number was. Those things DeBolt could ascertain on virtually anyone in the world drew a blank when it came to META’s lone surviving creator — if that was truly what he was.

So he roamed the palatial complex and scanned nametags, particularly those worn by men who appeared to be of Indian ethnicity — an assumption on DeBolt’s part, but he had no description of Patel to work from. He came across an evening session in one of the large conference rooms, and through the open doorway he saw a florid, professorial man at a podium prattling about network solutions. It occurred to him that if for some reason he couldn’t locate Patel, he’d probably landed in the best place on earth to find someone who could help him understand META. Even if the others here had no direct knowledge of the project, he was literally surrounded by experts on wireless networks and information systems. A demonstration of his abilities, as he’d done for Lund and Colonel Freeman, would unquestionably turn him into an overnight sensation. Instant celebrity. The downside to that, of course, was that he would effectively be highlighting his position to the other man like him. And Delta, DeBolt was sure, was not seeking celebrity.

He returned to the reception area where clusters of men and women stood with cocktails. DeBolt picked a small group and studied each face. Two men and a woman. He did his research, and was happy to get results from facial recognition inputs. By the time he made his approach there was no need to look at nametags.

“Annette Chu?” he said. “Stanford?”

A petite Asian woman in her forties pulled a glass of white wine away from her lips. “Yes, that’s right. Have we met?”

“Yes, years ago. My name’s Trey Smith. I was a grad student at UCLA when you were teaching there.”

She smiled, put out her hand for a tentative shake. DeBolt could see her trying valiantly to make an association.

“I’m sure you don’t remember me,” he said. “I finished the year after you moved to Palo Alto.”

“What did you study?” she asked politely.

“Network architecture.” DeBolt shifted his gaze to the two men and introduced himself, before saying, “I went on to work at Cal under Dr. Patel. I understand he’s here at the conference, but I haven’t been able to find him.” He let that hang.

“I haven’t seen him,” Chu said.

One of the men offered, “I went to his talk on day two. Very good — Patel’s at the forefront of wireless integration.”

“I think I may have him beat,” said DeBolt with a smile.

“You should come tomorrow morning,” the man continued, “he’s the featured speaker.”

“I’d like to look him up tonight — I wish I knew where he was staying.” This was met with blank looks all around.

And so it went. DeBolt worked the room nonstop. He talked to dozens of professors and PhD candidates, took a pocketful of business cards from corporate sales reps. Most had seen Dr. Atif Patel at some point during the conference. Many had attended his first presentation, and there was universal anticipation for his second talk tomorrow. Yet no one knew where he was at that moment. Indeed, no one had seen him all day. A former student of Patel’s thought he might he staying at the InterContinental Wien. A Google rep swore she’d seen him walk into the Hotel Sans Souci. DeBolt took the time to investigate each claim. The InterContinental’s electronic guest book was apparently easily breached, and he discovered in less than a minute that Dr. Atif Patel was not among its registered guests. The Sans Souci took nearly ten minutes, but the result was the same.

Try as he might, DeBolt could not locate the one man who he hoped could set him free.

Delta drove his rented car through the heart of Vienna, more a quest for inspiration than a means of conveyance. The evening rush was fast approaching, the bustling arteries below the Danube building to their daily crest. As he regarded the sea of blinking brake lights around him, it struck him that he might be the only driver on Martinstraße not annoyed by the traffic. When it came to handling a vehicle, Delta had long been subjected to different levels of concern, having spent too many years in places where roadbeds were inlaid with explosives, where overpasses spoke of snipers, and where every oncoming car had to be thought of as a bomb. The throng of urban mechanization around him now? It was practically soothing.

He rather enjoyed driving, a vestige he supposed of his first, and very brief, posting in the Corps with a logistics battalion. Even the recent accident in Iraq, which had nearly taken his life, had done nothing to dampen his enthusiasm. Delta liked the vibration of an engine, the feedback of steering in his hands. The paradoxical sensations of freedom and control. He’d often thought that driving was the nearest he came to relaxation.

In that moment, however, it simply allowed him to think.

It had been a frustrating day — this too a reminder of his years in the Corps. He remembered on one occasion waiting five hours for an ammo shipment, only to see the truck arrive empty. He remembered standing in a chow line for an hour to find nothing left but MREs — beef stroganoff, his most despised — because a herd of Air Force weenies had cleaned out the serving trays. Frustration. It was to be expected, a part of any mission.

