The Enemy Within

CHAPTER 19 BACKLASH

Helen Gray fought off the last clinging tendrils of a nightmare and woke up, suddenly aware that she was all alone in the rumpled bed. She opened her eyes. The glowing digits on his bedside clock read 1:41 A.M. Where had Peter gone?

She pushed herself upright and looked around the room. The lights were off, but her eyes were adjusted to the darkness. Her lips curved upward in a smile as she noticed the pieces of clothing strewn across the floor from the half-open door all the way over to the bed. Someday she and Peter Thorn were going to have to learn to set a somewhat slower, less frantic pace in their lovemaking.

But not now. After weeks of strain and enforced separation, neither of them could have been expected to restrain themselves for very long. And they hadn’t.

With her section on a twelve-hour stand-down, Helen had driven straight to Peter’s town house. She remembered falling into his arms as soon as he opened the front door. Her memories after that were a tangled mix of roving hands, parted lips, motion, warmth, and finally, a swelling, crashing wave of sheer ecstasy.

Sleep had come after a welcome slide into restful oblivion that had been broken only by an old nightmare from her childhood. A nightmare of being hunted through an endless maze of narrow, dead-end corridors and impossible turnings. It was an evil dream that had come back to haunt her in these past several weeks as she and her fellow FBI agents grappled with their faceless, nameless foes.

Helen glanced at the empty place beside her and guessed that the nightmare had begun only after Peter left her side. She shook off the last wisps of sleep.

Her nose twitched as she caught the welcome smell of coffee wafting in through the open doorway. She slid out of bed, threw on one of his shirts, and glided quietly out into the hallway.

The lights were on in the guest bedroom Peter used as a work space. She pushed open the unlatched door and went inside.

Wearing only a pair of ash-grey Army sweatpants, Peter Thorn sat at a desk, paging steadily through a stack of reports she had forwarded from the FBI task force. Under enormous pressure from above for results, Special Agent Flynn’s initial reluctance to share their information with the government’s other counterterrorist units had faded somewhat.

Peter had pinned a large map of the United States to the wall above his desk. Color-coded pins marked the location of different terrorist attacks. His light brown hair was tousled and his green eyes looked weary. A forgotten cup of coffee sat cooling beside a calculator and a pocket calendar.

Helen leaned over and put her arms around him. “Couldn’t sleep?” she asked softly.

He looked around with the same wry, boyish grin that had first attracted her to him. “Nope. Sorry.” He tapped the disordered pile of papers in front of him. “I just can’t seem to stop going over and over these reports in my mind.”

“What are you looking for?”

Thorn shrugged tiredly. “I’m not sure exactly. Maybe some pattern we haven’t spotted yet. Some common method of operations or choice of targets.”

She nodded slowly. “Not a bad idea, Peter. Nobody on our task force has the time or energy to look very hard at the big picture. Everybody’s locked into the little piece of the puzzle they’re directly responsible for investigating.”

“What about Flynn?”

Helen shook her head. “He tries. But every time he starts pulling all our data together, it seems like somebody from the White House calls for another briefing. Or he has to fend off the press or the Congress. There are too many distractions. Too many conflicting demands on his time.” She nodded toward his desk. “So, are you finding anything interesting in all of that?”

Peter grimaced. “Nothing solid. Just an ugly sneaking suspicion that we’re looking in the wrong god damned place for these bastards. I’m beginning to think we’re not dealing with domestic terrorism at all. That maybe most of what’s been happening is something that was planned and organised overseas. That we could be facing a single, coordinated terrorist effort.”

Helen straightened up to her full height, suddenly very alert.

“Explain.”

His mouth turned down even more. “I wish I could. It’s more a feeling than anything else.” He pushed some of the FBI incident reports to one side. “Look, discount the background noise the murders and penny-ante bombings conducted by the second-raters and punks we’ve already caught. Right?”

She nodded. Each large-scale terrorist massacre or bombing seemed to spawn half a dozen or more copycat acts most by known psychos or members of hate groups already under FBI surveillance. The legwork involved in running those incidents down consumed precious time and resources, but it never seemed to bring them any closer to the people who were doing the real damage.

