Free Fall

Forty-Three

Linthicum, Maryland

“Damn. So close,” Keith Dorling whispered to himself, his chair creaking as he leaned back to think in the subdued light of his workstation.

He’d shifted his focus from his three monitors to the faces of his wife, Eve, and their little girls, Hayley and Ariel, smiling back from the framed photo beside his keyboard, taken during last summer’s trip to Cape Cod.

What I do here keeps them safe.

Dorling worked at the Defense Cyber Crime Center. Known as DC3, it operated under the Air Force Office of Special Investigations. He was a civilian analyst, an expert in cyber crime, and he held top secret security clearance with DC3’s Analytical Group.

The group was a member agency of the National Cyber Investigative Joint Task Force and was helping the FBI. Dorling, regarded as one of the center’s best investigators, had been tasked to help investigate the Zarathustra emails.

For the past several days, he’d been attempting to track the source of the potential threat arising from emails sent to Newslead, a news agency in New York, and the Kuwaiti Embassy in London. This case was unlike any he’d pursued. The subject was remarkably skilled. Dorling had marveled at the beauty of the encryption work that the sender, Zarathustra, had employed. It reflected a level of sophistication and understanding that Dorling had rarely encountered in his work. His target had used rented servers in Thailand and Romania. Dorling had been tight on the trail, discovering that Zarathustra’s path then went to Sweden, and then to servers in Estonia.

With the Kuwaiti email, he’d found a glimmer of something that took the trail to the United States, suggesting that the end point-or source-was here.

But it had vanished.

That’s where I lost it. I can’t find the source. Not yet.

Dorling exhaled, reviewed the logs and dates, then rechecked all the notes supplied by analysts in the UK who were also pursuing Zarathustra.

I must’ve missed something. Okay, back to square one.

He shook his head and resumed working.