The Hunted

45

Hector DeSantos entered the situation room, his Coach leather attaché in hand. Brian Archer was sitting at the conference table, papers scattered beside his laptop. His hair was a disheveled mess and he was huddled over a document, tracing a portion of it with a pencil and an index finger.

“Brian,” DeSantos said, “I’m sorry—”

“You’re sorry you’re late again,” Archer said without lifting his eyes from the page. “I know, Maggie kept pulling you back into bed for another go-round and you couldn’t break away.” He looked up at DeSantos. “Or is it that you slept late because the alarm didn’t go off? Or did you drop your keys down the sewer—”

“All right, all right. Point taken.”

“At least you’re not bullshitting me by saying it won’t happen again.”

DeSantos took a seat next to Archer and handed him a piece of Juicy Fruit.

“What is this, a peace offering?” Archer took the gum, folded it into his mouth, and nodded at the paper-strewn table. “The computer finished decrypting the first NSA document.”

“No shit?”

“No shit.” Archer selected a paper from amongst the maelstrom of pages on the table and handed it to DeSantos. He took the document and read from it: “CARD Report. Memogen Project confirmed with SCP. Subject Scarponi is an ideal blank blank. Blank blank blank excellent proposal. Cooperation with blank blank blank blank is required. Approval blank assistance blank blank blank. Blank blank secret.’” DeSantos looked up from the document, his brow knitted with consternation. “Three days of word crunching and that’s all it came up with?”

“It’s a little incomplete.”

DeSantos tossed the page onto the table. “A little incomplete?”

“Our decryption software isn’t that swift.”

“You mean it sucks.”

“It needs work,” Archer corrected. “But that’s why we have the NSA.”

“Yeah, but in this case we can’t give it to NSA because that’s where we got it from in the first place. They’ll know their own code.”

Archer leaned back in his chair. “I know a guy there, we’ve hacked together before.”

“You live in a weird world, you know that? Normal people like me, we hang out together, throw back a beer or catch a movie. You hang out and hack.”

Archer ignored his partner. “He’ll take a look at it without a problem, Hector. And, he’ll keep quiet about it if I ask him to. He owes me.”

DeSantos was shaking his head. “I don’t care how much shit you’ve done for this geek. You’re not seeing the big picture, Brian. What if he’s the one who developed this code for this — this Memogen Project — whatever that is? We’ll have breached his system. I don’t think he’ll take that lightly. Faster than you can say ‘we’re cooked,’ we’ll be filleted, fried, and served up in federal court. That’s after they start asking questions — like, ‘Why were you hacking into our secure network? Where did you get the pass codes? Why did you do it?’ The fact we’re government employees won’t count for shit. Heat will come from all over the fucking place.”

“Knox will clear it up—”

“Knox won’t do shit. He’ll put a fucking football field between us and himself. And if you don’t think he’ll do that, you’ve had your head buried in computer code too long.”

“Knox is the one who gave us the entry codes to begin with. His handwriting is all over this. Who else would have access to what he gave us?”

“Knox doesn’t know what we did.”

“Don’t be so sure.”

DeSantos laughed. “He sure as hell didn’t intend for us to use some earthworm program to hunt around the NSA and DOD databases.”

Archer held his hands out, palms up, professing his innocence. “He didn’t say not to. Maybe he wanted us to find this stuff.”

“Yeah, and maybe he didn’t.”

“Why wouldn’t he? What’s in here that we’re not supposed to know about?”

DeSantos was silent for a moment, then shook his head. “I don’t know. But none of that matters, Brian. We don’t know what we stumbled onto here. We could’ve just stuck our noses into some fucked-up shit that we have no business being in. Without knowing what we’re up against, we can’t be making calls to anyone even remotely connected to NSA, especially a techie analyst who works there. For now, we keep this between us. We don’t even tell Knox. No one. No exceptions.”

Archer rubbed at the strained creases in his forehead. “None of that matters if we can’t figure out what the rest of the memo says.”

“Don’t you know anyone else who can crack this code?”

“There’s always the Yellow Pages,” Archer said with a smirk. “They’ve gotta have a listing for encryption cracking specialists.”

“Wait a minute,” DeSantos said. “I know someone. He may not the best source, but it’s worth a shot.”

“Who does he work for?”

“The state of New York.”

“Too risky.”

“I don’t think so.” DeSantos stood and opened his attaché. “He doesn’t exactly work for the state.” He pulled out a small black book. “He’s in Attica.”

“The prison?”

“Like I said, he might not be the best source. But if we’re desperate…”

“You’re out of your mind.”

DeSantos thumbed through his book. “Think about it. He’s got no connections to feds. He can’t hurt us.”

“Forget about hurting us. Why would he help us?”

“He helps us out, we help him out a little with his parole.”

“What’s he in for?”

DeSantos smiled. “He broke into the state’s abandoned-items database and started assigning some of the assets to himself. White-collar crime.”

“And he ended up in Attica?”

DeSantos shrugged. “He pissed off the prosecutor, the judge, and the jury. He can be a little obnoxious.”

Archer eyed DeSantos suspiciously. “I don’t know about this.”

“‘Subject Scarponi is an ideal blank blank for this project,”’ DeSantos repeated. “Aren’t you the least bit curious how Scarponi is tied in to all this?”

“Even if we jump through all the hoops and get this thing deciphered, I doubt we’ll have all the answers.”

“Probably not. But shit, my curiosity is piqued.”

“Curiosity killed the cat.”

“So I’ll have to be a little smarter than that dead feline.”

Archer was silent for a moment, his gaze fixed on the tabletop. Finally, he said, “I don’t like this.” He looked up at his partner with dark eyes. “You mark my words: this is going to be trouble.”