“Well, then, take another look at what’s left. Bombings and massacres that jump from D.C. to Seattle, to Chicago, then back to D.C., and on to Dallas. More bombs that hit L.A. and Louisville on the same day. Then another series of bombs and ambushes back in this area. And now this communications virus in the Midwest.” Thorn jabbed a finger at the map as he spoke, pinpointing each separate incident. “Every attack is professionally planned and executed. Every attack strikes a new area and a new type of target. And every attack spreads our personnel and resources across a wider and wider area.”

“Sure.” Helen frowned slightly. “But, Peter, several groups with very different agendas have claimed responsibility for the worst attacks.”

“Sure. Groups that no one had heard of before this all started. Terrorist organisations that never showed up on any law enforcement agency’s radar screen. Terrorists with access to plastic explosive, SA-16s, and now computer viruses, for God’s sake!” He shook his head forcefully. “It’s just too damned much, Helen. Every instinct I’ve got tells me that there’s someone lurking out there pulling the strings and watching us jump.” “Who?” she asked quietly.

“God knows. I don’t.” Some of the fire went out of his eyes. “Maybe those German neo-Nazis we heard about after the synagogue hostage-taking you smashed. Maybe the people who recruited those Bosnian Muslims Rossini and I tried so hard to find earlier this year.”

“So you think the terrorists, or some of them anyway, are foreigners?”

Peter nodded. “Yeah, I do. I think that’s why none of your people have ever been able to find a print they could match at any of the crime scenes. Plus, there’s at least one piece of supporting evidence that backs up my hunch.”

He sorted through the stacked documents and pulled out a stapled collection of transcripts and photocopied letters. “Take a gander at those.”

She glanced through them and looked up. “The oral and written communiques issued by the different terrorist groups?”

“Uh-huh. Supposedly issued by everybody from the New Aryan Order to the Black Liberation Front. But they’ve got one thing in common. Rossini and I both checked them over to make sure.” Peter paused to take a sip of his cold coffee, set the cup aside again, and continued. “Every single message is perfect. Not a single spelling error. Not a single misplaced comma. Not a single piece of slang. They’re all absolutely grammatically perfect.”

Helen vaguely remembered hearing or reading something similar. Had it been in a memo from the FBI’s own language experts? She frowned. So many documents had crossed her temporary desk in such a short space of time that she’d often suspected the task force would drown in paper before finding its first terrorist. Still, how had she missed something like this? How had they all missed something like this?

She already knew the answer to her question. The FBI task force had been swamped right from the day it was formed hit from all sides at every turn by new demands on its time and its limited resources. If Peter’s guess was right, that had been an important part of the terrorist plan from the very beginning. Her face darkened in anger.

He reached out and took the material out of her unresisting hand. “I think all of these little propaganda pieces were written by the same people. By people with a thorough, but very academic, knowledge of American English.”

Helen nodded slowly, still rocked by the stomach-turning possibility that the Bureau task force had been walking right past an important clue. ’God, Peter, I think you’re probably right.” She hesitated. “But…”

“But I don’t have a single shred of solid proof beyond those communiques,” he finished the sentence for her.

She shook her head. “I’ll talk to Flynn tomorrow morning anyway. We’ve been focusing all our energies on the domestic angle. Maybe it’s high time we widened our search.”

Peter smiled crookedly. “You think Special Agent Flynn’s really going to listen to a wild-eyed theory from an Army grunt?”

“Coming from a smart Army grunt? He might. Mike Flynn’s got a good head on his shoulders,” Helen countered. “He doesn’t put up with bullshit, but I’ve never seen him turn away a good idea no matter where it came from.”

“That’s nice,” Peter said, still clearly unconvinced. He bit down on a yawn and glanced at his watch. Then he pushed back his chair and stood up. “Look, maybe we should try to get some sleep. You’ve got to report back, and I’ve got a date with Rossini a little later this morning.”

“Oh? A date with the Maestro?” Helen asked, slipping her arm around his waist. “Is there something I should know about you, Colonel Thorn?”

He laughed softly, almost against his will. “Not that kind of a date, Agent Gray.” His smile slipped. “Rossini wangled a copy of that damned computer virus out of the Computer Emergency Response Team. We’re going to run it by somebody he knows a guy the Maestro says is a Grade A computer whiz.”