His bad day had begun long before he’d arrived in Vienna, but now that he was here it was time for damage control. In the most literal sense, he had been honest with Patel — he didn’t know where Bravo was at that moment. Almost certainly the Coastie had come to Vienna, and if so, Delta was sure he could find him. Lund was proving the more difficult target to track, and so she became his priority.

She’d readily taken the bait he had put out, deciding, based on his fraudulent text, to travel to Vienna in search of DeBolt. Unfortunately, she’d surprised him by being quick enough to get on last night’s flight. Lund had arrived a full day earlier than planned — hours before Delta himself was scheduled to reach Vienna. With that one cock-up, his strategy to tail her from the airport tomorrow morning was shot full of holes.

Having at least been forewarned, he’d tried to be proactive. While tracking her United Airlines flight across the ocean, he had sent a tip to the U.S. Coast Guard, ostensibly from the Department of Homeland Security, regarding the international departure of a civilian employee who was wanted as a witness in a homicide investigation in Kodiak. Using Wi-Fi during the course of his own flight, Delta had sat back and monitored the situation via META. In the early hours this morning, he’d watched a stream of back-and-forth messages between the Coast Guard, U.S. State Department, and ultimately the Austrian government. It worked just as he’d hoped — Lund had been detained the moment she landed in Vienna. In effect, the Bundespolizei were holding her in custody for him.

Then a new problem arose — once Delta landed, he couldn’t figure out where she’d been taken.

His improvised scheme was further undone by a series of misfortunes. Lund’s phone had briefly come to life when she arrived at the airport, but within minutes it was turned off, probably by the police when they arrested her. Then came the truly maddening breakdown. META, for all its technological wizardry, had been stymied by the most ordinary of afflictions — the Bundespolizei computer system that tracked inmates and detainees had crashed. Delta was furious, but left with little recourse. He simply had to buy time in order to locate Lund.

He knew from message traffic that she was to be handed over to U.S. embassy staff, and subsequently transported back to Alaska under military escort. Not wanting that exchange to take place, he’d inserted a number of disruptions on the State Department end regarding the escort’s authorizing paperwork. A chain of phone calls ensued between the escort officer, Marine Captain Jose Morales, and the local police. Soon the embassy and the State Department became involved, further levels of bureaucracy crosshatched. The channels of communication, and resultant confusion, grew exponentially.

Altogether, Delta knew he had created a window, albeit a very narrow one. His inspired idea of bringing Lund to Vienna was on the verge of going down in flames. Like so many ops, a promising blueprint had been defeated by the most common of enemies — complexity.

Driving wasn’t giving Delta the clarity he needed. He sat rigid and seething, gripping the wheel hard as he weaved amid traffic and circled the same city blocks. He tried to think tactically, bending to the facts as he knew them. He considered going to the airport, waiting near the Air Force jet that was to transport Lund to Germany. When she arrived, he could kill her on the spot, although it would likely entail removing her escort as well. Delta had reservations about killing another Marine — even if he was an officer.

He tried to compose his thoughts. Where would they take her?

Given the circumstances — police involvement, immigration, and diplomatic channels — a large city like Vienna presented any number of possibilities. Was she being held at one of the many police stations? In a secure government ministry building? Had she already been transferred to the U.S. embassy? He tried to leverage META, but the responses came at a glacial pace. Embassy information — daily sign-in logs, message traffic, personnel files — all arrived as if through quicksand. Austrian government data welled up from an even thicker bog, a delay that he suspected was due to the translation from German to English. Or perhaps the delays were only a reflection of his outlook — his frustration level peaking.

He drove aimless circles around Alsergrund, the ninth district in central Vienna. He cruised streets once frequented by Freud, never giving a thought to how the father of psychoanalysis might have marveled over the processes of his META-Marine mind. At one point Delta was so distracted in composing a mental inquiry that he nearly caused an accident outside Schwarzspanierstraße 15, the apartment in which Ludwig van Beethoven had died. It was soon after this near miss, with a taxi driver raising his fist in Delta’s rearview mirror, that the distant voice of a drill sergeant from basic training invaded his thoughts. When things go to hell, simplify.

And that was what he did. He ignored everything that had happened that day, all the hunting gone wrong. Delta backtracked, past the Vienna airport, over an ocean, and settled on something far more basic — his last solid point of orientation. He had discounted the prospect for hours now, but decided it was worth another try. From the window in his eye, he dispatched a request to locate Shannon Lund’s mobile phone.