He shrugged. “Of course, it’s probably just a waste of time. God knows, every cybernetics expert in the federal government is already doing the same thing.”

Helen hugged him tighter. “You just keep at it, Peter.” Then she stepped back and held out her hand. “Now come take me to bed.”

Thorn’s grin returned. “Yes, ma’am. Anything you say.”

Joseph Rossini took the Dulles Access Road out toward Herndon, relying on their official Pentagon identity cards to get them through the tollbooths without having to scratch around for exact change. He also drove fast, exceeding the speed limit by at least fifteen miles an hour.

The older man caught Thorn watching him out of the corner of his eye and lifted his shoulders. “I hate poking along, Pete. Going fifty-five’s just not efficient.”

Thorn hid a smile by pretending to take an interest in the passing scenery. Saddled with a loving wife and a multitude of kids, the Maestro had obviously decided to settle for the first half of the male equation seeking “fast cars and loose women.”

They sped past what looked like a military encampment. It was a staging area for one of the security patrols established under the President’s vaunted Operation SAFE SKIES. Two Blackhawk helicopters and a couple of Humvees sat under camouflage netting in a clearing off to the side of the road. Soldiers wearing the Screaming Eagles patch of the 101st Air Assault Division tramped through the mud left by another hard rain. They looked thoroughly bored and uncomfortable.

Thorn looked away, still angry at the clear waste of good manpower. He turned back to Rossini. “You’re sure this guy Kettler can handle the job?”

“Uh-huh. Without breaking a sweat.”

Thorn hoped the Maestro’s confidence wasn’t misplaced. The man they were on their way to see, Derek Kettler, made his living as a freelance software designer and consultant. Apparently, JSOC had hired him once before to craft special security and antiviral programs for its intelligence section.

“Kettler lives and breathes computers, Pete,” Rossini con tinned. “The guy’s a little unusual, but he practically dreams in machine code. He’s good. One of the best.” “Just how unusual is he?” Thorn asked sceptically.

Rossini shrugged. “He telecommutes so he can work alone. He likes being alone. He hates having to take orders. In fact, he hates just about anything to do with authority or control.”

Thorn arched an eyebrow. “Then why work with computers? Hell, they’re nothing but rules and instructions…”

Rossini shook his head. “Those are physical limitations, like gravity or the speed of light. It’s people telling him what to do that Kettler has trouble with.”

Great, Thorn thought. They were off on a visit to the Computer Hermit of Herndon.

The older man pulled off the Access Road, fast-talked their way past the local tollbooth, and followed a series of treelined streets to a newer part of the town.

The housing development still showed signs of newness. A Dumpster loaded with construction scraps marked the corner where they turned off the main road, and two of the end units still had raw, muddy earth instead of lawns. The homes were attractive, brick-fronted, two-story town houses. Different gables and copper trim gave each a small bit of identity otherwise lacking in their construction.

Derek Kettler’s house was third from the left in a row of ten. They parked, and Rossini muttered, “Stay here in the car for a minute, until I signal. He agreed to meet with us over the phone last night because he’s dying to see this new virus, but he really wasn’t very happy with the idea of a face-to-face chat. Like I said, he prefers dealing by modem.”

Swell. Thorn sat stiffly in the front seat, watching Rossini climb the front steps to Kettler’s town house.

The Maestro knocked, and then, after waiting a few moments without any apparent response, pressed the bell. Even in the car, Thorn could hear the sound, not of a bell, but a fierce animal roar. Rossini seemed to expect it and looked apologetically toward the car, shrugging.

The door opened, and Thorn saw Kettler for the first time.

His immediate impression was a 1960s-style hippie without any of the tie-dyed colon Rossini’s computer genius wore a grey sweatshirt, jeans, and sneakers, all of which looked rumpled even the shoes. Kettler himself was in his thirties, slightly overweight, and badly in need of a haircut. His black hair and beard were long and lank.

Thorn watched the two men speak for a few minutes. Kettler kept nervously glancing toward the car while Rossini made soothing gestures. Finally, the computer expert disappeared, still shaking his head, and the Maestro motioned for Thorn to come on up.

He trotted up the steps and followed Rossini inside.

He first noticed the smell, a mixture of stale food and mustiness and other things he didn’t want to identify. The front door opened into the living room, which was dominated by a six-foot-high, ten-foot-wide entertainment canter. Thorn considered himself something of an audiophile, but this system was incredible. It included a CD player and a tape deck, but it also contained a reel-to-reel tape player and a turntable. There was even what looked like a CRT and a computer keyboard built into the system.

A mass of scattered clothes, magazines, and paperback books surrounded the wall unit, covering about half the carpet. Empty potato chip bags punctuated the mess.

If Thorn expected the living room to be the worst of it, he was mistaken. When they walked back past the kitchen, he spotted countertops littered with dirty dishes and empty soda cans. The room’s main fixture seemed to be a large green plastic trash can with so many pizza boxes stuffed into it that they overflowed onto the floor.

Kettler led them upstairs.

A converted bedroom was obviously the heart of the house. A large U-shaped desk filled the center of the room, with computer boxes and electronic components on the desk, on shelves over the desk, and on the floor beside it. Bookshelves crammed with thick hardcovers and trade paperbacks lined one wall. They were all computer-related, with titles like Numeric Process Control Codes.

Thorn didn’t even feel tempted to open that one.

Like the rest of the house, the blinds were closed, and he doubted if they were ever opened. In stark contrast to the rest of the house, though, the desk and the room were comparatively neat, although he could see small piles of debris in the corners.

Kettler’s system was already on. Several large-screen monitors displayed brightly colored geometric designs against a darkened background. The center monitor, a huge two-page display, showed a blue and white emblem surrounded with the words “United Federation of Planets.”

Cute. Very cute.

“Gimme the disk,” demanded Kettler.

Rossini handed it over without apparent qualm, violating several federal laws in the process. Thorn winced a little, but kept his thoughts to himself. The diskette passed to them by CERT bore only a handwritten label identifying its contents as

“MidTel Virus, Unknown.”

Kettler handled it like it was red-hot.

He sat down in a swivel chair and started typing. “Okay, Maestro, I’m going to reconfigure my system. I’ll isolate one CPU, and then we’ll see what this beast looks like.” Rossini explained to Thorn what they were seeing while Kettler typed in commands and threw switches on a homemade junction box. The software designer had four computers wired together. One was a server, or file manager. Another did nothing but log on to bulletin boards, download files, and screen them for material he was interested in. The final two were paired processors, hooked up in a special rig that allowed Kettler to designate which processor would handle a task. Isolating one of the units would protect the rest of his system from damage if the virus started running wild.

Despite his misgivings, Thorn had to admit he was impressed by the sheer amount of linked hardware in the room and by the evident ease with which the other man handled his equipment.

New lines of text popped into existence on the central monitor.

“All right, here we go,” Kettler muttered to himself. He slid the disk into a drive and typed in another set of commands.

“All right, it’s just one big file. Okay, baby, let’s see if we can find out just what you’re made of.” Kettler conducted a running monologue with himself while he started running a series of keyboard controlled tests, probing around the file’s periphery. Rossini stood over his shoulder, answering questions about the known behavior of the virus.

“Oh, yeah.” Kettler nodded knowingly. “Same kind of trick we’re supposed to have pulled on the Iraqis during the Gulf War.”

Thorn looked at Rossini. “Is that true?”

“Uh-huh,” the older man agreed. “The story showed up in a number of the journals. According to them, we planted a virus in the printers inside their air defense computers in Baghdad. It would have worked pretty much the same way.”

Thorn whistled sharply. Maybe Amir Taleh’s belief that Iraq was behind the effort to rebuild radical Islam’s terrorist forces was right after all. Was this a case of an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth?

The big monitor suddenly filled with jumbled numbers. “Yes!” Kettler exclaimed.

Thorn looked over Rossini’s shoulder. “That’s it?”

“Yeah, in octal code,” Rossini answered.

“This will make more sense,” Kettler announced, and hit a key. The numbers vanished. They were replaced by text grouped in three-letter combinations.

Assembly code, Thorn realized. That was one step up from octal, but it was still Greek to him.

Kettler, however, studied it as if he were reading a road map. Tracing his finger across the columns of code, he scrolled the screen up and down. There were pages of the stuff. Oblivious to the two men, he murmured to himself and scratched notes on a pad.

Thorn fought the urge to check his watch.

After what seemed like an eternity, Kettler shouted, “All right!” for the umpteenth time. Spinning around in his chair to face them, he smiled, almost beaming. “It’s the Bulgarian!” “You’re sure?” Rossini demanded.

“Absolutely,” Kettler asserted. “This is his stuff. I know viruses. I have to in my line of work. See?”

The computer expert took a key from his pocket and unlocked one of the desk drawers. He pulled it open and lifted out a long disk box that had been marked with yellow-and black striped tape.

He held the box carefully, as if afraid to jostle its contents. “This is my collection. Every virus I’ve ever heard of, including some that were stopped before they hit the street.” He patted it almost lovingly.

Rossini looked at the box in horror, as though the codes it contained were about to leap out and infect him personally. Like any good analyst, he was instinctively repelled by the idea of a program deliberately created to destroy information.

Kettler flipped open the lid and pulled out three neatly labeled disks. “All three of these babies hold viruses created by the Bulgarian, and the similarities are unmistakable. Some of the subroutines are identical.”

Rossini saw Thorn’s impatient look and explained. “He’s right, Pete. Programmers are like other artists. They’ve each got their own styles and their own bags of little tricks favorite techniques they use to achieve specific ends. To somebody who knows how to read this stuff like Derek here, those are as good as fingerprints or signatures.”

Kettler was still engrossed in the machine code showing on his monitor. “God, Maestro, this is beautiful work! Whoever paid to have this little monster made sure went to the right place.”

Unable to contain himself any longer, Thorn cut in. “Much as I hate to break up this little mutual admiration session, can either of you tell me just who the hell this Bulgarian guy is?”

Rossini filled him in, with Kettler interjecting occasional comments.

Only a few viruses had ever been traced back to people with names. Several, the nastiest of a nasty breed, had been linked to a mysterious individual “the Bulgarian.”

Nobody knew his name, but detective work, much of it unofficial, had traced some viruses back to Bulgaria and to a master programmer working covertly there. Bulgaria’s secret service had always had an evil reputation. It had been involved in several assassinations, and even linked to an attempt on the life of the Pope. As a result, many in the computer world assumed the Bulgarian had originally been trained and paid by that country’s now-defunct communist government, probably as part of a plan to wreak havoc on the technologically advanced West. Whatever he had once been, it was now clear that the virus-maker was working as a cybermercenary selling his destructive wares to the highest bidders.

Kettler finished by saying, “Whoever made the deal for this program paid pretty dearly for it. There’s all kinds of gossip on the Net, the computer bulletin boards, about what the Bulgarian charges to do his thing including some pretty wild guesses. But I’d bet you’re talking at least a couple of million bucks to craft this baby, and probably a lot more.”

“Several million dollars?” Thorn raised an eyebrow and looked at Rossini. “You believe that a white racist group or a band of black radicals could raise that kind of cash without anybody hearing about it?”

“Not a chance. That has to be a government’s money,” Rossini said flatly. “Whichever it is, I’d say your theory is looking better and better. This campaign is being orchestrated from overseas.”

Kettler stared at both of them. “Let me get this straight. You guys think these terrorists are working for some foreign government?”

They nodded slowly.

“Wow.” Kettler shook his head. “Far freaking out. This’ll sure rock some boats on the Net.” He pawed through the diskettes on his desk and came up with a stack of four. “See these? That’s almost four megs of traffic on the terror wave alone. Practically everybody with a modem and two brain cells to knock together has his or her own theory about what’s going on.”

The computer expert slipped his diskettes back into place and shrugged.

“Between this terrorism shit and the code controversy, I’ve been on the Net almost constantly.” “Code controversy?” Thorn asked.

Rossini nodded. “Some government agencies wanted to restrict commercially available E-mail encryption programs to ones the government could break…”

“Hell, no, Maestro. Not that old gripe. That’s yesterday’s news,” Kettler interrupted. “This is a privacy issue deal. It broke out a couple of months ago when some guy started bitching about unbreakable, coded E-mail he’d spotted on CompuNet, one of the worldwide computer bulletin boards. Said he’d been intercepting a ton of scrambled posts from somewhere in England to a bunch of users scattered across the country all using an encryption program he’d never seen before. Boy, did that set off fireworks!”

The computer expert smiled at the memory. “Geez, you should have read all the screaming about the sanctity of private electronic mail, and the First Amendment, and all the usual shit…”

“Hold it,” Thorn broke in, his mind racing in high gear. Two or three months ago? The timing could be coincidence, but he’d been wondering how the terrorists coordinated their attacks. Were they using computer hookups to communicate? He looked down at the younger man. “Are you saying someone has spotted coded messages coming from a foreign source to people here in the U.S.?”

“Yeah,” Kettler answered with a nonchalant shrug, “and as far as I’m concerned, they can put them in left-handed Swahili. I don’t give a rat’s ass. I’m just getting a kick seeing how loud all the Net prudes squawk about it.”

Thorn took a step closer and spoke slowly, intensely. “You’re missing the point. We’ve got terrorist attacks going on right and left, and now you’re telling me someone’s been intercepting coded messages?”

Kettler nodded, a little taken aback, but starting to understand.

“Yeah. But that’s not necessarily unusual. A lot of Email these days is PEM, privacy-enhanced E-mail. It’s just that these messages are using a real high level encryption program nobody’s ever heard of.” He shook his head. “Like I said, a bunch of us have been arguing the issue on some of the Net forums. It’s not general knowledge. Cripes, if CompuNet or any of the other public bulletin boards knew that someone was routinely breaking into their private message files, they’d have a conniption fit.”

Thorn cut him off sharply. “I don’t give a goddamn about the legalities, Mr. Kettler.” He leaned forward, towering over the openmouthed computer expert. “Do you know the person who’s been making those interceptions?”

“Only by his handle. He calls himself ‘Freebooter,’ ” Kettler replied hesitantly. “He’s a real top-gun hacker. He’s a little strange.”

Thorn didn’t say anything, though his mind reeled slightly at the thought that the computer expert could find anyone else odd.

Rossini joined in. “Can we contact this guy, Derek?”

“I can dial him up, I guess. I know where he usually hangs out in cyberspace.” Kettler absentmindedly scratched his beard. “Freebooter won’t talk to you directly, though, Maestro. You work for the Man.” He didn’t even mention Thorn.

“Whatever. Just do it.” Rossini almost pushed Kettler into his chair.

“Do you think he’ll be there?”

Kettler nodded, typing fast again. “Freebooter’s always there. He practically lives on the Net.”

The strange lines of machine code vanished as he shunted back to the CPU he had dedicated solely to monitoring the computer bulletin boards.

A speaker suddenly spat out a dial tone, followed by the sound of a number being punched in at high speed. The screen flickered and then blinked into another image. This one showed a rippling black flag emblazoned with a white skull and crossbones. Bold text letters spelled out: WELCOME TO THE PIRATES’ COVE.

Kettler looked apologetic. “It’s a hacker’s BBS. I like to keep my ear to the ground here… you know, just kind of see what’s new.” He bent over the keyboard again, fingers flashing through long-practiced combinations as he logged on and called up a list of those currently on-line. He leaned closer, scrolling through the names and then nodded sharply. “There he is!”

Thorn focused on the list and saw it. A line read: FREEBOOTER, IN THE TAVERN.

The computer expert punched a few more keys and leaned back. “Okay, he’s chatting with someone else right now, but I just paged him.” “Good,” Thorn said simply. “Now, you know what we want?”

Kettler nodded rapidly. “Yeah. A data dump of every encrypted message he’s collected, right?”

“Right.”

“Okay,” Kettler said. “Listen, Lemme work on him for a while. This could be kinda tricky. Freebooter’s a touchy bastard. If we screw this up or he gets spooked, he’ll drop off the Net, change his handle, and then we’ll never find him.”

Thorn frowned. Despite Kettler’s demonstrated computer expertise, he was reluctant to trust something so important to someone so flaky. Still, he had to admit the bearded whiz kid knew a hell of a lot more about the strange subculture they were fishing in than he did. He nodded. “All right, Mr. Kettler. We’ll do it your way. You reel him in.”

Kettler hesitated. “There’s just one more thing.”

“Yes?”

“This guy won’t do shit for free, Colonel Thorn. He lives on secret knowledge. It turns him on. Makes him feel good. Know what I mean?”

Thorn nodded. He’d seen others in the intelligence game with the same compulsion.

“So we’ve got to offer him something,” Kettler continued. “Trade stuff he’d be interested in for those message files.”

Thorn nodded again. He thought fast. “Does Freebooter usually blab his secrets? Or try to sell them?”

“No.” Kettler shook his head. “At least, I don’t think so. I think he only started posting stuff about the codes because he got so frustrated that he couldn’t crack them. He even dropped out of the Net debate once he realised no one there had the kind of decryption software he needed.”

“Fine. Then you offer him what we just learned about the Midwest Telephone virus. The Bulgarian connection. The fact that we now suspect the terrorist campaign is under foreign control. The whole bit. You emphasise that it’s knowledge that only a very few people in the U.S. government possess. And you promise a first look at whatever our codebreakers come up with if they can crack those messages. Think that’ll make him bite?”

Thorn carefully avoided locking at Rossini as he spoke. What he was proposing was a massive breach of security. But damn it, they needed those message files. Trying to track them down on their own would take too much time.

Kettler nodded slowly, thinking it through. “Yeah. That might do it. Freebooter knows I’ve got some Pentagon connections.”

He sat upright as text began appearing on his display. “Here we go. He’s answering my page.” His hands came down again over the keyboard.

Thorn felt Rossini’s touch on his arm and stepped back. Nothing more would be served by crowding Kettler now. Strange as it might seem, he would have to rely on the oddball computer expert who was busy wheeling and dealing over the ether to acquire illegally obtained information from an electronic Peeping Tom. It was an uncomfortable, if unavoidable, position.

The time dragged by, punctuated only by a steady clicking as Kenler typed in offers and responded to counteroffers.

Thorn paced impatiently, matched almost step for step by Rossini. His mind whirled with the information that might be contained in those encrypted messages. Proof that a foreign government was behind this wave of terror. The hiding places and plans of the separate terrorist cells. A target.

That was what he wanted. What the whole country needed. Something or someone to focus their anger on, to strike back at to destroy. Knowing their enemy would change everything. Maybe.

“Got it!”

Thorn’s head snapped up at Kettler’s triumphant cry. He crossed to the computer expert’s side in two long strides. “Where?”

“There.” Kettler pointed to the blinking red light on one of his machines indicating a hard drive in operation. “I’m downloading Freebooter’s files now. Shouldn’t take more than another minute.”

This time Thorn stood impatiently by, waiting for Kettler to pull up a directory of the files he’d just received. There were more than a hundred of them, some dating back to early October when the mysterious Freebooter had first stumbled across them. Others were more recent.

“Pull that one up,” he ordered, pointing almost at random.

“Right.” Kettler complied swiftly, his own curiosity now clearly engaged.

All three men stared at the message that popped onto the display.

The main body of the message was an indecipherable hash of numbers, letters, and characters.

“Go to another,” Thorn commanded. He barely noticed Rossini pulling in chairs so that they could all sit grouped around the monitor as Kettler began dancing through the encrypted messages first at random and then in chronological order.

Even a cursory check of the time/date stamp each message contained began to reveal a distinct pattern. Communications from a single, unidentified, foreign source, “Magi,” were being sent to at least ten separate users in the United States. And those users communicated only with Magi never with each other. More damning still, there appeared to be a rough correlation between the messages from Magi, the deadliest terrorist attacks, and the messages back to Magi.

Thorn felt his pulse starting to accelerate. To his trained eye, the sequence was a familiar one: operations orders and postaction damage assessment reports. He felt the strange elation of seeing a long-sought enemy moving into his sights. He was willing to stake his career on the belief that he and Rossini had found the communications network the terrorists were using to conduct their campaign.